Looking in a New Way

In Maria Kuznetsova’s story “Sandwoman,” the narrator develops debilitating insomnia after having a baby. Her scientist father gives her instructions for a cure, but she tinkers with the formula and ends up sleeping all but one hour a day. When I read the piece, I was immediately drawn to its offbeat tone and to the narrator’s voice, which is in turns playful, exuberant, dark, and funny. Though much of the story is fantastical, it speaks volumes about the real-life experiences of women who struggle with their physical and mental health postpartum. Maria’s imaginative and surprising perspective made me want to dig into the story’s origins when I got to talk to her.

Maria teaches creative writing at Auburn University and is the fiction editor of Southern Humanities Review. She’s the author of two novels, Oksana, Behave! and Something Unbelievable, and is at work on a third.

Nancy Holochwost: “Sandwoman” mixes realism with some magical elements, like the elixir that causes the narrator to sleep. Why did you take that approach?

Maria Kuznetsova: I have a series of stories about this character. I started writing them five or six years ago, after my grandma passed away. She was an atheist, and I started to wonder: If someone who is an atheist dies, where do you visit them in your imagination? Where can I picture her? Is it heaven? Is it nowhere? Is it a bar? So I wrote a story where the character’s grandma dies, and the character meets her in a bar, and it becomes a sacred space. That was the first time something happened in my life that I couldn’t write about in a realistic way. Even though people lose loved ones all the time, my grandma’s death defied my comprehension. I just couldn’t figure it out.

I wrote “Sandwoman” four years ago, when my first child was a baby. I had serious postpartum depression for a year, which mainly presented as insomnia. I’d written about the experience in an essay [“The Unimaginable Hell of Postpartum Insomnia”], but I wanted to look at it in a new way — and find a way to laugh about it, because it wasn’t funny at all while it was happening. When I was in graduate school, Carmen Maria Machado visited one of my classes, and she advised us when writing horror stories not to write about what’s scary to other people, but to write about what’s scariest to us. The scariest thing I could think of at the time I wrote “Sandwoman” was being awake forever. I couldn’t imagine anything worse. I’d rather have had my eyes poked out with needles.

Since publishing the essay, I’ve heard from tons of women who’ve had postpartum insomnia, but at the time I wrote it, I thought I was the only person on Earth who’d ever experienced such a thing. There’s a sense of isolation in having a weird ailment that feels like it’s your fault: Why can’t you just fall asleep? To make it worse, people kept telling me, “You can go insane if you don’t sleep.” Yeah, that really helps. Thank you. [Laughs.]

Nancy: The narrator’s fear of her insomnia does feel very true to life. It sounds like you were processing your personal experience by telling her story.

Maria: For sure. Most of my writing is at least partially autobiographical. In this story I wanted to play with the parts of my experience that I couldn’t write about in a purely autobiographical way.

Nancy: When our staff read the story, we had different ideas about what the narrator’s sleeping might be meant to represent. We liked that the story left avenues of interpretation open rather than telling the reader what to think.

Maria: One of my writing professors in grad school, Ethan Canin, had a line that I repeat constantly to my students: You shouldn’t idea your way into a story, but you can story your way into an idea. I didn’t set off to comment on motherhood or postpartum depression. My postpartum depression was unlike anything I’d ever known — I had never experienced even one percent of that pain before — so it was new and terrifying and also kind of fascinating. In writing about it, I wanted to explore not the way I actually felt slogging through a year of being constantly awake, but how enjoyable it would be to never be awake, or to sleep through an entire pregnancy, like the narrator does. I wanted to have fun with the darkest part of my life while also showing the desperation I felt.

Nancy: Part of what makes the story so interesting is that the narrator doesn’t react as one might expect to losing twenty-three hours of every day. She misses her children and husband, but she also says having just one hour a day with her husband makes their relationship better, and she looks forward to the “relief” of sleep. Can you talk about her feelings?

Maria: The stories I’ve written about this character have something of a formula: she has a problem, her dad gives her a solution, she messes it up or overdoes it, and then she has to reckon with the opposite extreme — in this case, never being awake instead of always being awake. Though that’s not ideal either, she relishes it in some regard. Usually her husband acts as the grounding force, her dad is the dreamer, and she’s somewhere in between, but she ends up going along with whatever happens to her, partly because there’s nothing she can do to counteract it. It is unexpected, I guess, but if she were upset about it, that would be an even weirder story. I tend to lean into the absurdity of her predicaments, while the character of the husband serves as the voice that says, “This is not normal.”

Nancy: At one point, when marital troubles arise, the narrator asks, “Why couldn’t I have had the love and the relaxation?” This line makes me think of the question of whether women can “have it all.” Did that idea factor into the story for you?

Maria: In another story about this character, she doesn’t want to have a body, and she becomes a floating orb; in “Sandwoman,” she essentially says, “Fine, I won’t be awake.” Her attitude is like, fuck it, you know? In those ways, she is flouting the typical expectations society has for mothers and women. But again, I wasn’t intentionally trying to make any commentary. I think those ideas come out in the stories because that’s how I was feeling when I wrote them, so the narrator does, too.

Nancy: If somebody had offered you twenty-three hours a day of sleep when you had insomnia, would you have taken them up on it?

Maria: Probably. But not if it would have gone on forever!