Childhood tragedy, grief, memory, redemption: these are the complex themes at play in Claire Oshetsky’s deeply felt novel Poor Deer (Ecco Press, 2024), about sixteen-year-old Margaret Murphy trying to make sense of accidentally killing her best friend, Agnes, at four years old during their made-up game “Awake, Oh Princess.” Complicating the tragic event even further is Margaret’s mother’s denial of her role in it. “You’re a very wicked girl,” she tells Margaret. “You were inside the house with me all day! You are never to repeat that awful lie again, do you hear me?”
Margaret does hear—all too well. Throughout her early childhood, Margaret’s inability to both understand and acknowledge the truth of what happened to her friend eats away at her, spreading literal and metaphorical infection throughout her small body. Meanwhile, even her mother cannot forgive her, leaving Margaret alone as she struggles to understand the meaning of death and where Agnes has gone. As Margaret spins fantastic tales in her own made-up language, attempting to impose one happy ending after another onto that fateful day, it’s Poor Deer, a creature of her imagination, who shows up uninvited to goad her into confessing, relentlessly badgering her to try again and again until she tells the truth.
A lyrical, dreamlike, and heartfelt examination of how we heal from tragic events and learn to forgive ourselves, even when we’re denied the truth, Poor Deer ultimately shows us a hopeful way forward. I was delighted to speak to Claire Oshetsky via email.
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The Rumpus: I read in another interview that the inspiration for Poor Deer came from your own experience of accidentally locking your friend in a chest, except that she survived. In this sense, Poor Deer is a fiction within a fiction within a fiction. What made you want to explore this experience in a novel? And what do you think the role of fiction is, both in terms of denying difficult realities and allowing us deeper access to process them?
Claire Oshetsky: I should say right away that my memory of the day when I was four and locked my friend in an ice chest in her garage, then ran away in terror when I couldn’t get the lid back open, is not a traumatic memory because the outcome was a happy one. My friend’s mother found her in time. In the space of minutes—it doesn’t take more than that to suffocate in a locked, air-tight box—the outcome could have been so different and so terrible.
Maybe writers don’t actually need traumatic childhoods to become writers. Maybe it’s luckier to have trauma-adjacent childhoods. My very powerful memories of that day gave me confidence that I could write accurately about how a four-year-old might experience such an event. If my friend had died that day, though, I don’t believe I would have been able to write this novel, or write anything, or live with myself. You could say my novel has another layer of fiction wrapped around it in that I’ve written the story as a journey toward redemption and self-forgiveness, whereas I’m not sure whether, in real life, anyone who caused the accidental death of another person, however innocently, would ever learn to fully forgive themself.
Rumpus: There’s Margaret’s wish to escape from the truth, but there are also other factors that deny her access to it, such as her mother’s refusal to hear it, her inability as a young child to process the permanency of death, and the natural inclination of adults to euphemize difficult things for children. Why was it important to you to add these additional layers of denial to Margaret’s trauma?
Oshetsky: I wasn’t thinking of these women’s coping mechanisms as denial or as adding layers of trauma to Margaret’s experience. I was thinking of them as kindness. I wanted to write accurately about how adults in Margaret’s life in a 1950s mill town in Maine would try to speak to this small child about death. These women would see a four-year-old child in front of them. They would not have an appreciation for how complex the mind of a child can be. They would assume the best way to explain death to a child would be by invoking images of heaven and happiness. These women in my novel have a deep religious faith. They are consoling themselves as much as Margaret when they tell Margaret that her friend is in heaven. They are trying to cope with the tragedy in a way that makes sense to them.
I’m rejecting the word “trauma” because this story is set in the 1950s, before we used diagnostic vocabulary to explain life’s tragedies. People in this novel cope with tragedy in a different way from people of today. They would not think “trauma.” They would say to themselves, “I will pray on this, and trust God, and in time, I’ll feel better.”
Rumpus: As Margaret tries to cope with her confusing reality, the Poor Deer of her imagination arises from overhearing everyone call Agnes’s mother “Poor Dear.” In both your debut novel, Chouette, and in this book, wild creatures and nature often signify some aspect of humanity that’s at once terrifyingly out of our control and, uniquely healing. Can you talk about this tension and why you’re so drawn to it?
Oshetsky: I’m not sure if the wild glorious female Strix that appears in Chouette is at all related to the musky, mourning, perpetually sorrowful creature that appears in Poor Deer. Let me think about that concretely for a moment.
The Strix in Chouette is female perfection. She represents, for me, a Superwoman who has rejected every constraint of society and has become fully free. She has answered the question for herself that Mary Oliver posed in what is probably her most quoted poem: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” The character’s origins grew out of my love of other bestial novels where a woman gets erotically involved with a big old wild creature, like Mrs. Caliban by Rachel Ingalls and Bear by Marian Engel and The Pisces by Melissa Broder. I started to wonder why the lovers in these books were all such heterosexual guy-creatures. I decided what the world needed was a novel with a big old bestial lesbian love affair in it.
Poor Deer in Poor Deer is something different. She is grief. She is the voice of a guilty conscience. She is the image of a mother so reduced by grief that she has become animalistic and irrational. She is acting on instinct. She is a terrifying apparition of an unforgiving God. She is wrapped in blue robes, evoking Mary. Margaret conjures her up so that she can have someone to talk to who knows the truth about her past when no one else does, but the creature’s grief is too great, and Margaret can’t control her own creation.
I suppose the creatures in both novels are a handy way for me to introduce ideas and feelings into my story on a level that is mythological and powerful and Jungian. I’m just guessing about this, though. As characters, they each were born fully formed, and they didn’t explain themselves to me.
Rumpus: Staying with your desire to write a bestial lesbian affair, both of your novels feature unspoken or impossible love between women. In Chouette, Tiny’s Strix-lover is a female who’s too violent and wild to settle down, and Tiny also feels unrequited love for an unnamed woman in her husband’s family. In Poor Deer, there’s Margaret’s mother’s unspoken love for Agnes’s mother and teenage Margaret’s budding, misplaced interest in Penny, a stranger she rescues from the side of the road.
One of the things I find so interesting about love between women, both in your novels and in our society, is how knotty it can become in a culture that permits women to express platonic love for one another freely, even as it fears and punishes romantic love between people of the same sex. What interests you about these miscommunications and missed connections between women? Is there a history of this in fiction?
Oshetsky: I’m not very interested in writing about either (1) heterosexual relationships, or (2) groups of hetero men. Have we not done these things to death, people? I mean, I think we have. It feels so constraining to me to write about men, or about a man and a woman in a sexual relationship, or about a man and a woman as a married couple. The constraints feel suffocating to me. I think about the way you can’t just write a woman character into your novel who makes more money than her man because that feels like a weird counterfactual to readers, one that goes against type.
So as a writer, you need to spend words explaining why this successful woman actually isn’t a castrating bitch because ever so many stories will take a counterfactual like this and make it into a plot point. It can’t just be. It needs to be explained or made into a conflict because it runs counter to expectation. If your woman character is taller or stronger or more successful in any way than the man, then you, the writer, need to explain why she is that way. If she doesn’t want children, same thing. As a writer, you’re fighting against the horrific weight of expectation because of all the goddamn stories ever written about hetero men and hetero couples across the centuries, whereas women’s relationships are still a wide-open fictional territory. Queer relationships of all kinds, same thing. Characters with nonconforming genders are yet another vast new territory of fictional possibility. It’s like an Oklahoma land rush of possibility, fictionally speaking, and it’s the territory where I’m most interested in writing stories, even if, so far, I’m just tiptoeing around the edges.
Specific to the queerness in Poor Deer, I was feeling very much aware of time and setting. We’re in a Catholic-heavy mill town in northern Maine in the 1950s. How would a woman or a girl acknowledge, or even have the language to explain to herself, her queer feelings? Without the words to define these feelings and without concrete examples of queer people living in the culture where she lived, how would these feelings manifest themselves in her relationships with other women? I wrote to answer these questions for myself.
Rumpus: Poor Deer is an adult novel written from the perspective of a child from age four to sixteen. You’ve really captured her voice and childlike way of seeing the world. One of my favorite examples is four-year-old Margaret at Mass: “Margaret liked to swing her legs back and forth and look around. The ceiling soared. The organ sounded. Mea culpa, the priest said. Mea culpa, the people answered. Doe-May. Moose. Biscuit. The people prayed and beat their chests. Just when Margaret lost all hope of ever going home again the people stood up and rushed forward to the altar. Her mother and her aunt rushed up there with the rest. Margaret opened her mother’s pocketbook and dug around for a Life Saver, and when she couldn’t find one, she put the tip of her tongue on the pew in front.” How did you approach writing from a child’s point of view?
Oshetsky: The example you mention came from my own memory of being in Mass as a child. The pew in front really does taste salty and warm. I tasted it, back then. As far as writing from a child’s point of view, there are so many books that do this so well. Some of my favorites that I studied for technique are What Maisie Knew by Henry James, The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers, and Real Life by Adeline Dieudonné. I didn’t really want an omniscient voice for the story, and I also thought first-person from a young child’s point of view is quite limiting. That’s why I came up with the frame story, where the main narrator is sixteen and is steeped in the storytelling traditions of both the Bible and folktales. She uses her storytelling gifts to tell the story of her life.
Rumpus: Margaret narrates the story at age sixteen in the form of a confession. Interestingly, however, the book begins in third person. Sometimes, even within the same scene or chapter, the story switches to first person, and sometimes second. Why did you make these choices?
Oshetsky: I chose the age of sixteen for Margaret-the-narrator because I wanted the voice to have some sophistication but to still have the veneer of naiveté. A lot of her word choices are a little fantastical, a little “off.” I loved writing in this voice of a savant who isn’t quite in control of her own skill with words. The switches in tense and point of view were a technique I used to disrupt the chronology of the story and to add layers of interest and intrigue. You never really know the exact point in the story where Margaret is writing from, chronologically speaking. What this means, among other things, is that Margaret might be writing some stories as if they are full of portents, but on the other hand, she might be writing these stories at a time after the events have come to pass and using her knowledge of a past event to tell a story that reads as a prophesy, just like the writers of the Gospels did.
Generally, I was interested in making readers participate in the act of storytelling. They need to make choices about what to believe and who to forgive, just as the characters in this story need to make choices.
Rumpus: Both your novels blend surreal aspects with reality. In Poor Deer, at first, there seems to be more separation between the two because Poor Deer is understood to be a figment of Margaret’s imagination. However, after Aunt Dolly gets injured, she can also see and hear Poor Deer. Meanwhile, you rarely pause to signal to the reader whether we’re supposed to accept the surreal aspects as real. Why are you so drawn to blending magic with reality? And how do you approach doing it so seamlessly?
Oshetsky: I’m not sure why I write this way. It feels very natural to me. Sometimes I feel as if I’m writing from a sublingual level of understanding or in a dream state where the normal rules of logic don’t apply. Sorry, I know “sublingual” means “under the tongue,” but what I mean is it feels as if I’m writing from a place that comes before words, language. But there is still a logic. Or at least there is a logic that makes sense to me. I’m not out here deliberately trying to make my stories sound surreal. They feel real to me.
Rumpus: As Margaret struggles with the pain of trying to understand what’s happened to Agnes, her mother, Florence, treats her normal reactions to tragedy—and indeed almost everything she does—as bad behavior. Despite herself, Florence pulls further and further away from Margaret, until she eventually leaves her for good with her sister, Margaret’s aunt, Dolly. It’s ultimately through Dolly’s love for Margaret that Margaret begins to imagine redemption for herself. Do you think there’s any hope of redemption for Florence?
Oshetsky: I’ve noticed that some readers think Florence is a bad mom. I think she is a good mom. I imagine Margaret, growing up, is a baffling and slightly scary person, even as a child. Florence is not an educated woman. She is terrified that her child is a bad person who deliberately caused the death of another child. The doubt of what her child did and didn’t do on the day the girl next door died is a terrible weight for her. Near the end of the novel, Florence’s now-boyfriend defends her choices in a phone call he has with Margaret. I meant this conversation to gently acknowledge just how hard it has been for Florence to be Margaret’s mother. She did her best. She ends the story living with a man who loves her deeply. I think her life from now on will be a contented one.
Rumpus: What was the most fulfilling thing about writing Poor Deer?
Oshetsky: I never show anyone what I’ve written until I feel it’s “done.” And even then, I think, “Gosh, this is never going to be something anyone else in the world will understand or relate to because what I write feels so personal.” But with Poor Deer, the day after I sent it to my agent, and before I heard back from her about what she thought, I asked my husband, David, to read the manuscript. The look on his face when he came to the end meant everything to me. He got it. That’s when I knew it was going to be all right.
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Author photograph courtesy of Claire Oshetsky
