A decade ago, Jody Hobbs Hesler brought a short story to our shared workshop at Bread Loaf that absolutely floored me. That story stuck with me and ultimately appeared in Hesler’s short story collection, What Makes You Think You’re Supposed to Feel Better (Cornerstone Press, 2023). I was so thrilled to read the revised version, because it was even better—like unexpectedly meeting an old friend who it turns out has just been getting more fabulous.
I was even more thrilled when she shared the news her debut novel was coming out. Without You Here is intimate and emotional. When I read the book, and then when we talked about it on Zoom for this interview, I was reminded of why I was drawn to her writing all those years ago: she puts people first, writes with empathy, and truly cares about her characters.
It made me consider how so many of us are thinking about a tricky ending to a story on a walk or at the dentist office, chipping away at our novels in precious quiet hours, and just the sheer perseverance it often takes to get our work into print. How hard we have to work to make it good enough in the first place, and then the extra work to find the right home for a manuscript, whether it’s a short story, poem, or essay. Sometimes, many years pass. The advice to writers to get comfortable with rejection is as well-worn as the most tired cliché—and it’s also cliché for a reason. Hesler is a writer who knows a lot about it. The interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
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The Rumpus: I’ve got nothing against the forty-under and thirty-five-under lists, and I love seeing younger writers named to these, but you are a post-fifty debut. I think that maybe these don’t matter as much to authors who have come to writing later, but for those of us who have been at it at for a long time, there’s a weird sting to lists that we’ve quite literally aged out of.
Jody Hobbs Hesler: Waiting until after fifty for my first book wasn’t my first choice! A book is excellent validation for the writer’s work, and that validation is hard to wait for. My story collection and novel were accepted by different small presses within three months of each other shortly after the world began opening up again after the pandemic. These were not the first two books I’d written, revised, rewritten, re-revised, and shopped around. I’d had close calls along the way, including a brief, unproductive stint with an agent for a book that’s now consigned to the virtual desk drawer. By the time these acceptances came, I’d been at this work long enough to know that no opportunity is a guarantee and that there are countless heartbreaks behind every win.
I kept trying. After every rejection, I got back to work. This means I kept plying the trade, getting better at it, and producing new work to put forward. It also means that when I hit a wall, thinking I’d tried everything, I had to believe instead that there were opportunities left to discover.
But now, I’m glad the earlier books didn’t publish. They weren’t as good as the ones that did. And I’m happy to report I found a new agent for the next book, which is close to its final revision.
Rumpus: There’s a way in which Without You Here feels longer than 300 pages. It’s not that it reads slowly, it just has weight. Can you talk about the pacing?
Hesler: The structure of this book was probably the biggest challenge in terms of figuring out how to tell the story. The first time I tried, it came out linear. That didn’t work because the plot circles back to the tragic event of one of the main characters. The linear format didn’t serve the story.
The book has two main characters—Noreen, and her namesake aunt who goes by Nonie—and when I started to interweave their perspectives across time, it meant I could keep the pressure on the present instead of having to constantly contextualize in the way that the linear structure was forcing me to do. It opened me to being able to write about why Noreen was facing a particular challenge at a particular time, for example.
Rumpus: This isn’t a spoiler for the novel, because it’s on the jacket copy, but to distill the plot down into a sentence: Noreen is the same age now, the present being the very late 1990s, as when her aunt committed suicide in the late 1970s. There is an escalating tension as Noreen reaches a parity in age with her aunt, and Noreen is also in crisis. How did you handle that?
Hesler: I had to ask: “How do I keep this person who is gone?” Again, written chronologically, most of the time Nonie wasn’t there. It was a problem.
Rumpus: “Keeping a person who is gone” is also a life question, not just a structural concern for a novel.
Hesler: Yes.
Rumpus: Your novel follows a very strong matrilineal line. Some of the relationships are complicated but also definitely binding.
Hesler: In writing this book, I wanted it to be about women. I did as much as I could to focus on the female characters. There are men in there, and there are some important roles, but they aren’t the starring roles. They’re definitely the supporting roles. As a woman writer, that’s an important thing to me, to figure out how to tell these stories of women. The family system is trapping each of them in a different way.
In the case of my main character, Noreen, she ends up marrying someone who probably literally would like to trap her, and that’s obviously not great. It’s still the larger trap—or entrapment—of family systems and the characters approach it in different ways. Noreen’s grandmother, the primary matriarch, has a leading trait of bitterness.
Rumpus: Alongside the matriarchal lines, the narrative addresses suicide and suicidal ideation in a frank way. It struck me that you must have bumped into a language problem. From a 2024 perspective, when we observe this family in your novel, many contemporary readers will recognize the intergenerational trauma immediately. I looked it up, and the phrase “intergenerational trauma” started appearing in academic discourse as early as the late 1960s, which surprised me. The two main story lines are again, [one] in the late 1990s and [two] the late 1970s to the early 1980s—but even in the ’90s I don’t think “intergenerational trauma” was in the popular lexicon.
Hesler: That, and how we even characterize mental health now. Panic disorder wasn’t defined until the third version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, or the DSM, in 1980. Before that, it was just grouped under other anxiety issues. My character Nonie—we would probably refer to her as bipolar, but that would have been called manic depression at the time.
I did a lot of research to try to understand not just how we think about mental health now and how it would affect a family now but also how to kind of combine all of the changing understanding of mental illnesses in the story.
Doing the research on that posed so many different challenges. Every time I would Google something like “history of manic depression,” I would get case histories of people. The case histories were really interesting but didn’t give me the kind of historical data I was looking for.
I realized I needed more source material, and I interviewed professionals in the field of mental health to hear their perspectives. I also read a lot of books and watched many documentaries and really just tried to find out as much as I could.
I wanted grounding in specifics so that I would never be using mental health as a prop or trope. If my understanding was more fully fledged, my characters could be more fully fledged.
Unfortunately, I think it’s safe to say most people have lost someone they know to suicide, or at least have known someone who has ideated, so some of my research also took the form of personal experience.
Rumpus: With those challenges—like research, our changed understanding of mental health, and even nomenclature—why did you choose this particular timeline?
Hesler: My interest in diagnostics, and how mental health diagnostics have changed, was part of it, but part of setting this in the late ’70s through the late ’90s is that I grew up in that time.
One of the things I’ve been mulling over, in the last several years, as a writer, is this question of: What are some of the main things that haunted my generation? I was thinking about things we fixated on that people don’t think about anymore.
As an example, in the background of the novel is the Iran Hostage Crisis in late 1979. This was something kids knew about at school. Every day, my teacher posted the daily tally in the window of her classroom, which was 444 days. It’s interesting because it’s something that my kids will only read about in a history book, but it was present for me. As we go forward in the timeline, it’s Y2K.
Rumpus: You negotiate very well in this book, the way in which things change over decades but also how things stay the same. You mentioned earlier that Nonie’s mother, who is Noreen’s grandmother, has a defining trait of being bitter. Yet, I feel for that character, trapped in an era where women had so few choices. At the same time, the “trapped” feeling transcends any particular era. How were you thinking about this?
Hesler: I think it goes for both family dynamics and marriage dynamics. Things that we wish we had made progress on, and things we have made progress on but are not quite all the way there.
Noreen does not have the same severe mental health challenges as her aunt Nonie, but she still struggles, and she marries a man who she sees as a steadying influence for the things about herself which feel to her like they’re spiraling into outer space.
She was raised with an underlying fear that she, Noreen, would turn out to be like her aunt Nonie. At best, troubled, and at worst, at risk for suicide. Noreen is hypervigilant against this.
There are times where she’ll get excited about something, and then the excitement becomes too much. She’s always studying the influence of her aunt, remembering it. Noreen has some mildly wild times in college, and then she’s ready for some grounding, which is how she comes to her marriage.
Rumpus: Knowing that many people reading this interview will not yet have read the book, it’s worth mentioning that heterosexual marriage was probably always in Noreen’s future. She’s not pushing against it, nor pushed into it. Her eventual husband is a bit awkward, but smart. He’s a handsome guy and well-dressed. He’s also dangerous and possessive. When we are zoomed into the very present of the narrative, Noreen has a young daughter, who she is much more engaged with than her husband. What were you thinking as you wrote what became the later sections?
Hesler: There are households that find some kind of fifty-fifty parenting balance, but far from all.
Luckily, there’s a lot of change in that direction. But even when there’s that support, I can attest to how the neurological connection between mother and child seems to demand more from the mother. Even the most supportive partner can’t stand in and become a receptor for all the neural connections nature builds into that relationship. There’s only so much support you can have and really truly feel like you’ve been relieved of a set of responsibilities. Often, starting out there are not a lot of options. Often, when you become a parent, you’re not at the peak of your career. So you don’t have any money. You might not have any help. You don’t necessarily have many, many things.
Being a new parent, no matter your age, can be isolating, but for Noreen as a young parent, it’s even more so. Her husband doesn’t have to go so far as to refuse to let her leave the house or actively track her to isolate her further. They’re a one-car household, and she’s at home in a rural setting, twenty miles from town with an infant.
Rumpus: But even though they have agreed, in a way, about how their life will look, Noreen’s husband creates a type of infrastructure around her that makes it very hard for her to have any independence. It’s subtle because she is very self-aware and realizes there’s an element of privilege in here too, because while oftentimes with young families, as you said, it’s hard to get help. Noreen stays home, which means they can afford it, but she still pays a price for that, in terms of her own freedom.
Hesler: She does. The idea that she agrees to having one car, she agrees to being at home with their daughter, Evie, and she agrees to delaying the finishing of her teacher certification—it’s all a little bit at a time. Her complicity prevents her from really seeing that this is a structure being imposed on her.
This was really important to me because that’s the way those relationships work. There’s a lot of trickery, and what we might call gaslighting now, but it’s even more complicated than gaslighting or trickery. It is figuring out how to get your buy-in and then using that against you later. So when she has an opportunity to be alone, she’s not terribly in touch with who she is or what she wants. The self-awareness you mentioned has been diminished.
Rumpus: Right. I think of an example that has different stakes, like when I’ve complained about jobs I’ve had, and people are like, “But didn’t you really want that job? Didn’t you choose it?” Then your own choices are a weapon against you.
Hesler: Just because Noreen was on board with the decisions in the marriage does not mean she deserves to be punished.
Rumpus: Sometimes we change our minds.
Hesler: Especially when it’s a slow chipping-away of your own personality.
Also, I did stay home with my kids. I stayed home with them because we had the privilege to do that but also because it was an unscripted amount of time so that I could use whatever was mine to write. I wasn’t going to have that kind of freedom with a different job. I definitely know about the way it feels isolating to be an at-home mom.
Rumpus: You mentioned at the beginning that part of the structure—and restructuring—of the book was about “keeping the pressure on the present.” You also mentioned this novel is not the first one you’ve written, it’s just the first to be published. How do you keep the pressure on the present in your own writing life?
Hesler: Having two books back-to-back really helps, though of course I didn’t plan that. What’s funny is about a month before I got my first book accepted—the story collection—the Atticus Review published my essay “A Redheaded Stepchild Reflects on Rejection.” It’s a personal essay that addresses some parts of my own family history, and I didn’t put it exactly this way in the piece, but I have a little bit of a pet peeve about writers who pooh-pooh anytime a writer gets a little disgruntled by too much rejection.
Writers are supposed to have this thick skin, always. I feel like that’s not really genuine to the experience of the writer who’s supposed to be emotionally receptive. I think we’re expected to be all the things. We’re supposed to have the thick skin and the soft underbelly. It’s a lot.
It was a hard essay to write, and it was such an interesting essay to have out in the world. I had so many people interact with me about it.
Then, as I said at the beginning, three months after I got an acceptance for the story collection, this novel was accepted.
The essay was in part about how to pick yourself up, despite the fact that sometimes it’s hard and it’s lonely, and there are so many different answers to the same question about how to stay present and deal with setbacks, and I think probably the most important one is community.
I’m putting the work in, putting the work out there. When we are working in community, we can talk about these things and not feel so alone.
Rumpus: Even though so many of us are compelled to work on our pages, sometimes in a long stretch of consistent rejection, I think sometimes we wonder: “What’s the point?” Did you ever feel that way?
Hesler: In a world that really measures you by external achievements, it’s tough to keep the faith and keep doing it and doing it and just trust it, and then make yourself trust again.
There were so many times that I just wanted to quit à la Jerry Maguire, as in deliver my little manifesto and storm out.
Every time I would picture it, it would make me laugh, which helped, but there was no place to storm out of. Really, if I did that, who would even know?
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Author photograph courtesy of Jody Hesler
