I first met Jen Michalski in 2016, after I published an article about the somewhat dismal sales of my debut collection of short stories and Michalski, being Michalski, reached out to offer a review of my book in her literary journal JMWW.
Since then, I’ve come to admire her not just as someone who gives back to the literary community but also as an author. Michalski is an award-winning author of eight books of fiction. She writes just as convincingly about an herb from Polish folklore that bestows immortality (The Tide King) as she does about driving around in a borrowed Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles–themed sedan (You’ll Be Fine), and she can nail the emotional resonance of long-buried family traumas (The Summer She Was Under Water). In her newest novel, All This Can Be True (Keylight Books, 2025), Michalski makes readers want to break out the black eyeliner and catch a show headlining (the excellently named) Clit Girls.
I’ve been reading her books for nearly a decade now, and what strikes me as the through line across her catalog is a persistent commitment to humanizing all of her characters, even—perhaps especially—the ones who are unlikeable or odd, inscrutable, even cruel. She seems to understand what makes people tick. She is generous in sharing that understanding.
We spoke over Zoom, and this conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
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The Rumpus: A lot happens in the first five pages of All This Can Be True. We learn immediately that one of your main characters, Lacie, wants to divorce her husband, Derek, and that she has battled with prescription drug addiction; in these same opening pages, the two are traveling by air and he has a stroke while on the plane. What was your process of structuring the opening, and how were you thinking through it?
Jen Michalski: The idea of the book came right as the pandemic started. I had this image of a woman waking up and there was another woman lying next to her, and the phone rang, and she answered it, and it was the hospital telling her that her husband woke up from his coma.
At that point, I was thinking of it cinematically too, as in, “What’s happening here? What are these women doing in bed together? Why was this woman’s husband in a coma and why is he now awake? There were questions right away, but my instinct was to also put the reader in an area of great uncertainty.
I started to wonder if the husband’s coma was from COVID, but there was a point that if you hadn’t written about the pandemic and your book wasn’t in the pipeline, no one was interested in publishing it. However, the point was, what if there could be a mesh of the two things I was thinking of? There were the women in bed and the man in the hospital.
I kept trying to set it up. Lacie and Derek at the airport, him not feeling well, her talking to a lesbian couple at the gate. I was trying to foreshadow.
During the pandemic, I was watching a lot of movies from the seventies, which are beautiful and rich, but they also have a lot of scenes before the inciting incident. It creates atmosphere, but as modern readers—or viewers—I think we are much more accustomed now to getting to the action quickly, and as a writer I want to put the reader at the edge of the cliff.
As you’re writing, sometimes you feel like such a responsibility to lay groundwork, ground people in a scene, but my writing group also essentially told me to get to the point, so I put Lacie and Derek on the airplane in the opening and got rid of the setup.
Rumpus: Does this structure become a question of delivering on how readers expect a book to behave?
Michalski: I don’t know if it’s just an attention span thing, but I’ve definitely noticed that even reading literary fiction of an earlier era, things just happened a little more organically.
Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom came out a decade and a half ago, and it dives immediately into the past for a hundred pages. It’s very character-driven, but also very indulgent. I can see how it might not be to the taste of readers of today.
I think people have a more intense desire to feel like they know not just what something is about, but what it is for. They want to know what’s going to be on the test, even if the test is just book club.
If it’s too hard to find, if the book is akin to a big old grandmother purse with lots of threads and wrappers and tissues in it, they don’t want anything to do with it, even if there’s also some treasures in there.
People want something more like the clear backpacks we use at stadiums. They need to see what’s in there. For my part, I don’t think it’s good or bad. I think it’s just the way we’ve evolved in terms of processing information.
At the same time, I did feel that starting my book quickly gave me some space to go back, once I had caught the reader’s attention.
Rumpus: I think there are some other forces at work too. Ten years ago, most people didn’t have “content” in their lexicon in the same way we do now.
Michalski: And by that same token, if I wrote this book ten years ago, it would be a hundred pages longer.
Writers often can make it so hard to invite the reader in. There’s a prologue. There’s a big interior scene. If the book is a door, it should be open, not locked up, because you want to welcome the reader. You also want to communicate that there’s a clear payoff.
Go on Goodreads and click to the one-star reviews that are five paragraphs long, where people spend a lot of time detailing what they didn’t like. I read these—and these are my favorite reviews to read—to see what problems readers have with particular books. It’s usually the same things: believable characters, character motivation, and pacing.
We’re in an age of this constant feedback loop for our work and other people’s work, so we should take advantage of it.
All This Can Be True is still 290 pages, but it’s definitely more compressed than it would have been without reflecting on how certain kinds of novels have changed, and reflecting back on my own body of work.
Rumpus: Does this thinking about compression and payoff change what you write about topically as well as structurally?
Michalski: I try not to compromise, but when I do look at my own work, I’m not sure all of it is in fact terribly inviting, even though that is my advice to other writers! I’ve always wanted to write what interests me, and I have always accepted that there may never be a huge or mainstream market. Writing is a way for me to process the world and see it, but I also want a dialogue in the conversation about how I see the world.
My work has never been commercial, and that’s not to say there aren’t times where I’ve been disappointed that a book hasn’t done better. I’ve had discussions with people who suggest writing something that’s really popular or saleable, as if we can fully predict that, or even a friend who suggested I ghost write.
Those two things, both writing for the payday, feels more like a commodity. I’d rather focus on my own work, which is again, about the ways that I interact with the world, in the same way someone might interact by playing music or painting.
Rumpus: I also disagree with this notion of somehow mainstream fiction or serialized romance is somehow easier. It’s still hard. There might be more of a formula, but there still has to be an emotional grab in the text. How do you respond to this idea that if you, as a writer, are capable of writing great layered, nuanced books of literary fiction that you could just crank out a romance novel in five weeks and make a million bucks on it?
Michalski: I’m not even sure it’s about layers, or if it is about programs teaching writing a certain way.
Sometimes I used to go to these little regional conferences and there would be one or two literary fiction writers, and then there’d be the person who wrote a thriller and they were the headliner.
Attending these events, I was a little young and scoffing at, “Oh, look at this wannabe John Grisham,” but then I would find that I learned a lot more about craft from these writers than I would from a lot of the classes I took in undergrad or graduate school.
Those writers really knew how to create suspense and tension, and they knew how to handle pacing.
Different genres can teach each other things.
Rumpus: In your new novel, Lacie, while her husband Derek is recovering after the stroke on the airplane—not a spoiler—meets Quinn, and the two women have an immediate connection. Their meeting dictates much of what happens next, plot-wise. How do you handle a high-impact chance encounter in a novel?
Michalski: It’s hard because obviously there’s a bit of a contrivance there, and the feedback I kept getting from my writing group was that there had to be something that connected Lacie, Derek, and Quinn; Quinn just can’t walk into their lives.
Readers find out later what the connection is, but I worked though different secrets in the pages that didn’t end up in the book, just like I worked through different reasons for Derek to be in a coma.
In my writing group, the representation of genre is non-fiction, children’s books, screenplays, literary fiction, short stories. It’s interesting to get these perspectives, and it helps me bring in what works, whether that’s a plot twist or something else.
In real life, someone like Quinn could disrupt Derek and Lacie’s relationship out of nowhere. Yet, the solution that I engineered to make the chance encounter and the context of past connections work on the page had more of a cinematic scope to it, and as I wrote that version of the draft, it felt like the right one. As I was re-reading and editing, I thought, “I’m going to sell this book.” I also thought, “Okay, if I don’t, I still did it right for this book and I’ll feel absolutely no regrets about it.”
I wrote the book I could write. I felt at peace with it. After I started sending that version out, I had a new agent within a month, and the book sold within two months.
Rumpus: The character of Quinn fronts a post-Riot grrrl band, the Clit Girls, and from that she has a particular kind of feminist fame. I’m curious why you chose this persona for your character. That kind of rocker feels like a different era, closer to the 70s movies you were watching in lockdown or even Franzen’s Freedom than the musicians of today.
Michalski: There are probably two answers here. First, I am someone who secretly always wanted to be in a band. It’s not that if I had to choose between being in a band and being a writer, I’d necessarily choose a band, but over the years I’ve tried to teach myself guitar and bass and piano and this and that. I can play a couple little things, but I just never had the discipline, or I found that during the time I’d put aside to practice an instrument, I’d always gravitate to writing.
Quinn as a character is an Easter egg for myself. Quinn being in the scene was a celebration of my love of the whole Riot grrrl movement coming out of Washington state when I was in college in the nineties.
You’ve got Bikini Kill and then on to Sleater-Kinney. Now it would be someone like Chastity Belt. Quinn is an homage I’m paying to artists with whom I grew up, artists I really was interested in. These women were and are great and incredible and I want the next generations to know them.
Second, it’s just where I am. A lot of this book is about encores in life. Second chances, and even later in life encores. I’m at the stage in my own life where whatever I was expecting to happen either did or it didn’t.
I’m personally in the process of being either at peace or reinventing, and I think a lot of my audience are in a similar space. It seems the people who are at peace are also reinventing.
There was a time that there were bands I followed in the DC scene in the eighties and the nineties that were all of a sudden working the alphabet agencies in the 2000s—and two of the members from Velocity Girl transitioning to being rock mommies and doing a kid’s show.
That hit me. I could never take on so much risk and then end up feeling like I’d failed, but my character Quinn could.
It’s Lacie’s daughter—the next generation and who is plugged in to being an influencer—who inadvertently propels Quinn to get back to music again.
I love that redemption story of someone who doesn’t really know who Quinn was, but could still set her on this path to, if not actual redemption, at least an acknowledgement of “Hey, you were doing something important with your music.”
Rumpus: Lacie also has a redemption story because she’d gone through a period of substance abuse, and a period of strife. There is the juxtaposition of her on the surface, the perfect controlled life paired with a Klonopin addiction; the perfect marriage paired with the fact she’s really unhappy. How were you thinking of her as you wrote?
Michalski: There are people that are struggling with all sorts of addictions, whether it’s alcohol or a pill or just internet or whatever. I made a conscious choice to downplay it. It’s part of her character, but I didn’t want to over-write it, to take away from the present situation. Lacie is someone who’s always felt a little out of step or not quite in the life that she wanted.
In terms of her marriage, it strikes me that there are two kinds of people. There are people who get divorced with alarming frequency and just jump ship at the first sign of any boat shaking.
Then, there are people who will just ride the Titanic down, and Lacie is one of those. I think we are wired to ride or to jump, and a lot of our adulthood is spent trying to understand or even unravel that conditioning.
I say this as someone who moved across the country, from Maryland to California, without knowing anyone, but it’s still hard for me to take major risks.
For someone like Lacie, who has insulating wealth and doesn’t have the same questions most of us have, like how we pay for health procedures or make the rent or mortgage, it feels like it would be even more difficult for her to take a risk.
At the same time, I do like to urge people like her, because maybe we can all embody some bravery when it comes to risk-taking.
Rumpus: Is that why you wrote this book?
Michalski: Why does one thing rise to the top over another? Looking back, when I started it, my wife and I were literally trapped it our house during lockdown, and it felt productive—or rewarding?—or cathartic?—to write about a woman who’s trapped in her life, too. I’m not sure I’d be as interested in writing this book from the perspective of what my life looks like right now, frankly.
It was hard to make Lacie sympathetic, as she is someone who seems to have it all, at least on the surface. Besides the obvious—that wealth isn’t everything—I always strive to find the human in every person.
The reader can be critical of Lacie crying over her spilled milk, but that’s what we do as authors: we put people in each other’s shoes, put ourselves in each other’s shoes. It felt challenging and rewarding to help her find happiness.
I know many people who can’t give up on the idea of what their life is versus the shape they expected their life to take. I don’t know who told them the expected shape, but, still, they are trapped in that space.
I wrote this book a little bit for me, and a little bit for Lacie, and a little bit for everyone.
It’s what I can do to try and relay empathy. We’re all a little bit country and a little bit rock ‘n roll, and I feel I’ve succeeded as a writer if I can humanize the worst and best in my characters.
