Save this article to read it later.
Find this story in your accountsSaved for Latersection.
Well enter, he says, a region where things seem not to behave as themselves.
Things never behave as themselves in Galchens fiction.
But in Galchens new book, the devilishly goodEveryone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch, irregularity is anathema.
Abiding by the rules of polite societybecomes a matter of life or death.
The idea came to Galchen early in the Trump administration.
I was desperate for escape, says the 45-year-old, speaking over Zoom from her apartment in New York.
Even before the pandemic, I was just like,Ive got to get out of this moment.
Im leaving the year.
Im leaving the century.
Shes less eager to define her own identity as a writer.
You cant plant truffles.
But it’s possible for you to sort of nose around for them.
Her sentences all have excellent posture.
Meanwhile, her narratives thrive on unreliability.
That collision is exactly where Galchens fiction resides, the place where absurdity froths up into hilarious social discomfort.
If that process sounds mystical, it is, even to Galchen.
This is just, she writes in an email, How It Works.
What they are most frequently is unorthodox.
Galchen wanted to know how this could happen.
I thought, okay, shes almost the oldest woman in town.
Shes been without a man, doing manly work, earning money, for years and years.
And they know that her son is so powerful.
Shes actually super-successful in her way, she says.
So it was just really to see her fall.
Just the sort of crooked path that makes sense for her.
(Im only getting the good.
I just dont look at the rest.)
She also doesnt like Googling herself, or even looking in the mirror.
), and tarnished by it.
(Galchen insists that while she likes funny books, she herself is not funny.
Its a novel of manners, where nobody has any.
Its unusual in fact (why be coy?
My primary identification was as a child of immigrants.
Other categories that were meaningful to me were Liking Math, Growing Up in Oklahoma.
But she also admits that having a daughter may have changed the way she looks at the world.
They were obsessed with asking her to cry!
They were just begging her to cry.
I mean, she was hearing all of these horrible stories.
Did they not move her?
She wouldnt cry publicly.
Isnt Katharina a kind of witch?, I ask.
She was an indomitable woman who mixed up tonics for neighbors and dispensed advice like she was everybodys mother-in-law.
A woman without concern for social codes might as well collect newts eyes and castrate men with a wink.
She has unsettling powers.
