L’Esprit Featured Writer || Issue Four

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A conversation with author Jaclyn Gilbert about her new novel, Pauline. Read an extract of the book here.

L’Esprit Literary Review: How did your piece come to be, and what do you want our readers to know about your work? Is there any context you would like to provide to either the extract specifically or the novel in general?

Jaclyn Gilbert:  This excerpt from my novel, Pauline, draws inspiration from Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” a short story that has influenced my life and writing process since I was a teenager. The first time I read it in high school, I was haunted by the escalating effect of the narrator’s voice, and how precipitous her sense of reality is, weighed against what she is told to believe about her nervous condition and the space she is asked to inhabit in the nursery of an abandoned summer home. Gilman underwent a Victorian rest cure in 1892, under the care of Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell at Turner Hospital in Philadelphia, where she was told never to touch a pen or brush for the rest of her life. She spent weeks heavily drugged, subsisting on a diet rich in “fat and blood,” which shares the title of one of Mitchell’s most influential papers, available online. At Turner, Mitchell also treated Civil War veterans for phantom limb syndrome, a coin he termed. I wanted to explore the parallels between the duality of that space through the distorted lens of Jane Fulsom, a woman suffering from postpartum grief in the months between when her son is born and her father dies of cancer after he survives an unnamed war in the novel. Jane’s condition encapsulates much of the isolation I felt when my own father died during the pandemic, when I was struggling to embrace the unknowns of new motherhood and allow myself the space to “be mad”–the space to create without imposing conditions around what I should say or write about during this unstable time of my life.

LLR: That leads nicely into our next questions: what is your creative process like? When you sit down to write, how do you approach your work? More specifically, can you speak to the journey of working on this novel? 

JG:  It can be hard for me to pin down my process, because every story feels different. When I started Pauline, I was teaching “The Yellow Wallpaper” to a writing student, and I became obsessed with peeling back layers of meaning that had not felt available to me in my teens. Perhaps because I lacked the experience to feel the angst and repression of desire the narrator inhabits in a tangible way. I began reading about Gilman’s life extensively, finding solace in her diaries and autobiographical writings. During this time, I had a severe case of shingles, which was followed by Covid, the flu and pneumonia. I’d never spent so much time in bed in my life–and I can vividly recall the first day I left my house to see the water, now that we live near the beach in coastal Connecticut. A whole void of language seemed to open up out of the waves; I felt a voice rise up that was both my voice and someone else’s–maybe Gilman’s ghost??–and I let myself write a kind of monologue that asked for repeated expansion. I became obsessed with particular words and ideas that felt rooted in the Rest Cure era, too–laudanum, chlorhydric acid, brown gingham dresses, the garden walk, a silk kimono–scraps that gave me the raw materials I needed to access Jane’s landscape (both her physical reality and her warped interiority). I began to see a correlation between the madness of polite Victorian society and the chaos inside women diagnosed with hysteria. How the ways in which they were treated in sanatoriums like Mitchell’s denied them their basic autonomy, let alone a voice to resist the ills of modern medicine (the ills of industrialization), made their conditions worse instead of better.  This reversal of experience–for what appears to be “well” to be mentally ill, and for what appears to be mentally ill, to be “well”–continues to drive my writing process. And maybe this is true of my work in general….I am always trying to excavate the unsaid, to unravel our surface reality into a kind of interior labyrinth that is its own truth, its own self-contained subjectivity….to better understand the ironies inherent to our human condition. To allow the chaotic and disordered to have a place to reside in, despite what institutionalized reality tries to deny or forget. 

LLR: At L’Esprit we like to talk about literary ancestry, a concept somewhat removed from influences that encompasses the work that, much like genealogical ancestry, finds its way into one’s writing—intentionally or otherwise. Are there writers or works that you might see as your literary ancestors, as a writer generally and/or with regards towards this project?

JG: Well, I know I’ve mentioned one of them already for this project, but in general, I am a big Virginia Woolf fan. Like Gilman, Woolf underwent a similar rest cure under Mitchell’s supervision. Septimus Warren Smith in Mrs. Dalloway is based on her own experience undergoing his treatment. I am obsessed with Woolf’s fearlessness when it comes to narrative–how her use of language mirrors water, moving in waves, expanding and contracting out of the particular consciousnesses of her characters, relying on language, on repetition and atmospheric detail to take us outside of time and back inside it again, altering our perception of reality. Alice Munro is another ancestor I try to return to as often as possible. I recently reread her short story, “Carried Away,” novel-like in its proportions as it traces a love story out of letters written during the First World War, referring to multiple histories rooted in industrial violence, and how dangerous (yet human) it is to fall in love with elusive ideas that defy reason. The hallucinogenic ending of this story guides what I hope to achieve, ultimately, through writing Pauline.

LLR: A more specific version of that same question: Which novels, stories, literary movements, traditions, or ideas do you see this novel as being in conversation with? 

JG:  Lately, I’ve been reading a lot of Claire Keegan, a new obsession! I especially love her novel, Small Things Like These and her story collection, So Late in the Day. Keegan, like Munro, has a masterful gift for honing in on the seemingly quietest moments of existence that hold the most potential for radical self-realization, destruction, or change. I recently read Susan Minot’s Evening, too, an incredible work of non-linear narrative that examines the unreliable nature of memory and desire, and the texture of a life by way of water and shadow rising up over the page. Emily Holmes Coleman’s Shutter of Snow, recommended by a beloved writing professor, is another work with which I feel a certain kinship on the sentence level, illuminating the horrors of how postpartum grief has been treated for centuries. Coleman’s work is nearly out of print and yet, to me, her voice should be celebrated in equal measure with that of T.S. Eliot, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald, all of whom were her contemporaries. Lately, I’ve also been getting into Munch and Kirchner’s lithographic drawings and prints–there’s an exhibit at the Yale Art Gallery running until June that looks at their history with illness through texture, light, and shadows that reflect buried mythologies of self and”‘other”. Next on my list is to watch the German expressionist 1920 silent horror film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. 

LLR: Did you have a favorite (perhaps here meaning ‘most amusing’) review of Late Air, or one that simply stood out in some way? 

JG: This is such a hard question for me–maybe because Late Air came out the year before my son was born–six months before the pandemic started–and so much other life has happened since. But while it wasn’t a review per se, the interview I did with my good friend and the poet Kristina Andersson for The Rumpus stands out as one that helped me see things about my own writing process–especially as it relates to my relationship to running, language, and my body–in ways that didn’t feel possible before our conversation. 

LLR: Both that book and this project explore marriage and domesticity, although in different ways. Can you speak a little to that, and perhaps how your goals have changed between the two?

JG: A very meta question, because I suppose I should separate my goals for writing about marriage and domesticity from my goals for living them–which are very hard for me to do–and perhaps why I am so interested in the relationship between marriage and madness in general!…..but I will say that because Late Air and Pauline feel like such different books, how they look at this relationship is one that wants to shift and evolve. Late Air is largely a novel about how grief affects two people–Nancy and Murray–after they lose their only child. They need to grieve their loss in fundamentally different ways, making them strangers to one another over time. Murray’s need to suppress his grief after his star athlete suffers a traumatic brain injury runs inverse to his ex-wife Nancy’s need to rediscover her body through running much later in life, leading her back to a place of love and healing when she least expects to find it by the end of the novel. 

Pauline is about the particular grief of new motherhood–about the isolation a woman feels when her identity is asked to shift radically, overnight in a hospital setting, only to be deemed “unwell” if she cannot embrace this shift the ways she’s taught she should from images of ideal motherhood. It is about how the hospital space so often bleeds into the domestic space when it comes to fulfilling our ordered roles as women, as caretakers and nurses, without ever remembering when or how we’d signed up for this level of self-sacrifice as mothers or wives. The patriarchal nature of turn-of-century medicine that bears more in common than we’d like to with contemporary medicine makes us question the ways in which the hospital is an extension of the home–a space of confinement and isolation, a space of ordered routine that can be enough to make a person mad. The stoicism of grief–or the stoicism of being asked to repress our grief in order to survive in society–enacts a kind of violence within. For veterans forced to adapt to society after the war, as though it were no different from before they left to the war, or women asked to quiet their voices after an irretrievable piece of themselves has been taken a way to give birth to a child, we are denying them the right to heal on their own terms. Pauline is about the power of the imagination–the power of the surreal–to give us the strength to survive inhumanity by taking residence within. 

LLR: A major theme of Late Air was long-distance running; in Pauline, you’re exploring another fairly specific narrative element: the early 20th-century sanatorium, and, perhaps more broadly, the intersection of mental health and society in a specifically charged manner. How have you navigated the process of, to a lesser or greater extent, centering a novel’s architecture around a central throughline?

JG: Now that you mention it, both Late Air and Pauline are novels about places that reflect institutions. Late Air is set at Yale, where I ran cross country as an undergraduate-–a place that still feels particularly charged, and in many ways, unhinged, for me. The pressure to perform well weighed on me, and more often than not my best athletic performances failed to reflect what I was feeling on the inside. My relationship with my father ended when I was in freshman college–or more like it was the beginning of the end; what would happen after that year, became like a slow unraveling of my psyche that would take years to recover, or try to repair through remapping my relationship to my body through language and writing. In Pauline, the sanatorium similarly reflects the idea of a space meant to reflect order and control, when in reality it is a place that makes the patients it has been designed to treat feel helpless and out of control. This disconnect is what drives what happens in the book–it leads Jane to look for air and light in ways she isn’t expecting–leading the boundaries between the gated communities she’s been confined within to turn watery and other. As Jane follows Pauline to an island by ferry, the known landscape of the hospital begins to fade away, giving shape to a new subterranean landscape of discovery through which Jane seeks to recover what she lost–or what no one gave her the space to grieve after her son was born and her father died. 

LLR: Following that idea, of institutions centering both novels: how does sense of place function in your work? Do you start from a particular setting or is that an element that appears once the narrative has begun to develop?

JG: I usually start with a character before a place, but I guess I’m also always thinking about place as a particular time of life–a particular season of life, and so in that way, I guess time also occupies place through the particular of consciousness of the character or characters I am working to build. Through building that consciousness in time, the setting starts to clarify–largely through the language needed to realize a specific architecture. In researching Pauline, I’ve done a lot of reading about sanatoriums characteristic of the era–and the different contexts they occupied. They were in some cases used as prisons, others as hospitals, and others as resting spaces for wealthy artists. The multiplicity of space creates a haunting effect historically when you consider the different possibilities for treatment. I’ve also been interested in spaces designed by bodies of water–for access to fresh sea air–but which also allow proximity to chaos. For storms to rise out of the sea, storms that mirror an escalating desire for freedom within. 

LLR: An interesting element of characterization in the pages we see here is the direct address. Can you talk a bit about that technique as it features in Pauline, and your point-of-view choices (perhaps especially as relative to your compositional goals) in this project?

JG: Throughout writing this project, Pauline represents a shadow self, a mysterious “other” that lives both outside and within Jane’s psyche. She is the vehicle for Jane to converse with herself she didn’t have access to before–both before she entered the sanatorium and throughout her first week’s at the hospital before she first notices Pauline in the garden. Through Jane’s observations of her elusive physicality–her phantom limb–Jane begins to give voice to repressed memories from her childhood–the memory of her father surviving the war, and who she had been before she married and started her family. Pauline also offers Jane a visceral, concrete lens for seeing the sanatorium as an oppressive place that resists what she has been told to believe about it, allowing her to form her own opinions and realize that still has a voice–that her thoughts are still valid, even though the rest of the world assumes she is mad. I understand Pauline as a means of self-awakening, an entry point into the  surreal nature of grief–of living through grief–that challenges our perception of the real, our illusory need for stasis in order to survive.

LLR: You also write and publish essays. How do they intersect with your fiction, and how do the two genres inform one another?

JG: I like to write nonfiction on the side….in ways that trick myself into fiction. Or for my lived experience as a mother, distance runner, writer, etc to find clarity through essay, or fragments of essay into memoir (maybe?) that might inform the deeper themes and ideas I am after in my fiction. The essay I published in Tin House online, for instance– “Core Being” navigates my experience suppressing loss through trying to control my body athletically. It was part of a larger memoir project–or still is, I suppose–about examining how this need for control both pulls me away and back to my center over time. It is about the nature of trauma, of injury, of fracturing and trying to recover what is lost through language, to move through pain to see beyond it.

LLR: How do you approach revision?

JG:  My approach seems to change as much as my process does…..but I think in general I always begin with a rough draft. I try to let myself write what I’m focused on into a shape with a through line–usually a circular, non-linear through-line in need of drastic restructuring, expansion, and compression, though not necessarily in that order. Once I have the rough shape, I try to hone in on a condition for change and transformation. What would it mean for the character I am creating, and the situation I am tightening, to change by the end? Does the character desire change or not? How does the situation evolve to complicate the character’s condition? These questions allow me a bird’s eye view of the order and the kind of patterns I am trying to build through scenes and the particular atmosphere my characters have been asked to inhabit. The structure usually clarifies around these questions through rewriting and being open to play with order, and to explore new possibilities for scenes I hadn’t considered in the first draft. Once I get into a rhythm with this, I allow myself the fun part, which for me is working on the sentence level, very slowly….I like to play with rhythm and sound as much as possible, and to get the sound and rhythm to match where my characters are in space as they move through it. It feels like getting into a flow state when I am running for a really, really long time. 

LLR: What was the last book, story, poem, or work of art that moved you?

JG: Munch’s Toward the Forest–as I mentioned a bit earlier, I became haunted by the image from a Yale Art Gallery flyer, advertising their latest exhibit “Munch and Kirchner: Anxiety and Expression.” It took me weeks to see it in person, and this began to feel like a journey all on its own–my struggle to carve out time for myself to immerse in an art-filled space. So often my schedule feels chopped into a billion pieces across my different jobs across the spheres of motherhood and my work as a literary agent and as a private editor and writing teacher, and fiction writer. When I stepped into the exhibit for the first time two weeks ago, I felt like I could breathe again. The mixture of sharp structured lines with undulating light offered a new lens into Jane’s view from the ridge. I copied down lines from the caption, an excerpt from Munch’s writings: “They went into an opening in the forest–on both sides stood tall conifers and birches–lush and dark against the twilight evening air….They walked up and silently, heads bowed–they were enveloped in an atmosphere of solemnity, as though in a church.” 

LLR: Anything else you’d like to say to our readers?

JG: Along with Munch & Kirchner, I highly recommend Sarah Ruhl’s modern play, In the Next Room, about the invention of the vibrator in the wake of Edison’s invention of the lightbulb—it pairs well with the exhibit!

 

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Jaclyn Gilbert is the author of the debut novel Late Air. She holds an MFA in Fiction from Sarah Lawrence College, was a 2019 and 2023 writer-in-residence at the Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild and Vermont Studio Center, and her short fiction, essays, and book reviews have appeared in Post Road Magazine, Tin House, Lit Hub, Paper Brigade, and Connecticut Literary Anthology. Most recently, she founded Driftless Literary as an agenting collective for representing genre defying work in the U.S. and abroad.

Photo Credit: Michael Shoemaker is a poet, writer, photographer and author of Rocky Mountain Reflections (Poets’ Choice, 2023). His photography has appeared in Front Porch Review, Writers on the Range, Littoral Magazine, Yahoo.com. and elsewhere. He lives in Magna, Utah with his wife and son where he enjoys looking out on the Great Salt Lake every day. His online photography portfolio is at https://michaelshoemaker.crevado.com/ Michael has been awarded an artist residency at the Wolff Cottage in Fairhope, Alabama for October 2025. He is an editor at the Clayjar Review and an assistant editor at Lit Shark Literary Magazine.