Ohio, 1985. Photograph courtesy of Mary Robison.

There were a few conditions around my first meetings with Mary Robison. She is an extreme night owl; hates Mondays; preferred a place to talk where she could make endless pots of decaf, someplace where she could easily duck out and smoke. Home wouldn’t work. During our second set of conversations, conducted on the phone, I understood why that was: neighbors, talkative ones, tend to drop in, much as they do in her novels, with some fascinatingly oblique and long-winded monologue, or asking to walk Robison’s cat.

When we did meet in person, in the fall of 2022, it was in a beige-walled motel suite. On a Wednesday afternoon, Robison arrived in a long black skirt, a deconstructed rosary made by her daughter Jenny, stacks of silver rings, and motorcycle boots, her black-and-silver hair down. She spoke in low, quiet tones. She did not avail herself of the kitchenette’s coffee maker, having brought bottled iced green tea. We met over four days; on the first, before I’d pressed the Record button, she was talking about The Stars at Noon, her favorite Denis Johnson novel. Smoke breaks bracketed our conversations, counted out in Camels because Robison can no longer find Old Golds. 

The first stories Robison published, in The New Yorker, were written in the mid-to-late seventies, when she was still a student at the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars, studying with John Barth. Her first collections—Days (1979), affixed with high praise from Richard Yates, and An Amateur’s Guide to the Night (1981)—placed her in league with a dazzling group of American short-story writers, including Amy Hempel, Raymond Carver, Ann Beattie, and Frederick Barthelme, though with a critic-coined label, minimalism, that she disliked. More books followed at a steady clip: the novel Oh! (1981), about an eccentric and motherless Midwestern family, later adapted by Michael Almereyda into the 1989 film Twister, starring Harry Dean Stanton and Crispin Glover; the collection Believe Them (1988); and Subtraction (1991), a novel in which a poet tries to track down her errant husband all over Houston. In the nineties, alongside her teaching gigs, Robison worked as a script doctor in Hollywood, a job she gave to Money, the protagonist of Why Did I Ever, her 2001 novel structured in 536 vignettes. It won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, beating out Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections and an Alice Munro story collection. Her novel One D.O.A., One on the Way (2009) intersperses reported details from fractured post-Katrina New Orleans within its vignetted form. Robison is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rea Award for the Short Story, and an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature. Of all the ways her admirers—among them Hempel, Richard Ford, Rick Moody, David Leavitt, and Larry McMurtry—have praised her work, she is most partial to Barry Hannah’s description of her prose, as “pure, grim poetry.”

A Mary Robison sentence is unforecastable, charged with peculiar energy. Her characters lend seemingly benign observations rhythms all their own. “They’ll move a word so that the whole line is different,” Robison told me. “It’s a word, and a pause, and a gasp, and whatever. It’s a syntactical thing, and I try to screw with that.” Here’s Money’s platonic partner, after delivering a lengthy and unsolicited interpretation of the story of David and Goliath: “ ‘Well, lookit,’ Hollis says, a little flustered. ‘I can think this stuff or share some of it. You people choose.’ ” 

A few years ago, Robison began listening mostly to jazz and blues. On the morning of our first meeting, she’d been hunting for the Bessie Smith song “You’ve Been a Good Ole Wagon” on Last.fm, and she talked about Smith, Jelly Roll Morton, and Billie Holiday. “Wanting her voice to be another instrument—how does a person have that as a lifelong goal?” For a while she led a photography group on Flickr, often posting cropped and color-tinted photos, especially of her late daughter, Rachel, who, she said, “was just born to be photographed.” Robison lives with Jenny, a jewelry artist she credits as her sharpest reader. She’s private about exactly where that is. She has lived all over the country, including for stretches in Mississippi, Texas, Massachusetts, and Florida. During our conversations, she recounted the bus trip she took when she left Florida to take care of her mother, leaving behind her car for her daughters. She was weaning herself off flying; there was no train. She still has a fondness for the people she met along the way. “They didn’t have to explain anything,” she said. “You know the reasons they’re on the bus too.”

INTERVIEWER

Tell me, what are you writing now?

MARY ROBISON

I’ve been involved with a novel for about ten years, maybe more than that, called “Glass Avenue.” It’s a book about giants—three men who have giantism. They’re not eight feet tall but they’re damn near. When the three of them go out anywhere, people start screaming and tearing out into the parking lot. It’s bizarre, because everything, of course, has to be. They wear a size thirty-five shoe. They can’t fit into cars. There’s a social worker who is assigned to their case, studying them at an institute. She lives with these three giants.

INTERVIEWER

What got you thinking about those characters?

ROBISON

That she could belong with them and help them seem less preposterous, less menacing. She could remind them of the humor in their lives. I mean, not like a setup joke.

INTERVIEWER

So not “Three giants walk into a —”?

ROBISON

No, ha. So much of humor is stock, and I want to steer away from that. Buttering the tie and slipping on the banana peel … I get it, you’re watching someone be ridiculous, but you don’t know the tie-butterer. It’s the human part of humor that you can relate to. Like Mel Brooks—“I’m wearing a cardboard belt!” That’s how he described being down and out. So many writers have done so much for me in that way—Donald Barthelme, David Foster Wallace. Wallace’s funny is, of course, also heartbreaking. It’s the magic and the humor and the heartbreak.

INTERVIEWER

Do you think humor is undervalued in fiction?

ROBISON

The joke may not be unappreciated, but it is undercherished. I’ll admit that humor is paint that covers a lot of sins, but I think readers minimize the ability to mix it in. What I like is the element of surprise. It could be a dog crossing the street one morning with a string of wieners, which is something I’ve always wanted to see. That’s my golden dream. I don’t think I ever will. But you don’t know—it could happen, and it could change you, and change your life.

INTERVIEWER

Sometimes the dog is there, but we don’t see it walking by.