As the short story writer Kelly Link was preparing her latest collection, she found one story veering off track. The Lesson began life as a “supernatural wedding story”, Link says. But then it turned into something else: “I used some of my own life.”
Link is married to another writer, Gavin Grant, and lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, where the pair run Small Beer Press, a little publishing house. In 2009, their daughter Ursula was born prematurely at 24 weeks. It took a year and a half to get her home. She’s fine now. “But there was a quality to that year and a half, where time went very fast and simultaneously very slowly,” Link says. “Her situation changed, sometimes moment from moment, and so it felt as if we were living, each moment, only in that moment.” So The Lesson turned into a story about how a premature birth had affected a gay couple looking to adopt.
The story is unusual for her because Link doesn’t usually write things so strictly in the realist vein. Despite having only three short story collections under her belt, including this month’s Get in Trouble, she’s admired by some of the most celebrated names in the business; both Michael Chabon and Neil Gaiman are fans.
Link works across genres, not fitting easily into pre-prescribed marketing categories. Her stories typically see reality and fantasy collide, which means that on some readers lists she’ll go right into the fantasy bin. But Link’s form of magic is decidedly literary, the tone of the stories tending towards the melancholy and eerie. “Fairy tales are a very useful kind of storytelling shorthand,” she says. “You can use fragments of them in ways that add dimension and weight to whatever other kinds of story you’re telling.”
In Get in Trouble, Link branches out from fairytales into other fantasy tropes, with vampires, spaceships and ghosts treated matter-of-factly. As the critic Daniel Mendelsohn once put it, Link’s stories derive their appeal from the way “they replicate so uncannily the feel and logic of dreams”. In the first story, The Summer People, the metaphysical people of the title are not clearly defined. All along you wonder: who are they?
Another story, I Can See Right Through You, traces the arc of a decidedly more modern fairytale: a failed romance between two young movie stars. I was sure she had to be riffing on Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart. But Link was referring to something else altogether. “The starting place was something that the writer Holly Black told me about something she’d read about the relationship between Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio and their experience filming Titanic, which was a stressful and enormously isolating shoot,” she says.
“They felt that they had gone through something that no one else would ever understand – and then, on top of that, the success of the movie, which is another kind of stress, another kind of isolation and pressure. So I took that and tried to come up with two people who weren’t like Winslet and DiCaprio at all. Or like anyone else.”
In fact, she had stories by authors Joyce Carol Oates and Elizabeth Bowen in mind as models. Also, she adds, “I’d already written one vampire story for the collection, and wanted a second one.” She is always promiscuous like this, it seems; in interviews you’ll find her citing Cheever and Angela Carter alongside YA novelists as her inspirations. She is a great fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and The Vampire Diaries. She is someone who can find meaning in all sorts of unlikely places.
And she doesn’t have an ideal reader. “I’ve been thinking about this question for a while and now want to turn it on its head,” Link says. “I mean, it makes more sense – doesn’t it? – to cast a net as wide as possible when writing stories. I suppose I write stories for people who feel that the world is a strange place, but try to have a sense of humour about it.”
Get in Trouble is published by Random House in the US and will be out in the UK from Canongate next month
