In Process With: Katya Apekina

"Sometimes if you take too long with a novel it becomes a bunch of new novels in the process."

This month’s In Process With…brings us to the desk of novelist, screenwriter, and translator Katya Apekina.

At the New York reading for her latest novel, Mother Doll, out in paperback this very month (and available in hardcover now if you can’t wait) Katya described the act of writing it—a book that prominently features a psychic—as channeling. And while it’s clear that there is more than a bit of divine energy flowing through Katya’s brain onto the page, there is also a lot of talent and hard work, both her novels masterclasses in the structural choices that make novels feel muscular and important rather than wispy or meandering. Mother Doll is indeed like a Matryoshka doll, an examination the very question of what lives inside a story and between: generations, narratives, families. If you’ve been a long time Talk Soon reader, you perhaps remember my noting that Katya’s first novel, The Deeper the Water The Uglier the Fish “is the best use of multi-point of view I’ve maybe ever seen in all my reading years.” I wrote that in 2019 and I stand by it.

When Katya was asked to forgo summary and describe what her first book was about, she said this: “Artists as monsters. Angry muses. Vampiric husbands. Collateral damage. Echoes and mirrors. Children of the fallout. Life in the aftershocks. Kaleidoscopic narratives. Bottomless hunger. Not knowing where you end and where another person begins. Consuming others and being consumed. The wobbly construction of self from leftover scraps. Internal apocalypse. New York in the ‘90s. Road trips! A keen desire for things one should not have.”

Yes, please, more please! Katya’s work is absolutely symphonic in the way it weaves together all the instruments of fiction: voice and storylines and characters, with an often humorous touch. Though there is always so much going on in Katya’s work, it reads like a dream, by which I mean effortless to be inside of, though I suppose, too, there is also the sort of dream that one has and is mortified to remember was self-created, the type that makes you question who you are, really, in the deep of your subconscious. Katya’s work is bold, inquisitive of our inner workings and flawed selves. In the above interview, Katya says of her first book: “I guess my novel has been criticized for being “too dark.” But, I don’t know, it is dark and that’s not for everyone! So maybe that doesn’t bother me. The things I write are slippery and not easily categorizable, and maybe I enjoy making people a little bit uncomfortable, with form, with content. I think discomfort is important.”

I know I overuse the word complex to describe fiction I love, but I am using it again here, because this is one of Katya’s gifts, complexity without being complicated or fussy or fearful of what we might find if we keep digging.

Katya Apekina lives in Los Angeles her husband, daughter and dog. In addition to her two lauded novels Katya translated poetry and prose from Russian for Night Wraps the Sky: Writings by and about Mayakovsky (FSG, 2008), short-listed for the Best Translated Book Award. She has done residencies at VCCA, Ucross, Art Omi, Jan Michalski Foundation, and Playa, and received an Elizabeth George grant. You can find her on Instagram here and learn more about her here.

-Danielle

What have you been working on this week?