Author Chat: Harriet Armstrong, Author of To Rest Our Minds and Bodies
If you'd like to learn more about the book, you can find it on the publisher's website or likely in any of your local Indies. And I'm also a fan of many of Armstrong's short stories and essays, which you can find linked on her website.
One of the things that makes To Rest Our Minds and Bodies so unique is your very specific prose style where you dispense with a lot of conventions of dialogue to create these long paragraphs that blur together thought, feeling, and speech from many different characters. The prose reads incredibly fast, and it feels like you’re just taking a scan of the main character’s mind, how she is subjectively experiencing even what others say to her. This is even more interesting when she attempts to connect with her physical body in new ways. Was this style the instinctive way the project first came to you, or did it develop over time? Were there ever moments where you had to get past any kind of “rules” or expectations you might’ve taken on from the writing world?
Thank you! That is lovely to hear as that is exactly what I was hoping to do with the dialogue (and with the quotes from songs and things like that, too): create the sense that the narrator’s thoughts and feelings, the media she consumes, and the words and actions of the other characters are all experienced in the same subjective way, without much distinction being made between internal and external inputs. The narrator experiences her own mind as extremely claustrophobic, everything is filtered through the lens of her perception and emotions and the things she fails to understand – but at the same time, she’s very permeable and external things can touch her very deeply. So I wanted the stylistic feature you point out to show both the claustrophobia and the immediate way that certain things – lines from Luke, for instance – reach right into her. This part of the style was quite instinctive as it came right out of my conception of the narrator’s mind!
In terms of rules or expectations I felt I had to get past in writing the book, I was inspired by lots of books which use language and form in unusual and experimental ways, so I didn’t feel constricted on that front – if anything, I had the opposite worry: that my book was going to be an overly simple, limited tale about one girl, rather than anything particularly conceptual or innovative! But then the formally interesting features of the book seemed to arise naturally out of the character and her feelings and ways of experiencing things.
I love how you manage to capture so many small moments of growing up from the strange, specific alienation of encountering a communal kitchen shared with strangers for the first time to having a first crush that makes you turn inward. I’ve always thought the power and beauty of crushes weren’t whether they came to classic romantic fruition but what they taught you about yourself along the way, and I feel like the book really embodies that. Was there anything that, in writing the novel, shifted or altered your perception of the university period of life or young adulthood in an unexpected way?
That is a lovely question. I wrote the novel a few months after graduating, and at that time, I still felt very much inside the experiences of being at university, first love, being twenty-one and things like that! In a way, writing the book was a way of mourning these experiences that I still felt extremely attached to – a way of preserving that period, perhaps more so than shifting my relationship to it. But having the chance to see what people think of my novel has certainly shifted my perception of that period of life enormously! It has been so moving to see that my novel, which draws on all sorts of very private feelings, observations and experiences, resonates with other people, too – and in that way, I suppose it has shown me that all kinds of feelings are far more universal than they can feel when you are really young!
I’m curious to hear more about your path into publishing. You published To Rest at 24, and you’ve previously mentioned it was your first major project you worked on. What led you to starting this project in a serious manner, and what did pursuing publication look like for you?
Throughout my teenage years and at university, I’d always loved writing, but just seen it as something fun to do around my school work and studies. When I graduated, I moved to London and started working as a teaching assistant, but I felt very aimless and writing came to fill the space my studies used to fill. At first, it just felt like a way of processing the ways I felt unhappy at that time, but quite quickly it became the centre of my life in its own right! I feel grateful looking back that I felt so confused and somewhat depressed at that time because I think it forced me to look at what, within my life, could actually excite and sustain me – and it was interesting and deep down not surprising to realise that that thing seemed to be writing.
In terms of pursuing publication, I started sending the novel around and reached out to the wonderful Les Fugitives, having admired their books for a long time and very luckily for me, they were interested and then everything grew from there!
One of my favorite pieces of your writing is the essay in Granta “Lol I’m just trying to tell you how it feels for me.” Mostly because I relate to it deeply as someone who ends almost every single text message with lol like it’s some kind of punctuation. Clearly, you think deeply about how we interact and live our lives online. Do you think/how do you think your relationship with the internet influences your writing?
Definitely! A lot of the internet references in my novel came automatically, part of my wish for the novel to closely reflect the real experience of life, but some were deeper than that too. Texting is important, in the book – there are multiple points where the narrator is physically separate from Luke, missing him and feeling alienated from him, and the separation is punctured by some kind of text or gif or sticker that he sends her out of nowhere. Only partially punctured, though, because really what she actually wants is connection that’s totally unmediated! Then there are moments when Luke sends messages that feel completely generic and impersonal, and impose distance and freak her out. I think texting is super interesting and actually a little creepy: the way that things can be conveyed, sometimes really important things that change a relationship forever, without the people necessarily really feeling real to each other while communicating.
I don’t think there’s that much about this in the novel, but I also think the internet is so interesting in allowing us to treat people as objects we can study and gather data about. An earlier draft of the book had a scene where the narrator is listening to all Luke’s Spotify playlists and imagining she’s him and wondering what he feels when he listens to each song – a behaviour that I think links with quite a profound wish to know what it is like to be another person, and to keep that person alive in your mind the whole time. This wish is very closely linked with the desire to write, for me! However of course, it’s also just weird that we can access all this data about other people using the internet and personally this year I have stopped using social media for the most part as I feel like the constant awareness of everyone else’s existence and their ability to look at your existence is not very helpful for the forgetting of the individual self which I find essential for writing!
While you’re probably best known for your novel, I actually first discovered your writing through your short stories in a few literary magazines I keep up with. Since you’ve published short stories, essays, and a novel, I’m curious how your writing process varies based on form and which you feel most naturally at home working with?
I definitely love writing novels most of all. I love having the freedom to construct something over hundreds of pages so that the core or meaning or effect of the work emerges gradually. I felt very daunted at the prospect of writing an essay since a big part of what I love about writing is uncertainty, and getting to explore an experience without having to say anything about it, and I worried this would make writing an essay impossible for me – but I ended up really loving writing the ‘lol’ essay once I realised that an essay didn’t have to be some authoritative text but could instead be interested in the texture of different feelings just like fiction!
I know authors hate to talk about the end of their books or explain the meaning of their work, but I have to ask: everyone in my M.Phil cohort read To Rest Our Minds and Bodies because one of our friends loved it so much. We were standing around talking about it one day, and we realized we all had completely different views about what the ending meant. I’m not going to ask what it actually means, but I do want to ask what you were thinking about when you wrote the ending and how you settled on that conclusion for the story? Please feel free to be as vague or specific as you’d like.
It is so lovely to hear that your cohort all read it and wondered about what the ending meant! I’ll try and answer without giving any spoilers about what exactly happens at the ending… but I wanted an ending where the narrator is denied any sort of narrative resolution, neither a satisfying ending nor a tragic one. She wants to do something extreme and maybe feel something new and different for once, but in the end, her body gets in the way, she feels uncomfortable but nothing at all transcendent or even very interesting happens. This felt right, to me, because the narrator is always wanting to get out of her own body and mind and she is never able to. The ending sort of mirrors her sexual experiences, to me: wanting to do something that will bring her into some sort of new state, but not being able to enter that new state at all.
And to close, do you have a novel in the running to be your favorite for the year?
My favourite novel I’ve read this year would have to be Air by Christian Kracht. It is such a surprising and excitingly constructed novel, so atmospheric and strange and with so many moments of great feeling hiding underneath its mysterious surface. I adored it!
About Harriet Armstrong: Harriet Armstrong was born and raised in Oxford. She has had short stories published in Cōnfingō Magazine, The Georgia Review, the Virginia Quarterly Review, Giramondo's HEAT literary magazine and Forever Magazine. In Autumn 2024, aged twenty-four, she was a Resident at the Giancarlo DiTrapano Foundation for Literature and the Arts. She lives and works in London. To Rest Our Minds and Bodies is her first novel.
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