#387 Inside the Emotion of Fiction SIMONE IN PIECES by Janet Burroway, published by University of Wisconsin Press on November 4, 2025.
https://uwpress.wisc.edu/Contributors/B/Burroway-Janet
What is the date you began writing this piece of fiction and the date when you finished the piece of fiction?
I began Simone in Pieces as a short story in the fall of 1996 (yes, really). It was intended to be a satire of a department meeting, but took an unexpected hard turn into grief in the narrator’s memory. I realized I had to figure out her whole life to make sense of it—and that life evolved very slowly over thirty years, usually through a new character whose voice I needed to hear before I could write it.
BELOW: Janet in 1996
I finished it over and over again in 2024 and ’25; I guess the finally-published version was sent to the press in Feb. of ’25.
BELOW: Janet in February of 2025
Where did you do most of your writing for this fiction work? And please describe in detail.
It was begun in Tallahassee, Florida, finished in Chicago. But the serious molding and shaping was done mostly in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, in a big walk-out basement that was the most spacious study I ever had. We had bought a house too big for us so that we could have all the grandkids there at once, and the basement fell to me by default. It had an open wood fireplace facing a deep leather couch, and the front wall was all glass, looking onto woods. Sometimes the wasps got in and my cat Nutmeg would leap after them, but most of the fauna was outside, all show: deer, wild turkeys, squirrels, chipmunks, rabbits, raccoons, an occasional fox, and once even a quasi-domesticated peacock.
My desk was 3X5 feet, an art nouveau monster I owned for fifty years and had shipped from England. To my right was a framed pinboard two feet high and sixteen feet long that my husband Peter Ruppert had built for me, and that told our story from left to right in photos, quotations, sketches, posters, program covers and trinkets.
Now that I remember it, I don’t know how I ever got any work done there. My study in Chicago is 8X12 and looks out over the dining table onto a fire escape and the corner of a deco office building.
What were your writing habits while writing this work- did you drink something as you wrote, listen to music, write in pen and paper, directly on laptop; specific time of day?
I must tidy or clean or arrange flowers—something patently domestic—before I can sit down to work. Peter pointed out that this was not procrastination but a useful ritual: outward order makes for inner order. That seems true to me.
I write straight onto my MacBook Air, always with a glass of very iced water in front of me, gum and lozenges handy in the drawer (I gave up smoking in 1986, but this habit persists). The pattern is to flash down whatever junk seems next in the story or uppermost in my mind, and then (because I write long) try to chop out the excess prepositional phrases and the superfluous details. (I’m doing that here right now.) It usually isn’t right in some way, so I blame myself in unspoken obscenities and read for a while, or work on something else, or get in some steps until it’s time for a nap.
BELOW: Janet in 1986
I’m a night person but can no longer pull an all-nighter. So the best time to write is usually between about 11:00 a.m. and 3:00. If the evening spirit moves me, I can keep at it till 10:00-ish.
https://www.margotlivesey.com/
Please include just one excerpt and include page numbers as reference. This one excerpt can be as short or as long as you prefer.
pp.111-112, Simone in Pieces
(Leo Aczél’s toddler has given Simone a case of German measles, and she has lost a baby over it. Though he and the child used to encounter her in the local zoo, and had developed a kind of friendship, he has not encountered her since.)
There was no reason to expect anybody in the faculty common room at this hour, but there was someone standing at a table, outlined against the window which was bright with snow: a woman tall enough that she had to hunch forward, a fist against the wood, riffling through a pile of papers; and when he recognized Simone Puig he quickly turned to retreat, but she had looked up. She blinked and stared at him with doleful eyes—accusatory eyes?—or she didn’t recognize him?—or might snub him, or, no, in pain!
He said, “Simone, I’m so sorry,” went toward her and lifted his arms in a helpless shrug but then kept lifting them, and they were reaching, on her shoulders, actually around her, and she stumbled into his too-heavy hug.
Like somebody digging who forgets to ask the layout of the city pipes, and the first blow of the pickaxe finds the water main. No. Slower, tentative: one of those Art Film farces where the dimwit hero starts to fall and takes hold of the nearest whatever, which is the edge of a fruit cart, and the cart upsets, apples everywhere, grapefruit rolling in the road, roosters scattering, and then the horse turns into the street and steps on a, what, honeydew melon, which explodes, and hoof-over-halter goes down, the carriage of the Lord High Mucky-Muck crashes on its side in the street—from awkwardness to embarrassment to humiliation to disaster, and the whole province is altered forevermore. Like that, she took his hug and welled over and then sobbed, couldn’t stop, a stupidity of hiccups and snot, half-laughs, wiping her nose with his proffered handkerchief, will it never end? No, never, because now he was stroking her back, her head fitting into his neck, she calmed a little but did not move away, her hot face was wetting his shirt, he held her to him shushing and murmuring, stroking her back. And now this would always be between them, that she did not pull away but let herself go limp into his torso as if she took solace there. Lay against him, scalding face to his now-damp shirt, arms trapped, his buckle cutting at her elbow and the smell of her hair musk and sweet earth, flowers. And sobbed.
Why is this excerpt so emotional for you as a writer to write? And can you describe your own emotional experience of writing this specific excerpt? This emotional moment must not be from the character’s emotion but from your emotion as a writer.
I knew this was a turning point in the novel, and I had to pull it off: something happens between them that will remain long buried, but never disappear. I approached the scene with some trepidation because it’s so easy to make mawkish, yucky. I put it off, more than once.
And then I searched my own memory for that moment when you know you’re falling in love: physically tumultuous, out of your control. (Margaret Drabble in The Garrick Year calls marriage a long effort t to get back to that moment of terror). In this case strong feeling between Sinone and Leo is forbidden—they are both married—but also revelatory. Also awkward and inappropriate to the point of silly. I remembered and felt all those emotions at the moment I began to write their encounter. But there was no way to get at what happens to Simone and Leo except through metaphor, which I think naturally occurs when you place yourself fully into another’s experience. I thought of the pickaxe in the water main first: your fault but also out of your control. And then this moment from more than one movie came to mind. It was funny, ridiculous, but also headlong and relentless. I couldn’t name a single movie in which I’ve seen this kind of perpetual-motion disaster; I couldn’t tell you if I’ve used any of the details from any of those movies, but when I put myself there, stomach turning, the images tumbled out.
https://www.amazon.com/Garrick-Year-Margaret-Drabble/dp/0445040181/ref=tmm_mmp_swatch_0
Were there any deletions from this excerpt that you can share with us? And can you please include a photo of your marked up rough drafts of this excerpt.
Alas, I have nothing to share. This novel took so very long to write that most of the earlier drafts are already in the archives at Florida State. They are full of deletions, corrections, and rewrites. For this scene, very unusually, what I wanted was (as I remember) nearly all there save for the usual mopping up of excesses. (At least one of my readers found it way too excessive as it is.)
What I wish I could send is a clip from one of those minutes of movie mayhem.
Contact information
Janet Burroway