Adam Levin on How to Exacerbate Trauma

This interview was featured in the Books & Fiction newsletter, which delivers the stories behind the stories, along with our latest fiction. Sign up to receive it in your inbox.

In “Jenny Annie Fanny Addie,” your story in this week’s issue, a twelve-year-old girl named Addie is at a swimming lesson at her day camp when an older boy runs up and gropes her. This sudden violence precipitates a few things, which include an obsessive mental spiral on Addie’s part. Your portrayal of her interiority carries the story. How do you approach depicting the mental processes of a young girl in such a delicate situation?

I started writing from Addie’s point of view a couple of years ago—I’ve written a whole book from her point of view—so it’s hard, by now, for me to distinguish what I knew at the beginning from what I discovered as I went along, in my usual slow, sentence-by-sentence way.

As I remember it, though, I was thinking a lot about some of the sharp, art-prone, highly self-conscious girls I was friends with as a kid, and about my sisters, who also fit that description, and about my wife, who, ditto: imagining how one or another of them might have reacted had she been in Addie’s shoes, and trying to be true to that while, at the same time, trying to figure out how she might have described her reaction to herself, or to me, if reflecting on it five or six years later.

More generally, I was also thinking about how trauma can be made worse, inadvertently, by those who mean best and love us most, even and sometimes especially when we’re certain of their good and loving intentions. How knotty and maddening that can be.

When I was younger—too young—I got a master’s in clinical social work, and I worked as a therapist for a couple of years. I had a number of clients who’d experienced trauma, and more often than not, I’d notice that when they described the trauma to me, a large portion of what they said was concerned with the ways in which others (loved ones, cops, high-school principals, or other therapists) to whom they’d previously described the trauma had responded, how the things those others said to them seemed to retroactively reshape the original experience, to make the experience less coherent for them after the fact, more traumatic than it had originally been.

I was thinking through all that stuff, too, I bet.

Addie’s mother picks her up from camp and they go to lunch and a movie, “Terminator 2,” which came out in 1991. What makes this the right era for this story?

It’s either too hard or too easy to say why it’s right. I could go on for pages about that era. I could probably go on for pages about the end of the summer of 1991, those weeks just before “Nevermind” would be released, Season 3 of “Seinfeld” would start, and Anita Hill would testify before the Senate. I’m thinking that’s why. Because I know I can go on, and so I know I don’t have to. Even maybe mustn’t.

In the car home, the oldies radio station plays “The Weight,” by the Band, which prompts Addie’s memory of her brother, Len, pointing out how people mishear the song’s lyrics in a significant way. This is a staple realization of young adulthood, but this memory also tells us a lot about Addie’s family dynamics. Can you tell us more about that?

I guess that, apart from bringing across the ways in which the whole misheard-lyrics thing steers and is steered by Addie’s thoughts, what I most wanted the scene to do was to show her family to be a loving one. There was a far too simple, afterschool-special-type reading of the story that could have arisen without the scene’s inclusion: a reading in which the way that Addie contends with what has happened to her was shaped long ago by family dysfunction or abuse or something like that. I think (I hope) the scene prevents that kind of reading.

Not that long ago, you moved from Florida to Chicago, the setting for your most recent novel. What fictional possibilities does Chicago provide that Florida doesn’t?

Fistfights on ice? I don’t know. Possibly none. But Chicago’s where nearly all the fictional possibilities I’m tuned to lead me. It’s my home town. My whole life, I’ve lived away from here for barely eight years. Maybe that’s all it is. Home-town stuff. Deep love of home town. The sense that I know the place enough to know the specific ways I’ll never know it, the ways I might learn to, the ways I’d rather not. Plus Chicago’s where they talk all my favorite Englishes. ♦