INSIDE VOICES - Robert Gwaltney and Jeffrey Dale Lofton introduce Jody Hobbs Hesler

Inside Voices/Jeffrey: The opening images of a story always interest me. I wonder why an author chooses IT for their story. Why did you begin Nonie's story in the imaginary world she created for herself?

Jody: In the opening scene, Nonie is a child, lost in her imagination. She pictures herself on a highwire, mastering this very difficult thing, but disruptions from the real world keep knocking her down. This makes an apt metaphor for her character—even as an adult, she’s happier in imaginative, whimsical spaces, and the real world doesn’t like her to stay there. Family is part of that real world, and this scene brings the whole of her family dynamics into view, showing how her personality challenges her family and how they respond by quashing her spirit rather than connecting with her.

Inside Voices/Robert: “Without you here, I’d think this was someone else’s family,” Nonie says, tapping Noreen’s nose. “Without you here” takes on much deeper meaning than that. How did you decide on this as the title?

Jody: For the longest time the title was Little Angel, which is Nonie’s nickname for her niece, and that title communicated their fondness for each other, the purity of that affection despite the obstacles in their story. But it also accidentally made me think of those Hallmark Precious Moments angel figurines, which, pardon to anyone who likes those, felt a little cute. This isn’t a cute story.

When a later revision generated that comment from Nonie, it resonated right away. Without You Here. The whole novel is about a broken connection, about the absence that Nonie leaves behind. The scene the lines come from finds Nonie and Noreen off to themselves during a family gathering, which is what they both prefer. That they feel such affinity for each other is beautiful, but Nonie’s sense of being unmoored without her niece weighs on that relationship too. That one line of dialog holds all those layers.

Inside Voices/Jeffrey: I'm interested in how the impact of one struggling person can have such a strong and devastating effect on a family or community. And also how the disappearance of that person has an equally profound impact. So this is about suicide, but it’s also about the struggle of life and how we navigate it so differently—especially on the surface. Will you talk about that?

Jody: In Without You Here, I’m exploring the complications of loving someone, and being loved by someone, whose emotional and mental struggles interfere with their day-to-day functioning. Noreen has some similar, but less all-encompassing issues, and an uncle/great-uncle in the family died by suicide decades earlier, a story that’s never spoken of directly. The secrecy perpetuates Nonie’s shame and stokes the family worry that shrouds both her and Noreen. That puts three generations of worry on Noreen’s shoulders. Quite a heavy burden.

I was especially interested in showing the power love can wield, despite challenges like these. Some unhealthy patterns in Noreen’s life can trace back to how her relationship with her aunt worked, but so can her joys and celebrations. No matter how troubled Nonie was, she was also a vivid, loving, whimsical person, and she left behind a love strong enough to energize the most positive and joyful parts of Noreen’s life for decades after she’s gone.

Inside Voices/Robert: Prophetic: “It’s always good to have your own way out,” Nonie says. “Out of what?” “Whatever you need to get away from.” Will you talk about the very caged and trapped feeling that Nonie and Noreen, and even people like Ted struggle with? Maybe talk about the resources you list in the book to help get through rough times.

Jody: Feeling trapped is a great way to put it. Nonie felt trapped by her mental illness. Panic attacks overtook her without warning. Depression fogged her senses and made her feel alone, lost, and futile. And she felt trapped by her family’s sense that something essential was wrong with her, that she required fixing. And she felt trapped in a world that expected her to conform to expectations that didn’t suit her. She loved intensely and lived passionately, but those traps would sneak up on her and she couldn’t figure out how to get away from them.

Noreen’s almost literally trapped in her marriage, as an at-home parent, way out in the country without a car of her own. Each condition of her trapped-ness is something she agreed to, so she feels complicit, which makes it harder for her to reckon directly with failures in her marriage. Beyond that, she feels trapped by her family’s persistent worry that she’ll turn out like Nonie, which sets her up to doubt herself.

And Ted, Noreen’s father, feels trapped by the grief that overtakes his wife, Nonie’s sister/Noreen’s mother, after Nonie dies. Ruth had loved and worried over Nonie since childhood, had been deputized to help her when her mother was too tapped out or didn’t feel like it. She felt responsible and sad and angry. Her grief gets messy, and Ted gives up trying to figure it out. He flees, via divorce, remarriage, relocation, all at the expense of a more genuine, enduring connection to Noreen. Even Noreen’s husband feels trapped – by his father’s outsized demands on his time and the stifling purse strings George can’t quite do without.

Despite all this trapped-ness, I hope the biggest takeaway for this story is that love has value, even when we’re broken inside.

You also asked about resources. For anyone who reaches my book while in crisis themselves, the front pages include national helpline numbers and websites for those considering suicide, or grieving a loss to suicide, or trying to survive an abusive relationship. There’s also a Q & A at the back of the book that a licensed counselor/writer friend of mine helped me generate. The questions could be used for a typical book club, but they could also apply in a therapeutic setting, for caregivers, family members, or people coping with the same conditions my characters had. For any setting, the questions are geared toward empathy and discovering connections between our experiences and the characters’ experiences. I hope the book helps people talk about hard things.

Inside Voices/Jeffrey: There are so many beautiful turns of phrase.

"remembering is different from feeling." So lyrical and mournful.

“Joy doesn’t cancel grief as much as it complicates it."

“Clouds don’t have anywhere to go…Yet they’re always leaving.”

This is a hallmark of your writing. Your short story collection is similar. Wistful, heart-heavy. Why do you write what you write?

Jody: Thank you so much for saying that. Every minute I spent writing Without You Here I was aware of a need to do my best to make it beautiful. It’s all about people suffering, grieving, losing hope. Luckily there’s hope leftover too, but I didn’t want the overriding flavor to be sadness as much as I wanted it to be beauty. The beauty of what was life affirming in their stories, for the hope Nonie and Noreen both live on. Beauty reminds us of the characters’ complexities and keeps us from viewing them only as functions of their struggles.

Inside Voices/Robert: Let’s talk about structure for a moment. Your debut short story collection What Makes You Think You're Supposed To Feel Better came to mind as I read Without You Here, because so many of the chapters read like standalone short stories. I wonder if that was intentional and which you prefer to write more, short or longform fiction.

Jody: Getting the structure right for Without You Here was the hardest part. It is equally about Noreen, who’s 8 years old when her aunt dies from suicide, AND about that aunt. But how do I maintain the story’s tension if one of the main characters is absent for a significant portion of the timeline?

I knew from early on I had to try something different, something I didn’t know how to do yet. Jane Alison’s craft book Meander, Spiral, Explode was a big help. It offers plot shape alternatives to the more typical Freitag triangle that’s been pushed on me since high school – the old inciting incident, rising action, crisis, resolution model. Jane Alison’s plot shapes mimic shapes you find in nature, like the meander of a river or the spiral of a leaf falling to the ground.

The spiral made sense to me. I could switch back and forth in time, circling around the tragedy of Nonie’s death, showing how that loss rippled out and out and out into Noreen’s life. I got really excited about it, then it was like my whole mind erased itself. If I throw chronology out the window, then what comes first? What after that?

That’s when my kids stepped in. They’d read several drafts of Without You Here over the years and really believed in it. My youngest input every chapter description I’d sketched onto index cards into a spreadsheet, and my oldest studied the spreadsheet and reasoned out a possible nonlinear sequence to follow.

I used that sequence as a jumping off point and ended up with the final draft that splits between Nonie and Noreen’s voices and spirals around the defining fact of Nonie’s loss over the course of decades, while the present arc of the story marches through the last months of 1999. The chapters are connected by mood and theme, emphasizing the characteristics Noreen and her aunt share, the ones that make the whole family worry Noreen will follow in her footsteps, and highlighting ways the loss stays with Noreen and affects her friendships and major decisions.

For the chapters to make sense spliced together this way, each had to be at least somewhat self-sufficient, so they did behave a little like short stories. But they don’t stand alone the way a short story does. I think the sequence and spiraling heighten their meanings and push the reader forward in the larger story.

As for which I like better, the long or short form, I like both. They’re totally unlike each other, but I think of them as cross-training for each other. Short stories are exercises in what to leave out. Novels are exercises in how to curate what you leave in.

Inside Voices/Jeffrey: "Some nights Noreen shouts herself awake from bad dreams that play out different ways she might..." be responsible for something an adult did. You address the tendency of children to take the responsibility onto themselves for things outside of their control. Why was that important to do?

Jody: The beauty of Nonie and Noreen’s relationship was as important for me to get right as the precarity of it. Nonie’s wonderful in a thousand ways, but she leans some of her adult needs against her favorite person, who’s still very much a child, way too young to be able to manage what’s asked of her. Noreen becomes a caretaker, and that tendency to sublimate her needs and wants, and sometimes safety, to benefit someone she loves plagues other relationships in her life, sets her up for her marriage. She has to learn to give the same level of priority to caring about herself.

Inside Voices/Robert: I've either read something you said or heard you talk about grace and forgiveness. Will you elaborate on that, especially where Nonie's mother is concerned?

Jody: I believe in redemption and hope, people learning to be better than they are. My characters almost always embody this yearning combination. When readers connect with that struggle, it feels like I’ve helped something important to happen. Like that’s one of the most important things I’m writing toward.

Suicide is an especially complicated tragedy to heal from. There’s grief, fear we missed a chance to help, anger that the person succumbed instead of reaching out. Every character in Without You Here would benefit from forgiving themselves and Nonie, from finding some grace, but not everyone knows how to do it.

Martha, the matriarch of the family in Without You Here, doesn’t know how to do it. We meet her as a relatively young mother in the first chapter, and even there she’s bitter and demanding. But right beside her front door is a framed photo of her brother and herself, laughing in the front seat of a convertible. This is a picture Martha sees every time she leaves the house. A picture every member of her family sees. A picture her children grow up with. That her grandchildren grow up with. This hard evidence that the emotionally straight-jacketed mother/grandmother they know is capable of hilarity and joy. And fondness. Her bitterness is a direct result of a grief whose cause she’s never forgiven – her brother’s death by suicide. When Nonie dies the same way, Martha’s anger helps her survive the loss. She doesn’t learn a new, better way around her grief. Though Martha extends zero grace to herself, zero grace to Nonie and later to Noreen, I think the reader extends grace to Martha. Not a lack of accountability, but grace. Here’s a person so broken by her own sadness she’s become a liability to people she loves. That’s really sad. It’s hard to fully blame her.

Inside Voices/Jeffrey: What’s next for you?

Jody: I’m meeting with you today while I’m at a writing residency at Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, so right now I’m finalizing a few short stories, hoping to inch toward the next collection. I also recently sent my next novel manuscript to my agent, and I’m mulling her notes on it before jumping into the next round of revisions there.

The new book is called Watchdog, and it’s another family story. In the smallest nutshell, it’s about how ignorant we are about where danger comes from and about our power to keep anyone safe. In a larger nutshell, it’s about a family at odds about what’s happening with their oldest daughter. The mother senses something off. The father sees nothing concrete and brushes off all the worries and flags. This difference between them breeds tension and drives them farther apart, distracting everyone from the real problem while it grows more dangerous under their noses.

The plot here is linear, but we have two voices again. The mother and the oldest teen daughter. Through the daughter’s sections, the reader discovers the source of the threat right away, while the parents blunder forward, wasting time.