In our Craft Capsule series, authors reveal the personal and particular ways they approach the art of writing. This is no. 215.
There is an unexpected transformation at the heart of my debut novel, Amphibian (Ig Publishing, 2024). It appeared accidentally while I was writing, but then the metaphor grew and swallowed the book whole. As this fabulist thread crept onto the page, I found myself asking: What purpose does it serve? Or, the more layered question, is it real? Is it a figment of my protagonist’s overwrought preadolescent imagination or is it actually happening to her? Does it matter?
In an interview with Shimmer magazine, Carmen Maria Machado spoke of her reaction to first reading the genre of magical realism: “It seemed to sync so cleanly with my perception of the world—reality tinged with inexplicable events, a kind of lushness that I understood but had never put a name to.” My guiding lights in literature almost always dabble in the liminal space between the real and the imagined. But I can’t rightly say my book is magical realist. I never set out to depart from the bonds of realism, and once it had happened, I needed to work out if and how it served the story.
I avoid reading fiction when I’m writing because my magpie brain might thieve and mimic. The writer’s voice muddles my own and the polished prose seems superior to anything I can conjure. Cinema avoids these anxieties as a different medium; for me, spoken dialogue evades comparison to its equivalent on the page. Inspired by new worlds of sound and vision, language remains my own; but I can still immerse myself in an adjacent sensory world to the one I’m creating.
I watched every movie I could on girlhood—Catherine Hardwicke’s Thirteen; Céline Sciamma’s Girlhood; Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank—and then I found myself in a new seam. In Anna Rose Holmer’s The Fits, a tight-knit teen dance troupe starts suffering from a mysterious outbreak of seizures; in Joachim Trier’s quietly unnerving Thelma, the religiously repressed protagonist feels sexual attraction for the first time, and with it comes violent supernatural outbreaks; and in Julia Ducournau’s Raw, a barbaric university hazing unleashes Justine’s true cannibal nature and new desires.
Fabulism in film generally functions with less ambiguity than on the page. In literature, as a cocreation of the text and the reader’s imagination, we might wonder the degree to which what we’re reading is metaphorical or real (it can, of course, be both). Think how Rachel Yoder in Nightbitch (Doubleday, 2021) dispensed with this question almost immediately—her protagonist is very much an actual dog (and a metaphor, too)—while other fabulist books remain purposefully fluid, like the owl-baby in Claire Oshetsky’s Chouette (Ecco, 2022). In film, we’re fluent in visual cues that indicate whether what we’re shown is illusory or otherwise; for example, in Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures, such is the ardor of the two best friends that they depart for a spiritual “fourth world” together, and even though the film shows us this place, it’s clear by the special effects that it’s a shared vision and not a physical realm.
In the fabulist films I found myself rewatching, there is no question that what we’re seeing is real in the story world. I use the term fabulism rather than fantasy, because these films primarily explore personal, human themes, occurring in otherwise realist worlds. But each of them contains a moment of slippage, when we accept the strange as part of the emotional and symbolic logic of the story. In the stomach-churning Raw, this moment comes when a bikini wax goes awry, and Justine tastes human flesh for the first time, snacking hungrily on her sister’s severed finger. It is a perverse twist on the well-worn coming-of-age trope of ritual depilation.
These films use fabulism to make sense of the visceral experience of becoming a woman. They transform body horror into a vehicle of rage and revolt against patriarchal expectations of women’s bodies and behaviors. Coming-of-age, after all, is a time when we depart from the safety of childhood for the perils of socially conditioned womanhood. How apt to represent that by flooding the boundary between the real and the fantastic. Of course, lots of books do this too, but the medium of film afforded me a different clarity as a first-time novelist exploring these muddy waters. The unexpected bodily transformation that appeared in my novel, I saw then, was real but also a metaphor for the radical experience of puberty. In my next draft I needed to find that moment of slippage. To show, as these films had done, that at its onset, female sexuality is so powerful, so subversive, that it ruptures the story world, and sets new rules in motion.
Tyler Wetherall is the author of Amphibian (Ig Publishing, 2024) and No Way Home: A Memoir of Life on the Run (St. Martin’s Press, 2018). Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, British Vogue, and Condé Nast Traveler, and elsewhere. She is also the creator of the New York City book events newsletter Reading the City. Find Tyler on Instagram, @TylerWrites.
image credit: Denise Jans
