The Ill-Fitting Skin: A Review and an Interview with the Author, Shannon Robinson
by Julia Tagliere and Julia Wilson
“Don’t look, and it won’t hurt” was once common advice for enduring pain, but it also suggests an insight into Shannon Robinson’s award-winning debut collection The Ill-Fitting Skin. In her new book, which won the Press 53 Award for Short Fiction, Robinson explores themes of incredible pain: a parent’s dementia diagnosis, a miscarriage, the loss of a child to a poorly-understood disorder, even the loss of one’s self-concept through another’s abuse.
But Robinson does not write of these experiences directly; instead, she writes of children becoming werewolves, of women birthing rabbits, of a songbird leasing space in a woman’s womb. Even in her less-speculative pieces, Robinson leads us to the pain at the heart of each piece via intentional misdirection, which allows readers an initial, almost superficial response: How baffling, to have your child turn into a werewolf! How terribly these little boys treat the girl who just wants to play their game! But then, just when the reader is thoroughly distracted by werewolves, litters of bunnies, and zombie cosplay, Robinson slides a knife under the ribs, piercing straight through to the story’s true dark heart, sometimes with as little as a single, casual line.
The genius of Robinson’s fluid prose and somewhat unsettling tales is that they strike individual readers differently. It is easy to understand that the werewolves, the rabbits, the bird living in the belly are parables for a more real and also disturbing reality—but what reality? To write this review, we both read Robinson’s book, and while we came up with different understandings, likely influenced by our own life experiences, through Robinson’s skillful treatments we could easily recognize the truth of the other’s interpretation as well.
“Origin Stories,” the first story in the collection, starts with advice from parenting- of-toddlers books that seems patently obvious: Never bite back. But what if your child is a werewolf? In other words, what if your child is different from the other biting toddlers and is not just going through a phase? What if all the standard parenting advice is useless to you?
[Genna] remembered the very last time, pre-wolf, that Wystan acted out in public. They’d been at a park where he’d been throwing sand into other kids’ faces over and over despite her reminders, pleas, and threats, and then he began screaming when she dragged him out of the pit and away from the park. He struggled so hard to escape her grip, she thought he’d dislocate his arm. She thought she’d dislocate his arm… “What is wrong with your child? What is wrong with you?” No one actually said this, but she could hear all the other mothers thinking it…”
“Rabbits,” written in the style of a fairy tale (but seemingly inspired by the wild true story of an 18th-century English woman, Mary Toft), depicts a woman birthing rabbits, endlessly. A connection can easily be drawn between that obviously fantastical situation and the eternal fixation on the fecundity of women, often with little regard for their well-being, a circumstance that has existed from the earliest times even to the present day:
I felt uncomfortable about being exposed to all those men, and I told Dr. Howard so in private. He patted my shoulder and called me a good girl. “Don’t worry,” he said. “They’re men of science. They won’t see a naked woman but a machine of flesh, operating as it was designed to do. Or in this case, with a fascinating variation.”
In “Changeling,” Robinson takes a hard look at the realities of dementia, devoid of any sentimentality or wishfulness. The knife in the gut comes from the inherent surrealism, all too familiar for those who’ve experienced it, of watching a loved one transform into an otherworldly being; in this case, one who obsessively unravels and re-knits old sweaters, alternates between trying to nurse and kill a therapeutic baby doll, and swears viciously and easily:
I kiss her forehead, and she murmurs something. “What’s that, Mom?”
“You smell like cunt,” she says.
A changeling, a mother turned callous vulgarian, a boy become monster, an intervention staged when it’s already too late. Robinson spares readers, briefly, from direct, head-on collisions with the reality of some of these shared sorrows and fears, but only briefly. This collection is a haunting, poignant reminder not only of how many experiences we have in common, but also of the pain that was always there, hidden behind a shimmering subterfuge, waiting patiently for us to be ready to look.
Interview with Shannon Robinson, author of The Ill-Fitting Skin
Baltimore Review: First off, congratulations on this beautiful collection. When is the actual publication date?
Shannon Robinson: It's May 3, coming out with Press 53, and I will be 53 in the month that it's published.
BR: Can we ask how long you worked on this collection?
SR: I started working on some of the stories during my MFA, which was 2010-2011, and the most recent ones are from the past two years. Some of them have been published, and some I've revised, and they've transformed somewhat, but it's all come together over the course of about a decade. A collection should be a group of stories that are bound together by some common theme or, you know, an emotional concern. Here, the thematic concerns are primarily motherhood, nurturing, and failed or compromised nurturing—nurturing of other people, but also nurturing of the self as a woman.
BR: I think that it really hits home, this overarching theme of people who are outliers in a way, that it feels like everyone's going through something, like childbearing years, disruptive children, or aging parents, but this feels beyond that. For example, the first piece in the collection, “Origin Story,” was really interesting, because when Julia and I were deciding to do this together, we each read the collection separately then got together and talked about what we thought these stories were about, and we had different ideas, particularly in “Origin Story.” It spoke to us differently depending on our own life experiences. Like, don't talk to me about your child who doesn't nap or anything like that, because I've got something more to worry about.
SR: I guess a lot of my stories come out of my personal experience. So even though this is a story about a werewolf, it’s rooted in the real. Parenting can be really fraught. You're just not prepared for it. Or maybe it's a matter of like, you're not listening when people are telling you that parenthood is difficult and motherhood is difficult. You know, I used to be the person giving a little bit of the hairy eyeball, I’m sorry to say, to somebody with a crying child or a kid who was acting out. I mean, you might have a particularly challenging child. Maybe you have a colicky child, maybe you have a child with behavioral issues. Maybe they are neurodivergent. A lot of parents, I think, identify with that feeling of like, I don't know what I'm doing. I am at sea or feeling alienated, and we're all feeling judged. Parenting can feel like you're very much on your own. I think that a lot of women are having children at an older age, and they're further along in their career, and they're no longer in this setting where they have the older woman, or the family or community to help them out, so it's an especially isolating and alienating experience. I'm glad you both had a different take on this, because what I didn't want was for it to feel like an allegory for one particular thing. I wanted it to feel like the metaphor had a lot of room for different interpretations.
I wrote “Miscarriages” many years ago. I had had a miscarriage and I felt very blocked. And so I just thought, oh, I’ll kind of just play around with writing small pieces. That's what I can manage right now. And then it seemed that the form was really suiting the subject matter; here are little compartments where this character can place her feelings. And there are lots compartments within that story—the titled sections, but also the images. There are lots of things that contain other things, not the least of which is the womb.
BR: I have to comment on a very small thing that just hit me: the section title “Womb-ah womb-ah-womb-ah.” It sounds exactly like when you're listening to a fetal heartbeat.
SR: Nothing prepares you for that. And I almost don't want to tell younger women about it, because it is such an amazing surprise when you have that first ultrasound. I was so floored by that—it's like it's an army marching. It's waves hitting the shore. It's that it's a life force and a whirling sound.
BR: You sometimes seem to approach experiences from a speculative place rather than approaching them head-on, like there's more multitudes contained in these stories than you could address head-on, and their impact is so large and vast, it's very hard to capture those. But if you start with a story of a werewolf or a bird taking up residence in a womb, it's a way of accessing those through misdirection. But then when you realize what the story is actually about, or what you believe it to be based on your own experiences, it's even more intense than if you had just gone immediately to the miscarriage, or if you had gone immediately to the loss of a sibling, for example.
SR: Yeah, I reach for the fantastical for the same reasons that poets reach for metaphors. This is just as a way of being able to explore something that is really difficult to pin down, really difficult to put into words, so why not reach for something that's beyond this reality? And one of the assets, one of the strengths, of the fantastical, is that it defamiliarizes what you were talking about. It takes you off your guard. It makes you rethink things. You approach it in a new way and you’re trying to orient yourself within this strangeness, and therefore, I think it allows for that really rich play of uncertainty and murky emotions and discovery.
I like taking reality as a departure point, and then taking it somewhere strange. Or maybe I should say stranger, since reality is so often strange in itself. My story “The Rabbits,” which is about a woman who gives birth to rabbits, is based on an actual, historical figure named Mary Toft. Now the real-life Mary Toft was an 18th-century hoaxster, a liar who managed to convince people that she'd given birth to rabbits. She made quite a sensation, and the medical community was fooled, at least for a time. But in my story, Mary Toft really does give birth to rabbits—except everyone comes to think she’s a fraud.
BR: I very much felt, after reading your story, less like she was a fraudster and more that she was a sympathetic figure, who had experienced the loss of a child, who had had great difficulty conceiving, and perhaps, was then taken advantage of by the doctor, who squirreled her away and reserved her as sort of a medical oddity to be poked and prodded and studied, and all at the hands of a group of really unsympathetic men in positions of authority. It really drained whatever power she had had.
SR: Oh, yeah. Everybody was very, very happy to be part of this show. And then she was thrown under the bus—or the carriage, I guess, given the time period.
BR: Another aspect that is difficult to talk about, I think, is the dynamics of sexual power, of gender power, like in the story “Dirt.”
SR: “Dirt” is a story about working a job and about how it feels to be financially coerced. There are so many moments where she (the protagonist) feels like, I'm choosing to do this, I am choosing to remain here, I can do that. But really, she's not being given a choice. She's reacting to her financial situation. There's a movie out recently called The Royal Hotel, about these two girls who have run out of money while vacationing in Australia, and they end up working at a bar in the outback, in this mining town and the patrons are flirting with them. The men are very aggressive. It's highly sexualized. And these girls don't flirt back. And I remember watching that, thinking you know, you’ve got to play the game a little bit, otherwise, you're not going to get through this. But they don't want to. They don't want to, and that made me think of how many experiences I've had where I have reacted to advances that are inappropriate in a way like, oh, haha, I’m just sort of managing their egos, managing the discomfort—as if it's a job. And I think the discomfort is that she doesn't realize her agency is really compromised in this situation. I mean, it's not incidental that in her home life she is in a relationship with an academic. She's failed in that world, where she thought she was going to be taken care of and respected by her thesis supervisor. It ends up he's just interested in using her as a sounding board for his ego.
BR: I think she felt like she had the upper hand because she was attractive and an ordinary person and had no idiosyncrasies, and this guy was obviously a weirdo. And so she felt like she had the upper hand and it flipped on her. He still had the sexual upper hand. And he just tossed her out on the street basically and made her feel like dirt again. And how did that happen? That this guy who was sort of pathetic still had the upper hand? That is just so painfully what women go through all the time, which is you lose control of a situation.
SR: He's good at this manipulation.
BR: I’d like to talk a bit about the piece “A Doom of Her Own.” I can't wait for an actual paper copy of your book so that I can do the tactile act of flipping the pages; it is going to be amazing. Even without that, though, I can envision the effect of turning back the pages of time, literally. I'd love to hear what brought you to that structure for this piece, this sort of reverse flip-book activity.
SR: I was inspired by the Choose Your Own Adventure books that I read in the 80s as a kid. I don't know if you remember those series, but you would have an adventure, with a choice for what would happen next in the story at the bottom of the page. And always there was some kind of cheesy theme for each one, some extreme situation. You would be in a jungle, or you'd be in the vampire castle, you'd be here or there. So I wanted to use those themes as well to evoke this extreme storyland and graft that onto a story of a toxic relationship. I thought that would be fun,. I loved reading these stories as a kid, but I also found them frustrating, because you think, oh, here I am doing everything right, I am in charge here, and yet it's designed so that you'd still end up dying. You still fail. Sometimes you get stuck. And you'd have to keep going back, keep your finger on the one page so you can figure out, how do I get out of the maze? And then finally, you figure that out. So I thought yes, this is such a great metaphor for being stuck in a relationship or feeling gaslit or feeling manipulated. I want to get out of the story. How do I exit this story?
BR: But also it was devastating because each time you flip back, you're presented with the possibility of a different choice, being presented with this sort of false hope to say you could still change things and get out, and then you realize, no, you can't.
SR: And that feeling means, pay attention; this is bad. Your frustrations and fears and desires are valid. If you’re hungry for something, that doesn’t mean you have to turn off your appetite, you know? You’re allowed to be hungry, and you’re allowed to feed yourself what you need.
BR: So do you have any other projects that are in the works?
SR: Yes, I am continuing to write short stories, but I'm also thinking about a novel that is based on a Victorian-era killer named Amelia Dyer. She was what's known as a baby farmer. So women of that era, poor women who could not afford to have another child to take care of and feed, would give their baby over to someone who would adopt the child, usually for a flat fee. But as you can imagine, this was not a regulated industry. These babies didn't fare well. Many of them died, and Amelia Dyer, she determined—what's cheaper than feeding these babies? Not feeding them. A lot of them ended up in the Thames. So I'm interested in her, and I'm interested in juxtaposing that with a speculative future element, where there is a detective who is working with cases of children who have been left in what's called the Stasis, a device where you can just place a child in suspended animation. This technology, which was intended as a child care solution, has become problematic—as you can imagine.
BR: Are there any authors that you would consider instrumental in the way you write or what you write?
SR: Margaret Atwood was an early influence. I read everything that she wrote, everything I could get my hands on, as a young woman. She was the first author who I really became aware of, as in an author whose work I read in its entirety. She's a wildly inventive writer who also plays with genre, so I love that. Definitely, she was a strong influence, alongside Alice Munro. Later influences were George Saunders, John Cheever, and Lorrie Moore—I love their humor, their sharpness, their deep-seated weirdness. Kelly Link and Danielle Evans are both so inspiring, as is Carmen Maria Machado and Karen Russell. I don't want to leave people out who are also amazing, but those are people who come to mind right now.