An interview with C. Michelle Lindley
On writing her prismatic debut, The Nude
A statue, unearthed. A woman adrift. The sea, the sun.
Set in the male-dominated art world of the late 1990s, C. Michelle Lindley’s prismatic debut follows Elizabeth, an art historian who has arrived to an island off the southern coast of Greece to make an acquisition—the marble statue of a nude woman, dredged from the depths of the Mediterranean in a fisherman’s net.
An unsettling tension purrs beneath the halcyon facade of cerulean skies, bougainvillea, and heat-choked days as Elizabeth becomes enmeshed in an amorphous situation with her translator and his photographer wife. The success of her assignment comes under fire as foreboding encounters with locals, debilitating reoccurring migraines, and distressing memories from both childhood and the recent past tease through her days with troubling intensity.
In The Nude, Lindley explores the complexities of cultural theft and the question of who art belongs (or should belong) to with a dazzling rigor, while telling a nuanced and brilliantly vivid story of trauma, desire, and the cost of success.
Was there a specific moment or encounter that inspired The Nude?
I was living in Ithaca, New York and it was the dead of winter, twenty degrees and snowing. I think I was working on something else—maybe a short story—when the image of a statue in Mediterranean waters came to me. No project of mine had ever begun with such clarity, so I knew I needed to follow it.
What was the most exciting aspect of sitting down to write each day?
I sometimes feel that the discourse around writing is that it’s either tedious and vampiric and useless and nobody really likes to be doing it—or that it's mythical and spiritual and Godly and will save us from ourselves. The day-to-day is much less polarizing, less dramatic—it is work, after all—but it's this, actually—the quotidian—I find exciting. Fiction asks a lot from me, but it gives a lot back, too: steadiness and structure, oftentimes surprise. Space to say what I would otherwise find unsayable.
I’d love to hear more about how you decided upon the location for the novel—can you share what drew you to Greece as a setting?
Once I had that beginning image, Greece seemed like the most natural place for the story to unfold. Perhaps it had to do, again, with my middle-of-winter existence. Maybe I was craving the warmth.
How do you find writing about a place when you’re not there—how do you summon and sustain the location throughout the writing of a novel?
I was intrigued by the gap of knowledge, by the challenge of writing completely new terrain. I could visit Greece a thousand times, read a thousand books, but there’s so much The Nude’s narrator and I will never understand about its histories, its nuance, emotional ties to certain locales, etc. And while I didn’t want to paint everything with gloss, I didn’t want to other it, either. I wanted Elizabeth’s experience to feel like a realized one, something alive, symbiotic and ever-changing, where her perspective affects her experience, and her experience affects her perspective. I wasn’t trying to get every detail of place—which is actually an amalgam of several islands—exact, but I was hoping for an exactness of feeling, of what it’s like to still be yourself while you’re somewhere else. And I think that objective sustained my momentum.
Do you have an ideal writing set-up?
I’m very grateful to have a little at home office filled with my books but lately it’s felt cursed in there, so I’ve taken to the couch like a Victorian. Sometimes, you have to change spatially to change neurologically. I don’t know. I do know that, at this point, I do my best writing in the morning. Ideally with a lit candle.
“But this statue seemed disconnected from that history. Its body bore no details: no nipples, no belly button. Her knees and elbows, creamily wrinkleless, her face rendered warmly. A pert nose, eyes dreamy and downturned, lids half-open. I stepped closer and craned my neck. The marble had cracked around the figure’s thigh, and in this space, the cactus had made a home. I touched my finger on one of the needles and pressed, but it didn’t break skin. My eyes traced her back, landing on the thickness of her neck, the delicate ornament of her hair, swept up into a bun—pulled a little too tight, but full of purpose. The bridge of her nose protruded forward. A transgression of her femininity, a refusal of the ideal.
I envisioned someone else on the other end of the road, studying me, as I studied her.”
—C. Michelle Lindley, The Nude
The Nude is your debut novel—I’d love to hear about what the journey of writing, querying, and then publishing looked and felt like for you. Do you have any advice to share with writers who are working on their first novel?
I began the book halfway through my first year at an MFA program and then about a year and a half later, it became my thesis. Then I worked on it for a bit longer, then sent it out to agents. I cold queried and found names by looking in the backs of books I loved. That’s the best advice I could give about querying— make sure you are choosing agents whose taste you really admire.
In general, I found the whole process opaque, and I wonder now if that was good or bad. In some ways, it drove me to the edge of a cliff because I just wanted to know the “correct” way to do everything, but in other ways it was probably healthy to not get stuck on expectations. From what I understand, it’s quite different from person to person. And I think that’s the best advice I could give on that. Try not to compare too much or get lost in how you think the experience should look, based on someone else’s.
I recently read that squirrels gather and store away up to three thousand nuts in a season, and that this is called caching. It made me think of how I save snippets of poems, photos, and quotes as inspiration for my own projects. What did your caching for this novel look like, and do you gather inspiration for a project in any specific way—mood boards, outlining, playlists, etc.?
What a wonderful concept. I did take a screenwriting class during my MFA, where we were tasked to make PowerPoint presentations (basically mood boards) of the mini screenplays we were working on. I ended up doing one on my own for The Nude. I don’t know if I could find it now, but when I think of it, I remember grainy images, muted colors.
I think aggregation happened alongside the writing, but I also think first books are cachings of whole lives, in a way. I’m sure I’d been accumulating inspiration long before I ever started the project.
The Nude takes place in 1999, in the lead-up to Y2K—what were the challenges of capturing and bringing that time to life, in regard to technology, Elizabeth working in a male-dominated environment, or even the way the characters spoke and interacted with one another?
The biggest challenge was staying true to how Elizabeth would dictate her experience. She’s not a completely unenlightened character, but she’s a product of her time and place, and there are certain things she wouldn’t have the language to discuss—her privilege, for example. Or, how she processes some of her experiences with men, and with women. Setting the book before the ubiquity of cell phones, the internet, made Elizabeth—an already isolated character—more isolated. That she be, in more ways than one, unreachable, felt foundational to the book’s core.
The narrator, Elizabeth, is an art historian working as a curator who specializes in female statues of the Hellenistic-Mediterranean—how much did you know about this field before writing? What was your most surprising discovery?
Along with English, I studied Art History in undergrad, but that was some time ago now, and I’m not sure I retained anything other than interest. So, I went in with little knowledge. I did a lot of research and consulted with two art historians. One was gracious enough to read the whole book through, and the other—who specialized in cultural theft and repatriation—answered some important questions I had about logistics. (Which I’m sure I still did not get one hundred percent correct, but that’s fiction, baby!)
What surprised me most was not how unregulated the industry is—spend any time in a museum and you’ll be quick to pick up a predatory energy—but the depths of secrecy among those in the know. I couldn’t find many first-person accounts from anyone who held positions similar to Elizabeth’s—and I get it, they probably have ironclad NDAs, but still. Don’t those expire? Anyway, I did find a book called Chasing Aphrodite, written by two journalists about the shady deals behind many of the beloved exhibitions at the Getty, which was an incredibly helpful resource.
You’ve mentioned in a previous interview that you’re conscious of the senses as you’re writing a scene—I think of the chapter when, as a child, Elizabeth gets in a car with a stranger and you describe her body still wet from the river, the velvet care of his touch, the soft leather of the seat in the white sedan. You write that the air was like barbecue and citronella. I loved this chapter, it feels like a total immersion.
What are three books (or poems, stories, films)—either similar in tone, subject matter, location, or ones that might have inspired you while writing—that you would recommend to readers who enjoyed The Nude?
Oh, I really love this question (and thank you!). For a while, I tried to stay away from reading books set in Greece because I didn’t want to warp my own lens. When I had a fuller draft, I did read Katie Kitamura’s A Separation, which is brainy and austere, and I think everyone should read it, though they might have already. That’s an obvious suggestion, given the locale. My next two recommendations are less obvious, but the first is Diana Khoi Nguyen’s poetry collection Ghost Of. It’s about grief and absence and it really moved me around the time of writing this book. The second is Luca Guadagnino’s slept on HBO show, We Are Who We Are, which shares nothing in common with The Nude, but is beguiling and follows no rules and still has me thinking about the malleability of our desires.
What has been a recent source of inspiration, or joy?
I recently came across the idea of a “joy journal,” where when something joyful happens—once a day, once a month, once a year, however small—you record it. I started one last month. I tend to run on the less joyful side, so I don’t have a lot of entries, but I’ll share this one from a few weeks back:
January 11 - meal at Encanto in Lisbon, Portugal with Logan. It was a theatrical experience. Ate this carved out apple thing, which had mushrooms in it? I didn’t understand, but it was the best bite of food I might have ever had. Then we walked around. It was warm out.
C. Michelle Lindley is a writer from California. Her debut novel, The Nude, is out now.
To buy a copy of The Nude, consider supporting one of the author’s favorite bookstores: Books Are Magic, McNally Jackson, Pegasus Books, Powell's Books, and Liz's Book Bar.
From beginning to end - This was a truly great interview! Particularly enjoyed the insight into the process of what went into this book :)
Wow I NEED to read this! Sounds amazing!