Our Research Notes series invites authors to describe their process for a recent book, with “research” defined as broadly as they like. This week, Ursula Villarreal-Moura writes about Math for the Self-Crippling, selected by Zinzi Clemmons as the Gold Line Press fiction contest winner.
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Houses
What’s more hypnotic than knowing every detail of a room? Touching curtains, sniffing the pillows on a couch, witnessing the sunset through a window — there’s an undeniable romance in all those experiences. Many of my childhood memories revolved around the intimacy of rooms and houses. Early on, I realized there was nothing as comforting as feeling safe at home and nothing quite as fleeting as time.
In shaping this coming-of-age tale of a young Chicana in Texas, I came to understand the influence place has on character development. The city of San Antonio certainly plays a role, but the narrator is a product of both the drama as well as the quiet moments that unfold in her grandparents’ home and the parents’ house. Each home has its own energy and, in a sense, is a unique character in the book. It would be insincere to say that I set out to write a book about houses. Instead, my subconscious mind began working out my understanding of home through these flash stories. One story ends with the narrator announcing she is her own house, which speaks to ideas of safety and autonomy.
In the titular story, the now adult protagonist tries to find refuge in her old home, but time has rendered that pivotal place foreign. It’s become a location to visit with curiosity — a blank slate onto which to project ideas because it belongs to another family and it’s no longer familiar.
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Dreams
Around the time I started submitting this book to contests and thinking of it as a completed manuscript, I decided to search the document for thematic words. The first word I searched was dream. When I saw how many times it appears, I was struck by how integral dreams are to the narrative.
The family in Math for the Self-Crippling is spiritual and mystical. Like most families, they spend time together in their waking lives, but they also intersect each other in their dreams. A goal of mine was to complicate the notion of dreamland as a playground. Traditionally, dreams allow us to explore ideas or relationships in new ways or perhaps we become terrorized by nightmares. I became interested in the idea that the truth lies in dreams.
As the narrator of the book matures, she starts to understand her work life better due to her dreams. Dynamics become clearer to her and she sees that her bosses have misled or outright deceived her. Dreams become a tool in which she can start to comprehend the world more accurately.
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Therapy
Another setting that plays a significant role in the book is the therapy session. Again, my subconscious mind brought issues of mental health — despair, anxiety, loss — to the surface. I knew I wanted to write about losing a loved one, but I was surprised to find myself writing about it in the context of seeking mental help. For quite a few years, post-graduate school, I struggled with depression and worked with a number of therapists, some more helpful than others. I became deeply interested in therapists as interlocutors, which is evident in many of the stories.
In the second half of the book, the therapists fade out a bit more and the protagonist starts to process issues in new settings such as the inside her car and at the beach. In the last few stories, I aimed to show that these struggles are continuous but perhaps less crippling.
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Mysticism
As a child, I wasn’t surrounded much by books. Instead, oral storytelling filled my life. My grandparents and great-aunt were tremendous storytellers and often their tales incorporated fantastical elements. Magic and the unexpected felt commonplace in my childhood world. I came to learn that what was possible might be tied to the outer bounds of one’s imagination. The more open a person was to surprise, the richer their life could be. In that vein, I tried to stay as open to the world and its beauty throughout my childhood.
Eventually, outside influences like school, crushes, and popularity took center stage in my life and edged out my imaginative life. In retrospect, it was a sad shift from multiple realms of possibility to the literal world.
I’ve lamented that loss a bit, and in an attempt to recapture that wildly imaginative child I was, I set out to write stories that were unpredictable and fun. It was important to me that life be presented prismatically with magical elements. I don’t think this type of imagination was unique to my childhood; I’m certain many children and even certain adults dwell in this land of mysticism or creativity.
Ultimately, I turn to books for the wild possibilities an author can conjure. For that reason, I hope Math for the Self-Crippling will take flight in the reader’s imagination.
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