The women in novelist Ling Ma’s universe are always finding themselves either on the run (escaping pandemic-savaged New York, chasing down former lovers, fleeing into otherworldly portals) or paralyzed in some liminal state (foreign airports, a bad drug trip) that they’re desperate to awaken from. In her new collection, Bliss Montage, each story unspools like a dream sequence privately remembered, and dream logic rules supreme. Stories nest within stories in a vividly realized world, with minimal rationale: Of course a useless rich husband speaks in dollar signs; why wouldn’t a yeti hit on you at a bar? Across the book’s eight stories, dreaming itself also serves narrative purpose. Her characters find themselves in each others’ REM cycles, or use sleep (or cryogenic freezing) to absolve themselves of near-term consequences—when confronted for his betrayal, an ex-boyfriend says, “I thought I was dreaming.” It’s no surprise, then, that when I meet Ma for lunch in Lower Manhattan, she tells how the premise of many of these stories began as dreams themselves.
“If I remember a dream, I do feel like there’s some kind of anxiety embedded in it—some premise that touches a nerve,” says Ma, austere in a short bob cut and plain black tee, while we watch trains hurtle by on the Manhattan Bridge from our vantage outside Golden Diner. The 39-year-old author is in town for Bliss Montage’s publication week, and she describes the surreality of a reading she gave the previous night, that writerly fantasy-nightmare-combo of having all eyes on her.
“I felt like I was going to be cannibalized,” she laughs, evoking the casual violence dotting much of the language of her short stories themselves—“Bougainvillea the color of bruises”; a mother having children “one gang-bangingly after the other”—abrupt slips of the tongue revealing all is never as it appears. Ma herself is full of these casually intriguing admissions (briefly, we discuss the potential cultiness of her “low, ground floor levels” of involvement in Transcendental Meditation), and it’s understandable how reader response would be so, well, consuming given the eventful few years since Ma published her Kirkus Prize-winning debut novel, Severance, about an apocalyptic pandemic that ravages the world—in 2018.
I ask Ma what’s surprised her most about Severance’s ascendence as arguably the most prescient pre-COVID novel we had about America’s capacity for handling a real-life viral pandemic (plus an accompanying reckoning with capitalism). She admits that her original fear was that the novel, written between 2012 and 2016, was actually going to end up looking outdated, especially once the Trump era got going. “He ushered in this new sense of absurdity,” she says. “If you were going to put in a novel, in 2012, a lieutenant governor saying, ‘We need to sacrifice our grandparents for like, the sake of the economy,’ that reads as really on the nose.” Long before quarantiners started wandering the streets Severance’s Candace Chen does in an abandoned New York, before real-life corporations started fixating on in-office appearances amidst widespread illness, reality had already jumped the shark. (For those curious about whether Ma has since enjoyed the other major pandemic-themed work of fiction, Station Eleven, she’s seen the first episode of the show and plans to keep watching.)
For Ma, writing Severance was intended as a way to distill her own coming-of-age anxieties as an English major matriculating at the University of Chicago days after 9/11 (“During freshman orientation, one of the events was in the Hancock Tower, at the very top; there was all this talk like, ‘Should we be up here? Is it a target?’”), then as an observer of the 2003 SARS pandemic, then as a cog in the publishing supply chain and then a laid-off Playboy fact-checker (Ma treated that severance pay as a kind of writing fellowship, thus began Severance). “If I open it up to a paragraph, I can immediately tap into that sense of doom that was very much a part of my life in my 20s,” Ma explains of the novel. “And that sense of apathy and detachment as well.”
Self-imposed déjà vu is, of course, a time-old technique, though the loops of Ma’s own life have been making themselves more apparent lately. “I do have a lot of returning in my past,” she says of her position teaching creative writing on the same University of Chicago campus now, of even writing much of Bliss Montage back in the same pre-grad-school apartment where she’d started Severance a decade ago. Ma’s process involves two shifts: Drafts are first handwritten, then transcribed with revisions into a laptop while, in the case of Bliss Montage, lying down—since Ma was pregnant at the time (another auspicious return: Her ob-gyn was located in the same building as the old Playboy office, which at least solved the long-running puzzle from Ma’s fact-checking days of seeing lingerie models and pregnant women overlap in the elevator bank). These days, she’s living in the same neighborhood where she’d began as a writer in her late 20s, “so I can keep circulating,” as she puts it.
These are the starter ingredients for Ma’s particularly grounded brand of surrealism: a dearly familiar home base (not to mention escape from distractions—“I can write in Chicago. I can’t in New York!”), a keen cinephilic habit (“It helps you zoom in on the most efficient images”), plus the works of Kafka, Marilynne Robinson, and more. “I like to emulate Sherwood Anderson, this sort of Midwestern, naturalistic, plain-spoken style that I think is very elegant,” Ma says. “But then, you know, just add zombies or like, yeti sex.” Though Bliss Montage has the latter and more, including the existence and detailed cultural customs of a made-up nation called Garboza, she’s less interested in fantastical flexing for fantastical flexing’s sake. “Someone told me that my writing is realism, but it just masquerades as something else,” she says. “I think emotional realism is what I’m going for.” Hence the dream-like qualities of these stories, where even the weirdest plot trappings are only secondary to the emotions at stake.