The Miniscule Mansion of Myra Malone by Audrey Burges
Berkley/Penguin Random House, 2023
Audrey Burges is a writer many of us in the literary community know and admire as a flash writer. Her latest endeavor, The Miniscule Mansion of Myra Malone, still concerns itself with small things, but is, in fact, a novel. A longform story, something many of us flash writers fear or admire or both.
Myra Malone lives as a relative recluse spending her days outfitting a dollhouse (though we are never to call it that; it is “the Mansion”). Her outreach into the world is via a blog where she muses about her choices, and—as she puts it—the choices the Mansion itself makes—Myra simply following magical orders. When a man comes across her blog, he is shocked to discover that the mini Mansion mirrors his home exactly. What ensues is a relationship between two outsiders and a dissection of history and how storytelling unravels through generations. It is the perfect novel for a rainy day, cozy in all possible ways. Burges’s deftness with short pieces shines in blog entries and in scenes throughout the book. I emailed with the author to discuss the things that most intrigued me.
Jen Fliss: Right away, the narrator addressees the reader, says “Take a deep breath…I want you to visit the place that popped into your head.” And a little later, the narrator says, “also, she has a pet dolphin for some reason?” This gave the narratorial millennial/younger adult vernacular. I find looking at framing and narrator choice in novels fascinating; they’re like a way into the author and not just the story. What made you decide to give the narrator its own voice like this?
AB: It’s interesting to me that the vernacular comes across as millennial. Myra is, of course, in terms of age, but I didn’t actually go into writing her with that in mind. Her blogs sound very much as she does when she’s speaking, and the way she speaks is the way I heard her in my own head—her voice was very clear to me right away. The blog entry that opens the book actually didn’t exist in the first draft. Originally, the first chapter began with the teapot. But when the book was acquired, my brilliant editor, Cindy Hwang at Berkley, suggested starting out the novel with an entry from the titular blog, and “An Unpredictable Place to Start” immediately popped into my head due to its significance later. But once I started writing it, I realized that Myra wanted to have this opportunity to put the blog in a context, and it became an opportunity to speak in her voice—which is warm and descriptive and a little bit wry. But it’s entirely her. I don’t think she could have come out any other way.
JF: I love dollhouses. I love miniature versions of our own lives and objects. They’re a perfect-slash-imperfect mirror for the way we collect things in our real lives. Talk to me about how you see the microcosm of the Mansion reflecting the greater world…both in the novel and outside of it.
AB: The Mansion in my head really started as its full-size version. I knew from the beginning that it was big before it was little, and that its minuscule version was intended as a kind of grab-and-go way for the Lady to travel without ever leaving it behind. There’s a comfort in that, but there’s a hold, too—an inability to really experience the world outside the bubble you’ve always known. All of the characters in this novel have some degree of being closed-off and much of that is an artifact of the world that surrounded me while I was writing it. We’d been locked down for months, we never went anywhere, and all of our interaction was over screens. So much of my frustration and bewilderment and fear wound up inflecting those characters in ways I didn’t recognize until much later. The novel is its own kind of microcosm for the story I was trying to tell myself: that there was much that made no sense, and sometimes I wouldn’t have the answers, and it could still be okay in the end. Because I wasn’t doing it alone.
JF: Myra’s mother, Diane, says to her at one point, “there are places we can go…Because we can’t stay here.” It felt like it summed up the themes of the novel perfectly. Can you talk a little about this?
AB: I love that you picked this sentence because it’s actually Diane and Myra together. And in creating their impending financial disaster via her shopping and hoarding, Diane forced it into reality. Myra is the one who filled in the blank at the end to make the sentence “because we can’t stay here.”
Being a recluse and having to leave her home behind—Myra’s worst nightmare, really—became the catalyst for making her life complete. This is really the same for all of the characters’ lives because they all had missing pieces, and by the end everyone finds a new reality, and they’re better for it. That wouldn’t have happened without the “…we can’t stay here.”
JF: It doesn’t get a lot of space in the book because she is a secondary character, but Myra’s mother Diane’s hoarding and spending sprees I found especially interesting. I know it was a mechanism for the cabin being sold and putting pressure onto Myra, but what made this the avenue to do that?
AB: That came from life. Again, during the pandemic, when we didn’t go anywhere, I ordered an astonishing—absolutely astounding—amount of stuff. Stuff for the kids, stuff for me, stuff for the house, a million things that I thought would make things better, or less tedious or overwhelming, or even more beautiful. I ordered big bags of googly eyes and put them on plant pots and appliances (one reason I probably love the movie Everything Everywhere All at Once so much). I ordered craft and art supplies for a dozen new hobbies. Massive huge truck-to-driveway stuff and teensy tiny delicate stuff. I completely lost my mind, I think, for a little while. Diane’s compulsive self-comfort was very familiar to me. Ordering clothes she never knew if she’d have a chance to wear or purses she never knew if she’d carry, but that she really desperately wanted to—that was me, all of it. I didn’t go as far as Diane, certainly, but I think that was because I had someone to pull me out of it. She didn’t.
JF: Within the novel is Myra’s blog. You include entries within your novel. This is another thing I often like when I read, a books-within-books kind of thing, almost epistolary. Why did you use this form?
AB: Originally, there were only three or four blog entries in the first draft of the book, and early feedback I received from my agent, my editor, and my first readers all said that I needed to write more of them. I think there’s a version of who we are as people that comes across in our writing, and that version is both an enlargement and a distillation of who we are in person. Myra is who she is because she writes. And as Gwen explains to her, that’s the person that brings people back to the Mansion website. I don’t think I could have gotten that attraction across any other way.
JF: What is the place of magic in literary fiction?
AB: Literary fiction is inherently magic, don’t you think? Stories are inherently magic. You’re leading real people down a path and showing them the people who live there, and telling them, “These people. You should care about them. Intensely. You should be invested in who they love, and you should wonder what their days are like, and you should cry when they are hurt. Also: none of them are real.” That takes a little bit of magic, no matter what story you’re telling. The kinds I tell are set here, but they’ve got just a little thread of something that can’t quite be explained. The stories I most love to read are the ones that stretch out and thin the veil between what’s obviously real and what may not be.
JF: What does magic realism mean to you?
AB: To me, magical realism means our world, a little off-kilter, with just a dash of sparkle.
JF: Writers often think deeply about all the choices they make in their narrative. It’s something I love to do. If someone catches the deeper meaning, great…it’s like a puzzle unlocked, but it’s also not necessary for the flow of the story. When they take the form of an object, I like to call it a literary tchotchke. Myra wears a lapis acorn charm around her neck. It’s a connection to her step-grandmother and grandfather. But why an acorn and why lapis?
AB: There is no such thing as a meaningless plant in any of my books. There’s an old story about floating two acorns in water to see whether they float together or drift apart, and that’s supposed to reveal whether or not you and the person you love will be together forever. Oaks are also symbolic of endurance and longevity. Lapis is the same, and because of its color, it is often associated with water, which was part of the Lady’s power. It’s the same reason that the table in the hidden room is inlaid with a lapis oak.
JF: “… you can stand here and be the sun.” Myra’s grandfather Lou says this when he first meets his future wife, Trixie. This may have been my favorite line. (Your secondary characters were wonderful!) It’s an easily digestible nugget of figurative language. As someone who writes humor and literary fiction short stories, do you find the balance between literal and figurative writing difficult?
AB: That’s another line that popped into my head fully formed, and it was so completely consistent with Lou’s character—a little funny, a little flirty, and a little poetic. He describes himself as a recovering English major, and that tends to inflect his dialogue.
I love writing dialogue and conversation, and I really only get to do it in any depth in my books, because my other forms are so short. I can really get into the sandbox with the characters and let them talk and see where their conversation takes the story.
I’m someone who uses a lot of figurative language in my own conversation, and to me, a good metaphor can make what’s literal even more so, if that makes sense. It can describe a situation, or an interaction, or an object, even more clearly than reality can. Sometimes, it can also do so more succinctly, which is why I think I write so much humor and flash—figurative language is very precise. It gets across in four or five words what a literal sentence might take ten or fifteen words to accomplish.
JF: What was it like moving from writing flash and short stories to the longer form of a novel?
AB: I actually began with a novel! I started writing flash, humor, and short stories to build an audience while I was querying a novel that I ultimately shelved.
Then the shorter work became its own thing. It became who I was as a writer, and it helped immensely when I wrote The Minuscule Mansion because I’d learned so much about how to construct a narrative, and how to feed a reader down a page, and how to structure things more precisely. Short forms are a great way to learn how to form a satisfying arc, because they have to stand on their own. If you can do it in 800 words, when you give yourself thousands to play with, the ends of the rainbow are just farther apart. And you can give yourself more leeway in picking the hues in between.
JF: This may seem odd, but I loved reading your acknowledgements; it was like its own piece of writing. It made me laugh, made me go “awwwwww…” It got me thinking about all the other pieces of a physical book. How can authors use those other parts, like endpapers, font, and internal design choices (I know a lot of this is decided by publishing staff), acknowledgments, artwork, etc.?
AB: It makes me so happy that you read those and enjoyed them because I agonized over them probably more than anything in the book itself. I really could have gone on for volumes. I wrote this novel in an exceptionally “online” time, and I really don’t think I would have believed in myself as a writer nearly as much if not for those online friendships and supports. Those little snippets of interactions—friendships that found toeholds in the words we exchanged online—probably had a lot to do with the way I wrote a lot of the other pieces, like my bio, the book club questions, and the acknowledgments. There’s a lot a writer can’t control about the publication process, but I view anything I’m asked to write as an opportunity to weave a little bit of myself into the lines. I’m also a devoted reader of acknowledgments and blurbs and bios. Even the dry ones give me such an intriguing peek into who a writer is, and what’s important to them. It’s like walking through a neighborhood at dusk and seeing glimpses of people’s houses from the street—oh, that painting is stunning, what a gorgeous chandelier, look at those beams on the ceiling. I wouldn’t have put that piano there, I wonder why they did that? A million little stories spin themselves from the most innocuous things. Find those windows to display a glimpse of yourself.
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Audrey Burges writes novels, humor, satire, and essays in Richmond, Virginia. Her debut novel, The Minuscule Mansion of Myra Malone, was released on January 24, 2023, by Berkley/PRH. Her second novel, A House Like an Accordion, will be released in May 2024 by Berkley/PRH. Audrey is a frequent contributor to McSweeney’s, and her work has also appeared in Pithead Chapel; Cease, Cows; Lost Balloon; Into the Void; and numerous other outlets. Her stories have been longlisted for the 2022 Wigleaf Top 50, as well as shortlisted in the SmokeLong Grand Micro Contest, the Slackjaw Humor Writing Challenge 2021, and the Fractured Lit Fractured Ghost, Fable, and Fractured Fairy Tale contest. Two of her stories placed in the 2020 Pen Parentis Fellowship, and one received a Juror’s Prize.
Jennifer Fliss (she/her) is a Seattle-based writer whose collection, The Predatory Animal Ball, came out in 2021. Her forthcoming collection, As If She Had a Say, will be out in 2023 with Northwestern University Press/Curbstone Books. Her writing has appeared in F(r)iction, The Rumpus, The Washington Post, and elsewhere. She can be found on Twitter @writesforlife.