Interview with Mr. May, B. J. Hollars

B. J. Hollars gave us the great short “Missing Mary.” You can read it online here. In this short interview, we ask him about his inspiration, his methods, and his new work.

1. Tell us a little bit about the genesis of “Missing Mary.” Where did the idea come from and what kind of revision did the story go through to get to us?

I think I started this piece as a result of my desire to try to subvert a somewhat clichéd story trope. The opening line points to that—”You’ve heard this one before.”

This isn’t a new story: a girl goes missing, she’s never found, the end. While I was interested in Mary herself, I was far more interested in the lives she touched after she vanished. I was also interested in the mystery of the thing. I sort of viewed this as an erasure story. I started with a much, much longer piece with far more answers and then I just started whittling away until I broke it down into its simplest elements. I’m a bit obsessed with coming-of-age stories, but I want to write them in a unique way. I think this genre of story is often exploited and the end result is rarely original. And so, this was my attempt at an old story in a new packaging—something stripped of its essentials.

2. The narration of this story is one of the things that makes it unique. You address the reader directly, including asides like “but that won’t prove to be a critical detail.” Can you tell us a little about this style of narration?

Sure. I think this goes back to my idea of “new packaging.” I felt like that omniscient voice seeping through was quite ominous. Because the question becomes: “Wait a minute, if there’s an omniscient narrator involved, than why doesn’t he tell us what happened to Mary?”  The narrator himself is implicated in this way. If the narrator knows which clues are important and which aren’t, then surely he knows far more than he’s letting on. And so, the reader is forced to choose: Do I trust this withholding omniscient narrator or not? And I guess if you read the story, you really don’t have much of a choice.

3. Your piece is not the typical “missing child” story. In some ways, it’s about a whittling away—or collecting the lack of evidence, assessing material that does not relate to Mary. And then the ending has a surprise turn. How did this progression, this arrangement of details, come about?

Yes, I really like that interpretation. I think that’s dead on. This story is about whittling away. I want the reader to be the detective, but I want the detective to have bare bones resources. And so, a reader is given facts, but a few of them are red herrings. Some facts seem to push the reader on a particular path, but since we never know what actually happened to Mary, we aren’t sure which suspect (if any) is the guilty party. I wanted to create a world overflowing with suspects: a classmate, a police officer, a fisherman, even Mary’s family. But I think the lack of closure is important. As I was writing this, a friend of mine lost her dog, and I just kept thinking: How much more terrible to never know what became of her. That lack of closure, I think, puts a major hole in the center of the story. I couldn’t imagine any other possible ending.

4. What are you working on now?

Oh, all kinds of things. I’m quite excited about my nonfiction book forthcoming from the University of Alabama Press titled Thirteen Loops: Race, Violence and the Last Lynching in America. I’m also in the early stages of a second anthology. And there are always short stories to be written, and an essay in need of revision, and that bear of a novel that never quite steps into the light.