A Slow Descent Toward Hope – Interview w/ Zach Powers

A CONVERSATION WITH TWC DIRECTOR ZACH POWERS ABOUT HIS NEW NOVEL, THE MIGRAINE DIARIES

By Amy Freeman

When I was asked to interview Zach Powers, who is not only my friend, but also my boss, my only question was, “How annoying can I make this for him?” Given free rein, I decided to ask him questions about his latest novel, The Migraine Diaries, from the perspective of the protagonist’s headaches. Here’s how that went:

Migraine: I’m a little miffed that, although I’m arguably the backbone of the novel (if a migraine can be a backbone), I’m not a proper noun. You refer to me as “the hurt,” or “the pain.” In your own words, I threaten. I keep you moored to the spot. I sleep in a corner of your head. I’m a main character, I’m never capitalized. Why not?

Zach Powers: Damn, migraine, you’re coming right out with the hard hitters. I think when it comes to illness narratives, the way we talk about the illness is intricately tied to how we experience the illness. The illness has undeniable power over a person’s life, so I think it’s important, whenever possible, to not give in to the temptation (because it is tempting!) to grant the illness even more power. Migraine, you’ve mucked up my life more times than I can count, which inspired the narrator’s experience, so I’m not willing to grant you personhood. In reality you’re not a person. You’re literally in the narrator’s head. And fight you as much as he might, you can’t be a true villain because—I think I get into this in the book as well—you’re his self hurting himself. Turning oneself into the villain would add harm on top of harm for a person with chronic illness.

I, physical pain, first appear while the protagonist grapples with the emotional pain of a close friend’s death. Would this story even exist if the protagonist didn’t have to grapple with both kinds of suffering, in tandem and in perpetuity?

I wanted to write about the experience of you, migraine, but I also worried that would be a hard sell for readers. So, I decided to tie that to an experience I know readers love the heck out of: grief. It’s a little bit of a bait-and-switch. But also, the experience of pain and the experience of grief become metaphors for each other. From a writing perspective, that’s always where I get interested. I like to discover how two elements play against each other, and how the evolution of one reveals new things about the other, which then evolves itself, and they go back and forth redefining each other and further evolving.

This book holds a lot of pain, both physical and emotional, to wit: headaches (obviously), bruising, anaphylaxis, and immense grief. Can you talk about how the physical pain I inflict on the protagonist (sorry about that, but it’s my raison d’etre) informs the emotional suffering he’s enduring?

I think one of the interesting things that emerged from the interplay of the two pains is that they interfere with each other. Instead of compounding, the physical interrupts the processing of the emotional and vice versa. In a way, this still ends up as a form of compounding, because neither pain gets properly dealt with. Also, grief is inherent to chronic illness. In the novel, it’s manifested in a separate cause of grief, a friend’s death, but in real life, to become sick is to lose some part of oneself. That’s a sort of partial death. That’s grievable. I’m not a mind-body dualist, so to me that means the emotional has a physical component and the physical an emotional component. To hurt is to grieve and to grieve is to hurt.

The protagonist searches for a cure for, well, me, as he tries to heal from the loss of his friend. He’s looking for…something else. How does hope factor into this story?

One of the things I try to show in the novel is the unmaking of a life. A significant enough chronic illness can cause fundamental changes in a person. Hope, then, comes in the form of accepting, if not embracing, those changes. There’s no other side of a chronic illness. You don’t get better. The narrator doesn’t seem likely to stop having migraines. But there is another side to the unmaking (as opposed to the illness itself). So, maybe more accurately, hope comes from the process of remaking a revised version of self that accounts for the illness. Or something like that? In this way, illness narratives resist traditional story structures. I don’t want to spoil too much of the novel, but I can say that “endurance” can’t be a key moment or an event, much less a climax in the traditional sense. Maybe, then, the climax is the first migraine in the opening scene and everything after is denouement, a slow descent toward hope.

Personally, I’m not crazy about the whole “beauty is pain” trope I’ve seen bandied about. Yet, I think there’s some truth to it. I mean, you attribute moments of wonder to my appearances, like when you describe the twinkling phosphenes I show you. (A phosphene is the phenomenon of seeing light without light actually entering the eye. I looked up the term.) Sometimes, the phosphenes form constellations, like the close friendship structures altered by KJ’s death. What’s your take on whether there is beauty in pain? And how does that affect the protagonist?

One of the instigating questions when writing this novel was whether or not it was possible to make art from this particular negative experience. The catch is that I don’t think there’s any beauty inherent to the experience. At the same time, I’d say there’s no beauty inherent to a clear blue sky or cherry blossoms. Beauty comes from the interaction of a human mind with a subject. So, it’s possible to take a crappy subject, like debilitating pain, and explore it, after the fact, in a way that leads to poetry or insight or meaning. I was interested in that poetical potential. I was interested in what my mind might discover if I dwelled in a place I would usually not want to dwell.

If you pen a sequel, can I have my own narrative arc?

Sorry, pal, no sequel this time. Anyways, a narrative arc implies chronology, and the first thing to go during a migraine is a sense of time. Instead of an arc, the novel’s structure is an infinity symbol. Migraine—like grief—is timeless and endless at once.