“The real work of structure and story”: A Conversation with Nicole Haroutunian

Nicole Haroutunian’s novel-in-stories Choose This Now (Noemi Press, 2024) follows a tapestry of college friends from young adulthood to motherhood, their stories weaving together over the years, snapping apart, and coming back together again. As the settings shift and the years add up, the dynamics become more complex. Along the way, Haroutunian examines what we choose, what we don’t, and why. 

 These intertwined narratives build on each other, proceeding chronologically with a steady eye on the past these friends shared. As they mature, they grapple with their careers and their creative pursuits, trying to maintain some semblance of their former selves, especially in the swirl of motherhood. Haroutunian has a special gift for layering multiple themes together and constructing a unique vibe, whether the characters are trying to pull themselves together at a college Halloween party, melting down in a painting studio, or having a stand-off in the waiting room of toddler ballet class. The overall effect is that of a carefully constructed quilt, with more to see every time you look at it. 

Jocelyn Jane Cox: I also enjoyed your first collection, Speed Dreaming (Little A, 2015). How do you think your writing – or your worldview (or both) – has evolved since you published that? 

Nicole Haroutunian: Thank you! Speed Dreaming started off as disparate stories and then coalesced into a linked collection at the urging of my editor. He pointed out that a few of the characters seemed like the same person. I thought their similarities were a problem, but it hadn't occurred to me that the solution was to simply give them all the same name. Choose This Now started off structured more like how Speed Dreaming ended—as linked stories—and then became a novel-in-stories as I revised. So, I learned a little, but not a lot!

Revision is where the real work of structure and story happens for me. It’s a bit of a hybrid way of writing; I conceive of stories that stand alone but belong in the same world. I have to spend time looking around that world to see how the stories connect, converge, and propel into each other. I do think that a reader coming in cold would be able to tell that an older person wrote Choose This Now than did Speed Dreaming. I cover similar territory—art, labor, friendship, parenting—but through a more developed lens.

JC: There is a real sense of “growing up” in these pages, or trying to, anyway. There are complexities when these friends are college-aged and a new set of complications when they’re older, dealing with marriage, motherhood, and career success (or frustrations). Are your characters maturing? Do you think we ever actually grow up or do we just have different choices to make? 

 NH: These characters are still growing up at the end of the book as they’re approaching forty. They have fairly gently arcing narratives in that they are in an ongoing process of learning to trust themselves at the end of the book, but they do make progress, or at least change. Part of how I see that is in terms of the permeability of their identities. When they’re in college, the two friends aren’t Valerie and Taline, they’re Val-and-Tal. Their edges aren’t defined. Val thinks, “People are confused when we’re not together–people including us. Where’s your other half? they say, and we look around, wondering, too.” By the end, they’ve cleaved from each other. But their identities are totally caught up in another person by then, their respective daughters.

JC: Talk to me about friendship. There is a big disappointment, or betrayal, at the heart of this book and a few others speckled throughout. How much disappointment can friendships withstand? Do you think this is a matter of forgiveness or just accepting people for who they are? 

RH: One of the characters, Valerie, reads a choice her best friend, Taline, makes as a betrayal, but it’s self-serving for her to believe that. Rather than an actual betrayal, it was Taline making a choice that didn’t involve Valerie. Taking it so personally allows Valerie to blame someone else for the choices she herself makes next. Really, as you pointed out earlier, what is happening is that they’re growing up, and Valerie isn’t ready to do that. Valerie comes to see, over the years, that what Taline did wasn’t actually wrong. Their friendship stretches and morphs as they get older, but they do remain dear to each other and essential in each other’s lives. I think that’s often how it goes. I remember being in my early twenties and spending day after day, night after night with certain friends. Now, in our forties, maybe we see each other every few months after much planning and rescheduling. Thank goodness for text messaging. 

JC: There is a formative event that happens to Valerie in the book, something she just can’t let go of for many years. It resolves in a way readers might not expect. Without revealing a spoiler, what were you trying to depict here - do you see Val’s actions as healing or destructive? 

NH: Yes! It’s both. For many drafts, I left it ambiguous whether she blew up her life or made peace with where she was by finally returning to and confronting this formative event, as you call it. She came to a place where the best option, rather than leaving an open question about what could have been, was to find the answer. That she made that choice at all felt like a resolution to me. I love ambiguity, so I argued that the reader didn’t need to know what actually happened. But, I think my editor asked me if I knew. And I did. Suddenly, it seemed disingenuous not to share that with the reader.

 JC: One of my favorite stories in the book is “Seas Between Us” when Taline attends a party in the suburbs that seems to hit her as more depressing than fun. There is a sense of youth lost but also reclaimed again. Can you share what needle is moving here and what is shifting? 

NH: This story was rejected so very many times by so very many literary journals, who almost all claimed to love it, so I am just delighted that it is one of your favorites. Taline, fresh off a year that included a harrowing breakup, miscarriage, and more, winds up at a bizarre suburban orgy when she thought her oldest friend–who knows nothing about what Taline is going through, or so Taline thinks, at least–was just dragging her to a regular old New Year’s Eve party. Everyone else is buying into the premise of it, the theater of the party. Taline used to love that kind of thing, but faced with these adults embracing a momentary escape from their everyday, she wants more. She doesn’t want pretend change, she wants it to be real.  

JC: Given the “state of the world” many are suggesting that friendship and found family are going to be even more imperative as we try to help not only each other but those in our communities who are suffering. How does your notion of friendship intersect with the concept of mutual aid? 

 NH: Strategizing, commiserating, resource-sharing, brainstorming, contextualizing—these are all skills that dear friends of mine, like you, have, and I think it is important to remember that we aren’t going to be resisting, reinventing, or mobilizing on our own. After the election results became clear, my group chats were quiet for a few hours while everyone absorbed the news and then we were off and running. 

JC: What are you working on next or hoping to work on next? 

 NH: I’ve got another novel-in-stories in the works, this one really trying to take advantage of the form by examining the same incidents across different stories through the telling of a subtly unreliable narrator. It’s a lot about maternal anxiety and friendship, so picking up on some of the themes of Choose This Now, but in a more experimental format.