Bookish Brews Snapshot
Psychopomp by Maria Dong
A mentally ill space miner on a desolate moon attempts to make sense of her unraveling reality—and the deadly conspiracy unfolding around her.
💫 Atmospheric 🥀 Flawed Characters 💀 Dark Content 🤔 Thought Provoking
- Genre: Science Fiction
Interview with Maria Dong
Amanda: Can you tell us what you’re most proud of about this book?
Maria Dong: I think it’s a very “Maria Dong” book—what I mean is, it’s not the very best at any one thing. It’s not the most imaginative book you’ll read all year, or the most beautifully-written, or the most artfully plotted. But it crams a lot of really weird and divergent threads and commentary together into a small container and (hopefully) manages to make them all kind of weave together. Diaspora feels? The lived experience of mental illness? Space elevators? Privatization of prisons? *slaps side of the book* Yeah, there’s a little bit of everything in this bad boy…
(I feel like publishers should start advertising my books with, like, Do you have ADHD or mental illness? Well, have we got a book for you!)
Amanda: What is the most important thing you hope that readers get from this story?
Maria: I wrote this book during one of the darkest times of my life. I’d just realized that despite spending a lot of time, effort, and money, the career I had chosen was just not working out for me and was actually causing me a lot of harm. I’d wrapped up so much of my identity in that career, and we weren’t really in a financial position for me to do something else, but it got to the point where I started to actively fantasize about ending my life—so, I didn’t really have a choice. I knew from experience that when I get to that place, I am a danger to myself, so I put in my notice and quit.
Things got weird after that. There’s this tiny deck my husband and I erected in our backyard, this literal 10 foot by 10 foot floating platform of wood. I spent a lot of time laying on my back on that deck in a bathrobe, staring up at the trees, trying to understand the wreckage of my professional life, how could I put my husband into this financial position, berating myself for having such a weak mind, even though I knew better.
But here’s the thing about depression (and dare I say capitalism, facism, and oligarchies)—even when it feels like nothing is happening, it’s an inherently unstable state. There’s all this tension under the surface, all this stored energy just waiting to boil over—which means that there’s always a way out, even if it cannot be visualized or conceived of in the moment that you inhabit. At that time, I could’ve never dreamed of the career change I was going to make, and how much happier I was going to be. I did not understand that I would later find out I had ADHD, and how much clarity and wisdom that would bring me when trying to figure out how to approach my life. I could not have conceptualized that I would someday have a daughter, that she was going to do things like learn how to moo like a cow and blow kisses.
So, I guess the message is: hang in there. Maybe, to do that, you have to get a little crazy, act in ways that are not “normal” or well-received. Whatever. You do what you have to, and you dig your claws in and hang on, because one day this moment will pass, but you can’t get to that point without sticking it out.
Amanda: What are some themes you worked to tackle in this story?
Maria: Someone once said to me that a lot of my work is about reframing the concept of agency and examining the choices people make when all of the choices open to them are bad. I think that was really astute. I know when my debut came out, a lot of people left reviews that essentially said it was unreadable because of what a bad person the narrator was—which I found so interesting. The old adage, hurt people hurt people—I think there’s never been a truer thing said. And if a narrator comes from a background of trauma, the expectation that they’re just going to be this perfect, morally-upstanding citizen all around—especially when they are and aren’t really positioned in systems that would give them opportunities and resources to process that trauma and self-actualize? Frankly, I think it’s kind of ridiculous, and maybe even reflective of an inability to self-reflect on those instances when maybe we weren’t always being our best selves.
So that’s a big theme, and one I thought was pretty relevant when I was writing this book (oh, five years or so ago?), because I was worried about the direction corporate oligarchism was taking us in. In fact, I needed a placeholder villain for the original version of the book, so I picked the most cartoonishly, comically evil rich tech villain I could think of…and now that person is occupying a seat of enormous power in our government. So…that feels bad. Like, did I accidentally make this happen? 😓
