Conversations: "This Is My Face When You Won't Stop Talking" by Flávia Monteiro

Blog Editor Chase Isbell interviews Shenandoah contributor Flávia Monteiro about her creative nonfiction essay “This Is My Face When You Won’t Stop Talking” featured in Issue 74.1-2. In this conversation, Monteiro addresses the dual presence of humor and pain in her writing and the use of space on the page as an extension of form. She also invokes the literary history of the Brazilian crônica and the genre’s influence on her approach to storytelling and written language.

Your writing in “This Is My Face When You Won’t Stop Talking” delivers a striking tonal complexity. You shift rapidly from the comedy inherent to gross bodily functions and awkward social interactions to somber moments of self-reflection and examining your very existence. How did you find a balance between its more comedic and more serious moments, and how did you settle on its overall tone? Do you see the piece as working across opposite tones, or should we be thinking differently about the contrast between comedy and seriousness? Looking more broadly, what role do you think humor plays in serious subject matter?

I love that you asked about opposite tones, because the flip side of pain, to me, is humor—not joy. My work tends to be gigglish with sudden slips into gloominess, so I’m used to bouncing between feelings. But this specific essay taught me to integrate those two poles.

I started working on it for a comedy workshop, so I was going for more than giggles. I wanted to push toward hysterical. But already on page two, the evil bats that inhabit my soul were taking over. If I tried to dial up the laughter, they also dialed up the grief. I had to be very intentional not to let darkness dominate.

One basic thing I did was reorder the sections to make sure the bats made room for clowns every few paragraphs.

Another, more important, move was to study funny essays. I learned they never end on a somber note. The comedic ending usually provides some sort of release. I then realized I had the perfect moment of release, both metaphorical and physical: the actual pee scene. So, I made it my ending—and resolved the story with a gesture that is funny and sad at once.

Your piece makes many interesting formal moves, the most obvious of which is the large spaces between sections. Given that we are an online magazine, the spaces made for a more immersive reading experience as I often found myself having to scroll through the large swaths of white screen, making the absence of text more noticeable and more present than if I had been reading it in print. How often do you think about medium while you are writing? Is the page itself, either virtual or material, and the way the words sit on it, a tool in your writing process? And what role does space play in “This Is My Face When You Won’t Stop Talking” specifically?

I think about the page as space all the time. Playing with format and structure is my way to observe the show-don’t-tell rule. I’m not very good with scenes—my memories are shaped more like snapshots—and so I’m constantly thinking of other ways to make the reader feel immersed in the story.

In this case, I was trying to disorient the reader a bit. I wanted the white space to feel like you’re talking to a narrator who takes long pauses. Most importantly, I wanted the white space to represent those interruptions that happen in the form of silence, absence, abandonment. I can show you loneliness, but it’s tricky to make you feel lonely when reading. So, I used those awkward blank lines in the hopes they would translate a sadness that’s too big for words.

I already mentioned that your piece exhibits a very obvious desire for self-reflection, but even more than self-reflection, the writing is punctuated by moments of knowing self-awareness. There are several points at which you come out and say exactly what type of person you are. All creative nonfiction makes the self a part of the subject matter just by demanding a writer speak to a real experience, but I want to know how does it feel for you to write about yourself, especially in a genre like creative nonfiction? How does the version of you on the page feel similar to or different than your real self? And how does self-awareness guide a piece like “This is My Face When You Won’t Stop Talking”?

I’m a huge fan of creative nonfiction, both as a reader and a writer. You’ll find me waving pom-poms whenever an I sprouts on the page. So, I truly enjoy writing about myself, as painful and murky as it sometimes is.

I know writing is not therapy, but it can be therapeutic. On the page, I let parts of me that are shy or shriveled take up space. Once an essay is done, I’ve conjured a stranger who is and isn’t me. Because, you know, what I call me is actually made of many personas. The family me is different from the friend me is different from the creative me. So, I guess my self on the page is just another part of my real self. With each essay, I’m adding to that patchwork.

One such point of self-identification is when you write, “I’m also a Brazilian kind of person.” According to your piece, your Brazilian-ness not only constitutes a way of inhabiting an identity, but also suggests a certain relationship to communication. Do you feel like that applies not only to how you speak, but also to how you write? Is there a Brazilian quality to the literature you produce? And if so, where might the reader find it in this piece?

Yes, definitely! Even when I don’t write about being Brazilian, I write as a Brazilian. I moved to the U.S. in my mid-thirties, so my brain had already been shaped by my home country.

A clear sign of this is my love for circularity. When I tell a story, I’m not necessarily interested in change, as long as there’s movement.

That also applies to writing, sure. My essays borrow heavily from the crônica: a genre that thrived in Latin America, but really grew wings in Brazil. A crônica is a short and mundane piece that resembles a conversation, and so it welcomes drifting. The story moves forward, but also backward and sideways: there are digressions, second-guessings, associative leaps. In this essay you published, the paragraphs don’t follow each other neatly, yet the reader can follow the plot. Much like in a conversation, we trust the speaker is taking us somewhere—so we relax and enjoy the ride, however zigzaggy it is.

Following up on my last question, there is an obvious interest in this piece in the act of speaking itself. In many ways this essay reads as a monologue, and my experience of reading it at times felt like listening to someone telling me a story. As a writer, what is your relationship to oral storytelling? Do you find yourself replicating the way you or others speak directly on the page? If so, how do you go about doing that? And, speaking very broadly here, what do you see as the relationship between the spoken and written word?

I don’t come from a family of storytellers, but I do come from a country of storytellers. Go to any town in Brazil, and you’ll see people in flip-flops at a sidewalk bar telling lies—stories you know are tall tales, but that you want to hear anyway. Folks are there for the play.

This playfulness conflicts with our written language, though: Portuguese likes to wear a bow tie on the page. This is changing fast, as more marginalized voices gain access to publishing, but the books I read growing up—in the 80s and 90s—were very formal.

Already then, I wanted to write, but I couldn’t risk being boring. Remember I was raised to believe no one would let me finish a story. I sensed that the spoken language could hold people’s attention better than the pomp of written Portuguese. So, from an early age, I strived for a chatty writing voice. When I started working in English, I was comfortable with that voice and—even though the spoken–written gap is different in the U.S.—I brought it over. I taught my English words to wear flip-flops too.