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When one of the two central characters in your debut novel is dead, there are unintended consequences, as Anna Montague reveals at the start of our conversation about How Does That Make You Feel, Magda Eklund? In the book, Magda, a psychiatrist who is turning 70, takes a lengthy, life-changing road trip with the cremated remains of her best friend, Sara, buckled into the passenger seat beside her.
“My apartment is just covered in urns,” Montague says, speaking from the Brooklyn apartment into which she has just moved. “I’m actually really looking forward to exploring other decor options once the book is out. I have maybe 15 in my entryway.”
In fact, Montague’s late grandfather, who was the manuscript’s first reader, suggested she call her book The Urn. People have already been sending them to her, and no doubt she’ll be getting more with the publication of her highly anticipated novel. What’s more, one of these gifted vessels may actually contain remains. “It sounds distinctly like there are some ashes in it,” Montague says, laughing, “but it seems to be locked. I don’t know who sent it, so I’m in a bit of a holding pattern with that one.”
“I remember wondering what it would be like to try and start over . . . when you’re in your 70s, and you think you have everything sorted out.”
While she was working on the book, Montague lost not only her 100-year-old grandfather, but two other dear people: her 94-year-old grandmother and a woman named Dorothy (Dot), one of her father’s elderly neighbors whom she had befriended. One day, as Montague dog-sat for Dot’s husband, who was traveling, she suddenly realized that Dot’s ashes were in an urn in the room where she was writing. She notes that “many of the impulses that Magda has” towards her friend’s urn in the book—like talking to it—“are very true to real life. At least for me. I found that the desire to connect and pay homage to that person still very much existed in ways that I didn’t expect.”
Montague’s initial inspiration for the story came when her therapist dropped her. “It’s not as sad as it sounds,” she interjects, explaining that during the pandemic, her therapist—whom she guesses was in her 70s—decided to downsize her practice to only patients she was seeing regularly. “When I asked her what she was planning to do with all of that newfound free time,” she continues, “there was a pause. And she said, ‘I don’t know, maybe I’ll travel.’ I remember wondering what it would be like to try and start over . . . when you’re in your 70s, and you think you have everything sorted out.”
Thinking about her therapist led Montague to the character of Magda, and Sara’s character appeared soon after. “I thought I was drafting a short story,” Montague recalls. “And within a couple of pages, Sara was already there. I thought, ‘Okay, this is perhaps not a short story, and this is definitely about the relationship, the friendship between these two women.’”
Readers who plunge into this heartfelt, well-told saga may be surprised to discover that Montague is only 31. “It is very easy for me to write from the vantage point of a senior citizen,” she admits with a laugh. “Perhaps too easy.” She describes her friendship with an 80-year-old named Lena, noting, “if you just had a profile of the two of us, you would never know that I was the younger one. [Lena] likes dancing to house music and afternoon boat cruises, and I am often in bed with a cup of tea at an hour that I won’t disclose. But I’ve spent a lot of my life around significantly older people, many of whom were mining the difficult space of recognizing that their lives were more than likely half over, sometimes more than three-quarters over.” The conversations Magda has with herself about what it means to enter her 70s are drawn from ones Montague has had “with many of the older folks in my life.”
“Most women I know become happier and more fulfilled as they get older,” she adds, “and I wanted Magda to very slowly come to terms with that.”
“That’s the absurdity of a road trip, right? You can have it all mapped out perfectly, but you cannot anticipate all of the events that will happen.”
Montague got to know Lena through SAGE, a national organization that advocates for LGBTQ+ elders and fosters intergenerational connections among LGBTQ+ people. Hearing about Lena’s experiences living in New York informed Montague’s writing, including her decision to set How Does That Make You Feel, Magda Eklund? in 2011, just before New York state’s Marriage Equality Act.
“One of the things I was thinking about quite a bit while writing was the inherent queerness of female friendship,” she explains. “The intimacies that are allowed both privately and publicly to female friends that aren’t allowed to men. As an adult, for example, I’ll often have a friend stay over, and my male friends would never have a sleepover. . . . Women are encouraged to support each other in ways both emotional and physical [that] are so different from the ways that men are socialized.” She suggests that the intimacy of female friendships can be confusing for male partners, even a source of envy, “because it’s a degree of closeness that they have not been allowed. And maybe it’s even a degree of closeness . . . they have not been able to achieve with their partners, you know, because those needs are being met elsewhere.”
Montague dedicates her book to her friend Isabel, whom she calls “the platonic great love of my life.” They met at summer camp and have been “a constant” in each other’s lives since they were 13. The two talk every day, and as Isabel is a poet, they often confer about writing projects.
Once Montague decided that Magda would take a road trip, she says, “I had a pretty good sense of where she would go, but I didn’t have as much of a sense of what would happen to her emotional or intellectual self along the way. That’s the absurdity of a road trip, right? You can have it all mapped out perfectly, but you cannot anticipate all of the events that will happen.” She adds, “The first draft had many more flat tires and a number of more absurd characters who didn’t make it through to the final manuscript.”
Montague also turned to psychology textbooks for reference. They were useful for chronicling Magda’s psychiatric practice as well as Magda’s own inner struggles, which are much harder for Magda to face than her patients’ quandaries. Montague confesses, “There were many moments when I just wished I could grab Magda by the shoulders and shake her. And then I had to remember that I was the one creating this person and all of her problems—which meant I was also responsible for solving them.” Never fear, readers. The solutions—and the long and winding roads that Magda takes to reach them—are one of the many delights of this book.
The author still feels connected to Magda and Sara, and anticipates that these characters may reappear in her writing. However, she is now “very much in the weeds with the next one”—something completely different. Montague is an extremely busy literary professional: She also works as an editor for Dey Street Books, focusing on narrative nonfiction, science and wellness books. (She recently worked on NPR music critic Ann Powers’ “kaleidoscopic” biography of Joni Mitchell, Traveling.) Montague says that it helps that she suffers from insomnia, which gives her time at night for her own writing. Writing fiction while editing nonfiction dovetails nicely for her. “It feels like there’s just enough distance between the two, but there’s enough overlap that I can learn and apply those learnings to the other,” she explains.
Montague has always filled her life with books, and juggling between different ones is nothing new. As a preschooler in Irvington, New York, she kept books in multiple rooms so that one was always at the ready. She kept one in her bedroom, another in the kitchen and yet another in the front hallway so she’d have something to look at while putting on her shoes. She began writing short stories at a young age as well. “I was always particularly captivated by people and their motivations for—everything really,” she says with a laugh. “I think at the heart of it, that’s always a principal focus and fascination of mine.”
What about that therapist who dropped her and inspired How Does That Make You Feel, Magda Eklund? Does she plan to send her a copy?
“Yes,” Montague says. “She was very excited to hear about the book, and we’ve exchanged letters here and there. My current therapist is also excited to read it, but I’m a little scared of what they’ll make of it.”
Read our review of How Does That Make You Feel, Magda Eklund?
Anna Montague author photo by Hannah Solomon.