Today marks the book birthday of NYU Alumni Kate Doyle’s quarter-life-crisis story collection, “I Meant it Once.” While her short story collection was released in July of this year, it is currently available in the UK starting today!
“I Meant It Once” is a collection of the between-space, the growing pains–funny, strange, sly, a coming to grips with the ineffable and exhilarating confusion of first … well everything, and the growing consciousness that nothing will ever be like it was. It contains the in-between of childhood nostalgia, early pleasures, and the heightened apprehension of adult dating, friendships, rivals and unease.
Kate Doyle is an American writer in Amsterdam. A former bookseller at Buffalo Street Books in Ithaca, NY, Kate has published her stories in “No Tokens,” “Electric Literature,” “Split Lip,” “Joyland,” “The Millions,” “Lit Hub,” “Wigleaf,” “ANMLY” and elsewhere. She was a 2021 Public Space Writing Fellow, and her work has received support from Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Hawthornden, the Adirondack Center for Writing, NYU Paris and the Community Arts Partnership of Tompkins County.
What sets your collection aside from other writing that discusses womanhood?
So many other books about women’s lives have been important to me—so more than trying to set my collection apart from them, I’ll say something about my book that feels especially urgent to me at this moment in time. It was important to me that whatever preoccupies these narrators is taken seriously in the book. In several stories, that preoccupation is a close friendship fading away. In another story, it’s the memory of an ex-boyfriend’s dog. In another, it’s a basket of heart-shaped scones that someone gives the narrator when he breaks up with her, which becomes this sort of darkly funny emotional injury that she can’t get over—in part because she’s telling herself what we so often tell women, which women internalize: you should get over this. She sort of thinks to herself, it’s just some baked goods, what’s more innocuous than that? But eventually, she allows herself to try to understand why it feels so bad to her, and she figures out something about her own experience and the experiences of women more broadly that is exactly why she couldn’t get over it. It’s a story about learning to take yourself and your own experiences seriously, in a world that is always telling you not to.
I mean, we write off young women very easily as a society. We kind of want to tell a woman in her twenties that her real life hasn’t started yet—maybe because she isn’t someone’s partner or someone’s mother, and those are roles that we are more prepared to endorse than “young woman figuring out how to exist.” We are quick to tell young women that what obsesses them is silly, that “there are worse things than this.” A lot of people tell these characters to calm down or take it easy throughout the book. I wanted to try to get at real difficulty and confusion these women feel as they come of age and try to learn to exist in a world that is so prepared to write them off. Even now people will sometimes say to me something like, “Oh, these characters are so young and clueless!”—as if it were an objective fact. I disagree. I think that’s a knee-jerk reaction to how we’ve been socialized to think about women. To me, there is nothing clueless about these characters. They see very clearly, and feel very acutely, that they exist in a world that isn’t okay. They feel all the dread and powerlessness that comes with realizing that. But every time they get close to saying it outright, people are like: Can’t you calm down?
Why did you write this as a short story collection rather than just extending one of the short stories into a book?
Mostly I was just following what made me curious, and what felt within my reach as a young writer learning how to do this. I think I first wrote a short story versus trying to start a novel because it felt more approachable—and then once I had written one, I wanted to do it again. Eventually, I looked at those first few stories and tried to notice what they had in common, themes I could keep writing about further: things like memory [and] the passage of time. Close but difficult families. Formative friendships that may or may not withstand change—especially between young women. Over time something I came to love about the collection as a form, versus the novel, is how it takes you on a thematic journey as a reader, more than a plot journey. With a story collection, the reading experience lets you think about one thing from many different angles. It’s a very thoughtful, reflective form in that way—a form that’s energized by all the different ways there are to look at something. It suits how complicated and beautiful life is, I think.
Which short story was hard for you to emotionally write? Was there one that you feel encapsulates who you are as an author?
Mostly I found them emotionally reassuring because every story gave me a place to express something. I definitely believe in writing as a way to come to grips with parts of your own experience, and I wrote many of these stories in my twenties, which is such a fraught period of life, so they gave me a place to sort myself out emotionally.
But maybe the story “Briefly” required the most emotional focus to get right. It’s about a young woman remembering the summer she studied abroad, and she’s trying to understand why the memories are both beloved to her and also quite troubling. It was really a story about someone who can’t look at a memory head-on, who avoids talking about something directly—and eventually, I realized that was making it difficult for the reader to follow the events of the story. It took me years, and the encouragement of my editor, to summon whatever it took, emotionally, to let the narrator state more directly what she loved about that summer, as well as what’s sort of haunting her about mistakes she made.
As for choosing only one that encapsulates me as a writer, that’s a fun question and a tough one! I suppose I’d pick “This Is the Way Things Are Now,” which is the first story I wrote. It gets a few things I love to write about, that are throughlines in the whole book. Things like coming of age. The ends of friendships. The way siblings can somehow both cut each other down and support each other through anything. It’s all told in rapid shifts between the past and present; it’s very much a memory-driven story. I wanted it to feel like you’re in the main character Helen’s mind, experiencing everything along with her, and remembering everything too.
In your Acknowledgements, you write a thank you to the grad school cohort at NYU. How do you think your writing experience at NYU has helped shape you into the person and writer you are today?
I did thank my cohort at NYU, and actually, so many of the individuals I named in the Acknowledgements are also NYU classmates. I want to be sure to say that not everyone needs to get a master’s degree to be a writer—that’s not the only way, not by any means—but for me, at that moment in life, it was exactly what I needed. I made wonderful friends. I was immersed in going to readings and going to workshops and submitting my work to literary magazines and talking about books. And it was very meaningful to be in a community of other young writers, all of us trying to figure out together how to do this—especially because it was a bit hard in those years to explain to everyone else in my life what I was doing and why, and whether this would ever be a book.
So it was a comfort to have this place together where we were all doing this weird thing, where there was nothing we had to explain to anyone about having made this commitment to writing. I also hadn’t been in the best place emotionally when I was an undergraduate, like some of the narrators in my book, so I used to joke that my master’s at NYU was “remedial college.” I had a lot more fun in those years, and that was important. There was a lot of laughter and time spent with friends. Those friends all read drafts of the book and gave me important feedback over the years, and I don’t think there would be a book now if not for them. I needed their encouragement and their friendship the whole way. That community was essential.
Your dog, Luna, is “someone who loves books as much as you do,” according to your author bio. If you had to pick a dog breed to describe your short story collection, what would it be and why?
This is a fun question! There are a lot of dogs in my book, and I think it’s because there’s so emotionally direct about them—they can express things very clearly that humans would hold back, or question, or equivocate on. Anyway, the reason I always say Luna loves books is that I worked at a bookstore while I was finishing “I Meant It Once,” and Luna would come to work with me. So she was a bookstore dog in those years, and at one point the store was running a little series on Instagram called Luna Picks, where Luna would “interview” debut authors about their books. So thanks to Luna, I met a lot of other wonderful fellow writers!
Luna is likely a chihuahua-terrier mix, though I don’t know for sure. In general, people like to guess what else she might be, so maybe she’s like my book in that way: because—and I think this applies to most story collections—she’s made up of these different kinds of energies, and it’s fun to think about how those add up to her whole being, her overall Luna-ness. She’s also very loyal and sweet, being a chihuahua, but also tenacious and strong-willed, being a terrier, and that mix of emotions is a lot like the characters in my book: they feel things deeply and have a lot of affection for people, but they’re also quick to jump to action, a little obsessive, often impulsive. It makes life seen through their eyes very vivid, which (I hope!) makes for good reading.
Many thanks to Kate for answering my questions! I really enjoyed reading your answer to one of my questions that I had to put as the first question in the article! As a young woman living in the city, I can totally relate to the confusion of being a 20-something-year-old and having society feel like it isn’t anything major. Thank you for making me, and other readers, feel seen.
I’d also like to thank Cassie Mannes Murray from Pine State Publicity who reached out to me about interviewing Kate for my Author Spotlight series. It was such a pleasure working with you, and I hope we continue to work together!