On Writing a Story about the Love and Worship of a Possible Female Deity
Agnès Madrigal, interviewed by Sara Parrot
Agnès Madrigal is a writer of works of fiction. She has completed two novels and several short stories, among various other writings. I met with Agnès to discuss her first novella, Messiah, which is the story of a woman who, upon revealing certain physical and psychological attributes, is considered by many to be a new messiah. We met in Agnès’s sun-dappled living room in San Francisco on a Sunday morning where we shared black coffees, fruit tarts, and an electrical conversation. These are some of the fragments from our time together. SP
Sara Parrot: How did you come up with the idea for Messiah?
Agnès Madrigal: The genesis of Messiah did not start so much with an idea as it did a voice. I was writing in my journal—as I usually do when I am in need of a story—and hoping that one of the writings would start to reveal a greater narrative. This has been the case with some of my other fictions, especially my short stories. For Messiah, the idea did not start on the page. I kept finding my thoughts interrupted by a voice, and I eventually paused to listen to the voice. The voice was moaning, shrieking, and it spoke in a kind of babble, not in actual words that we know. I realized that this was a character emerging—this was Amelia, the protagonist’s wife in the story, the woman who is considered to be the messiah.
Author’s markups to a preliminary draft of Messiah. Photograph by Madrigalit
SP: That is a really fascinating explanation, and not what I—or most readers—would have expected. But obviously you cannot write a story in babble. How did you work through Amelia’s “words” to start the novella?
AM: Well, I realized straightaway that Amelia could not be the narrator of the piece, and it was, in seeking a narrator, that more of the story came together. I elected to tell the story through the point of view of the man who loved her, her husband, Ismael. This was an odd choice for me because it meant the narrator had to be male, and I had not really entertained the idea of writing outside my gender before—much of my writing is based on a female perspective or experience—but I wanted to follow the storyline as it was appearing, so I gave it a try. In writing school, they recommend that if you write outside your own gender, you should alert the reader to it as early as possible in a story, so there was my first sentence: “I am a man.” I think it works well that way because along with establishing the narrator’s gender, it also sets up the primary struggle that he faces throughout the book, the struggle of being a man beside a character who is believed to be a god of sorts.
“I am a man. My name is Ismael Cassius. I am, as I write this, a witness—an emissary—although other identities I wore for a while.”
—from the opening lines of Messiah
SP: Was it difficult to write from a male point of view?
AM: Not as much as I feared it might be at the outset. Again, the story really took the lead and led the way through, so I didn’t think about it as much as I initially thought I would have to. In fact, I did not really pause much to think “what would a man do?” because in so many ways, Ismael’s responses were very human, neither male nor female, and I appreciated that lack of prejudice as I wrote. And, of course, the flip side of making the spouse/narrator male, is that the messiah is female—and though I did not try to exploit a feminist narrative in the text, it did please me to be able to offer this twist on the tradition. It’s overdue, I think [smiles].
Author’s markups to a preliminary draft of Messiah. Photograph by Madrigalit
SP: Though it makes no declaratives, this is a story about religion. Are you a religious person? How did you think about religion when you wrote?
AM: I am a religious person. I was raised in a Catholic family, but I am very interested in all religions—not just on a philosophical level, and I often wish that I could take the time to read, worship, and complete more studies to be a more deeply religious person. I love the idea of belief, I love the beautiful suspension of doubt that most religions require—I feel quite strongly that much exists beyond our empirical experiences. And I love the idea of an all-encompassing, powerful form of love. I think that I was able to bring these concepts into the writing of Messiah. I toyed, at times, with Christian tropes, but mostly I wanted to leave specific types of religion out of the story—because I do not wish to judge or critique any religion, and because I wanted the story to remain fundamentally about belief, how we formulate belief and what we do with it.
“Messiah. The newspapers call you this, not I. They splatter the front pages now with your face and occasionally mine. The shots are unflattering, as photographs typically are, and I try desperately to ignore the black-and-white text that accompanies them—having spoken to neither of us, I cannot imagine what the reporters could possibly say.”
—from part one of Messiah
SP: What do you hope readers will draw from this story?
AM: Well, first of all, their own conclusions and their own impressions. As a writer, I don’t want to be didactic. I just want to create a framework in which to explore particular ideas and leave the rest for readers to think about for themselves. Secondly, though, I hope they will think about how belief is made, how it is used and possibly abused, and, most of all, how omnipotent love might be. I feel that as humans, whether we are religious or not, the substance of love is always accessible to us, is always able to be explored, modelled, and expanded. All of my stories are interested in love, and Messiah is perhaps the most explicit in a particularly grand kind of love—the love of god, the love of humankind. I should hope that we all might find takeaways of that sort, at least the latter, whether it is through this story or via other stories, religions, experiences.