20 Security Questions for Mary Miller & Louis McDonald, Jr.
Interviews
By Odie Lindsey
Louis McDonald is 63, recently divorced, a lover of fast meals and sedentarism, and the accidental owner of a new, adult dog. His acquisition of the latter—the result of taking a wrong turn, in an attempt to avoid his now-flourishing ex-wife—puts McDonald into action, as the protagonist of Mary Miller’s latest novel, Biloxi.
Or rather, no. The dog, Layla, puts McDonald into considering action, actively. Layla lets Louis off the leash, so to speak. The novel is about what he does with the space.
From the moment that border collie hops in the car, things great and small begin to tumble forward for Louis. He moves from sharing bologna and Big Macs with Layla to impersonating clergy and spying on another man’s wife. While navigating dog parks and poop ethic, ex-in-laws, and lawyers, Louis will consider reconciliation with his distant family, engage strangers, and attempt a date or two! In dialogue with Layla’s gagging and shedding, Louis will even consider leaving Biloxi, and hitting the westward road, ho.
McDonald’s author is blade sharp and relentlessly funny: smart funny, crass funny, clever funny, silly funny, plus. Miller cohabitates with Louis and that dear dog, in turn putting us front and center as Louis both implodes and blossoms as the common divorcee. In Biloxi, the plot can be ratcheted by the grease stain that hits McDonald’s pants as he approaches the woman he is desperate to impress. By the gust that lifts the great sail of his combover as he tries to settle in at a beachside bar.
Mary Miller storytells with a nod to some of her literary compatriots, whether McMurtry’s Danny Deck, or Larry Brown’s Leroy from “Big Bad Love” (whose “My dog died” is, syllable for syllable, maybe the greatest gut punch of an opening sentence in Southern literature, or dog literature, or dark comedic Southern dog literature, or all of it). (Of note: no dogs die in Biloxi.) A minimalist, a maestra of the spare assessment, Miller has been likened to Carver and Beattie and Hempel by no less than Joyce Carol Oates.
Yet the story, her style, is tethered to the new, the now. A generational reckoner, Louis isn’t so much trapped by his inability to wield technology—his iPad is stolen by a rangy love interest, btw—but by the fact that, as with the Cheese of the Month club membership his daughter gifts him, nobody really needs such things. He doesn’t bemoan the loss of the Mom and Pop store, but rather, the extinction of the massive Toys“R”Us chain. He’s in tight with the third or maybe fourth generation of reality shows, and levels a critique of the twenty-four-hour news cycle.
Miller mines the humanity of characters built of Value Meals and breakups, and the hour-to-hour search for a little something more. Louis will be made to face up to life after marriage. Mary Miller will lead him to a crossroads of the commonplace. This use of spare detail, this amalgam of quotidian and extraordinary, is why a chorus of critics and litfolk have announced her admission into the Pantheon of Southern Literature, and/or her having taken up its Mantle. This claim is wholly appropriate . . . as long as she is given credit for redecoration of the former. As long as the latter has a few dog hairs woven in.
Biloxi, the town, is the location of things small and great, cast-off and profound. A hundred and a half years ago, it was both a cheap vacation spot and safe place for New Orleanians to dodge a Yellow Fever outbreak. It is the historic site of Mississippi’s first-ever direct-action Civil Rights protest and it boasts a souvenir site with a giant shark mouth for a door, where you get a free hermit crab with purchase of a hermit crab hut. It is at once the location of Jefferson Davis’s home, Beauvoir, and the scene where a casino barge was raised up by Katrina and slammed right into that same stodgy spot.
But back to Biloxi. While poised to tear into it—to immerse, to absorb, to guffaw and applaud (and be jealous, and sick with my own parasitic maximalism)—I was on a train, in a foreign country. Somehow, somewhere, I tripped a global-positioning, algorithmic switch, a thing beyond me and yet of me, tethered to my shitty bank balance . . . and I was forced to answer a string of Security Questions before I could move on in life.
Security Questions, ugh. Like Louis McDonald, or perhaps Biloxi itself, these inquiries are the stuff of contradiction: simple yet gravitational, ephemeral yet time-tested. (Name of Your First Grade Teacher? Oh come the fuck on.) (But hey, shout out to Mrs. Kwan!) They insist that we confirm ourselves, courtesy of benign, basic summaries . . . which are also our most intimate record, our most critical archive.
Thus, in the spirit of the achievement that is Biloxi, the fusion of everyday and existential, monumental and mundane, here’s a half-ass string of Security Questions . . . of sorts . . . as asked of both Mary Miller and Louis McDonald, Jr. They may choose to answer, elaborate, or pass.
20 SECURITY QUESTIONS: MARY MILLER and LOUIS MCDONALD, JR.
1. What Was the Name of Your Favorite Childhood Pet?
Mary Miller: There was a succession of poodles throughout my growing-up years—one would die and we’d get another, though none of us cared much for poodles, so it was rather baffling. First there was Susu and then Buffy and then Penny. They were ’80s-style neglected, all of us running loose in the neighborhood until it was time for supper.
Louis McDonald, Jr.: Before Layla, Old Blue was my favorite. Back then we only had outside dogs.
2. Favorite Soft Drink: Pepsi or Barq’s Root Beer?
MM: I guess I’d prefer a Barq’s so long as vanilla ice cream is involved.
LMJ: I’m a Pepsi man.
3. On What Date Were You Admitted to the Pantheon of Southern Literature?
MM: I’m fairly sure my friend put me in the pantheon, but that’s how this whole business works, doesn’t it? The review is dated February of 2019 so let’s just go with that. I’m pretty jazzed.
LMJ: What’s this about, now?
4. Is There a Parthenon of Southern Literature, and Is It in Nashville?
MM: ?
LMJ: ??!?
5. Favorite Human with Dog Name?
MM: I’d have to go with my husband, Lucky, who makes a cameo in the novel as a douchebag lawyer. In real life he is also a lawyer, though not a douchebag.
LMJ: I know a guy named Buster. I wouldn’t say he’s my favorite.
6. Favorite Part of Being a Sixty-Four-Year-Old White Guy?
MM: I get to be as curmudgeonly as I want, which is pretty damn curmudgeonly.
LMJ: What’s the question?
7. Best Biloxi Vacation Stop: Beauvoir or Beau Rivage Casino?
MM: We call [the latter] “The Beau.” The flowers are pretty and the sushi is edible and there’s a nice pool. About twice a year I like to go there and lose my money.
LMJ: I’ve never been inside Beauvoir. I’ve been to the casino a few times with my ex-wife, though, for anniversaries and such—she liked the Italian place. I ordered the scallops. Overpriced.
8. Favorite Book Read in Biloxi?
MM: I’ve wracked my brain and can’t recall anything I read during my year of living on the Coast, so I’m pretty sure this was a period in which I revisited devastating but comforting favorites, like Willy Vlautin’s The Motel Life. I watched the entirety of The Office for the first time. I also relied heavily on the gang from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.
LMJ: Bassmaster Magazine is a good one. Outdoor Life is okay, too, but my subscription ran out in 1995.
9. Favorite Book-as-Gift?
MM: Depends on the person, though I’ve given away multiple copies of Flying Leap, by Judy Budnitz; A Stranger in This World, by Kevin Canty; City of Boys, by Beth Nugent; The Moviegoer, by Walker Percy; and Wait Till You See Me Dance, by Deb Olin Unferth. I read a lot of memoirs, but I don’t gift them to people. It might offend someone if I gave them a book about bipolar disorder or drug addiction. Too much subtext.
LMJ: I gave some books to my granddaughter once. They had nice pictures, very colorful. I was told she liked them.
10. Best Song Named After Dog?
MM: One time, after my mother’s high school reunion, she did a dance called “Walkin’ the Dog” or “Do the Dog.” It was dirty. My sister and I still talk about it. Oh, here! I found a link: http://www.metaphordogs.org/Dogs/entries/thedogdance.html
LMJ: Dolly had a pretty good one—“Cracker Jack.”
11. Worst Part of Being a Sixty-Four-Year-Old White Guy?
MM: There’s a lot of sitting.
LMJ: You’re an asshole.
12. Is the Mississippi Gulf Coast more Flora-Bama, Floribama Shore, New Orleans, or . . .
MM: When I first moved down there, I was surprised by all of the shirtless and shoeless men; often you’d see them darting across the road while smoking and carrying plastic bags from the dollar store, but that’s just the culture.
LMJ: I don’t drive in New Orleans—too crowded, too many one-way streets.
13. Location Where Barq’s Root Beer Was Founded?
MM: You want me to google this? You just going to have me googling stuff?
LMJ: Biloxi, though most people think it was New Orleans. They’d be incorrect.
14. Original Naked and Afraid, or Naked and Afraid XL?
MM: Soooo . . . I had to look this up. XL involves a group of people surviving for forty days as opposed to two people surviving twenty-one. If I wanted to watch Survivor, I’d watch Survivor.
LMJ: This is a dumb question, like most of these questions.
15. Best or Worst Hurricane Name?
MM: I always liked the name Camille.
LMJ: I once had a crush on a redhead named Camille.
16. Which Naked and Afraid Do They Watch in the Pantheon of Southern Fiction?
MM: You’re making fun of me now.
LMJ: Fuck you.
17. Do You Miss the Internet?
MM: I never get the chance to miss it.
LMJ: My iPad was stolen and my phone doesn’t do all that.
18. Favorite Sum Up of Your Career Thus far?
MM: I just won a Pushcart for a story I published last year in the Paris Review, so that’s kinda cool. The problem with this writing business is you always feel like you’re behind even if you’re doing things you never imagined in your wildest dreams. Twelve years ago, all I wanted to do was write tiny stories and publish them at elimae, RIP.
LMJ: I’m retired.
19. Favorite Sum-Up of Your Career to Come?
MM: A Pulitzer would be nice. A genius grant, also.
LMJ: I said I was retired!
20. Favorite Non-Spoiler Line(s) from Biloxi?
MM: I like it when Louis breaks out into song: “And then I petted her head and rubbed her belly, which was starting to smell like a Frito, and what popped out of me was a corn chip song I made up on the spot. It was repetitive and catchy. She loved this corn chip song, watched me straight on and wagged her tail. Right after I stopped singing it, though, I had no idea how it had gone, couldn’t remember it at all. Oh, a corn chip! You smell like a corn chip! I sang, but I couldn’t recapture the glory of the corn chip song for the life of me.”
LMJ: Oh, go to hell.
Odie Lindsey’s story collection, We Come to Our Senses, was included on Best of 2016 lists at Electric Literature and Military Times, and the New York Times Book Review noted that it “captures our culture now.” He received an NEA-funded fellowship for veterans to the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and a Tennessee Arts Commission fellowship in Literature. Lindsey’s novel, Some Go Home, will be published by W. W. Norton in July 2020.
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