An Interview with Mary South

“There’s a sameness to all the content we consume… I feel like the rapidity and the amount of it, the bombardment of it, has a very numbing effect. How do we exist with genuine feeling amid the chaos?”

Forms Mary South’s Stories Have Taken:
A Hospital Website’s FAQ Page
A Profile Piece Gone Awry in an Architectural Magazine
Interstitial Phone-Sex Transcripts
Text Message Exchanges with a “Ghost”

Mary South and I first met as work-study scholars at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference in 2018. I was at the raw beginning of my career; she had recently sold her debut collection. I quickly came to see Mary as a writer to both admire and emulate—her prose is psychologically labyrinthine, deeply empathetic, and utterly creative. Late in the conference, she read from her story “Architecture for Monsters,” which at first appears to be a magazine-style feature about a famous and intriguing architect and quickly descends into a dizzying exploration of motherhood, violence, and art. I was taken with the story immediately.

One and a half years later, Mary’s collection You Will Never Be Forgotten is available for the rest of the world to read. These stories are filled with the close observation, cutting analysis, and surreal brainspace so characteristic of the work I first encountered at Bread Loaf. In the title story, which was recently published in The New Yorker, a woman works as an internet content moderator by day and stalks the man who raped her by night. In “The Age of Love,” a man who works in a nursing home begins to listen in on his patients as they call a phone sex hotline, only to discover that his girlfriend has developed a deep emotional relationship with one of the men in the home. In “Not Setsuko,” a woman raises her second child to be an exact replica of her first.

These stories are terrifically scary. They dance around the existential questions of our hyper-technologized time. How far across the ideological chasm can empathy extend? When everyone is under surveillance, what does it mean to have a private life? Is love durable under late capitalism? Is sanity?

In January, Mary and I spoke by phone about the collection.

—Noah Bogdonoff

THE BELIEVER: I think the first thing I want to talk about is trauma. This seems like a book that is really concerned with trauma, but it’s different from many books dealing with that subject matter in that it tends to depict people with trauma actually behaving quite badly. How did you decide to approach these complex and sometimes disquieting realities in your stories?

MARY SOUTH:...