Photo credit: Ashley Pieper

Bruna Dantas Lobato’s debut novel, Blue Light Hours, is a rare, slim book that feels like a shard. It slips under your skin; you hardly notice the work it’s doing until you’ve put it down and the world feels slightly off-kilter. The book chronicles a young Brazilian woman’s first year as a student in America through Skype calls to her mother; a single woman in her fifties, who lives alone in Natal, Brazil, and struggles to fill the void left by her daughter’s departure. A lifetime ago, I too was a scholarship student living in America for the first time, having left a single mother on the other side of the Atlantic. Reading Blue Light Hours, I had the uncanny feeling of falling into conversation with my former self.

The novel is ground-breaking on both a craft and a personal level, as Bruna elegantly demonstrates the difference between tension and conflict. The unnamed mother and daughter of the novel are not antagonists; they are attempting to support each other, as best they can. What drives the narrative forward is precisely the impossibility of this allegiance: to follow her own path, the daughter must break away from the mother and yet she is aware that her mother is vulnerable without her there. The daughter grows increasingly invested in her new life, but it comes at a cost, both to herself and to this person who means the world to her.

Fittingly, Bruna and I spoke over a video call from two different continents. It was midday for her in central Iowa and early evening for me in France. The connection became unstable within moments, and we cut our cameras so we could keep talking—a fix Bruna suggested with just the kind of ease you might expect from someone who has spent a decade thinking and writing about long-distance intimacy.

We discussed mother-daughter relationships in literature, the guilt that comes with being a class transplant, and the vagaries of writing an “internet novel.”


Anna Polonyi: What were some of the challenges you faced when trying to render these long-distance calls in a way that still felt grounded in the physical?

Bruna Dantas Lobato: When I first started working on this, I told people in my MFA program that I wanted to write an internet novel set on Skype. I was laughed out of the room. [Laughter] They told me it was going to be so bad, boring, and gimmicky.

But I thought, surely there is a way to do it. I’m trying to write this non-place, what would that be like? I looked into airport novels. Novels set in a McDonald’s or a Wendy’s, places that are kind of nondescript, or that all look the same. And then I started thinking: What if I could make Skype a bit like a stage? Maybe even like a puppet theater. I went analog, in a way, while writing about the internet, because that was the best way for me to handle the constraints of the video calls.

The moments I found most heart wrenching were when we’re reminded of that fourth wall, to keep using the theater metaphor. We’re startled when we’re reminded that it’s a Skype call, because the connection goes bad, or there’s a funny tilt of the screen, or the angle is weird. It’s a particular brand of loneliness.

Oh, I so agree. The screen approximates our loved ones, but it also [emphasizes] distances so terribly. The screen is so cold. All the features of Skype, or Zoom, or whatever are so impersonal. It’s one kind of intimacy, but it also makes us very aware of our bodies being isolated, because we’re tapping behind glass, right? We’re fully aware of the fact that there is no reaching somebody else from a distance.

As I was editing this book, and the pandemic happened, everyone suddenly had to go through these things that many of us have been doing for years, which is communicating through video calls. How many holiday parties and birthdays and Mother’s Days have I been at through Skype? My family will just put a computer next to the cake. And then guests will walk by and say hi to me. My head is just floating on a table.

I can describe my day all I want. But there’s nothing like not describing it, not using language, just doing those things together. Cooking or watching a movie together. Trying to replicate that is impossible.

The book makes a bold turn in the second section, which delighted and surprised me. We shift to the mother’s point of view and suddenly we have access to her in a way we hadn’t had before. What made you want to do that?

It started as an exercise. I kept thinking that I didn’t have enough insight into the mom as I was writing the daughter section. Maybe I should do what creative writing professors tell you to do, which is to write from another character’s perspective, just to see if you can embody them a little better. I wrote the chapter where the mother adopts a dog, and once I wrote that one, I was like: Oh, I love her so much more. I want to keep exploring this.

Was including her a later decision?

Yes, it was. Originally, I wasn’t going to include this chapter in the novel, but I told my agent that it existed and she wanted to see it, then asked: Why aren’t you including it? I didn’t know yet if I wanted to switch points of view. It only settled for me once I figured out that I needed a third section, in which we got to experience both of their perspectives. Once I understood that I could look at both of them from the third person, then having the mother’s section added something important.

The third section you mentioned is one in which the mother and daughter are finally reunited. And while it’s a moment we’ve been waiting for from the very beginning, it also filled me with ambivalence. The daughter has developed these refined tastes around expensive tea and electric toothbrushes. There’s a critique of American materialism there. No matter how wonderful this Nespresso machine is, can it really make up for the years of absence?

That chapter was actually very personal because my mom had just visited me when I wrote it. And I caught myself feeling guilty around all of the things that to me were pretty incredible, but that she somehow didn’t enjoy or understand. When did I become this version of myself that my mother doesn’t recognize? [In a material sense] it struck me that I’ve been utterly colonized. The things that used to belong to a life that I associated with the empire, with rich people on TV, were now part of my daily life. There I go with my unnecessary gadgets, thinking this is the only way to live. Now when I go home to Brazil, I need to bring all these bullshit items with me—God forbid, I go a week without my charcoal face cleanser! [Laughter] So I was critiquing myself, knowing that it can’t be helped. This is the life I have now, and it’s the world I live in.

What made the mother a difficult character to write?

Of all the characters, she was the most confusing, the hardest to pin down. Most characters in literature, and most humans, are very contradictory. I was trying to understand her cognitive dissonances and where she would contradict herself. How she felt lonely, for instance, but sometimes didn’t do enough to get out of her loneliness. I was aware of that, especially as I was writing characters that are very co-dependent.

That’s interesting. I don’t know that I would have thought to use that word. Is this relationship codependent or just intimate?

Now that people are reading the book, some of them tell me their relationship is unhealthy. That makes me laugh. The characters are from the kind of family where the mother took care of her own mother, and it was the only way they knew to live. At least, that’s how I was writing it. I wasn’t aiming to write two clingy, needy people.

I’ve also gotten responses from fellow Latino readers, and sometimes readers outside of the United States and Western Europe, and they tell me: yes, 100%. This is exactly what my relationship with my parents is like. My mom won’t let me wander too far, and it is my life’s purpose and duty to be here for my parents.

It’s reassuring to see that people can see themselves reflected in a book like this. And for those who don’t, maybe it can inspire them to think critically about their own relationships.

Absolutely. This is maybe embarrassing to admit, but the first thing I did after putting your book down was call my own mother. The thing that particularly moved me was the very genuine yearning the two characters have for one another.

Their relationship is both a source of tension and a balm. It’s a place of familiarity that the daughter can always go to. Just knowing that her mother is always going to be there gives her a sense of permanence. It does become a source of tension in the book, especially near the end, since it’s pulling the daughter away from her daily life. But I would also say that it’s what keeps her going; it’s what keeps her sane. It helps her survive her first year in America.

I tried my hardest to show that there’s joy in their relationship too.

I want to talk about that joy. I don’t think I’ve really seen it on the page before. What mother-daughter relationships haunted this one as you were writing? Did you feel like you were striking out towards uncharted territory?

That’s such a good question. I did read a lot of mother-daughter books as I was trying to figure this out, but you’re right that I couldn’t find anything that was just about devotion and love in this way.

I revisited Lucy by Jamaica Kincaid, for example, and The Autobiography of My Mother, where she writes about the protagonist’s mother at length. But Kincaid wanted to get rid of the mother, to rip her out from inside of her character. I read a lot of books like that.

I wanted the mother and daughter in my book to go through a coming of age together. As we’re seeing in films and novels, women in their fifties have to come of age again. They have to come into their own as older women. We also do that when we leave childhood. They didn’t have to have conflict. What if they could have their arcs alongside one another?

I kept dreaming of a book where there was genuine friendship between mother and daughter.

There are all these books in which sons want to be like their fathers. And then all these books in which daughters don’t want to be like their mothers, because their mothers represent the patriarchy to some degree. The moms are not women who feel like role models for them. Maybe they didn’t work enough, or maybe they worked too much, or maybe they didn’t stand up to the fathers. That’s when I realized it was going to be so difficult to do. One thing I did in my efforts was to get rid of the men.

Oh, interesting. What do you mean?

I had a father character in my very first draft. But it meant that suddenly there was this other gaze, like this presence that the daughter could compare things to. She felt like the mother should have pushed him away, or she should have protected her more. I eliminated the male characters, and then it was much easier for me to sustain a relationship where the daughter saw the mother as her whole world, and a proper role model, not just someone under the weight of the patriarchy, which of course she is, but that wasn’t my concern.

In thinking about this, I read one book that was very, very helpful, even though it wasn’t a novel: Adrienne Rich’s Of A Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution.

That book blew my mind when I read it. How did it help you in the writing process?

There was this section where Rich talks about how even her young seven- or nine-year-old son Pablo is a male gaze in their home. He’s already judging her and thinking: Are you a good enough mother? Are you providing for me right? She realizes that he can’t help but see her through that lens, even at such a young age. And it softened the look that I had for my own mother; I’ve been so harsh on her. I realized she was also just trying to survive and live in the world.

As a teenager, I wanted to run away from life as I knew it, and the sexism of my hometown. But the book made me see that I had the opportunity to run away, while my mom was there to stay. She had to make do with the tools that she had available. I realized I wanted to write a love story between a mother and a daughter with that kind of softer look toward the mother, and that I’d never read anything like it before.

Anna Polonyi is a French-Hungarian-American writer. She holds an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is a former Fulbright fellow. She lives in Nantes, France where she teaches English and creative writing.


 
 
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