The Familiar is about mid-life crisis, and specifically female mid-life crisis. What prompted you to write about this topic?

About four or five years ago, just after turning 40, my life began to feel like it was coming apart at the seams. I began to see how my ambition had worn all the other parts thin. Our house—which we’d been living in for over a decade—showed signs of wear and neglect: cluttered rooms, major appliances failing or in disrepair, paint on the walls chipped or faded or marked. My children were more independent than ever but also relied and depended upon me in new, complex ways (mostly emotional—teens are so much more work than toddlers). Even my relationship with my husband, which has always felt like my easiest relationship and also my most nurturing, became more difficult to navigate.

I think the most startling part was that for all of my ambition, for all of those attempts to *be* something or *do* something in my career, how little I had to show for it – apart from a lot of chaos and damage. It was frightening to realize, but it also made me angry. And for the most part, angry at myself. I needed a way to process that anger, so I began to write. And as I wrote, the anger melted away and I began to have fun – poking fun at myself, at the myths I grew believing, at the systems and institutions I worked inside (and that subtly and not-so-subtly worked against me).

Your poems investigate disillusionment and a lost sense of self, and yet they embrace humor, too, and often at the expense of the speaker. Can you talk about your decision to use self-deprecating humor, as well as pop culture references and informal language like slang, in poetry?

If mid-life does anything, it humbles you and makes you take yourself less seriously.  To some extent, that spilled over into the work. I stopped being as precious about my word choice—not less finicky (I could still agonize for days over the “right” word in a line), but less concerned with whether or not it felt smart enough, unique enough, poetic enough. I wrote from a language of my body—which was (and still is) betraying me—and from a language of my psyche, which is a weird amalgamation of academic jargon, my adopted vernacular from Long Island, my deep and abiding love of profanity, and my sense of the ridiculous (or perhaps, just my genuine ridiculousness). The Familiar is a work of fiction, written with poetry, but I wanted that fiction and poetry to reflect my experience genuinely, which means it had to sound, for better or for worse, like me. Like all parts of me.

How is this book different from your first collection of poems, Fabulous Beast?

Much of Fabulous Beast was written post-partum, and those poems focus on an experience of motherhood, leaving girlhood, and becoming a partner in a shared life. It was written at a different point, a different decade, in my life—and it shows. The voices of that book are very different than the voices in this new one.

Fabulous Beast feels, to me, like water rising behind a dam. Something lurks there, threatens to spill over, but never quite does. Possibly because I was also exploring the forms of fable, fairy tale and myth with that book, and so my experience with motherhood and love and life were being expressed far more obliquely.

The tone of The Familiar is far less veiled or difficult to pin down. I think it’s irreverent, brash, full of rage, full of sorrow, and far more direct—and also far more appreciative of the comedy/tragedy binary that so often happens in life. Even though I believe its philosophical bent is a little more grim than Fabulous Beast, it’s far more likely to make you laugh.

Where did you come up with the idea for your characters, the Extraordinary Self and the Ordinary Self?

I’ve often felt like I’ve had two careers, that of writing teacher and that of writer (which honestly don’t often go together as well as one would hope), but as I entered mid-life I felt like I also had two selves—one that was setting metaphorical fires and another that was putting them out. I saw that career-focused part of me as the part that wanted to be extraordinary, to do something exceptional, something outside of routine and the everyday; but I also felt acutely the part of me that was satisfied with being present with my loved ones, with the calm and measured happiness of routine, who values the sanity of the ordinary.

I felt such a push and pull between these sides of myself. I wondered who would win in a winner-takes-all battle—like in the movie Highlander, but with an unfortunate lack of Queen’s soundtrack, and an even more unfortunate glut of bad hair. Extraordinary Self vs. Ordinary Self: There could only be one. But even I didn’t know: who would win in that battle? I had to write the story to find out.