Feb 19

Feb 19 The uneasy timeliness of ELEGY, SOUTHWEST

Madeleine Watts is the author of the novels Elegy, Southwest (2025), and The Inland Sea (2021), which was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award and the Glenda Adams Award for New Writing.

Her work has been published by Harper’s, The Believer, and The Guardian, among others. She was born and raised in Sydney, Australia, and now lives between New York and Berlin.

Interview by Nirica Srinivasan

This must be a uniquely weird time for Elegy, Southwest to release, because there are many things in life that seem to parallel what’s happening in your book—the devastating LA fires, for one. What was really surreal for me was the influence of David Lynch especially, because he’s mentioned many times in your book, and I was reading it the week he passed. I’d love to hear specifically what Lynch means to you and how he has influenced your work.

Oh, that’s such a fun question. You’re the second person to tell me that they were reading the book the week that Lynch died. I love David Lynch, and he’s written into the book—there’s a visit to his house. When I found out that he died, I looked at my phone, I was standing on a street corner and I said to my husband, who was coming up behind me, “David Lynch has died. He’ll never read my book.” I don’t think even in the back of my mind I had realized that one day maybe that was what I would want, but now there’s a sort of finality to that kind of thing.

There are lots of films that are really stitched into this particular book. When I think of representations of Los Angeles, Mulholland Drive and Lost Highway are the really, really big ones for me. The thing that his work was always able to do was to really embrace and revel in the dream world of America, and then to turn that on its head and to point out its perversity and the rotten heart of the apple. But still maintaining the beauty of it, never letting go of the enchantment. LA is such a wonderful city to play with those themes, because it sort of exemplifies that.

I also always really love the way that [his films] can’t be read for meaning—people can try to find the key or find the answer to Blue Velvet or to Mulholland Drive, or whatever, but that’s not the point. The point is to be in the experience of the ambiguity. I’ve always really loved that about his work, and this book has quite a bit of ambiguity in it.

It was such a jarring thing to be reading it during that time! But also so lovely, because the other thing I realized was that I have barely any personal reference points to the places you write about (I have only visited America once, when I was eight years old) but I had all these vivid images, which were just images out of either Lynch or Wim Wenders.

Wim Wenders is a huge influence on the book! One of the things that I was really interested in doing with this book, and with the road trip in particular, was rendering an outsider’s experience of America. I’m Australian, and I moved to the US when I was twenty-two, but I can never experience America as not from the outside. And you realize, when you get to America, that it is so much the hegemonic power—especially when you’re from an anglophone country and you share the same media, you have an understanding of America way before you’ve ever seen it. That kind of imagery, it’s all myth, it’s all dream-world stuff to play with.

When I was writing the book, I started really gravitating towards depictions of America that outsiders had made. I rewatched Paris, Texas and The American Friend. With Alice in the Cities, I remember being in the middle of writing the draft, and it had sort of ground to a halt and I didn’t quite know where I was going with the book. But in that particular movie, it starts with a road trip around the US and then it changes, and then you’re in West Germany and you’re on a road trip—and it's still an American road trip. It’s this way in which the American road trip is in no way tied to the physical geography of the United States. Like America is the dream that precedes itself. I found that really wonderful and useful. And there’s a way that Wim Wenders will pick up on things—he’ll really tenderly look at Spanish moss on a tree in a way that is so clearly the gaze of an outsider.

Is there anything specific in your writing that you felt like your outsider-ness lent you? A way to examine America?

Initially, when I first started writing the book, I wasn’t wedded to the narrator being Australian. I wasn’t even necessarily wedded to her not being American. But I have a really wonderful group of people who share writing together. My friend Alex, who is Australian, pointed out that there are things that I kept writing into the book that were things that an Australian would notice. So eventually I made her Australian, because he was right. Alexander Wells—I will shout him out—totally saved the perspective of the book.

The big thing that he first pointed out is where there’s a line about fountains in malls being full of water. Growing up in Australia, that kind of extravagance with water wouldn’t have happened. I grew up in Australia during the 2000s, when there was this really long drought and we had really strict water restrictions, even though I was in the middle of the city. People would be having punching fights because somebody had used a hose to hose down cement. Public fountains and things like that were turned off. I have this sort of inbuilt thing about drought conditions that’s really strong, even though I’ve lived in places where there was water. That kind of thinking is all there in the book, and that’s very tied to my specific position as an Australian.

There’s also a section on eucalyptus trees. The first time I went to California, I was stunned, because all of the trees and all of the flowers, all of the plants, they’re all Australian. I’d watched American films filmed in Los Angeles my entire life and somehow I’d never noticed the eucalyptus trees, bottlebrush bushes, anything like that. It felt uncanny. Like I’d walked into a David Lynchian kind of dream zone! It felt so familiar, but I’d never been there before.

But again, I grew up in Sydney in a particular era where there were drought conditions, but also fire conditions, so when I look at lots of eucalyptus trees with lots of leaf litter on the ground, I think of fires. The awareness of those things is very tied to my Australian-ness. I don’t ever want to write [that] into the book with a really heavy hand; [it’s more just that] because I am Australian, I am seeing this, and because Eloise is Australian, she’s seeing this. It’s there in a way that I know belongs to my not being American.

Something that struck me while reading both Elegy, Southwest and rereading The Inland Sea is that they’re both novels told in retrospect. There’s a sense in Elegy, Southwest of it being haunted by a future that hasn’t happened yet. And you sprinkle in hints towards that future, which I thought was a really interesting way to structure the book. What do you think is useful to you about the novel-in-retrospect idea?

In both instances, that wasn’t necessarily deliberate. I think it takes me a while to be able to synthesize the recent past. If The Inland Sea is dealing with 2012 and 2013, I’ve started writing the first sort of sentences of that in 2015, and you know, it takes you a long time to write a book! So that ended up coming out in 2020. With Elegy, Southwest, it was a similar timeline—this is dealing with 2018 and 2019, and I started writing it in 2020 and mostly 2021. And now it’s coming out in 2025. So that particular aspect comes from just how I approach writing in general, which is often that there’s a fundamental concern that I have that is really troubling me or baffling me, and I don’t know how to think about it or get inside of it unless I start writing about it. But to try and do that takes a couple of years. So what ends up happening is both of these books end up being basically recent historical fiction.

There’s this awareness as I’m writing of the things that are going to have happened that I’m not going to include within the scope of the book, but are being experienced in the scope of my writing them. So in Elegy, Southwest, it very, very deliberately ends in February 2020. I didn’t want to write a Covid book, but I was very aware of it. There’s one tiny little mention about someone being in quarantine, and that’s all there is, because the way in which Covid butts up against or into the book was a thing that I don’t think needs to be in the book. The book itself is thinking through these events through a mindset that is very influenced by Covid and the events of the last three to four years. It’s a book about grief. I don’t know that I would’ve framed it that way or thought so much about grief in this book if I hadn’t started writing it during the pandemic.

Speaking of grief, at one point Eloise is thinking about the “utter poverty of language in the face of calamity.” In that moment the calamity is grief, but it did also speak to these bigger ideas in your book of climate change and impermanence. It made me think of Morton’s Hyperobjects, and of Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement, both of which I think you cite in the book. I was curious about how you think of language generally in the greater calamity of climate change, but also the act of writing fiction specifically.

I think that my first book addressed climate change, but it had kind of come on the side. I hadn’t set out to write a book about climate change or that really even addressed it—it just happened. So this time around, I was really thinking about these things and I was really trying to make sure that I had an answer.

I was not only reading Amitav Ghosh and Timothy Morton while I was writing the book, but I was also teaching them. In the last five years I started teaching, and so often I’m teaching classes about writing about nature, or climate change, or place. We have these discussions about how climate change can feel so big and so scary—the only other thing that ever comes up as a proxy to it is writing about war. But climate change isn’t like war, because you can’t see it happen. You can’t really see the whole of it happening in front of you. Any micro-fragment, like the floods in your city and town, are not like the floods happening elsewhere. And they’re not the fires and they’re not the drought. And it’s also incredibly slow until it’s incredibly fast. It’s so much longer than your lifespan and will go on so much longer than your lifespan. Those are all things that contribute to making it really overwhelming, and also contribute to making it really hard to make art about.

I don’t see any point for myself in making things that are not about what it’s like to be alive in the moment that I’m alive in. That’s kind of how climate change continues to preoccupy me, because I just can’t not be aware of it. We have these conversations about the bigness of climate change and I think it really calls into question, what is the point of making art about this? And those questions, when they’re presented from students who have presumably enrolled in my class because they want to try and make art about it, lead to really productive conversations, but they’re also really sad and really scary. There’s an impulse to question the role of art making. This is something that came up a lot in Covid as well, where the things that made life worth living was art basically—books, films. From my perspective, the art that we make is the measure of our humanity. We live incredibly impoverished lives without it.

When it comes to writing, what you can do with writing that you can’t do in any other medium is be in another person’s consciousness. Film can do plot and film can do story, but it can’t really do consciousness and it can’t do interiority. That connection to interiority is for me what defines whatever my artistic project, quote unquote, is. I think I’m always going to write from thinking about interiority and thinking about what it’s like to be in another person’s head, and to really try to communicate to the stranger on the other side of the page, something that feels a bit like consolation or like they’ve been seen.

And the only thing you have is language. The ability to narrativize or use language really butts up against the things that render you wordless, like fear, or something like climate change where it’s like, how do you even talk about this? It’s so enormous and so difficult to understand. I think I’m fundamentally aware within myself of this contradiction where I don’t think words are good enough, but they’re all I specifically have. I’ve written some of this into the book, where Eloise is always sort of telling stories and talking and putting things in language, and Lewis is quite resistant to that. [For him,] to put things in language is to almost kill it, by putting names on it. Something is allowed to live and be alive as long as it hasn’t been defined by language, because language can be used as a label, which can delimit how you think about it. But you’re within this contradiction—you can’t think without language either. I think that contradiction is something I’m always very aware of. I’m somebody who really labors over the sentences, and I really think about, what are the right words to use? I really fidget with the words. So there is this sort of understanding that the words could be different, and what if the right language hasn’t been good enough? What if I have never been able to find the right language?

I think I reread The Argonauts a couple of times in the process of writing the book, particularly the beginning. And that’s what that book starts with—the conversation between Maggie Nelson, who believes that words are all you have, and her husband Harry Dodge, who basically has the same position as Lewis in the book. I think that I was always revisiting that conversation and staging it against myself. There’s a debt to Maggie Nelson that I probably owe.

That thread of climate change is so vivid in your books! Something that’s stuck with me is the scene in The Inland Sea where the protagonist, who is always very caught up in the state of the world and the disasters around her, is trying to talk to her colleagues. And her friend says, “Talk about the weather.” And she says, “I am talking about the weather!”

The weather’s interesting! The weather’s not neutral. I now live in this weird interzone where my family is spread out across the world, so [me and my husband] are basically paying attention to the weather in four to five different countries, and multiple cities within those countries. And there’s this weirdness of the contradictions—a few weeks ago, I was texting with my friend in LA who had fled the fires because of the toxic smoke and was in the desert. Meanwhile it was snowing really, really hard here; it's the one single time that it snowed. And then I was talking to my mother who’s in the southern hemisphere and she was talking about this incredible heat wave. The weather’s not neutral, it’s not a boring middle ground of things to discuss. It’s got a lot of drama to it.

I was curious about your research for this book. How much of it was stuff you were reading because of your own interest and how much of it was research specifically for this book? Or for teaching?

Basically everything that’s in the book is to some extent a product of research, but it was reading that I was doing for years that I didn’t think of as research. I was just reading stuff I was interested in. The starting point for the book was these two trips I took to the Southwest in 2018 and 2019. I took a lot of notes I knew I wanted to write about, because I’d spent years at this point obsessed with the Colorado River and with water in the Southwest. I knew I wanted to write something about it. I didn’t know what it would be—it could have been a magazine nonfiction piece, I didn't know. Then they sat there for a few years. At a certain point, some of my reading took on [that view]—I was sort of like, I'll read this book even though it's not really grabbing me, or it's not particularly well written, but I'll read it for informational purposes.

I also used to work in this incredible bookstore that just had everything. I could just be at work and if I had a passing interest or a whim, I could generally find something to read. That really informs the way I think and it informs the way that I carry around references. So some things, like the inclusion of Elizabeth Bishop and Georgia O’Keeffe—I was just writing, and then suddenly I was like, oh yeah, remember that thing about Georgia O’Keeffe that I read, that I never really thought was in any way relevant to this project or this book? And at a certain point, I didn’t really need to read anything for the book while I was writing—I’d already read it. I looked at the bibliography recently and there’s nothing really in there that’s newer than 2021, and that's because by then I had done all the reading—that’s when I started writing. I didn't read anything new.

There was also the teaching—I’m an adjunct, so I would be teaching sometimes at universities like Columbia, Johns Hopkins, or the Center for Fiction. Catapult used to do these online classes that were great. It wasn’t necessarily that I was reading to teach stuff that somebody was telling me to teach, but it basically forced me to go back and think through certain things. So with Timothy Morton, or Amitav Ghosh—I can talk for hours about The Great Derangement because I have read it and read it and read it so many times. And stuff like Daisy Hildyard’s idea of The Second Body—I would teach that a lot and I find it really useful, but now I find it’s completely threaded through the whole book. I really liked teaching, but I was also in the position of teaching these classes that were very relevant to the book I was writing. I could go in and have these conversations about theoretical things where the students didn’t always know that it was so incredibly relevant to the work I was doing. In the acknowledgements, I’ve thanked one specific class where I do feel like actually that entire class was very useful for the book—I was teaching it while I was writing the second draft.

The research that I do is really, really important, but it’s not necessarily performed as a deliberate act of research. It’s just kind of what’s happening in my head.

I also think it’s so interesting that you get to kind of work through your thoughts in action and not just in your writing!

I don’t mean to ask “What are you writing next?” because Elegy, Southwest is barely out, but since you started writing this book, are there ideas that you’ve come to in the interim years that you’re interested in researching and exploring more in your writing? There are strands that connect The Inland Sea and Elegy, Southwest—are there new ways you think about those, or new things you’re keen to read more of that might show up in your later work?

I’ve probably started four different projects that are all sitting there. It’s really hard to start writing another book when you’re kind of living in the content of [the previous one].

It’s funny, I can see so many similarities between The Inland Sea and Elegy, Southwest. I think that there are certain things that I probably am just interested in and gravitate to as a writer. Some of them are thematic, like the weather and the environment. There’s also a reproductive event in both books, and even in my short stories and essays—I’m very interested in the physical experience of inhabiting a female body, and the way in which your physicality, and even your experience of time can be really tied to reproduction. Dead animals show up a lot in both books. Particularly snakes! I think that maybe one day I’ll be one of those writers where you could have basically a bingo card—like, oh, there’s the dead animal, there’s the snake, in whatever I write.

The things that I have started looking at writing all basically have a relationship to those themes. There’s an interest in looking and observation, and what can be interpreted—one of the books I think focuses more on that. There’s another which is very much more about weather in general. Another is concerned with the idea of Leave No Trace. Whichever one rises to the surface, it will inevitably be connected to these books as well. I think it’s all sort of within a continuum—they’re all probably going to continue to have a close relationship to one another.

Something that I think the bibliography at the end of your book really makes clear is that so much of what you read has an influence on how you think generally and therefore finds its way into your work, which is very cool.

I’ve always read a lot, but because I worked in a bookstore for a long time, I think my instinct is to read quite laterally and broadly. With the bibliography, it’s obviously rare for a novel to have one, and it was partly just because for years I would see novels where I look at it and think, I know what you’ve read to write this. I can see it. But there’s no acknowledgement of it because it’s not a quotation. It just felt to me like so many books and films and other people’s thinking and work has gone into this in some way. Its influence might be there in just one sentence of Elegy, Southwest, but it just felt sporting and the right thing to do to put them all in the same place and say, if you really want to be a completist, this is everything.

I really love it. I have a list of things to look up from your bibliography!

Another thing I kept thinking of while reading your book, and this may be because of very surface level connections, is Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive, which is also about a couple on a road trip in a very similar part of America. But specifically what I found interesting is that in Lost Children Archive, there are these chapter divisions of lists of objects that they have with them in boxes in the car. And you have these indexes or lists at the beginning of each of your chapters, of things or phrases that show up in the chapter. How did you think of those?

That’s funny—when the Valeria Luiselli book came out and I had just started to think that I was going to write about the Colorado River in the Southwest, I remember my stomach feeling like it was falling. I was like, oh no! I read it when it was in proof form, and I didn’t go back to it for a long time. I think I read it and deliberately didn’t retain very much of it. Which is not to say that I think i’'s a bad book—I think that I needed to really feel like these books were very, very different. And I think that the things that I have retained from that book are quite different. Valeria Luiselli is an incredible writer. But yeah, I have no memory of the lists, actually, I will go and look at how she introduces the chapters!

The indexes in Elegy, Southwest came about mostly because of Sebald. It’s something that you see in really old, nineteenth-century works of scientific inquiry or travel narratives. I remembered these indexes being used in Sebald’s Rings of Saturn, which was a huge inspiration for this book—probably the biggest influence structurally in how Elegy, Southwest turned out. And I remembered that he had these indexes at the beginning of chapters. But he doesn’t! He has them in the contents page at the front.

So I was trying to remember where I’d seen these before, and part of it was this search for them. I really love Cormac McCarthy, and he uses them in Blood Meridian. I had a conversation with Australian writer Rebecca Giggs, who had used them in a book she wrote about whales, Fathoms, and she was like, I got them from this book called Seven Tenths, which is about the ocean. There is a relationship to a particular kind of scientific inquiry that stems from the enlightenment, that I think often is at the root of a lot of mistakes that were made in the nineteenth century, and that we’re currently dealing with in the twenty-first century, like colonialism and empire. A way of thinking that you can know and understand the world if you make it orderly, and that what is orderly to you is orderly to the world.

I liked the idea of taking those indexes into the book, because it’s a travel book—they’re going places, they’re seeing things. They were really fun to write. They were like a little treat to myself every time I edited a chapter—I could go in and figure out what was going to be in the index. The indexes are meant to be almost a prose poem that you can read alongside the book. I think they probably yield more for you when you reread the book—it’s a book that hopefully really rewards second readings.

The things in the indexes were originally out of order, not chronological to the story, precisely because I was interested in resisting that kind of orderly reading to the chapters. But my editors all said that they should be chronological, which I accept is clearer and more clarifying for the reader. But I think that is the spirit in which they appear in the book, as a sort of this gesture at wayfinding that is deliberately going to frustrate you, because you cannot find your way through the chapter by reading the indexes, except if you’re doing a second read.

This is just something I had to ask—something I noticed in the book is that there are so many signs. Pretty much from the first page, Eloise is noticing signs across the cities and landscapes they pass—signs like “Llamas stay for free” outside a motel; advertisements everywhere. Is this just a symptom of America? I thought it was fascinating.

It’s a symptom of America! It’s also a symptom of the things that I notice. A lot of those details, particularly details like signs, came from my original notes that I was making when I was in those places. So I would be in the passenger seat writing them down—I’ve given Eloise all of this, because it’s just fundamentally the way that I was seeing things. A lot of what I would see would be plants where I didn’t necessarily know the plant name, so I would really have to try and describe what a particular kind of tree looked like as we were going past, and then would have to find out later what that was.

But the easiest thing to write down was signs. Just the proliferation of private property signs in the United States. From an outside perspective, it's really a little much. And there’s a kind of absurdity to advertising, which I think I just find everywhere. Now I’m in Germany, and one of my favorite things to write down is the signs that will be in German and English. There’s a sign that’s in all of the subways here that says “Tired of speaking silly German?” There’s another one that says, “Schreib Dein Buch,” which means “write your book.” I inhabit the city with these two phrases, one in German, one in English, tired of speaking silly German, write your book, tired of speaking silly German, write your book. I think advertising and the signs do something to your experience of a place, again because language is doing it. So it is this specificity of things that I would notice.

The signs especially felt like they were part of my imagination of America already. I can see a camera focusing on the signs in a sort of montage.

If you watch the beginning of Alice in the Cities, it’s this German guy driving around America, and you get these shots of things like the Spanish moss and a main street of a town. But as the main character is driving along, he’ll see signs and, I don’t know, the radio tower, and he’ll just say it to himself. And I do that all the time!

It’s such a thing that you’re doing when you’re an outsider, particularly in America because you’re sort of savoring the weirdness of it. I don’t do that in the UK, I don’t do it here. I definitely don’t do it in Australia where everything is cohesive and normal to me. To me it’s in America where everything is kind of [surreal…] To bring it back to David Lynch, he’s a very realistic filmmaker of America in many ways. I do think that there’s a relationship between his and Wim Wenders’ depictions of America, even though of course Wim Wenders is extremely German. There’s a kind of absurdity in the way that you see things and you want to say them aloud and hold them in your mouth, which I think is very much a symptom of being from the outside and then suddenly finding yourself there.

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Nirica Srinivasan is a writer and illustrator from India. She likes stories with ambiguous endings and unreliable narrators.

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