Michelle Hart Is Queering the Campus Novel

In this interview, Michelle Hart discusses her debut novel, ‘We Do What We Do in the Dark’; the art of the flashback; and how ceding your power can be very hot.

Michelle Hart’s debut novel, We Do What We Do in the Dark, is a sexy and unsettling queer coming-of-age story about a college freshman named Mallory who has an affair with an unnamed literature professor and how the aftermath shapes both women’s lives. You may know Hart from her work as a former assistant books editor at O, The Oprah Magazine and Oprah Daily, where she championed queer books. Today, she curates Electric Literature’s Most Anticipated LGBTQ+ Books coverage and writes electrifying fiction that will turn you on and also make you want to call your mom.

Her novel is a propulsive exploration of desire, belonging, and the grieving process, and it is also very funny. More people should be talking about the line “Mallory had watched so many episodes of ER and Grey’s Anatomy with her mother that she began to resent the doctor for having a dramatic and sexually robust life independent of saving her mother.” Though the novel’s timeline overlaps with the Me Too movement, it resists neat categorization as a Me Too story, leaning into the gray areas of power and secrecy. Hart and I spoke over email in May about ambiguous sexual power dynamics, becoming a different writer in the time it takes to finish a novel, and allowing our characters to be horny for loneliness. Our conversation has been edited for clarity.

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Ruth Madievsky: I will always drop everything to read a campus novel. The claustrophobia and intimacy of the college campus is great raw material for the cultivation of dark secrets, uneven power dynamics, and experiences that will reverberate throughout the characters’ lives. Queer campus novels often feel to me like an even richer and more complicated reading experience because, for example, the sexual power dynamic between these two women with an age difference doesn’t comfortably lend itself to a Me Too framework the way a story about a male college professor having an affair with a female student would. Your novel seems much less interested in litigating the ethics of this affair than in exploring how it profoundly affected both women. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the possibilities of the queer campus novel and on writing sexual power dynamics that don’t cleanly fit the dominant narratives that anyone who spends time on the internet can’t escape.

Michelle Hart: I love what you said about the novel being less interested in “litigating the ethics” of the affair than exploring the emotional consequences of it. This was tricky to get right since the book would be coming out in a sort of “post–Me Too” time and because the timeline of the novel runs through the dawn of the movement. The trick was figuring out how to acknowledge [the movement] without having the larger cultural context swallow the story. As a reader, I’m wary of didactic stories, ones with clear morals. One of my mentors, Tayari Jones, used to say that stories should be about “people and their problems” rather than “problems and their people”; in essence, even if a writer is mulling over some larger societal idea, the focus should be on the character, truthfully portraying their idiosyncrasies and their wants without bending them to prove a larger point.

The guiding principle of the book was examining how Mallory herself would think and feel about this relationship. Mallory is attracted to the woman, in some sense, because the woman is able—due to her age, her station in life—to shape Mallory’s life. But I’m not sure Mallory is, at least in the beginning, conscious of the affair being a “student-teacher relationship.” I think Mallory would resist most external definitions of the relationship altogether. That’s who she is. She has felt alone for so much of her life, and that kind of loneliness often makes one covet one’s own definitions of things—including, in this case, queerness. And that’s who the woman is too. At one point, the woman tells Mallory that she knows the latter will never expose the affair because then the whole thing would no longer just be theirs. So the extent to which the book itself participates in or resists dominant narratives is tied very closely to how Mallory does.

As a reader, I’m wary of didactic stories, ones with clear morals.

RM: Early on in the novel, you write, “The woman fulfilled so many of Mallory’s wants but left so many unfulfilled that the feeling of wanting in and of itself became desirable.” One of my favorite things about your novel is how horny for loneliness Mallory and the woman are. They want to connect, but perhaps what they want even more is the sweet, sweet agony of yearning. Getting what you want is terrifying! The aesthetics of yearning—the sad music and the comfort food and the lightning-strike sense of purpose—can be so intoxicating. I wonder if mutual desire to be possessed by someone who can’t give themselves fully to you is a big part of what attracts the characters to one other.

MH: I am dying right now at the idea of being “horny for loneliness.” You’re not wrong. I think both Mallory and the woman desire the safety of solitude—not just because connecting with someone else is hard, but because there’s a certain power in disconnection, in keeping the world and its people at a distance. Voluntary solitude can be a way to assuage involuntary loneliness.

It’s electrifying to feel as though things are happening on your own terms. That’s one reason the affair appeals to Mallory: Keeping it secret means it won’t be tainted by anyone’s thoughts or judgment. She gets to set the relationship’s parameters. The flipside to this, of course, is that she is not really setting those parameters herself; the woman is. They meet when the woman wants to meet. The woman’s status more or less forecloses any future for the two of them. Mallory mostly defers to the woman. The erotic crux of it is this: Mallory gets the pleasure of a relationship free of others’ definitions and freedom from the responsibility of having to define it herself. To me, the notion of having power and also completely ceding it is hot.

RM: For me at least, finding the right title is one of the most challenging parts of writing a book. With both of my books, the titles were suggested by friends, because I simply could not come up with anything that didn’t sound like a first-draft MFA thesis or erotic crime fiction. We Do What We Do in the Dark feels absolutely perfect for this book. Did you always know it would be the title? Were there any others you seriously considered? I’ll join you in mutual vulnerability and share that before we landed on All-Night Pharmacy for my novel, some of my outtakes were Prescriptions (boringggg), Salvation (too loaded and religious-sounding), and I Can Make It Hurt (I desperately wanted a St. Vincent lyric as my book title and basically any lyric would do).

MH: Wait! That’s so funny because the original title for [my] book was also a St. Vincent song: “Save Me From What I Want.” That song is sort of sad but also sexy, both lithe and heavy with longing. It’s exactly what I wanted the book to be. Anyway, [the] final title is a line of dialogue spoken to Mallory by the woman, and as soon as I wrote that line, I realized it had to be what the novel was called. It’s the thesis of the whole book: the way these two women experience desire, the shadows as their meeting ground. I also think there’s a singsongy feel to it, the repetition of the first two words, that’s almost childlike—a nod to the woman’s profession and to the characters’ arrested development.

RM: I have seen many a hot take about flashbacks in literary fiction. I think they can be deployed very artfully, as in your novel, where Mallory has a complicated secret friendship with the mother of her childhood best friend, Hannah, and it builds a foundation for her affair with the professor. Did you always know your novel would have an extended flashback section halfway through?

MH: My hot take is that I’m not a fan of flashbacks in fiction. A lot of the time, for me, they tend to interrupt the propulsion of the present narrative. Also, flashbacks are too frequently deployed to make a contemporary scene weightier. For me, it was more interesting to find more concrete ways to convey the meaningfulness of a scene. But all this is to say that my book contains a giant flashback that interrupts the present narrative and is deployed mostly to make the contemporary stuff weightier. Oops.

It made me think about how queer people often experience time: looking back to gather clues about who we would later become.

The trick was to do it in a way that spoke to the themes of the novel—how could I make the form match the content? I looked at a book like Sweetbitter, and one of the things I admire about that novel is that Stephanie Danler tells a full story without ever really detailing her protagonist’s past; reading it, you get the sense that the character herself is trying to leave her history behind. And then I read Garth Greenwell’s What Belongs to You, the first section of which details the nameless narrator’s relationship with a male sex worker and the second section of which weaves the emotional fallout of that relationship and the death of his father with scenes from the narrator’s childhood. It’s done in one long paragraph, unbroken; the overwhelmingness of the emotions literally and narratively overwhelm the reader and the story. The form matches the content. Greenwell essentially queered the structure of the book. It was a revelation. It made me think about how queer people often experience time: this constant looking back to gather clues about who we would later become.

RM: You’ve shared in other interviews that you’ve been working on a version of this book since college and that it didn’t come together until after you wrote your short story “Hiddensee”—about an affair between a college student and a professor, which was published in Electric Literature in 2017—and until after the Me Too movement happened. I’m so curious about how, on a craft level, the novel changed over time as you came closer to discovering its final form.

MH: One of the hardest parts, for me, about working on a thing for so long is that I became a different writer in the ten years it took to finish this. And I think, if a reader were to really zero in on the prose of each of the three sections, they might be able to detect a subtle difference in voice. The first section of the book, centering on the affair, is written with this sort of droll cleanliness. The second section, the childhood stuff (which I wrote first), is sort of sadder and maybe more maudlin. And the third section, which takes place years after Mallory has graduated from college, is freer and a little more unwieldy, maybe more “natural.” But the thing about the book that ended up saving me from having to meticulously redo every section in the same exact voice was the fact that the narrative exists in three different timelines; as such, the three subtly different tones of the book make perfect sense. The character would be more maudlin in childhood. The character would be more buttoned-up and clever in college. The character would be looser and more articulate in adulthood. Taking so long to write this book ended up being a gift: Time itself became the plot, and the slight tonal shifts became intrinsic to the voice.