An Interview with J. Nicole Jones

Ghosts are whispering to those willing to listen, and writer J. Nicole Jones is listening intently. From the beaches and inlets of her native South Carolina, to railroad apartments and townhouse stoops of New York City, she’s collected the stories of spirits who yearn for reconciliation. In her forthcoming memoir, “Low Country” (Catapult, April 2021), her own family history is inextricable from these ghosts and their haunts. Here, we spoke with Jones about superstition, country music and why she set out to write her ghosts better endings.

Kelsey Motes-Conners

On New Year’s Day 2021, you offered an explanation for the mayhem of the year 2020, confessing that your parents had left their Christmas tree up until July.

J. Nicole Jones

I apologize.

KMC

Superstition runs deep in your book; what superstitions do you carry with you?

JNJ

That’s a good question. Man, my therapist has a whole list. My mom and her sisters are strict about not passing salt directly into each other’s hands. I don’t say happy birthday before somebody’s birthday. No shaking hands in a door frame; no hats on the bed.

KMC

No hats on the bed?

JNJ

I feel like this is just becoming a list of obsessive compulsions.

KMC

Are you a superstition collector, or did you inherit them all from one source?

JNJ

Most of the ones I’ve internalized are the ones I grew up with. But I do remember them. I really like them. I think superstitions are rituals; they are comforting. In moments when you’re adrift, those little things from childhood come back.

KMC

Speaking of childhood, growing up in the lowcountry of South Carolina, you were steeped, and sort of entangled, in the dense, sticky superstitions, folklore and ghost stories of that place. Because you’ve said that memoir can be a record to “keep alive a place,” I wonder: do you feel that your book is keeping a place alive that would otherwise be lost or unseen?

JNJ

I love the idea of memoir as time travel. Nabokov writes about this in Speak, Memory, about taking magic carpet rides or train rides through his childhood. You board a train in 1917 and then you get off in Switzerland 50 years later. Places in time exist so fleetingly, and, especially as older people start to pass away, those places really are gone forever. So writing this book was a very deliberate act of preserving a place in time — for myself, for the comfort of having it there. But I wasn’t very comfortable growing up there, so writing was a way to revisit and capture the place, but also to reclaim it on terms I could be in control of.

Emma Fricke Nelson

You now live in Brooklyn; so tell us about leaving the lowcountry. How did you get from there to here?

JNJ

When I was a kid in South Carolina, I started to become aware of the things that I was not learning, from books usually, things that maybe I might need to know or would’ve liked to know about. My family moved to Charlotte, North Carolina, when I was entering high school, and I secretly applied to all of these college-prep schools. College was going to be my ticket out of the rural South. I found it really hard to leave my family when it came time for college, so I ended up going to the only school I applied to in the South — and then when I didn’t love my experience there, I graduated early and moved to California right away.

I worked a lot of odd jobs: waited tables, worked in a greeting-card store, worked at a little local newspaper. I wasn’t really sure what to do with myself. I wanted to be reading and writing all of the time, but it didn’t occur to me that that was an option for a life and a profession, other than possibly at a newspaper. I traveled around a lot. I moved from the West Coast to Boston, just because I had some friends there, and worked for a couple of years at The Globe Corner Bookstore, a travel bookstore which is no longer there but was just wonderful. The store was organized by region, and right alongside the travel guidebooks — like the Lonely Planets and the maps and the Frommer’s — there would be novels and memoirs and essays and books of history and reportage. So if you’re going to go to India, next to your guidebook there’s “The God of Small Things” and “A Suitable Boy.” That store really shaped the way I think about literature. I feel like all writing is travel writing in a way. All writing is writing about a place, even if it’s only a place in time.

Some of my co-workers at the bookstore were working on their M.F.As. I didn’t know that such a thing existed, but I was looking over their shoulders, thinking, “I like that syllabus.” So I started taking workshops online and then at Grub Street after work, dipping my toe in. I paid a couple hundred dollars to enroll in a memoir writing class right across the Boston Common at Emerson College, which was so intimidating since the rest of the students were all getting their master’s degrees. We read the expected canon guys, Gorky and Frank Conroy and Tobias Wolff. The professor, who I didn’t realize at the time was an established literary figure, was very generous. He told me I should apply to M.F.A programs and write this book. I thought I’d go back to California, but I ended up in New York, at Columbia.

KMC

I’m interested in how this bookshop, in its physical placement of books, is so instrumental in shaping your idea not only of what writing can be, but of all of the different points of access into a story. It’s an almost cubist mentality, to build a place out of its many facets. No wonder you’re a nonfiction writer, in my opinion.

JNJ

I love that cubist image. Colombia professor Patty O’Toole would tell us in class that we had to write people from 360 degrees, and I always imagine that: moving around somebody, getting all of them.

KMC

That sounds very O’Toolian.

EFN

You were also influenced by songwriting and country-music tropes, growing up with a prolific country-music songwriter for a father. Is country music still a part of your life?

JNJ

Yes and no. I think when you’re surrounded by something as a kid and then you start to grow into an adolescent, you immediately want to distance yourself from everything. I grew up listening to Dolly, for example, and could sing the words to a lot of her songs from a young age, but in college I would not have admitted to listening to Dolly Parton. I’m happy she’s very cool now.

EFN

Do you listen to any modern country music?

JNJ

Lots of women. Women in country music are so good and get so little credit. There are fewer women charting now than ever before in the history of country music. I listen to the usuals, nothing esoteric. Kacey Musgraves is wonderful. Taylor Swift, obviously.

EFN

These artists are taking country music in a whole new direction, bringing back musicians like your dad — not to the country stations, but to the conversation.

JNJ

My dad talks about this when he asks me to come down to Nashville. He sees it as a town of writers and artists with a real sense of community, and very few rhinestones and not about the radio.

EFN

Is there a song or record that you put on when you miss home?

JNJ

No. Is that a horrible answer? That must be so disappointing. Guy Clark is my dad’s favorite guy. His songs remind me of my dad. We had sort of a complicated relationship with country music. My brothers and I felt for a while that it took him away from us, physically and in terms of the lifestyle. When I think about home and the sounds of home, I think of Myrtle Beach, about my grandmother. She would sing “You Are My Sunshine.” I know that’s not a very deep cut. But when I hear it, I can feel my grandmother’s hand keeping time on my back.

KMC

Early on in the book, you write, “I used to think I learned storytelling from my dad.” But over the course of the book, you allow us your realization that, in fact, you learned storytelling from many other less seen (and less male) sources. Your grandmother was an avid reader — and, we discovered, a member of the Chicora Book Club, which was founded in 1894 and about which there is basically no information online, other than its mention in the obituaries of a handful of ladies with names like Virginia and Margaret. It has the feel of an almost clandestine women’s society. Tell us about your grandmother’s relationship with books and reading.

JNJ

She was always reading. She was so sharp and witty. She won a scholarship to Winthrop College, which was one of the only girls’ schools in South Carolina. Her family couldn’t afford the uniforms, which is another one of those Nabokov “fold the carpet” moments, another pattern that repeats and repeats and repeats. She’d say that her mother and her sister would stay up all night sewing so she could have the right clothes to go to school. There’s a picture of her standing in her homemade suit next to a train with a bunch of girls about to go off to college. She had to drop out after a semester to take care of her family — her father had a heart attack. Books had gotten her out of Myrtle Beach, so when she had to go back, and once she was kind of stuck in her marriage, I think books became a real source of escape and solitude. She was alone with her books. She was always asking people what they were reading, always wanting to talk about the stories she had read. Books were a source of comfort, a source of safety.

KMC

Would she give you books to read? Could you just go grab things from her bookshelf?

JNJ

She had a shelf of Ernest Hemingway books. I’ve got a copy of “A Moveable Feast” with some of her handwriting scrawled in pencil. When I went away to school, I would send her books. As she got older, she really loved romance writing, which I’m glad to see is now becoming more acceptably literary. But what’s not a romance novel, right? War and Peace is a romance novel.

EFN

Did she ever read any of your work?

JNJ

No, no she didn’t. I didn’t really write this book until after she passed away.

EFN

Given all of the influences you grew up with, your own storytelling impulses might’ve taken any form. What do you think memoir can do that country-music lyrics or a collection of folktales can’t?

JNJ

I love memoir. I love novels too, but I do get a little defensive about memoirs. I think they get a second-class designation, and I don’t know why. The greatest writers have written about their lives. Tolstoy has a memoir. There is something unique to memoir; interrogating your own memories, investigating why we think or feel things or remember things a certain way, especially when we realize later we were wrong. I try to be really honest in the book that all memory is unreliable, and I think memoir gives space to dive into why we hold onto certain things even when we find out that they’re not real. Memoir is expansive and full of multiple layers of reflection, and I think that makes it different and important. KMC

In this memoir, you dismantle the folktales and superstitions and stories that you grew up with, and then excavate around them and reassemble them into something new. So tell us about the creative process of writing this book.

JNJ

I left my job at Vanity Fair to write this book, and then all of my work — my computer and notebooks full of handwritten notes — were stolen from a car. I just thought, “Well, I’m going to go be a lawyer or something now; I can’t look at a blank page anymore.” Then my grandmother died about six months later, kind of suddenly, and I just started writing again to feel closer to her.

KMC

Where did you look for inspiration and instruction? How did you shape its structure?

JNJ

I love elliptical narratives. The number one response I got when I was trying to publish the book was, “This is interesting, but why don’t you make it chronological?” But I didn’t want to do that; I feel like that’s not how memory works, that’s not how memories influence the present or affect the future. I really wanted the structure of the book to reflect what it’s like to remember things; to be living life in the present, but also be continually tugged, like when you’re swimming and the tide is pulling you back and back. I wanted the book to be structured to reflect how memories come to the surface unexpectedly in daily life, even as you’re, I don’t know, on the G train or something. You get off at your stop, but part of you is in the past, and it can feel like you’re in multiple places at once. For inspiration and instruction, I’m a big re-reader, and I will pull out books and authors that made an impact on me over and over. Like Zora Neale Hurston, Maxine Hong Kingston. Sebald, I re-read a lot.

EFN

As you prepare to hand this off, especially right now, especially as it’s about the South, after such a shift in the national collective consciousness, how do you see your book contributing to the conversation about Southern identity?

JNJ

I can only really speak for myself, but I hope Southern identity is changing for the better. Maybe part of being a good literary citizen is doing what you can to be a good regular citizen. The link between artists and activism is historically strong in most places, and I think it’s gotten stronger the last four or five years. I was so inspired by R.O. Kwon’s text events, and texting or calling alongside other writers to register Democrats and inform voters in Georgia — that gave me a lot of hope. To see the whole country get excited for Jaime Harrison, whom I’m so excited about as a native South Carolinian, gave me a lot of hope. And, of course, thank you to the voters of Georgia.

I remember lying in bed the day after the 2016 election, thinking, “It’s like my abusive, racist grandfather is in charge of everything now.” But I’ve come to feel like hope outweighs the despair. The South is a contradictory place. Maybe that’s what is recognizable in Southern art: a strangeness that comes from the friction between those opposing forces.

EFN

You write about the ghosts that come through your house, that live in the swamps, and they’re both there for real, like at your grandfather’s house, but then also in your mind and in your heart — so much is still hovering.

JNJ

Something I very deliberately tried to do with this book was to acknowledge, with respect and where I am able, some of the ghosts of history that get swept under the carpet because they’re not very polite to talk about, or they’re not good at selling tickets to tourist attractions. There are the ghosts you take with you wherever you go, and the ones that are bound to a place. I feel like I grew up with both kinds, and the only way to stop feeling haunted is to have a straightforward conversation with them.

Since leaving the South, I realized that historical ghosts are everywhere in America. There’s that image from January 6 of the guy standing in the Capitol with the Confederate flag, and behind him is a portrait of John Calhoun, who was a really terrible guy. Like, one of the worst people to hold office in American history. A monument to him was finally taken down in Charleston last summer, but his image is still displayed in the Capitol for people to walk by every day. I feel like that’s a historical ghost that needs to be exorcised.

KMC

Speaking of ghosts, you visited Edith Wharton’s home, the Mount, to take a guided ghost tour for the Paris Review Daily.

JNJ

Yes.

KMC

On purpose.

JNJ

[Laughs]

KMC

This is my worst nightmare.

JNJ

Oh, no. Tell me why.

KMC

I’ll tell you someday, when I’ve had plenty of wine. But I do think that the intentional ghost chasing you’re talking about is not unlike memoir writing. The approach is similar, unearthing something that might be unpleasant or imperfect, but has value if it can be understood. In writing “Low Country,” what ghosts do you feel you’ve exorcised?

JNJ

When somebody dies, part of grief is realizing all of the wrongs that can never be made right. So I was writing to recover my grandmother’s words and her voice, but also to write her a better ending in some way. Writing the book was a way to give her more history than she was able to have. So I feel exorcised of my need to do that for her.

KMC

Having exorcised that need, do you have any sense of what’s next for you?

JNJ

Yes and no. I get a little superstitious talking about it.