Amy Grace Loyd

Amy Grace Loyd is an editor, teacher, and author of the novel The Affairs of Others, a BEA Buzz Book and Indie Next selection. She began her career at independent book publisher W.W. Norton & Company and The New Yorker, in the magazine’s fiction and literary department. She was the associate editor on the New York Review Books Classics series and the fiction and literary editor at Playboy magazine and later at Esquire. She’s also worked in digital publishing, as an executive editor at e-singles publisher Byliner and as an acquiring editor and content creator for Scribd Originals. She has been an adjunct professor at the Columbia University MFA writing program and a MacDowell and Yaddo fellow. She lives between New York and New Hampshire.

Loyd's new novel is The Pain of Pleasure.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

As preface I should say that I almost called the novel Heavenly High as a reference to the Nietzsche epigraph at the start of the novel, that pain and pleasure are inextricably linked and if one wants a heavenly high, they’d better be prepared for its opposite. I thought about The Habits of Pain, Habits of Pleasure, given our habits at either extreme, and in between, are actually written into our brain, on a synaptic level.

But finally, The Pain of Pleasure just felt most direct. It gets to the thematic stuff pretty effectively—that our pleasures can become our pains—and it’s an intentional reversal on the more familiar S&M phrasing, the pleasure of pain.

The story is largely based in a headache clinic and digs into the science of pain. For migraine sufferers in particular, on a super literal level, a lot of the fun and/or delicious stuff on offer in this life—like booze, too much junk food, too much sugar or salt, getting too little sleep, getting too much, and storms coming and landing hard—can lead to a migraine attack.

Then I also wanted to get to what we do to avoid pain—sex, drugs, whether prescription or illicit, distractions, even obsessions of one kind or another. There’s a missing woman at the heart of things in this novel, a former patient of the doctor who runs the clinic. She’s left behind a journal for the doctor, an account of her affair with a married man. At first, her lover is the answer to a lot of what ails her — she feels “a different woman in a different body.” There are sensual discoveries in store for her, in great contrast to the sensual wallop she gets when she’s stricken, and she believes she’s fallen in love, but that gets complicated, as intense relationships can, and painful.

And in these times we’re living, post a global pandemic, it seems crucial to be honest that physical and emotional pain is part of being alive, not an indictment of who you are, not a cause for shame or apology. Just the cost of being human, though we can’t seem to help but try to outrun that cost, even if it’s often fruitless.

What's in a name?

For the missing patient, I picked the name Sarah not only because it’s a common name, full of music and history, but for this: “…the last syllable of her name, ah, always recalling the relief that wanted to come but wouldn’t.”

For a stretch while I wrote and rewrote, the doctor was just “the Doctor” — no name and capitalized because his whole identity is taken up with doctoring. Eventually, I named him Louis Berger because he acts as a kind of shepherd (berger in French) for his patients and because of the great art critic John Berger and his Ways of Seeing. As Dr. Berger says in the novel (and he’s not the first), in talking about our perceptions of ourselves, whether while we’re in pain or feeling pleasure, “We see things not as they are but as we are.”

Finally, there’s Ruth, a biblical enough name like Sarah, but also solid, old, and part of it is found in the word “truth.” Like so many of us, she’s trying to determine what’s true and what isn’t about her, those around her. What is true and what is just the story we tell ourselves about our lives and keep refining? A story we think needs to have a clear beginning, middle, and end and with some pay-off and all the loose bits all tied up but never are. Thank goodness for literary fiction in that it allows us to play with those expectations, that order, and arrive at an experience far more like life.

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your new novel?

My teenage self could be a real asshole and was pretty miserable. I was one of the popular girls who around fourteen got ousted from the clique (and what a terrifying clique it was). I was plenty ostracized (endless crank calls, stuff posted on my locker and written on the bathroom walls, nasty things said about me loudly, in earshot, and me sitting alone at lunch) and was at sea for some years. But eventually in a high school in a town over, I found my footing; and it was Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter read in ninth grade that helped this along. I saw in Hester Prynne’s story that being in exile, being outside convention, was a freedom, that keeping up with any Jones was a trap that would keep getting tighter. Also, being on the outside and being ill now and again, as I was even back then with migraines, makes you so much more compassionate and open. I don’t wish any pain on anyone, but, boy, does the chronic kind keep you humble and adaptable.

All that said, I think Amy at, say, fifteen or sixteen would have gotten into the atmosphere and eeriness of the book, the sense of a world being overthrown by environmental currents and other human events and misfires—and understand the discussions of physical pain, which are, in this novel, of course both metaphoric and literal. My hope is that she and any reader would get that there’s no outrunning our pains regardless of all our careful planning and pretending otherwise, and that if we can just relax into this fact, rather than resist it, we can cope with it a whole lot better. Not saying it’s easy; it’s not, but it sure is alive with lessons and mystery.

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

I think endings might be harder to write or at least decide on, but I think I review and tighten that first 25 to 35 pages of a book more than any other part—I work and rework it—because as an editor I know other editors, literary agents, and reviewers, if it comes to that, aren’t going to give a book many pages before they have to move on—they read for a living so have to pace themselves; they can’t go much further than their engagement takes them. The beginning of any story, fiction or non, should have some hooks built in and express a lot of what the story is up to in terms of subject and style so it gives someone a sense of the stakes and the world they’re entering into.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

Yes, in the doctor of the story, by way of his crippling sense of duty and trying to fix things that may not be fixable. He can’t solve human pain, can’t cure migraines, only treat them (there are no cures as I write this for an affliction that is in large part still a mystery), but he digs in, shows up, tries and tries.

In Ruth, I see that sense of being in exile that I can fall into, that we all can, if we’re being honest.

In Sarah, who’s a migraine sufferer like me, whose experience of pain, while more extreme than my own, is something I understand too well.

And all the experiences of love in this story are experiences I’ve had—unrequited love; love that felt like an addiction, that was probably more lust than love; the sweetness of new love; and time-worn, at-home love; love that seemed more about control than connection; and also the disallowing of love, stopping it before it can take hold.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Music is always a big inspiration for my work, and for years now, I’ve been mesmerized by Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater and listened to it to transport me—into my feelings, out of them—to get me in a mood that would help with writing, at the very least out of the urgencies and distractions of everyday living. So it was great to incorporate that piece of music into the novel: Adele Watson, an overbearing and wily force in this book, uses the otherworldly opening movement of the piece to seduce Ruth, who’s new to New York and desperate for money and a little belonging, into not just coming to work for her as a nurse in the clinic that Adele’s created, but to being her creature, really. Adele talks about how music heals and she’s right, it does, and certainly inspires, but it can also encourage someone to let down their guard, let their longings show.

Of course, there’s also the music of the wind, of storms, and of the city in all its moods and seasons, that urban kind of silence which is never fully silent; it breathes and sings (sometimes with harsh, jagged sounds) and makes you feel part of its breath and that song. It can really work on the imagination and sensory self. I wanted that to be part of this story too—the unpredictability of our climate today, of city living, the fragility of our day-to-days, particularly on an island like New York with its ancient infrastructure and insufficient protection from the rising water.

Visit Amy Grace Loyd's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Pain of Pleasure.

--Marshal Zeringue