From Our Authors | October 04, 2024

Recently, TMR intern Sterling Sewell interviewed Louise Marburg about “Semicolon People,” in which a woman finds a new lease on life after switching antidepressants during the COVID pandemic. First published in TMR issue 47.2 (Spring 2024), Marburg’s story is about returning to the world at a time when the world was only just coming back to itself. You can read it here.

Sterling Sewell: The narrator in “Semicolon People” learned about the significance of semicolon tattoos from an online search. How did you develop the idea for this story, and did it emerge from a similar discovery?

Louise Marburg: I discovered the semicolon tattoo pretty much the way the narrator did. I’d heard about it and then went online to check it out. The story wasn’t really developed around the tattoo; it’s really about a woman recovering from debilitating depression and entering the world that depression had denied her—a world exemplified by the doughnut people, for instance. Like most of the elements in my stories, the tattoo presented itself along the way. I have a semicolon tattoo. It’s my only tattoo and I’m very fond of it.

SS: What, if anything, makes “Semicolon People” different from other stories you’ve written?

LM: Unlike any of my other stories, this one is unique because it’s pretty much about me. I have bipolar disorder, I did in fact ask my psychiatrist for the medication that changed my life, she really did fire me because of it, and I have a tattoo of a semicolon on the palm of my hand. (PSA: do not get a tattoo on the palm of your hand unless you love pain!) I have no plans to write more autobiographical stories—I am not that interesting, to be honest—but I do love this one. I think it’s one of my best.

SS: What was the writing process like for this story?

LM: The story was culled from a longer work I was trying, and failing, to write. I am not a natural novelist, but I am a natural story writer. I saw the story pop out of the dreary (to write) novel, so I happily took it and trashed the rest. I’ve never done that before and probably won’t do it again. I have written one novel I think is good and two I think were not. The good one, however, has been out on submission an embarrassingly long time, so who knows, maybe it’s not as good as my agent and I think!

SS: “Semicolon People” has numerous references to age and time. In one instance, the narrator remarks that her relative youth is “a constant surprise.” In a story focused on the difficulty of communicating the experience of depression to others, how do nods to age relate to the primary themes?

LM: When a person is depressed, they miss so much in life, and it often can feel like either missing time or time elongated. The narrator is surprised to see she is still relatively young because she spent so much time in a state of despair, not seeing herself at all. Despair can make a person feel aged, almost decrepit. So when the narrator comes out of her despair, she is surprised not to see an old woman who has suffered.

SS: What are you working on now? What should readers keep an eye out for?

LM: I have a comic novel out on submission, so send all your good thoughts toward the success of that! But I am really a short story writer, and I’m continuing with that, building my fourth collection. My current interest is female characters in early adulthood, the various difficulties and humiliations of that age, when one is an adult but without full agency. I would never want to go back to my twenties, and I think most women wouldn’t! But it’s an interesting time of life for fiction.

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