On the first page of Claire Oshetsky’s new novel, “Poor Deer,” a 16-year-old girl named Margaret sits at a motel desk. She’s decided to write her “confession” — the true account of what happened to her and her best friend, Agnes, when they were 4. The girls were playing in a tool shed, inventing a game that involved Agnes locking herself in a cooler, after which Margaret was to open it, revealing the princess inside.
But Margaret couldn’t open the cooler latch, and a panicked Margaret ran home, hid under a table, unable to tell her mother what had happened. Agnes died, and Margaret has lived with the crushing guilt ever since. She’s also lived with something else — Poor Deer, a creature who haunts her, urging her to confess what really happened that day. “Enough of your pretty lies,” Poor Deer insists. “It’s time to tell the truth.”
“Poor Deer” is the third novel from Oshetsky, a former science journalist whose fiction debut, “The Book of Dog by Lark Benobi,” was published in 2018. They made waves with their second novel, “Chouette,” which garnered rave reviews upon its release in 2021.
Oshetsky spoke about “Poor Deer” from their home in Santa Cruz, where they live with their family. This conversation has been condensed and edited for length and clarity.
Q. There are two memorable characters, Margaret and Poor Deer, at the heart of this book. Did one of them come to you first?
Margaret came first, and I really started with a challenge. I wanted to see if I could start a book with a senseless tragedy, something that happens in the real world, and take my book somewhere redemptive. So I began with the idea of these two little girls at an age where they are completely innocent victims, both of them in different ways, and took it from there. Poor Deer evolved as I went. I didn’t originally have a ghostly presence or a conscience embodied — I don’t even know what to call Poor Deer in the novel, but as I was writing, I had this feeling that I wanted to make this go somewhere happy by the end. I was struggling with it as a writer, because in my heart, I feel like some things we never get over. So to write a true book about something that someone does get over was a challenge.
Q. Was it difficult for you to sit down every day and write about the effects of something that’s just so completely awful?
It was a challenge. I wanted it to be true to human experience, and not make it sentimental, but also not to make it so dark that I left my reader with a sense of hopelessness. It’s easy to write sentimentally. It’s easy to write with no hope. I think that that thin path of redemption that’s earned, that was my goal in writing this book. It’s certainly the kind of book that I love, something that challenges me with a dark premise, but ends up being hopeful about the human spirit, the human condition. I love that kind of book, and I wanted to see if I could write one.
Q. People talk about the stages of grief as if they’re a linear process, but in reality they’re not. It’s an unpredictable process for everyone. How do you think Margaret has been able to survive going through that for essentially her entire childhood?
I tried to write a character who, in the beginning, is simply not aware of what death is, and the finality of death. It takes her a long time to grow into the understanding that her friend has died, especially because the adults in her life are trying to hide that fact from her in a loving way, saying that her friend has passed on or is an angel in heaven. So Margaret takes a while to understand that she has lost her friend forever.
Margaret is the narrator of the story, and she’s 16 when she sits down and explains her experience as a 4-year-old, and she’s gone through childhood of being ignorant about death. She’s gone through feeling responsible for what happened, and feeling terrible in a way that really is still kind of naive since she was too young to understand the accident, and now she’s come to a point where she’s kind of becoming an adult and needing to really integrate this experience into her life and move on from it. That was my feeling, that she’s not continuously grieving through those years. She’s processing and learning how to grow out of her grief into something new where she can move on in her life.
Q. Margaret is wracked by guilt, of course. Do you think that the guilt is part of her grief, or are they two separate things that have combined to sort of make her life difficult?
I think there are some kinds of ways of losing people [in which] the grief is going to be mixed in with guilt, that we didn’t try hard enough to save them. We didn’t understand them. We didn’t realize what danger they were in. You still have that attached to your grief. I definitely wanted to explore that feeling in particular, not just that she’s sad, but that it is mixed up with this feeling that she could have done something and should have done something to save her friend. I think that it’s natural that very often we want to take responsibility.
It’s so strange, because the same event or action can be the same, and if it leads to a good outcome, we think, ‘Oh, OK,’ and if it leads to a bad outcome, we feel terrible, but we did the same thing, right? If you run a red light and you hit somebody, you think, ‘I did this terrible thing.’ But if you just zipped through, you probably never think about it again. It’s a mistake, but it’s not a devastating thing that changed your life. You can do the same thing, and in one case, because of the outcome, you never forget it, and you never forgive yourself, and in the other case, you never think about it again because nothing bad happens.
Q. Margaret was raised Catholic, and much of the novel is Margaret’s attempts to write her confession. It seems there’s almost something sacramental about that.
Yes. I was thinking about the sacrament of Confession, and I was raised Catholic, but I’m not a Catholic expert, so I looked it up. I wondered, how would this act of Margaret’s negligence or ignorance leading to a child’s death, be treated in the Catholic dogma? And of course, a 4-year-old child is not capable of mortal sin. You don’t have any reason to feel guilty, the Catholic Church would say, but of course she feels guilty. Anybody would, who remembered an event where maybe they could have done something. So she’s kind of left out hanging to dry as far as organized religion goes. She has to find another way to figure out how to forgive herself.