Francesca McDonnell Capossela

Francesca McDonnell Capossela is a queer writer and Irish American dual citizen. She grew up in Brooklyn and holds an MA in creative writing from Trinity College Dublin. Her writing can be found in the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Point magazine, Banshee, The Cormorant broadsheet, Columbia Journal, Guesthouse, and the anthologies Dark Matter Presents Human Monsters and Teaching Nabokov’s Lolita in the #MeToo Era. Francesca lives on the Lower East Side of Manhattan with her dog Lyra.

Are there particular films that have influenced your writing?

Carol is one of my favorite films (based off the Price of Salt––a favorite novel). I wouldn’t say that the plot of the film influenced my debut novel, Trouble the Living, but I do feel like that film taught me what a good ending is. The final moments––of Therese rushing through New York to get to Carol, flashes of which we saw at the beginning of the movie––culminate in a long look between the two of them, and Carol’s slightest smile. The look is so incredibly meaningful and powerful both because of Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara’s brilliant acting and because the story has already done all the work to get us there. It’s a scene that made me realize that an ending can and should be small and subtle, because if the film or book has succeeded, that subtlety is all you need. By the time we get Therese and Carol’s glance, we know them so intimately––their pain and their love––and that look is enough to tell us all we need to know.

Is there a genre of music that influences your writing/thinking? Do you listen to music while you write?

I don’t listen to music while I write unless I’m just messing around to get words on the page. I do love music, though, and it helps me clarify the feeling I’m trying to capture in a project long before I’m able to put that feeling into words. For Trouble the Living, the songs I listened to again and again included “Mother” by Pink Floyd, which has one of the most toxic mother-child relationships in music, “Black Boys on Mopeds” by Sínead O’Connor, about the brutality of the British government and a mother’s impossible wish to shield her child from grief, and Danú’s beautiful “County Down” about homesickness for Ireland. Those songs reminded me of the feelings at the center of my novel whenever I felt lost while writing or editing.

Is there a work of art that you love. Why? Have you ever visited it in person?

I’m very ignorant about visual art and, more specifically, I’m entirely clueless about sculpture. It’s almost never provoked an emotional reaction for me, and often I find it actually boring (my own fault, I know). But when I took a semester off during my junior year of college, I spent about a month in Florence. During that time, I read a lot about Michelangelo, and saw a lot of his work. The piece that moved me the most was Michelangelo’s The Deposition, a sculpture of Jesus, Mary Magdalene and the Virgin Mary. I love this strange, unfinished sculpture for two reasons: one, its imperfection (Michelangelo deemed it flawed and tried to destroy it). And two, the intimacy of Jesus and his mother. Even though their faces are unfinished (or maybe because of it) Mary’s grief is palpable, and her closeness to her son is haunting. It is the kind of mother’s love that fascinates me.

If you could create a museum exhibition, what would be the theme?

I’m obsessed with challenging the idea of “muses” and artists, especially when female “muses” are seen as objects that inspire a man to create. A lot of these muses were actually themselves artists, or contributed to their lovers’ work in some way, and I’d love to create an exhibition that shows famous’ artists portraits of their muses alongside the muses’ own work. For example, Picasso’s portraits of Françoise Ginot, next to her self-portraits. I’d like to see those two representations of Ginot face off.

Is there another profession you would like to try?

Since I was a kid, I’ve wanted to be able to play sports well. I loved watching baseball and basketball (I grew up a Red Sox fan in Brooklyn), but I was terrible when it came to actually playing them. Watching the Women’s World Cup this year made me dream of being an athlete again. I’m so envious of that way of interacting with the world, so different than sitting behind a computer all day, imagining. The thought of running down the pitch like Sam Kerr–-it must feel like flying!