Jackie Townsend

Before becoming a full-time writer, Jackie received her MBA from UC Berkeley and worked as a management consultant in the Bay Area alongside her husband, who worked in Silicon Valley and other parts of the world before starting and running his own tech company. Their careers, both exciting and exhausting, fuel Jackie’s novels and essays, as does her travel and exposure to foreign cultures. A native of Southern California married to a native of Italy who carries around a big hole in his heart for home, her themes revolve around displacement, crossing borders, belonging (or not belonging), loss, and love. You can find her living in New York City with her husband, sometimes. Riding High in April is her fourth novel.

Twitter: @JTownBooks

Are there particular films that have influenced your writing?

Ingmar Bergman’s film, Scenes From a Marriage, takes you inside a long-term couples’ unraveling. All Berman’s movies cut to the essence of human nature. Guilt, insecurity, self-loathing. His movies are in Swedish, and there is something about reading the English subtitles that alters my experience watching his films. His narration is simple, elegant, profound. I will often pause the frame to write something down. I can picture Bergman sitting at his desk in his home on the windswept Faro Island, agonizing over every word. Not one will be ancillary, which for me is critical to one’s writing, giving every word a purpose. Bergman is not afraid to go his own path. Everything you need to know or understand is right there in his prose. In the telling.
An alternatively styled film that has influenced my writing is Sofia Coppola’s, Lost in Translation. In all her films, Coppola artfully and uniquely captures the feelings of isolation that one experiences in “other” places. She does this by pairing up two lonely, mismatched strangers, by keeping her dialogue sparse and her scenes visceral—its more about what the characters don’t say, what’s written between the lines, the mood she creates inside a scene, that leaves me thinking about the film long after it’s over. I am married to a nationalized U.S. citizen, a man who walks around with a big hole in his heart for home, and, as a consequence, I write a lot about displacement. When he transitions back to being an Italian, we must communicate without language, and it’s only in these cast-off moments that’ I’m able to get closer to some truth about myself, him, the world.

What piece of clothing tells the most interesting story about your life?

I grew up two blocks from the beach. In terms of footwear, I either went barefoot or wore thongs—otherwise known as flip flops back then (versus underwear). A center thong post sandal wasn’t so great for a world traveler, and I was loath to wear Birkenstocks or close toes shoes outside the office. In 2010, I bought a pair of FitFlops because they had a solid base with added arch support and a shiny gold strap that gripped my foot like a glove and didn’t pinch my toe jam. I could walk for miles in those shoes, and they proceeded to go everywhere with me.
Up and down the hills of Cinque Terre to find a tiny fish restaurant on one of the unreachable inlets, passing others along the way in their boots and walking sticks; down the steep wine pathway of La Morra, Italy, as part of the Mangialonga—The Long Meal—an annual Italian gastronomical event celebrating harvest; around the dingy alleyways of Naples and Rome; through Hanoi and Cambodia and the ancient religious shrines of Angkor Wat. I can see those FitFlops on my feet now, propped on the base of the scooter I rode all over Goa, India to get to the flea markets and off the beaten path beaches; trouncing around the dirty streets of Mumbai, avoiding the potholes and the sacred cows. A decade of walking those shoes endured. They refused to die. I must have thrown them out a half a dozen times, only to fish them from my trash can the next day. I’d bought other FitFlops but none of them fit like these FitFlops. I finally deposited them directly into the garbage truck so that I’d have no opportunity to retrieve them. Beaten down but still strong, miles of character, but it was time to put them to rest. They were tired.

Not all books are for all readers… when you start a book and you just don’t like it, how long do you read until you bail?

I’m drawn to language when I read a book. Lyricism, metaphor, depth, this is what grabs and holds me. A sense, a feeling, that the author is taking me on a journey. I don’t have to know where, or why, just that we are going deep inside the psyche, that’s why I keep reading. And I need to know this on the first page. Otherwise I’ll put the book down. I don’t like to do this—I wouldn’t want someone to do this with one of my books—but that’s what I do.
The books I prefer don’t usually have happy endings.
In Virginia Wolf’s novels, not much happens. But I’m immersed at sentence one. Rachel Cusk, the same. Sigrid Nunez, I’ll go anywhere she wants to take me, and the farther through the book I get the slower I read. It’s not intentional, this slowing down, just that at some point things will start to grow languid, the world in slow motion and me reading only a page or two at a time. Something in my subconscious doesn’t want the book to end. Because once I get to the end it will be over, and then what?
I put Anna Karenina down when I reached the final chapter. Each night, I would look at the book on my bedside table willing myself to pick it up and finish it. My husband kept asking me, “Did you finish it?” “No, but I’m go to,” I would respond. “How could I not?” Tolstoy’s masterpiece must have sat on my bedside table for an entire year before I finally moved the book onto a bookshelf, where it sits today. I’m embarrassed to say I didn’t even know Anna died on the train tracks until my husband finally told me. By then he didn’t need to.

Is your go to comfort food sweet or savory? Is it something you make yourself? Does food inspire your writing?

In Italy, on a fateful day twenty-four years ago, I was introduced to the aperitivo, where, alongside a campari with prosecco, you are served tiny plates of patatine, formagio, salami, olive. To this day, I cannot have a glass of wine at home without setting out a few of these savory items. Plus a candle. A long way from my beginnings. I grew up in a family of six with two working parents in the dawn of the microwave. I didn’t know what a vegetable, fruit, or grain was that didn’t come out of a can or box. As I grew into a single-minded adult trying to make her mark on the world, I viewed cooking as a threat to, if not my independence then certainly my success. If I had time to cook then I wasn’t working hard enough. For a whole year I lived off cups of Ramen noodles because you could buy a box of two dozen cups for five dollars—I was intent on doubling down on my student loan payments.
THEN SOMETHING HAPPENED THAT CHANGED EVERYTHING. I married an Italian. An Italian who spent summers at his family’s villa in Piemonte, eating peaches straight from trees, grapes off the family’s ancient vines, or lardo (cured pig fat) made from the farmer’s pig. He spent school years in Bangkok sucking down Khao Niaow Ma Muang (mango with sticky rice) and Tom Ka Kai (chicken and basil). Family meals were long, languid feasts with all the cugini and zii crowded around small dining tables (where I came from, It was considered a “special occasion” to eat at a dining table, any table for that matter.)
The first time my husband introduced me to his cousins in Rome we went for pizza. I ordered mine with topping of half peperoni and half mushroom, at which point my soon-to-be husband put up a halting hand at me and assured our appalled-looking server that I would be having the margarita. My husband wasn’t particularly patient about my food naivety. I had to adapt quickly and I did. In fact, it felt natural, easy. Like the margarita, its ingredients so simple, sublime. When I fell in love with him I fell in love with food. The two became inextricably linked and it’s been that way ever since. In life and in my writing, in my characters’ journey towards the “self” never does not involve food. Food equals love equals life.

Have you ever experienced Imposter Syndrome?

Imposter Syndrome: we don’t feel we are being our “true” selves in what we are doing; we are faking it; we are an imposter. In other words, we don’t feel comfortable. But don’t we live in a constant state of uncomfortableness? Aren’t we, to some degree, an imposter in everything we do? To be living is to be trying, trying to find the thing that rings true to us, pushing ourselves to think differently, see things from fresh, new perspectives. And while this means doing things we might not want to do, isn’t this how we learn? How we experience joy?
Yes, I have experienced Imposter Syndrome. I lived with it in my prior career as a management consultant, and I live with it in my present career as a fiction writer. I remember spending all-nighters getting ready for board meetings in which I would stand before a room of stone cold executives trying to convince them something that I was not so convinced of myself—trembling and sweating and hating myself because I knew this wasn’t me but an imposter. But that was the worst of it, not the best of it, which was working with smart, interesting people from all over. Learning from them. I both hated and loved that career, like anything else it was a balance, and when that balance tipped too far in one direction, I moved on. I tried something else.
Fiction writing. I took all those imposter voices in my head and put them into words. I created characters out of them. Characters who were versions of me and you and everyone we know. Writing fiction is imposter syndrome. Am I really even writing fiction? Isn’t this all just different versions of me? Is this what I should be doing with my life? Fifteen years later I still don’t know. What I do know is that I’m going to keep trying, until I can’t try anymore.