An interview with The Secret Box author Daina Tabūna

Philippa Barker interviews Daina Tabūna, author of short story collection The Secret Box.

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The Secret Box is a collection of three coming-of-age short stories: ‘Deals With God’, ‘The Secret Box’, and ‘The Spleen, My Favourite Organ’. They follow three female protagonists at various stages of adolescence as they attempt to make sense of the world and find their place in it. ‘Without warning, the time had arrived where it wasn’t our dolls that had to be beautiful and sexy, but us ourselves.’ What appealed to you about the coming-of-age genre? And what made you want to tell these stories?

I struggled a lot with self-acceptance when I was growing up. There were plenty of things I was ashamed of, plenty of times I felt like a misfit. The stories in The Secret Box were inspired by such experiences – like embarrassing fantasies about being the chosen one for some divine task ('Deals with God'), excessive attachment to games your peers have already outgrown ('The Secret Box'), or fear of intimacy with the opposite sex (‘The Spleen, My Favourite Organ’). When I got older, I realized such experiences were actually quite common, though I rarely saw similar stories in mainstream culture – the characters of young women usually didn't resemble me or any other real girls I knew. I can admit it felt empowering to share things I used to hide and pray that no-one would ever find out. But mainly I wrote those stories with the hope that they might help someone else feel less lonely and isolated because of their own 'secret boxes'; that they would perhaps make other people feel represented the way I didn't.

All three stories are written with an intimate voice and close point-of-view, letting the reader right into each protagonist’s thoughts and feelings. ‘It was a challenge, and I had always shied away from challenges. But this time I wasn’t afraid. This was my game, and he was playing it.’
Can you talk a little about why you chose such an intimate voice in which to tell the stories? And how you went about writing it?

I was very young when I started publishing my writing – I had just turned 15 at the time of my first publication at a literary magazine. As a teenager I didn't really write about my personal experiences and feelings, though it was quite an intense time – it all seemed too intimate, too silly, too girly, too trivial – inappropriate for the 'big', 'real', 'serious' literature that I was striving to create. The impression I had was that the 'real' art was probably centered around a disillusioned middle-aged (or sort of ageless) male and told in a sort of emotionally detached, purely intellectual manner, and for a while I did my best to adapt to this frame. 

So yes, it did take me some time to grow out of these assumptions and to find the voice I used in the stories in “The Secret Box”, but once I did, I didn't even seem like a choice. It was just the only way how to write them.

How much did you draw on personal experiences to create these characters and their stories?

I used my own experiences as a starting point, but then shaped the stories in ways that seemed to work best, sometimes getting pretty far from the actual events. Often writing the 'real story' doesn't capture the emotions connected to it – I guess because it's impossible to include the entire context. So sometimes it's better to just create a whole new one. 

‘I only knew one thing – something had ended. The people who had been friends and objects of desire since I was a teenager, the ones I had grown up with – they didn’t exist anymore. We didn’t know each other. There was no point in trying to bring back what once had been.’ You’re a Latvian writer writing Latvian characters, yet your stories contain shared teenage/human experience which British readers can relate to and find themselves in. Are you surprised by how the stories resonate so widely?

I'm really glad and thankful about British readers enjoying my work. I suppose most writers want their stories to speak on a universal level that's accessible to everyone. I didn't include many details that would be specifically 'Latvian' or tied to a narrow time period, but in a way it also can be seen as a generational thing – I'm lucky to have spent most of my life in a free, democratic country, without any huge catastrophes defining my lifeline, and it applies to my characters as well. I also made a decision to keep their environment fairly ordinary, typical – it gave me a chance to focus on subtleties of the horror and beauty of everyday life. But I believe all of this doesn't determine whether art resonates with people or not. If a story has authentic, relatable characters, it doesn't matter that much whether their setting is strange or familiar to the reader.

Despite the insecurities and growing pains your protagonists face, each story is balanced with a dry and often self-deprecating humour. For example, in the final story, the young woman’s attempts at conversation with her awkward date: ‘“Yes, internal organ. Which internal organ is your favourite?”’ How important was this comedic element to the stories?

I believe that the pains of my characters are definitely worth examining – just as every living being's experience. At the same time, I did acknowledge that I wasn't exactly writing about such tragedies as, for example, the Holocaust or Soviet forced-labour camps. Even in the harshest conditions people have managed to find something to laugh about, so it seemed appropriate that so do my characters who are just trying to navigate adolescence. Sometimes my first drafts are pretty humourless, but I usually find something funny about the situations afterwards – if nothing else, then the exaggerated seriousness of them.

The title story of the collection tracks the evolving relationship of a brother and sister, their game of paper dolls forging a secret bond between them as they seek to distract themselves from their parents’ divorce. Can you talk a little about their relationship, and how this story came about?

In this story I wanted to examine the ways we are shaped by the games we play – and are encouraged to play – as children; particularly about the differences between 'girl games' and 'boy games'. Girls who enjoy 'boy games' are often proud of that, but you don't see it happening the other way around – which teaches us at a very early age that being a girl is still seen as inferior to being a boy. The boy in the story is not even a particularly 'girly' boy – he just happens to be lonely, and the intricate narratives of the paper doll universe gives him the opportunity to escape his own. But, as much as he loves this elaborate storytelling, he also resents it for not being 'manly' enough.

Furthermore, I wanted to reflect on the abandonment and sense of betrayal that the younger child might feel when the older sibling steps into the wider world, leaving their common playground. Of course, it's the natural way of things, but it can also be a real heartbreak – maybe the first one of such a scale.

I myself have two siblings – an older sister and a younger brother. In a way the boy in the story combines both of them, and also a lot of pure imagination, of course.

What were your influences, literary and otherwise, when writing the stories in The Secret Box? 

I assume I have been influenced by a great deal of authors, but often those influences are quite impossible to untangle and locate in my writing, even for myself. But I should probably mention that the nuanced and daring way Margaret Atwood writes about girls and young women, especially in Cat's Eye, certainly has made an impact on The Secret Box.

Another important source of inspiration besides literature was pop culture – the TV shows and music I grew up with, both the great and the terrible.

Do you have a writing routine?

Sort of, but I wish I had a better one. I absolutely love coming up with story ideas but writing them down and pulling together can be exasperating. I have tried different sorts of rituals to make it a tiny bit easier, but in the end it all still comes down to just sitting down at a computer. People tend to see it as a way more romantic process than it actually is, at least for me.

I actually wrote a longer piece on this topic, which you can read here. 

What are you working on at the moment?

I'm working on a novel-in-stories about women who attempt magic. It's going to be called Witches.

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Find out more about the The Secret Box by Daina Tabūna, along with the Emma Press’s other short story collections.