The debut novelist talks F-18s, Madonna envy, and the influence of memoir.
Boo Trundle is a writer, artist, and performer whose work has appeared across various platforms and publications, including the Brooklyn Rail, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and NPR’s “The Moth.” She has also released three albums of original music with Big Deal Records. Here, she talks about the fine line between truth and fiction, and the collage-like process of filling those gaps in the writing of her first novel, The Daughter Ship.
The novel’s setting shifts from the New Jersey suburbs and Virginia Beach to a fantastical submarine. How did setting become so important to The Daughter Ship?
The story is built around places that are actually home to me, like Virginia Beach, where I grew up. In a military town, you’re surrounded by giant war machines. If you’re outside, talking with someone, and five F-18s fly overhead, you can’t hear what the other person is saying. After the jets head off over the ocean, the air smells like burnt fuel for 20 minutes. We just grew up like that. But it’s not normal. The Daughter Ship approaches this dissonance with curiosity; it questions the “normal.”
New Jersey, where I’ve lived for over 20 years, is also home to Katherine, the main character. In her 40s, a married mother of two teenagers, she’s stuck in a very plastic, domestic lifestyle. The actual story takes place inside her crumbling selfhood. I look at her state of being as a place more than her town. Her outsides are quite similar to mine. Honestly, our insides are the same, too.
You walk a thin line between truth and fiction, which may encourage readers to see the entire novel as autobiography. How do you respond to this?
I’m 100 percent a fiction writer. On the other hand, when I was writing The Daughter Ship, I accidentally landed in a memoir workshop down in Florida. The teacher encouraged us to bring in personal artifacts and archival writing: journals, family obituaries, letters from friends. I dug out a story I wrote in the third grade about a lonely giant who lives in a submarine. Soon, I was off and running with the submarine. I am “memoir-influenced,” I would say.
My writing is also shaped by adventures in spirituality and psychology. While writing The Daughter Ship, I was deep into Internal Family systems, a therapy modality that encourages you to greet your lost psychic parts, including your inner child. I found many inner children who didn’t get along. I put them in the submarine and made them duke it out. The interplay between Katherine and these kids generated the plot of The Daughter Ship.
As long as I’ve known you, you’ve been creating something. Music, visual art, stories, blogs, videos. Did you have to give yourself permission to move into these different media, or have you always known you were a multidisciplinary artist?
I’ve always thought I was a brilliant genius. I’m delusional. It doesn’t matter what I am taking on, I think I am a master, or will be eventually. I don’t know what that is; it’s a missing cog in my brain. No matter the challenge — tennis or oil painting — I just jump in. When I moved to New York after college, I thought, “Hey, I can sing, I know a few chords on the guitar. I’ll be a rock star!” I figured I’d go play at CBGB, so I auditioned. Of course, I failed the audition. But I went back and auditioned again. It’s the missing cog in my brain.
Or maybe that’s the genius.
I went home, cried, and tried again, finally getting a slot on Wednesday nights at 1 a.m. I never became a rock star. I’d go to therapy, whining and moaning, “I’m so jealous of Madonna. Madonna is on tour. Madonna got her own record label.” Madonna this, Madonna that. My therapist said, “You act like it’s you and Madonna, neck and neck.” Meanwhile, I was playing late-night acoustic gigs with 10 people in the audience. So there’s definitely something wrong with me.
You’re one of the funniest people I know, and this comes off beautifully in The Daughter Ship. I marked the funny lines in green. Very few pages have no green. I’m not sure humor was as apparent in your early work. How did you learn to incorporate it so effectively into your fiction?
Maybe I’m calming down as I get older. My fiction used to grab people around the neck and say, “LISTEN TO ME.” That vibe doesn’t get many laughs. Also, you can learn to be funnier. I’m taking a joke-writing class right now. Most of my jokes still don’t land, but there is a craft to it.
Can you share a creative exercise that helped the most?
Cut and paste, or cut-ups, découpe. The technique is based on Dadaist word collages from the 1920s. William Burroughs and the Beats used it. First, you write a story, highlight the stuff that feels alive, resonant. You throw out the dead parts. Then you glue one good part at the top of a blank page and another good part at the bottom, and you write between them. You keep doing it. Sometimes I’d use big scroll paper to glue it all together.
I love collage in any form. Collage requires a surrender, a letting go. It also introduces the wonderful elements of excision, randomness, and reconstruction. It’s about process. In fact, I’ve been calling The Daughter Ship a process novel. I may have made up that term. The Daughter Ship drills down into the same stuff, over and over. To me, this approach is more like life. It would be nice if life had a beginning, middle, and end. Some people think it does. But every closing is also an opening. A big epiphany may seem like it’s bringing your story to a tidy conclusion. Five minutes later, an F-18 drops a bomb on your head. Even if it’s just a metaphor, the bomb. That’s how I write.
Margaret Hutton is the author of the novel If You Leave, coming in fall 2025 from Regal House Publishing. Her short fiction has been published in the Sun, the South Carolina Review, the Antioch Review, and elsewhere.
