Amy Grace Loyd: On Writing Into a Wish

Amy Grace Loyd is an editor, teacher, and author of the novel The Affairs of Others and The Pain of Pleasure. She began her career at independent book publisher W.W. Norton & Company and The New Yorker, in the magazine’s fiction and literary department. She was the associate editor on the New York Review Books Classics series and the fiction and literary editor at Playboy magazine and later at Esquire.

She’s also worked in digital publishing, as an executive editor at e-singles publisher Byliner and as an acquiring editor and content creator for Scribd Originals. She has been an adjunct professor at the Columbia University MFA writing program and a MacDowell and Yaddo fellow. She lives between New York and New Hampshire. Follow her on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

In this post, Amy Grace Loyd explains how her latest novel was inspired by an abandoned church, a book review, and her own experience with chronic migraines.

Name: Amy Grace Loyd
Book title: The Pain of Pleasure
Publisher: Roundabout Press
Release date: June 13, 2023
Genre/category: Literary Fiction
Previous titles: The Affairs of Others
Elevator pitch for the book: The story of frustrated love and desire, of extremes of human pain and pleasure, set in a headache clinic housed in a decommissioned Brooklyn church during some wild weather

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Three things inspired this novel: 1) An abandoned church in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, empty except for a daycare in its basement, to which I used to walk nearly daily when I lived in downtown Brooklyn. 2) A lovely line from a Newsday review of my last novel, The Affairs of Others, that “those who look for their experiences of altered consciousness through the legal drug of fiction will be well satisfied.” And 3) the migraines I’ve had since I was small, and that became chronic in my 30s and through the period I was writing this novel.

I’ve been a heavy consumer of the legal drug of fiction for decades, particularly of those books that derange and rearrange your experience of the world as you read and after. But that “altered consciousness” is also something that comes with migraines—how an episode hijacks your senses, can cause you to see, feel, and even hear things that are not there, and forces you to surrender to the body’s imperatives. It seemed irresistibly rich metaphorical territory for a novel.

When I would walk to the lonely Brooklyn church, often to outrun a migraine or its aftereffects, the silence in and around it felt a relief. Other days the place felt full of ghosts and stories; sometimes I could hear the kids in the daycare and found myself wondering where adults could go for a nap and a cup of juice. That’s where the idea of a headache clinic offering support groups came into it. I wished one for myself and so wrote into that wish and a whole fictional world emerged with it.

I started on the story back in 2013 but kept leaving it and then coming back to it. While the weather was already moving toward greater unpredictability then, it hadn’t reached the level of extremes it’s arrived at today and will yet. My intention as I wrote was to exaggerate the weather anomalies hitting New York City both for atmosphere and emotional resonance—wind that wouldn’t stop over weeks and then months. Turns out, I only projected into what can and does happen now. The weather I dreamed up for atmosphere, for a feeling of surreality, is our reality.

And the novel is told from multiple points of view. I tried to cut, reorder it, to tell it from only one—Ruth’s, a nurse new to New York City. But in cutting the doctor’s voice, I’d lose his expertise as a neurologist who treats headaches and too many of the insights into brain and pain science, which I found thrilling and knew many of my readers would too.

So much of The Pain of Pleasure is not only about what we can’t control in the world around us, like the weather, but in our own bodies, including physical and emotional pain, hunger, violence, rage. I couldn’t have anticipated how much more topical this would become with the pandemic and how COVID would rewire so many bodies and change our thinking about our physical vulnerabilities.

Part of the story directly takes on how disasters can both divide and unite us, in terms of our ability to connect, to surrender our individual stories and needs in order to find a way to work together. As Mrs. Watson, the domineering patron of the headache clinic at the heart of the story, says, “Storms are always coming. You have to be equal to them.”

Yes, plenty. The literary publishing landscape has had to change along with the zeitgeist, as it should, and certainly along with people’s attention spans and what the publishing business supposes those to be.

More and more fiction, no matter how literary, is expected to grab you by the throat off the bat in terms of voice, style, action, to compete with all the media and noise out there now. The industry is also very focused on disrupting standard or too familiar narratives and helping with cultural correctives that are long overdue. There’s not an agent or editor out there who doesn’t want to facilitate this. Me included.

Add to this that by the time I had a finished manuscript, the imprint that published my last novel, Picador, was no longer, at least not as a publisher of new work, but only of reprint titles. The loss of that publishing home, I knew, would complicate publishing this by the numbers. So I adapted, as we are all called to do now, and looked around for another way, with collaborators who understood what I was after with this wild collision of inner and outer weather.

When I found Roundabout Press (and it me), it was such a joy. And their mission statement, to provide “a forum that is free from corporate or conglomerate concerns” and publish work “that challenges the status quo,” felt like fresh air to me, someone who’s had to serve many corporate concerns over the years and not always with great enthusiasm.

The increased threat of extreme weather patterns, the availability of new headache treatments, and even the legalization of cannabis in NY state (because a character, another doctor in the novel, believes cannabis is the cure for all that ails him) meant I had to keep updating the story, changing its particulars—far more often than I would have imagined!

And the crises and very eventfulness around us, the sheer speed of the information coming at us, of the changes in how we work and interact, can persuade you that your time is not your own, that privacy is a luxury or a thing of the past. Writing is one of the remedies for this. Or it is for me.

It requires creating boundaries, calling on your will power, and making time for your story as you would a relationship, so that you can imagine it as deeply as possible. It can be a quiet resistance against these very visually-driven and ever-accelerating days that try to tell you words, especially your words (one after another chosen to build a world, create an impression) do not matter. While I wrote this novel, I found I needed this deliberativeness with language more than ever, to slow down and think and see for myself, allow the imagination to breathe and take up time and space. That was surprising and really beneficial.

I hope that they’ll recognize in the story all that we can and cannot control in ourselves—pain, hunger, violence, desire—and in the world—the weather, general chaos, other humans and their chaos. And marvel, as I do, at what we humans will do for love, connection, pleasure, escape, and that trying to control, seduce, or shame others to secure these ends can make for the most fascinating and tragic consequences.

I hope they learn more about the brain and the climate and that the passions at work here, sometimes working at cross-purposes from one character to the next, will remind them none of us is alone in our complexity or fear, rages or longings.

Adapt and collaborate but with care! Use the obstacles out there and the many paths to publishing today, from small presses/indie publishing to self-publishing, to your advantage.

Do your research into all the approaches and keep in mind that while going outside big-five publishing can be liberating (as it has for me), it also has challenges—no advance, doing a lot of the pr and marketing yourself or building your own team around promotion, and hoping some of the media will come along. But there’s plenty of great advice out there on how to do this well for the readers you’re hoping to reach.

And, as I tell my writing students over and over, while writing with an agent’s and/or the marketplace’s preferences in mind is never foolish, you must also honor your intentions for your story, be mindful of what inspired you to tell it and why you told it as you did.

But, being an editor myself, I firmly believe in having an editor and outside readers work with you to ready your work for publication and to pay close attention to their suggestions, what resonates and what does not, what can be fixed or clarified in other ways than those suggested. We all of us need other pairs of eyes to see what we cannot, what may be obvious or too implicit to us.

Stephen King is right: “First write for yourself, then worry about the audience,” which is to say at first you are collaborating with your own imagination, and then in the revision and editing process working with others’ imaginations, hoping to capture them by presenting as seamless, unburdened, and uninterrupted a fictional dream as possible.

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