When Nina St. Pierre’s mother died, after having endured two life-changing fires, Nina started writing to try and understand what had happened. The memoir Love Is a Burning Thing, a propulsive story of her mother’s spiritualism, her bouts of mental illness, and ultimately her extraordinary life, is Nina’s debut. It took her 13 years to write the book, a time she describes as being “at turns inspired, exhausted, and tortured. I felt like I couldn’t figure out the best way to tell it, structurally. At one point, a poet friend in grad school suggested that I let it incubate. That maybe this book didn’t have to be my first book. She may have been right, but I didn’t listen.”
The writing necessitated a process of attrition. Nina did a lot of searching for her mother that ultimately wasn’t included. The book might have, but doesn’t, show us the trip to South America, the train back to her birthplace, Iowa, nor to her mother’s hometown. What we do have: an unforgettable portrait of a mother and her brilliant, honest, and searching daughter. She worried, while drafting the memoir, about compressing or flattening her family, about losing the ambiguity and tension she had felt as a child. It is a transpiring in keeping with her mother’s mysterious beliefs that when Nina struggled to capture her mother’s stories, it was her mother herself who spoke. “Her voice unblocked it, all her funny sayings and ways of talking reanimated her.”
I finished the book grateful to know Nina’s mother, both a model for living outside of the confines of society and for the toll that took. Nina was considered and precise on the desire for an expansive life like her mother’s: “On one hand, it keeps you ambitious, open, motivated; but at the other extreme, it can lead to chaos, and even total annihilation of the self.” The trade-off is one that Nina spent 13 years evaluating.
Nina notes that it was difficult, throughout the writing process, for her to locate the story. Something that began as a straightforward plot-based narrative became a cultural history of self-immolation, what Nina describes as “an experimental collaged Kate Zambreno–esque narrative splicing in Foucault’s Madness and Civilization.” Nina says she could write another book, about the writing of this book: “Coming soon to an esoteric bookstore near you.”
Sarah Blakley-Cartwright (SBC): There’s so much love for your mother in this book. What did you hope to understand about her by writing this book? Were you cognizant, as you wrote, of hoping to find empathy for her actions?
Nina St. Pierre (NSP): Working on a project for over a decade means that it took on as many different forms as I myself have. This book was my 30s. It anchored and expanded me. It became its own world to return to and unfurl and tinker around. As the work developed, I was driven by a primary question: Was my mother mentally ill or did she actually have access to otherworldly realms and mystical experiences? Ultimately, over the course of writing, I developed an even deeper empathy for her actions; but at the outset I was just trying to understand her experiences, and my own dissociated reactions to some of the events.
As the book became bigger than me or her or us, I was cognizant of structuring the book in a way that the reader would have to understand her as a complete person, if not have genuine empathy.
SBC: How did you decide how much of yourself to bring in? Was the book always a story about you both?
NSP: I had to be pushed hard, continuously, over the years, by teachers and writer friends and readers, to put more of myself in this book. It began with a more research-based framing, which as a journalist, was my comfort zone. Also my mother’s story and life was so outsized that it took up all the space. And I wanted it to. It was hard to imagine anyone caring about me or my life against the unfathomable things she’d lived.
But it turned out people really wanted to hear what I thought and felt about it all, and part of the project was figuring that out for myself. So, I would say, it began as her book and slowly became mine—which I almost think you can see in the way it unfolds on the page.
SBC: Your mother was incredibly dynamic. But there was also a sense of increasing anxiety, as we begin to learn of the rootlessness of your childhood, motel life in the Alpenrose in Mount Shasta, the Corinthian in Balboa Park—and it escalates from there. There is a sense of fire as an organizing principle; the fact that, actually, fire follows a predictable pattern.
Was it comforting to find order in something that can cause such wreckage?
NSP: Love this question! And yes! Actually there was. Fire is both unknowable and measurable. And I suppose the ways in which my mother was unknowable but tethered herself to a chaotic, life-giving element, gave the story a through line or guiding structure, which I had always yearned for, as a child, and later, an author. Though I personally might have chosen something a bit less volatile. She was a Leo, though. So it tracks.
SBC: The book is divided into parts: Ignition, Growth, Free Burn, and Decay. Can you talk about how the book found its final structure?
NSP: That organizing principle came much later in the drafting. When I sold the book, it didn’t even have chapters. It was more fragmentary. With the guidance of my agent and then my brilliant editor, Pilar Garcia-Brown, I tried out chapters and found it soothing to have things a bit more ordered.
In grad school, I’d had this wacky drunken idea that the book had to be meta to be proper—that it actually had to self-immolate in some way (that was my time of reading Foucault and all, again, grad school). When my editor and I started to talk about using fire as an explicit organizing principle, a bell struck. I had wanted something like this but couldn’t figure it out in language. But learning about the stages of a fire, and seeing how seamlessly that tracked with the arc of the story, was arresting. I would say unbelievable, but by that point so many things about the creation of this book had been serendipitous that I came to believe it had its own magic.
SBC: The book’s setting is a rural California that is often left out of sunny dispatches from the glitz of Hollywood or a mouse-eared magic castle or a patchouli-scented Haight-Ashbury or the ergonomic beanbags of a tech-startup office. Your life with your mother was wholly original. The mother of your childhood was full of energy and inspiration, concocting adventures with no budget. Your mother tries to protect you from the price you would pay for an ordinary life. Can you say more about this? What is the price of an ordinary life?
NSP: Damn. Whew. Yes. So many ways to answer this, which might variously offend people. But here goes. It’s trifold—for my mother and where she came from, ultimately an upper-middle class existence that she characterized as unhappy and repressive, the things she was taught to aspire to equated to, for her, a sort of soul death. She might have been materially comfortable and socially accepted if she chose that life, but her desire for justice and equality and a more expanded view of humanity would be sacrificed.
At the launch event in New York for LIABT, the brilliant Chloé Cooper Jones, who was kind enough to be in conversation with me, characterized it as yearning for a “bigness of life,” something my mother and I ultimately shared—she in the ethereal or spiritual realm, and me in the material. That is such a great umbrella term for the type of yearning that drives those of us who are perpetually searching. It’s definitely something I’ve inherited and at times battle with—but think I have for the most part struck a healthy balance with. Where my mother might have meant it more literally—as in she could not survive that life, and almost didn’t—for me, it’s more existential. I have to feel like I’m evolving, growing, learning; that “all of this” means something. I’m very Neptunian, and without a purposeful life, I would be driven toward escapism and the annihilation that my mother skirted.
SBC: You draw a beautiful throughline of how poverty leads to survivalism and cultural isolation leads to disenfranchisement and finally expands into paranoia. Were these revelations unlocked through reading and writing?
NSP: Thank you for saying that! And yes, in part. More so through thinking and even talking about these things with friends, other writers, and my editor, who helped crystallize something I’d been implying but not saying outright—which is the connection between poverty and avoidance of mental health issues. My editor helped me tease out that it wasn’t just a generational mentality or even the typical rural “buck-up” attitude, but that as people are struggling to pay the bills, there’s just no mental energy to address “bigger” problems, which is something I’d lived and known but hadn’t put fully into words.
There were a lot of assumptions I had about what people know—anything from what cosmic new age beliefs are, to the ways in which poverty permeates every aspect of life—that I had to extract and articulate, often painfully, for readers who don’t know.
At the risk of sounding pretentious, a lot of my lived experience and the ways I have analyzed and come to understand and express them, track with developed social critiques, pop sociology, and academic theories. But it was only reading and studying them retroactively that I found and understood “terms” I could use to put a cap on many points that I’d come to organically or through lived experience.
The cultural critique portions of the book seem to be the most divisive for readers so far. Some people applaud that I’m talking about the machinations of capitalism, etc., while others think it dilutes the personal narrative. But to me, bouncing between our daily bread and dysfunctional government systems, or quotes by artists, is most organic to my mother’s way of thinking and our conversations, and mine as well. Cultural collaging is a part of what I’ve inherited—in both the living of life and the stories we told about it. That might not have come across in my mom’s characterization clearly enough, which I’m seeing now. But our household had true conversational range. I keep thinking of the Wolfgang Tillmans retrospective at MoMA a couple years ago. I was really moved by his non-hierarchical presentation of information. On one wall, he’d have a huge photo portrait of a stranger on a corner, next to a smaller photo of a celebrity. They seemed to be arranged at random, everything intermingling. The daily grime of life along with its elevated moments. Yes, I thought, that’s it! The sacred is the mundane and vice versa. There’s something equalizing, even radical about that. And I’m so grateful to have been raised that way.
Some things that people are talking about now I knew were “a thing” for a long time. Things like spiritual bypassing or the Venn diagram of wellness culture and conspiracy. Often, I was developing these theories or thoughts myself and reading retroactively to affirm or I guess even validate them. But while writing this book, I had a protective instinct not to overread because I felt I might lose my own voice or perspective and defer to experts instead. I have the journalist’s desire to get every fact right and I’m a completist by nature, so reading less actually helped me stay truer to the heart of the story and get in touch with my own voice. A lot of the more theoretical social-theory stuff got fleshed out in later drafts. But things that I read that helped me most figure out how to get an embodied experience on the page were poetry or books like Lidia Yuknavitch’s Chronology of Water or Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater.
SBC: The book’s epigraph is drawn from The Descent of Inanna, the ancient Sumerian epic poem inscribed on a tablet sometime between 1900 to 1600 BCE about a Mesopotamian goddess who passes from heaven through earth to the underworld. What is its relevance here and now?
NSP: I have this witchy Russian artist friend, Elisabeth, in New York. At one point, I was struggling with the journey this book had taken me on and she said to me what became the epigraph: “The ways of the underworld are perfect, they may not be questioned.” I got chills over the phone. She understood what this book was about more than I did. I started reading about Inanna and felt great connection to the themes of stripping down, of having to leave everything at a series of gates, of entering the underworld, of being killed and resurrected and making concessions to live; of wanting to be of both heaven and earth, the above and below, and the psychic price that must be paid for that duality. At one point I had a retelling of the epic in the book, interwoven with the period of my teenage descent into partying and annihilation. But I could never quite metabolize in my own words how it was relevant to my story. It was more of a bodily sense. So I took it out and let it be. An epic like that perhaps shouldn’t be retold through my words at all. But there are many amazing reinterpretations of how her story is relevant today. Jeanna Kadlec, a beautiful writer and astrologer friend of mine, taught an amazing seminar, called Roses & Thorns: A Venus Retrograde Cloister for Creative Recovery, based on the myth of Inanna, and recommended a number of good books on the subject.
SBC: You set yourself the project of unraveling what you call the “looping endless narrative” of life as your mother’s daughter and you dedicate the book to “those left piecing together shards.” The book is, in many ways, an attempt at sense-making of your childhood.
How did you begin sorting out the many voices and stories that surrounded you? Do you still feel driven to sort out this story, after having completed this book, or has that urge been satisfied?
NSP: It’s hard to say because it’s now a total amalgamation of them all. Like my mother’s spirituality, the book ended up being quite syncretic and bespoke. So much so that if you pulled a thread anywhere the whole thing might unravel.
It’s a distressing way to structure a book, to be honest. At many points, I wished I could just take an existing model or template to the thing. But whenever I tried, it seemed to resist. I always wound up at the same looping problems.
In terms of the sorting, I wrote many sections and drafts and even character studies that didn’t make it in. At certain points the men in the book were much more developed and even my mother’s friends had bigger roles. But I kept coming back to, and readers encouraged me to really focus on, my mother and me. Which both story wise and ethically, was correct. Letting my interactions with her center the work and have other people become a chorus or tonal backdrop helped a lot of the noise fall away.
SBC: At one point, after you’ve left your mom’s house at 16, and she comes to find you and bring you back, you sense yourself dissociating from the present moment. You write: “I was already outside the moment. … Looking at my mother with a yearning, and a nostalgia, for something we never really had. As if I already knew what was going to happen next. As if I was already mourning. We’d tried our best, hadn’t we?” How helpful or estranging, in the moment of the experience, was this impulse toward narrative construction?
NSP: It’s something more gossamer than that. In short, and at the risk of sounding precious, I’m an artist. As much as I’ve tried to resist that at times, it just is. And artists are always sentimentalizing the moment, which I suppose is a form of estrangement.
Romance is essentially protective, isn’t it? I’m just working out this thought in the moment, but I like where it’s going. Romance bubble wraps what is real. So even in these raw, real painful moments with my mother, the ability to zoom out and see us from above like characters in some gritty mother-daughter saga, was a way to both protect myself from the non-glamorous gnarly pain of the moment and add a cinematic veneer to it—which was ultimately both helpful by cushioning me from the pain and ultimately estranging from the reality of what was going on. So, okay, maybe both!
SBC: You invoke your mother’s own voice to give a sense of the escalation of her paranoia. Did inhabiting her voice in this way give you any sense of pause?
NSP: Not really. I had internalized these ongoing little snippets and phrases she’d said, her speech patterns; they became a chorus that ran through our everyday lives. A refrain. I didn’t have to inhabit her voice because she shared so much of it with me. All I had to do was find it again and tap it.
SBC: Your mother fiercely guarded her independence and her individualism, both of which many people tried to stifle. There is a line I haven’t been able to stop thinking about: “Her agency is what complicated her archetype.” Your mother was a woman who defied trope or category. What was it about her story that made that classifying tempting for you and others?
NSP: It’s hard, and dangerous even, to speak in monolithic terms, but at least in white middle-and upper-class American culture, I find there’s a real allergy to complexity. The more aligned I was with the dominant culture or striving toward what I saw as “normalcy,” the more I found myself craving a template to understand my mother. I wanted her self-immolation to make sense contextually. But it never did. It was a wholly unique experience, informed by the culture and times she lived in.
She contained so many contradictory ideas about what the dominant culture believes to be true, particularly about women and mothers, that there was no real model for her, or her life. She was fiercely independent and needed help. She was a wonderful mother and overextended me emotionally and spiritually. Ultimately, we often need a precedent to understand something new. What I understood when I finally had to write a damn ending, and am still processing now, is that my mother refused to be archetyped, even in death, and each attempt of mine that failed to do so pushed me closer to the truth—which is bespoke and syncretic. What made the book difficult to write, pushed me as a person to work through ways that I was still striving toward the center in my own life and yearning for acceptance/validation for the life we’d lived. When she was alive, she was always radicalizing me. But I resisted it because I yearned for stability and acceptance. But in completing our story, finally, it stuck. I get it, Mom.
SBC: You describe trying to disintegrate yourself, to be light enough that you almost disappear, which you learned was a way to get close to God. One way you found to do this was dance. Can you speak about your relationship to your mother’s web of spiritual, mystical, and religious beliefs? How much did you want to believe, or was it important to you to draw a line in the sand between your two realities?
NSP: For my mother, faith was a relief, a release, a purpose, a mission, but for me, it felt like a fault line. It was ever-shifting and unstable. As a kid I didn’t have the ability to separate my mother’s relentless spiritual longing from the instability of constantly moving, or later from the confusing looping stories she told. To me all these things became conflated—so that belief itself was a danger to my stability and sense of self. Belief could be easily manipulated. The ineffable was unknown, even sinister. Whereas dance was embodied and controlled by me. In dance, I could experience the drive toward transcendence that was part of my DNA, but I could contain it. As for the rest, I became devoted to the material world, to the body, to things I could see, feel, hold, snort, drink. I dated men who were immovable—like old-growth trees. Salt of the earth. That grounded me; that was real.
SBC: Over time, you came to this conclusion: “What if every complicated story, every contradictory, impossible, uncapturable, untellable story, is our chance at god? Every time we let many things be true at once, maybe that is god.” What is it about ambiguity that is divine? What about writing about the unanswerable: When does it feel unsatisfactory, or like ambiguity is evading something true?
NSP: I’ve been trying to work through this, and in a lot of ways think this is a coda to the book. To embrace the unknowable is an essential component to faith; but the unknowable is also where people are most easily manipulated. Maybe it’s like this ongoing conversation I’ve been having with Micaiah Johnson, who writes beautiful literary sci-fi, and our friend Wesley, a Classics scholar who’s always hammering on about Lacan. We keep circling back to only true thing being experience itself. It follows then that the purest art form would be performance art. Experience is inherently ambiguous and subjective. Maybe it’s the interpretation of it that estranges us from what is divine. Maybe the divine is not meant to be interpreted at all. Like Innana’s story in my own words didn’t work. And yet, here we are. It’s basically an impossible task. But poetry and dance and movement come closer to it than words. I love words and have been transported into a full-bodied experience through words as I’m sure many of us have. But they have limits. This question is the question, really. The line between ambiguity as the most accurate possible representation and as an artistic cop-out is extremely fine, but when you read one versus the other, you can feel it.
SBC: Your mother was a writer. She framed her own struggles as biblical-level tribulations, but she also had a great sense of humor. As you say, “she never gave up the right to narrate life in her own words. She wrote obsessively, as if trying to record it. Maybe I was carrying some part of that forward.” Can you talk about the portrait your mother painted of herself?
NSP: I wish she could have written her own book but with some perspective in a way. Because even in her journals or an autobiographical screenplay I’d found that she’d written for a class she was taking at the community college, she was always self-characterized as this persecuted, misunderstood warrior. She was always rising above and struggling and fiercely protecting her family against both men and the Man, while simultaneously embroiled in some psychospiritual warfare. Talk about romanticizing as a survival mechanism!
But, then again, what do I know? Maybe she was Joan of Arc reincarnate. I just wonder who she was really fighting against and what her story might have sounded like if she was allowed vulnerability in its telling as well—if she didn’t always have to be fighting.
SBC: You describe the project of writing beautifully: “Obsession as an antidote to death. Attention as a preservative to life.” Do you feel differently about your mother’s life after having written the book?
NSP: Hell yeah. So much more compassion and awe. What a badass. She screwed me up in some ways, but I’m okay now and my drive and vision and passion and even my hedged optimism about life is testament to the fact that the stuff that really matters, she got right. I do wish she’d had more lightness and a softer place to land and been able to accept help (for her and us) without being so threatened—in ways imagined and real.
But a seer recently told me not to feel bad about this. She said my mother told her: “I chose this life. It was always going to be this way.” That was a relief. 
Featured-image courtesy of Nina St. Pierre.