Old Crimes: And Other Stories by Jill McCorkle | Algonquin Books; January 2024
The title of Jill McCorkle’s latest book, a short story collection called Old Crimes, hints at dramatic secrets. Some of the regrets embedded in those secrets are painful: In “The Lineman,” the second story in the collection, a man ruminates on his regret at cheating on his high school sweetheart but considers the great gift of his daughter from his second, rocky marriage.
In the closing story, “Sparrow,” a town gratuitously discusses a woman’s murder-suicide, only later wondering if the story isn’t quite what it seems. Most of the stories are about regrets over things left undone. In the title story, a woman thinks back to a neglected child she met on a rather listless vacation with her boyfriend. In “The Last Station,” a woman finally expresses her regret at all the years she spent placing her family, who don’t even remember her birthday, above herself.
Many of the stories are set in an anonymous small town in the South, and a few have nearly recognizable North Carolina landmarks. They feel like they could be drawn from one community but also that they could take place anywhere—which is exactly what McCorkle wanted. The unifying themes—regret, selfishness, honesty—emerged as McCorkle was writing, coalescing into a collection that encompasses stories she wrote decades ago as well as some sparked by work on her last book, 2020’s Hieroglyphics. This retrospective attitude is one of McCorkle’s favorites to write. Since her first novels in the 1980s, McCorkle has written characters looking back over their lives.
McCorkle has been writing in and about the South for decades, with a few discursions to the Northeast. Originally from Lumberton, the Dos Passos Prize winner has spent years teaching at several universities, including UNC-Chapel Hill, Duke, and Harvard. Now based in Hillsborough, McCorkle recently retired from teaching creative writing at NC State University but says she plans to continue taking students at workshops and touring with Old Crimes this year.
On the heels of the release, INDY sat down with McCorkle to discuss small-town mythologies, building believable towns, and why it’s so important to look back over your life.
INDY: Many of the stories in this collection interact, and many take place in the same town. How did you balance this consistency of voice with how unique all these characters are?
JILL MCCORKLE: Oh, thank you for that. I really wanted that effect of how every microcosm is similar in a lot of ways, that you could have a very similar experience in a different place and being a very different human. I wanted to paint portraits of fully developed people but then show them interacting in ways and in places that have more of a universal feel. I kept coming back to something like the story “Sparrow,” where you’ve got parents gathered at a ball game. Though they may all look alike on the surface, they’re not. They’re bringing different stories and a lot of disagreements but still fitting under the umbrella of one place and the history of that place.
I used to do this prompt often with my classes, writing that kind of lore, the myths of a town, the stories that get told. And so often when that kind of conversation comes up, people refer to the child something happened to or abduction stories. Those are definitely the kind of stories that paralyze a town and then become something much bigger.
I read in another interview that you were thinking about fairy tales with this collection, which surprised me because it’s definitely more on the realism side. But those stories of the kid wandering off into the forest—is that how you were thinking about fairy tales with this collection?
Absolutely. I grew up reading the real fairy tales. They were meant to be moral lessons, some more extreme than others and scary as a result. But there were lessons in the stories, and I very much see the way these children are almost turned into saints in that regard. I love the threat of fairy tales in that way, the menace. Some end happily ever after, but not as often as you would think.
Oh, that’s great. I was also really curious about the title, Old Crimes. Many of these stories deal with regret, but many of the main crimes were by omission rather than commission. I think growing up Protestant, I forget that’s really a thing, you know? Can you dig into that a little bit more?
Yes, I think there are times when silence is pretty dangerous. And I think that a lot of our regrets in life probably do fall under that category of those times when you don’t speak, don’t act. Given where we are in the world, I think we’re in such a place. It just bothers me any time life is made so simple that it’s this easy either/or, right/wrong label for a person.
I find that really threatening, because humans are a lot more complicated than that. It’s too easy to do away with many things in that way. I mean, I’m thinking in particular of the way one person can have had a positive influence in one way and have done something really terrible in life. Some of the characters there felt that way, and it was interesting to me to do that because I don’t think any human is pure.
Not to immediately drop back to fairy tales, but those simplistic narratives about who is safe are often worse for us.
Yes, and we’re very often wrong when we form those quick judgments and first impressions.
I was struck by the different ways you looked at female characters wishing they had asserted their desires. These women who had sacrificed their whole lives and wished they’d been a little bit more selfish—I loved them.
I think that’s unfortunately a truth, right? I was in high school in the ’70s, with “We’ve Come a Long Way, Baby” [a cigarette jingle] and Gloria Steinem. We had gone from the housewives on TV to Mary Tyler Moore, and things were looking up. They did not keep moving at that rate. In fact, there have been some giant steps backwards. I think that there are women, a little older than I am, especially, who really fell into that place. I think it could be true of a man as well, that you wake up one day and have that sudden realization that years have passed. And that’s a kind of regret, what you did not do or weren’t able to do, like the mother in “The Last Station,” out there with her cross. She’s letting it all out, the years of what she felt were sacrifices.
Another consistent theme was finding the right balance of honesty and selfishness. There’s a perfect amount of both that will keep a relationship functioning and also protect your personhood. These balances are so specific, but you need them.
Right, you do. In my last novel, Hieroglyphics, there’s one character who was a dancer and taught dance, so she’s always talking about balance. And in her old age, she has decided, that’s the magic word: balance. I tend to agree with that. You could take a big swing in either direction, but I’m always thinking, Where’s the bridge between the two? Where is the cog that holds the pendulum?
Looking at both this book and your body of work, this posture of reflecting over the years seems like a place that you like to write from. Why is that a perspective you like so much?
You know, I just think I’m really interested in how we’re shaped by what has already happened, what happened early in life, oftentimes what happened to family members. As children, we hear the stories that are part of our family history, about things that happened before we were born. The best part about getting older is that you really can look behind you, and so many things are as clear as if there’s a map. And you begin to understand and recognize things that you could never have seen in the moment. There’s the wonderful opportunity to learn from ourselves that way, just by looking back and putting things in perspective.
The best part about getting older is that you really can look behind you, and so many things are as clear as if there’s a map. And you begin to understand and recognize things that you could never have seen in the moment.”
Sometimes, I’ll look back and think about kids I was in school with, and it’ll suddenly occur to me, “Oh, wow. Their life was so much harder.” Or you learn one little detail about somebody you grew up with, their family or their situation, and suddenly, the light bulbs go off. And you sort of understand everything you thought you knew in a different way, you know? There’s something very satisfying in that to me, that if you do live long enough, you do have the opportunity to make sense of it. Sadly, what everybody always says is “If only I could have this brain and that body.” I think that’s the wish. But I told an audience recently that if I had to choose, I think I would take the mind over the body. It’s a tough choice some days.
Depends on the day …. You’ve mentioned before that you pull details from your life for your fiction. What is the process like of making those memories distant enough to fictionalize?
Usually, the characters and the situation are far removed, and what I use of mine are details or hobbies or interests that immediately make me feel close to those people. If I have a character remembering something in third grade, I can give them to my third-grade teacher or class.
I’m a big believer in the emotional truth, and that’s what we bring to the page. Flannery O’Connor, as controversial as she is these days and as mean as she could be, I’ve always really admired her whole thing about how you’ve sort of got all you need emotionally as a writer by the time you’re a teenager. I think that’s really true. We know what everything feels like. We know anger, we know love, we know grief. I’ve always encouraged my students to really reach back and reconnect with those primal emotions. When you first recognize and know all these things in their purest form, and then transpose that onto your character.
Comment on this story at backtalk@indyweek.com.
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