Ideas about partnership seem to be shifting beneath our feet. The language of polyamory and ethical non-monogamy has entered the mainstream just as renewed appeals to domesticity and tradition have found enormous audiences of their own. Relationships of all shapes—romantic, familial, platonic—feel simultaneously more open to reinvention and, conversely, tethered to tradition.
Though the plot of Carrboro writer Elisa Faison’s debut novel, Skin Contact, hinges on a couple navigating their newly opened marriage, the book is equally concerned with lineages past and lineages projected—grief; sexuality; motherhood; the identities women inherit, subvert, and outgrow; and what is kept of institutions when tradition is subverted. Skin Contact introduces the question of whether, by opening her marriage, its protagonist will be able to avoid disappearing beneath the roles she’s expected to occupy.
Skin Contact follows Frances and Ben after they decide to open their marriage in the wake of Frances’s mother’s death and her own crisis of self. Its premise is undeniably sexy from the first page. As lovers come and go, friends become confidants and antagonists alike and new relationships throw old assumptions into question, Faison builds an ensemble novel that’s as interested in friendship and family as it is romance.
The result is a book that resists becoming an argument about how people should love and is, instead, an exploration of how they actually do: imperfectly, unexpectedly, and often without the language to explain it themselves.
Faison, a former local bookseller, recently finished a PhD in contemporary American fiction at UNC-Chapel Hill. She brings both researched exploration of the domestic novel and innate curiosity about changing shape of familial life without ever losing sight of the people at its center. On the heels of the book’s June release, Faison spoke with the INDY about Yesteryear, building a novel from interconnected stories, and writing beyond the clichés surrounding polyamory.
INDY Week: Skin Contact spans several years and follows several different interconnected lives. At what point did you know the shape the novel was going to take? Or was that always in the background?
FAISON: It took a little while. I published the first story that I wrote, “Mother Love,” which is the first chapter of the book now. I wrote that just total as a standalone short story and was actually working on another novel at the time that was out on submission which was really different. It was more of a classic rom com. I was just going crazy with that being, you know, out on submission and, well, that’s not gonna be published. That just went away. [laughs] That will never see the light of day. It will live on my computer forever.
Then I wrote “Group Sex,” and that’s about the same Ben and Frances characters. Once I sort of did this for the third time, when I was writing about another character in their world, I was like, ‘Maybe this is a novel project.’ At that point I thought, ‘This is going to be a bigger work that I can put together…do I need to restructure this to be a third person omniscient regular novel that can alternate or jump perspectives between people?’
But I really didn’t want to because something about the idea of the topic, openness and polyamory—I wanted it to be a more fluid form. I wanted it to kind of mirror the dating experience. You can sometimes meet someone and feel really connected with them and really invested in their life. And then maybe you don’t see them again, or maybe they just pop up tangentially later, like, at the grocery store. I wanted it to feel like that. And then I got excited about that idea. But I also became really interested in more of the friend group and family dynamics.
The chapter-asides are titled things like “A Few Questions and Helpful Comments Their Friends Have About Adam and Celeste.” The language around polyamory and non-monogamy and open relationships has evolved so much in recent years, at least it seems that way, and so many people’s assumptions about what those relationships look like have also changed. As you were writing Skin Contact, how did you want to reflect those evolving conversations?
I really wanted to consider the changing perspectives. And that was one reason, too, that I wanted to include some of the previous generations. Because I wanted to think about on the long scale: How have perspectives of marriage and monogamy and wifehood and what we owe to our partner, how have those perspectives changed? I think the way that even Frances’s mother and Frances use a term like “marriage” are really different.
Then on the micro, you’re exactly right. The basic words that we use to describe non-monogamy or polyamory—is it ethical, non-monogamy, or relationship anarchy—all of these things have changed. Even in the time of writing they were changing. And I wanted to include the different perspectives and keep it really topical. There was initially sort of a monkeypox judgment happening in those [chapters of commentary from Ben and Frances’ friends]. And we were like, ‘Okay, this is dating it.’ So we took that out. But a character like Ben, who wants to be very correct in all his terms, and he’s sort of constantly focusing on editing himself in his head or changing the words that he’s using to use the right words—I wanted that to be reflected there, too.
As I was reading, I was like, I know this guy.
Yeah, I know. He’s totally the kind of guy especially. Especially if you are in graduate school.
We’re in this moment culturally, as you just said, in which people are questioning inherited ideas of marriage and partnership. But there’s also this renewed interest in stability and tradition and, well, the tradwife culture of it all. Those trends are existing in contrast to each other but also, you see their roots and discourse intertwined. Did you feel that tension while you were writing this book?
Thank you so much for asking. Yes, I was thinking about that a lot! When I was writing my PhD, the evolution of domestic fiction and how portrayals of the house were reflected in the portrayals of the women and women’s interiority. There’s a connection always between the woman, the speaker of early novels, to the house itself.
When I was thinking of Skin Contact, you know—I mentioned that I wanted it to be an open form structure; I wanted to keep it a little bit messy, to feel a little more chaotic. Partially that’s because I wanted to reflect the changing views of domestic life that we have now. So if the novel is the house—with different rooms you can enter but it’s all tied together by the main protagonist—I wanted to question our view of the house as a stable thing and to consider how our art forms have to change if we change these traditional ideas of domestic life and marriage.
I wanted to question our view of the house as a stable thing and to consider how our art forms have to change if we change these traditional ideas of domestic life and marriage.”
With something like Yesteryear—which I was obsessed with, to be clear—that novel is dealing with kind of the same idea: What happens when the privacy of the house is just totally blasted and made public. Being an Instagram influencer, a tradwife influencer, is on the same spectrum, kind of, as opening your marriage. You’re allowing what has been traditionally a really private space and a private relationship—that you sort of “don’t ask, don’t tell” of someone’s marriage—you’re inviting that to really be on display. You’re getting a lot of questions, you’re getting a lot of feedback, and you have to decide what image you want.
I think something like Yesteryear is playing with that by exploding the balance of time and space. And I wanted to do something similar even though it’s deeply non-traditional. I’m really curious about how domestic fiction is changing right now. And there are a lot of different ways that it’s changing, even as we’re trying to bring the focus back to the home.
People are increasingly looking for certainty in everything they consume—politics and identity and relationships in literature and media. Skin Contact seems comfortable leaving room for something ambiguous, and comfortable asking questions instead of answering them definitively. Was that push for certainty, being too didactic, something that you wanted to actively resist?
It was. I would say it became something I wanted to actively resist. When I had the initial seed for the novel I was working as a bookseller at Flyleaf Books, and I am also in an open marriage, a polyamorous marriage. I was reading a lot of books and feeling really bothered by the portrayals that I was seeing. They just didn’t feel quite right to me. Most of the things I was reading were either exploring polyamory as a kind of stopgap before you find the right person, or it was connected really clearly with abusive relationships.
It’s either portrayed as something misguided that you try in a relationship before you realize it doesn’t work or before you grow out of it or what have you. Or it’s written as a tool of abuse in many great books. But none of that felt true to my experience or the experiences of most people I knew. I did have the idea of wanting very specifically to show a polyamorous relationship in a certain light that was a healthier and more positive depiction.
But that also was immediately just kind of boring, too neat and tidy! As I was sitting with it and working on it, I was thinking “In order for it to be this healthy portrayal there have to be fights and confusion and conversations and additional conversations and new feelings that you don’t expect to have.” Because all of that is part of a healthy relationship.
When I wanted to bring in the other perspectives and opinions too, then, it felt equally important to me to treat every one of those other forms of relationships with the same level of care that I was treating Ben and Frances’s open marriage. I have, in the book, as I have in real life, literally no agenda as to what type of relationship anyone wants to be in. I just wanted to treat all of them with care and have every character be a well-rounded character who is sometimes making a bad choice and sometimes making a good choice, no matter what type of relationship they’re in.
Along those lines, something I kept noticing was that Ben could have really easily, at so many points, become either an antagonist or a saint by making even slightly different decisions than he does or reacting to things differently. I’ve been curious what you thought about writing him with that kind of complexity, but I feel like you just answered it.
There are a couple of straightforwardly antagonistic people but mostly, I think, people aren’t like that. I think everyone makes mistakes and can do something really bad. And most of the time they just don’t mean to and they want to then fix it. I love Ben and he feels very precious to me. He was an especially complicated character to write because, well, the men of polyamory are horrible! I mean, not really. That’s obviously a joke!
But, to be fair, the cliches are tough to avoid!
The cliches abound! Anytime you hear about someone in pop culture, the media, invoking polyamory, it’s always like, David Harbour who used polyamory to cheat with impunity on Lily Allen or whatever. So there’s that stereotype and it felt so important to me to just consciously throw that on its head by having Frances be the instigator but also to make sure Ben wasn’t simply the saint either. It was hard for me, and I hope that it worked.
What kind of conversations have you had with readers since the book came out? Have there been any interpretations that have surprised you?
Oh, my gosh. A lot of people, way too many people have revealed secrets about their marriage to me that I wish I didn’t know. I’m here for the gossip, but sometimes I’m like, ‘Oh, my god, now I have to hold that!’
Total strangers!
Total strangers! Sometimes family members, all kinds of stuff! But actually, everyone who I’ve spoken to has been incredibly kind and positive. I think what has surprised me is that it is often not the demographic of a person that I would expect who has told me that it was a wonderful read for them. Someone said to me: “I’ve never known anyone in an open marriage. I’ve never read about this before and I’ve always felt really suspicious about it. But these were just normal people!” So, it’s actually been a really nice, positive response and that has sometimes surprised me.
Then you also go into the hellscape of Goodreads, and, well, that response can feel surprising, too. Some readers just don’t like the structure, which is totally fine, but the kind of polarizing nature of the structure was a surprise. But I really like it, so what can you do?!
You live in the South, in a very progressive pocket in the South here in Carrboro. Were you considering that broader cultural context specifically here, or did you want it to feel more anonymous and universal?
I didn’t consciously, I think, choose one or the other, except for the fact that it is deeply set in Chapel Hill. I’m so happy when some people have realized that Ben is hanging out at Linda’s. So it is very much here. I never wanted to reset it or consciously set it in New York City or somewhere like that. The only setting that I specifically delineated is that the chapters from Frances’s grandmother are in a small town in Tennessee. Which is indicated by her proximity to Vanderbilt. That does feel important to me.
We did a full cast for the audiobook, and they asked me if there were any regional accents. They did such a good job because the person who narrates the grandmother’s chapter has a Southern accent, and then the person who narrates the mother’s chapters has a very light Southern accent. And then Frances doesn’t have one. So I think it shows how regionalism has changed,but also avoids erasing where it’s set.
I want it to feel universal but I also think that it being set in the South doesn’t keep it from being universal because these issues of open marriage, queerness, everything—that’s everywhere.
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