Kayla Rae Whitaker wasn’t initially gung-ho about life on the East Coast. But by her second year in NYU’s MFA program, the Kentucky native realized she’d built a life for herself and didn’t want to leave. “I was as surprised as anybody,” she says. “I was surrounded by writers and books, and there were events and wonderful things happening all the time.” Deciding to stick around after graduation, Whitaker took a couple office jobs at NYU and committed to writing 1,000 words of fiction a day — before work, on her lunch breaks, on the subways. Four years later, the result of her toiling is here.
Whitaker’s debut novel, The Animators, out this week from Penguin Random House, tells the story of Mel Vaught and Sharon Kisses, a female animation team transitioning from the underground to the mainstream with the success of their first full-length feature. Sharon—straight and not loving the single life—is the more strait-laced and introspective of the two. Mel—gay and loving the single life—is more of a party animal: raucous, grating, manic. The latter propels much of the story as the women embark on press tours and tear down the walls of their mostly male-dominated profession, but it’s the former who narrates the story, guiding the reader through the different stages of their art, friendships, and tragedies. The Dot and Line caught up with Whitaker to talk about her dynamic duo, New York, and, of course, her own favorite toons.
A good chunk of your book takes place in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bushwick, where Mel and Sharon have their art studio. As someone who used to live on Troutman Street, I wanted to say that you nailed the feel and attitude of the place — especially the rats.
[Laughs.] I hope you didn’t have any in your home.
We had a few in our basement, and I remember tripping over one on the sidewalk once. They are huge and fearless over there.
Yes! Where are you from originally?
I’m from the West Coast. So living here has been a big adjustment: It always feels like I’m running a never-ending marathon.
It does. I just moved to Louisville, Kentucky [from New York] — I’ve been here for six months. I’m originally from Eastern Kentucky, from a very small town in the rural South, and I’m kinda going nuts. I feel like I’ve got this little tremor going on all the time.
The year that I got sober, sitting down and writing those 1,000 words a day, it was a life raft in a big way.
Whenever I come back to the L.A. area, I feel very anxious too, like the world is passing me by and I’m missing something. But then as soon as I get back to New York, I feel like I immediately need a vacation.
That has definitely happened to me. There’s this kind of pressure, and especially now, with the build up to the book and the fact that I work at home, it’s hard not to work all the time.
Speaking of: How did you get to be so disciplined with your 1,000 words a day?
I started when I was really young, which is to say college. One of the biggest personal ties I have with this book is that I’m a recovering alcoholic. (I got sober when I was 21.) The year I got sober, I was in the process of, to use a horrible cliché, picking up the pieces of my life one by one, reconstructing my life, making it one I wanted to live within, not one I had to escape because it was killing me. So the year that I got sober, sitting down and writing those 1,000 words a day, it was a life raft in a big way.
It seems like animation was similarly a life raft for Mel. As you said, her addiction is a very personal thing for you. But it’s also something that many readers might identify with too. How did you make sure to write about something that’s oftentimes so tragic so responsibly?
The thing about [A.A.] meetings and talking to other people who have the same illness, it’s almost like there are these little tendrils that come out and start to connect your very isolated experience with theirs. It’s this lifeline. Despite the fact that when I see Mel I see an addict, I didn’t want to see just an addict. When you’re looking at someone who has this illness, they’re a full-fledged person. That responsibility [to make them three-dimensional] is intimately tied to craft in a very real way.
Was writing about her in that way cathartic?
In the end, yeah, but it also still feels like an ongoing struggle. I got sober pretty young because I became a drunk pretty quickly. I felt ashamed for a lot of my life, and it wasn’t something I talked about for a long time. I come from a really small town, so there’s this voice in the back of your head always that’s like, They’re gonna be talking about you at Wal-Mart, or They’re gonna be gossiping about you in church. I still have to fight to get that voice out of my head. It’s still there on a lot of days, and it kind of felt like I was writing against it on some days.
What made you want to flesh out Mel and Sharon’s relationship in the first place? And why was it important to you to make one of them straight and one of them gay?
Mel came first. The scene where she’s talking about Florida—where she’s talking about the kids throwing marshmallows into the water and the alligators coming up and clamping their jaws over the marshmallows, which was actually a really wonderful tale I picked up from my husband—I could hear the sound of her voice. I knew she was a lesbian in the same way that I knew she was a blonde, in the same way that I knew she was incredibly near-sighted, in the same way that I knew her wrists and knees were really knobby. I knew these things about Mel instinctively, and Sharon really came out as a counterbalance.
The more I wrote about them, the more I thought, Well, you can’t write about them and you can’t write about them working together seamlessly without writing about their difficulties. You can’t write about them without writing about them fighting. With Mel and Sharon, they spend so much time together they fight like a married couple.
It never feels heavy-handed in the books, but here are two feminist badasses who, in their world, are prototypes for the young women who end up following in their footsteps. Mel is very clearly a force to reckon with, but Sharon takes some time to get there.
Sharon’s evolution was really important to me. I wanted her to locate those resources within herself. She’s one to assume a more passive role. And I think women are definitely still bred to be very passive in lots of ways. Sharon grew up in the South, where all of that’s amplified. I wanted Sharon to have the realization that the tools that she’s been born with as a woman were not serving her out in the world, as an artist and as a person. She comes to that realization after a lot of loss. It always kills you to see that — that these things don’t come without a certain price — and I hurt for her when I was writing a lot of this. But the story wouldn’t be honest if that weren’t a factor.
[Eds. note: Light spoilers from the book follow. If you don’t want any plot developments ruined, skip to the next embed.]
It’s tough to read about Sharon’s losses, and it’s especially tough to read about the stroke she suffers about midway through the book. How did you make that section feel so vivid and real?
Around the time I was drafting that section of the book, I actually saw a TED Talk by Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor [a brain researcher who studied her own stroke as it happened in real time]. I thought, Oh my god, that’s it! That’s what happens to Sharon. So I did a lot of research on women as stroke victims and what their recovery is like.
Wow — yeah, that TED Talk is one of my favorites. All the details you employ immediately made me think of it.
It’s amazing! On a more personal note — and I didn’t connect this until after I had written a lot of the hospital scenes — basically the whole time I was growing up my dad was chronically ill. He had a massive heart attack when I was 8 that almost killed him. And I spent my entire childhood in hospitals with him, at his bedside. There were so many midnight trips to the ER and weeks and weekends that we spent at the hospital. He went into a coma and passed away the day after I finished my freshman year at [University of Kentucky]. You think these things don’t have an impact, but then I reread those scenes and I was like, Oh my God, that was my childhood: worrying, anxious, waiting.
I’m always amazed when I see a writer who’s a social butterfly. I suck at all of that stuff.
I feel like this kind of dips into another part of the book that fascinated me: family genetics. Not just what you inherit from your parents physically, but what you pick up on a personality level, too. There’s that notion of kids wanting to be the opposite of their parents — their greatest nightmare being they end up turning into their parents almost to a T. It seemed like Sharon, for example, resents the fact that her mom is so sketchy with guys, but she also falls for guys who are awful for her. I was wondering if you thought these characters were identifying with that fear?
There’s a lot to be said for unconscious influence — those voices you hear in the first five years of your life. I think for Mel and Sharon both it’s a huge part of their sleeping lives as adults, the things that they never talk about, the thoughts and the memories that are in the bedrock of their heads. It all goes back to the things that happened to them in the first 10 years of their life. I’m 32, and I’m hurtling toward middle age. I can feel it. I can feel certain things solidifying, and it’s scary in a way to realize, Wow, the potential for change is not as great for me now as it was 10 years ago.
What do you mean by that?
I’m always amazed when I see a writer who’s a social butterfly. And they’re there — they’re a hoot, they’re great, they’re great at networking. I suck at all of that stuff. There was this point in my life when I thought, Well, at some point I’m just gonna become more comfortable with that. There’s still hope for me. Nothing doing. I’m in the same position I was in a decade ago.
I was trying to write a book that would feel real, especially for people who grew up with Nickelodeon — did you watch a lot of Nickelodeon?
You said it feels like you’re hurtling toward middle age. I think Sharon and Mel would say they feel the same. What is it for them that’s so terrifying about adult life?
Particularly for Sharon — and there’s probably an edge of this for Mel as well — when her life is painful or mundane, she soothes herself with her imagination. But I think the really scary thing, probably in a comforting way as well, about getting older, is that yeah, your possibilities begin to narrow. You begin to live one kind of defined life. It doesn’t mean you can’t make enormous changes or change your life trajectory, because you absolutely can. But for Mel and Sharon, in a very specific way, they hit 30 and it’s kind of like Oh, God, there are options that are sealing off! It’s a weird sour note to getting older, but it’s definitely there, and I think there’s this fear of, What if I’m living the wrong life?
The story at its core is about two women struggling to create their art. What made you pick animation over other media as the best way to tell their story?
A big part of it is just envy. I can’t draw, and I really wish I could. I’ve always loved animation. I watched a lot of Warner Bros. when I was a kid. I used to watch those old Merrie Melodies. And when I was 9 or 10 years old, I caught Liquid Television on MTV. It scared me a little bit and made me uncomfortable, but it also made me very, very happy. I actually did some scholarly work with cartoons when I was in college.
What did you do?
As an undergrad at the University of Kentucky, I got caught up in the image of the hillbilly in animation. Specifically, Squidbillies, which is like 10 seasons long now. The story of a bunch of squids living in north Georgia, driving their truck around, clicked with all the other research and study I was doing on general cultural perceptions of Eastern Kentucky and large parts of the South as a whole. So I guess it was kind of natural that I had these two women I wanted to write about, and my personal obsession with animation probably has a lot to do with the fact that they became animators.
Your obsession shows. This is a book that mentions Cowboy Bebop on one page and Robert Crumb on another. How did you pick which animation references these characters would cite? And how do you do that without bogging the story down in unnecessary details?
It was a really delicate balance. The weird details that I loved best are the girls using a mirror to check their perspective when they’re drawing something, just to make sure that the form looks the way they want it to from the opposite side. Things like that make the story real. I think Vaughn Bodē [who wrote Deadbone Erotica] gets a mention. I would love to encounter somebody who reads the book and says, Hey, I love this guy!
My editor helped tremendously with this. I think by the time I started working with Random House, I’d been with the story for probably five years. You want to nerd out a little bit, because nerding out is fun and nerding out makes a story move. But you don’t want it to become too sick. So that outsider perspective helped a lot. I was trying to write a book that would feel real, especially for people who grew up with Nickelodeon — did you watch a lot of Nickelodeon?
Tons. I was of the Angry Beavers, Rocko’s Modern Life era. Rugrats was appointment television in my household.
Yeah, Rugrats was an amazing show. It was a deeply weird show, but the look of it was really fun and colorful. You could enjoy a lot of the jokes on two levels. It was the same with The Simpsons. I think I got more of an education from The Simpsons and from shows like Rugrats than I did from school.
Do you have any favorite Simpsons or Rugrats episodes?
There’s that amazing episode of Rugrats [Season 2’s “Party Animals”], where the adults are having a party downstairs, and a very bizarre, and in retrospect, very drunk man who was dressed up like a baby comes upstairs and scares the hell out of the kids. I loved that. I loved the soundtrack, too. Years later, when I was in high school, I started listening to a lot of DEVO, and I realized that Mark Mothersbaugh did music for Rugrats so there was a lot of spillover into my adult life. But I liked that, and I like that we can talk about it. We meet people our age and they have a really deep connection to something like that or Hey Arnold!
That was another one of my favorites. Same with Doug.
Yeah, I liked Doug.
They were such funny shows, but they were all quasi-depressing with their underdog natures. It seems like they all borrowed at least a little bit from Charlie Brown.
Did you read a lot of Peanuts when you were a kid?
A little bit. The comic strip I read the most as a kid was Calvin and Hobbes.
Oh, yeah! Oh, man. There’s a big four-book volume on our bookshelf right now. I loved Calvin and Hobbes. It’s interesting that you bring up Peanuts, though. I hadn’t really thought about that before, but it makes total sense.
What’s that?
There’s this underlying sadness and futility to Peanuts. We had an old Peanuts volume from the ’60s or ’70s. It had belonged to my uncle, and I picked it up and started reading it when I was about 8. I read it over and over. I must have read that book literally 500 times, and it was just so dark. It’s really, really depressing. There’s a wide thread of that running through Nickelodeon.
Not enough to totally turn a kid off of it, though.
Mhmm.
I don’t think you ever watch a show like Doug and think, Man, I love Doug because he’s so cool! Quailman is a different story, obviously — but yeah, as a kid you’re never scared away from watching.
I remember watching Doug and feeling a sadness for Roger. Like man, that guy is going through a major identity crisis [laughs].
One shout-out that sneaks its way into your book is the Cintiq, the electronic board Mel and Sharon use for drafting. It’s funny: these women are so old-school, but they eventually can’t resist this device that makes their creative process that much easier. It’s obvious we both miss Doug. But since Mel and Sharon evolve with the times, I wanted to also ask you about your more current animation obsessions.
Well, I gotta say, I’m so glad I live in a world with Adult Swim. Huge Adult Swim fan. I love Rick and Morty.
Oh. My. God.
[Laughs.] Are you a Rick and Morty fan?
Huge. Eric [Vilas-Boas, editor of The Dot and Line] and I have ranked every episode.
Oh, man. So in the top five you have to put the cable episode [Season 1’s “Rixty Minutes”], right?
Yep.
Okay, good!
Do you have a favorite episode?
It’s probably the cable one, just for the gags and other kinds of ridiculousness. I’m also a fan of whenever Rick gets his heart busted. Like the end of the second season, where he just kind of forsakes the whole family — as the kids say, it gave me all the feels.
Do you also watch BoJack Horseman by any chance?
I love BoJack. And I’m really glad to see that there are these cartoons coming out that have that Peanuts layer to them. The humor coexists with really awful things, as happens in real life. The episode that was entirely without language [Season 3’s “Fish Out of Water”], where he goes to the underwater city to do promotional stuff and he finds the baby seahorse — amazing.
Such a good episode.
You know what else I love — I think it’s a widespread love, which is a good thing — is Bob’s Burgers. It’s so sweet without being sappy. Do you watch Bob’s Burgers?
If we’re being honest, I actually somehow like Bob’s Burgers more than Rick and Morty. Meaning I love Bob’s Burgers so much.
Me too. The episode where Bob keeps finding his turkeys in the toilet [Season 4’s “Turkey in a Can”], and he’s getting so pissed off?
[Laughs.]
He’s like, Who’s doing this?
[Still laughing.]
And he’s sleepwalking and he thinks it’s Tina going through potty training again. The line I remember from that show—[laughs]—is, “Wow, Tina you really had to go.” That episode made me so happy. It was about family and connection and loving your kids. But it wasn’t saccharine.
Such a good show. Especially if you love puns, right?
I think Gene is the king of puns. What’s your favorite episode?
I guess it’s a cop-out to say I don’t have a favorite episode, but my favorite moment at least, which always comes to my mind whenever I’m trying to describe the show to someone, is in the episode where Tina learns how to drive [Season 3’s “Tina-Rannosaurus Wrecks”].
Oh, yeah!
It’s such an absurd scene to watch, but it makes so much sense at the same time. You’re watching her inch the car toward the only other car in the parking lot and it’s perfect. But I also really love any of the musical-heavy episodes. I wrestle a lot with who my favorite character is. It used to be Tina, but now it might be Louise because she’s become way more three dimensional than she used to be.
Yeah.
Maybe it still is Tina. When they did “The Equestranauts” episode — I mean that was insane. Dan Mintz wrote it, which is why I think it’s so good. Who knows the character better than the guy who actually is Tina?
That is a really great episode. Her latent sexuality is written so well. It’s kinda gross and clammy, but very real. That’s as close as you can come to a 14-year-old girl’s sex drive. There’s one still where she’s slow dancing by herself. It’s one of the most uncomfortable things I think I’ve ever seen. [Laughs.]
Also, I love any excuse to see Tina run —
[Laughs.]
—or do her weird nervous groaning noise.
[Does a really good impression of Tina groaning.]
Bingo! Yeah, the first time I ever saw Tina do that, I died laughing. That was when my like for the show became love.
It’s so good. Fox used to be so terrible. It used to be Cops 24/7. To have a show like Bob’s Burgers is kind of amazing. I haven’t watched a whole lot of network TV in the last 10 years, but I probably watch more Fox than I do any other network.
Do you watch any of the Fox ADHD stuff?
I just got Hulu, so I feel like I’m playing catch-up.
I just ask because I feel like it was their answer to Adult Swim, but somehow even weirder.
Yeah.
Axe Cop is so strange. Golan the Insatiable is so dark. Lucas Bros. Moving Co. —
I haven’t watched that last one, but I’ve wanted to.
I really, really like that show. It’s not really like Bob’s Burgers, but it reminds me of it in the sense that it has a weird charm about it, especially if you like the Lucas Brothers’ stand-up. It’s amazing to see their minds working in this way.
I’ll check it out. You know what I loved discovering?
What’s that?
I can’t remember loving a show so immediately, but it was Harg Nallin’ Sclopio Peepio. Did you ever watch it?
I didn’t. What’s it about?
It was Brad Neely. He did China, IL, which was amazing, and also the “Professor Brothers” shorts online. It was so weird. The show was like a mosaic; like really weird 10- or 15-second clips, built into a 15-minute show. I started watching that this summer in the middle of our move. Like most moves, it was frustrating. So I would watch Harg Nallin’ Sclopio Peepio to cheer myself up.
A lot of the people who I know who are really funny, humor is their knee-jerk reaction for when something horrible happens or for when they’re struggling with depression.
There’s a lot of humor — dark and light — in your book. Did you draw from any particular comedic influences?
I actually love sketch comedy. My first real sketch comedy show that I loved was The State on MTV. I was about 9 when I started watching and I loved it. It was the first time I’d ever seen sketch comedy. I didn’t even know that that concept existed. I was also a really big fan of Mr. Show and The Ben Stiller Show. And I was a really big Kids in the Hall fan — so much so that we drove to Canada to see the performance live.
Wow, that must have been incredible.
It was probably one of my life’s fondest memories. I really like stand-up too. I’ll put on Patton Oswalt and Mitch Hedberg when I’m doing stuff around the house. It’s all a really big influence on my fiction. When I see humor in a novel, that’s a really big draw for me, too. That’s why I’ve always loved George Saunders. I haven’t read Lincoln in the Bardo yet. I’m curious: Can you make Lincoln funny?
I haven’t read it yet either, but that would be a feat. I’m reading Poking a Dead Frog [Mike Sacks’ book of interviews with comedy writers] right now, and there’s a great quote from Bruce Jay Friedman in it. He says, “I’m not comfortable with the idea of ‘using’ humor to achieve a purpose. I can’t imagine Evelyn Waugh, while writing Decline and Fall, saying, ‘I think I’ll use a little humor here.’” As he implies, humor’s never supposed to be a clinical device, but I did want to ask you how you thought about injecting humor into this book while writing it. Both Mel and Sharon feel so naturally funny and unfunny.
I love that quote. It makes a lot of sense. When Mel turns into an ass, she’s incredibly funny. It’s stressful for the people around her because she’s a natural exhibitionist. It really is something that would occur naturally when I would start envisioning Sharon and Mel having a fight, and Mel would draw a little comic while they’re arguing on the subway platform.
The weird thing is humor would pop up when I was writing scenes that were hard to write. A lot of the people who I know who are really funny, humor is their knee-jerk reaction for when something horrible happens or for when they’re struggling with depression. I have yet to figure out if it’s a defense mechanism against darkness or if it’s something that goes hand in hand with the darkness.
What do you think it is for Mel?
I think it’s something that goes hand in hand. She would never be able to filter out her sense of humor. For a lot of women in particular, we’re conditioned to be very pleasing and to not tell jokes as much. Mel has none of that, which made her fun to write.
It seems like her humor is a double-edged sword. It’s a defense mechanism, but it almost always foreshadows something bad about to happen.
Yeah, it’s heartbreaking. I thought about writing about stand-up comedians more than once. At some point it’s gonna pop up on my radar.
If you don’t mind sharing, what’s on your plate next?
There’s one project I’ve been working on that was my thesis at NYU, about a woman who’s 75 and gains custody of her three grandsons in rural Eastern Kentucky. Among other things she was a semi-pro wrestler in the ’50s, and she is the least maternal person on earth. It’s about her attempting to raise her grandchildren. Another is about a rabies outbreak in a small town also in Eastern Kentucky — I can’t get away from home. It’s about this group of punk kids who end up being quarantined together. There are a couple other seedling ideas I have, and I can see really clear characters popping out of them. Usually, a good sign.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Photo of Kayla Rae Whitaker: Danielle Siess
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