I first met Emily Doyle eight years ago, when we were both students in a fiction workshop at Stanford University. The story she submitted for critique, “Ronald Reagan Is Reborn as a Puppy and Learns to Behave,” was, and still is, unlike anything I had ever read before—bold in asserting its premise, tender in evoking her characters’ complicated inner lives, and startlingly funny. It contained what I would later come to understand as a hallmark of her work: characters reckoning with power and agency, told with humor and heart. The story is part of her debut collection, Please Don’t Touch the Body, out from Bloomsbury on July 14.

Situated on a sliding scale between realism and surrealism, the eleven stories in the collection make the bizarre moments of everyday life feel both tremendously significant and completely normal. In “Copernicus Is Dying,” a nationwide cricket shortage reveals the cracks in a mother-son relationship as the mother goes from Petco to Petco in search of food for her son’s lizard. In “Thursdays for Haru,” a woman cherishes the alone time provided by her husband’s weekly abduction by aliens. I spoke with Doyle about her stories’ varied approaches to genre and the interplay of touch, power, and connection in her work.

Amanda Rizkalla: I’d like to start by talking about something that unites the stories in Please Don’t Touch the Body, which is touch. In the book, touch is its own form of intelligence. For example, when the alien touches Haru’s wrist in “Thursdays for Haru,” Haru’s mind “fills first with static and then with an understanding of herself.” In “The Diver,” each of the octopus’s tentacles is a “brain-filled limb” responsible for mediating its experience of the world through physical contact.

On the other hand, touch can be destructive when it is unwanted or nonconsensual—I’m thinking of the title story, of course, and some smaller exchanges between characters in other stories. Because the collection explores it so well, and in multiple contexts, could you discuss how touch emerged as a throughline for your book?

Emily Doyle: This is a great question. I’m interested in the moments where we can feel settled and safe enough to receive touch as pleasurable, because that simple act is often made complicated by painful experiences or violations.

The touches throughout the collection are hinge points for the stories. As you said with “The Diver,” the touch the diver shares with the octopus is healing for her, and something she needs to shake herself out of a depression that she has found herself in post-divorce. Touch helps her remember that she wants connection. She wants to be with other people, including her son, whom she’s essentially been neglecting.

I like that you brought up consent because, as you mentioned, touch can also be destructive. Hanging over the whole collection is this plaintive request of not touching, which is also the title of the book: Please Don’t Touch the Body. But of course, touch happens throughout the collection. In the title story, a ghost invades the protagonist’s personal space. The protagonist’s arc is about finding her way to a sense of greater safety. The story ends with her letting herself enjoy touch as a simple pleasure. It can seem like a small moment, but for someone who has been hurt by contact with other people, I think it’s profound.

The protagonist’s arc is about finding her way to a sense of greater safety.

Rizkalla: On a similar note, personal space and solitude are necessary components of self-actualization in these stories. Your characters transform when they have time to themselves. I’m curious what you think it is about solitude, or even the illusion of it, that nudges your characters toward this kind of metamorphosis.

Doyle: I often find the world to be an overstimulating place where you don’t have control over how other people treat you, talk to you, and look at you; this collection is full of people who feel similarly. It’s for people who feel like the barrier between themselves and others is thin and are tired of that. Being able to retreat is important for the characters of this book to recalibrate and figure out how they want to reenter the world. I think that happens in these stories because that’s how I personally move through life. It’s probably something a lot of writers can identify with because this can be a solitary profession. It’s a lot of hours alone, working by yourself. I hope other writers can relate to that.

Rizkalla: I certainly do.

This process of recalibration for your characters brings up a recurring element in the collection: the idea that, sometimes, characters need to leave—to be allowed a complete change of scenery—before they can return to their lives with clarity. A woman spends hours diving in the ocean and surfaces as a more emotionally available mother for her son. An expectant mother needs to lose herself in a paperback thriller before she can confront her feelings about her imminent due date. A law student requires time and space away from her religious upbringing to figure out what she actually values. How do you think this kind of departure helps people better understand themselves?

Doyle: It’s such an interesting subject you raise, this idea of a pause or leaving. Starting from the opposite end, I’m interested in the people who don’t leave, the people who don’t get to pause. Many go through their whole lives without taking a moment to step away and think about what has happened to them, or the choices they are making, or the life that they’re living—people who have this sort of breathlessness about them. The world makes it hard to pause. Our jobs, our lives, our responsibilities—they all pull us along this current of activity that can flow from our childhood to our graves.

The world makes it hard to pause. Our jobs, our lives, our responsibilities—they all pull us along this current of activity that can flow from our childhood to our graves.

I believe, almost in a moralistic way, in the value of retreating from that activity. It's a luxury, though, to be able to step away for even a moment; it’s easier for some people to pause than for others because of constraints related to money and external support that a lot of us can’t access. But it’s my deep hope that people are provided with more opportunities to simply exist.

Rizkalla: Switching gears a bit, some of your stories feature speculative and surreal elements—weekly alien abductions, a ghost draining the life force from an unsuspecting woman, Ronald Reagan reincarnated as a puppy. Could you talk about the impulses and instincts that take your work outside of realism?

Doyle: I was raised in a version of Christianity that was mystical. I’ve been thinking about this a lot because I’ve been trying to understand my impulse toward the surreal and speculative elements in my stories. I grew up in a situation where, if I told an adult in my life, “Hey, I think a demon is trying to attack me as I sleep,” that adult would have said, “A demon, right. Let’s pray.” They would not have said what I would say now to a child, which is something along the lines of, “It sounds like you’re feeling anxious or scared. We should talk about that.” As an adult, I don’t hold particularly religious views, but I do think that as a child I developed, through religion, a flexible relationship to reality that never really went away.

For instance, when I wrote “Thursdays for Haru,” I knew that I wanted it to be about fetishization and the experiences that my grandma and my mom went through as an Asian woman and a part-Asian woman. But the way that manifested in the story ended up taking it outside of realism. In “Thursdays,” a husband has a Japanese wife whom he fetishizes, and when he brings home an alien, there is this moment where he implies that while his wife is still exotic, she is not as exotic as a literal alien. But when I was writing the story, I didn’t really think, And now I’m moving into this speculative element. Here I go. It just happened.

The same is true for “Ronald Reagan Is Reborn as a Puppy and Learns to Behave.” I was interested in Reagan as a historical figure who intensified this era in the Republican Party where masculinity and power and this kind of rugged bootstrap mentality were all intermingled. I wanted to put Reagan in a situation where he lost his power, and that ended up manifesting through him being reincarnated as a puppy. Suddenly, he finds himself at the mercy of his owner who happens to be a queer young person. He’s being yanked around by her, and she and her mother even take him to the vet to be castrated. He’s forced to think of himself not as a man with all the charisma that he had when he was a human, but as this new, much weaker being with the same power-grabbing impulses.

To me, the scale between realism and everything else is slippery. Oftentimes, I don’t even notice myself moving along that scale until after I’ve already drafted something. And then I have to think about how it will be labeled and marketed, or how my agent will sell it, or how my editor will position it. But it’s not helpful to consider this while I’m actually writing.

Rizkalla: This is something I really admire about your work. There is something about even your most surreal stories that resists being categorized as pure science fiction or pure fantasy. Instead of worrying about the confines of genre, you let your stories express their otherworldliness however they want. 

Doyle: I don’t want to pretend that I’m doing anything new. I owe a lot to surrealists like Kafka, whose novella The Metamorphosis is just as much a story about someone being trapped within mental illness as it is about a man turning into a literal insect. And I think Ottessa Moshfegh is doing something fascinating with My Year of Rest and Relaxation, where the events of the novel could almost happen in real life, but the slipperiness of time in that story makes it so that we are not quite functioning according to the physics of our actual world. Of course, Gabriel García Márquez’s sense of the thin veil between the living and the dead, Carmen Maria Machado’s playfulness with genre, and Gerardo Sámano Córdova’s Monstrilio are all doing this as well, and while it can be difficult to categorize their work, I find that really exciting.

Rizkalla: Given the variety of genres your work engages with, I’m wondering if you could walk me through the process of arranging the collection. How did you decide the order in which the stories should appear?

Doyle: I organized the collection in terms of the reader’s energy, with the help of my agent, Amy Bishop-Wycisk; my editor, Grace McNamee; and one of my writing mentors, Michael Jaime-Becerra. I’ve read some collections where I feel like my energy stays up almost the whole time, and there are others where my energy starts to lag as I’m going through the stories. When we were organizing this collection, I asked myself, “What is that about? What makes it so that sometimes I feel engaged throughout a whole collection and sometimes I don’t?” I realized that the answer had to do with variety, which probably comes down to personal taste. And for better or worse, the stories in my collection are certainly varied. For a reader like me, this adds to the fun. Everyone seems to be so concerned about short-story collections and how to make them more like novels, but I like collections that upend expectations throughout in a way that hopefully takes advantage of exactly what a collection can do best. 

But the variety, especially in terms of genre, also made placement tricky! I was wary of a reader picking up the collection and getting three stories in a row that contained surreal elements and then expecting all the stories to be that way, or vice versa. I decided to put a few stories at the top that showed both the thematic variety and the variety of genre, so that the reader could learn what to expect from the collection.

I also had to think about where I wanted to put “Please Don’t Touch the Body” because it’s the longest story and the title story, both of which assigned it more weight. I chose to put it last because that story reads differently if you have the context of the others that come before it. Putting it at the end primes the reader to understand it in a way they might not if they read it first.

Rizkalla: I’m always curious about the moment when a group of stories decidedly becomes a collection of them. Aside from being unified thematically, your collection has some recurring characters, motifs, and settings. What was the process of establishing those connections? Were these links there from the start, or were they something you consciously teased out once the stories felt like a book?

Doyle: You know, I’d challenge any writer to produce a series of stories that aren’t thematically linked. We all have these obsessions to which we can’t help but return over and over and over again. Like I said before, I wanted, and still want, the stories in Please Don’t Touch the Body to feel distinct from one another, for them all to be mixed in terms of genre and style. But also, I can’t get away from my own obsessions, which is a gift because they’re what link the stories thematically.

Rizkalla: And what are those obsessions?

Doyle: In almost everything I write, there is a person—usually a woman—who goes from being in some circumstance of powerlessness to gaining, by the end of the story, a little more power. I am drawn to this journey because of how I grew up, which was in a situation where I wasn’t sure how I would gain power or control. A lot of the women in my life, although they were and are magnificent, could only really get power indirectly. I became fixated on that as a kid and never let it go.

A lot of the women in my life, although they were and are magnificent, could only really get power indirectly.

People want different things from collections. What I personally care about when I read a collection is being able to locate a single mind at the center of the stories, no matter how dissimilar each story might be from the next. I want to unearth a series of fascinations that I can attribute to a particular mind. What I like about collections like Rejection, by Tony Tulathimutte, Her Body and Other Parties, by Carmen Maria Machado, and Vampires in the Lemon Grove, by Karen Russell, is that I can see how the stories come from the same person even though, as I’m reading, every story is so full of surprise. Each exposes a different aspect of each of those writers, and how their specific minds manifest in their work.

Rizkalla: I love that way of putting it—this idea of a single mind asking the same questions of different characters and situations, iterating through the writer’s obsessions.

Doyle: To me, that’s what’s wonderful about collections. The author slowly reveals too much about themselves.

Rizkalla: It’s like a portrait of the author emerges in a short-story collection in a way that maybe you don’t quite see with a novel.

A story collection is a character study of the author themselves.

Doyle: Yes. I love novels, but I think short stories are unique in that way. A story collection is a character study of the author themselves.