Mary Kuryla’s debut novel, Away to Stay, tells the dreamy and disquieting tale of Olya, a 12-year-old living a transient life with her mother, Irina. After Irina abandons Olya, leaving her in the care of a strange man named Jack, Olya finds herself for the first time experiencing what it feels like to have a place to call home. Olya finds herself in an unexpected battle of wits when she tries to train Jack’s stubborn dog, Bird. It doesn’t take long for the effort to evolve into a full-on dog heist. Kuryla has successfully captured the desperations of homelessness. PW spoke with Kuryla about finding the voice of her narrator, the meaning of home, and more. (This interview has been edited for clarity.
Away to Stay is at once tender and madcap, successfully capturing a bold coming-of-age narrative from the perspective of a 12-year-old girl. How did the idea for the novel come into form?
The idea for the novel was in part conceptual: how would a preoccupation with shelter and the comforts of a home affect a person’s relationships to family and friends? Could the longing be so profound that it would color how a person perceived the world? I wanted to explore what that longing for home would look and feel like through the eyes of a young girl.
Another part was anecdotal: I knew a man who would rouse his hunting dogs from under his house by shooting at the floor. These ideas combined with reports from friends of being locked out or expelled from their homes, but still they did not leave. They stayed by the house or under it. Homes have a gravitational hold over the human psyche, and no wonder. The most basic humans needs are food, water, air, and shelter.
The final part was a kind of bearing witness to the failure of this wealthy country to ensure these most basic needs for its people. There is no doubt that the heartbreaking rise in the number of unhoused people in Los Angeles over the past 5 years is unprecedented in my lifetime, and this reality underscored the urgency of delivering Olya’s story, which is populated by adults one step away from homelessness.
Olya's mother, Irina, is a Russian émigré who sacrifices her daughter’s security and safety to pursue her dreams. How did you come up with this character? And how did you approach crafting Olya’s worldview and voice, particularly the manner with which she relates to such a broken and unfamiliar world?
Much of what I imagined about Irina came from my marriage to the author Eugene Yelchin (Genius Under the Table, Candlewick), who emigrated from Russia in his twenties. Eugene arrived in the US with $72 in his pocket and little English at his disposal. His was a country where the political institutions destroyed the very fabric of the nuclear family to instill primary allegiance to the state. The character of Irina is a tragic depiction of what these destructive political forces ultimately produce. In creating the character of Irina, I wondered whether America had produced its own version of the destruction of family.
With Olya, I wanted to portray a character for whom too much longing for home would color everything, perhaps even affect how her brain perceived the world. Would this obsessive longing heighten or dull the senses? In Olya, I think we see versions of both. Olya is the book’s narrator as well as its central protagonist. We see the world through her eyes and her linguistic system. The book starts in media res, with Olya outside of a house about to knock on the door. This felt right because Olya has lived life on a threshold. Any minute it could start, this life of hers, but it cannot commence, at least in her mind, without a home, shelter, roots.
Olya's language, in the beginning of the novel is not so much stilted as hewn by her reading of the Bible, which she stole from one of the so-called vacancies she and her mother stay in when times are good. Itinerant, brought up by an immigrant, and a reader of the Bible, Olya perceives her world through the scrim of biblical wisdom. This has conferred upon her a unique view of home, especially its interstices and cracks. The work of such astonishing writers as Noy Holland, Christine Schutt, Ali Smith and Joy Williams, to name a few, were essential guides in navigating Olya’s voice.
Your novel tackles transience in a manner that's so uncanny yet understated. As someone that has experienced homelessness, I’m fascinated with how you so accurately captured that precarious balance of tunnel vision and desperation. Could you talk about how you worked on achieving this balance?
Olya’s years of an itinerant life with her mother has resulted in a kind of deprivation of the senses. There is no room for her to enjoy, let alone luxuriate, in the simple pleasures of nature, popular culture, or even friendship. She remains hypervigilant to simply surviving. How can we, the reader, entrust her to deliver reality as it is? It was after taking a workshop with the brilliant teacher and writer Charlie D’Ambrosio that I began to grasp the complicated maneuver of writing a narrator who is both interpreter of the story and an actor in it. The key, it seemed, came in embracing Olya’s longing and obsession and allowing this to be the window, clouded as it was, through which we would look.
Olya and Jack become obsessed with trying to train Bird, a dog exhibiting, among other things, a dire sense of wanderlust. Might it be that Bird is indicative of transience itself, perhaps an emblem of planting roots and of settling down?
Yes! Longing for home, but incapable of staying; Bird is the embodiment of that tension, the purest and most innocent version of it. Bird reflects Jack’s ambivalence and loss of trust in others and the world in general. Jack wants Bird to trust him to be his master, and yet Jack does not even trust himself, let alone Bird. His time in Afghanistan is in part to blame. This tension reaches its apotheosis in Jack’s relationship with Irina. No matter what Jack does, Irina will not stay with him, nor will she quite leave him, either. Jack can’t make Irina stay, so he takes this out on Bird.
Jack has come home from fighting in another American proxy war of geopolitics and fossil fuels, only to be cast out into the wilderness of the American suburbs. We are not much interested in our warriors, especially when they return and most need our support. American vets are treated as damaged goods, as the hundreds of unhoused veterans encamped outside the Veterans Administration in Los Angeles’ wealthy Westwood area attest. This longing for home but being incapable of staying plays out in several scenes in the novel.
Maybe the proverb really is true: "Home is where the heart is." In the case of Irina, Olya’s mother, Jack, how does home translate to each of the characters?
For Irina, home equals danger, even death. It is through her character that the legacy of the Soviet system’s destruction of the nuclear family is played out in her constant fear and refusal to unite her own family. In Jack, we bear witness to the military’s abandonment of servicemen, and even working animals. Jack prizes his home, even if it is falling apart, and is reluctant to share it. He knows there is nothing standing between him and the street if he cannot make his mortgage.
In Olya, the legacy of an indigent life manifests in a girl at once wise beyond her years and, despite all her declarations of wanting to stay, terrified of commitment. But despite these traumas, the characters have endured. They behave badly on occasion, and why would we expect otherwise in people so abandoned by the system and by each other? In the end, I was hoping the novel would inspire exploration of our own conditional response to what is acceptable behavior for those who struggle to obtain their most basic survival needs.
What does home mean to you? Has it changed for you or remained the same?
I don’t know much about astrology, except that my sign is Cancer and our most dominant trait is love of home. That would be true of me. I grew up in Michigan and loved my home and family, but when my dad died, I was ten, we were displaced and thereafter moved often; once we lived in three different houses on the same street. From college on, I continued the pattern of moving from one apartment to another then across the country. I married a Russian émigré, who had risked his life to leave his home. I had this image of us both leaving our homes and setting out on new terms. But we ended up living longer than I’ve ever lived anywhere in a house in the woods in Topanga Canyon, where we raise our sons, while knowing we cannot stay because of the fires that worsen every year and the fact that we don’t have the means to protect our home so we could perhaps stay. The wilderness now seems only the province of the rich.
When my mom passed away last year, and my husband and I discussed putting our house on the market, I had a kind of crisis. I came to realize that for me, losing my home was aligned with losing a parent.
Going is easy. Staying is hard. Staying takes character. Olya develops character in this novel through her stubborn determination to stay, which is precisely what Jack needed so desperately from someone. In turn, Olya learns that it is not the house that matters but the people in that house, the people that were there, perhaps, all along, they just needed to be uncovered. She had to stay find them.
