Teri Vlassopoulos is back, following up her celebrated novel ESCAPE PLANS with LIVING EXPENSES, a novel about sisterhood, family, infertility, and more. Vlassopoulos talks to me about the story changed over the years that she was working it, and how she took inspiration from books like Amy Fusselman’s THE PHARMACIST’S MATE, which weave the experience of infertility into the wider context of life itself, as just one piece of a larger puzzle, whose other pieces include Sea Shanties, an AC/DC concert, and more, all within the space of about 100 pages.
Teri talks to me about how novel it was to encounter Fusselman’s memoir about infertility more than two decades ago, and about how that story resonated with her long before she’d have her own experiences with infertility. We also talked about Laurie Colwin (of course!), her wonderfully oddly plotted novels about ordinary people, about how food writing found its way into LIVING EXPENSES, and what’s tricky about fitting an infertility narrative into the container of fiction.
As the children to a single mother who immigrated from the Philippines, Laura and Claire have always been exceptionally close. Told from the perspective of Laura, Living Expenses is about a point of divergence in the sisters' lives: Claire has moved to San Francisco for a startup job in Silicon Valley while Laura and her husband, Joe, remain in Toronto and decide to start a family. Laura quickly encounters issues and begins the slow process of fertility treatments. Meanwhile, Claire gets involved in a venture that taps into the fertility industry. Living Expenses interrogates the strain that can accompany even the strongest of relationships, and captures the inevitable creep of technology into all facets of its characters' lives, from communication to reproduction.
Teri Vlassopoulos has published three books, a collection of short stories, Bats or Swallows, which was nominated for the Danuta Gleed Literary Award, and the novels, Escape Plans and Living Expenses. Her fiction and non-fiction has been published in Room Magazine, Catapult, The Millions, The Rumpus, The Quarantine Review, Open Book, and more. She also publishes a regular Substack newsletter, Bibliographic. She lives in Toronto.
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