Use the Words You Have - An Interview with author Kimberly Campanello

A striking debut novel and literary romance, Kimberly Campanello's 'Use the Words You Have' unfurls over a long, hot Breton summer as American student K's relationship with a Breton local ignites her self-actualisation as a woman and a writer. Barred from speaking English by their French Honors programme, the other American students’ identities flicker and fade from the estrangement. Yet for K, who immerses herself deeper into her exchange family’s life, this dissolution makes way for a profound transformation.

Would you consider Use the Words You Have a work of autofiction? How does storytelling, fictional or otherwise, help us better understand our experiences? 

In 1294, in Vita Nuova/New Life, his series of poems about his great lost love Beatrice, Dante created a persona remarkably like the real Dante Alighieri. He even writes an accompanying prose commentary that includes narration of the experiences that precipitated the poems and a discussion of their formal properties and style. In the poems, Dante portrays Love as a body, as a man. In the commentary, Dante discusses this portrayal of Love. He says that Love is ‘accident in a substance’, something that happens unexpectedly to a body; it is not a body, a substance in itself. He says that there is a rationale for his portrayal of Love as a man, as a body, and he could explain that, of course, just as all poets should be able to do regarding their creative decisions. (He does not.) In Use the Words You Have, K is written ‘as if [s]he were a body’, and her story reveals that writing and reading are the actions of the heart pumping blood through a written someone’s veins so we can understand and feel experiences, those we have had, have not had, and possibly never will have.

Why are coming-of-age stories so compelling? Why do we return to these stories even when we’ve aged out of their youth? 

We read these stories when we were becoming, when we were young. We return to them because they remind us that we are still always becoming, even now.

What is the relationship between perspective and memory in the novel?

Can you remember the first time you learned a word in your first language? A fundamental word, like the tide? Maybe not. Can you remember the first time you learned that word in another language? You probably can, and you can probably remember what you were doing when you learnt it, as if that learning was truly momentous, like the moon landing, which was when you were ironing handkerchiefs watching television, like my grandmother. She called them hankies. Was her telling of that story the first time I learned that word?

K is having these experiences through reading and learning a new language, which means she is also experiencing new words for the first time. Words are themselves experiences, and so K creates both a memory of the word, its meaning and its context, and gets a reminder of what words themselves are. K realises that as she is living, she is creating a life with words, and as such, she is reading her life as if it was written. And throughout the book, an older K is speaking to that K, saying, yes, it was so, it was as you planned it, planting those new words, because I remember them, it. 

Language appears almost as a character in its own right in this story. If you had to give this role an archetypal assignment— hero, villain, sidekick, etc— what would you call it and why?

Language is the blood that gets pumped through the heart. It only circulates if you use it. If you read it. Write it. Speak it. Language moving is what makes us live. Language remembers every encounter it’s ever had, every user whose body took it in through reading or listening or seeing or touching and put it back out there in the world by speaking or making a mark on a page. So language is all archetypes at once, which K realises:

There are feelings in and around these things and

the words brush up against them and sometimes they

stop and get to know each other. The words and the feelings

speak to each other. They take their time at this.

Some words are sitting in her heart. They are resting

there for her to use one day, for her to explain all of it

deliberately and with utmost precision. These words are

the most accurate words to explain this. They are the select

few words he says to her when she is lying back and

being taken and being given to. They are gorgeous words

and nasty words. She is both the best and the worst girl

alive. She contains all these words. They flow out from

her and he breathes them in and releases them into the

air like smoke. He doesn’t put the words onto her. He

reads them straight off her flesh and she is grateful for

this.

The story is very transportive— to Brittany, to the summer, to youth, to the beach. What are your favourite beach reads? 

Two erotic French novels K would have loved to read had she found them that summer:

Françoise Sagan, Hello Sadness 

Colette, Green Wheat 

Other perfect companions for Use the Words You Have:

Andre Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

Deborah Levy, Hot Milk 

Michael Amherst, The Boyhood of Cain

And short story collections with at least 2-3 of the elements you mentioned. I first read all of them on the beach: 

Italo Calvino, Difficult Loves 

Joanna Walsh, Vertigo

Clare Fisher, How the Light Gets In 

And two left-field-read-over-two-sweaty-beach-days novels – one set in prehistory that remakes atmosphere and point-of-view, and one set near Derek Jarman’s house on the Dungeness Coast as a strange visitor comes to see a painter called Dolores:

William Goulding, The Inheritors

Abi Curtis, The Headland

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Use the Words You Have by Kimberly Campanello is out now via Somesuch Editions, and available to purchase in Europe via Well Read here.