Past Lives: Rivka Galchen

Past Lives is an interview series with School of the Arts Writing faculty, students, and alumni who began their professional lives on different career paths. In this series, we discuss the lives they led before they became artists—and how their work in other industries informs the creative work they do now. Here, we talk to Associate Professor, Head of Fiction, and Writing alumna Rivka Galchen '06 about her journey into and out of medicine, kooky scientists, and raising the fictional stakes.

Rivka Galchen is an award-winning fiction writer and journalist whose work appears often in The New Yorker, Harper’s, The London Review of Books and The New York Times. She is the author of four books: Atmospheric Disturbances (Novel, FSG, 2008), American Innovations (Short Stories, FSG 2014), Little Labors (Essays, New Directions, 2016), and her latest, Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch (FSG 2021). She has received numerous prizes and fellowships, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rona Jaffe Fellowship, The Berlin Prize and The William J Saroyan International Prize in Fiction. In 2010, she was named to The New Yorker’s list of 20 Writers Under 40. In addition to an MFA in Writing, Galchen also holds an MD from Mount Sinai School of Medicine.

Before you started your MFA at Columbia, you received your MD from Mount Sinai. Why did you make the decision to go to medical school?

Rivka Galchen: There's a lot of different reasons people end up in medical school. Mine was maybe not the best, because I didn't end up there because I loved medicine and I had two passions: medicine and writing. I wish that was my story, but it's totally not. I am a naturally dutiful and obedient kind of person, and I felt that I owed it to my family to pursue a reliable, stable, respectable profession.

My father went to Columbia, actually, for graduate school in applied mathematics and he did not put that much pressure on me to pursue a practical career, mostly because he suddenly died when I was just a few weeks into my freshman year of college. But that left my mom in a sad and difficult predicament. Understandably, that made her all the more interested in my having a very independent, stable career. Now that I'm a parent myself, I understand this a lot better than I used to, but she really was almost obsessed with this idea of “Why wouldn't you do this if this is available to you?” I felt like that was reasonable. I didn't grow up knowing any artists or writers or anything like that; and I had—probably unfairly—a sense that those were great luxuries, and not appropriate goals.

When did you shift focus?

RG: I sort of have a “negative” way of making decisions—which I don't advise—but even in high school I was always writing. It's what I took very seriously, what I enjoyed, but it wasn't something I thought I would go for directly.

I just noticed that when I was in medical school, I changed from someone who loved school and was always trying to please and was always doing my best and had my heart in it, to one of these disaffected, detached, kind of cynical people. And I really didn't recognize that person. That's just not me. I would have dreams that I had failed out and, weirdly—this is sort of embarrassing—I had these dreams that I had failed medical school and been offered a research assistant position with Toni Morrison. Total strange dreams that were very transparent. So, it was like I kept walking backwards towards pursuing a career in writing.

I didn't know why I would be in my twenties and be aggrieved and bitter. It didn't seem appropriate, especially knowing how lucky I am as a person. And it was in trying to not become that kind of person that made me think, well, there would be nothing wrong with trying to have a career in writing and it not working out and then doing something else. That would feel very different than never trying. So when I finished medical school, the story I told myself was that I would keep a hand in medical research. I knew I wasn't going to be a clinician. That wasn't a setting that worked for me, but I thought, I'll keep my hand in public health research, and I can go back to it, and I'll only be all the more open to it for having pursued what I really love first.
 

Were you writing while you were in med school?

RG: Yes, I was always trying to write. I was in a workshop at the 92nd Street Y. What was comical was that I had a friend in my medical school class who published his first novel before he started medical school and then wrote a second novel while in medical school and loved medicine and was really passionate about it and was making it all work. So it was clear that this was an option for someone, but that just wasn't me.

When you left medical school did you start your MFA immediately?

RG: Yes, I did. I had taken off time in the middle of medical school to do public health research, but once I left medical school I came straight here.

In your first novel, Atmospheric Disturbances, what made you choose to write from a doctor's perspective?

RG: I started the novel during my fourth workshop at Columbia. [The main character] is a pretty bad doctor, so I had a lot of fun with it, but again, it's almost like I walked at it backwards. I didn't use all the things that I had learned until a bit of time had passed.

I was thinking about how I love the sound of people lying to themselves. That's my favorite sound. I really like authority that doesn't really work. And a doctor has a certain kind of authority. For that particular book, which was a very emotional book, his authority wasn't that useful to him. The things he was authoritative about just didn't help him at all. I was interested in that.

And then, I love language—as almost every writer here does. There's a lot of wonderful estrangements in medical language, so I was drawn to that.

After studying medicine, did you approach writing any differently than the ways you had thought about it before?

RG: I was hungrier than I was before. I was already interested, passionate—whatever those words are, those were apt words for me; but spending time in what felt like not quite the right life—I think most of us spend most of our time in not quite the right life; that's just life. But spending so much time there made me hungry—I was just really hungry. That was really useful.

To me, medicine and the sciences seem very different from creative pursuits like writing fiction. Did you feel that too? Or did you find medicine had more in common with writing than you expected?

RG: Well, the actual practice of medicine, being on the floors, was surprisingly emotional and social. You're always in private spaces where you don't actually belong—whether it's the space of people's bodies or illnesses or families. I found that almost too interesting.

It is a field where—and I admire this—where often, your job… I think someone with a different personality might be different, but I felt that my job was to have no personality except for whatever was needed of me. That's a really sane practice, and good, but not super nourishing the way that a creative field is kind of wonderfully selfish. In a creative field, you can take [these questions] seriously: "How do I feel? What am I thinking about?"

I do think the sciences are very creative, or that's what my sense was from my father, who was almost more of a kooky artist than me, you know? I'm more practical, so I think there's something close there, but medicine is truly—your hand should always be clean. It's so practical. That was very different in a healthy way; it was quite different.

I can imagine the skill of being an observer crosses over into writing, too, especially if you're getting these insights into people's very private lives.

RG: Yes, absolutely. That sense of transgression, where you're sort of like, “I'm just looking to be in this other person’s space and head.”

In general, the act of writing is so solitary compared to being in medical school, where you're constantly surrounded by people. How did you find the different environments affected your writing process?

RG: Like a lot of writers, I'm a natural introvert, and I feel like introverts need social life almost more than anyone else. There's something about inhabiting a situation with social interactions that aren't about going to a restaurant or a party, but instead have a kind of a structure. That way in which people interact is really nourishing for me.

I don't know how different writers do it. I actually feel like some writers are very social, but they don't need a structure for being social. They actually like to socialize. It's like this crazy other thing. But for me it's nice to have formal social environments to match with the solitary time, and it's not even the solitary part that I think is hard. Just being in your head is a really great thing, but at some point, it turns on itself, and it probably sours the work as well. So it's nice to have a structure that ends that “being in your head” part.

As writers we're always talking about “heightening the stakes.” But when you’re a doctor, you’re dealing with life-or-death circumstances, the highest possible stakes. How did that affect the way you consider fictional stakes?

RG: We often think about “What are the stakes?” and then we [ramp] up all of the externals, like money and health and all of these things. But I find that the thing that’s truly unbearable and vulnerable usually has to do with an ego wound. It’s really painful and hard to do that to our characters, to make them that vulnerable. In a funny way, it’s easy to think of oneself as a hero in a story, facing adversity after adversity, as long as one’s adversity isn’t one’s own pride. I often think about those stakes.

Can you recommend any fiction written by doctors?

RG: Chris Adrian writes wild and fantastical stuff that’s also very human. He has a divinity degree as well. He’s probably my favorite. I also love nonfiction by doctors, because I feel like they’re narrating from a special vantage point.