Michael Mirolla’s newest novel is a spectacular deep-dive into an imagined A.I.-dominated future which questions what family bonds really are and the nature of storytelling itself. Mirolla has published more than two dozen novels, plays, film scripts, short story and poetry collections. His awards include the Hamilton Literary Award and three Bressani Literary Prizes. A symposium on Mirolla’s writing was held in Toronto in 2023. He does freelance editing and serves as Guernica Editions’ editor-in-chief. Turn off your cellphone and take time to read this exciting new novel.
Where did the idea for this novel come from?
I don’t think there was a specific idea that started the process of writing this novel. Maybe a bringing together of ideas that have worked their way through the majority of my writing: how human identity is a fluid thing that changes with each attempt to find a definition; the role gender plays in that definition; the connection (or not) between a work of fiction and the world outside that space. But perhaps the original idea for How About This…? was: Could I create a story about family (in the postmodern sense of family) using faux A.I. as the story’s author? Place that story in the near future? And then add a soupçon of metafictional structures to it? Did I succeed? I’m not sure.
There are a few famous novels that make use of fictional footnotes. Did any of them serve as an inspiration for this work?
Well, I did read Pale Fire a long long time ago. But the footnotes Nabokov uses actually serve as the narrative itself. A few of my footnotes do that but mostly they’re written for fun. I had a previous shot at using footnotes in a novel. That was Torp. But the footnotes never made it to the published version.
There is so much humour in this novel. Was that hard to achieve?
I don’t think the humour was difficult to achieve. After all, there is a lot of dark humour (really dark) in the world around us. And in dystopian writing in general. The real trick, I think, is not allowing that humour to overpower the “heart” of the story. And that heart, in this case, is this group of characters trying to hold onto to family in a world that seems to be disintegrating around them. The joke, of course, is that this family history of a married lesbian couple who find a set of twins on their back deck is supposedly being written by an A.I. Collective from the further future because humans have lost the ability to tell their own stories!
You could categorize this novel as being speculative fiction as it’s set in the future and mentions so much of what we are starting to go through in society now. Did you intentionally mean it to be speculative?
In my humble opinion, the real strength of dystopian “speculative” fiction is that it is actually talking about present-day conditions, disguised as something that will happen in the future. This is what separates it from hard-core science fiction which focusses on the technologies of the future. In my case, I wanted to see what would happen if I mixed speculative fiction with metafiction: a novel set in the future that displays the traits of self-reflection, speaking directly to the reader, etc.
Your novel is also meta-fictional as it is keenly aware of itself. Why did you do this?
So a part of this question was answered (I hope) in the answer to the previous question. In a more general sense, the majority of my writing has tipped towards metafiction. So it was almost natural for me to use those techniques here. More importantly, in a philosophical sense, I believe that a work of fiction is by definition metafictional even if it appears to be simply describing the external world. I’ve actually written papers on this. Here, because I was setting the novel up as if it were being written by an A.I. Collective from the 22nd century (when A.I. has taken over as the apex predator), I had the opportunity to go “whole hog” as it were into the metafictional mode: from “dear reader” to false starts and footnotes, from comments on the writing process to a character by the name of Michael Mirolla criticizing the novel.
Ultimately, this novel is also about family. Was it difficult to create family characters set in the future?
Well, the actual family characters were not all that difficult to formulate, given that the story supposedly takes place only 20 years or so into the future. The specific characteristics of the four central characters were a little more difficult, given that I’ve personally only known some type of traditional family. But I did some research and hopefully the four and their interactions come across as believable.
What part of the novel was the most fun to write?
It was all fun. But the material about the self-doubt faced by the A.I. Collective authors in their inability to grasp basic English idioms was at the top of the fun list.
Did your Italian heritage play any part of this work?
At a subconscious level, that heritage plays a part in everything I write. In fact, it’s only been recently that I’ve been able to escape from under the thumb of the character named Giulio who runs through a number of my novels and short stories. In this case, I guess the idea of “family” itself comes from my own experiences with tight-knit family groupings.
What advice do you have for writers trying to write experimental novels?
Remember that fiction, no matter how realistic, is not an actual reflection of an external world. When writing novels, when writing short stories, you are creating bits and pieces of your own universe. It may well touch in places the external world as we know it but it isn’t that world. Fiction is bound only by your talent, hard work, and most importantly your imagination. It is bound by the way you string together the elements of the language – the more rich your language, the better chance of succeeding.
What are you working on now?
I’m working on the sequel to How About This…? To be called … How About That…? The basic plot: Ariel and Malak, the twins from How About This…?, are split apart due to a quarrel. Ariel convinces the A.I. Collective not to delete their character so that they can go on a search journey to find Malak, a journey that takes Ariel beyond Earth.
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