Since Peter Mountford exploded onto the literary scene with his award-winning novel A YOUNG MAN\u2019S GUIDE TO LATE CAPITALISM (HMH, 2011). He\u2019s become known for creating stories in which characters blow up their lives and his latest book DETONATOR (Four Way Books, September, 2025) is no exception. A chance encounter with her ex\u2019s new girlfriend at a funeral in the Scottish Highlands spurs Sarah out of a ten-year isolation (\u201cLove of Her Life\u201d). An assiduous and reticent Vietnamese dry cleaner, Minh, discovers that one of his regulars is none other than former secretary of defense Robert MacNamara\u2014an architect of U.S. violence in Vietnam; as Minh\u2019s daughter looks on, he must decide how to proceed\u2014maintain his role as unassuming proprietor or protest (\u201cMr. McNamara\u2019s Suit\u201d).<\/p>\n
Even for those that make a seemingly more reasonable choice, there\u2019s dissonance.<\/p>\n
In \u201cPay Attention\u201d homemaker Vivian\u2019s lover, a BDSM dom, crosses a boundary, triggering her to reconsider his place in her life, fraught as it is with caregiving her children and her stroke-survivor brother. As Vivian is looking at her brother, who can no longer speak or go to the bathroom independently, Mountford writes, \u201cThe agony of his situation is so total it\u2019s almost impossible to witness. If you stare at it, you\u2019re cruel. But if you look away, you\u2019re callous\u201d.<\/p>\n
Yet Mountford has no such concerns; he gazes unflinchingly at characters\u2019 situations while he confidently employs story-telling strategies to keep his narratives moving\u2014strategies he\u2019s obliging to share with his students and fans alike.<\/p>\n
– Shaun Anthony McMichael<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
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SAM:<\/strong> The undergraduate bromide with writing is to \u201cshow, not tell\u201d. But the more one writes, the more that maxim shifts to \u201ctell but tell well\u201d. For instance, early on in your story \u201cOne More Night Behind the Wall\u201d the narrator comes out and says, \u201cThat was the party where Priscilla died. And nothing was really the same after that.\u201d I notice other writers, Colson Whitehead comes to mind, showing a card like this early on. It creates suspense and draws a reader in. How much weaker would it be if it was \u201cThat was the party when something happened\u2026 (Dun, dun, dunnnnn!)\u201d Is this one of the lessons you impart to students and clients?<\/p>\n
PM: <\/strong>Absolutely. That’s a big thing I talk about a lot\u2014showing and telling simultaneously and knowing what to show and knowing what to tell. \u201cOne More Night Behind the Wall\u201d is inspired by Charles D’Ambrosio’s story, \u201cThe Point\u201d, which has a death that’s described at the end. Yet he tells the reader very early on that this person has died. And so, the death, when it happens, doesn’t jump out of a box at you. I think that is the kind of thing that might have happened in older stories. But I think to a contemporary reader, it can feel a little manipulative while at the same time displaying the writer\u2019s lack of narratorial control. If you don’t set a reader up, a big death has an impact when they get to the moment, but it feels more like you just thought it up in the moment.<\/p>\n
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SAM:<\/strong> Let\u2019s talk about larger-than-life mother characters juxtaposed their impressionable sons. We\u2019ve got numerous examples in your work: Gabriel\u2019s mother and his love interest Lenka (A YOUNG MAN\u2019S GUIDE TO LATE CAPITALISM); the mother in \u201cOne More Night Behind the Walls\u201d; Vivian in \u201cPay Attention\u201d; and Anne in \u201cHorizon.” You lost your mother when you were in fourth grade to cancer. Describe the process of making your mother characters so strong: they are iconic and memorable\u2014 overbearing at times, but also realistic, and likable.<\/p>\n
PM: <\/strong>When A YOUNG MAN\u2019S GUIDE was published I was oblivious to the fact that I\u2019d created this hapless male character, Gabriel, surrounded by these very strong, smart, dynamic women on all sides. It wasn\u2019t just my mother who had that kind of presence in my family but also my sisters and the women who stepped in to help raise me after my mother died. I was always surrounded by these very assertive, complicated women\u2014all formidable in their own way. And this is how I\u2019ve seen the world and how I render it. I do think they’re all quite different from one another but I do find them mesmerizing as characters.<\/p>\n
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SAM:<\/strong> I admire your female characters. In this collection, they appear as more sexually dynamic than the men: two embracing lesbian relationships, one delving into BDSM. How do you ensure your women characters don\u2019t come across as oversexed or as figments of male fantasy? You\u2019ve had powerful women in your life, which I\u2019m sure helps\u2026<\/p>\n
PM:<\/strong> I think it’s a lot of women I actually know and how they express and think about their sexuality. My fiction is definitely made up, but, like all fiction, it is also drawn, we have to admit, from things we know and what we observe with our own eyes and ears. I am interested in sexuality in general\u2014the way it affects and plays with power dynamics between relationships. Also, from a writer’s standpoint, it’s a simple matter of sexuality drawing on serious emotional situations for people. In sexuality, there\u2019s a lot of pain, desire, fear, and shame and all these powerful emotions, and it’s very difficult to talk about. So, from a dramaturgical standpoint, I find, when characters are in intense sexual situations, it makes for a fertile writing landscape.<\/p>\n
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SAM:<\/strong> The continuum of memory and forgetting is another topic of the collection. It comes up in \u201cOne More Night Behind the Wall\u201d; \u201cOut on the Cold Road\u201d; \u201cMr. MacNamara\u2019s Suit\u201d. In \u201cDetonator,” the narrator says, \u201cI remember smiling, and it\u2019s possible I had warm tears on my cheeks, or else that\u2019s just my memory connecting with my imagination, as it often does, because they\u2019re old friends and have been helping each other along ever since they met.\u201d Is literature humanity\u2019s limbic system, a center for memory and emotion? Compare this with the news, chasing headlines or the latest stupid thing the president has said or done. Is literature a way to reconcile with all the ways we remember wrongly?<\/p>\n
PM:<\/strong> I think so. All fiction is very much about time. But we have awareness of only the things that have transpired in our own lives, and the things we’ve perceived. We only have our paths to really look at, and I do think our memories are deeply flawed. Certainly, mine is. So there is a kind of dream machine that’s taking place while you’re trying to explain what you’ve seen in the world and your imagination does get involved.<\/p>\n
Life is also very painful for many of us in extremely serious ways, and sometimes people just don\u2019t want to remember or think about something. And I feel like Minh, the protagonist in \u201cMr. McNamara\u2019s Suit\u201d, avoids delving into the wound of the Vietnam War, because the wound is just a great place of pain. And because he doesn\u2019t want to think about his past, he doesn\u2019t face reality. I’ve felt that way at times myself. Life is hard enough; I don’t need to go prodding the scar tissues of memory.<\/p>\n
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SAM: <\/strong>Speaking of how our brains work, accidents and medical complications also play out consistently in your work. The loss of Leonora\u2019s leg in your second novel THE DISMAL SCIENCE (Tin House Books, 2014). Gabriel getting hit by the shrapnel and bone fragments of the dynamite blast. Priscila\u2019s death. The speaker in Detonator\u2019s hilarious and inopportune post-coital brain hemorrhages. Novelist Louis Erdrich has a long-standing friendship with a family doctor who helps her with nitty gritty specifics. Do you lean on such friendships or resources so that the medical mishaps read as detailed and realistic? In past interviews, you\u2019ve mentioned how you\u2019d been \u201caswim in tragedy\u201d from a young age, which I\u2019m sure inspires\u2026<\/p>\n
PM: <\/strong>I’ve had to do a lot of research, mostly just through the internet, and it is enormously complicated. My father had a stroke around 10 years ago, which is why I think there’s so many brain injuries in my stories. Nonetheless, the brain injury in the story \u201cDetonator\u201d\u2014the post-coital brain hemorrhage\u2014is very different from what my father experienced, and so that required an enormous amount of research. That was an incredibly difficult story to write. There was the emotionality in it of course, but also technically and logistically. I had to manage a time jump and all the character’s confusion and trying to reconcile that with what was actually happening. And then also trying to understand how this brain injury would make a person like him operate. So, it took a voluminous amount of research like watching interviews with people who have similar brain injuries and so on.<\/p>\n
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SAM: <\/strong>All that research and work paid off, because objectively, \u201cDetonator\u201d is an immaculate story! You mentioned in an earlier interview how you feel writers only have 1-2 perfect short stories in them. Yet DETONATOR contains several. What are the conditions required for these \u201cperfect stories\u201d, the forces of pressure needed for those diamonds?<\/p>\n
PM: <\/strong>Karen Russell and I were talking about this the other day. She\u2019s written a great many amazing stories. We were talking about our experience where sometimes your best story just kind of happens without an enormous amount of effort. It will just come out of you. You will stand up, look at it, and ask \u2018did I write that? Because I don\u2019t remember writing that!\u2019. Even with stories like that\u2014so good they seem to have been written by someone else\u2014there\u2019s a ton of labor involved. I remember the labor that went into the title story \u201cDetonator\u201d. But the strongest qualities of the story were already present.<\/p>\n
Where do these things erupt from? It’s very hard to say. For me they often have some connection to something that is of extreme emotional potence for me. And often it’s something that I think is lurking out of view for me in my own mind.<\/p>\n
Let\u2019s take \u201cLove of her Life\u201d, set in Scotland. With that story, I was very preoccupied by the difficulty of making decisions as an adult, and how they often have very surprising outcomes for us. Even if you’re making well-informed decisions, it’s hard to predict how it’s going to shake out. So that kind of obsession of mine fueled the story.<\/p>\n
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SAM: <\/strong>In your work, the personal and the political intersect. There\u2019s a new leader in Bolivia and there are new directions in the lives of protagonists Gabriel and Vincenzo. There\u2019s a civil war in Sri Lanka and civil conflicts in the families of \u201cOne More Night Behind the Wall\u201d and \u201cHorizon\u201d. A reliable customer of Minh\u2019s dry-cleaning business turns out to be one of the architects of U.S. violence against the Vietnamese people. A historical event gives gravitas to the personal elements unfolding and vice versa. What\u2019s your process for finding these connections?<\/p>\n
PM:<\/strong> When somebody asked Milan Kundera about how he got all this wonderful political stuff into his fiction, he answered something like, \u201cit’s not that difficult when there’s a tank gun barrel poking through the grocery store window.\u201d And my life has been a bit like that. I’ve lived in South America during a lot of upheaval, in Sri Lanka during a lot of upheaval. I grew up in D.C., around a lot of power players. For instance, I saw Robert McNamara on the subway in his London fog coat, and what always struck me was that when you look at people living amidst situations with global ramifications, you’re looking at real people who are complicated and have rich emotional lives. And the fact of the political complexity that’s occurring proximate to them doesn’t really disrupt their humanity, regardless of where they are situated on a political spectrum. And so, I just am very interested in humans who are having difficult, complicated lives but who are also near a lot of political drama which is in conversation with their personal life.<\/p>\n
There are people right now in Venezuela falling in love with each other, or breaking up, and there’s some kid who stubbed his toe, and another who\u2019s mad at his brother. All of these things are happening simultaneously.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n
SAM: <\/strong>A human femur carried home and buried, a suckling pig\u2019s spine broken, a downed fence, a newly cleaned freezer, a dead dog, a dry-cleaned suit\u2014these are just a few of the memorable metaphors and symbolic gestures that emerge in your stories. How do you cultivate them, drawing them out to suggest but not force a reader into concluding what they mean?<\/p>\n
PM:<\/strong> I don’t know where any of those came from. I think it’s just trying to imagine the characters’ life in a vivid and realistic way, and what would they be encountering in their day-to-day existence that would be realistic and normal. I was just talking to a student here about this. It’s a difficult thing to teach. Sometimes you close your eyes, and you just wander blindly into a scene or a situation with your character, and you just have to have a little faith that you will find something of value within that. And so it’s a little bit of a trust fall with your own intuition. You think about things that might actually happen and you improvise and you realize that something might have metaphorical value or resonance that’s much deeper than anticipated. So you can lean on it a little. All those metaphors you listed were found by accident. You mentioned earlier that scene when Gabriel from A YOUNG MAN\u2019S GUIDE\u2026 gets shrapnel and bone from the hand of the mining protestor shot into his face from an explosion. And it\u2019s like he\u2019s got some of Bolivia and the Bolivian people embedded in him now. And I was like, oh, right! He’s been trying all along to kind of keep a safe distance from the Bolivian people for emotional reasons. He’s trying to stay up on the 8th floor, far away from them. And now these people are literally inside of him. I didn’t think about that until I saw it on the page and was like, oh, I see how that works!<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n
SAM: <\/strong>The plot of literary fictions can swing on a connection\/ disconnection paradigm. Vincenzo and Gabriel end up disconnected from their most meaningful relationships; through no fault of his own, so does the speaker in \u201cOne More Night Behind the Wall\u201d. Conversely, protagonists Sarah (\u201cLove of Her Life\u201d) and Vivian (\u201cPay Attention\u201d) are veering toward connection. When do you know in which direction a story will lean with its characters?<\/p>\n
PM:<\/strong> It’s often the natural consequences of what the person wants and the choices they’re making; I’m just trying to be faithful to what they’re experiencing and why they would want to do what they’re doing, and what are the outcomes of that? I think in \u201cLove of Her Life\u201d, she’s deliberately making a choice to no longer be alone. Life’s too short for that. For the first time in 10 years, she\u2019s aggressively pursuing connection. Being alone for her is no longer a good way to live. And so she lands where anyone would who makes such a strong choice in that direction.<\/p>\n
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SAM: <\/strong>Have you ever had an editor not buy the direction you\u2019ve chosen for the ending?<\/p>\n
PM:<\/strong> My story \u201cImpact Play\u201d in the anthology KINK (Simon & Schuster) went through a tremendous amount of editing. I had to rewrite the end a great many times to try to make it work in a way that was interesting and nuanced. But that’s really uncommon. I’ve not usually had that experience. However, with The Dismal Science, my second novel, I had an amazing editor at Tin House, Tony Perez\u2014married to Karen Russell, interestingly enough\u2014 and he suggested I needed a new first chapter, that the beginning that I had written for the book, wasn’t the beginning. It was the most fun writing assignment I’ve ever had\u2014an easy, delightful experience. And so, the first chapter in that book is something I wrote in the space of a week or two. I think it was so enjoyable, because I knew the character (Vincenzo) very well, and I’d written this whole book with him. I jumped back 6 months before the book starts, and took a moment in his life, a weekend or something, and examined it to prefigure the events of the book. I think it makes the book a thousand times better.<\/p>\n
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SAM: <\/strong>Minh, Vincenzo, and Gabriel are three great characters who appear in your work. These characters are of different races\/ ethnicities from yours, yet you limn them effectively with sensitivity and realism without fetishizing or caricaturizing them; and their racial\/ ethnic makeup is essential to how their stories unfold. Describe the importance of this effort for white-bodied writers as a mode of raising racial consciousness and maintaining high standards in fiction writing.<\/p>\n
PM:<\/strong> You’ll notice that when I\u2019m writing in first person, it\u2019s from a white man\u2019s perspective. I don’t write first-person from non-white characters or women’s point of view. I always do third limited. There\u2019s a bigger difference so I don\u2019t think I can get into first person there. When choosing POV, the question to ask is, can you successfully find empathy in a deep and real way for this person and their experience? I think I do with the characters in these stories. I’ve certainly tried with other characters who I’m very different from in any number of ways, and I’ve failed, and I can see it. I can feel it when I’m not able to pull it off. I tried to write a crime novel from the point of view of a detective\u2014a white guy. But I couldn’t, for the life of me, figure out what it’s like to be a person who chooses to become a police officer, and then what it’s like to be in that milieu. I put in tons of research, and I still couldn’t figure it out. I spent all this time around these detectives. I went on ride-alongs. But I couldn\u2019t bridge that gap. I couldn’t find my way into these people. So, I had to give up on that, and it’s not the only time I’ve had that experience.<\/p>\n
I remember I had a negative review of A YOUNG MAN\u2019S GUIDE in which somebody said something to the effect of, \u201cI don’t like this book, I wish this book was about the experience of, Bolivian peasants\u201d. But I couldn\u2019t write that book. Ever. No amount of research would ever enable me to write that book.<\/p>\n
I’m sure that’s a limitation of mine. I know there are amazing writers who can throw their voice really far, like Adam Johnson and Anthony Doerr. It\u2019s incredible how they do it. They’re both such ambitious writers to such an extreme degree and they have a lot of time to focus on their writing. They can delve deep into characters with whom they have almost nothing in common. It\u2019s very impressive.<\/p>\n
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SAM: <\/strong>Here\u2019s an expat question. In \u201cBoca Del Lobo\u201d, you write from barkeep, Maria\u2019s perspective, \u201c\u2026like other foreigners who remained, his loneliness had ripened and then fermented into a kind of spiritual sourness\u201d. Do you think that this would happen to you if you decamped permanently from the U.S.?<\/p>\n
PM:<\/strong> For a time, certainly. I might have recovered, too. But I think she’s also spending a lot of time with young, lost foreigners staying in Bolivia for a while. So, there\u2019s a bit of a sample bias there.<\/p>\n
Becoming an expat is understandable. I found quite a sense of relief in my experience living in South America and Mexico. Sure, capitalism is everywhere in the world. But places where capitalism isn\u2019t going so well, people seem less transfixed by it. I found myself liberated from this thing that was grasping me by the shoulders and I didn\u2019t even realize it. That’s one of the wonderful things about exploring the world is discovering how strange your own cultural viewpoint is.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n
SAM: <\/strong>Speaking of shifting perspectives, there\u2019s this idea of reading fiction as a way of \u201cgetting an education\u201d. I feel that way with your work. Whether it\u2019s about Evo\u2019s election in Bolivia, the world of hedge funds, and game theory (A YOUNG MAN\u2019S GUIDE\u2026); Machiavelli, Purgatorio, and Chess (THE DISMAL SCIENCE); the Sri Lankan civil war and the gay architect Geoffrey Bawa (\u201cOne More Night Behind the Wall\u201d), I\u2019m always learning when I read you. These are things you have researched; some are things you\u2019ve experienced. What\u2019s the feedback loop like for you of living, reading, and fiction writing?<\/p>\n
PM:<\/strong> I’m very interested in fiction that does what straight-up fiction’s not supposed to do. I mentioned Milan Kundera earlier. But there are other writers who do this. You\u2019ll be reading a work of fiction, a novel, or a short story, and they start doing something that reads a lot like an essay or a research paper. They’re talking about philosophy or science. Ben Lerner’s novel 10:04 that has an enormously long passage about Walt Whitman in it. And I love that! It gives the story the energy of an essay. I don’t understand exactly why they need to be so separate all the time. People get very nervous in the United States when you start talking about politics and real people like Robert McNamara in the middle of a short story, and you start talking about history and philosophy. But to me, those are the best parts of life, so why not just throw them into fiction. And there\u2019s certainly precedence for this: the many pages in Moby Dick devoted to whales; the metafiction in the sequel to Don Quixote. I feel like older writers were more daring in some ways.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n
SAM: <\/strong>You\u2019re closer to Vincenzo and Luce\u2019s age now than when you wrote their stories. You wrote them so well, with such authority. When you re-read or think of how you wrote them, are there elements of cringe or confirmation in your feelings? Would you write them differently now?<\/p>\n
PM:<\/strong> In THE DISMAL SCIENCE, Vincenzo’s in his mid-to-late 50s, and after the book came out, I was worried that maybe he reads more like he\u2019s a decade older\u2014retiring from his profession, exhausted, and wanting a simpler life away from the ambition and drama of his younger years. But I\u2019ll be 50 this summer and, in a way, I\u2019m relieved. Because I already feel geriatric and exhausted. Like I want to relax, slink off into the distance, and have a lie down. So, I\u2019m very pleased and more confident now than upon publication, that I expressed his experience accurately.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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