The Daughter Ship: A Novel

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Boo Trundle is a writer, artist, and performer whose work has appeared across various platforms and publications, including the Brooklyn Rail, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and NPR’s “The Moth.” She has also released three albums of original music with Big Deal Records. Here, she talks about the fine line between truth and fiction, and the collage-like process of filling those gaps in the writing of her first novel, The Daughter Ship . Rail: This feels like another spiritually inspired artistic practice, like meditation, or compassion. This idea of sacred attention. I’ve heard you talk about trying to be “utterly present,” and something called “the eternal present.”

The Daughter Ship endures in your mind, soul, and heart. Through corporeal evocation, vulnerability and humanity, it builds up the reader's capacity for intensity, until the reaction changes. There's a tonic in it." --Christie Henry, director Princeton University PressLikeJesus' Sonin its frenetic energy and storyline,The Daughter Shiptaps into a supernatural, transformative power. And it's FUNNY! Truly darkly hilarious." —Laura Sims,author of How Can I Help You

Boo Trundle’snovel The Daughter Ship startles in the best of ways, in its inventiveness, in its humor, and in its truths. This powerful debut is one of the year’s best books.” —David Gutowski, Largehearted Boy This unforgettable chorus of charming selves, battling over Katherine's wellbeing, is unified by their hope for her future, as they collaborate to shape a personal narrative like no other we've experienced in fiction.

by Cathy Alter

This brisk, mesmerizing version of her life is told in alternating short chapters by Truitt, Star, and Smooshed Bug--her inner children, each with their particular strategy for coping with Katherine's past at the hands of a hopeless mother and a terrifying, seductive father. Several of her female ancestors, Confederate widows and their daughters, who've imposed a legacy of racism and damage on her bloodline, also join the telling.

Empty museum. She’s never been in one. 10,000 degrees in Peace Square. Burns. The worst kind of torture. Oh shit. All the MFA people writing. All this writing. Nothing against writers, god love ‘em. But too much already. No more writing. Including me. Rail: Oh, Julianne Moore. Right. Playing your mother in Being Flynn (2012). Can you tell me more about this sequence and how the pieces work together? How you made these choices? Multiple voices tell the story in The Daughter Ship. Three of these voices belong to children who live at the bottom of a lake in a rusty WWII submarine. As I worked on the novel, I had playlists going for each of them: Smooshed Bug, Star, and Truitt. They struggle to make themselves known to Katherine, the novel’s protagonist. The kids on the submarine have distinct personalities, different takes on reality, and, naturally, their own personal jams. Two more characters board The Daughter Ship as the plot unfolds: Ryder and Elegy. They have songs here, too. Another narrator is Dead Girl, a personified DNA strand that guides the course of events. Dead Girl represents the female ancestors on Katherine’s mother’s side of the family. Dead Girl has her favorite songs. Finally, we have the main character, Katherine, a regular woman in a regular suburban life with a regular Spotify account. Katherine might work out to her songs, or she might only listen to them because her teenagers make her, or, maybe, she cries to them in her car in the Target parking lot. This playlist is a group effort.Flynn: Well, before that first photo of my mother is the poem “Hive,” which ends with a house being set on fire.