FEATURED

Published in Missouri Review, August 2025

by Anne Gimm

Anne Gimm: Your story collection, Detonator, opens with a flash piece about a car accident that involves a goose. Why did you decide to start there?

Peter Mountford: I like a book that starts with a mini palate cleanser that kind of sets the tone. In novels, it’s often a prologue, or something. That piece was originally published as nonfiction at Tin House Online—and it is, in fact, nonfiction.

Incidentally, the first two stories of this collection take place at the exact same location—the Colombo Swimming Club, in Sri Lanka—although there would be no way for the reader to know this.

In “Around the Corner,” I don’t mention that the childhood memory of almost seeing a man kill himself took place at the Colombo Swimming Club. The second story, “One More Night Behind the Walls,” is very much fiction, but the walls of the title are the same walls described in “Around the Corner,” when the kids are looking over the wall at a man who has put his head down on the train tracks.

Somehow, I hoped that this subterranean connection between those stories, even if I was the only person who knew about it, would be felt by the reader.

AG: Your two novels, A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism and A Dismal Science, are concerned with the way that work and wealth determine every facet of our lives. In Detonator, another external force seems to animate your stories: the great equalizer that is death. Did you have a thematic framework for organizing this collection?

PM: That’s a very keen observation, and I don’t think I’d thought of it quite that way before. I wrote those two more wealth-oriented stories earlier in the process of working on this book. They were published around the same time as those novels. My life has been marked by sharp contrasts in wealth and power—not just living in Sri Lanka and Ecuador and elsewhere, as an American, but also just attending private schools, where I was very much a middle-class kid surrounded by very wealthy classmates. Also, my life has been marked by death, lots and lots of death—by the time I was thirty, I’d lost all my grandparents, my mother, several very close friends, my college girlfriend. By the time I was forty, it was a lot more than that.

AG: The sex in these stories—illicit, boundary-crossing, kink—often mirrors the complex power dynamics of a story’s world. A young American boy witnesses his mother’s affair as Sri Lanka descends into civil war. A hospitalized brother’s wish to die becomes the catalyst for his sister to save her marriage. A man’s spinal tap leads to tender revelations about his imperfect relationships. If death is the catalyst for a character’s change, sex is the vehicle for that transformation, signaling the loss of childhood innocence, hope of a new start in life, or its ongoing frustrations. How would you describe the relationship between sex and death in these stories?

PM: There’s a scene in Trainspotting where Rent Boy ends up having sex with the widow of his dead brother in the bathroom at the brother’s wake, and that always struck me as disturbing but also, yeah, I mean, it makes sense. Sometimes sex, especially intense or desperate sex, can be as close as we have to an antidote to death—some kind of primal rejection of our demise.

In my story “Love of Her Life,” the protagonist, a middle-aged woman, attends her friend’s funeral in the Scottish Highlands, and ends up in bed with her ex-husband’s new girlfriend—this is where this idea is most overtly animated in my stories, I suppose. Crucially, she kind of hurls herself at the idea of this woman, who is basically a stranger to her, at the end of the story—she’s kind of wanting to commit to a lifetime with this woman. It’s not even clear the protagonist is bisexual, let alone a lesbian, but she’s all in, and I empathize with that, with that terror of aloneness, grabbing onto the nearest person just so you’re holding someone when death comes your way.

AG: In your short story “Pay Attention,” you seem to give us access to the thoughts of the wife as well as the husband. Do you prefer to write from a specific point of view when writing fiction? The stories in Detonator are all written in first person or limited third.

PM: Oh, I don’t think the reader actually has access to the husband’s mind, although I can see why it would seem that way. It’s more like we’re in the woman’s point of view and she knows exactly what he’s thinking because they’ve been married a long time. I really only like writing first person or limited third, and I don’t really like switching points of view within a story. And I don’t like a distant or omniscient narrator. To me, as a writer, I am drawn to characters in difficult situations, trying to figure out their lives, and I want to be with that person on their journey. I want to be surprised by what happens, and be with them as they figure it all out. I certainly don’t want to be looking at that person from the outside, or from a safe distance. I want to be stuck within the blast radius of their life choices.

AG: The actor Russell Crowe and the U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, a controversial historical figure from the Vietnam War, make appearances in two of these stories. I found the McNamara character more intriguing than Crowe, perhaps because I know less about his private life—there’s been a constant trickle of Hollywood gossip about Crowe over the years. Was there an inspiration or a reason for introducing famous people in these stories?

PM: I’ve done this kind of thing before—Paul Wolfowitz was a character in my second novel, Evo Morales was in both of my novels. I originally saw this in David Foster Wallace’s story “Little Expressionless Animals,” which is set on the set of Jeopardy!, hosted by Alex Trebek. The story has fictional people and fictional situations interacting with real people on a real show. This blurring of fiction and reality was very exhilarating to me as a reader; I found it challenging and exciting, so I’ve done it a number of times myself.

In my case, both of those examples were born of tiny seeds of a real experience. Once, when I was in DC working for a think tank, they sent me to the Brazilian embassy to listen to the ambassador give a breakfast talk about US-Brazil relations. A group of us sat around this table, and I was next to this old guy, who, it turned out, was Robert McNamara. Later that day, I saw McNamara again, in that famous London Fog raincoat from the poster for “Fog of War,” standing on the Metro platform, looking so lonely and befuddled. Basically, that’s how that story began.

The Crowe story is similar. I was living in Ecuador when they shot Proof of Life there—this huge Hollywood production swooped into town, and suddenly everyone I knew was working on this movie. I ended up at a party hosted by Russell Crowe, and we had this snippy interaction, basically exactly the same as the interaction between Crowe and the narrator of that story. Other than that scene, and the fact that this movie was shot in Ecuador, everything in that story is made up, but with both of those stories, there was a kind of seed of actual experience from my life that I used as a jumping off place for the fiction.

AG: The residual pain of war is present in the stories: “One More Night Behind the Walls,” “Horizon,” and “Mr. McNamara’s Suit.” Whether it’s Vietnam or Sri Lanka or the Middle East, anyone whose life has been touched by war knows that the experience profoundly changes them and everyone they love, no matter how long ago it happened. I once heard C.J. Chivers describe war as something like the justification for all the crimes and sub-crimes of humanity. In other interviews, you discuss arriving in Sri Lanka as a little boy just days before the outbreak of civil war. Your father had worked for the IMF there. I was wondering if there were other personal touchstones in this collection?

PM: Yeah, we arrived in Sri Lanka shortly before what came to be known as “Black July”—a time of horrifying anti-Tamil violence at the start of the war. In my twenties, I spent a couple years in Ecuador during a time of crisis and revolution—and in Chiapas, Mexico, for a while shortly after their attempted revolution. You can see how these experiences bring out not just the best and worst in people, but the strangeness of people. In Mexico, my closest friend was my landlord, who was a shaman who played billiards, and had to be constantly reassuring the townspeople, “No, Peter is NOT with the CIA, he’s actually here writing a novel.” Nobody believed him. CIA made much more sense than fiction writing.

I guess it’s clear from my previous responses, but I like a personal foothold in the story, somehow, and then I can make up everything else in the story. Like “Love of Her Life”: the setting is something I experienced—snowy funeral in the Highlands of Scotland, one of two buses gets stuck on the wrong side of the pass, half the people end up at a wake at that house near Pitlochry, which is, incidentally, the same house that’s mentioned at the end of the story “Horizon.” But the characters in that story are nothing like people who were actually at the funeral; none of the events, otherwise, has any basis in reality. So the stories are kind of littered with these odd fragments from reality.

I want to reexamine the world I’ve already seen, to go mining for meaning and order, and often that work involves shifting a lot of things around, adding people, taking people away, changing what happens, a lot. Sometimes people have dreams that help them sift through the psychological debris collecting in the corners of their minds, and I suppose these stories can be a bit like that for me, even if nobody knows about it but me. I like that there’s a little bloody fingerprint hidden in the story, and it’s all mine. 

Anne Gimm is a writer from New Jersey. She received her MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts.