Navigating the Timelines of Brutalities

Brooke Knisley and Margo Steines talk tense, text and weaving essays into memoir.

Margo Steines

In her 2023 memoir Brutalities: A Love Story, Margo Steines constructs meditations on violence and intimacy using two separate timelines written in two distinct styles. One of the timelines, told through essays, follows her experiences as an adolescent dominatrix in New York City and intense relationship with a much older man. The other timeline comprises diary-esque dispatches about her present-day pregnancy and relationship with an MMA coach during the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Here, ambivalent memoirist Brooke Knisley speaks with Margo about weaving together these timelines to show how Margo’s relationship with violence has evolved, juxtaposing the two relationships that bookended this transformation.

Brooke Knisley: Not only was Brutalities written beautifully, but I really appreciate how you juggle these two different timelines—navigating and signposting each—for the reader. How did you come to the decision to frame your memoir this way?

Margo Steines: I had written most of the book as if it was going to be a collection of essays. The whole time, I knew I wanted to connect them in some other way, but I didn’t know how. At the same time, I was writing daily about my life—not necessarily toward the book. That’s a practice I have when I’m in a project, and often, it ends up informing the project. And it felt like such a different voice—once I had written enough of it, I went back and was like, “Oh, it’s all the themes that I’m already talking about in the essays. I want to weave it between them.” I love thinking of a book or an essay as an experience design.

Brooke: In the [essays of the past] timeline, you use a traditional paragraph style, and it felt like you were doing that to lean into the tradition and normalcy of society’s interactions with violence. Whereas, in the “present” timeline, it’s more fragmented, like dispatches, as you’re exploring this new relationship to violence. Was that a conscious choice?

Margo: There are a couple of subtle formal differences in the two categories of material. In the essays, they’re indented as MLA style, or whatever, dictates. And the others, like you said, have text blocks. The interstitial memoir pieces are written in the present tense, whereas the essays are all written in past tense, and the memoir pieces also occupy a stricter, more intimate first-person. I wanted to establish myself as two different narrators: the narrator very close to the material being narrated—in my body, in my apartment, in the quarantine—and then also the [essay] narrator looking back.

Brooke Knisley

Brooke: In the essays, you’re taking almost a journalistic approach to all those past experiences and moving around to connect them thematically. And in the present-day timeline, in quarantine with your pregnancy, you are very much present in your body and the text is more linear. Were you trying to show how time moves differently for you now?

Margo: Yeah, if you take all of the [present-day] memoir pieces and compress them together, it was a few months of my life; they run very linear, in a chronological order, and fairly close to each other in time. I did approach the research in the essays as an emergent journalist—some more than others. Definitely the fighting essays more than the ones about my earlier life. But I felt like my role as a narrator and researcher shifted a lot throughout the work of the book; those are probably the two broadest differentials: going in with a press pass to MMA fights versus being alone in my house, thinking about myself.

Brooke: Your fascination with violence seemed to start during your relationship with the much older Dean, who introduced you to receiving violence as a means of titillation early on. Did you feel that as you were writing—those were the essay sections that felt the most intimate and personal, to me—that your strong feelings for Dean began your fascination with violence?

Margo: One of the reasons I became so involved in all that stuff with him was I just wanted to be around him. But also—why? Why did I want to be around a man who was not very nice to me? You could say that he groomed me in some ways, but I also already had a lot of curiosities and predilections—intense experiences of degradation and trying to see how fucked up I could feel. He wasn’t a research project for me at all.

Brooke: Then you got curious and started intellectualizing those feelings?

Margo: Not at the time—I was not particularly self-aware. Later, I was like, “Wait, what does all this mean?” I wanted to be like the best or the most—that was the summary of my whole life for a long time. I didn’t want to just be some other girl; I wanted to be the most extreme. At the time, I thought that was all about him. But looking back at it with thirty years of therapy and an adult’s ability to analyze myself, it was much more about myself, my understanding of who I was, and trying to figure that out.

Brooke: I also saw you coach writers trying to construct their personal story—and even have a self-paced course. What led you to wanting to engage with other people’s stories on that level? And what would you say working with you is like?

Margo: I started wanting to work with other people during my MFA; I really liked engaging in people’s work. The role I thrived in was coaching, finding the voice everyone had, and using this verbal space between people as a space of creation.

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Margo Steines is the author of Brutalities: A Love Story from W.W. Norton. She holds an MFA in nonfiction writing from the University of Arizona and lives and writes in Tucson. Her work was named Notable in Best American Essays 2021 and has appeared in The Sun, Brevity, The New York Times (Modern Love), the anthology Letter to a Stranger: Essays to the Ones Who Haunt Us, and elsewhere.

Brooke Knisley is a creative nonfiction and comedy writer with bylines in Narratively, HuffPost, McSweeney’s, and The New Yorker’s Shouts and Murmurs. Read her work here.