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I had the pleasure of interviewing Megan Choritz on her latest novel, The Sound of Ice, published by Melinda Ferguson Books Ride or Die Press imprint.
Far out at sea, 167 tiny boats form a silent ring around a solitary iceberg. On each boat are a mother and daughter with one simple mission: watch the ice, protect it and survive.
Charlotte, a healer who shelters women fleeing violence and abuse, finds herself at the centre of a world descending into chaos as the Water Wars erupt and the fragile balance between humanity and nature begins to collapse.
Both a gripping dystopian thriller and a powerful meditation on endurance, The Sound of Ice explores themes of female resilience, environmental collapse, exile, trauma and hope. It is the story of women pushed to their limits and the extraordinary lengths they will go to protect one another when the world has failed them.
Q: What sparked this story? Specifically, what ignited the image of an iceberg ringed by boats containing women and daughters?
MC: I heard an interview on the radio, a long time ago, where a man had had this great idea to harvest icebergs with giant ships that would pull them to shore. It seemed like a crazy, man response to a problem. But the image of this valuable resource stuck. And then I imagined who would protect it. Sometimes it feels like we ask the most from the most vulnerable. That, I think is the kernel of The Sound of Ice. Women, mothers and daughters, even chosen ones, having to do the protecting, of water, of hearts, of relationships.
Q: What role does magic play in your tale?
~Some women have inner goddess: I have my inner critic instead, who sounds something like my mother.~
~A man’s rage may be more physical, but a woman’s rage is born from centuries of violence.~
~And yet, I thought, how often we hear the phrase; it’s just hormones. As if hormones were not the most powerful force in the human body. Hormones tell us what to do; when to grow; when to sleep; when to eat. Hormones regulate temperature; fertility; muscle development. Hormones trigger every stage of the body’s development. Hormones dictate our mental health. They drive our personality. They are the source of all power, all change in the body and the mind.~
~Smallness in women is a measurement of virtue.~
~A mother loves her child for who they are, not for what she thinks they should be.~
~Not all men find guilt in their hearts. And yet, all women find damage.~
~’Survival isn’t brave,’ she said, ‘Sometimes it’s the only choice.’~
~Young people think in absolutes. But love is a trap that closes very, very slowly. Not like the Venus flytrap, in spite of its more suitable name, but more like the cobra lily, that guides its victim gently downwards into the killing jar.~
~Perhaps I hold on to people so hard that I end up breaking them.~
~This is the part of the story where we pretended to be a family…~
~I am filled with a terrible and hideous secret. A secret that makes my heart pound in my chest and ears. A secret that will never be shared or spoken out loud but thought about every single day, from this moment on. The wrong parent has died. The wrong parent had died and left me with an imposter parent, a big adult child who needs looking after even though I am its child.~
~Why are we so slow to come round to the reality of the person we are with?~
~A raven is in the road, in the late summer’s dusk light. I watch it trying to break off a chunk of what looks like pita bread. It manages to smash off a piece and moves to the gutter with the piece in its beak. A rat slides off the pavement and takes the bread. The raven has shared its meal. I am in tears.~
~I don’t want the full, messy version of my whole self to be seen. But if I don’t say it, then I am writing a fairy story. I am looking for a happy ending. I am lying and believing my own lie even as I do it.~
~This is the part of the story where no one knows how to feel. Where blame, always unspoken, likes at the root of how the rest of us, the living, feel about each other…[we] spread the blame around and cradle our resentment and twisted sadness like our own misshapen babies. Forever.~
~When I was a kid, it seemed like everything good happened in America, like cheerleading, and yearbooks, and proms, Satanism and the Manson family.~
~It started when I was a Columbiner, although that all belongs to a different version of me, an earlier draft that occurred somewhere between scrapping the girly-girl version of myself, the version that carried a handbag, and the creep that I am today.~
~Job ads are written in a language I don’t speak. Self-starter, results-focused, standard, highly competitive, pro rata, OTE. How do you pick a career if you don’t know what anything means?~
~It made sense that I felt most alive as the clock struck three.~
~I read once that people who read true crime believe there’s a disproportionate chance of something terrible happening to them, that serial killers are more common than they are. But what about those of us who have lived through it?~
~And you are a person, no matter your name. But in many years, other people may forget it, or they may spell it incorrectly and only remember it that way.~
~And sometimes you need something, even a stone, to help you believe that the rest of your journey will be easier than it has been.~
~He looked around him and thought about the fence. He wondered whether it was keeping him in or the world out.~
~It seems a strange irony that a book about good morals ultimately has questionable morals of its own.~
~Everything had its place, a home. And he couldn’t take any of it because it belonged where it had always been, even if he did not.~
~If I had known how painful it would be to sit and write this book about my life, I doubt that I would have ever picked up my pen filler, the only writing instrument allowed to an inmate in solitary confinement on death row.~
~There is nothing wrong with losing, but men don’t cry! If either of you cries, not only will you lose your bunk, you will eat, sleep, and walk on your knees! ‘Cause real men don’t cry.~
~The longer I kept up this schedule, the more I noticed an eerie feeling growing, like not having my own shadow.~
~For many years I stared out at what I thought was freedom through a mesh screen and a crack in an old broken window. I would not find myself–and inner freedom–for many more.~
~”That fuckin’ bird ain’t worth all this Why you trippin’, Jarvis?”
“Why?” I asked. “Man, you ask me why? ‘Cause, man,” I blurted out, “that bird has my wings, that’s why!”~
~Sabrina was a born-and-raised Manhattan heiress whose wardrobe was pure Audrey Hepburn and whose bookshelves were stuffed with Stephen King.~
~And also because you laugh like a helicopter.~
~I’m the kind of guy people are always more interested in before they get to know me.~
~”I’m a mystery to me too,” I say, “I didn’t realize how little I understood myself until I met Cleo and Sabrina. They’re both so sure of how they feel about things.”
~Just because he’s a pilot doesn’t mean he’s not a ghost.~
~Don’t you see, once there’s a rumour that you’re dishonest, it sticks to you like…a bad smell that you can’t wash off, and everybody knows it’s there, they notice it, and I don’t want to be in Norwich day after day thinking that people are thinking I’m some kind of fraud.~
~Those Russians weren’t so great on enjoyment, were they? I reckon they boozed and shagged like the rest of us, but it’s not as if it gave them much joy, if you know what I mean.~
~I don’t tell lies as a rule, except when I have to, if you know what I mean, but I reckon you weigh up the price of honesty against the price of dishonesty, and sometimes dishonesty’s just a better deal.~
~Do you ever wonder whether you can really decide your own future? Or is what we were born for decided for us by somebody else?~
~ You know, I guess nobody’s reading Camus any more, but he maintained that ‘There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide.’…Which makes me kind of wonder: why am I doing a PhD on Kierkegaard?’
~I mean, what are friends for if not to share each other’s mystifications?~
~They had looked forward to her talking. But now Sthenno felt there should be more time between a child beginning to speak and a child asking questions of every single thing she could see or not see, from the birds in the sky to the wind in her hair.~
~As far as they could tell, he did not seem to have thought about the Gorgons at all. ordered to fetch the head of one of them, he had simply set out to do so with no thought for how the Gorgon might feel about giving it up.~
~ It’s true we weren’t here at the beginning, but we were here at the end and which is more important?~
~So to mortal men, we are monsters. Because of our teeth, our flight, our strength. They fear us, so they call us monsters.~
~The first flute therefore sounded exactly like what it was.
The desperate cry of a reed that has been severed from its root.~
~Her hair which had been relaxed for Christmas, was now shaved off because it was not allowed at her primary school.~
~Only a woman who can relate to our struggles can see and hear us.~
~For a long time, she had been thinking about what it was that she wanted in her marriage. But even now, she still did not know.~
~She had wasted a long time trying to recreate the things she’d lacked in her childhood. She could admit that to herself now.~
~I write sometimes, when I feel my heart breaking.~
~They will hear from the horse’s mouth when I say this is where it all happened.~
