Jacky ‘The Beetle’ McKenzie is in the midst of a hard time. A rising ‘starchitect,’ her new utopian building designed to radicalize societal norms is receiving scorn from the public and from the press — a disdainful journalist even suggests she’s endangering women with her avant-garde ideas. At her helm is her husband and creative partner, Mark, and her girlfriend, Clarissa, who calms her down when the industry gets too insidious. But as Jacky barrels towards self-actualization, becoming the most streamlined version of herself, she must make a choice if the life of the public figure is truly for her. With cutting insight and an intricate and provocative character study, A Scarab Where the Heart Should Be presents an entirely new type of complicated woman.
Our Culture sat down to talk with Marieke Bigg about architecture, beetles, and self-fortification.
Congratulations on your new novel! How does it feel so close to being out?
It’s always a bit weird with publishing; everything takes so long. I wrote it probably two years ago, now. It feels a bit abstract, but it’ll be great once it’s out there and I can talk to people about it and get a response.
You’ve had three books come out over the past three years, though, right?
Yeah, I guess I’ve been writing a lot, nonfiction and fiction. I treat nonfiction as my day job, really, some of the research-focused writing. And novels in between. There’s been a lot going on.
Jacky is probably one of the most interesting characters of the year — she’s this no-nonsense architect completely determined to streamline her business and life. Where did the idea for her first come from?
It’s always so hard to trace it back, but I remember the idea for the story started with, I think I misread a line in the book I was reading, which kind of got me thinking. “She didn’t hear him say it was over,” or something. And it got me thinking about the type of person who would be so caught-up and self-involved, not being able to hear someone else, and Jacky flowed from that.
Where did the architecture angle come from?
I’m a sociologist by training, so I think I’ve always enjoyed architecture as a visual expression of sociological ideas. I’ve always been interested in it anyway, and it’s quite visual, as well. It also suited Jacky — architecture has been this very masculine discipline about making your mark on the world.
She’s delightfully radical — in one early interview with a journalist, she defends her choice to not put breastfeeding rooms in a university building to normalize women breastfeeding in public. In her words, “Transparency inspires self-respect. The space we occupy can improve us. In that way my buildings aren’t about people in that they show us how collectively, we can transcend ourselves, even when we surrender to the natural laws of space and time.” She makes a compelling case. What was it like occupying her mind, justifying these extreme ideas?
Surprisingly easy, really. I think it’s always helpful, and I enjoy in my writing taking a thought or way of being to its logical extreme. I did that a little bit in Waiting For Ted; Rosie, the protagonist, had a clear vision of how she wanted to live her life. I think it’s a similar thing with these kinds of views. I really enjoy going with them. It’s cathartic in a way, almost carnivalesque, turning everything upside-down and reveling in it.
I love when two characters are arguing in a novel and there’s something to agree with on both sides.
That’s really interesting, you saying that makes me think about writing and how it gives you an opportunity to explore someone’s world on their own terms. I’m currently doing psychotherapy training, which is all about trying to understand and meet someone where they are. You discover more and more, which is that any worldview, absurd as it seems from the outside, has a logic, makes sense.
I do feel like there is some truth to her ruthlessness. When the journalist asks her if her architecture requires a level of social responsibility, Jacky responds in Darwinian fashion, saying that her buildings sort the strong from the weak. “That’s a natural law we all know well,” she says. “And those laws are timeless, and that’s what will make my buildings meaningful to societies to come, and they wouldn’t be if I pandered to trends.” Did you ever find yourself agreeing with her?
I think there’s a seductiveness to that way of thinking, and there’s a reason why people hop on board — it serves a privileged elite very well. That sort of egotistical, individualistic way of thinking. But I agree with her to the extent that it’s an artistic impulse we all have to create and manipulate our environments. That’s a calling we all have. But we mature and we learn to coexist. But it’s recognizing that impulse isn’t exclusive to evil or abnormal people, it’s a capacity we all have. And then we decide what to do with it.
She signs up for Twitter to defend her buildings, and I think it’s the perfect place for someone so provocative. What was it like imagining how the public would react to her personality?
It was an interesting experiment, in a way. I felt her anxiety as I was doing that and it mirrors my own. I think I’m just figuring this out as I’m talking about it now, but how Twitter suits her very well. It’s just speaking into a void, which makes you very anxious. The responses are delayed and they’re anonymous. It’s this ambivalence — on the one hand it’s this perfect platform for her where she can express herself and be provocative, and on the other there’s this deep insecurity and need to be validated that I think unfolds as the story goes on, that leads her feeling anxious, lost, alone, empty.
It’s interesting Jacky takes so willingly to the ‘Beetle’ moniker and even perfects her look so as to be more recognizable as this ‘starchitect,’ as they call her. Why do you think she enjoys being compared to a bug so much?
I think there’s a lot of deep-rooted self-hatred. And a lot of her character is a defense. She talks a lot about buildings, fortification, armor. I think that’s also the branding, the exaggerated beliefs do. They all protect her from the outside world, at the same time, she’s reaching out to it, because she wants intimacy, but she’s too afraid.
The way you so easily enfold her into her own nature and the scientific process is so striking, in one chapter about how she’s an endangered species, you write, “[Jacky]’d had to birth a new world order that would welcome her kind, before she could think about populating the world with more of her.” What was your goal about writing about a woman’s body and place in the world this way?
I think not so consciously, but now that you’re talking about it, it was a kind of exploration for me as well, of this foreign object, of this woman who behaves in many ways, like a misogynistic man, really. But there’s also moments where she says things like that, like, “The world needs to change to accommodate me, I’m not going to pander to these expectations of women, to mother in a particular way.” Those are glimpses of something else and something true. It’s also a kind of irreverence. Women can be conflicted and confusing and there’s aspects of her you might relate to and aspects of her that are completely insane.
At the beginning, Jacky is concerned with how other people can misinterpret her work, but by the end, she makes a grand statement to the public with a building and leaves that life. What do you think changed in her?
It’s this reluctant awareness, but this growing realization that she can’t go on living that way. There’s several points in the story where she’s incapacitated, reaches her physical extreme. But as a human she’s very isolated and she follows her way of being, and realizes it’s not conducive to life. Just reaching the apex of her vision and seeing emptiness in that.
I love that there’s a deep fascination with science, particularly natural selection, adaptability in one’s world, and beetles. There are chapters mixed into the narrative describing different beetles and how Jacky and her partners relate to them. Was there a lot of research going into the novel? Were beetles a hyperfixation?
Yeah, I’d say so. Artistically, I find them really amazing to look at. The more you learn about them, the more you see. It all felt very intuitive, Jacky as a beetle, her obsession with beetles. It felt like I could indulge that lightly maniacal interest myself. It was quite an iterative process — the beetle chapters came later, as I surrendered to the mania.
As well as your novels, you have a PhD and your first nonfiction book, This Won’t Hurt, details misogyny in the medical industry. Do you feel like your fiction is in conversation with this kind of work or are they separate experiments?
I think more and more they’re in conversation. Definitely similar themes, settings. [Jacky] goes to an IVF clinic, and my PhD was on IVF. There are these obvious themes and areas of interest. My next nonfiction book is on psychiatry and I’ve been working more on mental health now. The insights bleed into the different types of writing I’m doing.
I was going to ask what you’re working on next — anything more with fiction as well?
Just coming to the end of psychiatry, but I’m working on more fiction, and hopefully there will be more to come.
You’re very busy!
Yeah, I also need a holiday, so I’m trying to slow it all down a bit.
A Scarab Where the Heart Should Be is out now.