Staff reader Peter Witte talks with NER 46.3-4 contributor Maggie Mull about defamiliarization, the paradox of authenticity, and the uncomfortable humor in her story “Rounded at the Tips.”
Peter Witte: When I first read “Rounded at the Tips,” I was immediately drawn in by the awkward opening moment that the narrator has in bed with Isaac, who is masturbating next to her while believing that she’s still asleep. Similar to the narrator, who is confused about how to respond (“I don’t know if I’m supposed to act angry or aroused or just keep lying there”), the reader feels confusion too, or at least uncertainty about what to think, both about Isaac and the relationship. The confusion really grabs the reader and propels them forward. Could you talk about how you landed on that opening scene and what you think makes for a compelling beginning?
Maggie Mull: Against all good advice, I tend to love stories that begin (or end) with dreams or dreamlike scenarios, where there’s a sense that we are being given the answer to everything but not in a language we understand. I actually wrote the beginning to this story about fifteen years ago. It was inspired by true events that were so unexpectedly alienating to me—not good, not bad, but unforeseen—that they necessitated my review, as a dream might. I only recently learned a term for this—defamiliarization—and, even though it stands in direct opposition to what I’ve learned in most workshops, I think it is what I find most intriguing in fiction: strange moments in which the reader is estranged and thus tasked with parsing the words on the page. I understand so little about most things that I’ve sort of reasoned the best I can do in my writing is describe my confusions and hope they untangle themselves via somebody else’s interpretation.
PW: I am interested in how writers approach depictions of sex in storytelling. I want to ask a bit more about that uncomfortable and not-so-inconspicuous masturbation scene. That moment was handled deftly in your story as the details are suggested through simile and metaphor rather than being shown explicitly. I would love to hear your thoughts about depictions of sex in literature. Any sense of how to write it into stories with care, rules around the crafting, or do’s and don’ts?
MM: It’s very possible that what seems like craft, in this instance, is just my raging immaturity and blushing inability to describe sex (dare I say) head-on. Also, there is already a very popular place called The Internet where one can find many highly literal interpretations of sex, and I wouldn’t attempt to compete with that. A lot of this may be informed by my day job as a comedy writer, in that sex alone is not a great punchline. You can usually spot an unfunny person just by the way they confuse obscenity with a fresh take. I realize that makes me sound like an old dork—and I am!—but I think what I mean is that what excites me about sex in fiction isn’t the explicit activity of it but the implicit vulnerability in it, how it showcases and stokes humiliations, what I stand to learn from a character getting undressed. I mostly read fiction to feel less lonely in the world and in many ways the opening scene here is more about loneliness than sex. That said, if people want to write steamy sex scenes, I think they ought to—send me a copy!—but, like comedy, I don’t think it’s ever enough to just say bad words. I’m sure there’s already a website for that.
PW: “Rounded at the Tips” is an exploration of early adulthood and all of the challenges that come with it—relationships, finding work, figuring out one’s place in the world, etc. I’ve heard many people say that the middle school years are the worst, but for me it was my twenties. As I recall those experiences, I think about how much I struggled with many of the things that the narrator does. What are your thoughts on the twenties? Are they particularly challenging, and why?
MM: I started this story when I was twenty-five, hated it, abandoned it, then finished it at thirty-nine. And while the context remained a woman’s twenties, I think the anxiety of the story belonged to my thirties, which was my brutal decade. The twenties actually felt like a time of expansion to me, of one lesson opening up into another like my life was actively birthing itself. But my thirties felt like a cyclical reexamination of the same dreadful lessons over and over again, and it gave me the sense of motion without movement. This could just be the universal experience of the past ten years, which coincided with my thirties, but I feel, at its heart, this story is about the world spinning at a faster rate than our ability to make peace with its comedies and dramas. In fact, for that very reason, I’m not even certain that’s what the story is about!
PW: The narrator, a woman in her mid-twenties, seems to be wrestling with authenticity. It is both her own authenticity—she and Laurel have “twenty-four-year-old girls speak,” she resists sharing about her life with Laurel, and so forth—and the authenticity of her surroundings, such as the nail salon art that advertises “Autumn Rose” and the magazine ad of the woman in the string bikini. Is that a fair assessment of a main conflict in the story? Does this kind of struggle exist for all of us, regardless of our social identities?
MM: I love this question because it’s actually the word I’ve been looking for: authenticity. You’re onto something here that builds upon the last question, which is: If the future constantly urges us forward before we have digested the past, can we ever be fully authentic in the present? I think the title “Rounded at the Tips” is about this conundrum, that we often end up shaving parts of ourselves down (or off entirely) to keep going in life. This story may be an exploration of my fear that true authenticity is an unreachable goal—by virtue of attempting it, we lose it. Likely there are some devout meditators out there that have transcended this problem, but I stand by the Tao of Vonnegut that we’re probably just here to fart around and, at best, be kind to one another. At forty, that’s become a more romantic quest than solving the mess of myself.
PW: The story is serious but it definitely has moments of humor and comic relief that appear through unexpected similes and metaphors like “it sounds like he’s massaging an octopus with Crisco.” There’s some some dark humor too, such as “[my dead mother’s] hand . . . suddenly felt like a dead, white-eyed cod.” I discovered online that you are a writer and producer of a variety of television shows with credits that include the very humorous Family Guy and Maggie. For me, I often find the absurd to be funny. Discomfort, I think, is a key to comic relief. I imagine the medium matters, but what makes something funny to you? And how do you approach writing humor?
MM: I’m so glad to hear that there are moments of humor in this story! I think it’s probably much easier to write humor than it is to have written something humorous—you really never know if the former is going to yield the latter. After fourteen years writing for television, I still don’t always know what’s going to get a laugh. Sometimes the least funny joke—in being the least funny—becomes the one you can’t stop laughing about. It’s an unpredictable mathematic, but I find that the funniest people I know all share an incredible ear. For better or worse, they pick up on everything, just as writers do, which is probably why good writing is also often funny.
For me, yes, the absurd is funny and discomfort is key. And inherent to both of these is a recognition of those subtle human behaviors that showcase how none of us know what we are doing and that we aren’t hiding it as well as we think we are. Those kinds of small, telling details make me laugh. Bad haircuts. Awkward handshakes. Or, in this case, masturbation—and all its supposed sexiness—being described for what it really is: a sad sloppy chore.
PW: Near the end of the story, the narrator sees a magazine ad that offers a false representation of reality and, for a moment, she speaks aloud the truth: “God . . . What a fucking mess.” This truth-speaking gets both Laurel and Trin to snap out of the false world, but only for a moment. Shortly, Laurel labels her a “freak” and returns to the magazine world. But the narrator is done with the muck and fakery. Sometimes, I like to imagine what happens in the next beats after a story ends. After I read “Rounded at the Tips,” I had a strong sense that our narrator left the nail salon then went on to find happiness that she’s still living inside. She did not need to know where the mess was draining away to. Am I onto something here?
MM: I’m hesitant here to reveal that my interpretation lacks some of your hopefulness for the narrator, because I need hopefulness! The people need hopefulness! Hopefulness is good! And the narrator absolutely has that moment of awakening and of “snapping out of the false world” at the painful cost of inhabiting a truer reality. I suppose when I was writing the ending, I saw her bumping up against the challenge of “seeing the light” in a world that’s very happy to keep distracted. What can she then do with her awareness? Where does it go? How do you move forward with integrity when the world opts not to? I think I imagined the water draining from the tub in the same way that her personal truth must now ebb to accommodate the tidal bombardment of modern life. What I love about your reading is that, you’re right, she doesn’t actually know where her newfound knowledge goes, but it does go somewhere. Whether I meant to write that or not, that is how I want to see the story ending.
PW: Finally, what stories or books have you found engaging, fun, or moving that you would recommend right now?
MM: I’ve been reading a lot of Elizabeth McCracken’s stories. I love the humor in her prose but also how honest it all feels without ever veering into pretentiousness. I also recently read and loved Claire Keegan’s story collection So Late in the Day. Truthfully, I need to read more and watch crime documentaries less, but I like to tell myself that they both feed a similar education in what people do behind closed doors.
Maggie Mull is a television writer (Family Guy) and a contributing cartoonist for The New Yorker. She was awarded first place in the 2025 Kirkwood Prize and the 2024 Zoetrope: All-Story Short Fiction Competition. Her fiction has also appeared in the Mississippi Review.
Peter Witte is a reader for the New England Review. His writing has been published by The Threepenny Review, The Sun, and West Branch, and most recently featured in A Short Story, Long. He teaches at the University of Maryland and lives in University Park, Maryland.