Editor's note: This article deals with adult themes including rape and suicide.
Mary South’s debut short-story collection is called "You Will Never Be Forgotten." The stories feature characters trying to use technology to escape their uncontrollable feelings of grief, rage or despair. South uses carefully-crafted sentences and a fair share of dark humor to show that the results aren’t always what her characters hoped for.
"One of the things that really interests me about technology is that no matter how much it advances, no matter how instantaneously we can get the news, or how much information we now have than ever before, that our baseline, like human emotions and human psyche, hasn't changed," South told WPR’s "BETA."
South said as a millennial woman growing up with technology, she still remembers the dial-up modem of the early days of the web when it took what felt like eons, to download an image, whereas today we receive endless amounts of news and commentary instantaneously.
"I'm interested how that sort of reroutes our psychology, but then our emotions and our needs are still baseline the same," South said. "We still crave acceptance and nurturing and connection with others. But now that we have these amazing tools at our disposal, how do we go about getting them? When we have a dating app where you can meet hundreds of people that you would never have been able to meet before in your life, how do you go and adjust your behavior and go about getting that and fulfilling that need?"
South said she wants her stories to be complex and nuanced, which she says it is difficult to do when it comes to the internet.
"It’s like trying to ground the story in the character's emotions, trying to ground it and where they're coming from, to really imagine them fully in my mind and how they would respond to situations in their life," she said.
South said her stories have often been compared to the British science-fiction TV anthology series, "Black Mirror," which explores the dark side of technological innovation. She told "BETA" the "Black Mirror" episodes she most enjoys are the ones that really focus on the characters’ emotions.
"So it doesn't just become like a story about like, 'Oh, this is how we have no privacy anymore or this is how social media makes us lose empathy for each other,'" she said. "It's really about a character struggling with a core trauma or a core desire that they've never been able to fulfill in their life. And now, how are they going to go about getting that when they have all of these tools?"
South points to her story, "Not Setsuko," as an example. It’s a story about a mother who has lost her daughter tragically. The mother then clones her and tries to remake her memories, so she can live in the illusion that her daughter is back with her.
"The story is not really about cloning, although that's like a futuristic, near-futuristic technology," South said. "I really wanted to stay grounded with the mother and her desire to have her child back. I really wanted the story to be about grief."
The title story, "You Will Never Be Forgotten," is about a content moderator who is screening content to prevent traumatic and violent content from ending up online.
"She is also monitoring her rapist as he is living his life online, seeing what he's posting on social media," South said. "And she starts also monitoring him in real life, following him around the neighborhood after he goes home from work. And that kind of thing."
"And it's mostly because she's trying to process the trauma of her sexual assaults. But also, she's worried that what happened to her is going to happen to other women. So there's a lot emotionally for her to deal with," she added.
In the story, the woman makes a fake profile on the dating site where she originally met the rapist and begins corresponding with him.
"But then the whole thing seems really false and wrong," South said. "So she confesses: 'This is me, this is the woman you sexually assaulted. Do you remember me?'"
South said it was a difficult story for her to write.
"I didn't want to retraumatize the reader by the way I dealt with it. But then again, I also thought it was important if I was going to write about these things that I fully look at them and not shy away from writing about them," she said.
"What I hope I accomplished was by grounding it in her emotions and her point of view and her struggle to get over it, I hope that the reader can really feel her pain," South said. "It's really about her pain and recovery. I wanted to fully inhabit her and fully present her to the world and do her justice and have her be seen in the way that she feels very invisible. Her rapist hasn't been held accountable. So I wanted that character to be fully seen and have her justice in a fictional way."
