Jennifer Percy’s writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, and Oxford American. Her brother, who she mentioned in our conversation, is the writer Benjamin Percy—author of 2013’s werewolf epic, Red Moon and a past contributor to “By Heart.”
Jennifer Percy spoke to me by phone from her home in Brooklyn, where she teaches writing at New York University.
Jennifer Percy: The lessons my father taught me as a child all revolved around science. He was an amateur physicist and saw the world through only that lens. I remember him saying that we are all formed of stardust, that the atoms in our bodies began in stars millions of years ago. Or how, if we stepped into a black hole, we’d be turned into a stream of subatomic particles. I remember him telling me about matter depressurizing in space, how our eyeballs would come out of their sockets.
The natural world was a huge part of my childhood. We lived in rural Oregon, between the mountains and the desert, with not a lot of people around. We spent our weekends in the wilderness. Night was very dark, and every night we’d go out and look through a telescope at stars. But they wouldn’t be stars to my father. He’d call them “dying suns.”
If I burnt a gingerbread man in the oven, and cried to him about it, he’d say, “Well, one day the sun’s going to destroy the earth. Then we’ll all be like the gingerbread man.”
This brand of science terrified me—but my dad found comfort in going to the stars. He flees from what messy realm of human existence, what he calls “dysfunctional reality” or “people problems.” When you imagine that we’re just bodies on a rock, small concerns become insignificant. He keeps an image above his desk, taken by the Hubble space telescope, that from a distance looks like an image of stars—but if you look more closely, they are not stars, they are whole galaxies. My dad sees that, imagining the tiny earth inside one of these galaxies—and suddenly, the rough day, the troubles at work, they disappear.
Still, I found the brutal immensity of the universe frightening. My brother and I, like many kids, were shaped by poking through the books we had at home, and we had just two kinds: physics books and Stephen King books. Both were terrifying. So we had to choose what kind of fear we liked best—the terror of the universe or the terror of the clown that lives in the sewer and is going to kill you. I think my brother chose Stephen King and I chose Stephen Hawking.
I pursued a career in science, and in college, I studied physics. I worked with those guys that make Mars Rovers and understand the properties of crystals and who ride in the Vomit Comet over the Gulf of Mexico, imagining themselves space-bound. But I was unhappy.
The language of science was unsatisfying to me. “The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it’s comprehensible,” Einstein said. But I don’t think human relationships are ever fully comprehensible. They can clarify for small, beautiful moments, but then they change. Unlike a scientific experiment with rigorous, controlled parameters, our lives are boundless and shifting. And there’s never an end to the story. We need more than science—we need storytelling to capture that kind of complexity, that kind of incomprehensibility.