Interview with Trish from NARCISSI by Babette Fraser Hale

Narcissi is a novel in linked stories about ten women who fall for a charismatic Texas novelist named Cole Burnett. Freshly split from his second wife when the story begins, Cole celebrates his freedom to write something important, significant. His life is lonely, though, and he keeps meeting women who share his need for warmth and closeness, however temporary.

Trish is one of his longtime women friends, a former student who kept up with him. She’d had a crush on him for years.

I interviewed her at a coffee bar on Rice Boulevard in Houston, near Rice University. Trish is about my age, vivacious, stylish in an orange summer dress and, to protect against enthusiastic air conditioning, a blue jean jacket embroidered with sunflowers.

I: You knew he had multiple girlfriends, ones he slept with? 

T: I did. Or I thought I did. He had a way of connecting with you. (She glances away, remembering.) Some might call it flirting, but it was more in the way he listened. He would look at you, just a flash of a look, but it sank all the way in. You felt seen. I realized that a man like that would be hard to resist.

I: But you did resist.

T: (She laughs.) That would be giving away the story, wouldn’t it?

I: So he listened well. That’s all it took to make him attractive?

T: Come on. You know why he was attractive. You invented him, after all—assuming you did invent him. Did you?

I: Sure. Not that I haven’t known some men like that. Good men and less good. Nice men and less nice. Maybe even one or two who were outright rotters. I guess I want to ask you, though—do you think he was a womanizer?

T: I think a womanizer views women as commodities. Conquests. That’s not like Cole at all. He cared for women as people. He was sensitive. 

I: What do you mean by sensitive?

T: Empathetic. And I always got the feeling he could see more of what was going on around us than I could. He was a little on edge in crowded rooms.

I: He had good reason for that, at one point.

T: What do you mean?

I: You’ll need to read the book.

T: Kind of hard to read it when you’re in it, though. When that’s who you are, a character.

I: I know. I’m sorry about that. (Shrug) But back to Cole, why don’t you tell me why you found him attractive? Did you think he was hot?

T: (Laughs) I think our generation would call it sexy. He had that masculine slouching grace, and the curly red hair, and the greatest smile. The scar didn’t detract.

I: He was lucky. It was a nasty injury, and still women were drawn to him. Didn’t the multiple girlfriends put you off a little? Could you trust his empathy?

T: I was his friend. Why wouldn’t he have others? I would just assume he slept with some of them after he was divorced. You know he was married much of the time I knew him. As I was.

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Babette Fraser Hale is the author of Narcissi, This Familiar Heart, and A Wall of Bright Dead Feathers, winner of the debut fiction award from the Texas Institute of Letters. Her stories have won the Meyerson Award from Southwest Review and been included among the “Other Distinguished Stories” of the year in Best American Short Stories, 2015. In addition to writing fiction, she has been a magazine feature writer, columnist, contributing editor, book editor and publisher. She lives in Texas. In 2025 she was elected to membership in the Texas Institute of Letters.

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Category: Contemporary Women Writers, Interviews