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Interview with Roxana Pană
author of the novel The Milk Bone
author of the novel The Milk Bone
You started writing “The Milk Bone” in college, but the manuscript was left waiting for years. What changed in you during these years? What had to happen so that the story could finally be finished?
A lot has changed in my life, I got married, I became a mother, I moved from Bucharest to somewhere in the countryside, but not much has changed in me, in my creative spirit. It was as if I had pressed a button and paused, and one day, exhausted, caught up in the daily routine with the children, I felt the need to return to myself, to the day I pressed that button. It happened many times that I reread what I wrote in high school or college and could no longer find myself in those words or ideas. But when I started reading “The Milk Bone” again, I realized that I hadn’t changed much and continued the story one morning, as if I had put it aside the day before. In addition, everything that is happening now with Artificial Intelligence and the wave of texts devoid of the stakes of real experience put me on high alert. I felt a need to get the book out into the world – to put on paper a story written with human blood, flesh and teeth, before everything was drowned in synthetic content. And, of course, I also had to get lost a little in the chaos of motherhood so that I could realize how much I also need a moment when I can just be with myself.
The break from the novel was dedicated to the birth of the children. Looking at the finished book, you feel like you have returned to an old manuscript or that you have met a younger version of yourself who still had something important to tell you. say?
I just felt that the phrase I was holding tightly inside me needed a full stop. And yes, I met a younger version… it was like a reunion over time with a woman who already carried within her all the intuition of the story. It reminded me of who I was beyond the role of mother and gave me the courage to carry out a voice that had been patiently waiting to be heard.
“The Milk Bone” talks about the traumas that are transmitted from one generation to another, sometimes without being spoken. How much do you think we carry within us the stories of those who came before us and, above all, can we really break such a chain?
I am convinced that we do not only inherit a name, an eye color or a piece of land…, but also others… for example, qualified fears. I believe that our existence is fundamentally circular. We do not live in a straight line that simply detaches from the past, but in a spiral in which the same themes, the same wounds and the same encounters return under other masks. That is precisely why, in the novel, there are so many mirrored events, so many transgenerational echoes – from the gestures of women to the strange symmetry between the figure of Ștefan in 1965 and that of Professor Damian in 2010, from the golden bug that appears when the walnut tree is planted in 1900 and reappears in 2050, to the connections between primary fears and the feeling felt in the face of death.
In the book, Ștefan, the little boy who lives with the terror that losing a tooth means dismemberment, becomes the key to closing the family circle. He takes the walnut mass to the refectory of a church and screws its legs with his own hands. That screwing is the final act of restoring order: a man in the family takes on the debt and pays it, and the table no longer sits in a house haunted by silences, but becomes pure.
I believe that the chain breaks at a certain point, through a gesture of assumption and forgiveness, sometimes seemingly banal – through a word, by putting some screws back in place, or by the simple decision to stop passing on the pain.
The symbol of the “milk bone” seems to mark the moment when innocence must be abandoned in order for real life to begin. For you, when is the moment when a child ceases to be a child?
The novel is, in fact, about roots – about everything that comes from our past.
On the one hand, we have the spiritual heritage, symbolized in the book by a silent witness: the Walnut. With its deep, purple roots, it carries everything we receive emotionally: the hidden traumas, the fears that grip us at night under the covers, the pain of abused women and the curses thrown at our nerves. But cutting down the walnut is not the end. It does not disappear, but turns into a table – a massive, heavy, unmoving walnut table that takes up all the air in the room. It becomes the place where warm bread is placed, where love is made, but also the place where the coffin is placed. The cut walnut thus becomes a solid structure: the only thing that does not shake when the rest of the world collapses.
On the other hand, the milk tooth represents the physical root – that is, what we inherit directly in the body, through blood and flesh. It carries our fragility in the face of time, the disease that lurks around us, schizophrenia or the metastases that grind our skeleton. The milk tooth is the small, bloody and vulnerable bone, which reminds us that we are soft, fragile.
I think that, metaphorically speaking, a person ceases to be a child when he feels the hole in his gum… a wound that scares him that it will leave him crippled forever, but then he realizes that something much more solid is about to grow there.
How do you see Ofelia? Is she a victim of the past, a survivor or a woman who has the power to change her destiny?
Ofelia is all three, but at different moments in her life. She starts as a silent victim, becomes a survivor when she leaves for Bucharest and tries to bandage her wounds through education and books, but ends up, in the end, a woman who fully assumes the power to change her destiny. She refuses to carry forward the fatalism subliminally transmitted by her grandmother Antoaneta – the idea that their blood is tainted and that all they have to do is atone. With each subsequent choice, Ofelia decides to no longer be a simple echo of the past.
The novel seems to ask a painful question: how much of what we become is our choice and how much is the result of the wounds we received before we could choose? Where do you think a person’s freedom begins?
Freedom does not mean pretending that the past did not exist or running away from it. Freedom begins the moment you realize that you are in that circle and choose to do things differently. When you experience an old pain, you recognize it, but you choose not to pass it on. Freedom is when you stop and say: “So far their story has been, here begins mine.” Like Ofelia, they try to build a new life, and one of the most important gestures is buying a walnut table for their apartment, as an acceptance of the past, which they place in the middle of their home. The table is not the same one from the old house, but the choice of wood unconsciously repeats the family pattern. The novel thus suggests that trauma is not transmitted through objects, but through the emotional forms that people come to consider “home.”
If the reader were left with only one thought after closing the book, what would you want it to be?
I know that “The Milk Bone” is not a comfortable book and probably not the kind of reading that everyone will enjoy, especially in the hurried pace of today’s youth. I never wanted for a second to write something just to be pleasant, easy to digest, or fashionable. I wanted to write something profound, something that would reach the heart, that would hurt, but also heal.
I would like the reader to be left with the feeling that we are all like walnut wood: we carry within us cracks, knots and deep shadows, a strong root, a past, but beneath all these layers of pain, the fiber remains dense, undecayed and ready at any time to support the weight of life.