Hypertext Magazine asked Alex Poppe, author of Moxie, “Would Jax be the lover or the beloved?”

By Alex Poppe

Moxie started as a response to my partner who told me I was losing my looks due to drinking. I told him I was losing my looks due to age. Although I accepted that I was middle-aged, I didn’t think that meant I had to relinquish the spotlight of my own life or acquiesce to a world that would discount me because I was no longer young or attractive. I remember an Oscar ceremony where Jaclyn Smith came out to present an award, and she was applauded because she looked so beautiful despite her age, and I found it a bit ridiculous and angering because her beauty was her greatest achievement, not her talent or her ability as an actor. In that moment, the applause rendered her two-dimensional. How many times have you heard a man be complimented on how beautiful his partner is as if he had anything to do with it? With these events in mind, the crafting of Jax, the protagonist of Moxie, began.

I set out to write an unlikable character whom the reader would champion. Jax is highly disfigured, angry, self-loathing, spoilt and profane, yet readers empathize with her because she is funny, self-aware and non-apologetic, especially with regards to appetite. Usually it is male characters who are written this way, usually to provide the opportunity for a love redemption. I wanted to craft a female character who is the charming rascal, the female equivalent of a man-child, a female character who is not an ambitious, career-driven bitch who needs to be redeemed by love, but rather a female character in charge of her own sexuality despite being aesthetically hideous. Jax would have been a trope if she had the sexual appetite she has in Moxie and were still beautiful or at least not disfigured. That is why Jax chooses to be the lover and not the beloved.

The lover has the fun. The lover decides, chases, flatters, devises, schemes, convinces, takes delights, and sometimes wins although the win is not as fun as the pursuit. That is why Jax, like the cowboy, the explorer, the adventurer, and all other male romantic archetypes, ultimately always leaves. The heart is a lone hunter, and in the hunting is the living.

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Alex Poppe is the author of two works of fiction Girl, World by Laughing Fire Press (2017) and Moxie by Tortoise Books (2019). Girl, World was named a 35 Over 35 Debut Book Award winner, First Horizon Award finalist, Montaigne Medal finalist, short-listed for the Eric Hoffer Grand Prize and was awarded an Honorable Mention in General Fiction from the Eric Hoffer Awards. Her short fiction has been a finalist for Glimmer Train’s Family Matters contest, a nominee for the Pushcart Prize and commended for the Baker Prize among others. Her non-fiction was named a Best of the Net nominee (2016), a finalist for Hot Metal Bridge’s Social Justice Writing contest and has appeared in Bust and Bella Caledonia among others. She is an academic writing lecturer at the American University of Iraq, Sulaimani and is working on her third book of fiction with support from Can Serrat International Art Residency and Duplo-Linea De Costa Artist in Residency programs. When she is not being thrown from the back of food aid trucks or dining with pistol-packing Kurdish hit men, she writes.