All Interviews

"This is the best time of a writer’s life," Molly Giles says by telephone from Hawaii. "The book is finished and the reviews haven’t come out, so there’s a little breathing space."

For the moment, Giles is idling with her sister at a friend’s condominium not far from the beach. "We really have nothing else to do but swim and see movies," she laments wryly.

In about a week, however, she will return to her home in west Marin, north of San Francisco, to begin promoting her first novel, Iron Shoes. Then at the end of the summer, she’ll pack up her belongings and drive to the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, where she has been teaching creative writing for the last year, after many years of teaching at San Francisco State University.

Giles is by all accounts a wonderful creative writing teacher. Her classes at San Francisco State were routinely oversubscribed, and she is sometimes credited with boosting the careers of Amy Tan, Gus Lee, and Melba Beals among others, a claim she is far too modest to even acknowledge.

"Teaching is something I like, and I would never want to give it up," Giles says. "But it’s always a struggle to teach and to write. A lot of teaching is performance. And writing is something you do in a cave. It’s something you do in your sweats, talking to yourself. It’s not performance; it’s crossing out, it’s revision. I have to be frank; teaching actually does drain you. I have heard some writers say that it nourishes them, and I just think, wow, they are different than I am."

So for much of her career, Giles has been able to write only on the occasional weekend and during the summers and school vacations. For a number of years she rented an office over an old saloon in Point Reyes Station, a lovely rural village in west Marin now filled with bookstores, bakeries, boutiques, and bicyclists. There she produced many of the swift, intelligent, sharp-edged short stories that have earned her a well-deserved reputation as one of our best contemporary short story writers. Her first story collection, Rough Trans-lations, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. She is also the recipient of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, the California Book Award for Fiction, and the Small Press Best Fiction/Short Story Award. Now, after seven years of work, she is publishing her first novel, Iron Shoes.

"I’m really a short story writer. So it was the most frightening feeling in the world to type ’21’ on a page," Giles says, laughing. "I swear, most short story writers are probably very anal and they like to stay within their boundaries. So if suddenly the boundaries are taken away and you can go anywhere you want, it’s alarming to many writers, at least it was to me. Traversing the novel was like walking across a swamp with only one two-by-four. I’d throw the two-by-four down, walk to the end of it, swivel around, throw it forward, and continue walking over the swamp. It’s an alarming freedom."

Giles has used that freedom to extraordinary effect. Iron Shoes focuses on the difficulties of 40-year-old Kay Sorensen, a quick-minded, musically talented, self-aware, and oddly passive woman who sees herself as stuck, unable to take a step forward or backward in her relationships with her parents, her husband, or most of the other people around her. By turns funny and lacerating, the novel has a honed intensity, a verbal energy that makes it difficult to put down.

One of Kay’s essential problems is that she lives deep within the shadow of her mother, Ida, a vibrant, glamorous, dominant woman, who is dying loudly and horribly as the novel opens. "I really like the character of the mother," Giles says. "Ida is full of sass and vinegar, which is what my mother used to call it. She’s a good contrast to her daughter, who has less sass and vinegar, essentially because Ida’s taken it from her in many ways."

In a wonderful, psychologically acute scene that perfectly illustrates Kay’s dilemma, Ida attends Kay’s performance with a group of local amateur musicians. Ida arrives late, is wheeled down near the front, and falls into a loud coughing fit just as Kay begins her solo. For Kay, this is reminiscent of other disturbances during childhood performances.

"Most people aren’t stuck by choice," Giles says. "Kay is really caught between a rock and a hard place. Yes, this is something her mother has done since she was a child, but Kay can’t enjoy the pure luxury of anger because her mother genuinely is ill. Kay gets stuck between compassion, which is a natural and a good feeling, and anger, which she’s perfectly entitled to. And anger is always going to be balked, always, in her relationship with her mother. She can’t ever get purely angry with her mother, because you can’t kick a cripple and feel good. Although the anger is justified, there’s really nothing Kay can do about it. Except internalize it."

In other hands, an exploration of a buried personality such as Kay’s might induce claustrophobia. But Giles writes with such economy and vigor, and most of her character—Kay, her mother, and her emotionally distant father, Francis—speak with such intelligence and wit, that the book flares and sparkles with unexpected insight.

Probably the greatest surprise of the novel is its dark, corrosive, shocking, side-splitting humor, something Giles herself sometimes calls "sick."

"I’m walking a tricky line," Giles says, "and I guess that was the hardest thing in the book—to balance the horror of Ida’s physical life with the humor of comparing a woman with no legs to Humpty Dumpty. That’s very risky. I tried to hold that tone throughout the novel. I think that sort of humor is natural to my background. My family is Irish and they’ve always made light of terrible things. It’s sick. But it sustained us. And I think that’s my essential vision of the world."

Pausing for a moment, Giles considers the reception of the book in the wide world. To my surprise, she worries the book will be too quirky for some readers. Then, with a kind of silent, philosophical shrug she laughs and says, "The one thing a writer doesn’t need to have is pride. You have to be very humble and just go in there and make a fool of yourself. If you’ve got the capacity to make a fool of yourself, you have the capacity to write."

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.

After years at the helm of the online magazine The Morning News, Rosecrans Baldwin has made his fiction debut. And what a debut it is—in addition to being a BookPage top debut for 2010, the LA Times placed You Lost Me There on its Summer Reading List, and TimeOut Chicago named it as one of the Best Summer Reads.

An intimate look into the evanescence of memory and the troubled man who has made his living studying its breakdown, You Lost Me There is an unforgettable read. Before the simmering hype comes to a rolling boil, Baldwin took some time out to talk to BookPage about the union of art and science, his other writing projects and how he plans to celebrate the launch of his first novel.

Throughout the novel, Victor undergoes some rather weighty moments of introspection—do you feel like you learned anything previously unknown about yourself while writing You Lost Me There?
Absolutely, and I wouldn’t think of sharing it in public. That’s what novels are for.

One of the conflicts in You Lost Me There seems to be based on fundamental incompatibilities between Victor and Sara—he is a scientist and she is an artist. Do you think science and art are diametrically opposed, or can they be reconciled?
Artists and scientists have lots in common. They work instinctively through long investigations, where the outcome is unknown. Both fields appeal to those who are drawn to lifelong disciplines, and also dabblers. I don’t think that Sara and Victor’s difficulties necessarily arise from their occupations, but it is their work where those difficulties often play out.

Do you feel like problems in relationships arise because the players change or is it perhaps their inability to change that causes issues?
Both—and six billion reasons more. But those two reasons are significant, absolutely. Sara, quoting Victor, says at one point maybe some marriages aren’t meant to last beyond a certain period—that, like humans, there may be diseases inherent to the body of the relationship that stay hidden for decades, but eventually appear.

One of your characters is a poet, and some of her verses are scattered throughout the novel. What was it like writing those? Have you ever had poetic aspirations?
I wish I could write poetry. I’d say I’m halfway-awful at it, which is what I’d also claim for Regina, the poet in the book. I wrote poetry all through college—and as soon as I graduated, I moved to New York and switched to writing novels in the mornings before work. Recently I’ve gone back to writing poems, but as warm-up exercises. I write really good warm-up poems. They are the equivalent of sweatpants.

As someone who didn’t necessarily excel at the sciences when in school, what was it like to research such a complicated topic like Alzheimer’s?
It was interesting. Less about Alzheimer’s Disease specifically, more in talking to scientists about their daily work—hearing about how labs function, how grant-writing works. For a while I thought academic scientists and writers were very similar; now I think it’s scientists and baseball players. Lots of training, lots of drudgery. Endless scoreless innings, but with occasional flashes of brilliance. And an idea of working in a tradition.

There’s a lot of drinking going on in this novel. What’s your alcoholic drink of choice?
I am a tequila guy.

How was writing a novel different from developing The Morning News and writing for a magazine?
They’re entirely different, but they’re both things I love doing. TMN gives me a venue to collaborate. One of our editors describes working on TMN as like playing in a band with two-dozen close friends, and I think that’s about right.

One thing our readers may not know is that every year The Morning News holds an NCAA-style literary match-up of the year’s most notable books (The Tournament of Books). Any hopes (or fears) that You Lost Me There might make the cut next March?
We instituted a rule that books from the Tournament’s staff are forbidden from competing. Thus Kevin Guilfoile’s new novel, The Thousand, won’t be eligible either. But yeah, if my book was in competition, I would be terrified of fighting in 2010. It’s been a terrific year for novels.

It took you five years to complete this novel—will we have to wait another five for your follow-up or do you already have something in the works?
I’m currently working on two new books, a nonfiction book about Paris and a novel about Tijuana. Hopefully, they won’t take decades, but you never know.

I imagine an author’s first release party for his first novel is kind of like a girl’s sweet 16th birthday party . . . but maybe with fewer frills and less pink. How do you intend to celebrate the release of You Lost Me There?
With roasted pink frilliness. My wife and I live in North Carolina, where the regional delicacy is pork BBQ, so we’re throwing a “pig pickin’ ” in the back yard. That’s where guests arrive to find about 90 pounds of animal smoking in an oil drum, and they tear the meat apart with their fingers.

Author photo by Susie Post Rust

Superhuman strength, x-ray vision, the ability to leap tall buildings in a single bound — Superman’s got it all, believes author Michael Chabon. But if Chabon were a comic book superhero himself, he thinks he would have been "one of the also-rans. There’s Daredevil, who was blind; Hour Man, who had his powers for an hour; Bouncing Boy bounced into people; Matter Eater could eat anything," he said. "As a nebbishy Jewish guy from Cleveland, I always identified with characters with greater frailty."

And that’s the key to Chabon, who was all of 24 when he dazzled the literary world with his 1988 debut novel The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. While grateful to be published, the mad celebrity he garnered at the time struck him as "a horrible fate — I felt thrust forward," said Chabon, who though he seems neither nebbishy nor frail, holds his inner Bouncing Boy close to his heart. He combines his empathy for nebbishes and people who are "prisoners of their own limitations" and his love of comic book superheroes in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.

The novel, set in New York in the 1940s, features lavish descriptions and cameo appearances by historical figures including Al Smith and Orson Welles. The world Chabon portrays is so vivid, it’s hard to remember the author, 36, wasn’t even born then. "I’m drawn to the history of that period," he said. "Not just the battles, but the home front."

The home front is where The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay takes place. Joseph Kavalier escapes from Hitler’s Prague and comes to America, specifically Brooklyn, and the home of his cousin Sammy Clay. Sammy’s a huge comic book fan. Joe’s a killer artist. He’s also a deft magician skilled at Houdini-like escapes. Sammy, whose head is filled with stories, possesses, as Chabon writes, "a longing — common enough among the inventors of heroes — to be someone else . . . ."

The cousins, both in their teens, create a new superhero. "Armed with superb physical and mental training, a crack team of assistants, and ancient wisdom, he roams the globe, performing amazing feats and coming to the aid of those who languish in tyranny’s chains! He is. . . the Escapist!"

The Escapist earns his name. He eludes the forces of evil and beats up German soldiers with his righteous fists, while the comic books themselves provide escape from the grim backdrop of World War II. As Chabon writes, "Having lost his mother, father, brother, and grandfather . . . his city, his history — his home — the usual charge leveled against comic books, that they offered merely an easy escape from reality, seemed to Joe actually to be a powerful argument on their behalf."

At one time, the author, who lives in Berkeley, considered creating comic books himself. "I like drawing, I like graphic art," he said. "But I didn’t seriously think about doing anything other than being a writer. I never had parental resistance. I said, I want to be a writer, and they said, okay."

Growing up, Chabon was a devotee of DC and Marvel comics. When he got older, "Comic books were out of my life. I sold my collection for $1,000, which I frittered away. Except I held on to Jack Kirby’s, dug them out about seven years ago, and I remembered what I’d given up," he said, green eyes glowing. Chabon feels Kirby, the King of Comics and creator of Spiderman, The Incredible Hulk, and Captain America, has influenced everything he has written.

Superheroes and supervillains have played a part in Chabon’s writing since he wrote his first short story at the age of 10. "It was Sherlock Holmes meets Captain Nemo," he recalled. "I started writing on my mother’s typewriter and to my amazement, I finished it. I put an explosion at the end." He laughs at his 10-year-old self but learned a lot from his first writing experience. "I was trying to write in the style of Arthur Conan Doyle. It was my first awakening to style, word choice, voice, diction."

Since his Sherlock Holmes days, Chabon has become master of the short story and is author of two collections A Model World and Other Stories and Werewolves in Their Youth. And yet he isn’t comfortable with the short story form. "When I’m working on a short story, I’m in a constant state of anxiety and doubt," he said, raking a hand through his brown hair. "I’ll get really, really lost. I don’t know what it’s about or how it’ll end."

Chabon, whose second novel Wonder Boys is now a film, feels freer when writing novels. "I write with a vague idea of the ending I’m working toward and it will organically emerge. It’s like the opening scenes of "Get Smart," with all the doors opening. This will happen, then that will happen. There’s a certainty to it."

Chronicling Kavalier and Clay’s wild, funny, and poignant adventures, Chabon’s 736-page novel is longer than a comic book and 200 pages shorter than it was in its first draft. The epic novel took an epic four years, four months, and four days to write. "Every year there’s a big honker of a book that does really well," he said. "Maybe this’ll be the one."

He produced The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay as he always does, by keeping to a rigid schedule. "I don’t like not working," he said. "I write five days a week, starting Sunday, 10 p.m. to 3 a.m. I sleep till 11." This cockeyed system somehow allows Chabon to be not just a writer, but a father and husband. In the afternoons, he gets to play with his children, Sophie, 6, and Zeke, 3 (and proud owner of five Superman T-shirts), while his wife, mystery writer Ayelet Waldman, works.

Chabon has come far from being the kid who wrote The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, and that’s okay with him. "The older I get, the more amazed I am by that whole time. I’m embarrassed by the book in an affectionate way, like you feel about a younger brother — he’s irritating, he’s precocious, but he’s your brother."

That affection, compassion for the flawed, is the hallmark of Chabon’s writing. It’s what makes the very human Kavalier and Clay more compelling than the superheroes they create.

Miami writer Ellen Kanner is Wonder Woman.

Author photo by Patricia Williams.

During a telephone conversation from his office in New York, Louis Begley quickly rattles through an impressive list of other writers who began publishing late in life. Then, with characteristic understated humor Begley adds, "I think it would be highly unlikely that one would successfully begin writing poetry at the age of 56. But novels are different."

No doubt. Begley proved this in 1991 when he became a first-time novelist at 56. The accomplishment is even more remarkable, considering that he wrote the novel while on a four-month sabbatical from his law firm, where he is senior partner and still practices full-time, Based partly on his experiences as a Jewish child in Nazi-occupied Poland, Wartime Lies won the Hemingway/ PEN award and the Prix Médicis Étranger, France’s highest award for fiction in translation.

Begley followed that with The Man Who Was Late (1992) and As Max Saw It (1994). Both were critical and popular successes. Then in About Schmidt (1996), Begley delivered what a Toronto Sun critic called his most surprising book, and created his most compelling, perplexing, even controversial protagonist, Albert Schmidt.

A tough, WASP establishment lawyer who is unmoored by the death of his wife and a deepening rift with his only child, Charlotte, Albert Schmidt at first seems to be merely an embodiment of the stiff prejudices of his class. But Begley lifts the veil and creates an intelligent, sympathetic portrait of an increasingly self-aware man in pursuit of unvarnished emotional truth.

Schmidt is a character who lingers in a reader’s mind. He has apparently also lingered in Louis Begley’s mind. Hence Begley’s newest novel, Schmidt Delivered.

"My interest in Schmidt has to do with questions of heredity versus nurture in his relations with his daughter Charlotte," Begley says. "It may be my time of life, it may be the time in which we live, but I am riveted to the relationship between Schmidt and Charlotte. For instance, why is it that it turns out badly between parents and children? And why is it that we ourselves turn out the way we are? Why is it that we find traces—the least lovable traces—of our parents in ourselves? How is it that we do not manage to stop ourselves from transmitting those very traces to our own children?"

Begley notes that Schmidt "is clearly not a choir boy." But he expresses surprise at the level of contempt directed at his protagonist by some critics of the earlier novel, who focused on Schmidt’s anti-Semitism, evidenced mainly in Schmidt’s reaction to his daughter’s plan to marry Jon Riker, a young lawyer in Schmidt’s firm. "This crowd of people thinks that characters in novels are supposed to be nice," Begley says. "If one sets aside Victorian novels, where are the nice protagonists of good novels? I don’t know any."

In Begley’s view, Schmidt is essentially a very decent man, struggling with his limitations. "He’s not your card-carrying anti-Semite. He is a man who is full of prejudices, some of them comical, some of them less comical. He is quite conscious of the undesirability of his prejudices but he also knows that they are a part of him. We all have dirty little secrets. . . . One of the things a decent man or woman must do is keep these things under control. Schmidt is not someone who would ever harm a Jew, by word or action. It’s just part of his variegated soul."

In fact, Schmidt’s saving grace is that over the course of these two novels, he grows in empathy and self-awareness. Begley attributes much of that growth to Schmidt’s increasing love for the magical Carrie, a young Puerto Rican waitress Schmidt meets in a local restaurant.

"My interest in writing this book is really a double interest," Begley says. "An interest in Schmidt and an interest in Carrie. I think of Carrie in a way as a noble savage. But it goes much beyond that because she is a very complex young woman—extremely tough, gifted, shrewd, courageous and wildly beautiful. She humanizes Schmidt. And I’m simply not willing to let her go, anymore than I’m willing to let Schmidt go."

Which leads Begley to muse on the limitations that Schmidt must ultimately face. "I’m generally interested in that perception that one has, at a certain point, of one’s own limitations and the limitations of others. People start out in life thinking that anything is possible, for them and for others. As they go along, if they have their eyes open, they see that there isn’t just an unlimited potentiality. There is a point beyond which one cannot go, however much one tries. And a point beyond which people one loves intensely and for whom one would have one’s right hand cut off will never progress. How does one come to terms with that?"

Begley explores the serious questions of this novel with a deft, often playful touch. He offers, for example, a marvelous comic portrait of Mr. Mansour, a billionaire who takes the reluctant Schmidt under his wing.

"Mr. Mansour and his circus!" Begley exclaims with evident delight. "He’s a sort of godlike figure, a pagan god, who can bestow great benefactions. He’ll screw things up in the most extraordinary ways. He’s also full of himself. Absolutely certain that he can fix everything. One of the funny things about very rich men is that they think they will have life eternal—because money is eternal. . . . I have an interest in what you might call the darkly humorous side of society. I mean I have fun with that."

Both the seriousness and the fun of Schmidt Delivered are carried by prose that is astonishingly clear and precise. Begley is a masterful stylist, which is also remarkable, given that he is not a native speaker of English. "Obviously I speak English well," he says, "but you’d be surprised how one’s language falls apart when one is trying to write. I don’t think this is true of native writers: suddenly you are unsure of the construction of any sentence. So I am a compulsive reviser; to get a paragraph written is like working on a chain gang breaking stones. At the same time I must say that after I’ve written a page or two, I realize it is also the happiest of occupations because it leaves me with a great sense of happiness, a happiness that I don’t experience in other contexts.

"For me," Begley continues, "the real goal is to write something that is not boring. That may sound very simple, stupid really, but it is true. My wife reads everything I write as I write it, and I say to her, ‘Don’t tell me whether it’s good or bad. Just tell me whether or not it is boring.’"

Schmidt Delivered is not boring.

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.

"I was interested, always, in any story about passion," says Kathleen de Burca, the narrator of My Dream of You. "I believed in passion the way other people believed in God; everything fell into place around it." The same is true for Kathleen's creator, Nuala O'Faolain, who in her best-selling memoir Are You Somebody? frankly discussed craving passion at an age where the world expects you to put up your hair and put on your pinnie. "I am, let's face it, in my middle years," said O'Faolain, 55.

In both her memoir and her novel, the Irish author limns the richness of a life that might otherwise be overlooked. "There's a new part of life now for women between 45 and 70," said O'Faolain. "The rest of the world is still looking on aghast these women are elderly but we're girls inside. We want love, the big thing, the wipeout, the shaking knees. A lot of other people might think it's unseemly to go 'round with their heart on their sleeves, but life's short, and I'm not going to bother my head about seemliness."

Both O'Faolain (pronounced oh-FWAY-lun) and her novel's narrator feel the teeming regret for the end of passion and the end of being perceived sexually. "It was almost shameful," said the author. "I do believe that was the deepest thing at work in me."

But her novel is much more. At its core is a moment in history. During Ireland's potato famine (1845-1848) when over a million died, an Irish stable groom had an affair with a wife of the English gentry. Kathleen, a travel writer on the cusp of 50 and on sabbatical after the death of a friend, becomes fascinated with the incident. Alone after a series of failed relationships, she wants to understand how passion could exist and triumph across political and economic divides during so dark a time. So she returns to Ireland for the first time in 30 years to find out. My Dream of You weaves the story of the past with Kathleen's present, her search for self. Said the author, "It's not a going-home book, it's a going-back book."

"Why would men so willfully blind themselves to honest, heartfelt news from the front? They should read it for the sex."

Though the heart of the story is set in Ireland, O'Faolain wrote it in New York, a city she adores. "I love it, I find it completely liberating, a great big immigrant place. Everyone's on their way somewhere else. I think it's wonderful, the history of immigration, of self-belief. It's a great credit to the human race, this place."

She likes it so well she's hoping to split her time between New York and her cottage in County Clare, Ireland. O'Faolain finds an Irish sensibility and an American one are two ends of the same spectrum. "We're too melancholy, too hidden, and here [in America], it's too optimistic and denies too much the bad side of life. But we need each other."

Being away from Ireland freed the author to take the story where she wanted and where others may not want. "I think I'm going to be murdered in Ireland," said O'Faolain, not entirely joking. "The famine is not something the Irish take lightly. This solemn and tragic event haunts me, but to treat it as part of a single individual's emotional life is really quite a daring thing to do, she said. But it was my only way of coming at it."

Illuminating an emotional life is what novels do best, which is why O'Faolain always loved them, why she turned to novels growing up as one of nine children in a poor Dublin household. "Novels were what I cared about," she writes in Are You Somebody?  "They asked the questions I wanted answered: How do lives get lived? How is love found?"

O'Faolain believes her themes of love and longing are universal. Some of her male friends don't agree. "I hoped for a human audience, but if what I end up with is a woman's audience, that's all right by me. But why would men so willfully blind themselves to honest, heartfelt news from the front? They should read it for the sex."

The wit and candor she brought to her memoir and still brings to her weekly columns for The Irish Times is evident on every page of her novel. "Much more than most writers, I'm aware of the reader," she said. "I'm urgently trying to tell a story that would interest them and the whole thing is defeated if it simply makes too many demands on the reader."