All Interviews

Betsy Carter is no stranger to hard times. Her own roller coaster of a life story, as recounted in her intensely honest memoir, Nothing to Fall Back On, includes cancer, a collapsed marriage and a house fire. Yet Carter a journalist who has worked at Esquire, Newsweek and Harper's Bazaar has taken every curveball flung her way.

Her humor and optimism shine through in her second novel, Swim to Me. It's the graceful and intriguing coming-of-age tale (or should we say tail?) of a young girl in the 1970s who searches for life beyond the confines of her unhappy home in the Bronx. Delores Walker's quest takes her to Weeki Wachee Springs, Florida (a real-life attraction, profiled in the box at right), where she becomes the star mermaid in an underwater show. Carter answered a few questions for BookPage about her new novel, the allure of mermaids and her own personal ups and downs.

Delores is thrilled at age 17 to find work as a mermaid in a Florida tourist attraction and as a weather girl for a local news station. Growing up, what was your dream job?
From the moment I went to Cypress Gardens and saw the water skiers with their tiaras and elbow-length gloves, I vowed to become one of them.

Swim to Me is set in the early 1970s, in the era of Watergate and Archie Bunker. What were you up to in 1973?
Alas, I was not a water skier. I was the media researcher/reporter at Newsweek.

You've set two novels in Florida, yet you live in New York City. Why are you so drawn to the Sunshine State?
We moved to Miami from New York when I was 10. I still haven't gotten over the colors, the heat and that behind many gas stations were cages with live bears and old Seminole Indians wrestling with alligators. Stuff you don't see in New York City.

Who would you rather be: Ariel (the Little Mermaid) or Esther Williams?
I envy Ariel's underwater lifestyle and her red hair, but Esther Williams got to wear those fabulous bathing caps with chin straps and the rubber flowers. I'd have to go with that.

Do you have a pool? If not, where's your favorite place to swim?
Chelsea Piers in New York is on the Hudson River with views of the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. It's the most beautiful pool in the world.

In a letter to her little brother back home in the Bronx, Delores writes, Things happen that you can never have imagined in your whole life. Tell us something that has happened in your own life that shocked you.
My life has fallen to pieces several times (see the last question). The surprising net of these disasters is a happy second marriage, a new career and the fact that I'm still here.

Delores and her fellow mermaids get a lot of attention when they stage an underwater take on The Godfather. What movie would best sum up your life?
No movie, but The Mary Tyler Moore Show came pretty close. Heaven help me, I've got spunk.

Delores' mother is a janitor at a New York City fashion magazine, where she hears a fashion assistant get quite the chewing out. You're a former magazine editor yourself. Are magazine offices really such snake pits?
Hmm, some places are worse, some are sheer joy. Mostly, I've worked at the latter.

You got rave reviews for your debut novel, The Orange Blossom Special. What's it like to write a follow-up? Nerve wracking?
It's a kind of disconnect. I write in my living room at home with only my dog, Lucy, as company. I find it remarkable that what happens in those hours gets turned into books that people actually read.

You wrote an incredibly candid memoir, Nothing to Fall Back On, in which you chronicled what you call your dark years: divorce, illness, career troubles. What was it like to lay bare your whole life for public consumption?
Insane. Horrifying. Liberating. And, God willing, I will never have enough material for another one.

Amy Scribner learned to swim in her grandmother's pool in Yakima, Washington.

Luck, chance, serendipity and coincidence: Patricia Wood knows well these four spices of life. It was through extraordinary good luck that her father, Ray "R.J." Dahl, a Boeing retiree, won $6 million in the Washington State Lottery in 1993. It was chance that her late ex-husband, an alcoholic Vietnam vet, had a brother with Down syndrome who remains a functional two-year-old at the age of 54. It was serendipitous that Wood met a valuable mentor in novelist and travel writer Paul Theroux (The Mosquito Coast, The Great Railway Bazaar) who encouraged her to drop everything and pursue the novel she was uniquely qualified to write. And it was purely coincidental that BookPage assigned this reporter to interview Wood, who happens to be a former high school journalism classmate.

When Wood and I talk to one another three decades after graduation, it isn’t to gossip about our former classmates, but to discuss her debut novel, Lottery, which opens with this line: "My name is Perry L. Crandall and I am not retarded." Wood has shaped her life-affirming book around a most intriguing premise: What if a mentally challenged shop clerk hit the big one?

We meet 31-year-old Perry, IQ 76, shortly before the death of Gram, the cantankerous, caring grandmother who instilled in him ironclad values after his self-absorbed mother left him in her care. When Gram dies, Perry’s money-grubbing brothers sell her house from under him and kick him to the curb. He moves into a small apartment above Holsted’s Marine Supply on the working docks of Everett, Washington, where he has worked his entire adult life. There, kindly shop owner Gary, his second mate Keith, a hard-drinking Vietnam vet, and the pudgy, pierced cashier Cherry help Perry navigate the swift currents of sudden independence.

Then the unimaginable happens: Perry hits the lottery for $12 million. Before the vulture brothers can descend, Keith helps Perry wisely choose annuity payments over the cash-out. As the family maneuvers to pounce on his millions, Perry revels in his new role as a businessman savant whose simple, successful marketing ideas spring from years spent listening to—while being ignored by—customers.

Owing to its cognitively impaired narrator, Lottery will inevitably bring to mind The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time and Forrest Gump, though a more apt comparison in tone and emotional impact might be Ron McLarty’s touching 2005 debut, The Memory of Running.

Wood, who lives with her architect husband Gordon aboard Orion, a 48-foot sailboat moored in Ko’Olina, Hawaii, was just a thesis away from completing her education doctorate on disability and diversity at the University of Hawaii when Lottery sold at auction for a handsome sum. With healthy advance orders and Hollywood sizing it up as the next Rain Man, that thesis may have to wait; she has three more manuscripts waiting to see daylight.

"I’ve had this kind of windfall now twice in my life," she admits. "I was under the mistaken impression that I would be able to write my thesis and promote Lottery at the same time. Ha! All of a sudden, my Ph.D. has served its purpose; I have the learning. I wanted the degree because then I could get a job. But that doesn’t seem to be an issue right now."

Wood has led a varied life: She served in the U.S. Army, worked as a medical technologist, and taught marine science and horseback riding. But it was her encounter at 19 with her then-husband’s brother Jeri that sparked her interest in cognitive impairments and society’s often-insensitive reaction to them.

"I was uncomfortable at first; I really struggled with my feelings," she recalls. "You could tell that there were periods of time when he knew he was different." Years later, the author herself had that same feeling of otherness when her father won the lottery.

"You would think it’s a life-changing moment, but it is more a change in your own cognition," she says. "The perception is that money solves all your problems. The life-altering events of the lottery are more in what you choose to do after that point. Is it going to define you?"

Her father, who was comfortably retired from the Boeing test flight program, had been playing the lottery for less than a year when a machine issued him the winning ticket. His only celebration was to upgrade from coach to first class on the European vacation he and his wife had already booked.

But an equally harsh blow accompanied his good fortune.

"Very shortly after they won, it became readily apparent that something was dramatically wrong with my mother," Wood says. "Her down-spiraling into dementia made me think, is this a pact with the devil? I started thinking, what would you want, win the lottery but know that you would be affected by dementia? I visualized one of those linear graphs—at what point as the wealth increases and the IQ decreases do you become acceptable socially? That was my premise."

Wood’s mother passed away last year. This spring, Wood used part of her advance for Lottery to take her 87-year-old father on a trip to Norway to boost his spirits.

Wood received help and encouragement from Theroux, her horseback riding student, and novelist Jacquelyn Mitchard (Deep End of the Ocean), whom she met at the Maui Writers Conference and Retreat. She modeled Perry’s supporting cast after people in her own life; there is much of her father in Gram, and her late ex-husband in Keith. Unfortunately, the less savory characters also resided close to home.

"The inspiration for the brothers, in part, comes from my own family," she says. "It caused hard feelings. It causes relatives to stop speaking."

Wood dismissed the suggestion of editors that she abandon the first-person narrative, knowing full well how challenging it would be at times to advance the story through Perry’s limited understanding.

"The authenticity is very important. I want people who are termed normal to really feel what it’s like to be like Perry. I didn’t want to have another book where this person is so inspirational, and celibate. A lot of parents of these kids who have read my book say, yes. Yes. I want to believe that my child has a life."

Jay MacDonald and Patricia Wood were classmates at Shoreline High in Seattle. Go Spartans!

Valerie Martin is anything but an autobiographical writer. Her previous novel, Property (2003), which beat out books by Zadie Smith, Carol Shields and Donna Tartt to win the coveted Orange Prize, is set on a Louisiana sugar plantation in 1828 and tells the disturbing story of the loveless marriage between the plantation owner and his wife and the morally fraught relationship between the wife and the female slave she was given as a wedding gift.

Her 1990 novel Mary Reilly, which was made into a movie starring John Malkovich and Julia Roberts that Martin does not particularly like (and in truth, the book is far, far better than the film), is a brilliant recasting of the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde story told from the point of view of a household servant.

And even her rather amazing new novel Trespass, which tells an emotionally and politically charged tale of the elemental conflicts that are stirred to life when Brendan and Chloe Dale's only child, Toby, falls in love with a Croatian refugee named Salome Drago, does not in any obvious way follow the contours of Martin's own life.

Yet in conversation, one is struck by the way in which Martin takes bits and pieces of seemingly ordinary personal experience and coolly transmutes them into fictional events of extraordinary power.

"I had a poacher," Martin says, describing the origins of the book during a call to her home in Millbrook, New York. Martin and her partner, translator John Cullen, bought an old, four-bedroom Victorian house there not long ago. Before that, they lived in a house with a meadow and a wood very much like the one described in Trespass. "I did exactly what Chloe does in the novel: I walked out and went up to the poacher and said, 'Don't hunt here.' He had an accent so I guess I had a foreign poacher. I was interested in how I responded to that."

Martin's response to her trespasser was remarkably layered, as is her novel. Chloe Dale's response, on the other hand, is swift and visceral. Chloe is an educated, middle-class American mother whose husband, Brendan, is a university history professor on sabbatical while he slowly completes a book about Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II and the Fifth Crusade. Chloe herself is an artist hard at work on the illustrations for an expensive edition of Wuthering Heights. Chloe sees her poacher as a threat and reacts, just as she sees Toby's new girlfriend Salome as a threat and reacts.

"One of the things I had been thinking about when I started was how often I've noticed that for my friends who have sons, their sons' girlfriends are never good enough," says Martin, the mother of one child, a daughter who now teaches ethics at the University of Pennsylvania. "I've seen it often enough to make me think that this is some powerful force that they can't control. I'll often meet the young woman who has been described as just impossible' and she seems perfectly nice to me. But then I don't have a son."

Family conflict is not the only kind of uncontrollable force that permeates Trespass. Martin began composing the novel writing her scenes by hand on paper, then editing and typing them into a computer at the rate of about a page a day just as the Iraq war began. "I was thinking about the lead-up to the war and war in general," she says. "My original notion was that the poacher was Lebanese and I was going to write about his life. So I read a great deal about the Lebanese civil war, which was really complex. Then John, my partner, who used to work for oil companies as an abstracter in Louisiana, mentioned that the oyster fishermen down at the bottom of the [Mississippi] river were Croatian. Several generations of my mother's family were all from New Orleans, and I grew up there, but I hadn't known that and I got very interested in it. That's where the Croatian strand of the novel came from."

That strand the dark repercussions of a horrific, genocidal war on Salome Drago's family intrudes increasingly on the Dales' rather sunny life as the novel progresses. "I was conscious early on that the book was about both the fear and the attraction of foreignness, which I think Americans feel particularly," Martin says. And in that, Martin finds a parallel with Wuthering Heights, the book Chloe is illustrating. "It's a book about what my book is about, which is fear of foreignness and the ingratitude of the upstart. It's also a book I've always loved because I think it's profoundly sociological and at the same time mythical. The notion of people who live in the light and those who come from the dark is so important to that book, and I liked the idea that Americans live in realms of light and live in fear of the intrusion of the realms of darkness."

Martin weaves her themes of darkness and light deftly. Trespass is a book that keeps you up reading at night and stays in your thoughts throughout the day. It is full of surprises, large and small. Yet despite its complexity, the story moves swiftly, with sparkling clarity and remarkable compression, especially near the end.

"I noticed when I would finish reading a novel that I felt I had been dumped out of really rapidly, I liked the feeling," Martin says, explaining her interest in swift endings to her novels. "So for a long time I've had a routine when I get within three or four scenes of the end: I try to imagine how many scenes I can do it in, then try to do it in one less. But the ending should also come naturally out of the story. I just try to follow the story. I don't think about readers, because when you try to please them, that way madness lies. I'm always just trying to write the book I want to read."

Which in the case of Trespass works out very nicely for other readers, too.

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.