Alice Cary

FictionLiterary Fiction

Elizabeth Strout

Interview by Alice Cary

Elizabeth Strout is both a maker and a master of messes, and seemingly, the bigger the better. On the phone from her Manhattan apartment, she discusses the close connections between her new book, Anything Is Possible, and her acclaimed 2016 novel, My Name Is Lucy Barton.

In the latter, during hospital visits in New York City, patient Lucy Barton and her mother gossip about people from their rural hometown of Amgash, Illinois. Anything Is Possible contains nine short stories about many of those characters (including Lucy herself and a family named Nicely). As is the case with Strout’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Olive Kitteridge, the thickly interwoven strands of these stories lend the collection the emotional weight of a novel.

Asked about a genre label for her work, Strout says, “I think—” and after a pause, continues, “they’re books of fiction.”

The author lets out a wonderful laugh, which she does often, adding, “You know, the truth is, I don’t really care what they are. That’s what’s so funny. They’re just—they’re books.

“I do think my brain works in this certain way,” she says, explaining that as she jumped back and forth from book to book and story to story, “I realized this was a big old messy tapestry.”

As in literature, as in life. In a story called “Mississippi Mary,” the title character observes: “But this was life! And it was messy!”

The complexity and disorder intrinsic to both life and art are precisely what drives Strout, who with the stroke of her pen paints sharp portraits of the intriguing divides between an individual’s public facade and his or her inner thoughts and private actions. (You might even call this the Olive ­Kitteridge Effect.)

“When you think about it,” Strout acknowledges, “we don’t ever know what it’s like to be another person. Oh, my God, that kills me so much.”

And you can tell it does, deeply. “Seriously,” she says. “We don’t know. We never know. We can only be in our own head and see things through our own set of eyes our entire life. I recognized that when I was young. I think I’ve spent my life trying to imagine what it would be like to be another person.”

Her quest has by no means been easy. “I listen and I watch and observe and I do everything I can. Everybody has that inner piece to them that’s their private view of the world, and I’m always trying to get in there.”

At one point in her youth, Strout toyed with the idea of being an actress, yet another form of inhabiting another persona. Her mother, a high school writing teacher, frequently gave her notebooks as she grew up in Maine and New Hampshire. An avid reader, Strout studied English at Bates College and got a law degree at Syracuse University. But practically on her first day of work as a lawyer, she knew she’d made a mistake.

“I was just so bad at it,” she remembers. “It was horrifying.”

Strout lasted six months, then began teaching English at a community college in Manhattan and writing in her spare time. A full-time writer now for a number of years, Strout wrote many of the stories in Anything Is Possible at the same time that she was writing Lucy Barton.

“I’m always making a mess on my table,” she explains, “just writing different scenes and pushing stuff around. I’m a very, very messy worker. There were times when I would think, ‘Oh, here’s the Pretty Nicely Girls; let’s see what they’re up to.’ And I would pull a piece of paper toward me and put some scenes down about them.”

Before committing words to computer, Strout begins by writing longhand, explaining, “It gives me the sense of earning the sentence, and what I mean by that is the physicality of it. Writing has always seemed to me to be a very physical job.”

Because Lucy is a writer, Strout contemplated having her be the author of these stories, perhaps having them appear in the same book as Lucy’s story. She abandoned the idea, however, realizing that Lucy’s distinctive first-person voice is too different from the third-person omniscient narration of the stories. Meanwhile, Strout simply continued to write.

“I don’t write anything in order,” she admits, “I don’t write a book in order; I don’t write the story in order. I never ever write anything from beginning to end.”

At some point, of course, there has to be order. How does that happen?

“You know,” she answers, “that’s a really good question. How does the book itself finally take shape? And oh boy, you know, the truth is I don’t really know. After I have so many scenes, I begin to see connections between the scenes, and I think, ‘Oh, OK. Here we go. This is this, and this is this. And now let’s start at the beginning, and figure out what the reader needs at the beginning.’

“What I do remember about every book is a sense of—not panic—but, close to panic at some point for a few weeks or even a couple of months—of trying to figure out how do I pull it together? Where’s the line going to be to connect the entire thing?”

To make the connections, Strout doesn’t use aids like timelines or family trees. While writing her second novel, Abide with Me, she tried putting packing paper on her wall and charting the book’s progress with a magic marker. “It just didn’t work,” she remembers. “I thought, this is foolish, so I took it down.”

What seems to help is walking around her apartment and talking out loud, saying things like “I get it, I get it,” or “No, no, no.”

Strout concludes, “I’m not a writer who goes, ‘Oh well, these voices come to me, and I just write them down.’ I’m perfectly aware at all times that I am writing a story and that I’m making these people up and that I have to figure things out.”

Unlike her first four books, mostly set in Maine, Lucy Barton and Anything Is Possible focus on an imaginary Midwestern town. “It never occurred to me that they would be in Maine,” Strout notes. “As I was playing around with Lucy, I right away saw that she would be in the Midwest. I just saw that there was sky, sky, sky. There’s sky in Maine, but it’s a different kind of landscape altogether.”

In the story “Sister,” Lucy returns to Amgash for the first time in 17 years, reuniting with her sister Vicky and her brother Pete. As Strout and I discuss these characters, it feels as though we’re catching up on mutual friends. I note, for instance, how fastidiously Pete cleans his filthy house, waking with nightmares in anticipation of Lucy’s arrival.

“Poor boy,” Strout says, her voice filled with compassion. “Poor man. He’s a man, but I think of him as a boy.”

The story is mesmerizing, with siblings provoking each other as only siblings can. When Lucy announces that she hasn’t visited for so long because she’s been “very busy,” Vicky snaps back: “Hey, Lucy, is that what’s called a truthful sentence? Didn’t I just see you on the computer giving a talk about truthful sentences? ‘A writer should write only what is true.’ Some crap like that you were saying.”

As we delight in Vicky’s spot-on jab, I remark that all kidding aside, Strout is masterfully adept at creating believable characters.

“I’m so glad to hear that,” Strout responds. “That’s my aspiration, always—to try and convey a truthful emotion.”

Her secret? Whenever she sits down to write, she takes note of whatever she happens to be feeling and attempts to instill that emotion into her fiction. “I finally realized that if I take this and use it on any level, then my writing will hopefully have a heartbeat.”

Later she comments, “One of the really fun things for me when I write—it’s one of the best things in the world—is that I love my characters. I don’t care what they do; I really do love them. And I feel for them. I don’t have the judgment for them that other people would—and should—because I’m just making them up. So, I love them.”

She laughs, adding, “They’re just people.”

This article was originally published in the May 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Elizabeth Strout is both a maker and a master of messes, and seemingly, the bigger the better. On the phone from her Manhattan apartment, she discusses the close connections between her new book, Anything Is Possible, and her acclaimed 2016 novel, My Name Is Lucy Barton.

Fiction

Julia Glass

Interview by Alice Cary

When Julia Glass’ publisher sends her the very first copy of a novel she’s written, she experiences a magical moment. “I lift the book out of the box and wonder, when did this get written?” she says. “It’s as if I had a baby without knowing I was pregnant.”

By now she’s had more than a few of these transcendent moments. A self-described late-bloomer, she published her first novel, Three Junes, in her mid-40s, only to see it win the 2002 National Book Award for fiction. Since then, she’s published five more novels, and now there’s another, A House Among the Trees, a rich new literary feast for her fans to cozy up with and savor.

The house in the title belongs to renowned children’s illustrator and author Mort Lear, who dies after a dramatic fall, unexpectedly bequeathing his home, art and literary affairs to his longtime assistant, Tomasina Daulair, known as Tommy. Meanwhile, museum curator Meredith Galarza feels jilted by Lear, who had led her to believe the museum would inherit his artwork. And British celebrity Nick Greene, who’s been cast to play the illustrator in a biopic, struggles to deal with many unanswered questions.

“I prefer characters who improve upon acquaintance.”

Glass reflects on this cast of characters while sitting in a cafe window seat in the picturesque seaside town of Marblehead, Massachusetts, where she lives with her husband (a photographer) and their two sons. Friendly and chatty, Glass shares story after story, reminiscent of her books, which brim with details, flashbacks and insight.

“My previous books have grown out of a single character who came to me in some way,” she says. “And when I look back, I can see how those characters have emerged from my own psyche, some part of myself that I’m not so fond of. I like writing about characters who are in some ways misfits.

“Disagreeable is too strong a word,” she adds, “but characters the reader has to grow comfortable with. I prefer characters who improve upon acquaintance.”

Glass notes that her new novel began in a very different way. “I was actually working on another novel,” she says. “So this book represents, for me, an act of infidelity.”

She’d written more than 200 pages when that manuscript began to present challenges. As is her usual routine, she started one writing day by playing recreational badminton (which she does year-round, indoors). Afterwards, at home in the shower, she began thinking about completely different characters, and decided to try writing about them. Before long, they took over, forcing her to call her agent.

“I have good news and bad news,” Glass told her. “I seem to have stopped working on the novel I’m contracted to write. But the good news is I’m writing another one that I’m really enjoying.”

The new storyline had slowly sprouted from several inspirational seeds. About a year earlier, Glass had read a New York Times article about the estate of children’s book icon Maurice Sendak, which he had left in the hands of his longtime caretaker, leaving a stunned Philadelphia museum out of the loop.

“I thought to myself,” Glass recalls, “what would it be like to be that woman, to not only be left with this enormous responsibility, but to have public opinion come down on you after leading this very monastic kind of life dedicated to the life and work of this great man?”

That dilemma stayed in the back of her mind, percolating. Meanwhile, she was watching movies with her older son, Alec, a Bard College student with a passion for acting. Before the Academy Awards in 2015, Glass listened to a roundtable discussion with the best-actor contenders, many of whom had portrayed a real person (such as Eddie Redmayne’s Stephen Hawking and Benedict Cumberbatch’s Alan Turing).

“Suddenly these two ideas came together for me,” Glass explains. “I thought, what if you had a situation where this great man dies very suddenly? His estate is complicated and he was about to be played in a movie.”

Glass’ fictitious children’s author is the fascinating heart and soul of A House Among the Trees, the creative sun around which the other characters orbit. “At first the characters of Tommy and Nick were there,” Glass says. “But because my books are so steeped in the past—they’re so flashback heavy, as one person has said—I should have known that the character of Mort Lear would become an important character, even though he’s dead on page one.”

At its heart, she says, the book is about relationships.

Did she do research on Sendak?

“Not one bit,” Glass says. “It is not a novel about Maurice Sendak.”

She quickly adds, “It would be insulting to Sendak to say that. Really, that story about the assistant, that’s the only thing. . . . I worry a little bit that people will think that I’m writing about Maurice Sendak, but I’m not.”

That said, it’s nearly impossible not to make comparisons, not to think about Where the Wild Things Are and its hero Max while reading about Mort Lear. Glass has created a character who sprang to fame with Colorquake, a picture book about a boy named Ivo whose artistic world magically explodes during an earthquake. And while Sendak’s assistant began working for the illustrator at age 19, Glass has 12-year-old Tommy meet Lear at a playground while babysitting her younger brother, who unknowingly becomes Lear’s model for Ivo.

“I surprised myself by creating fictitious children’s books,” Glass admits. “A couple of my early readers have said, ‘Why aren’t you writing children’s books?’ That’s because I don’t have that kind of mojo. I wish I did. We’ll leave that to the pros.”

Although never an illustrator, Glass is hardly a stranger to the art world. She majored in the subject at Yale, painted in Paris for a year on a fellowship and spent much of her 20s painting in New York City while doing copy editing work.

“I did large, expressive oil paintings, very colorful, some of which hang in my house,” she reminisces, “but I also did very meticulous, monochromatic pencil drawings. And I sold a lot of those drawings—portraits, still lives. The amount of time it took was absurd, so it wasn’t a money-making enterprise.”

Growing up in Lincoln, Massachusetts, Glass had always been a bookworm, working in Lincoln’s public library from fifth grade through college. She compares her years as a painter to time spent abroad, calling her return to writing akin to a homecoming, adding, “Writing is my native creative language.”

Glass’ career switch from painting to writing has certainly paid off, and winning the National Book Award for Three Junes as a newcomer signaled a major shift in her life. “Seismic,” she says. “Talk about quakes.

“Nobody knew me. It was like Julia who? Three what? I am quite aware that but for this particular confluence of judges at that particular moment in time—do I think I wrote the best novel of 2002? Of course I don’t. But I was certainly put into people’s awareness in the book world. For about a year I was invited to every literary gala. . . . And I enjoyed that year of being the flavor of the moment.”

Unlike some writers, Glass looks forward to publicizing her work. “I enjoy the public part of being an author,” she says. “I’m not some monastic introvert. I love doing events. I love meeting readers. It’s like old-home month when I get to go on tour and visit my favorite booksellers.”

Meanwhile, what about that poor novel that she abandoned? Will she return to it?

“We’re in couple’s counseling,” she says with a grin, “if it will take me back.”

 

Author photo © Dennis Cowley.

This article was originally published in the June 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

When Julia Glass’ publisher sends her the very first copy of a novel she’s written, she experiences a magical moment. “I lift the book out of the box and wonder, when did this get written?” she says. “It’s as if I had a baby without knowing I was pregnant.” By now she’s had more than a few of these transcendent moments. A self-described late-bloomer, she published her first novel, Three Junes, in her mid-40s, only to see it win the 2002 National Book Award for fiction. Since then, she’s published five more novels, and now there’s another, A House Among the Trees, a rich new literary feast for her fans to cozy up with and savor.

Children's & YAMiddle Grade

Karen English

Interview by Alice Cary

What was it like growing up black in a mostly white neighborhood in 1960s Los Angeles? Karen English, like the heroine of her new middle grade novel, knew the drill.

“Before we left the house, my mother would say, ‘Remember to act your age and not your color,’ ” English says. “It didn’t feel like a bad thing. It felt like, ‘Oh yeah, right. We have to show other people that Negroes are just as good.’ It was like a little responsibility that we had. It was so—I hate to use the word natural—but you know, after 400 years, it was like breathing.”

English remains a Los Angeles resident, and we speak over the phone while she’s visiting her mother in Northern California. English has written many children’s books, including the Nikki and Deja series and The Carver Chronicles, and is a Coretta Scott King Honor winner. But her latest book—the spot-on, beautifully understated It All Comes Down to This—is personal, taking on weightier themes and aimed at an older middle grade audience. Like Sophie, the novel’s 12-year-old protagonist, English grew up in an L.A. neighborhood that was “turning,” or growing more integrated.

At first English recalls idyllic touchstones: riding her bike and enjoying more freedom than today’s kids have. But she also remembers going to the house of a friend who suddenly announced, “Oh, I can’t play with colored people anymore.”

“It was like a stab in the heart,” English says. In one scene in It All Comes Down to This, Sophie isn’t allowed to swim in a neighbor’s pool, but Sophie’s white friend Jennifer sticks with her, refusing to swim.

“It was just the way things were,” English notes, “like the sun rising in the east and setting in the west. You just kind of accepted it.”

English was eager to fictionalize another particularly memorable incident. Sophie’s mother is modeled after the author’s, who came to California during World War II to work in a shipyard and later briefly played Ruby, the wife of Amos, in several “Amos ’n’ Andy” television episodes. After English’s mother and father divorced, her mother remarried a lawyer and moved the family to a middle-class neighborhood. Then one day, a black housekeeper pulled English aside to criticize her light skin, saying, “If you ever [go] to Africa, they would kill you. They don’t like no light-skinned Negroes in Africa.”

Coincidentally, English ended up marrying a man from Senegal. “So I learned that wasn’t true,” she says nonchalantly. And yet that incident made an indelible impression: “I wanted to write a book around it.”

Set during the summer of 1965, It All Comes Down to This begins with the arrival of a similarly gruff housekeeper, Mrs. Baylor, who makes such a remark to Sophie. “There’s still colorism—I guess I can use that as a word—in the African-American community,” English says. “It was really big back then.”

In one of the novel’s numerous historically informative moments, another housekeeper—a beloved one—asks Sophie (who loves to read and write), “Can’t you come up with something about colored girls? Don’t they have a story?”

English, who taught elementary school for some 30 years, understands this question all too well. She calls writing “an obsession” that started at age 7, and she penned her first novel in the sixth grade. “I couldn’t make my main character black, because other than Little Black Sambo, I had never seen black people in children’s books or on TV, nor in my teenage magazines,” English says. “So when I wrote this character, I said to myself, ‘She’s Negro.’ But I gave her blond hair and blue eyes.”

The author laughs quietly, a moment of amusement that stands in stark contrast to her powerful stories of racial injustice. In much the same way, It All Comes Down to This is a gentle yet provocative book, allowing Sophie’s eye-opening experiences about race to unfold amid quiet summer days filled with Anne of Green Gables, Hawaiian Punch and “Gidget” on TV. It’s as silent as a tsunami, striking with painful force at times, like when Sophie thumbs through an old Jet magazine from 1955, spotting photos of brutally murdered Emmett Till in his casket.

Also like Sophie, the author lived in L.A. during the Watts riots, which were foremost on her radar but distant enough to seem otherworldly. “It was kind of exciting,” English says, “and yet you felt responsible because you are a Negro.” She recalls how the National Guard pulled her over as she drove to church, miles away from the riots. She notes several similar childhood memories, saying, “We knew if the police stopped you, it was hands on the wheel, 10 and 2, yes sir, no sir. It was bad, even then.”

English’s novel also records changing racial nomenclature, a helpful history for young readers. “When I was coming up,” English explains, “you wouldn’t dare call someone black. But it was kind of liberating when that word came in. It was like, ‘Whoa, we’re black.’ And there was some power behind that word.”

A lot has changed since English’s childhood, but so much remains the same. She points to beloved children’s writer Beverly Cleary as her literary heroine, saying she adores her writing and was “propelled” by her example. But English added a personal twist: “I wanted to write something that reflects another kind of African-American experience. It seems like we have this prescribed narrative of drugs, gangs, absent fathers and poverty. That is part of our story, but we have other stories.”

 

This article was originally published in the July 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

What was it like growing up black in a mostly white neighborhood in 1960s Los Angeles? Karen English, like the heroine of her new middle grade novel, knew the drill.

NonfictionTrue Crime

Monica Hesse

Interview by Alice Cary

Traveling to Accomack County, Virginia, journalist Monica Hesse uncovers the complex triggers behind a pair of lovers’ five-month arson spree in the small, neglected town.

Accomack County Sheriff Todd Godwin told you he couldn't imagine anyone writing an interesting book about his county. But holy moly, the saga of Charlie Smith and Tonya Bundick's five-month arson spree is like something straight out of Fargo, without the snow. How did your Washington Post feature, which later evolved into this book, originate? At what point did you realize you had enough material for a book?
I live in Washington, D.C., about four hours from Accomack. It’s close enough that the fires made the news here, at least occasionally. Every few weeks I’d see something about how the fires were piling up on the Eastern Shore. When Charlie and Tonya were finally arrested, I thought, “Huh, that’s interesting. You don’t see a lot of female arsonists. I wonder what happened there?” So I drove down to cover one of the first hearings, and it happened to be the one where Charlie talked about why he and Tonya had started lighting the fires to begin with. And then I thought, “Holy —-.”

You've written three novels for teenagers, one of which is called Burn, and your first nonfiction book is about arson. Have you ever witnessed an out-of-control fire? Did you see any with the Accomack County firefighters?
The Tasley firefighters, who I embedded with—they gave me my own pager and let me sleep in the firehouse—used to joke that I was a fire reseller. Every time I stayed over, the night would be quiet except for a fender bender or non-fire-related emergency call. It got to the point where I was feeling really ghoulish, because you obviously never want to wish for something to catch on fire, but at the same time, I really wanted to see the Accomack firefighters in action.

Accomack County is where the Misty of Chincoteague books originated. Did you read these as a child? How long did you spend in Accomack County researching this book? How does life there compare to life in Normal, Illinois, where you grew up?
I’d heard of the Misty books growing up, but they just never became favorites of mine. I didn’t reread them until after I started working on American Fire, when I was going through a blitz where I’d read anything remotely related to the Eastern Shore. I rented a house down in the county for two months, and then I probably made nine or 10 other shorter trips down there. Accomack is a little more rural than Normal, but a lot of things felt the same. The low, flat land and the fact that you can drive for ten minutes in any direction, and suddenly be in the middle of cornfields. The people, too: the fact that friendliness was a default. In Washington, D.C., you don’t wave to strangers you pass in other cars, but you do in Accomack, and you do where I’m from, too.

What was your most memorable experience while writing this book? Your biggest surprise?
I was really sure that Charlie Smith wasn’t going to want to talk to me for the book. He hadn’t talked to anyone else, and people had tried. But I wrote him a letter that I guess stuck with him, and one morning I’d just stepped out of the shower when I saw an unfamiliar number pop up on my cell phone. I picked up, and he just said, “This is Charlie, are you the girl who’s trying to write about me?” I was flying around my apartment in a bath towel, searching for something to write with; my notes from my first conversation with Charlie ended up being on a roll of paper towels. But that’s how this whole book went. I would have completely given up on someone talking to me, and then they’d come through at the most unexpected time.

Todd Godwin, the Sheriff, wouldn’t talk to me for months. He was the nicest guy about it, but completely gave me the brush off. Finally one day my mother said, “Have you brought him a pie?” I don’t make pies, but I do make banana bread, so I brought a loaf over to the Sheriff’s office. He laughed when he saw me; I’m sure it looked as desperate and pathetic as it was. But that’s how these things work. You have to earn trust, and be patient, and show people that you’re going to put in as much time as it takes to get their story right.

Your book notes that “[a]rson is a weird crime.” Did the arsons change the county in lasting ways? Do many of the burnt buildings still stand?
Oh, a lot of them. The fires burned some buildings to the ground, but others they only singed. I don’t think the arsons particularly changed the county—it’s not like nobody trusts each other anymore, just because there was a serial arsonist—except that there are some places that end up having particular and peculiar dates with destiny. You can’t think of Holcomb, Kansas, without thinking of it being the setting of In Cold Blood, for example. And that’s what the arsons did. They took a place that nobody was paying attention to and made it briefly famous.

Charlie Smith and Tonya Bundick truly had, as Elvis would say, a "Burning Love." Each of them tell a very different story about who's responsible for these crimes. Will anyone but them ever know the truth? Do you know of any other arsonist couples?
I don’t think anyone but them will ever know. Which is part of what makes it so fascinating. I heard a writer once say that the best mysteries are ones that leave more questions than they answer, because the real mystery isn’t who does what, but why. To me, American Fire is a book about arsons, but it’s really a mystery about the unfathomableness of the human heart. I had a million theories for what really happened and why, and they would change every time I talked to a new person.

Do you have a favorite song about love and fire? Did you make a playlist as you wrote?
I’m one of those weird people who usually needs silence to write. But the house I was renting in Accomack had no television, no internet and no radio, and it was alone by itself at the end of a dirt road. I ended up needing some noise in the background, just so I wouldn’t jump out of my skin every time the house settled. I went to a flea market where a vendor was selling a boxed set of all the Harry Potter movies for 10 dollars, so I bought them, and then had them playing in the background the whole time I was down there. I don’t think I ever need to watch the Harry Potter movies again.

As for songs about fire and love: “Laid,” by James is oddly appropriate for this book, and it became more appropriate every time I heard it. Go listen!

What most surprised you when you spoke with Charlie and with Tonya?
How, even though they ended up having wildly different versions about what happened in their relationship, they both remembered and told me the same, odd little details about it. Like, how they would pass notes in the jail yard by pressing tiny pieces of paper between pieces of cutlery and burying them by the flagpole. It was obvious there had been a lot of love there at one point, and then it combusted. It made me so curious to try to understand what had happened.

As you wrote the book, Tonya refused any more interviews. What question would you most like to ask her? How does a person whose criminal record consists of stealing a box of Junior Mints from a grocery store in her late teens become a serial arsonist?
The things that I’d most want to learn about Tonya are things I don’t know that she’d ever talk about. It’s clear that she’s a proud, complex woman who doesn’t want to appear weak.

I have theories about her, which I didn’t put in the book because they were purely my own theories and it would have been irresponsible to print them for the larger public. So if she and I were going to have a truly honest conversation, I guess what I’d want is to be able to say, “This is what I’ve learned about you, and this is what I think happened. Did I get it right? Do I understand you?” It’s such a self-serving question, but that’s what I’d want to know. Did I come close to understanding you at all?

Can you imagine a movie about these Eastern Shore arsonists and the men and women who stopped them? Which actors can you envision playing Charlie and Tonya?
I’d always pictured someone like Sam Rockwell for Charlie. My agent told me she’d been picturing Channing Tatum—which was hilarious, that our brains had gone in such different directions. For Tonya, maybe someone like Jessica Chastain. I think she could have the right steeliness. The only character I can cast with certainty: the Tasley fire chief is a man named Jeff Beall, who made me swear up and down that if a movie was ever made I would do everything in my power to get Tom Selleck to play him. Tom Selleck, if you are reading this, call me.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of American Fire.

An excerpt of this article was originally published in the July 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Traveling to Accomack County, Virginia, journalist Monica Hesse uncovers the complex triggers behind a pair of lovers’ five-month arson spree in the small, neglected town.

NonfictionMemoir

Michelle Kuo

Interview by Alice Cary

"Get out of my face, China woman.” That’s just one of the greetings Harvard graduate Michelle Kuo received during her two years in the Teach for America program. She was working in Helena, Arkansas, an impoverished town in the Mississippi Delta, where most of her students had never seen a person of Asian ethnicity.

“Students will say anything to see if they can get under your skin,” Kuo says. She is calling me from Berlin, Germany, where her historian husband is doing research (both now teach at the American University of Paris). “They called a teacher next to me fat,” she remembers. “They called the teacher across from me a cracker. But teachers know that once you let students know it bothers you, you’re done for, so I had to pretend it didn’t bother me.”

Kuo had arrived in Arkansas in 2004 with lofty goals, eager to share readings she cherished from Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and Ralph Ellison at an alternative school for kids who had been expelled from other schools. She was particularly fond of Patrick Browning, a quiet, reflective young man giving eighth grade a third try. He ended up completing the year with the “Most Improved” award. Kuo tells his story in her moving chronicle, Reading with Patrick: A Teacher, a Student, and a Life-Changing Friendship.

Despite the challenges of teaching in Helena, the rewards were great, and when Kuo left to attend Harvard Law School, she felt seriously conflicted, wanting to stay longer. Not only did she and her students grow fond of each other, the adult townspeople welcomed her with open arms.

Little did she know she’d be back two years later, after being notified that high school dropout Patrick was in jail, charged with murder two days before his 19th birthday. She visited him while she was in law school, and again a year later, after her graduation in 2009. Patrick was still in jail awaiting trial. This time she made a bold decision: to put her life on hold for seven months, postponing a fellowship in California. As she writes: “Your sense of responsibility to your students never leaves you. . . . You wonder if you failed them.”

Kuo visited Patrick in jail every day, resuming their reading and writing lessons, and also taught Spanish part-time at a charter school (her old school had closed). “I initially just went to visit him and see how his case was going,” she recalls. “And then I realized he felt alone. I was devastated to see him like that. The last time I’d seen him was the last day of school, and he had been so excited about going to high school. So the news was a shock.”

There have been any number of books about teaching challenging students (think Pat Conroy’s The Water Is Wide), and numerous others about reading with prisoners (including Mikita Brottman’s 2016 book, The Maximum Security Book Club). Few, however, share Kuo’s unique vantage point of having taught someone both before and during incarceration. It’s this singular relationship, combined with Kuo’s heartfelt, introspective prose, that makes Reading with Patrick so memorable.

“Those seven months changed my life,” Kuo freely admits. “They were so extraordinary. When do we feel most loved? It’s when people show up. I guess Patrick changed me in that way: my belief in that kind of love as being so important.”

“When do we feel most loved? It's when people show up.”

In the county jail, Patrick’s first words to his teacher were, “Mrs. Kuo, I didn’t mean to.” His 16-year-old special needs sister had been returning home from a date with a 25-year-old man whom Patrick judged to be drunk and high. The man refused to leave when asked, so Patrick picked up a knife left on the porch from a stroller repair. Patrick claims he simply intended to scare the man, but they ended up fighting, and tragically, his sister’s date ended up dead.

Patrick was charged with first-degree murder. Had he been a white male in the suburbs, Kuo surmises, the charge might have been manslaughter due to mitigating factors such as the “castle doctrine,” giving people a right to defend their homes.

During Kuo’s hours with Patrick in jail, they read poetry and the works of Frederick Douglass, C.S. Lewis, Marilynne Robinson, W.S. Merwin and more. Patrick wrote heartbreakingly lyrical poems, as well as letters to the mother of his victim, his own family and the young daughter he had fathered. “He had come so far,” Kuo writes, “. . . and it frightens me that so little was required for him to develop intellectually—a quiet room, a pile of books and some adult guidance. And yet these things were rarely supplied.”

Patrick agreed to a plea deal, which saddened Kuo, who notes that “so little investigation was done into what happened during that evening that traumatized so many.” While in prison, he went on to proudly earn his GED—with notably high scores in reading and writing—and was released on parole after two and a half years for good behavior.

After her months with Patrick, Kuo returned to her Oakland, California, fellowship, working as an immigrants’ rights lawyer and later as a law clerk. Patrick, meanwhile, worked various part-time jobs in Helena, including laying tombstones at cemeteries. More recently, he left for Texas in search of better opportunities. “I hope he’ll have a better shot at finding permanent work there,” Kuo says.

Kuo wishes she were a clone so that she could still be “pushing [Patrick], encouraging him, lecturing him and sometimes haranguing him.” She continues to cherish their friendship and treasure his letters.

“Every time I hear about somebody getting arrested,” Kuo adds, “or a felon getting out of jail, I think about how they were all once students in a classroom.”

 

(Author photo © Kathy Huang.)

This article was originally published in the August 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

"Get out of my face, China woman.” That’s just one of the greetings Harvard graduate Michelle Kuo received during her two years in the Teach for America program. She was working in Helena, Arkansas, an impoverished town in the Mississippi Delta, where most of her students had never seen a person of Asian ethnicity.

NonfictionHistoryFood & Drink

Laura Shapiro

Interview by Alice Cary

In What She Ate, food historian Laura Shapiro reveals the surprising stories behind six fascinating women’s appetites. Her subjects include author, poet and diarist Dorothy Wordsworth, sister of William; British chef Rosa Lewis, known as the “Queen of Cooks,” whose champions included King Edward VII; first lady Eleanor Roosevelt; Hitler’s mistress and eventual wife, Eva Braun; British novelist Barbara Pym; and writer and publisher Helen Gurley Brown. 

We asked Shapiro a few questions about the secrets food can reveal, the questions that still linger and her own appetites and cooking habits. 

You wrote that digging deeply into the stories of these women sometimes felt like probing into "the underside" of a Norman Rockwell painting. What surprised you the most? Do any unknowns still nag you?

There’s an image I just can’t shake; it’s been hovering over me ever since I started reading about Eleanor Roosevelt and the food at the FDR White House. It's an image of Eleanor herself, one of the most generous and warm-hearted First Ladies in history, gazing pleasantly around the luncheon table as the main course is served. Her guests try a bite or two of some dreary, lifeless dish; they push the food around, and as soon as they can politely do so, they put down their forks. I think about this scene so often, I feel as though I must have been there, but I still can’t figure out what Eleanor was thinking. She loved these people! They were friends, colleagues, people she admired, people working hard for FDR and the New Deal. And she was watching them get up from the table hungry. What’s unknowable here, at least to me, is the nature of the disconnect between Eleanor-the-empathetic and Eleanor-the-oblivious. In the book I write about the various reasons why she tolerated and/or promoted terrible food at the White House, yet enjoyed food in other times and places. But this disconnect runs even deeper, and it’s a mystery to me. I suspect it was a mystery to her, too.

“Everyday meals," you write, "constitute a guide to human character and a prime player in history." In addition to the Last Supper, what other famous meals come to mind, and what questions do you have about that meal?
One day in Paris, probably around 1913, Gertrude Stein invited the writer Carl Van Vechten to dinner. Van Vechten was a cultural entrepreneur and activist—he was involved in dance, music, the Harlem Renaissance and pretty much everything else going on in the arts before World War II. He wanted to cultivate Gertrude Stein, and she was very willing to be cultivated, hence the invitation. Stein, of course, lived with Alice B. Toklas, a great cook and very discerning food-lover. In other words, everything was in place for a noteworthy meal. Toklas herself didn’t make dinner—they had a cook, Hélène—but as Stein’s devoted lover and most fanatic admirer, Toklas surely would have overseen the menu. Or did she? That night, Hélène served them "an extraordinarily bad dinner," Stein wrote in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. "For some reason best known to herself she gave us course after course of hors d’oeuvres finishing up with a sweet omelet." Actually that sounds good to me, but then, I always like the hors d’oeuvres best.

At any rate, I’m dying to know more. Years later, when Toklas wrote The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook, she described Hélène as "that rare thing, an invariably perfect cook. She knew all the niceties of making menus. If you wished to honour a guest you offered him an omelette soufflé with an elaborate sauce, if you were indifferent to this an omelette with mushrooms or fines herbes, but if you wished to be insulting you made fried eggs." I have a feeling insult was on the menu that night—but why? Why?

When you visit people’s homes, do you yearn to peek inside their cupboards and fridge? How and why did you turn into a culinary historian?
Yes, it was exactly that impulse to sneak a look inside other people’s refrigerators that propelled me into writing about food. Growing up I was wildly curious about what everyone else was eating—I remember looking at other kids’ lunch trays at Broadmeadow School, and trying to guess why they skipped the Jell-O but didn’t mind eating those horribly flabby mashed potatoes doled out with an ice-cream scoop. When I discovered that this obsessive curiosity was perfectly respectable as long as I called it being a culinary historian, I was delighted.

The chapter about Eva Braun is fascinating, including her fondness for daily champagne and her penchant for new clothes and preserving her figure. You note that historians have reconstructed Hitler and Braun’s last hours in minute detail, yet there is "remarkably little documentation of the last meal." What might those details reveal?
It’s fascinating that Third Reich historians have described practically everything about the final hours in the bunker, except the last lunch. Or rather, they've noted it, but the accounts differ; and it’s impossible to say for sure exactly what was on the table. I made what I hope is a reasonable guess, based on the most consistent information; but I hate not having all the facts. I think what I’d see, if I knew the food more precisely, would have to do with the nature of appetite and the symbolic power of the act of eating. They were under siege; horror and destruction were just outside, and they had created that horror and destruction, so the chaos was inside them as well. How do you feed yourself, what does sustenance mean, when you’ve brought about so much death and are now looking straight at your own?

Of the women you profile, Cosmopolitan editor Helen Gurley Brown’s food story seems particularly surprising. Famed for being on the forefront of feminism, she was constantly dieting with protein, pills and Lean Cuisines while still trying to cook for her husband. Why do you think she was unable to escape this self-imposed trap?
I was fascinated by the young Helen I discovered in the Helen Gurley Brown papers at Smith College—a smart, ambitious woman determined to make her way in Los Angeles. She had such a lively mind, and I think she could have gone in all sorts of interesting directions if she hadn’t decided to focus practically exclusively on men and sex. The moment she hit the big time with Sex and the Single Girl it was all over. She didn’t dare let go of the formula. So for the rest of her life, she worked like crazy on maintaining the same body, the same skin, the same hair and the same single-minded focus on men. It really was her prison, and by the end of her life, under the wig and the plastic surgery, there just wasn’t much left.

What were your favorite meals as a child? And now?
My mother was a wonderful cook, and in fact she worked as a caterer during the ’50s and ’60s, so there was often a lot of cooking going on in our kitchen that wasn’t for the family, it was for one of her clients. She would pack it all up, put it in the car, and drive off to the event. Late that night she’d return home, unpack the car, and put the leftovers in the refrigerator. The leftovers! I used to get up very early, go right down to the kitchen in my pajamas, and forage in the refrigerator for breakfast—the most glorious breakfasts you can imagine. There were cream-cheese-and-mushroom rolls; there were slices of "party rye" with onion, mayonnaise and parmesan cheese; there were cream puffs filled with crabmeat; there was liptauer cheese dip; and I suppose there were things like meat and vegetables, but those didn't interest me. Then I would check the cookie tin for desserts—brownies, rugelach, and what we called "edges." My mother made excellent lemon squares, and she always cut off the messy edges so each square would look tidy. The edges— lemony, buttery and crisp—were saved for us.

Alas, I’ve never again lived with a refrigerator that held such treasures, but to this day, leftovers are my favorite meal.

Once you got married, "the prospect of making dinner hovered over each day like a thundercloud that refused to break." To further complicate matters, you and your husband had moved to India.
It’s a good thing I got married back in the 1970s and not last week, because I’d be losing my mind even more definitively in today’s culinary environment than I did all those years ago. Back then I had cooked lots of meals as a woman but none as a wife, and I was frantically trying to figure out the difference between those two female identities. Yes, there was a male partner in my life, but it was the same male partner who had been there before the wedding, so why was I suddenly a different person? Or was I the same person, albeit wearing a ring and writing thank-you notes? In pursuit of some kind of answer, I focused on the act of making dinner, which I knew to be a special preoccupation of wives—at least, that was the message I had absorbed from all the women’s magazines that came to our house while I was growing up.

But suppose I were launching my domestic life today, and focusing on dinner as the prime signifier of wifedom. I’d be assailed on all sides by images of glamorous, perfect meals—they’d be on TV and social media, they'd be in newspapers and magazines, they'd be in every cookbook. The stakes would be impossibly high. I'd have wife-anxiety and also competitive-cookery anxiety. I’d be worrying about spending a fortune on flawless organic ingredients just to make my mother’s recipe for chicken tetrazzini, and I’d be worrying that I shouldn’t make it at all because it's so embarrassingly old fashioned, and I'd be worrying about whether to make some splendidly simple dinner instead, like grilled salmon, and then I'd realize I had no grill and that the good salmon cost $35 a pound—well, you get the picture. Mania in all directions simultaneously.

I think if I have any advice on starting to cook, it’s this—just cook. Regularly. Use fresh ingredients, and for heaven’s sake buy them in the supermarket if you want to. Follow some incredibly simple recipe, and cultivate a respect for the ordinary. The rest is commentary.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of What She Ate.

(Author photo by Ellen Warner.)

In What She Ate, food historian Laura Shapiro reveals the surprising stories behind six fascinating women's appetites. We asked Shapiro a few questions about the secrets food reveals, the questions that still linger and her own appetites and cooking habits.&nbsp
FictionLiterary Fiction

Celeste Ng

Interview by Alice Cary

At first glance, Celeste Ng may look unassuming, but make no mistake, this bright-eyed writer is a veritable fireball. She starts her books with a bang.

Ng’s narratives reveal families plagued by delicately interwoven secrets and misunderstandings that ultimately yield tragedy. Her debut bestseller, Everything I Never Told You (2014), begins with devastating news for a Chinese-American family. Her latest novel, the mesmerizing Little Fires Everywhere, starts with an equally provocative lead: “Everyone in Shaker Heights was talking about it that summer: how Isabelle, the last of the Richardson children, had finally gone around the bend and burned the house down.”

“That was fun,” Ng says with a grin, referring to her new novel’s incendiary beginning. “In literary fiction, you don’t often get to have explosions. If you think about action movies, Michael Bay gets to blow everything up. And then there are the quiet indie films, and that’s what literary fiction is. So it was fun to get to do that.”

As we talk on a hot summer morning, Ng sits in the corner of a dark cafe near Harvard University, her alma mater. She lives near Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her husband and soon-to-be 7-year-old son. The initial idea for Little Fires Everywhere was sparked by a church fire in Cambridge in 2009. “That gave me the idea of a literary fire that might burn everything to the ground,” Ng recalls. She speaks crisply and quickly, her mind overflowing with ideas and enthusiasm.

While Everything I Never Told You takes place in 1970s small-town Ohio, Ng sets her latest novel in Shaker Heights, Ohio, a wealthy, planned community that prides itself on educational achievement and diversity. Ng spent most of her childhood there, experiencing “that kind of blissful childhood that people think of, where you ride your bike and there are lots of parks and everybody has a front lawn.”

It’s hardly a haven for family arsonists, however.

“I had the idea of a dysfunctional family,” Ng explains. “I started thinking that there’s this one black sheep who is at odds with everything that the family and the community are aligning themselves with. What’s going to happen? How far is that tension going to go?”

Ng’s saga takes place in 1997-98, when Ng herself was a senior in high school, making her the same age as her studious, Yale-bound character, Lexie, the oldest of the four Richardson children. Lexie’s siblings include handsome athlete Trip (a junior); quiet, reflective Moody (a sophomore); and wild Izzy, the fire starter.

Both of Ng’s novels focus on the roles of mothers and daughters and the relationships between the two, but her new book includes a twist. “A lot of times I feel that mothers are supposed to be peacemakers who put out all of the fires,” Ng says, “but in this book, they’re inciting all of the fires.”

At center ring of these mother wars are Mrs. Richardson—a frustrated career woman, local reporter and busybody—and Mia Warren, an artist and single mother who lives hand to mouth and moves into a rental property belonging to the Richardsons. Mia and her teenage daughter, Pearl, soon befriend and infiltrate the Richardson family, with everyone helping to stoke the oncoming firestorm. Ng sees no heroes or villains in the story, just women acting “out of fear of losing their children, especially their daughters.”

The result is a deftly woven plot that examines a multitude of issues, including class, wealth, artistic vision, abortion, race, prejudice and cultural privilege. While all of this could be handled in a heavy-handed way, rest assured that in Ng’s talented hands, the issues arise organically.

“In literary fiction, you don’t often get to have explosions. If you think about action movies, Michael Bay gets to blow everything up. And then there are the quiet indie films, and that’s what literary fiction is. So it was fun to get to do that.”

Ng’s parents, both scientists, emigrated in their early 20s from Hong Kong to the United States, where they married, pursued graduate studies and raised two daughters. The family moved from Pittsburgh to Shaker Heights just before Ng turned 10, when her father began working at NASA’s Lewis Research Center and her mom began teaching chemistry and conducting research at Cleveland State University. The move proved to be transformative for Ng.

“It was the first time that I had been in a place that wasn’t basically completely white, where I was the only nonwhite person,” Ng says. “Before, in my elementary school, there was one black girl, one girl who was Jewish and one Asian girl, who was me.”

A woman ahead of her time, Ng’s mother tried to broaden her daughter’s cultural perspectives through books. “If there was a book that came out in the ’80s or ’90s that has to do with anything in East Asia, I probably had it,” Ng says, laughing.

While race was at the forefront of her first novel, it’s also an important subplot in Little Fires Everywhere, concerning a legal battle between a young Chinese immigrant mom who abandons her baby and a white couple who tries to adopt her child.

Ng, who describes her husband as a “tall white guy,” says she didn’t plan to write about this topic. “But because I’m in a mixed-race marriage and have a biracial child, these issues are just things that are on my mind,” she says. “In Little Fires Everywhere, I wanted to write about it from a different angle. I wanted to show the ways that race is not just an issue for nonwhite people; it’s an issue for everybody.”

As for her next novel, Ng is contemplating two “wildly divergent ideas” and has yet to settle on one. “The best analogy I have is that if you’re walking around a big walled city, you need to keep going around it until you can find a gate. I’m kind of walking around and trying to find where the gate is.”

No doubt she’ll find it, and readers will follow her in.

 

This article was originally published in the September 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Author photo credit Kevin Day Photography.

“Mothers are supposed to be peacemakers, but in this book, they’re inciting all of the fires.”
Children's & YAMiddle Grade

Katherine Paterson

Interview by Alice Cary

With My Brigadista Year, beloved children’s author Katherine Paterson shares the little-known story of Cuba’s brigadistas: teachers who helped promote Fidel Castro’s campaign for nationwide literacy. One volunteer brigadista is 13-year-old Lora, and through her story, readers discover a complicated history of Cuba.

You thought you had retired, but then this project evolved. How did this story begin to tug at your heartstrings? And you’ve noted that this book was a “pure delight” to write, as opposed to the agony that occasionally occurs. What made this project so delightful?
It was a delight because I had forgotten how much I love the process. Suddenly I had a story that few people in this country had heard, and I wanted to share it.

“If only the people of the world would unite in causes that heal and elevate our mutual humanity and shared planet, rather than fight to destroy each other and perhaps our beautiful world.”

You’ve traveled twice to Cuba. What drew you there, and how was it? What things surprised you most? Any plans to visit again?
Both times I went to Cuba, it was at the invitation of Emilia Gallego, who runs a literacy conference every two years for folks from Latin America. She asked me to speak despite my lack of Spanish because some of my books have been translated into Spanish and have been enjoyed in Latin America.

Yes, I certainly want to go to Cuba again. I have another invitation from Emilia for next spring when she is sponsoring a conference commemorating José Martí’s 165th birthday. I’m hoping to go either then or sometime before I get too much older.

I imagine many readers will be surprised to learn how in 1961 Fidel Castro achieved his goal of making Cuba an “illiteracy-free” nation in a year (the first country in the Western Hemisphere to do so) and that Cuba continues to have one of the highest literacy rates in the world. How did your impressions of Castro and Cuban history change as you researched and wrote this book?
I knew very little about Cuban history before I visited there the first time and knew nothing about the literacy campaign. For me, as probably for most Americans, Castro was a cruel dictator who caused great suffering in Cuba and drove many Cubans to flee. I had heard about their fine universal health care system, but had trouble reconciling that with the regime I thought I knew something about. I did know that Castro had driven out Batista and the American mafia, which was a good thing, but how good was it for one dictator to simply be replaced by another?

Was it difficult—or a delicate dance—to touch on some of the history involved in this story, including U.S. involvement in Cuba, as well as the repressive regimes of both Castro and Batista? I love what Lora says in the epilogue: “My country is not perfect, but, then, is yours?”
Yes, of course. The story is written in first person by a person who still lives and works in Cuba. I was conscious of the fact that my fictional character, like my friends who live there, would tread softly when talking about the political situation in her country when writing her story for Americans. She wouldn’t want to land herself in jail, now would she?

The narrative is compelling and flows so well. How did you begin to imagine the character of Lora, and was it hard to make her first-person narration sound so authentic?
I was inspired by actual stories, but I do also believe in the power of the imagination.

Your friend Dr. Emilia Gallego, a Cuban educator and writer, was herself a brigadista and one of the many young women whose lives were transformed by the campaign. How much of her experiences and impressions did you incorporate into your novel?
I found out just before my second visit that my brave, accomplished friend Emilia had been one of the teenage literacy volunteers or brigadistas that I went on to write about. She is a very proud Cuban, but, like many, never named Castro, simply stroked her chin to indicate the bearded one. The stories in my book were inspired mostly by the interviews with former brigadistas in the documentary Maestra and the accompanying book, A Year Without Sundays, because they were translated into English. But I treasure Emilia’s response to the draft of the book that I sent to her and that our friend Isabel Serrano helped her read. (Emilia is brilliant, but not in English.) Among other things, she said that if she didn’t know me and my books, she would not believe that someone who had never had the experience could have written the book. That gave me the courage to move ahead with the project.

This was indeed a war on illiteracy, and there were some tragedies. Some brigadistas were killed, and some reports say that others were forced to go. If you had been a 13-year-old Cuban girl like Lora, would have wanted to leave home and join this literacy brigade? And if you had been a Cuban parent, would you have allowed your son or daughter to go?
I’m not that brave a person. So I probably wouldn’t have volunteered. But having had four children braver than I was at 13 and knowing what a determined bunch they are, I would have swallowed hard, prayed a lot and known I couldn’t stop them.

Near the end of the story, Lora says, “We were like an army of sharpened pencils marching into the center of the capital among our flags and banners.” Can you envision such an army of global literacy volunteers?
The photographs of that march are thrilling! If only the people of the world would unite in causes that heal and elevate our mutual humanity and shared planet, rather than fight to destroy each other and perhaps our beautiful world.

You have said that books helped you through tough times as a child, and they still help you during transitions. Have any been especially helpful lately, and before and after the death of your husband, John, in 2013?
I have found that it is hard to watch television these past four years, because the news is so bad and so insistent. I’d rather read the newspapers that deliver news more gently and thoughtfully. So I am reading a lot. I think the book that was most helpful was Final Gifts, written by two hospice volunteers. Last year I was jury chair for the NBA in Young People’s Literature and was so heartened by the number of wonderful books I read—and saddened that we had to narrow our choices down to 10, five and one. My husband was jailed in Alabama in the summer of 1965, so March: Book Three, as well as the first two volumes of Congressman Lewis’ powerful autobiography, were especially meaningful for me.

Your son David has turned several of your books into movies, and there are plans for more movies, as well as TV shows. How are things going? Wouldn’t My Brigadista Year make a wonderful movie!
My sons (John is now helping produce) certainly think My Brigadista Year would make a great movie, but in the world of independent filmmaking, the gears turn very slowly. It took us 17 years to get Bridge to Terabithia into theaters, seven years to get The Great Gilly Hopkins into a few theaters and onto on-demand sites. Let’s hope the next movie can get made and into theaters in, say, four years.

When Lora describes her grandmother as “an old woman with young ideas,” I couldn’t help but think of you. You’re 84 and seemingly as busy as ever. How does it feel to be a Library of Congress “Living Legend”? Do you and the others ever hang out?
Boy, wouldn’t I have liked to hang out with Pete Seeger? But fellow legend Judy Blume took my son, my granddaughter and me to lunch in Key West last April. It had been years since Judy and I last saw each other, but she is just as lovely and gracious as ever. I fear, however, that lovely oceanside restaurant is no more.

Are any new books begging to be written? Please!
Don’t worry: If one comes knocking, I will throw open the door.

Beloved children’s author Katherine Paterson shares the little-known story of Cuba’s brigadistas: teachers who helped promote Fidel Castro’s campaign for nationwide literacy.
NonfictionBiography

Caroline Fraser

Interview by Alice Cary

Caroline Fraser’s endlessly fascinating biography, Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder, honors the 150th anniversary year of Wilder’s birth.

Fraser, who has written for publications including The New Yorker and The Atlantic, has been immersed in Wilder’s world for years, having edited the Library of America edition of the Little House books. On the desk of her home in Santa Fe, she keeps a program from the 1937 Detroit Book Fair, where Ingalls gave what Fraser calls “her most important statement about why she wrote the books.” Wilder said in her speech, “I understood that in my own life I represented a whole period of American history,” specifically, the settling of the American frontier.

(Carrie, Mary and Laura Ingalls)

Fraser’s goal with Prairie Fires was to meld the “great story” of Wilder’s life with American history. “While there are good biographies of Wilder available,” she explains, “I felt that the history really merited a closer look.”

Like generations of young readers, Fraser was fascinated by the Little House books as a child, especially because her maternal grandmother’s family emigrated from Sweden to Duluth, Minnesota. But what ultimately drew her into years of research was an interview she heard with William Holtz about his 1995 biography of Wilder’s daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, whom he claims essentially ghostwrote her mother’s books.

“I just thought really,” she remembers. “That was such a surprise.”

Lane was a well-traveled reporter and celebrity biographer who had publishing connections that were vital to her mother’s success. “If she had not,” Fraser says, “I don’t know that [the books] would have ever seen the light of day.” However, Fraser’s research reveals a more balanced collaboration between mother and daughter, one that she says “brought out the best part of both of them.”

Wilder began writing about her childhood as early as her late teens, although those manuscripts haven’t survived. Over the years she wrote for newspapers and farming magazines, also penning a gritty manuscript titled Pioneer Girl, which remained unpublished until 2014, well after Wilder’s death in 1957.

Little House in the Big Woods was published in 1932, when Wilder was 65. After years of financial instability, her books about her poverty-stricken childhood finally brought her wealth. In the introduction to Prairie Fires, Fraser calls the feat “a profound act of American myth-making and self-transformation,” as she “reimagined her frontier childhood as epic and uplifting.”

The Little House series “has all of Laura’s stoicism and her grit and determination,” Fraser says. “I think Rose made it more accessible for children at times―to kind of gentle down some of the harsher realities of what her mother was writing. She polished some of that and brought out the high points, the cheerfulness, the love in the family.”

Still, questions linger. At the Detroit Book Fair, Wilder firmly stated, “All I have told is true but it is not the whole truth.” Not quite, as it turns out.

“Laura and Rose would take factual material and transform it into fiction,” Fraser asserts, “and then claim it was factual, and have no problem with that. Rose cut her teeth in yellow journalism. Insofar as she had any training, it was in the yellow press. It was the real fake news.”

Wilder aptly described her books as “a long story, filled with sunshine and shadow.” The privations she and her family suffered, however, were much harsher than what was described in the books. The family’s only son died at 9 months, and Wilder’s sister Mary went blind. Years later, Wilder’s husband, Almanzo, suffered a stroke early in their marriage, making farm work difficult, and their only son died as an infant. A short time later, their house burned down. Wilder, her husband and daughter finally left South Dakota in 1894 to settle in the Ozarks, on a farm they called Rocky Ridge.

After their departure, Wilder didn’t see her beloved father again until years later, when he was on his deathbed. After that, she didn’t see her mother or sisters for years and wasn’t able to attend her mother’s funeral. Fraser says Wilder’s “exile” from her family was critical to her writing, adding, “I think all those years added up to a very intense yearning and nostalgia for her family, which resulted in her wanting to recapture and revisit her childhood in these books.”

In recounting her pioneer childhood, Wilder and her daughter blurred the lines between fact and fiction.

Fraser notes that readers cherish the Little House books for their “incredible sense of the closeness of the family.” The paradox, she says, is that Wilder and her daughter never had that. Lane suffered from depression and described her childhood as a “nightmare.”

“It says something about the extraordinary nature of literature that a relationship as fraught as that between Laura and Rose was able to produce this amazing testament to the American family,” Fraser says.

In recent years, many have criticized the series for its racist attitudes toward Native Americans. For example, in Little House on the Prairie, Wilder begs her father to let her adopt a Native American baby whom she sees passing by. Fraser notes that while the young girl’s statement may seem “innocent on the surface,” it embodies “a perfect image in American literature of what white settlement was all about, and the acquisitive nature of the people who came to the West and wanted to take everything that belonged to somebody else.”

Nonetheless, in 1894 Wilder wrote in her diary, “If I had been the Indians I would have scalped more white folks before I ever would have left [the wilderness].”

“It’s a very bold statement,” Fraser says. “I really think it’s one of the most extraordinary statements that she ever made and a really astonishing one for a woman of her era to make. Many other people were just terrified or overwhelmed by the kinds of experiences she had. She remembered the terror, she remembered being overwhelmed, but it did not affect how she felt about the land, and that, to me, is extraordinary.”

Despite the controversies about the Little House books, Fraser believes they will have an enduring legacy. “I certainly hope that people continue to read them, because I do think that they are really important, not only as children’s literature, but as American history,” she says. “They deserve a place among the classics of American literature.”

 

This article was originally published in the December 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

(Author photo by Hal Espen.)

Caroline Fraser’s endlessly fascinating biography, Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder, honors the 150th anniversary year of Wilder’s birth.

FictionLiterary Fiction

Chloe Benjamin

Interview by Alice Cary

It’s fitting that Chloe Benjamin was born on All Soul’s Day, a religious festival remembering those who have died. Her latest novel, The Immortalists, explores the eternal mysteries of death and the boundaries of science, religion and magic.

“The Immortalists felt like the book that I was always meant to write,” Benjamin says during a phone call from her home in Madison, Wisconsin. “If I died now, at least I would have written this. I don’t think I’ll ever have a book like this again.”

That’s a somewhat startling statement coming from a young writer, but at just age 29, Benjamin is well on her way to being an established author. Her first novel, the award-winning The Anatomy of Dreams, explored another intangible—the surprising power of lucid dreaming.

Benjamin says of her two novels, “The Anatomy of Dreams is a more internal look at the conscious and the subconscious, and an almost claustrophobic exploration of the central relationship. With The Immortalists, I wanted to cover more ground socially, culturally and historically, as well as interpersonally. It felt important to challenge myself to write a book with greater scope and diversity.”

“It was really one of the hardest writing experiences I’ve had.”

The premise of The Immortalists is immediately gripping: In 1969, the four siblings of the Gold family (Varya, age 13; Daniel, 11; Klara, 9; Simon, 7) live in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, where their father owns a tailor shop. When Daniel gets wind of a mysterious fortuneteller, the children track her down and have an encounter that will forever change their lives. The soothsayer predicts the exact date of each of their deaths.

The four sections of the book address each sibling’s life in order of their predicted demise. Simon was told he would die young, while Varya seems destined to live until a ripe old age. Or is she? One of the book’s central questions is whether the fortuneteller is clairvoyant, or whether her prophecies simply become self-fulfilling.

“I wanted to leave this open to interpretation, to see what the reader thinks,” Benjamin says. “I’ve always really been drawn to books with multiple perspectives or books that show how different people can interpret the same event in such varied ways.”

The book’s beginning brings to mind the four siblings who step through the wardrobe in The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. What’s more, at one point in The Immortalists, Klara’s daughter cries out, “It’s like Narnia!” when it begins to snow.

Benjamin laughs at the reference, explaining, “That was actually something I said when I arrived at college on the East Coast. Everyone made very prompt fun of me, because I was coming from California.”

As for parallels to the C.S. Lewis classic, Benjamin says they were unintentional, although she admits, “I think those books were in the petri dish that created this one.”

The Gold children all take strikingly different paths: Daniel, the oldest Gold boy, becomes a military doctor, while Varya ends up a scientist. Simon and Klara run away to San Francisco, where Simon dances, both ballet and in a gay bar. Klara becomes a Las Vegas magician, following in the footsteps of her namesake grandmother. She even takes to performing her grandmother’s act, the Jaws of Life, in which she hangs from a rope by her teeth, calling herself “The Immortalist.”

Benjamin, who initially knew nothing about magic, modeled the Jaws of Life trick after a real act she stumbled upon during her research. A Hungarian immigrant who called herself Tiny Kline once performed this extraordinary feat over Times Square and later played a flying Tinker Bell in Disneyland. “I think she just held on with her teeth,” Benjamin says. “It was so dangerous and unbelievable.”

It’s not surprising that showmanship is at the forefront of so much of the novel. Benjamin’s mother is a stage actor, and as a child Benjamin was involved in theater and active in ballet until college.

“I miss those things a lot,” she admits, “but I don’t feel brave enough to perform at this point in my life. I’m more comfortable writing something where I can make it as perfect as I can and then put it out there for consumption. But that level of risk and uncertainty and vulnerability—and also a kind of flash and dazzle—was a part of my childhood.”

Benjamin did substantial research for each section of the book, adding: “I don’t make it easy on myself. There’s an adage to write what you know; I’m more interested in writing about what I want to know.”

The research for Varya’s section proved most vexing. At first Benjamin had Varya study a species known as the immortal jellyfish, which seemed to be a perfect thematic fit­­—although the subject had its own challenges.

“I had to read so much molecular biology,” Benjamin recalls, “and that is not the way my brain works. So I’d be practically crying, sitting with this stack of academic journals that I couldn’t possibly understand. I worked on that section for years.” Ultimately, she ended up starting it over. “It was really one of the hardest writing experiences I’ve had.”

The completed novel spans decades, explores a variety of philosophical questions and addresses everything from gay life in 1970s San Francisco to the ethics of scientific research on animals.

As for her next novel, Benjamin is already at work. “I get an idea maybe once every five years,” she says, “and it’s like, OK, well I guess that’s what I’m writing. So as much as it’s driving me crazy, I have faith.”

 

This article was originally published in the January 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

It’s fitting that Chloe Benjamin was born on All Soul’s Day, a religious festival remembering those who have died. Her latest novel, The Immortalists, explores the eternal mysteries of death and the boundaries of science, religion and magic.

Fiction

Kristin Hannah

Interview by Alice Cary

Kristin Hannah has known for 20 years that she wanted to write a book set in Alaska­—and that she wanted to use a haunting and powerful title inspired by a favorite poem: The Great Alone.

In the meantime, she wrote more than 20 other novels, including her 2015 runaway bestseller, The Nightingale, a novel about two sisters in German-occupied France during World War II. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the blockbuster success of The Nightingale made it a hard act to follow. “It did kind of mess with my mind,” Hannah admits, speaking on the phone from her home near Seattle. “You feel an immense pressure to follow it up.”

Determined to write something completely different, she says, “I decided—clearly after too much wine—to write a domestic thriller.”

The book was set in current-day Alaska. Hannah wrote for about a year and a half, only to come to a terrible conclusion: Her manuscript wasn’t working.

“I had already thrown everything I could think of at it, and I had failed,” Hannah says. It was a heartbreaking realization, but as much as she loves thrillers, “I realized that I wasn’t ultimately interested in what happened. I’m much more interested in why things happen and who people are. Not only was the book not good enough to follow The Nightingale, it wasn’t good enough to be a book with my name on it.”

Fortunately, there were a few shreds of hope to be salvaged: the Alaskan setting, which Hannah says “is just as special in its own way as World War II France,” and a cast of characters she liked. So she created a new story for the Allbright family, who in 1974 move off the grid to the fictional town of Kaneq, located near Homer, Alaska. They are propelled by their survivalist father, Ernt, a Vietnam vet with post-traumatic stress disorder who has inherited a cabin from an old army buddy. The isolation becomes a pressure cooker for his demons, with tragic results for his wife, Cora, and their 14-year-old daughter, Leni, the book’s narrator.

Once Hannah wrote an opening scene from Leni’s viewpoint, she immediately knew that “this is a girl worth following.” After 18 more months of writing, she had crafted a new—and very different—novel.

“It’s a much more intense read than I’ve done before,” Hannah concludes. “It’s very much about this girl coming of age in an incredibly dangerous environment, both inside her home and outside of it. I think I was able to bring to the reader a vision of Alaska that is different than what they’ve read before.”

The setting provides a mesmerizing look at the difficulties that face a homesteading family. Upon their arrival in Alaska, the Allbrights are warned by Large Marge, one of the book’s many marvelous characters, “Alaska herself can be Sleeping Beauty one minute and a bitch with a sawed-off shotgun the next. There’s a saying: Up here you can make one mistake. The second one will kill you.”

The Allbrights make a multitude of mistakes, which translate into page-turning, riveting, wee-hours of-the-night reading. Leni, a whip-smart, book-loving girl, becomes a rugged Alaskan outdoorswoman, forced to make agonizing decisions about the domestic violence that overtakes her family.

It’s clear that Alaska is embedded deep in the author’s heart, a special connection that began with her own family’s odyssey. When she was 8 years old, Hannah’s father loaded the family into a VW bus and traveled through 16 states, landing in the Pacific Northwest.

“He said we were looking for home,” Hannah recalls, “and we’ll know it when we see it. It was about 100 degrees in that bus, and all I remember is my mom and dad saying, ‘Will you stop reading your book and look at the scenery?’ ”

Hannah offers readers “a vision of Alaska that is different than what they’ve read before.”

From this journey blossomed Hannah’s interest in Alaska, and she started spending summers there, once working in a fish processing plant, an especially grueling summer job. “You don’t sleep for hours and hours on end,” she says. “It was gross.”

The book’s title, which Hannah held onto for so long, also comes from her father. It pays homage to poet Robert W. Service’s nickname for Alaska, from a poem called “The Shooting of Dan McGrew”: “Were you ever out in the Great Alone, when the moon was awful clear, / And the icy mountains hemmed you in with a silence you most could hear . . .” During childhood camping trips, Hannah’s father used to recite Service’s poems to her and her siblings, who learned them by heart and later passed them on to their children.

Hannah’s mother inspired her as well and, in fact, launched her career. When she became terminally ill during Hannah’s last year of law school, Hannah’s mother invited her daughter to collaborate on a novel. She also predicted that her daughter would become a novelist, a notion that struck Hannah as absurd at the time.

“It’s taken me a long time to find my stride as a writer,” Hannah says. “The biggest part of that is finding my voice, and what I have to say. And it’s pretty clear that it’s about ordinary women banding together or on their own, fighting in extraordinary circumstances in an extraordinary time, and finding a way to both survive and thrive.”

As Hannah wrote The Nightingale, she pondered whether she would have risked her life to save a stranger in the circumstances that her characters faced. With The Great Alone, she contemplated a different essential question.

“I kept asking myself, ‘Could I survive here?’ ” she says. “And I can say with absolute certainty that I probably could not be an Alaskan pioneer. For me, interestingly enough, it’s not the weather and it’s not the dark. I think it’s the hard work and no reading time.”

 

This article was originally published in the February 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Author photo by Kevin Lynch.

Kristin Hannah has known for 20 years that she wanted to write a book set in Alaska­—and that she wanted to use a haunting and powerful title inspired by a favorite poem: The Great Alone.

NonfictionTravelMemoir

Shoba Narayan

Interview by Alice Cary

In Shoba Narayan’s delightful memoir, The Milk Lady of Bangalore, she recalls moving from America to India and the many joys she found there—the most unexpected being cows. In India, where cows are considered holy, bovines roam the street, and Narayan forges a friendship with the woman who sells fresh milk across from her home. In this Q&A, Narayan tells us about her bovine infatuation, surprising uses for cow dung and her career back-up plan.

Sarala, your milk lady, believes that “more than any creature, cows are connected to humans.” Another person told you that “cows are the most evolved animal, after humans.” What are your thoughts on these statements?
I started as a skeptic. I would roll my eyes at these statements and then try to figure out what the agenda was. I think those of us city-dwellers who have lost our connection to nature—the birds, bees and, ahem, bovines that surround us—are depriving ourselves of a vital link that is part of our evolution and ecology. Such statements reveal the connection that people like Sarala have maintained with all species great and small. Their lives are the richer for it. I am now trying to emulate and engineer such connections. It is easier to do in India.

You write that if anyone had suggested that youd be writing about cows, you would have yelled “Get out!” in an Elaine-Jerry Seinfeld kind or way. Now you're in love with them. Did you pick cows as a subject, or did they pick you?
Cows picked me. I used to see them all over the place in India. I didn’t realize then that they would arrive at my doorstep. The story too, unspooled over 10 years. Like the slow and sensuous gait of a cow, this was a tale that took its own time to come to life.

Unlike your previous book, the recipe-filled Monsoon Diary, this book contains only one recipe: for panchagavya, a mixture of cow dung, cow urine, yogurt, bananas and other ingredients. You describe an incredible number of uses for cow dung and cow urine, including urine as an elixir, which you tasted. Do you recommend it?
Look, I know that you guys are now rolling your eyes like I once did. Do I believe in esoteric alternative remedies that most people would mock? Yes. Do I imbibe cow urine tablets on a daily basis? No. Do I realize that this situation is ripe for satire? Yes. Do I add panchagavya to the manure for my garden? Most definitely. And I grow wonderful heirloom tomatoes, purple eggplant, beans, pumpkin, basil and tons of herbs. So there you have it.

You grew up in India, where cows are holy. Then you immigrated to America for college and journalism school, and eventually returned to India with your husband and two daughters. How has your view of cows changed throughout these transitions?
Well, it is hard to find a live cow walking the streets in the U.S. So my interest in cows remained dormant while I lived stateside. It was hibernating perhaps. When I returned to India, my interest renewed with fresh zeal because I saw cows as animals I had grown up with but also as symbols of Indian culture and the Indian ethos where fantasy and reality seem to blend in kaleidoscopic color.

What does your family think about your cow adventures? Are they as fond as cows as you are?
My husband tolerates it. My kids openly laugh at me while (I hope) secretly being proud of my peculiarities. My parents and in-laws who belong to the earlier generation of Indians heartily approve. My aunts and uncles use me as an example when they talk to their own children who are now in America. “Look at Shoba. See how connected she has become to her Indian roots,” they will say. My cousins all resent me for becoming an Indian role model in a way that they simply cannot emulate. I mean, how can you sit in Buffalo, New York, and compete for family approval with a cousin who has gone and bought a cow?

“The reason I want to buy milk from a cow,” you explain, “is because I am trying to recapture the simple times of my childhood, particularly after the intricate dance that I have undertaken for the last twenty years as an immigrant in America.” Can you explain how it feels for you to taste a glass of fresh, raw milk, and how it helps you reconnect with your native country?
I hate to burst this bubble, but I don’t drink raw milk. Years in America have made me a tad cautious. So all milk in my house, even my cow’s milk, is subject to strict standards of, shall we say, sanitation. We double-boil it and use it to set yogurt. For my everyday milk for coffee, I am, as I say in the book, still using pasteurized milk.

That said, I touch every passing cow. I am not queasy about dung. I don’t mind squatting on the sidewalk to milk a cow. These are the ways in which I reconnect with my culture.

Has Sarala read your book or articles that you’ve written about her?
Well, she doesn’t read English. But she knows about all my articles and my book because my newspaper sent a photographer to shoot her and her family for some columns I wrote about her in India. So every time one was published, I would walk across the street, where she milks her cows, and show her the piece. She would glance at her photo and nod her approval but it was not a big deal to her.

Sarala seems to have acted as a personal tour guide when you moved back to India, showing you so much about your new home, its people and ways. You write touchingly about your relationship and also mention how financial inequities at times made you feel uncomfortable around her as well as others. Are you still living in India, and do you plan to stay?
Yes, and yes. Still living in India. Plan to stay. For now. We have developed deep connections here to our large and extended family. My daughter goes to college in Pittsburgh, so we come back every year to visit. We go to New York, D.C., Florida and Pittsburgh—all places we have friends and family. I imagine that we might eventually spend time in California because my daughter studies engineering and, who knows, she may end up in Silicon Valley. We loved our 20 years in America and we could see moving back, but that won’t likely be for at least another few years.

You came to own a cow during the process of writing this book, which you donated to Sarala. Can you give us an update on Anantha, the cow that you and your husband named after his sister?
She is still around. Cows are often roaming untethered in Bangalore, so I meet Anantha on the streets sometimes and I speak with Sarala about her. I worry about her getting hit on the road. But life in India is all about relationships and most people quickly develop a keen sense of the balance between attachment and detachment. So I try to stay close with my cow but not too close.

You write that your life goal is to be a stand-up comic. How’s that going?
Not very well, I am afraid. I am taking classes with Second City, Chicago, but online classes can only help you so much. Now that would bring me back to America in a heartbeat: To study comedy for a year would be a dream. And it is easier to do in the States. I did a comedy Masterclass with Steven Martin online. All my classmates kept writing about their gigs in their posts. I don’t have a single gig in India.

You never planned to write cows until one “literally walked up to me.” What’s next? Have you bumped into anything new?
Hahahaha. Nice one. You know, that is such a nice line that I don’t want to add anything to it. Let me wait for the next story to bump into me. I can’t imagine what it will be.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of The Milk Lady of Bangalore.

In this Q&A, The Milk Lady of Bangalore author Shoba Narayan tells us about her bovine infatuation, surprising uses for cow dung and her career back-up plan.  
NonfictionMemoir

Tara Westover

Interview by Alice Cary

Describing her childhood as the youngest of seven children growing up without schooling in the shadow of Buck Peak, Idaho, Tara Westover says, “It all seemed very normal to me.”

Speaking by phone from her home in Cambridge, England, Westover, 31, describes her life’s improbable trajectory that led to her startling memoir, Educated. It was so unusual, in fact, that a bidding war erupted over the sale of her book, which is now being published in more than 20 countries and has inspired comparisons to Jeannette Walls’ The Glass Castle and Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club.

When her survivalist father recounted the story of the 11-day siege of Randy Weaver in the 1992 Ruby Ridge standoff, its vivid details became young Westover’s strongest memory. It was as though the Feds had invaded her own house with deadly gunfire. Striving to become fully independent and off the grid, the Westovers stockpiled food, gasoline, guns and a bullet-making machine in preparation for the End of Days.

“I was kind of looking forward to it in a lot of ways,” she recalls. “We were totally prepared. It was going to be a reversal of fortunes. My family had always been poor and looked down upon. Suddenly we were going to be royalty because we were going to have food and gasoline―all the things that people needed.”

The younger children in Westover’s family didn’t have birth certificates or exact birthdates. She wasn’t allowed to go to school, and there was little homeschooling. “By the time I was 10, the only subject I had studied systematically was Morse code, because Dad insisted that I learn it,” she writes. Doctors and hospitals were forbidden as well; the family relied on her mother’s herbs and essential oils, even after car accidents, concussions and severe burns. An older brother taught Westover to read, using Little Bear Goes to the Moon as her primer. A few books lay around the house, but lessons and tests were nonexistent.

She grew up studying the Book of Mormon, the Bible and essays by 19th-century Mormon prophets. Westover emphasizes that her story is not about Mormonism. She believes that mental illness, possibly bipolar disorder, led to her father’s extremism.

“There is a caricature of Mormonism that people have,” she explains. “I don’t want to contribute to that. These aren’t Mormon attributes. Mormons send their kids to school.”

Nor does Westover want her father to come across as a caricature. “Sure, his views are interesting,” she notes. “What’s also interesting is the fact that he sincerely believes them and that he is trying to look after his kids.”

Educated is the remarkable story of Westover’s education. She taught herself math so she could take the ACT, and at age 17 she first set foot in a classroom after enrolling in Brigham Young University. Fellow students laughed at her for having never heard of the Holocaust. Despite failing her first exam and fearing she would flunk out, she graduated in 2008 and later earned a Ph.D. in history at Trinity College, Cambridge.

Despite the gaping holes in their early education, three of the seven Westover children ended up earning Ph.D.s. “We seriously overcompensated.”

In many ways, Westover says, she had a positive childhood. “I grew up on a beautiful mountain that was like an amazing cathedral. The scrap yard at times was kind of like an exotic playground. And those are real parts of my childhood.”

“It was going to be a reversal of fortunes. My family had always been poor and looked down upon. Suddenly we were going to be royalty.”

However, a giant cloud overshadowed everything. Her father’s actions often endangered his children, and her childhood was complicated by years of physical and emotional abuse by an older brother. Her brother and parents deny this assertion, which has resulted in her estrangement from them and certain siblings.

Westover says leaving home and becoming educated “made me see my brother’s violence for what it was. . . . Suddenly, I could not accept it. And so once I started writing, I realized it’s really not possible for me to tell the story of my education in any kind of meaningful way without telling the family story.”

At first, the ongoing estrangement posed a problem in searching for an ending to her story. Westover admits, “In the end, I decided that maybe not having a neat ending would be what this book was about.” Perhaps, she adds, “people would see bits of their messy lives in my messy life.”

Her unique history presents hurdles when it comes to how she relates to her family in the present. “Most of the time I am no longer angry with them,” she says, “and the reason is that I am no longer afraid of them. I am no longer under their power.”

Anger did, however, color her outlook for years. “I became someone who had no beautiful memories,” she recalls. Writing helped her reconcile the contradictory truths of her past. “I could keep all of them because they’re mine, and no one can take from me the good, but also no one can obscure for me the bad.”

To prepare to write a book-length narrative, Westover read widely. And then, someone mentioned something called the short story. “I’d never heard of that before.” After listening to favorite episodes of the New Yorker Fiction Podcast 40 to 50 times, she modeled each chapter like a short story. The strategy makes her memoir particularly readable and compelling. “For me it was the greatest curriculum,” she says.

Westover concludes, “You only get the life that you get. I’m glad that I was pushed in that way because now I know what I’m able to do. . . . But I wouldn’t go back and go through that again. Not for anything.”

 

This article was originally published in the March 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Author photo by Paul Stuart.

Describing her childhood as the youngest of seven children growing up without schooling in the shadow of Buck Peak, Idaho, Tara Westover says, “It all seemed very normal to me.”

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