Katherine Wyrick

Relationships are complex things—especially those of the familial sort. Defining yourself within and apart from parents and siblings can be a life's work, at turns painful and liberating. This is one of the themes that Nancy Reisman, an award-winning writer of short fiction, explores in her beautiful debut novel, The First Desire.

During a midday phone call from Ann Arbor, where Reisman teaches creative writing at the University of Michigan, the author discusses home, family and the ties that bind. Her manner is easy, and the voice that floats over the line sounds both soft-spoken and assured.

Though she currently resides in Ann Arbor, Reisman's home, and the setting of her novel, is upstate New York. Reisman is acutely aware of the pull of home the gravitational force that it exerts on our lives. "Isn't that true of places where you grow up? I think the mark they make on you seems so distinctive, even compared to other places where I've lived for long stretches of time," she says.

It is the tension, the paradox the longing for home, and the longing to leave that she writes about so eloquently, and with such keen insight. "It's a huge conflict, certainly for [the] characters, but I think it's something that a lot of people experience at one moment or another in their lives," she says.

The novel begins on a glorious summer morning in Buffalo. The year is 1929. Sadie Cohen, now the married Sadie Feldstein, is enjoying the quiet and solitude of the early hour until her brother Irving arrives with some disturbing news—their eldest sister, Goldie, has disappeared. With this event, we are drawn into the life of the Cohen family, and into the life of the changing city itself. Reisman brilliantly evokes another era as she takes us through the Great Depression, World War II and its aftermath. She tells the story through different perspectives—those of the Cohen sisters, their brother Irving and their father's mistress—and forms these into a seamless narrative. That she accomplishes this ambitious feat so successfully is a testament to her talent.

Reisman says she chose this period in which to set her novel, in part, because it's a moment when the family and the collective unit was very, very important. The family matriarch has already died when The First Desire opens, but her presence looms large over the novel and in the lives of those she left behind.

"I think the mothers are really the secret heart of the book," she says. Reisman is quick to add that, although men have an important role as fathers, she's interested in "how [the maternal bond] shapes peoples' lives."

Reisman has a strong relationship with her own mother, like her mother before her. Perhaps, then, this closeness is something inherited, passed down through generations. "Whatever the reason, it's something that has been really vital in my own life," says Reisman. She is interested in how women negotiate relationships "with their mothers, their relationships with their daughters, with their sons, all of these family relationships . . . and the daily tragedies of the lack of connection. In some ways the power of those relationships is mysterious, but it's undeniable."

The life of a city fascinates Reisman perhaps as much as her characters' lives. The Buffalo Reisman knew in the 1970s has suffered since its time of economic prosperity earlier in the 20th century. In order to create an accurate portrait of the era, Reisman spent time in the Buffalo area, visiting public libraries and historical societies, reading newspapers, menus and the city pages (phone directories of the day) and studying photographs. She also interviewed people who knew the city at that time.

"Though the novel takes place in another time, the themes are universal. The characters are in part bound by social mores of the time and the place, but they also transcend them. That mix of continuity and change is something that I'm really interested in exploring and I don't know that it can ever be definitively nailed down. I think it's something that shifts."

Which brings us to the title, The First Desire, and the implications it has for Reisman's characters. She illustrates desire in its many forms—the longing to be known and understood, sexual desire, the wish for a life not led. The title, says Reisman, "does have all these other resonances . . . I do have that association to a kind of maternal connection or familial connection and a kind of idyllic one. I think for Goldie, it's the sort of fantasy of being alone with her mother and the happiness of that and the peace of that. That's the one that's most powerful for me."

Reisman may be a first-time novelist, but she's an acclaimed author of short fiction; her collection House Fires won the 1999 Iowa Short Fiction Award, and her work has also appeared in several anthologies, including Best American Short Stories 2001. When we ask if writing a novel presents a unique challenge, Reisman laughs. "Yes. The simple answer is yes. The challenge was simply scale, working with so many characters, such a span of time."

Reisman says she joked with friends, "Okay, the next novel is going to be one point of view: My Summer Vacation." Whatever follows, readers will be clamoring for it after a taste of Reisman's remarkable first novel. In luminous, unsparing prose she allows us to inhabit the inner world of her characters, experiencing their moments of joy and the way old wounds can inhabit the current moment. She understands the effect of things gone unsaid and that we all are made of many selves, some secreted from view. Reisman knows that home, though often sweet, can be sorrowful, too, and that our family relationships inform who we are, are bound up in the process by which we come to know ourselves.

Katherine Wyrick lives in Little Rock, Arkansas.

Kaye Gibbons’ voice sounds much as one might expect from a North Carolina born-and-raised girl. There’s a lilt unique to that area of the South, the elongated vowels and the tendency to turn one-syllable words into two. It’s a beautiful voice, mellifluous and made for storytelling.

She stops our conversation before it starts, saying something about a flight being late, needing to take her shoes off and settle in a bit before continuing. When she returns to the phone she admits to lying about the brief delay, but promises not to lie again during our interview (words an interviewer is always heartened to hear). Gibbons then confesses the reason for excusing herself: to tape Dr. Phil. Turns out, Dr. Phil’s advice can come in handy when on a book tour, what with his straight talk on boundaries and learning how to say no without guilt, lessons sometimes hard for a gracious Southern woman to learn.

At the moment, Gibbons is in her New York apartment, many a mile from her other home in North Carolina. In Raleigh, I do laundry, and here I do literature. Among her many accomplishments is a lesser-known honor: receiving a knighthood from the French, a shocking experience (FYI: Sharon Stone was knighted in the same year). The knighthood certificate, along with some Southern folk art, adorns the walls of Gibbons’ apartment, her very own writers’ retreat. Here, she can indulge her Diet Coke addiction and Dr. Phil habit, and also get down to the business of writing.

"Crafting the best literature I can" is an all-consuming occupation for Gibbons, who burst onto the literary scene in 1987 with the publication of Ellen Foster, an astonishing little novel about a spunky, unloved 11-year-old that earned her legions of fans and became a modern-day classic (not to mention an Oprah pick). Gibbons was only 26 years old at the time, in college and the mother of a small child. Oh, yes, and she wrote the novel in just six weeks. Whether you’ve known Ellen from the beginning or haven’t yet had the pleasure of meeting her, you will find that Gibbons’ long-awaited follow-up, The Life All Around Me by Ellen Foster, is a rare gem of a book, one that marks the return of one of the South’s scrappiest, most endearing heroines.

In the original novel, Ellen pours out the harrowing story of a home life so horrible she is forced to find her own foster family. When we meet Ellen again in The Life, she’s 15, that pivotal age in adolescence. Though now part of a happy home, she still must sift through the wreckage of her past and come to terms with the death of her mother. While there are heart-wrenching moments, there is a generous dose of humor, too. The book opens with a letter from Ellen to the president of Harvard University, requesting early admittance. She writes, in typical Ellen fashion, " One of my mottoes is that nothing you think, feel, or do should be watered down, so when I decided to try out for college, Harvard sounded like the only place to be." She continues her story in the first person, addressing the reader directly, as if picking up the thread of a conversation she began long ago. Gibbons also introduces new characters and fleshes out those near and dear; there is the devoted Stuart, a tender-hearted boy smitten with Ellen, and, of course, there is Starletta, Ellen’s old neighbor and a constant in her life.

So what was it like for Gibbons to revisit her debut novel? Had the seeds of a second book been germinating all these years? Gibbons tells us it took time to rediscover Ellen’s voice, but when she did, the voice was loud and clear. Ellen is still trying to find her place in the world, and she says at one point, I didn’t know how to feel at home out in the world or at home either. "That comes from my heart so directly," says Gibbons. "Ellen’s task is what mine was, which was to learn how to be comfortable inside. That’s what you carry around with you." She doesn’t consider The Life a sequel, but rather the next book in a series, something akin to checking in with an old friend from time to time. Eventually, she intends to write six or more books about Ellen’s life, to grow her up in fiction. As writer and character evolve over time, they will find new themes to explore and challenges to meet.

GIbbons has already begun the third book, in which Ellen "attends a prestigious Ivy League college and runs into hard-core prejudice and [has] to discover how hard she’s going to work to prove herself." One of the reasons Gibbons enjoys writing from Ellen’s point of view is that she gets to go back in time and say things I wasn’t able to say. "I get to live twice in some ways or correct mistakes, and she can do things I was too timid to do. I just felt like I needed that girl in my life." A particularly poignant scene in the The Life shows Ellen sorting through a box of her mother’s things, touching the artifacts of her former life. Gibbons conveys this scene with a tenderness untarnished by sentimentality. Coming to terms with losing a parent through suicide is something Gibbons knows well.  "Before I started it, I knew I needed closure on my mother’s suicide. I wondered if writing this book would help, and it has . . . it’s not a constant in my life anymore."  For a while, Gibbons thought about trying to write a book about her mother, but it was just too close. Though she didn’t expect to at the outset, Gibbons began to heal through writing in Ellen’s voice. "Ellen did it for me,"  she says. "I’d be a fool not to keep revisiting her. It is, above all, Ellen’s distinct voice that will make readers want to return to her story. I’d like for her voice to be recognizable when she and Starletta are 80 and roaming around Bali or Tahiti somewhere,"  Gibbons says with a laugh. Now that, we’ve got to stick around to see.

Katherine Wyrick lives in Little Rock, Arkansas.

During a recent call to best-selling author Lionel Shriver's London home, she reflects on the questions her new novel raises about the serious stuff of life: romantic love, the road not taken and, well, snooker. (The English pronunciation sounds like "snu-ker"; the American one rhymes with "looker.") Though relatively unknown in the States, snooker takes up more space on TV than any other sport in Britain, up to 12 hours at a stretch, according to Shriver. It also plays a big part in The Post-Birthday World, Shriver's brilliant, inventive new novel. She says of the billiards-like game, "The rules are pretty simple, but the execution is complicated. The skills required are fantastic, and it's a subtle game." Shriver could very well be describing her own novel.

"This book is all execution," says the author. The plot doesn't take any dramatic twists or turns, the storyline and subject matter aren't terribly complex—as Shriver says, "I'm not trying to surprise you." Instead, she brings her matchless skills to the table in a character-driven novel that explores the different shades of love.

Those who know Shriver's work will find a definite departure from her last novel. The controversial We Need to Talk About Kevin hit bestseller lists and won the prestigious Orange Prize for fiction in 2005. In that weighty novel, a mother attempts to come to terms with the fact that her son has gone on a Columbine-like rampage. The Post-Birthday World is lighter fare, though no less thought-provoking or significant.

"I wanted to do something nicer," says Shriver. While We Need to Talk About Kevin polarized readers, Post-Birthday will (pleasantly) resonate with them. Irina McGovern is a modestly successful children's book illustrator and expatriate living in London with her longtime partner Lawrence, a think-tank researcher and fellow American. Everything changes for Irina one fateful night when she and a dashing snooker player, Ramsey Acton, share a kiss or not over his snooker table. The two tales spin out from this encounter as Shriver follows parallel versions of Irina's life with each of the two very different men.

Shriver says, "I'm hopeful that one of the things that will make this book work for readers is that while Ramsey and Lawrence are supposed to be distinctive literary characters, they also stand for archetypes that have often popped up in a reader's life. . . . It's not just a woman's issue, but I'll speak in the female. Most women have had the experience of being in a relationship with both a Ramsey and a Lawrence. One is steady, safe, companionable, the best-friend model, while the other is rocky, passionate, unstable, frightening and exhilarating." Shriver suggests that there exist many kinds of love, one not better than another. "We use this very broad term, but the truth is that the feelings that you have for individual people are like tiny one-of-a-kind works of art," she muses.

"I was especially interested in exploring the kind of strange embarrassment that creeps in even between people who are supposed to be intimate."

Shriver writes flawlessly about the physical connection between Irina and Ramsey. Of the often steamy scenes, she says "when writing about sex you can so embarrass yourself if it doesn't work." Let's just say, it works. It really works. She is equally insightful when writing about emotional intimacy.

"I was especially interested in exploring the kind of strange embarrassment that creeps in even between people who are supposed to be intimate." One of her favorite lines from those scenes is when Lawrence refuses to tell Irina his fantasies: "Tragically Lawrence cared more about being respected than being known." Shriver believes that sometimes you can't have both. She says that she tried to keep the sides of the book balanced and notes that there is a high price to pay for each of her two male characters. "What is harder," she asks, "losing someone through betrayal or illness? Is it worse to betray or to be betrayed?" Shriver chooses to let the answers remain ambiguous. "I don't want to lecture my reader or draw too many conclusions for the reader," she says.

The Post-Birthday World is a book to reflect upon, preferably over a glass of wine, or a whole bottle—if you're Ramsey. "In which instance was Irina better or worse off? Very hard to say. Up to you. I enjoy that. . . . In a way, it creates a burden on the reader, I suppose, but a welcome one," Shriver says. At one point in the book, Irina explains to Ramsey the theme of the children's book she's illustrating and writing. "The idea is that you don't have only one destiny . . . as if everything hinges on one decision. But whichever direction you go, there are going to be upsides and downsides. You're dealing with a set of trade-offs. There are varying advantages and disadvantages to each competing future. But I didn't want to have one bad future and one good. In both, everything is all right, really. Everything is all right."

Born in Gastonia, North Carolina, Shriver fled the South like her heels were on fire. She says that she had that feeling that "you weren't where the action was . . . especially if you were ambitious." It was years later when visiting that she discovered that it was "a nice place to live . . . agreeable people . . . more cosmopolitan and sophisticated and that you could finally find sun-dried tomatoes there, not just fried green ones." Now in her late 40s, she's lived all over the world, in Northern Ireland for more than 10 years, and currently she and her husband, jazz musician Jeff Williams, divide their time between London and New York. Where does she feel most at home? It's comforting to know that even someone as fiercely intelligent as Shriver occasionally indulges in schmaltz. She says that recently watching the silly post-apocalyptic movie The Day After Tomorrow, in which New York is the target of a number of cataclysmic events, made her realize that if she has any emotional pull to a certain place, it's New York.

Shriver says her hope for The Post-Birthday World is that it will be "inviting, accessible and entertaining to readers." It is all those things and more. A caveat: For those who like their novels neatly tied up with the proverbial bow, well, they're not going to get that kind of present. With this book, however, Shriver has given readers a gift, one to be turned over in the hands and appreciated, held up to the light and admired and, most importantly, enjoyed.

Katherine Wyrick lives in Little Rock.