Katherine Wyrick

FictionWomen's Fiction

Cecelia Ahern

Interview by Katherine Wyrick

Cecelia Ahern is so wildly successful for her 26 years, you’d think her head would be spinning like the tornado that whisked Dorothy off to Oz. But as her bubbly Irish brogue travels across the Atlantic, she sounds remarkably grounded. Ahern, whose first novel, P.S. I Love You, written when she was just 21, became a bestseller and a major movie with an all-star cast, is gracious and down-to-earth. Her rise has been nothing short of meteoric, and there’s no apparent end in sight. She has just completed her fourth novel, There’s No Place Like Here, created a hit U.S. comedy series ("Samantha Who?"  on ABC), and has other film and television projects in the works. Not bad for a young woman who didn’t even aspire to be a novelist.

Speaking from her seaside home in Dublin on what she says is a glorious late afternoon, she looks out at the water as our conversation ranges from writing to rap. Asked about seeing the film adaptation of P.S. I Love You for the first time in October, she says, with a lovely lilt in her voice,  "It’s really nice to revisit that story because you have to keep moving on talking about your new one."  That story goes something like this: Holly, a recently widowed young woman living in Dublin, deals with the aftermath of her husband’s death from a brain tumor. In the process, she rediscovers herself and the joy of life with help from an endearing circle of friends and family and a cache of letters from her late husband.

Asked what compelled her at such a young age to write P.S., she says the story just popped into her head. She found it easy to identify with Holly and with the fear of losing someone so young, when you have your whole life before you.

Ahern is emotional when talking about seeing her first book on the big screen. She went to Los Angeles with her mother, agent and boyfriend in tow people who had encouraged her along the way for a private screening. She’d read the script and been on set, but the end product was even better than she’d hoped. She especially enjoyed having the opportunity to see the story in a new light and approach it with a fresh perspective, even though she did cry for two hours afterward. "Not to gush, but it was really one of the stand-out moments in my life,"  she effuses.

For Ahern, writing was always a hobby she never dreamed it would become a profession but she did feel drawn to media communications. She was actually working on her master’s in film production when she wrote P.S. I Love You. She has, she says, "always loved to go off on flights of fancy."  And fly she has. Her writing easily lends itself to both the big and small screen. Case in point: her latest novel has already been optioned for a series by Touchstone Television.

There’s No Place Like Here is the story of Sandy Shortt, a young woman so obsessed with finding things that she starts her own missing persons agency. Since childhood, Sandy has been plagued by where things, and people, go when they’re missing from the proverbial sock in the dryer to her childhood neighbor. But as with all of Ahern’s stories, there’s a fanciful, quirky twist. As Sandy searches for a missing man, she finds herself lost in a magical land where all lost things and people go.

"It’s just all very metaphorical really,"  Ahern says.  "It is about a woman who literally wanders off the wrong path, loses herself, wakes up one day, looks around, [and] doesn’t realize where she is. I think everyone can identify with that story; I just took it to a different level."

Though she didn’t write There’s No Place Like Here with The Wizard of Oz in mind, Ahern concedes that parallels exist. She wanted her character, like Dorothy, to be physically whisked off to a different place. Originally titled A Place Called Here when it was published in Ireland, the title was changed to emphasize the connection between the two stories for an American audience, which suited Ahern because she felt the allusion was apt. As in Ahern’s other work, there is a little romance in the mix here, too, in the form of a rather unorthodox patient/therapist relationship.

The fairy-tale quality of Ahern’s work would seem to recall Ireland’s rich history of myth and storytelling, but Ahern is a thoroughly modern young woman with her finger firmly on the pulse of pop culture. Her taste in books and music is varied, with a distinct American flavor; she likes Mitch Albom and 50 Cent. Despite the fact that her father, Bertie Ahern, is Ireland’s prime minister, there’s nothing uniquely Irish about her books—as evidenced by foreign rights sales of her novels in 40 countries. Ahern believes that if you write authentically about human emotions, you can touch any reader, regardless of culture or age.  "You can take readers anywhere if they can identify with the character and the feelings and emotions are familiar,"  she says.

Ahern has just finished her fifth novel, which will be published in April in Ireland and later in the U.S. Adhering to her rule of taking life one book at a time, she declines to discuss it but does divulge the title: Thanks for the Memories.

She also happens to be the creator of a successful TV comedy, "Samantha Who?"  Higher-ups at ABC contacted her after reading P.S. I Love You and asked if she’d be interested in writing a show for television. Within days she met with the comedy development team, writers and producers. She calls the show’s success "a modern fairy tale in itself,"  and adds, appreciatively, that she’s just so glad there is an audience out there for her bizarre little stories. The personable and ebullient Ahern takes her many accomplishments in stride. Though Dublin is her home base, she has spent a lot of time recently traveling between New York and L.A. for the movie promotion and book tour. She’s not just bi-coastal, she’s tri-coastal.

Of her early success Ahern says, "It’s a mixture of a lot of luck and a lot of hard work."  So that’s what they mean by the luck of the Irish.

Katherine Wyrick is a freelance writer in Little Rock.

Cecelia Ahern is so wildly successful for her 26 years, you’d think her head would be spinning like the tornado that whisked Dorothy off to Oz. But as her bubbly Irish brogue travels across the Atlantic, she sounds remarkably grounded. Ahern, whose first novel, P.S. I Love You, written when she was just 21, became […]
Fiction

Meg Wolitzer

Interview by Katherine Wyrick

First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes someone in a baby carriage, but what comes, say, 10 years later? A midlife crisis? In her smart new novel, The Ten-Year Nap, Meg Wolitzer explores this question through the interlaced stories of a group of women who abandoned their careers (in law, academia and the arts) to practice full-time parenting. Now a decade into it, these New York mothers find themselves reassessing their choices with an eye towards the future.

As in her seven previous novels, including The Position, The Wife and Surrender, Dorothy, Wolitzer demonstrates her powers of keen observation and razor-sharp wit. The Ten-Year Nap is a perceptive, compassionate and entertaining look at the choices we make and the ever-evolving ways in which we define ourselves. And Wolitzer accomplishes all of this while withholding judgment on the decisions made by her characters.

The four protagonists—Amy, Karen, Jill and Roberta—meet daily at a cafe called The Golden Horn. It is there that they find the support and camaraderie that, as any mother knows, is essential to navigating those golden early years of motherhood. But now that their kids are becoming increasingly independent, they feel the tectonic plates of their world begin to shift. Having long ago given up the careers that defined them in favor of full-immersion motherhood, they find themselves somewhat at sea. "There is some kind of taking stock that just innately takes place. You see the life cycle in your child happening, and it almost stirs that in you," Wolitzer says during a morning call to her New York apartment.

There are many nonfiction books in the ongoing dialogue between mothers who opt out of work and mothers who return to it, but, as Wolitzer points out, those books usually have an agenda and can only hint at the complexities of women's lives. "It's tiring for women to have to look at their lives as a nonfiction article because no one's life is like that," she says. In writing this novel, she wanted to approach the topic objectively through the lives of her characters. "To be reductive about anyone's choice is a mistake. I wanted to write this novel as a way to examine the multiple reasons women stay away or want to go back." And she's well aware that she is writing about and for women of a certain demographic, those who are indeed fortunate enough to have a choice in the matter at all. "The book takes place within a narrow band of society; the women have the option to stay home, most people don't."

Wolitzer says her interest in this issue began when she met other mothers through her children, now teenagers. "I was surprised to find women who had stopped doing what they did, or didn't know what they wanted to do, because I'm in an unusual position as a writer. I've been both home with my kids and working, and there are very few jobs that allow you that. I basically got to see both worlds, the world of motherhood and the world of work," she says. "I wanted to show the tensions between motherhood and ambition and work and vulnerability in as broad a way as I could."

It should be noted that to Wolitzer, ambition isn't a dirty word, one that should be spoken of in a hushed tones like some unseemly affliction (as in "She has . . . [stage whisper] ambition.") She notes how in our culture, specifically in the current political campaign, it gets a bad rap—ambitiousness is a quality revered in men but reviled in women, the scarlet "A" of our era. Wolitzer, however, chooses to embrace it. (No surprise, since it does take a certain amount of drive to write eight novels, the first straight out of college.) "Even for strong women, there's a fear about what that word says."

Wolitzer came of age in the 1970s, a period, she jokes, that she can't seem to stay away from in her fiction. Raised during the era of women's lib and conscious-raising groups, she was bewildered when she had kids and discovered that everyone wasn't trying to "have it all." She didn't have to look far for encouragement because her mother, Hilma Wolitzer, is also a novelist. Though fortunate to have the unique perspective of a writer and writer's daughter, Wolitzer admits that her situation isn't perfect. "Children are narcissists. They want what's good for them. A writer wants what's good for her. It's not ideal, and sometimes you cut corners. Children just want you to be theirs." She adds, "The notion of feminism that said you can have it all, that didn't turn out to be true really. Change takes a generation and a half."

Wolitzer says that she's never understood why writing about motherhood is seen as soft. "That's crazy to me," she laughs. In her capable hands, it is anything but. She manages to write poignantly about motherhood without being sentimental or mawkish. It is easy, she says, to veer towards the satiric, a route she didn't want to take. She insists that she did not set out to lampoon the stay-at-home mom, though admits that "there's satire to be mined in the over-involved mother." Of course, it wouldn't be a Meg Wolitzer novel if she didn't have some fun along the way, as in the chapter where a former corporate mom approaches a school meeting with boardroom intensity. Wolitzer is more interested in what would make someone behave that way and suggests that, in this case, it is perhaps because that mother doesn't know what to do next.

Motherhood, she suggests, is a series of necessary, albeit heart-wrenching, letting-gos. Wolitzer says she has moved through "great pockets of grief about it," but adds that, though the bond between mother and child is a powerful thing, "the letting go is equally profound."

"You've done your job because they're in the world. I think for women who have not started to think about 'what now?' – whatever that is – it's hard for them to let go of the hand of that child." She offers this poetic analogy: "It's like a big square dance, the partner, the child, moves away, and you have to make a new formation."

 

Katherine Wyrick is a writer and mother in Little Rock.

First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes someone in a baby carriage, but what comes, say, 10 years later? A midlife crisis? In her smart new novel, The Ten-Year Nap, Meg Wolitzer explores this question through the interlaced stories of a group of women who abandoned their careers (in law, academia and the arts) […]
Fiction

Jane Hamilton

Interview by Katherine Wyrick

Fans of Jane Hamilton, and there are many, know her for her provocative, heartbreaking dramas and her unique Midwestern sensibility. In novels like The Book of Ruth and Map of the World (both selections of Oprah’s Book Club), Hamilton plumbed the depths of the human psyche, creating haunting portraits of families in crisis.

Were she not such a daring writer, her readers might be surprised by her latest work, a comedy of (bad) manners, entitled Laura Rider’s Masterpiece.

A frisky romp of a book, Laura Rider marks a definite departure for this author. That’s not to say that her other books lack humorous moments, but this one is a walk on the light side.

On a recent call to her Wisconsin home, where she lives in an 1870s farmhouse on an apple orchard with her husband, Hamilton laughs, “This one has a more streamlined plot—it has a plot. I don’t think my other books have plots . . . so that was a fun thing for me.”

That plot goes something like this: Laura and Charlie Rider have been married for 12 years. Together they operate Prairie Wind Farm, a nursery they built in picturesque Wisconsin. Although Charlie’s ardent libido and bedroom acrobatics have driven Laura to swear off sex forever, they are happy enough—until Jenna Faroli, host of a popular radio show and Laura’s idol, moves to the small town. Jenna and Charlie’s paths cross, and an email correspondence, and later an affair, ensues. All the while Laura not only encourages and monitors their intimate email dialogue but participates in it as she conducts “research” for the romance novel she hopes to write. Things quickly spiral out of control as bonds are formed and boundaries crossed.

Much of the humor in the book lies in the flowery language of Jenna and Charlie’s (and Laura’s) courtship. In an email with the subject line “Dream come true?” Charlie writes, “Because I often imagine you walking along the grape arbor, I cannot be sure if it was you, or if I was tricking myself. Either way, vision or reality your presence is a joy to me.” How this almost childlike, unsophisticated man ends up wooing an intellectual giant like Jenna is part of the fun.

As far as her own research goes when creating the character Jenna, Hamilton says, “I’ve been on a lot of radio shows through the years and in a lot of studios.” Jenna might resemble a cross between Terry Gross and Diane Rehm, but, Hamilton assures us the character isn’t based on anyone in particular.
On the delicate task of writing about sex, and there’s plenty of it in this novel, Hamilton says, “Sex scenes are always hard. They have to reveal character; they can’t be over the top. An ideal love scene should be discreet yet revealing.” She manages to strike this balance with scenes that are alternately amusing and poignant.

A harmonic convergence of sorts happened to bring Laura Rider into being. “More than anything that I’ve ever written, it truly wrote itself. I felt like I wrote it in 37-1/2 seconds,” she says. When we ask why she thinks that is, Hamilton responds, “It was a gift from . . . whatever.” Could it be from the Silver People, we wonder (the alien life forms that Charlie believes abducted him as a child; Charlie might have a certain charm, but he’s an odd one). Well, from somewhere beyond.

Also, during the period between 2000 and 2004, Hamilton worked on a book she ended up having to abandon. “Maybe [Laura Rider] was just cosmic reparation for that harrowing experience,” she says. “2001 happened in there, and it just seemed like a frivolous thing to be writing a drawing room drama, a family drama, about people concerned about their own little worries.” Many writers and artists have, of course, struggled with this very issue, and responded in varying ways. Hamilton goes on, “I guess the embarrassing thing for me was that [the novel] was going to be dead on arrival.” She briefly entertained changing careers but “decided I would make it the best failure I could. . . . It was a long, dreary episode.” Fortunately, Laura Rider was at the end of it.

When she wrote Laura Rider, Hamilton says that she was also taking care of her mother in assisted living, and “was in dire need of amusement. . . . It was a life saver.” The timing couldn’t be better considering that, collectively, we could all use a bit of amusement, and this novel delivers it. But the original inspiration for this book, aside for the need for some levity, was a Caribbean cruise where Hamilton taught a writing workshop. She’d never before been on a cruise and was, well, surprised—and aghast.

“There were lovely people and interesting students, but I was freshly incredulous with this crowd; many of them seemed never to have read a book, or to be aware that there was a print culture, and yet were so earnest in their wish to be published and to write.”

“I just got home and thought, what would that feel like, to want to do this thing that you actually have no preparation to do and you don’t know that you don’t have the preparation to do it.”

Thus, the birth of Laura Rider, who fancies herself an emerging writer in an age where everyone thinks they’re artists. There’s a certain presumptuousness or over-confidence in that, proclaiming one’s self a writer, which rankles Hamilton. Though the book is all in good fun, it does raise some interesting questions, namely what does it mean to be an artist? Hamilton, citing a recent New York Times article, says, “There are more people writing novels than reading them.” As Jenna says in the novel, quoting George Bernard Shaw, “Hell is filled with amateur musicians.” In Laura’s defense, however, Hamilton does believe that we all have stories to tell.

And of course, Hamilton tells hers exceedingly well. She has succeed in writing a biting—or perhaps in this case, ear-nibbling—satire that is a rollicking read. It is at once acerbic and forgiving, though she admits, “This book feels a little snarky to me, but what are you going to do?” She adds, “I wish I could write it all over again.” We wish we could read it all over again, too.

Katherine Wyrick writes from Little Rock.

Fans of Jane Hamilton, and there are many, know her for her provocative, heartbreaking dramas and her unique Midwestern sensibility. In novels like The Book of Ruth and Map of the World (both selections of Oprah’s Book Club), Hamilton plumbed the depths of the human psyche, creating haunting portraits of families in crisis. Were she […]
FictionWomen's Fiction

Sue Monk Kidd

Interview by Katherine Wyrick

There's a sweet new voice in the world of Southern fiction, and it would be wise to listen. Known primarily for her books about spirituality (The Dance of the Dissident Daughter), Sue Monk Kidd now offers us her first novel, The Secret Life of Bees. But in her first work of fiction, Kidd does not stray far from her interest in the interior life. More than the coming-of-age story of Kidd's endearing heroine, Lily Owens, The Secret Life of Bees is the story of a soul's journey, its evolution and its slow awakening to life's great mystery. 

"I think of it as something deeper and more profound happening to [Lily] at the level of soul, and I wanted her to have a real transformation and a real awakening . . . to this other realm," Kidd says during a recent call to her home in Charleston, South Carolina.

But the path toward enlightenment is not always an easy one. As a young child, Lily's life was changed forever by one tragic event — the death of her mother. When we meet her as an adolescent, she is trying to come to terms with this loss, and with her relationship with her cruel father, T. Ray. Life on their South Carolina peach farm might be too bleak to bear if not for the feisty Rosaleen, Lily's "stand-in mother" who works for the family. Kidd writes beautifully of their relationship, its subtle workings and its fierce love.

"The yearning for home and mother, which is what drives Lily, is deeply embedded in all of us," says Kidd. "The symbolic layer of the novel for me was this longing that is in every human soul for the mother. The mother within, the archetypal mother, the divine mother, whatever you want to call that, it is in us, and we recognize it when we see it in another story, and it resonates in us. And home — the deepest calling we have is to come home to ourselves. And so those things were operating in my mind when I was trying to write Lily's story. Mostly, I have to say, I wasn't thinking about all that; it was sort of in the background. I wasn't trying to write symbolically, and I wasn't trying to write about these archetypes and symbols, I was just trying to tell a really good story." And at that she succeeds. The Secret Life is Southern storytelling at its finest, but the layers of this story run deep.

Ironically, Lily's journey home begins when she leaves the peach farm. The opportunity comes when Rosaleen takes a stand against some racists in town and is beaten and jailed; Lily then knows that it's time for them to fly. Led by Lily's search for clues about her mother's past, and guided by a picture of a Black Madonna her mother left behind, they make their way to Tiburon, South Carolina. It is there that Lily and Rosaleen meet three sisters who welcome them into their world of bee-keeping and their own brand of spirituality centered around a Black Madonna. And it is there, among these bee-keeping sisters, that Lily embarks on a mystical journey into the world of bees and the sacred feminine.

The symbol of the bee and of the Black Madonna are perfectly wedded to one another, yet Kidd says that she didn't know any of the symbolism of bees before writing The Secret Life or about the amazing connections to the Virgin Mary. Somehow the two just coalesced. "I think we have to trust that choreographer inside of the writer who does offer up these gems and images at times. And we don't know how rich and layered they really are." When she began her research, she thought, "I can't believe it! Here we go." Upon discovering that Mary was often referred to as the queen bee and thought of as the bee hive, Kidd says, "I was so floored." She adds, "Bees and honeymaking lend themselves to ideas of change and transformation. And they also sting, so you've got to have that side of it."

Kidd's research included spending some time with beekeepers. Her hours in the honeyhouse and at the hives were invaluable. "Some of those scenes where Lily is experiencing that rush of feeling and emotion when the bees come swirling out of their hives, I could never have gotten that from a book. The fear and delight of all that and the sounds of it. . . . The way your feet stick to the floor in a honeyhouse . . . The senses are alive in all of that experience." Kidd's vivid prose makes The Secret Life a sensual experience for the reader, too.

Kidd was also inspired by a visit to a Trappist monastery in South Carolina where she came upon an unusual statue of Mary, unusual in that it was a ship's masthead that had made its way to the abbey from the shores of a distant island. "The day that I discovered her, I was totally captivated by . . . the powerful imagery of this masthead Mary that was surfacing from the deep, washing up from the deep, onto the shores of consciousness so to speak, and here is the feminine, returning. And I just could not get over that."

It seems the time was right for Kidd to make the jump from memoir to fiction, and indeed this novel feels inspired. Kidd says the work was a challenge, but one she'd always hoped to meet. "In fact, when I first came to the idea that I would pursue a career as a writer I wanted to write fiction. But things didn't work that way for me. . . . Maya Angelou said [to be a writer of fiction] you have to have something to say and you have to have the means or the ability to say it, and then you have to have the courage to say it at all. And I don't think I had enough of all three of those . . . when I was in my late 20s and early 30s."

The Secret Life makes clear that Kidd does possess all the elements that make the alchemy of storytelling possible. She adds to that mix humor and an understanding of human relationships, and the end result is something quite extraordinary. "Sometimes you just get a gift from your own unconscious or from somewhere," the author muses. The Secret Life of Bees is certainly a gift to Kidd's readers, one that both entertains and satisfies the soul.

 

Katherine H. Wyrick lives in Little Rock, Arkansas.

There's a sweet new voice in the world of Southern fiction, and it would be wise to listen. Known primarily for her books about spirituality (The Dance of the Dissident Daughter), Sue Monk Kidd now offers us her first novel, The Secret Life of Bees. But in her first work of fiction, Kidd does not […]
Fiction

Tiffany Baker

Interview by Katherine Wyrick

On a recent call to her Marin County home, just north of San Francisco, Tiffany Baker seems unruffled, despite the fact that her babysitter hasn’t shown up to corral her three young children, who at present can be heard shrieking through the halls. An occasional squeal punctuates our ensuing conversation, but Baker maintains her composure and focus—and her sense of humor. Focus is something that the author obviously has in spades, having written her first novel while tending to one baby and pregnant with another. "I’ve always written, ever since I was little," she says.

In addition to three children, ages six, five and two, Baker has also given birth to a debut novel that’s already generating a big buzz. With The Little Giant of Aberdeen County, Baker introduces readers to Truly Plaice, an unconventional heroine, a giantess whose monstrous proportions make her both an outcast and a curiosity in her small, upstate New York town. "I know that it’s a very odd book," Baker concedes. But, we believe, one that will have considerable appeal.

Set against the bleak backdrop of a dying town, Truly’s story begins at birth, with an epic scene reminiscent of something out of Isabel Allende. Thereafter, the novel unfolds at a quieter pace. After the death of her mother, who died in childbirth presumably because of Truly’s enormous size, Truly plods through a hardscrabble existence with her tormented father and pretty, popular sister, Serena Jane. Her father also dies prematurely, and Truly, who continues to grow at an alarming rate due an untreated pituitary problem, is sent to live with the Dyersons, a luckless farming family trying and failing to scratch out a living from barren land and a series of decrepit race horses. Serena Jane, however, goes on to live a life of privilege and relative happiness—until, that is, she crosses paths with the cruel Bob Bob Morgan, the youngest in a line of Robert Morgans, Aberdeen’s family doctors for generations. This encounter changes the course of Serena Jane’s life and ends her plans to escape her hometown and become a Hollywood starlet. 

Asked about the creation of a character as peculiar as Truly, Baker says, "I’m very much a voice writer. I just got Truly’s voice in my head, for better or for worse, because it didn’t leave for years after!" She goes on to say that additional inspiration arrived in another form. "I got the image of this woman shrinking," she explains, which is what begins to happen to Truly toward the novel’s end.

Baker was also intrigued by the idea of a larger-than-life character that defies definition. "She’s just too big for her life, but no one can see her. She is so big and so out of the ordinary, but it makes her invisible. I became fascinated by that contrast," says Baker. She believes there are many people in society we willingly choose not to see, like the crazy person on the bus. "It’s so fun to give a person a voice who doesn’t have one," she says. The townspeople do, however, begin to take notice when Truly undergoes both an outward and inward transformation. And when Truly begins to grow out of her assigned role in society (or, in an ironic twist, "shrink" out of it), it makes some of those people very uncomfortable. As her name not so subtly infers, Truly Plaice does at last find her true place.

Though it would be accurate to subtitle the book, "The Incredible Shrinking Woman," Little Giant is less freak show than fable. Baker does turn her attention to the daily travails of her characters, but the story, which strikes a universal tone and has a folkloric feel, is not bound by city limits. Baker cites her Ukrainian background as one of the reasons folklore has always fascinated her. And she credits her boarding school experience back East for her interest in New England as a setting. It was also at her Rhode Island prep school that Baker fell in love with the writing of Nathaniel Hawthorne, which clearly informs her work. Baker, who has a doctorate in Victorian literature, says, "I’ve described [Little Giant] as kind of New England Gothic folklore." She muses, "I love that kind of fairytale, folktale feeling because maybe I never really grew up."

Though Truly takes up the most space, Baker also populates her novel with a cast of minor characters who add color and their own distinctive voices to the narrative. As the story progresses, Truly leaves the Dyerson farm and her adopted sister Amelia, herself an outcast, to take care of Serena Jane’s husband and son after Serena Jane abandons them. It is in the Morgan family home where Truly discovers family secrets that will change her life forever. Thus emerges the parallel story of Tabitha Dyerson, one of the novel’s most interesting threads. Tabitha, a rumored witch and healer, left behind a mysterious "shadow book," which has eluded generations of Dyerson men. It takes Truly to unravel this mystery, and it is in doing so that she finds she has the power not only to heal others, but also herself.

In the interest of not giving away too much, let’s just say that the most delightful aspect of the novel is the story of Tabitha’s quilt, an object that itself constitutes a character.

It comes as no surprise that Baker cites Allende, John Irving and Anne Tyler as influences. And, like Truly with her herbal remedies, Baker has concocted a pleasing brew of the three: the offbeat Irving with his penchant for eccentric characters, the magical quality of Allende and Tyler’s plainspoken insightfulness into relationships of every stripe.

Baker is currently at work on her second novel, in which she returns to New England, this time to a salt farm. She won’t divulge too much, but does say that it is about three women, two of them sisters, who are all involved with the same man. If Little Giant is any indication, we can expect Baker’s next book to bear the mark of her natural storytelling and astute observations on human nature.

Baker brings a wisdom and compassion to this timeless portrait of small-town life, a place where the boundŸary between reality and fairy tale is but a blur and happy endings are possible. "I love a happy ending," says Baker unapologetically. "That’s the whole point in reading, because you don’t always get that in life." In Little Giant, Baker rewards the reader with one, and it’s all the sweeter because of the long, hard road it takes Truly to get there.

 

 

Katherine Wyrick is a writer in Little Rock.

Author photo by Lauren Drever.

On a recent call to her Marin County home, just north of San Francisco, Tiffany Baker seems unruffled, despite the fact that her babysitter hasn’t shown up to corral her three young children, who at present can be heard shrieking through the halls. An occasional squeal punctuates our ensuing conversation, but Baker maintains her composure […]
Fiction

Audrey Niffenegger

Interview by Katherine Wyrick

Automatic writing, homemade ouija boards, bodysnatching, mistaken identity—these are but a few of the spooky pleasures that await the reader of Her Fearful Symmetry, Audrey Niffenegger’s latest novel.

Six years after her wildly successful book The Time Traveler’s Wife, Niffenegger returns with a riveting contemporary ghost story set in the environs of London’s famed Highgate Cemetery, the final resting place of Karl Marx and George Eliot, among other luminaries.

Her Fearful Symmetry (the title is an allusion to William Blake’s poem “The Tiger”) is the story of mirror-image twins, Julia and Valentina, who share a preternaturally intense bond. Their aunt Elspeth, their mother’s twin whom they’ve never met, dies of cancer and bequeaths to them her flat with the stipulation that they live there for a year. Before this sudden windfall, the twins have been somewhat adrift; neither seems to have any desire to finish college or to leave the home they share with their parents in a quiet Chicago suburb. Their indolence might be typical of many an American 20-year-old, but these girls are anything but typical. They move to Elspeth’s apartment, on the outskirts of Highgate, and come to know the building’s other inhabitants—Martin, a charming crossword puzzle creator suffering from crippling obsessive-compulsive disorder, and Robert, Elspeth’s bereaved lover and a scholar of the cemetery. As their lives become intertwined, they soon discover that the building houses another resident—the recently deceased Elspeth.

We spoke to Niffenegger from her Chicago home shortly before she departed on another trip to London.

The author says she first traveled to London to visit Highgate in 1996 and had a “miraculous and amazing” experience that became the germ of Her Fearful Symmetry. She had been toying with an idea for a book that somehow involved a cemetery, but wasn’t sure exactly what shape it would take. She had originally set the novel in her hometown of Chicago, but Highgate proved to be the perfect setting. First, however, she had to win over the Friends of Highgate, the organization that closely guards the cemetery’s legacy. Over time she was able to convince them that she wasn’t going to do “any sort of zombie thing,” and thus the novel was born.

Having never lived in London, Niffenegger spent a fair amount of time conducting research at the British Library and getting involved with the cemetery, where she is now a guide. She says writing this book was completely different than writing Time Traveler. “For one thing, with Time Traveler, I just sort of exuberantly jumped in and started doing it because I’d never done any kind of novel before, so I was kind of splashing around . . . trying things out . . . experimenting.” For her new novel, Niffenegger was determined not to recreate the same thing or revisit the same territory. “I thought maybe I could teach myself to write a different kind of book, and so on a technical level there were a lot of things I had to learn to do. . . . I had to start consciously analyzing and reading from other books.” Though echoes of Edgar Allan Poe can be heard throughout Her Fearful Symmetry, Niffenegger says, “The books I’m consciously modeling on are Wilkie Collins’ Woman in White and Henry James’ Turn of the Screw and Portrait of a Lady.” She acknowledges that other influences may be at play as well, “All sorts of things creep in there, and you don’t even realize it, ” with "creep" being the operative word here. The book is as entertaining as it is unsettling (albeit in a titillating sort of way).

Sisters, doubling and opposites are subjects that come up over and over again in Victorian literature, Niffenegger says, citing a Dorothy Sayers short story about mirror-image twins. She says her intention was to use these Victorian tropes as unobtrusively as possible.

“I think people who haven’t read much 19th-century fiction might find this thing a bit odd because the rationale for certain plot turns and character traits comes from the existence of previous characters and previous plots,” muses Niffenegger.

“People kept telling me that Julia and Valentina seemed unnaturally kind of wrapped in cotton,” she says. “For contemporary girls, it’s ridiculous. I think people were a little perplexed by it.” She likens them to “every Henry James heroine who emerges out of nothing and goes to the old country and has all these complicated experiences.” Niffenegger describes the twins as a type, not exactly modeled on Isabel Archer (from James’ The Portrait of a Lady) but certainly inspired by her. For this reason they do seem slightly anachronistic, somewhat out of step, even ethereal. “They have their own little world,” she says.

Though all her characters feel fleshed out (ghosts included), Robert, who becomes increasingly unraveled by Elspeth’s presence, is also a type. “Robert comes from a long tradition of rather weak men, but he does finally get it together,” Niffenegger explains. “He’s sort of like all those men in Greek myth and various medieval tales who are enchanted . . . and the triumph is of them getting away from the enchantress.”

Elspeth’s character also harkens back to other tales of the arabesque. “In ghost literature, the ghosts are often described as being hungry and cold and desperate to get close to people for the warmth; and there’s always this sense with the ghosts that they really aren’t people anymore, and they don’t have the full range of human emotions, so I was trying to gradate that . . . so the longer Elspeth’s been dead, the less she empathizes . . . she just gets more and more selfish”—a truth evidenced in the book’s chilling denouement.

For Niffenegger, delving into the supernatural wasn’t a way to explore questions of a metaphysical or spiritual nature, but a literary conceit, a way to tell a story—while paying homage to some of the great ghosts of literature.

She says, “If you look at both of my novels, you see that there is no God. I’m a total skeptic, which doesn’t mean that I object to other people believing anything they want to believe. In the case of Time Traveler, there’s no purpose and no control to Henry’s time traveling, and he’s just kind of like a ping pong ball, ponging around. With the characters in Fearful Symmetry, they all have this kind of vague, modern tiny bit of religion, but they’re really secular people, all of them. Martin, with his magical thinking, is really as close as anyone gets to actual belief.”

Of the phenomenal popularity of Time Traveler, Niffenegger says simply,” It’s crazy.” She imagined that the book would be published by a small press (which it originally was), for a small audience. “I never expected the book club phenomenon,” which she cites as the main factor in the novel’s success. “I didn’t think it was a book that would appeal to that many people.” Of the movie, released this summer, she hasn’t seen it and doesn’t plan to. “I don’t discuss the movie in any kind of depth because I haven’t seen it and also because the movie belongs to the people who made the movie. All the decisions were their decisions, and they had complete control over it. They made the movie they wanted to make without any interference from me. . . . I decided to preserve my own experience with my own book.”

Niffenegger, a visual artist whose stunning artwork can be seen at audreyniffenegger.com, teaches art at Columbia College in Chicago and published two illustrated novels prior to Her Fearful Symmetry. (She’s currently teaching a class about putting writing and images together.) Though her work has been compared to Edward Gorey, she says, “The person I really claim as an influence is Aubrey Beardsley,” a 19th-century art nouveau illustrator.

Asked if she ever considered illustrating Her Fearful Symmetry, she offers a definitive “no,” and adds, "The great thing about just words is that you can leave these empty spaces that people will fill.” Niffenegger is deliberately evasive when asked about what kind of book she might write next. With her penchant for all things Victorian, we wonder if historical fiction is in her future. She says the closest that she might get to something like that would be steampunk, a subgenre of fantasy and speculative fiction with Victorian overtones. The most she will reveal is that she’s working on something that takes place in 1972, which, depending on your perspective, could be considered historical fiction after all.

While it’s true that English lit buffs will relish the many literary allusions and Victorianisms in Her Fearful Symmetry, you certainly don’t have to be an English major to enjoy this spellbinding story, solid proof that Niffenegger’s ascending star is burning bright.

Katherine Wyrick writes from her home in Little Rock.

Automatic writing, homemade ouija boards, bodysnatching, mistaken identity—these are but a few of the spooky pleasures that await the reader of Her Fearful Symmetry, Audrey Niffenegger’s latest novel. Six years after her wildly successful book The Time Traveler’s Wife, Niffenegger returns with a riveting contemporary ghost story set in the environs of London’s famed Highgate […]
Memoir

Mary Karr

Interview by Katherine Wyrick

She may be 20 years sober and a Catholic convert, but don’t get the wrong impression—Mary Karr is no “candy-ass” (her word). She’s still the tough, scrappy outlaw that readers were introduced to in her first memoir, The Liars’ Club.

When it was published in 1995, The Liars’ Club offered a searing portrait of Karr’s hardscrabble Texas childhood that raised the art of the memoir to a new level and brought about a revival of the genre. In her follow-up, Cherry, she recalled the wild ride of her adolescence and her sexual coming-of-age. Her third memoir, Lit, more than 10 years in the making, details how Karr ultimately emerged from her troubled upbringing triumphant, but not before a descent into alcoholism and near-madness.

A recent call to her New York home confirms that Karr indeed hasn’t lost her edge. The conversation—briefly interrupted by a call from the dean of Syracuse University, where she teaches English, and the arrival of her “heroic” assistant, without whom, she says, she would be “like an overfilled Macy’s balloon”—proves lively and candid.

“I’ll tell you,” she says with only the faintest trace of a Texas drawl, “this is the first book I’ve been excited to promote. This is what my life’s about now . . . how I became a mother, my relationships, my spiritual practice, my nervous breakthrough. Those things are so much closer to who I am now. This is what I talk to people about. Even if people think I’m an idiot, I’m interested in having the conversation with readers.” And readers, whether familiar with Karr’s previous work or not, will be riveted.

Never shying away from self-scrutiny, she explores the dissolution of her marriage, the joy and pain of motherhood, her father’s stroke and death, her fraught relationship with her own mother and her professional setbacks and successes in equal measure. This account of the latter part of her life is as unsparing and unsentimental as her first two memoirs and, like the others, by turns hilarious and gut-wrenching. She again brings to the task her acerbic wit and a poet’s eye for lyrical detail.

In search of the stable home she lacked as a child, Karr married a handsome, patrician poet and with him has an adored son, Dev. But over time, she drank herself into the disease that nearly destroyed her mother. Her path included, among other detours, a stint in “The Mental Marriott,” a famous asylum, where she found wisdom in unlikely places.

Asked how writing this book was discernibly different from writing the other two, Karr laughs, “Well, for one, I’m clearly the asshole. I think that’s the big thing.” She adds, “The hardest thing for me about writing these books is how to handle the emotional and moral questions, and this one obviously posed a lot of moral questions. You know, how do you write about your child? How do you write about someone you’re divorced from?” She says that, toward the end of the process, she ending up throwing away 525 finished pages of work.

She’d been working on the book for seven years, and her editor was pressuring her to turn in a finished manuscript. “I said, look, y’all could publish this, and it’s technically true, in that I didn’t make up the events, but it didn’t feel true. I mean, the other thing was when I wrote about the religious stuff I had a very hard time not sounding like one of those evangelists saying send me a dollar.”

Writing about religion, she concedes, is tricky business. “It’s very hard to write about. It’s like doing card tricks on the radio, I think—writing about prayer and spiritual experience to people who mostly think you’re an idiot. On the other hand it was an important part of my story, and I felt obligated to represent it, not in any evangelical way. . . . I know this sounds insane, but I believe that God wanted me to write this book. That doesn’t mean that God wants the book to succeed by any measure.”

She’s unapologetic about her faith, and anticipates a backlash from critics and “professional atheists” alike. “Believe it or not . . . I’m an extremely private person. You really wouldn’t know that, even though I’m pretty open and honest about things that other people would not be open about, but the degree to which I care about my reputation is pretty limited. I really gave that up long before I published anything anybody read. I think you have to [do that] as a writer or else you’ll go insane. My fear [in writing about faith] wasn’t so much that people would look at me and think I was a candy-ass, as that I wouldn’t represent it truly—I wouldn’t be able to recreate an experience in the reader that matched and mirrored my experience. I wouldn’t be able to create an emotional experience for a secular audience. That’s what I was most scared about.”

Karr manages to write about spirituality without ever coming across as didactic or preachy—no small feat. “Well, on two earlier drafts I did,” she confesses. “Hopefully I corrected that.”

In one passage, she eloquently describes her first stirrings of faith, a brush with the numinous: “I feel some fleet movement travel through my chest—a twinge, a hint. This faint yearning was not belief itself, but wanting to believe.”

She says her transformation would never have been possible without her mother’s recovery from alcoholism. “I honestly think if my mother had not gotten sober, there’s no way. . . . She gave the whole family a great gift.”

“I was so scared and so mean all the time,” she says of her pre-sobriety days. “I do feel like my life has been transformed and is better than I could ever have imagined. I’m so much more in it. I have more life now in a day than I used to have in a year.”

Karr’s entire body of work attests to this simple truth: that the past, until you reckon with it, will remain in hot pursuit. In other words, what you don’t bring into the light will destroy you. Lit brings this process full circle. That pleasingly monosyllabic title encapsulates this writer’s entire journey thus far—one that is about drinking and the illuminating revelations of sobriety, about the redemptive power of literature and how the act of writing can save a soul. 

Katherine Wyrick is a writer in Little Rock.

 

 

RELATED CONTENT
Excerpt from Lit:

Age seventeen, stringy-haired and halter-topped, weighing in the high double digits and unhindered by a high school diploma, I showed up at the Pacific ocean, ready to seek my fortune with a truck full of extremely stoned surfers. My family, I thought them to be, for such was my quest—a family I could stand alongside pondering the sea. We stood as the blue water surged toward us in six-foot coils.

No way am I going in that, I said, being a sissy at heart. My hair was whipping around.

Wasn't that the big idea? Doonie snapped back, rifling through the back for towels and a wet suit. He was my best friend and maybe the biggest outlaw, point man on our missions. He tended to land the most spectacular girls. The ocean roar was majestic enough that I quoted robert Frost:

The shattered water made a misty din.
Great waves looked over others coming in
And thought of doing something to the shore
Water had never done to land before . . .

Pretty, Doonie said.

Quinn spat in the sand and said, She's always like Miss Brainiac, or something, or like she's fine.

He zipped up his outsize wet suit with force. The crotch of it hung down so low that for him to walk, he had to cowboy swagger.

My hair was three days without soap, and my baggy cutoffs were held up with a belt of braided twine a pal of ours made in prison.

That's me, I said. Miss California.

Reprinted by arrangement with HarperCollins Publishers, from Lit: A Memoir by Mary Karr (2009).

More from Mary Karr:
On religion: “The Catholic Church didn’t designate me a spokesperson. I’m sure the Catholic Church, many people, wouldn’t approve wholeheartedly of my particular brand of Catholicism. I mean, I have sex outside of wedlock . . . I do things the Catholic Church frowns on to say the least.”
On alcohol: “We have no business drinkin’, our people.” Describing a moment on her wedding day, she writes, “Drinking to handle the angst of Mother’s drinking—caused by her own angst—means our twin dipsomanias face off like a pair of mirrors, one generation offloading misery to the other through dwindling generations, back through history to when humans first fermented grapes.”

She may be 20 years sober and a Catholic convert, but don’t get the wrong impression—Mary Karr is no “candy-ass” (her word). She’s still the tough, scrappy outlaw that readers were introduced to in her first memoir, The Liars’ Club. When it was published in 1995, The Liars’ Club offered a searing portrait of Karr’s […]
FictionHistorical Fiction

Elizabeth Kostova

Interview by Katherine Wyrick

Elizabeth Kostova’s gripping debut novel, The Historian (2005), explored the legend of Dracula, undoubtedly contributing to the cultural craze that has now evolved into full-blown vampire mania. Her second novel, The Swan Thieves, focuses on French Impressionism, which raises the question: should readers brace themselves for all-out Monet madness? Probably not, but one thing is certain: The Swan Thieves will keep readers entertained and inspire them to reflect on some profound subjects—like the nature of genius, the power of romantic love and the purpose of art.

Kostova’s lush second novel ranges across two centuries in its exploration of love and madness.

Andrew Marlow, an amateur painter and accomplished psychiatrist, lives a solitary, structured life—until he begins treating renowned artist Robert Oliver, who was arrested for attacking a canvas in the National Gallery of Art. Marlow’s quest to understand this troubled genius leads him into the lives of the women Robert loved, including the enigmatic dark-haired beauty who haunts him.

This hefty novel travels from the East Coast of the U.S. to the coast of Normandy, from the late 19th century to the late 20th. In a recent interview from her home in the mountains of North Carolina, Kostova, in a quiet, measured voice, discussed the challenges of writing a novel that spans time and place.

“I haven’t written much about American places before this, and it was really wonderful. . . . It’s surprisingly challenging, I think, to write about your own time and place. I know that’s what most writers do, but I had somehow shirked it for years.”

Also difficult, says Kostova, is writing about visual art. “It is a very challenging subject, and as usual, I didn’t make it easy for myself, but I like these challenges.” She adds, “It’s so hard to convey a painting in words, and you’re partly relying on your reader’s recognition of certain styles and images.”

Asked what it was about French Impressionism that so captured her imagination, Kostova explains, “I was really drawn to it. And again it’s just one of those topics, like Dracula, that we’re so familiar with that I wanted to see if I could make something fresh out of it. I know that, personally, I had the experience of getting really tired of Impressionist painting because we see it everywhere, and it looks so pretty and tame, and it’s poorly reproduced on all kinds of objects, so I thought this might be interesting to go back and really look at some of those paintings again. And when I started going back to museums and seeing these paintings in the flesh, I was so overwhelmed by them. They’re so wonderful in real life, and Impressionism is so textured that you really have a sense of people working with the brush when you look at the originals that you don’t with reproductions.”

Kostova’s research took her to Paris and Normandy and into museums and libraries. In addition, she says, “I studied a lot of art history in college and that helped me, and I talked with art historians, and until I was about 15, I really loved to paint.”

She gleaned details from artist friends, who helped with the technicalities of painting, and her own sensory recollections. “I had memories of the way oil paint smells and the way you rework a canvas. More importantly, I have several close friends and family members who are very gifted visual artists, and they let me pick their brains and watch them paint and go to their studio classes.”

To help craft her characters, Kostova pored over biographies of artists and painters. “Sometimes . . . I think of this book as basically a biography,” she says. And her characters are so believable, so fully fleshed out, that it feels that way for readers as well.

Kostova also makes astute observations about the allowances made for genius, a theme, she notes, that has “plagued art and art literature since it began.” She says, “With The Historian, I liked the idea of writing about a supernatural topic and trying to make it human, and with this book I think I was really intrigued with the idea of writing on these rather time-worn subjects, the partly mad artist and the subject of genius and what genius is allowed to do and not allowed to do.”

Asked if she identifies with Robert’s obsessive nature, Kostova says she sometimes envies that kind of single-mindedness, but adds, “I also love to live in the world. A lot of other things are very important to me, like family and friends and social service and just the ordinary parts of life.” She says of Robert, “He can’t live properly in the world . . . in a way that sustains other people.”

Marlow, she explains, is challenged by Robert because he doesn’t seem to care about being cured or healed. Kostova muses, “I think in the person of Robert he’s faced with his life choices.”

As in The Historian, Kostova’s affinity for letters as a literary device lends a sense of immediacy and intimacy to the narrative (in a way reminiscent of A.S. Byatt’s Possession). “We all would love to read other people’s mail if that were permitted, right?” she laughs. “There’s this sense of a letter that takes you right to the heart of somebody’s life, and that’s not really true in our era, but it’s a very direct way to convey character.”

The intriguing title of Kostova’s new novel alludes to the myth of Leda and the swan, but its deeper meaning lies at the heart of the novel’s mystery—one that keeps readers turning the pages (all 576 of them). “I’ve always loved Greek myths . . . and swans are such emblems of beauty and grace; they’ve been so important in painting and sculpture, and we still have this reverence for them even in contemporary life that I think is very interesting. . . . Swans are a funny thing, they’re kind of like dragons: once you start thinking about them you see them everywhere culturally.”

In the novel, Kostova describes Marlow’s experience upon seeing one of Robert’s paintings: “At any moment something might happen; that was the remarkable thing. He had caught the instant of shock, of total change, of disbelief. . . . She was inches away from me, breathing and real, in the second of unreal calm before complete distress, and I knew myself powerless. I realized, then, for the first time, what Robert had accomplished.” Much like the paintings she brings to life in The Swan Thieves, Kostova’s eloquent prose possesses the power to both transport and inspire.

Katherine Wyrick writes from Little Rock.

RELATED CONTENT
Review of The Historian
5 Questions with Elizabeth Kostova on The Book Case

 

Elizabeth Kostova’s gripping debut novel, The Historian (2005), explored the legend of Dracula, undoubtedly contributing to the cultural craze that has now evolved into full-blown vampire mania. Her second novel, The Swan Thieves, focuses on French Impressionism, which raises the question: should readers brace themselves for all-out Monet madness? Probably not, but one thing is […]
FictionWomen's Fiction

Austen city limits

Interview by Katherine Wyrick

Ambient city sounds—horns, sirens—provide a fitting soundtrack for a recent conversation with Cathleen Schine, a New Yorker who has written so astutely about the lives of other New Yorkers. She does it yet again in her new novel, The Three Weissmanns of Westport, a reimagining of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility that tells the story of three urbanites in exile, and the cast of characters in their orbit.

During the interview, Schine, also the author of The Love Letter and The New Yorkers, makes a frank confession: “This is very unfashionable to say, but I read for comfort a lot of times. That sounds very old-fashioned, but that’s my dirty little secret.” Her readers can take comfort in the fact that she’s created another ensemble novel that, though sad at times, is also entertaining and diverting.

Other facts one might be surprised to learn about this prolific author: She’s partial to terriers (and presently owns a Cairn); before becoming a writer, she studied to be a Medievalist; and she didn’t read Jane Austen until well into adulthood. “I’m very unusual among novelists in that I didn’t read Austen until I was an adult,” she says. But when she did, “It was an incredible revelation.”

Asked about being dubbed by critics as a modern-day Jewish Jane Austen, a moniker she’s flattered by but reluctant to claim, Schine responds, “I’ve been writing for 25 years. That was written about me when I was quite a bit younger, but I’ve noticed that any woman who writes a comedy of manners is always in some way compared to Jane Austen. She’s the gold standard.”

The Three Weissmanns of Westport will, of course, invite comparisons to Sense and Sensibility, but Schine insists, “It’s somewhere between a theft and an homage, but what it’s not is an appropriation or a comparison. That, I know better. Jane Austen is an inspiration to anybody who writes a comedy of manners because she practically invented it.”

Schine’s story begins when 78-year-old Joseph Weissmann decides to divorce Betty, his wife of 48 years, citing “irreconcilable differences” (read: another woman). The genuinely perplexed Betty replies, “Irreconcilable differences? . . . Of course there are irreconcilable differences. What on earth does that have to do with divorce?”

Approaching grave subjects with levity is Schine’s trademark. “For me, it’s just the way I experience the world. It’s a good survival mechanism,” she says. In the past, she’s leaned more heavily towards comedy, but feels that “this book is sadder, more serious, a bit emotionally darker than other things I’ve written.” Though that may be true, she strikes a balance between pathos and humor. Let’s just say that if The Three Weissmanns of Westport were a movie, Nora Ephron would direct it. Or if it were a food, it would be some kind of chocolate-covered pretzel concoction—a little salty, a little sweet.

Schine has said elsewhere, “Families are funny and adultery is funny; families are tragic and adultery is tragic. Love just complicates everything that much more.” In The Three Weissmanns of Westport, she explores love in its many forms—maternal, romantic and filial.

As the world she knows unravels, Betty’s daughters—the passionate Miranda, a famous literary agent, and the more subdued Annie, a sensible library director—rally around her in support. Forced out of her elegant New York apartment by her husband’s mistress, Betty, joined by her girls, takes refuge in her cousin Lou’s cramped, run-down beach cottage in Westport, Connecticut. As they mingle with suburban socialites, they discover love in unexpected places—and truths about themselves and each other.

Schine describes the process of writing this novel as a dynamic experience, a kind of call and response between her book and Austen’s. “It’s partly my being caught up by the narrative of Sense and Sensibility and partly my own story and characters, sometimes pushing toward that and sometimes pulling away from that. . . . It was kind of like a dialogue. For me, reading and writing have a lot in common. So there was a lot of communication with the characters,” she says, adding, “All apologies to Jane Austen, of course.”

What appeals most to Schine about Austen’s work is that, though written two centuries ago, it still resonates with readers today. “So much of it feels so alive,” she says. She found herself asking, what in modern-day society approximates that? What is the equivalent?

She also wanted to write about “women who’ve lived a certain way whose whole lives have been pulled out from under them.”

“I know women to whom that has happened,” she says. Schine, like Austen, is particularly interested in the ways in which, even today, women depend on marriage to ensure social standing and economic security.

In writing this novel, Schine found herself returning time and again to the relationship between Betty and her daughters. Schine, who’s very close to her own mother, says, “I love writing about mothers and daughters and mothers and sons. That’s one of the things I found when I was writing this, that the mother took on a much more important and central role in my story; that’s one way in which it really veered from Sense and Sensibility.” Most poignant, perhaps, is the way Schine describes the awakening of Miranda’s maternal instincts after she meets a winsome toddler named Henry (the son of her new lover). “It’s hard to write about kids without it being sentimental,” says Schine. But she does it, drawing on her own experience of raising two boys.

Asked if she would ever write a memoir, Schine says she finds she can come closer to the truth when writing fiction. “Also, it’s just more fun for me,” she adds. “Part of the fun of writing is finding out what’s going to happen next.” Her ultimate goal, she says, is to create recognizable characters and a story that rings true to life. She does both in The Three Weissmanns of Westport, her lambent wit flickering across each page like moonlight on the waters of Westport.

Katherine Wyrick writes from Little Rock.

“Any woman who writes a comedy of manners is compared to Jane Austen. She’s the gold standard.”
Memoir

Gail Caldwell

Interview by Katherine Wyrick

Somehow it seems fitting that a conversation with Gail Caldwell would be punctuated by the jubilant barks of a dog—fitting because her exquisite new memoir, Let’s Take the Long Way Home, is a celebration of friendship, both canine and human.

Critic and author Caldwell wrote the book as a moving tribute to her best friend, writer Caroline Knapp, who died of lung cancer in 2002 at the age of 42.

From her Cambridge, Massachusetts, home, Caldwell explains that the source of said barking is her fluffy Samoyed, Tula, whom she lovingly describes as “a devil in a white suit.” Apparently, Tula protests when Gail is on the phone and at present is loudly voicing her disapproval and demanding a game of fetch. “She has me very well trained,” Caldwell (halfway) jokes.

Knapp would probably have appreciated this interruption because it was while walking their dogs that she and Caldwell forged their enduring, life-altering friendship. Though their time together was cut short by Knapp’s death, that was not, as Caldwell tells us in Let’s Take the Long Way Home, the end of their story. She opens her book with this poignant pronouncement, “It’s an old, old story: I had a friend and we shared everything, and then she died and so we shared that, too.”

When they met in the early ’90s, Knapp and Caldwell, both single and living in Cambridge, instantly bonded over their shared love of books, dogs and being outdoors. Caldwell was a book critic for the Boston Globe—her work there earned her a Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 2001—while Knapp was the author of the acclaimed 1996 memoir Drinking: A Love Story [read our review of Knapp's Appetites].

As their friendship grew, they learned that, despite different upbringings and a nine-year age difference, they had much in common, including their past struggles with alcohol. Caldwell writes eloquently about alcoholism and sobriety but doesn’t linger on the subject. When she does offer insights, they are profound and spot-on, but, she says, “Once you’ve been sober 25 years, the story distills itself. . . . It was a baseline, but I didn’t need to tell that whole story.”

Instead, in Let’s Take the Long Way Home, Caldwell concentrates on the intimacies and intricacies of their extraordinary friendship. “About halfway through our friendship, I think I realized that it was, in fact, unique,” she says.

In the book, Caldwell writes, “Finding Caroline was like placing a personal ad for an imaginary friend, then having her show up at your door funnier and better than you had conceived.” This is not to say, however, that the relationship was without its share of conflict. Both women were deeply private and self-reliant—and both were writers. Rather than ignore problems, they faced them head on. “We loved to dissect and explain and process and wonder. Because we acknowledged the rivalry between us, Caroline and I went toward each other instead of away from each other.”

She says that welcoming their competitive spirit, a “great energy,” allowed them to challenge themselves physically and creatively. Caldwell, for instance, helped Knapp become a stronger swimmer, while Knapp introduced Caldwell to the Zen-like pleasures of rowing on the Charles River.

They learned other things, too, like how to be vulnerable and how to trust in and lean on someone you love—not easy things for such fiercely independent women. 

Caldwell especially appreciated Knapp’s unflinching honesty. “I’m worried you’re sick of me,” Caldwell says she once confided in Knapp, who responded matter-of-factly, “I’m not, but what if I were? Big deal.” She says, “I remember feeling like I could exhale; it was a wonderfully liberating moment.”

She also admired Knapp’s quiet intensity. “We could always match each other in terms of intensity,” she says. “She could outdo me in terms of just staying power, and I didn’t know many people who could. And I don’t just mean on the river, I mean on the phone. That was one of the things we recognized in each other from the beginning.”

She elaborates on this connection in the book. “For both of us, in different ways, the volume of the world had been turned up a notch,” Caldwell writes. “Even on that first afternoon we spent together—a four-hour walk through late-summer woods—I remember being moved by Caroline: It was a different response from simple affection or camaraderie.”

Readers will also find themselves moved by Caroline, and will almost certainly be moved to tears when she is diagnosed with lung cancer that has spread to her liver and brain. The description of her illness and death is spare but wrenching.

Caldwell, however, also laughingly recalls times when they acted more like insecure teenage girls than self-assured grown women, playfully exclaiming, “I think you’re prettier than me!” or “I like your arms better than mine.” She pauses at the memory of her friend’s strong, rower’s physique. “She had these beautiful arms,” she muses, and you sense that she can still see her with searing clarity in her mind’s eye, suntanned and laughing by the river.

When writing about the life and death of a close friend, it would be easy to lapse into sentimentality, but Caldwell avoids this pitfall, instead offering a meditation on grief that is tender but never mawkish. “I always remember her being skeptical about any story that did not tell how difficult human relationships are,” Caldwell says. “Grief itself gives you the great capacity to make everything perfect in the friendship . . . and I could hear Caroline saying, ‘You’ve got to talk about the struggles . . . you’ve got to talk about how hard this was.’ I owe that honesty in many ways to her.”

About the process of writing the Let’s Take the Long Way Home, Caldwell reflects, “I was very scared when I started to work on this. There was a point where I thought that I would never write about Caroline and me. And then there became a point after that when I thought I couldn’t not write about it. I really went from one extreme to the other.”

As she grappled with this dilemma, she says, “Caroline was really my compass.” For a time, Caldwell would walk in the evening with Clementine (her beloved, aged Samoyed, a major player in the book), look up at the sky and ask Caroline, “Can I do this?” The answer she received time and again proved as insistent as two-year-old Tula, who throughout this interview continues to nudge Gail with her snout in a dogged plea to play ball.

Caldwell explains that she felt compelled to share this story in part because, “One of the most important things to me is knowing that there are people out there for whom Caroline’s book [Drinking] meant a great deal . . . and now I get to give people the Caroline that I knew.”

Caldwell, who says her book is “a tribute to memory,” adds, “There were passages I wrote with tears streaming down my face . . . but there was something else about it that was restorative. There was some way it captured the love and intensity between us, encapsulated it, which I guess is what writing does.” Especially writing as luminous as this.  

Somehow it seems fitting that a conversation with Gail Caldwell would be punctuated by the jubilant barks of a dog—fitting because her exquisite new memoir, Let’s Take the Long Way Home, is a celebration of friendship, both canine and human. Critic and author Caldwell wrote the book as a moving tribute to her best friend, writer […]
Fiction

Emma Donoghue

Interview by Katherine Wyrick

Imagine living within the confines of a 11×11 room, the only natural light coming from a skylight, a television your only link to the outside world. That’s just what Irish-Canadian novelist Emma Donoghue does in Room, a book so original and daring it recently landed on the longlist for the Man Booker Prize.

To five-year-old Jack, Room is his entire world, where he was born and where he lives with Ma, where he learns and plays. It is also where, at night, Jack crawls into Wardrobe to sleep, and to hide when Old Nick visits his mother (when the bed squeaks). For Jack, Room is the only home he’s ever known, but for Ma it’s a prison where she’s been held captive for seven years after being abducted as a teen.

Told in the pitch-perfect voice of a five-year-old boy raised in captivity, Donoghue’s stunning novel offers a unique portrait of one mother’s fierce devotion.

If this sounds like the stuff of tabloids, luridly sensational or gimmicky, in Donoghue’s talented hands it’s anything but. Told from Jack’s perspective, Room turns the usual victim/survivor story on its head, transforming it into something else entirely—a meditation on the nature of reality and a testament to the ferocity of a mother’s love.

In a conversation from her home in London, Ontario, Donoghue readily admits, in a lilting Irish brogue, that readers might at first balk at the idea of a five-year-old narrator, but believes that they will “relax into it after a few pages.” A native of Dublin, Donoghue received a doctorate in English literature from the University of Cambridge before launching her writing career. In 1998, she moved to Canada, where she and her partner are raising their two young children.

Her son was five while she was writing Room, and she says, “The dialogue came very easily because I know what they’re like—five-year-old boys in particular. I wanted to get Jack at that moment when [children] suddenly move from the very concrete, ‘where’s my next snack coming from,’ to the big questions. At that age they have this astonishing ability to tackle abstract issues and then swing right back to concerns about toys.”

Donoghue perfectly captures that liminal stage. Jack’s voice is wholly believable and pitch-perfect, and in him Donoghue has created a narrator who is endearing without being cloying, one whose phrasing, thoughts and insights are by turns touching and astute.

Coming across as sentimental or cutesy was, Donoghue says, her biggest fear. “Getting the readers to care is a challenge with any novel, but with this novel I knew they would care when they worked out what the situation was, so then my challenge was to rein in the sentiment.”

A writer of literary historical novels (Slammerkin, The Sealed Letter, Life Mask) Donoghue admits that Room marks a dramatic departure for her. “I’ve often been inspired by fact in the past, but it’s never happened to me in the present. I happened to hear about the Fritzl case in Austria, but that just gave me the hook, the notion of a child raised in a room not realizing that there was an outside world. That’s as much as I took from it.” (Interestingly, Donoghue had already completed the novel before the Jaycee Dugard case in California came to light.)

“I read up about a lot of those kinds of cases, but I deliberately kept the story in my book very different from all of them because I really didn’t want the book to be in any way like true crime,” she says. “I was interested in boiling down those situations to the essence of confinement and captivity.”

Donoghue stresses that she never intended for Room to be a realistic depiction of life in captivity. To that effect, she deliberately made Ma and Jack’s living conditions far better than in real-life cases, making their quarters an above-ground building with proper light and ventilation. She also didn’t want Room to “read like a treatise on male violence.”

“I didn’t want it to be about child abuse or about appalling neglect,” Donoghue says. “I wanted it to be just about the locked door. What if everything else is fine, but you’re locked away from the world?”

At times, Room has the feel of a macabre fairy tale—like a modern-day Rumpelstiltskin. “There’s no denying those overtones,” the author says. “I deliberately chose a common name for Jack because I wanted him to be like a hero in a fairy tale.” She’s quick to add, however, that though Room can be read on many levels, she’d rather readers understand it as a “real” story with authentic, true-to-life characters.

Above all, she explains, she was “trying to create a kind of test case for a mother’s love.” Strange as it may sound, Donoghue says that the simplicity of the story—a mother and child spending uninterrupted time together—is what has resonated with readers most. “Oddly enough, people have responded in a kind of nostalgic way. Nobody wants to idealize imprisonment, but many of us have such complicated lives, and we try to fit parenting in alongside work and socializing. . . . We try and have so many lives at once, and we run ourselves ragged.”

“Today parenting is so self-conscious and worried, so I wanted to ask the question, how minimally could you do it? One parent in one room. Would that do?”

Room seems to say yes, at least for a time—and with a young, resourceful mother like Ma. (A note to all mothers: prepare to feel inadequate as you marvel at Ma’s mothering skills and instincts.) “She really civilizes and humanizes Jack; he’s not a feral child,” says Donoghue. “She passes along her cultural knowledge to him, from religion to tooth-brushing to rules.”

Despite limited space and resources, by day, the two engage in “Phys Ed,” cooking lessons, model-making, storytelling, crafts, and standing under their skylight and screaming (for help, though Jack thinks it’s a game). Although they watch television for education and distraction, Ma limits its use, warning that it can turn your brain to mush.

As a reader, it’s easy to be lulled by the rhythm of their days until the horror of their situation reasserts itself (and the harrowing second half of the book begins). “It is a nightmare for Ma, but she’s managed to create an idyll for Jack within it, so she benefits too. She gets to escape from her situation by entering into this fantasy that they live in this world of only two people,” Donoghue says. “In a way they are their own society.”

This unique relationship gets right to the heart of Room—a book that illuminates the intimate bond between mother and child, and finds beauty in the unbearable.

RELATED CONTENT
Read Emma Donoghue's Behind the Book essay on Room.

Imagine living within the confines of a 11x11 room, the only natural light coming from a skylight, a television your only link to the outside world. That’s just what Irish-Canadian novelist Emma Donoghue does in Room, a book so original and daring it recently landed on the longlist for the Man Booker Prize.
FictionWomen's Fiction

Kim Edwards

Interview by Katherine Wyrick
When Kim Edwards began writing a follow-up to her wildly successful novel The Memory Keeper’s Daughter, she intended to create a contemporary story in the picturesque area of upstate New York where she grew up. She soon found, however, that the past kept asserting itself on the present.
 

The resulting novel, The Lake of Dreams, is a seamless interplay of the two—part historical, epistolary novel and part modern-day quest story. “The two are deeply interwoven,” Edwards says during a call to her Kentucky home. “The past presses itself on the present . . . it became more forceful as I was writing it.”

 
 

“I think the landscape of everybody’s childhood really stays with them.”

 
 

When the novel opens, Lucy Jarrett is at a turning point in her life and has returned to Lake of Dreams, New York, from her recent home in Japan, after a decade-long absence. Back in the rambling old house of her childhood, she finds that she is still haunted by her father’s unresolved death in a fishing accident years earlier. She also learns that her brother, Blake, has gone into the family business and joined ranks with their uncle in a controversial project to develop the area’s pristine wetlands.

 

Meanwhile, Lucy also reconnects with her first love, Keegan Fall, a sensitive, thoughtful glass artist who still carries a torch for her after all these years. But one morning, everything changes when Lucy makes a curious discovery in a window seat of the house’s long-neglected cupola. There she unearths a cache of letters, ephemera linked to the suffrage movement and an heirloom tapestry bordered with interlocking spheres—an ancient symbol that, as Lucy soon learns, also appears in stained-glass windows crafted by a local artist almost a century earlier. Thus begins a journey that will force her to rewrite her family’s history—and her own.

 

Though Lucy’s life doesn’t directly mirror the author’s, there are some parallels. Edwards grew up in Skaneateles, in the Finger Lakes region of New York, and after completing her graduate work, she traveled to Asia with her husband, where they spent the next five years teaching. Later on, she enjoyed revisiting the upstate area and muses, “I think the landscape of everybody’s childhood really stays with them.” She also relished rediscovering the region’s history and its ties with the women’s suffrage movement. “It was really, really fun to see it through that lens,” Edwards recalls.

 

An associate professor of English at the University of Kentucky, Edwards has been on leave for the past two years to write The Lake of Dreams. After a whirlwind tour following the success of The Memory Keeper’s Daughter, which has sold more than 4.5 million copies, she alighted in Kentucky seeking the solitude required to write. Her husband, former chair of the English department at the university and a carpenter in his previous life, built her a secluded home studio in which to work.

 

Edwards “wrote the book from the outside in,” she explains: “I told myself I had to write 1,000 words a day just to see where it took me.”

 

The story for The Lake of Dreams, however, had been germinating long before The Memory Keeper’s Daughter came into being, its images floating in the author’s mind like dust motes in the dappled light of a stained-glass window. Years ago, Edwards wrote a draft of a novel (her first) that had similar themes, like a concern for the land. Over the years, she returned to her discarded novel and came to understand it in a totally new way—an exercise that proved fruitful, because it was during this process that she found the voice for The Lake of Dreams. “For me, and many writers, that’s a crucial discovery,” Edwards says. If she had to identify the seed of the story, however it would be a stained-glass window. “I loved the metaphor of glass, as something that moves between states of being.”

 

It’s while standing before a series of these windows that Lucy experiences this revelation about her ancestor, Rose: “It was physical, almost, my desire to know who she was and how she had lived. . . . From this point in time, almost a hundred years later, the events of her life looked fixed, determined. And yet, in her brief notes I had recognized a restless passion that seemed familiar, mirroring my own seeking, my own questions.”

 

Fans of Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees will find much to love in this novel, especially the way Edwards integrates arcane subject matter into a contemporary story. The character of Lucy, with her wanderlust and longing for self-knowledge, recalls literary heroes across time.

 

“I think of this book as kind of a quest story, and so the underlying structure of that, both seeking something in the world and undergoing some kind of internal change, too, is the structure that was in my mind when I was writing it,” Edwards says. “I did a lot of reading about myths, traditional and ancient quest stories along the way. One of the elements of a quest story is that the hero gets called back from whatever he or she is doing at the time, so it seemed to fit really beautifully with the wandering Lucy has done.” (Edwards even manages to work a chalice into the narrative.)

 

Not surprisingly, dreams also figure prominently in The Lake of Dreams. At different points in her career, Edwards says, she has been interested in theology and the works of Carl Jung—interests that clearly inform her fiction. The design that appears on the heirloom blanket Lucy discovers was inspired by the Chalice Well of Glastonbury—on which appears a sacred geometry that consists of two interlocking circles, called vesica piscis, or in more modern terminology, a Venn diagram. At her urging, the book’s designers incorporated the blanket’s border into each chapter heading.

Though parts of the book feel a touch treacly, Edwards writes well about familial relationships and the tenuous ties that bind us. One particular passage stands out in which Lucy, visiting an abandoned chapel, sits bathed in the ethereal light of stained-glass windows. This magical, meditative scene transports the reader, with Lucy, to a place like dreamtime, where the veil between the worlds—the seen and unseen—grows thin. It’s a place Edwards herself has come to know through the creative process. Of the act of writing, she says, “I would emerge from it feeling like I was still partially there. . . . The writing changes you. You leave as a different person. You never know what you’re going to discover.” 

 

When Kim Edwards began writing a follow-up to her wildly successful novel The Memory Keeper’s Daughter, she intended to create a contemporary story in the picturesque area of upstate New York where she grew up. She soon found, however, that the past kept asserting itself on the present.   The resulting novel, The Lake of Dreams, is […]
Fiction

Kevin Brockmeier

Interview by Katherine Wyrick

Kevin Brockmeier is easy to spot. He enters the café wearing a long overcoat, wire-rimmed glasses round as compasses and the subtlest look of unease. It’s harder, however, to pin him down.

Brockmeier’s reedy voice, which sounds strikingly like David Sedaris’ (without the sardonic edge), almost gets lost in the din of this bustling Little Rock bakery. After easing into a corner by the kitchen, hazelnut latte in hand, Brockmeier eyes the digital recording device on the table. (He prefers being interviewed via email.) But soon enough the conversation takes on a life of its own, ranging from the pedestrian to the profound.

In his brilliant, curious new novel, The Illumination, Brockmeier poses a weighty question: “What if our pain was the most beautiful thing about us?” He explores this query in all its complexity through six novella-length chapters, linked by a private journal of love notes written by a husband to his wife. But first, the phenomenon occurs.

What people call “The Illumination” spontaneously begins at 8:17 on a Friday night, causing everyone’s wounds to shine. Everywhere, people in psychic or physical distress start to phosphoresce, to glow. In the aftermath of a car accident, the aforementioned journal of love notes passes into the care of a hospital patient and from there through the hands of five others, touching each of them in different ways. The six recipients—a data analyst and divorcée, a photojournalist, a young boy, an evangelist, a novelist and a homeless man—inhabit a world that feels at once bizarre and familiar, a world in which human pain manifests as light.

The journal entries interspersed throughout the book are by turns tender and playful, revealing the intimacies of a happy marriage. “I love watching TV and shelling sunflower seeds with you,” one note reads. “I love how easily you cry when you’re happy. . . . I love the soft blue veins on your wrist.” Brockmeier’s hope is that the notes come together to create a composite picture of one couple’s life together, and they do. “When I was working on the novel, that was how I began each day as a way of re-immersing myself in the world I was trying to create,” he recalls.

Asked about the genesis of the novel, the author points to the missionary’s monologue in the fourth chapter of the book, a section he references frequently during our conversation. “When Ryan [the missionary] is talking about human suffering, the question of it and the value of it, he considers that maybe it’s our suffering that makes us beautiful to God, and if so, what does that imply . . . and also if so, how dare he,” Brockmeier says. “I was thinking about those things, about what value [suffering] could possibly have, and I had this image of an injury shedding light. What if that was the way God saw the world—that your pain sets you aglow—and the image seemed meaningful to me, and it slowly gave rise to a novel.”

In addition to his novels The Brief History of the Dead and The Truth About Celia, and the story collections Things That Fall from the Sky andThe View from the Seventh Layer, Brockmeier has also written two children’s books, City of Names and Grooves: A Kind of Mystery. It’s not surprising that his imaginative blend of literary fiction and fantasy also appeals to young readers.

Growing up in Little Rock, Brockmeier attended Christian schools, which partly accounts for his familiarity with the Bible and his interest in theology, specifically the works of G.K. Chesterton and Simone Weil (an epigraph from her writings introduces one of the chapters in The Illumination).

His upbringing, of course, informs his writing, but his interests are wide and varied. To call him an avid reader would be a gross understatement; he’s voracious, a student of all things. “I’m an explorer. I try to find writing that excites me,” he says. Right now what excites him is an obscure slender novel, The Private Life of Trees, by the Chilean writer Alejandro Zambra. From a soft leather briefcase, the meticulous Brockmeier produces a series of lists. (He admits to being a prolific, slightly obsessive list maker by nature.) “It’s how my mind works,” he explains. He offers up his 50 Favorite Books, followed by 50 Favorite Stories, Movies . . . Albums . . . Children’s Books. And still there are others, all of which give insight into this somewhat elusive author.

After discussing his favorites for a time, talk gradually returns to Brockmeier’s latest novel, which deserves its own place on a “Top 50” list somewhere. Asked whether the purpose of this phenomenon, the Illumination, is to awaken compassion in all beings, Brockmeier pauses for a moment before responding. “Ultimately, just because you’re granted a clearer vision of the suffering that’s around you, doesn’t necessarily make the world a better place,” he says.

The cacophony of the bakery’s kitchen swells as the weight of this bleak conclusion settles over the table. But what if, like heat lightning, the small flickers of awareness that occur in each individual character ultimately raise the consciousness of humanity as a whole? A silence ensues before Brockmeier answers, with great deliberation. “It doesn’t seem to change the systems of the world—it changes individual souls,” he says. “And I don’t know whether that’s a pessimistic or a cynical way of imagining the way this phenomenon would unfold or whether it’s a realistic one.” The inherent question hovers unanswered in the air between us. “There’s so much pain in the world and so much beauty in the world and they’re so intertwined. How do you tease them apart and can you tease them apart?”

The novel illuminates this paradox without resolving it. The book does suggest, however, that the light offers a new way of seeing and relating to others through shared pain.

“There’s something very compelling about that,” Brockmeier says. “While I was writing the book, I felt as though I was reorienting my own way of looking at the world. It’s not as if I was walking around seeing light emerging from people, but I felt as if I was training my mind to be ready to see the world that way. And occasionally I was dreaming that I saw the world that way.

“I think the best books change the way you see the world while you’re reading them,” he adds.

The Illumination is one of those books. In it, Brockmeier reveals the interconnectedness of his characters’ lives and moments of crystalline compassion, and chronicles their suffering in prose sometimes so startlingly beautiful you have to look at it indirectly, like the sun. 

Kevin Brockmeier is easy to spot. He enters the café wearing a long overcoat, wire-rimmed glasses round as compasses and the subtlest look of unease. It’s harder, however, to pin him down. Brockmeier’s reedy voice, which sounds strikingly like David Sedaris’ (without the sardonic edge), almost gets lost in the din of this bustling Little […]

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