Rebecca Bain

Memoir

Rick Bragg

Interview by Rebecca Bain

When he was a child, growing up dirt-poor in a small Alabama town, Rick Bragg seldom had any coins jingling in his pocket. But even if he had, he would never have spent a penny on a Father's Day card.

As Bragg chronicled so eloquently in his best-selling memoir, All Over but the Shoutin' (1997), his father was a hard-fisted, abusive alcoholic whose lust for whiskey far outweighed any feeling of obligation to his family. When he finally abandoned his wife and three sons, young Rick had scant good memories of Charles Bragg, none of them worthy of a card celebrating fatherhood.

But at age 46, Rick Bragg inherited his own son when the confirmed bachelor surprised himself and everyone else by marrying a tall, red-headed woman, who was "just a little bit slinky." Stumbling into the role of stepfather to a 10-year-old boy not only made Bragg examine his position in this new relationship, it also made him want to learn more about his own father. The result is the third in his series of family memoirs, The Prince of Frogtown.

Speaking from his office at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, where he is a professor of writing (a title he finds quite amusing), Bragg elaborated on his desire to investigate the life of a man he reviled in his first memoir a decade ago.

"I'm older now and having a boy of my own makes me look at things differently," Bragg says. "I did not want to vanish from this world and have people believe that was all he was. As I said in the book, I've written an awful lot about people in prison, and I've written how they're there for their worst moment on earth – because they caught their wife cheating on them, or they saw some ugly look, you know, and they did something that brands them and sums them up forever. But it's not all they are. I guess in a way we were my daddy's worst moment. But it's not all he was, and I wanted to find people who would say something good about him. And I did." For three years Bragg tracked down his father's friends and the family members who knew him before alcohol turned him into the bitter, brutal man Bragg remembers.

"More than anything, I wanted to write about my daddy as a little boy because I didn't know anything about him. He never said to me, 'When I was a boy, I did this.' I wanted to see what he was like as a 12-year-old, I wanted to see what he was like as a teenager. And now I know." Although he grew up near Jacksonville, Alabama, the mill town where his father spent most of his life, Bragg felt that to understand the man he needed to know more about the people whose lives depended upon its giant textile factory. Talking to the workers who breathed cotton dust day after day to earn their paltry paychecks made Rick's admiration for them turn into something much deeper.

"People sometimes talk about Southerners and working-class folks, blue-collar folks, with this kind of hokey charm – aren't they quaint? Well, you know, people bled into their machines, they lost pieces of themselves at work, they stood over these machines for 12 hours at a time and did a job that quite frankly, most people just aren't tough enough to do," Bragg says.

The Prince of Frogtown alternates between two worlds. One chapter explores the father who is gradually becoming a more fully realized person to Bragg. The next examines his own attempts to understand the boy who has become his son. The hardscrabble existence Bragg endured as a child often has him baffled by a 10-year-old who still takes comfort in a "blankey," who demands to be tucked in at night, who wants hugs and hand-holding. But Bragg wasn't just afraid his son might never be "tough enough." As he writes in the book, his fears went deeper.

"I didn't care if he rode bulls or danced ballet, and that's the truth. But what made me crazy was the idea that he was the kind of boy I used to despise, the kind who looked down his nose on the boy I was. That was it, I realized. . . . That was what needled me. My mother cleaned their houses, cooked for them, diapered them. I would not have a boy like that." But even though this boy was growing up with privileges Bragg couldn't have imagined at that age, he discovered his son has a generous spirit, not a condemning one. "I was worried he might not like my people, or worse than that, he would feel a detachment or separation – which never materialized," Bragg says. "He's a good boy and he's got a good heart and he loves going home to see my people." Juxtaposing what he learned about his father's life with what Bragg feels are his own shortcomings as a parent doesn't change the countless ways Charles Bragg betrayed his wife and sons. But it does give Rick Bragg a better understanding of the man who died young from three things: bad luck, bad decisions and too much whiskey.

"I didn't try to recreate some daddy for myself in this book—that's the least of the things that happen in it. I just wanted to know who he was as a boy and as a young man, before he fell apart. I don't think that would be too hard for people to understand, to see why I would want that to happen." Bragg also heard from Jack Andrews, his father's lifelong friend, who contributed what is probably the saddest story in this eloquent, beautifully written and moving book. Right up until the day he died, Charles Bragg continued to talk about how much he loved his wife and boys and how much he regretted the way things turned out. As Bragg writes in The Prince of Frogtown, it wasn't enough. But it was more than he had before.

"I wish it had been different, but I cannot see it. I cannot see him living off his pension, or singing a hymn, or lining up to vote. I cannot see him going home to a paid-for house, with pictures of his boys on the wall. And I cannot see her there with him, to make it complete. But now I know he did see it, and that has to be worth something." Rebecca Bain, formerly the host of the public radio author interview program, "The Fine Print," writes from her home in Nashville.

 

When he was a child, growing up dirt-poor in a small Alabama town, Rick Bragg seldom had any coins jingling in his pocket. But even if he had, he would never have spent a penny on a Father's Day card.

As…

Fiction

Wally Lamb

Interview by Rebecca Bain

Having your book picked by Oprah for her book club is a heady experience for an author. Suddenly hundreds of thousands of new readers discover your work, you appear before millions of television viewers to receive Oprah's accolades, and you make a whole lot of money.

But according to Wally Lamb, this recognition can be a double – edged sword. Having had his first two novels chosen by Oprah (She's Come Undone and I Know This Much Is True), the pressure to produce an equally worthy book had Lamb struggling through a year – long case of writer's block. He started and discarded several attempts before finally finding his voice in a new novel titled The Hour I First Believed.

"I was scared to death," laughs Lamb, speaking from his office in Willimantic, Connecticut. "Once the canvas got larger and larger, I was pretty scared I was not going to be able to pull it off and finish it. At one point I talked to my agent and said maybe I should just give this advance money back and scurry back to the classroom and just forget about the whole deal."The acorn which grew into his latest work came to him in a single sentence which his soon – to – be protagonist whispered into his ear: "My mother was a convicted felon, a manic – depressive, and Miss Rheingold of 1950." For the next nine years, Lamb turned this sentence into a 700 – page epic, weaving the real – life tragedy of the Columbine shootings into one man's personal experience of love and loss – a tapestry that stretches back a hundred years, showing how our ancestors can take a greater role in our lives than we might realize."That's exactly what I learned by writing this book. I came to believe that in ways we can never really figure out – because we only knew our grandparents as old people and we didn't know their grandparents – that it's all sort of connected and sets us up for certain kinds of lives. I do believe that we have some control [over our lives], but probably far less than we realize."

This belief is personified in Lamb's central character, Caelum Quirk, a man described by his second wife as "an emotional eunuch." He and his third wife, Maureen, have moved from Connecticut to Littleton, Colorado, in an attempt to save their marriage. Maureen has been unfaithful; the only emotion Caelum seems capable of expressing is anger. However, their efforts to survive these problems are quickly overshadowed by the killing spree of two teenaged boys at Columbine High School where the couple works. Caelum is back in Connecticut, settling his recently deceased aunt's estate, when he learns of the horrendous events. Maureen is at the school; it is only by the slimmest of chances that she is spared. But she becomes a victim of "collateral damage" – the guilt and devastating emotions often felt by those who escape such a hideous experience. She becomes addicted to prescription drugs as a coping mechanism, so the couple move back to Caelum's family's Connecticut farm in yet another attempt to start their lives over.

An important part of The Hour I First Believed is Caelum's family history, which is thoroughly entwined with the women's prison across the street from his farm. His great – grandmother created the prison, taking as her motto, "A woman who surrenders her freedom need not surrender her dignity." Concurrently with writing the book, Lamb was forging his own connection with women prisoners, teaching a weekly writing workshop at the York Correctional Institution in Niantic, Connecticut. From the first day, Lamb found his students eager to write about where they went wrong, where their lives went out of control. Through their work, Lamb also discovered that about 70 percent of these women were victims of incest – a number born out by national statistics."Through what they write, they free themselves from a lot of that sorrow and a lot of that terrible, terrible guilt that sometimes comes along with being a victim. It's really been a profound experience for me to bear witness to the women and their stories. But also, it's hard because as it comes out of them, it becomes your thing to bear as well."

Lamb was so impressed with the women's stories that he approached HarperCollins about doing a collection of their essays. Choosing selections by 10 of Lamb's students, the publisher released Couldn't Keep It To Myself, promising each inmate $5,600 upon her release for what she'd written. But a week before the book's publication, Connecticut's attorney general sued the writers for the entire cost of their imprisonment, a figure much greater than the modest sum promised by the publisher. An ugly fight ensued, escalating into confiscation of the women's computer disks and, among other things, investigation of Lamb as a volunteer."I thank my lucky stars for '60 Minutes' and the Pan American Center which shed light on all this," Lamb says. "All of a sudden, Connecticut did a backflip and suddenly this program is wonderful and they're really gung – ho on rehabilitation and all that kind of stuff."

The theme of damaged individuals fighting for redemption is a familiar one for Lamb – it's been central to all three of his novels. And while he says he's never sure what will happen to his characters until he writes the end of a book, his personal beliefs would certainly steer him in that direction. As he says in the afterword to this novel, "I believe that love is stronger than hate."With his first two books, Lamb chose titles from old pop songs ("Undone" and "True"). However, in his latest, he took a line from one of America's favorite hymns, "Amazing Grace." "The Hour I First Believed" ends the second stanza, which is about the redemptive power of grace, one of the novel's themes. Lamb says it guided him throughout the nine years he spent writing it."I had that title before I had the book, right from the beginning. It was the carrot before the horse – and of course, I'm the horse."

Rebecca Bain writes from her home in Nashville.

Having your book picked by Oprah for her book club is a heady experience for an author. Suddenly hundreds of thousands of new readers discover your work, you appear before millions of television viewers to receive Oprah's accolades, and you make a whole lot of…

FictionInspirational Fiction

William P. Young

Interview by Rebecca Bain

God is a plump African-American woman with a broad smile who knows Her way around the kitchen; Jesus is a Middle Eastern man sporting jeans and a tool belt; the third component to the trinity is a wiry-looking woman who "was maybe of northern Chinese or Nepalese or even Mongolian ethnicity" although it's difficult to tell because "she seemed to phase in and out of his vision."

A bare bones description of the plot to William Paul Young's novel, The Shack, sounds more like a Monty Python skit than a serious story. And after getting turned down by 26 different publishers, no novel could have seemed less destined for success. However, this little book is packing a huge wallop with millions of readers around the world, and sparking a great deal of controversy along the way. Some Christian theologians have attacked it as heresy. Others are singing its praises from the pulpit. It all makes Young, a former office manager and hotel night clerk from Gresham, Oregon, grin as broadly as his depiction of God does.

"One of the things I would love to ask one of these [detractors] is 'What exactly is it that you're afraid of?' " Young says during a call to a hotel room in Denver, where he's scheduled to do a book signing. "Are you afraid that we're going to start worshipping large African-American women? Are you afraid people are going to stop reading Scripture or that they're going to mistake this book for Scripture? What part of 'fiction' do you not understand? Overall, I think the controversy is a great thing. I get a couple of hundred emails a day, saying this book has been a way for people to move deeper or back into a relationship with God. I really believe that this is something God has stirred up."

Mackenzie Philips, Young's protagonist in The Shack, has spent the past four years grieving the apparent murder of his youngest daughter, whose body has never been recovered. One cold winter day, he receives an invitation to return to the isolated shack where the girl's bloody dress was found. The invitation is from God, who chooses to manifest Him/Herself to Mack as a genial black woman. Over the course of a weekend, participating in a kind of spiritual therapy session/group retreat, Mack learns to rid himself of his Great Sadness and embrace God's grace and love through his conversations and experiences with the Holy Trinity.

The 54-year-old Young willingly discusses his own personal "shack."

"The Shack is a metaphor; it's my soul. . . . It's where you store all your addictions, all your secrets in this house of shame. It's everything you don't want anybody else to know exists. And it's held together by lies. I had a thin veneer of perfectionism and performance covering up an ocean of shame."

It was a veneer that blew completely apart on January 4, 1994, when Young's wife, Kim, discovered he was having an affair with one of her best friends.

"The Shack is a metaphor . . . It's everything you don't want anybody else to know exists."

"All I had left was the shame," he recalls, "and I had to make a decision to either kill myself or face Kim. So I chose Kim. For the first two years, she beat the crap out of me, every dig, coming after me. The intensity of her fury, that anger—that drove me to the edge to feel every single piece of garbage in my history. Then it took another nine years to heal up. So that's 11 years of experiences that Mack gets in one weekend at the shack."

Initially, Young had no plans to write a book. Then Kim asked him, as a gift to their six children, to write down the lessons on spirituality and life he had come to believe in so strongly—lessons that were very different from the ones he had learned from his rigid missionary parents or while he was studying theology.

"She said, 'Put in one place how you think, because you think outside the box and it's really wonderful.' I wanted to do a story because story has a way of communicating with the heart. I'm not thinking anybody else is gonna read this. So I can do whatever I want, try and communicate the things that are most intensely real and precious to me," he says.

When Young finished writing The Shack in 2005, he had 15 copies printed at Office Depot, which he gave as Christmas gifts to family members and several close friends. Soon those friends were asking if they could share the book with others, and Young began to believe his novel could have a larger audience. His pals Bobby Downes, Wayne Jacobsen and Brad Cummings helped him rewrite the book. When no publishers were interested, Jacobsen and Cummings formed Windblown Media to publish The Shack themselves. Their first print run was 10,000 copies in May 2007, and after Young and the book were featured on a few podcasts, they managed to sell about 1,000 copies. 

"So those 1,000 went out and in 10 days I'm getting emails from Australia and Africa and Ireland, and New Zealand and Canada—people whose lives were getting royally messed with in a very good way through the book," Young says.

Over the next six months, The Shack went through three printings almost solely through word of mouth. "We spent less than $300 on marketing and promotion through the first 1.2 million books. So anybody who hears about this almost always says, 'This has to be a God thing.' "

Windblown Media now has a cooperative agreement with Hachette Book Group, which makes things much easier—Young's son, Nicholas, doesn't have to take book orders or ship them out of a rented warehouse, for example. Hachette is also spearheading the campaign for a greater international market. The book's popularity continues to grow, with more than 4 million copies in print; The Shack has had the top spot on the New York Times paperback fiction bestseller list for most of the past six months.

Money from the book sales means Young no longer has to work three jobs to make ends meet. But the financial rewards mean less to him than the joy and insights many readers say The Shack has given them.

"What this book has given me is an ability to look from the outside into thousands of people's lives; people who are so hungry for authenticity of relationship that this book just blows open their hearts. All of a sudden I'm finding myself in a place with a platform that I never prayed for or asked for or thought about. And I'm comfortable because I didn't put me here. Every bit of this is the grace and the affection of God."

Rebecca Bain writes from her home in Nashville.

A bare bones description of the plot to William Paul Young's novel, The Shack, sounds more like a Monty Python skit than a serious story. And after getting turned down by 26 different publishers, no novel could have seemed less destined for success. However, this little book is packing a huge wallop with millions of readers around the world, and sparking a great deal of controversy along the way.
Fiction

Kathryn Stockett

Interview by Rebecca Bain

Stereotypes seem almost inevitable when someone tries to portray the relationships that existed 50 years ago between black people and white people in the South. Usually they swing from the extremes of Mississippi Burning to Driving Miss Daisy. So it’s a bit surprising—and refreshing—that Kathryn Stockett, who wasn’t born until years after that time, manages to capture something close to reality while avoiding most of the pitfalls in her first novel, The Help. Set in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1962, The Help is told through three voices: Aibileen, an older black woman who has been taking care of white families since she was 13; Minny, a younger black woman who finds it difficult to curb her sharp tongue around her white employers; and Skeeter, a privileged white girl fresh out of college, who wants more from life than marriage to the first presentable young man her mother can produce.

Stockett, a Mississippi native who now lives in Atlanta with her husband and five-year-old daughter, says the idea of writing the book first came to her as an antidote to homesickness. She was working for a magazine consulting firm in New York City, but frequently found her thoughts turning to the South and to Demetrie, the black woman who cared for Stockett when she was growing up. Finally she asked her bosses if she could take a month off to write about these memories. She laughs when she remembers the response.

“They said, ‘You’re not in Mississippi anymore, Kitty.’ They thought that people in Mississippi were a little more leisurely about jobs. I said, no, really, I don’t want to be paid. I just want to take a month off because I want to hunker down and write this story. And something happened—it was so nurturing and wonderful to hear Demetrie’s voice again. I think that’s really what drew me to the story, to hear her talking in my head 15 years after she had died.”

Although Stockett wasn’t born until 1969, seven years after the events depicted in her book, she said she not only had a wealth of information provided by the stories Demetrie had told her, but also from her parents and her 98-year-old grandfather.

“Demetrie worked for my grandmother and my grandfather, starting in the mid-50s, and my grandfather has the most remarkable memory. He doesn’t just remember details, he remembers dates. He remembers the temperature on that day; he’s kind of a savant that way. So I had a pretty good research tool right there in the living room with me.”

Stockett re-creates an environment that will be all too familiar to the people who lived through it: a time when “colored” people could cook food for white folks, but couldn’t sit down and eat with them. When a colored maid could wash the family’s dishes, but had to eat from her own plate because of the “germs” she might pass to her employers.

And heaven forbid that the black maid use the same bathroom as her white “family”! This is the event that opens the novel and that first opens Skeeter’s eyes to the injustice of this terribly skewed system. After listening to her friend, Hilly, present her plans for a “Home Help Sanitation Initiative” to their bridge group, Skeeter follows Aibileen, the maid, into the kitchen.

“Do you ever wish you could . . . change things?” [Skeeter] asks. And I can’t help myself. I look at her head on. Cause that’s one a the stupidest questions I ever heard. She got a confused, disgusted look on her face, like she done salted her coffee instead a sugared it. I turn back to my washing, so she don’t see me rolling my eyes. “Oh no, ma’am, everthing’s fine.

Skeeter may have had her consciousness raised a tiny bit, but it takes a long while before she can treat Aibileen as a person, rather than a colored person. Likewise, it takes a lot for Aibileen to learn to trust Skeeter. A key element of the book is Stockett’s use of language. The rhythms of the dialect are nearly flawless, due in no small part to the author’s refusal to use the “gonna,” “cain’t,” “sho-nuff,” spellings too many writers fall back on when trying to establish a sense of regionalism. Stockett credits this to her creative writing teacher at the University of Alabama.“She taught me a lot of things, but she taught me one rule and that was, as long as it’s a word in the dictionary, you can use it. So I had to be really creative in figuring out how to write idiom. As long as it didn’t set off the Spell-Checker, that was the rule—I could use it.”

Not all of the characters discriminated against in Stockett’s novel are black. Celia Foote is a white girl from the wrong side of the tracks who married well, but can’t break the barrier her background presents. Stockett felt she was important to the story, too.

“Just because you’re white and good looking and rich doesn’t mean you’re going to walk in the door of the Junior League,” she says. “I felt like if I was going to be talking about Southern women, I couldn’t leave out the fact that sometimes, they love to snub their own kind.”

While it was a daunting task to tackle stereotypes and successfully make her characters human, it took even more courage to write about this time and these issues as a white woman—something Stockett said she never forgot.

“You have to be careful what you say and how you say it, because people are really sensitive about this. We loved them [the black household workers] and they were part of our family but we didn’t ask them to sit down at the table with us. That just wasn’t done. Not that they were dying to sit down with us anyway, but there was a pretty well defined set of rules. And you knew what the rules were and you knew if you were breaking them.”

Breaking rules forms the core of The Help, an idea summarized in what Stockett says is her favorite sentence of her first novel: “Wasn’t that the point of the book? For women to realize, ‘We are just two people. Not that much separates us. Not nearly as much as I’d thought.’ ”

Rebecca Bain writes from her home in Nashville.

Stereotypes seem almost inevitable when someone tries to portray the relationships that existed 50 years ago between black people and white people in the South. Usually they swing from the extremes of Mississippi Burning to Driving Miss Daisy. So it’s a bit surprising—and refreshing—that Kathryn…

Memoir

Sue Monk Kidd

Interview by Rebecca Bain

During the summer of 1998, Sue Monk Kidd, whose best-selling books include The Secret Life of Bees and The Mermaid Chair, found herself in a free fall toward her 50th birthday. As a consolation gift for herself and a college graduation present for her daughter, Ann Kidd Taylor, she whisked the two of them off to Greece. Thus begins Traveling With Pomegranates, a memoir of their journey together, literal and spiritual, written by both women. It was a journey that allowed them to discover and appreciate each other as adults, as well as mother and daughter.

Kidd and Taylor reconvened recently at Kidd’s home in Charleston, South Carolina, the city where both women live, to reflect on their unique joint project. According to Kidd, the most difficult aspect of the book was figuring out how to structure it.

“There was my story, there was Ann’s story, and then we had this third story which was about the two of us and our relationship. So really, there were three intersecting layers to this book,” Kidd recalls in an interview with BookPage. “It just got more and more complicated. The main thing was, we knew this had to be the narrative of our relationship. But trying to figure out how to make all these different layered stories work together and feel seamless and flow into one another was the biggest challenge.”

The title, Traveling With Pomegranates, resonates on several levels, beginning with the significance of the pomegranate. In Greek mythology, Hades, lord of the dead, kidnaps the young maiden, Persephone, and takes her with him to the underworld.

Persephone’s mother, the Earth goddess Demeter, goes into deep mourning, allowing crops to wither and turning fields and orchards into a wasteland. To save the Earth and its people, Zeus orders Persephone released, but she has eaten four pomegranate seeds while in captivity. Thus, she must return to the underworld four months of the year, while her mother again mourns her absence and the land sleeps in winter. Kidd and Taylor were going through some difficult life experiences of their own at the time of their trip to Greece. Kidd was coming to terms with aging, looking for the courage to try writing a novel (her first, which became The Secret Life of Bees), hoping to reconnect in a meaningful way with her daughter, and realizing that as a person with great drive and ambition, her life lacked the joy of just “being.”

“This reconciliation of the opposites, the reconciliation of these poles of polarity we’ve lived and experienced in life, it seems like they come home to roost as we get older,” Kidd says. “It became something about learning how to both ‘be’ and to accomplish and write andcreate and make a difference. That was a very hard reconciliation for me. It went right to my core.”

Taylor had just broken up with her fiancé and was struggling with the “what do I do with my life” issues young people often face. The shattered romance and lack of direction had put Taylor into a fairly severe depression. As she writes in the book, “Being in Greece did not resolve the big questions for me, but I did discover some things. I learned how easy it is to give up and become draperies while everyone else is dancing. I learned there is a name for how I feel—depression— and I had to face up to that. I learned that Persephone does eventually come back from the underworld and that maybe I would, too. That I could talk to my mother. That while I have no idea what to do with my life, I am not a total loser.”

Speaking from her mother’s home, Taylor says she sees special significance in the story of the pomegranate. “The pomegranate and the swallowing of the seeds, it’s such a perfect example of how a symbol can take on individual connotations. For my mom it was about Demeter’s loss. For me, it was about Persephone’s transformation and the return that she made back to the world from this naïve, untested girl to someone transformed.”

In fact, symbols and talismans form a huge subtext in the memoir. Kidd wears a small silver bee charm around her neck, hoping it will inspire her to write her novel. She buys two glass pomegranates for herself and her daughter while in Greece, to remind them of Demeter and Persephone. She carries a small statue of Mary, Jesus’ mother, on the trip. Kidd believes symbols and talismans can tell individuals a great deal about themselves. “Symbols take us to a world that is deeper than our conscious minds are usually operating with. They open the door to a world that’s often under the surface and that has larger meanings than the ones we are consciously, on the surface, dealing with on a day-today basis. So a pomegranate is not just a piece of nutritious fruit.” Laughing, she continues, “I was compelled by the pomegranate because of the myth, and when I explored that myth, I was amazed to discover a whole story about a mother’s necessary loss and finding reunion. That took me in a very moving and meaningful direction in my life. So I came through being open to symbols. They give me courage.”

It was almost 10 years after that first trip to Greece together (the book also chronicles a return trip to Greece and one to France) that Kidd and Taylor finished their memoir. The two women had kept detailed journals, which proved invaluable when writing their story. But Kidd believes memory is like a muscle—the more you flex it, the stronger it becomes.

“Memory can be very elusive, but I do think it’s almost like a living, breathing thing inside of us. It’s all there, somewhere inside. If we can learn how to tap it, it does come flooding back. ” An afterword to Traveling With Pomegranates closes with one of Kidd’s favorite quotes:

“‘We write to taste life twice,’ Anais Nin wrote, ‘in the moment and in retrospection.’ Living the experiences in this book and then writing them was a privilege and a gift, but what I savored most was doing so with Ann. Tasting life together. Twice.”

Rebecca Bain writes from her home in Nashville.

 

RELATED CONTENT

An excerpt from Traveling with Pomegranates:

Sitting on a bench in the National Archaeological Museum in Greece, I watch my twenty-two-year-old daughter, Ann, angle her camera before a marble bas-relief of Demeter and Persephone unaware of the small ballet she’s performing—her slow, precise steps forward, the tilt of her head, the way she dips to one knee as she turns her torso, leaning into the sharp afternoon light. The scene reminds of something, a memory maybe, but I can’t recall what. I only know she looks beautiful and impossibly grown, and for reasons not clear to me I’m possessed by an acute feeling of loss.

It’s the summer of 1998, a few days before my fiftieth birthday. Ann and I have been in Athens a whole twenty-seven hours, a good portion of which I’ve spent lying awake in a room in the Hotel Grande Bretagne, waiting for blessed daylight. I tell myself the bereft feeling that washed over me means nothing—I’m jet-lagged, that’s all. But that doesn’t feel particularly convincing.

I close my eyes and even in the tumult of the museum, where there seems to be ten tourists per square inch, I know the feeling is actually everything. it is the undisclosed reason I’ve come to the other side of the world with my daughter. Because in a way which makes no sense, she seems lost to me now. Because she is grown and a stranger. And I miss her almost violently.

 
Reprinted by arrangement with Viking, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., from Traveling With Pomegranates by Sue Monk Kidd and Ann Kidd Taylor. Copyright (c) 2009 by Sue Monk Kidd and Ann Kidd Taylor.

During the summer of 1998, Sue Monk Kidd, whose best-selling books include The Secret Life of Bees and The Mermaid Chair, found herself in a free fall toward her 50th birthday. As a consolation gift for herself and a…

FictionHistorical Fiction

Diana Gabaldon

Interview by Rebecca Bain

September always brings a wealth of much anticipated events: a fresh start to college classes, new shows on television, another chance for a winning gridiron season. But this year, millions of fans around the world are focused on a different September experience—they’re finally getting to scratch their “what happens next” itch with the release of An Echo in the Bone, the latest book in Diana Gabaldon’s extraordinarily popular Outlander series.

It’s Gabaldon’s seventh installment of adventures starring the feisty Englishwoman Claire Randall, who was accidentally transported 200 years back in time to 18th-century Scotland. There she met and fell in love with a kilt-wearing Highlander named Jamie Fraser, and the two soon became nearly as star-crossed a couple as Romeo & Juliet.

Speaking from her weekend home in Santa Fe, with her family’s two dachshunds (Homer and JJ) curled up at her feet, Gabaldon is more than a little gleeful at the response she’s sure the new book’s cliffhanger ending will elicit.

“This is the fault of all the people who read A Breath of Snow and Ashes [the previous book in the series] and then wrote to me in droves, whining and moaning about how they were so sad this was the last book and they would miss them so much and wouldn’t I reconsider and do another book, causing me to write back in each case, saying ‘Why do you think this is the last book? Does it say ‘thrilling conclusion’ on the back of the paperback? Of course it’s not the last book!’ Which they all to a man replied, ‘But you tied everything up so neatly.’ I said okay, nobody’s going to reach the end of this book and think that.”

In An Echo in the Bone, Claire and Jamie leave their mountaintop home in North Carolina in 1779, to return to Scotland, a perilous journey made even more difficult by the Revolutionary War raging all about them. Jamie is one of the few survivors of the Jacobite Rebellion’s brutal defeat by the British at the Battle of Culloden in 1746. Weary of war, he hopes to fight for America’s liberation from England through his printing press, now stored in Edinburgh. After all, someone must be brave enough to publish the incendiary opinions of the fiery zealots advocating independence from England. People like Thomas Paine—who turns up briefly in the book.

But inevitably Jamie and Claire, and Jamie’s nephew, Ian, are swept up in the conflicts around them, including the two battles at Fort Ticonderoga. They are finally able to leave the colonies by escorting the body of Brigadier General Simon Fraser, one of Jamie’s relatives, back to Scotland for burial.

Mission accomplished, the couple next return Ian to his parents, a vow made in Voyager, the third book in the series, when the 15-year-old boy was abducted from Scotland by pirates and taken to the West Indies. But Ian is no longer a boy; he is a man who has experienced things his parents could never imagine. When Claire gets an urgent request to return to the colonies to operate on a grandchild (Henri-Christian, offspring of Jamie’s foster son, Fergus), Ian accompanies her. Not least of his reasons to return is the love he feels for a Quaker lass named Rachel. Grave matters, however, force Jamie to remain for a time in Scotland, so the couple is separated by an ocean for the first time in many years.

The events related here barely make up a third of the book’s more than 800 pages—a length shared by all seven novels in the series. Characters crop in one book, disappear, and then return two or three books later. Someone barely mentioned in an early book may become pivotal in a later one. Likewise, small events barely touched upon previously often assume much greater significance in a later novel.

Despite the 18-year span since Outlander was published, Gabaldon seems to have little difficulty remembering and retrieving characters or events from the nearly 7,000 pages of prose she’s devoted to Jamie and Claire.

“I don’t write with an outline. In fact, I don’t write in a straight line. I write when I can see things happening. What I need on any given day to start writing is what I call a kernel. A line of dialogue, an emotional ambience, anything I can sense very concretely. I write very painstakingly in these little disconnected bits.

“But as I write these disconnected pieces, and I continue doing research and of course thinking about the book all the time, they begin to stick together. They develop little connections. And I will write something and think, ‘Oh, this explains, finally, why it is what I wrote four monthsago happened.’ Then I can see what has to happen next.” 

One of the great joys of reading Gabaldon’s Outlander series is its “history made easy” aspect. Readers not only learn of the pivotal occurrences of the time, they also painlessly absorb the smaller details of life in the 18th century. Gabaldon gleans her major events from the usual sources: history books, biographies, contemporary accounts of the period. But she has also found another source of information in her travels to historical sites.

“I go to national parks and battlefields, partly because the bookshops offer such a selection of historical esoterica. These little national park service book stores sell not only the mainstream titles that deal with that period, but also books privately published by local people who are writing their families’ memoirs or who have great-great grandfather’s account of that particular battle which they’ve chosen to publish. Or an amateur botanist who’s written a treatise on all the local plants which grow or have grown around this particular spot. You can pick up these really weird little things that you won’t find anywhere else.”

She’s also on the lookout for any particularly fascinating quirks sported by the historical characters she brings into each novel. An example is the daily nude “airing of the skin” taken by Benjamin Franklin in An Echo in the Bone.

“That was one of those little kernels that I ran across in my research, and I said, ‘Oh, I have to use that.’ My imagination isn’t good enough to make up something that wonderful.”

One of the most popular storylines in Gabaldon’s series revolves around Jamie’s and Claire’s daughter, Brianna, her husband, Roger, and their two children, Jem and Amanda. Brianna followed her mother back to 18th-century America in an attempt to save her parents’ lives. Roger followed Brianna; they married, and might have stayed in the past until a health issue with their newborn daughter necessitated a return to the 20th century. Gabaldon continues to weave their now 1980s story around the events taking place in the late 1770s in An Echo in the Bone. One reason, she says, she took them ‘back to the future’ was to more fully illuminate what that past/present journey had meant to each.

“It was very interesting, both Roger and Brianna had some difficulty adapting to the past. So I was thinking, having struggled so hard to fit in to the 18th century, if they’re not in the 18th century anymore, can they still use those skills, or will it be all different? As to Roger, he actually found what he thought was his destiny in the 18th century. And so now he has the carpet yanked out from under him yet again, how’s he gonna deal with that? And if I’d left him in the 18th century, he would always, in some extent, be in Jamie’s shadow. I want to see if he can find himself spiritually in this new life as well as he did in the old one.”

Gabaldon says that by the time she was eight years old, she knew she wanted to be a writer. However, her father had different ideas.

“I did come from a very conservative family background, and my father was fond of saying to me, “Well, you’re such a poor judge of character you’re bound to marry some bum, so be sure you get a good education so you can support your children.”

A bachelor’s degree in zoology, a master’s in marine biology and a Ph.D. in ecology fulfilled her father’s edict, but Gabaldon still had the desire to write. She began working on what would become Outlander as a literary exercise, to improve her skills. She posted some of it online and the response to what she’d written was so positive, she contacted an agent. The book sold in three days, and her literary career was launched.

Now, 18 years later, with over 17 million books in print, there’s no doubt that Diana Gabaldon was destined to be a writer. As she’s said, she has no plans to wrap up the adventures of Jamie and Claire anytime soon, as the “now what happens?!” ending to An Echo in the Bone clearly demonstrates. Nor are her legions of fans likely to let her. History, both on and off the page, has proven that regardless of how many ‘loose ends’ she’s tied up, Gabaldon always leaves them wanting more.

Rebecca Bain lives in Nashville.

Author photo © Jennifer Watkins

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Memoir

Elizabeth Gilbert

Interview by Rebecca Bain

During the three years since the publication of Elizabeth Gilbert’s memoir Eat, Pray, Love, more than six million readers around the world have found resonance in her chronicle of personal discovery. This intensely driven writer learned to live in the moment in Italy (Eat), explored her spiritual self in India (Pray) and found her soul mate in Felipe, a Brazilian living in Bali (Love). The two planned to spend the rest of their lives together, but previous bad marriages made them determined to skip actual matrimony. Fate is capricious, however, and it intervened in 2006; because Felipe’s visits to the U.S. had been too frequent, he was banned from entering the country. If Felipe was ever to return, it could only be as Gilbert’s husband. This unexpected turn of events was the impetus for Gilbert’s new memoir, Committed.

“I was working on a novel about the Amazons,” says Gilbert, who was shocked by the sudden urgency of marriage. “I was well into its research and didn’t have any intention of writing another memoir. But when this came up, my spirits were so viral. I did not want to enter this union feeling about [marriage] the way I felt about it. I loved this guy way too much to enter into something so serious with such a profound sense of dread. Really, the most efficient way that I know to work through something is to write about it. And then, pretty quickly, as soon as the idea came to me, I realized this is a very interesting topic.”

“I left with a new respect for marriage, simply for no other reason than for its almost Darwinian survival.”

Which is why Committed is not only a memoir, it’s also a history of marriage through the ages and a social commentary on the institution. Gilbert even harks back to Plato’s Symposium and its discussion of soul mates: “Once upon a time . . . we humans did not look the way we look today. Instead, we each had two heads and four legs and four arms—a perfect melding, in other words, of two people joined together, seamlessly united into one being. . . . Since we each had the perfect partner sewn into the very fabric of our being, we were all happy.”

But in our happiness we neglected the gods, so Zeus punished mankind by tearing us apart, forcing us to spend the rest of our lives looking for the vanished half, our other soul. “This is the singular fantasy of human intimacy: that one plus one will somehow, someday, equal one,” Gilbert writes.

Speaking from the home she and Felipe now share in Frenchtown, New Jersey (dishes clattering in the sink and her dog barking occasionally), Gilbert elaborates on Plato’s concept.

“It is the most beautifully put metaphor. That along with Schopenhauer’s porcupine tells you pretty much all you need to know about intimacy. You just put those two things together, the urge to merge combined with the reality of how prickly it almost always is, negotiating your space versus somebody else’s space.”

Gilbert muses on the reasons people marry, many of which in this country, she believes, have nothing to do with true commitment.

It’s important that “we know the difference between the desire to get married and the desire to have a really great party,” she says with a laugh. “Especially when we are young, those two things can blur and you spend a great deal more time planning the party than you do planning the marriage.”

She contrasts this with a couple she knew growing up, the Websters, who married because he, as a farmer, needed a wife and she, as a woman, needed a provider. Love, passionate or otherwise, had nothing to do with the decision. For years they worked their farm, raised their family, shared good times and bad. When her health declined, Mr. Webster took over care of his wife, bathing her, feeding her, seeing to her needs until her death—not the actions of a person devoid of love for his spouse.

“We, having elevated the idea of romance and infatuation to such a high state, feel like the happiest day of your life should be the day you get married. That in itself should be the pinnacle. What the Websters probably knew, even to such an extent that they certainly never defined it, never even had to say it, because they just knew it, was that where a marriage begins is not nearly as important as where it ends up. You can begin from a place of great pragmatism and then over the years grow into a very deep, wordless affection and loyalty, which I found very moving to remember.”

Thinking about the Websters, Gilbert adds, “Felipe has this very specific word called bate pape that means ‘chit chat.’ It’s his favorite word for what the whole purpose of intimacy is. He said when he was a kid, his favorite memories of childhood were lying in bed, listening to his parents chit chat, make bate pape. And that’s where their intimacy was based. It wasn’t necessarily in high-flung sexual passion, although it might have been at one time. It was just about having someone to sit with at the breakfast table and have a cup of coffee with and talk about nothing and everything. And that’s a stubborn, consistent human need.”

 

Gilbert’s venture into the historical and social implications of marriage in Committed, especially as it pertains to women, ranges far and wide, from the 11th century, when ideas about marriage were more liberal than today, to modern Europe, where there is far less emphasis on matrimony than in America. It all makes for interesting and informative reading.

Readers who are hoping for more memoir, less research, might be disappointed in this new book. But it accomplishes what Gilbert set out to do—to bring peace to her decision to marry Felipe.

“I certainly went in with a great deal of aversion and hostility to this institution and I left with a new respect for marriage, simply for no other reason than for its almost Darwinian survival—the fact that this thing endures. Anything that lasts that long, including cockroaches and crocodiles, you have to admire. There’s something kind of remarkable about that. What could be called a kind of fusty, decrepit old institution continues to reinvent itself and re-evolve with every century, every generation,” Gilbert says.

“So instead of feeling like I’m being stamped into this form that doesn’t suit me, I can feel like I’m part of a very long story that’s always being rewritten. And now I have the rewriting of that tale.”

Rebecca Bain is a freelance writer and editor in Nashville.

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Memoir

Zoe FitzGerald Carter

Interview by Rebecca Bain

Attitudes toward assisted suicide for the terminally ill are seldom lukewarm—people either believe strongly that this course of action should be sanctioned or, just as strongly, that no one has the right to end another’s life, even for medical reasons and at that person’s request. Zoe FitzGerald Carter firmly believed in an individual’s right to take this difficult step until her own mother decided it was time to die. The anguish Carter felt, her conflicting emotions and the upheaval it caused in her family are painstakingly chronicled in her first book, a memoir titled Imperfect Endings: A Daughter’s Tale of Life and Death.

“It really was an incredibly difficult year,” says Carter, speaking from the home in Berkeley, California, that she shares with her husband and their two daughters. “I felt like my life had been derailed, and it was death and dying 24 hours a day. I started feeling very isolated from my husband and children because I felt like the predominant emotional event in my life was not with them. It was with this maddening, endless, difficult discussion with my mother which at some point I realized was only going to end when she died.”

There was never any doubt about whether Carter’s mother was terminally ill. Twenty years earlier, she had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s, and she was already dependent on around-the-clock assistance for the smallest of tasks. It was obvious that she would soon be unable to get out of bed at all. Her pain was increasingly resistant to drugs. So why did Carter refuse to go along with her mother’s decision?

“I live in Berkeley, and there are people who’ve read this book and they say, what was your problem? Why didn’t you just help her kill herself? You should have helped her go, it was what she wanted. And I don’t know if it’s because they haven’t experienced anything like this or it’s all about politics and assisted suicide should be legal, end of story. I think it’s probably because people have this idea—oh yeah, if I get sick, take me out back and shoot me. But I think when they get down to it, it’s a lot more complicated than that.”

It certainly proved complicated for Carter and her two sisters. While none of them wanted their mother to cease to be a living, breathing part of their lives, their responses to her decision to end her life were quite different. Her sister Hannah became Carter’s lifeline, the only person who shared her conflicting emotions. Katherine, the oldest sister, basically checked out of the whole scenario, saying their mother’s decision to die, her constant shifting of her “death date,” her demands that her daughters be by her side when she died, were all a shameless bid for attention—which Katherine refused to give her. It was important to Carter that this division among the sisters be chronicled in Imperfect Endings.

“I do think when a parent dies that what happens among the siblings, if there are siblings, is a really big part of the story: who shows up, who doesn’t show up, the different ways that they show up. The whole histories that we have in our families oftentimes emerge and intensify, and alliances and animosities and old regrets get reactivated and ratcheted up in these situations.”

Part of the impact of Carter’s book comes from her juxtaposition of chapters; she weaves her past into her memoir, giving the reader a more satisfying context to use as a contrast with the present. It becomes a reminder that an imperfect childhood often becomes irrelevant when a parent is dying. Musing on why this was important for her to bring out in her book, Carter says a relationship with a dying family member differs from any that has preceded it.

“When you’re with somebody who’s dying, you really do love them in this very pure way. You just love them and you’re there for them. It’s very healing. A lot of my anger and pain around my mother’s decision really dropped away at the end.”

Despite the gravity of the subject matter, there are sections of Imperfect Endings that are quite funny. The visit from the “Exit Guide” from the Hemlock Society is one such example: Carter’s snobbish mother cannot bring herself to allow this man to orchestrate her demise, not because she is bothered by “getting gassed,” but because he’s a good ol’ boy from Tulsa named Bud. This is, as Carter writes, a serious social handicap: “My mother is a solid Washington Democrat, a liberal even, but she’s also a cultural and intellectual snob, and this man is definitely not a member of the tribe.”

In the end, Carter’s mother (at the suggestion of her doctor) decides to refuse all food and water until her body ceases to function. It is this action that sways Carter to accept her mother’s choice of death and brings her to her mother’s bedside for the final time.

“I mean she didn’t eat, day after day after day. This was not a ‘dark night of the soul’ kind of moment where she took a bunch of pills and killed herself. This was something she talked about and thought about for a year and then persisted in, day after day at the end. . . . I saw her absolute commitment and unblinking strength during that fasting time.”

One cannot help but wonder, with all Carter went through, whether she would ever put her own family through such an ordeal. She says yes, but only if her daughters agreed that it was the right thing to do and were comfortable with the decision.

“I do believe assisted suicide should be legal, but you have to recognize that nobody wants to do it. Nobody wants to be in a place where they feel that is the best option. It’s not easy. And there is a price you pay for it. I do feel like there’s a price my sisters and I paid emotionally and psychologically by participating in my mother’s death. I think it’s a tricky issue.”

But, as Carter says, it was a privilege to be by her mother’s side when she ended her years of pain, although it’s not a topic she brings up at cocktail parties or the school’s PTO.

“People are uncomfortable talking about death. People think it’s all just a big downer, and it’s scary and awful. I don’t think it’s all just scary and awful. I think there’s something very life-affirming about going through a death with somebody. There’s nothing like death to remind you of one of the most profound things about life, which is that it doesn’t go on forever. That sense of gratitude for being alive and awareness of the gift of life is a wonderful thing to experience.”

Rebecca Bain is a writer in Nashville.

Attitudes toward assisted suicide for the terminally ill are seldom lukewarm—people either believe strongly that this course of action should be sanctioned or, just as strongly, that no one has the right to end another’s life, even for medical reasons and at that person’s request.…

Memoir

Annie Proulx

Interview by Rebecca Bain
Annie Proulx is a bit of a nomad. The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Shipping News and “Brokeback Mountain” moved 20 times as a child, and she’s kept the habit alive as an adult. A constant series of unsatisfactory houses—too big, too small, no bookcases—made her long for a home that reflected who she is as a woman and a writer.

Proulx almost has that ideal home on 640 acres in Wyoming, a landscape she writes about in her first nonfiction book in two decades. Her house and her book are called Bird Cloud.

Bird Cloud is many things: part memoir, part social history, part nature observations, with a little archeology tossed into the mix as well. However, it’s not exactly the book Proulx was planning to write.

“I hadn’t planned to write a memoir. What I thought I was going to be writing about were the problems and solutions in constructing my house because I find that sort of thing interesting. And there was a lot more of that in the book before my editor decided maybe there shouldn’t be,” Proulx says by phone from New Mexico. Laughing, she adds, “So a lot of that went out the window. And it gradually, by itself, turned into a memoir because life is holistic, not compartmented.”

The problems with the house began long before Proulx broke ground. She had been looking for land—beautiful, wild land—for some time when she found a former nature preserve by the North Platte River. But acquiring it proved a touch dicey, as she explains:

“I didn’t think we were going to get the land when we were bickering and dickering back and forth with the Nature Conservancy, from whom I bought it. And one day I was driving from the east to the west; the weather comes out of the west. And I was living on the other side of the Medicine Bowl Range at the time. And as I turned glumly into the driveway, I glanced up at the sky and there was this enormous, enormous bird-shaped cloud. . . . And I thought, oh, that’s cool. It must be a sign that I’m going to get the place, and it should be called Bird Cloud.”

Anyone familiar with Proulx’s work knows the physical settings of her fiction are often love poems to the land itself. Naturally she wanted the house she built on her Wyoming prairie, with its towering cliffs and gorgeous wetlands, to reflect that. As she writes in Bird Cloud, “Because place is such a major part of my writing and life, I thought it important that Bird Cloud breathe in and out of the landscape. A house subject not only to the wind, but to the drowning shadows that submerge it every evening and the sharp slice of sunlight at the eastern end of the cliff.”

And did her architect design such a wonder for her?

“Indeed he did! I love the place,” she says. “It’s incredibly beautiful, it is calming, it’s a fine place to work, all my books are there. The problem is, I can’t be there in the winter.”

All it took was one winter. Wyoming’s 80-90-mph winds pack the heavy snows into something resembling concrete. The stuff can’t be shoveled—it has to be poked with sharp stakes in an effort to break it up. Plus, Proulx has a half-mile-long driveway. When the snow gets packed like that, snowplows are useless. Proulx realized her house was only perfect about eight or nine months of the year—the other months she’d be trapped inside, unable to leave her beautiful prison. Wonderful as Bird Cloud is, she still hasn’t achieved a perfect house she can live in all year long.

“I was having exactly this conversation with my middle son and his girlfriend yesterday. There’s always a trade-off. There’s always something that’s awful and wonderful about the place. When we look at it, we usually see the wonderful things and not the awful things. It’s when we start living in it that the awful things become quite upfront.”

When the weather begins to worsen in Wyoming, she relocates to New Mexico, where she spends the winters. That’s why she was in Albuquerque when our conversation took place.

Proulx’s new book isn’t just about her house or her life in Wyoming, fascinating as that is. She also shares the entertaining histories of some of the more colorful characters who lived there in the 19th century (and some equally colorful ones who live there now), her theories on the extinction of the woolly mammoths and her lyrical observations on the flora and fauna. She’s got a rich source of material: There are pelicans, bald eagles, golden eagles, great blue herons, ravens, scores of bluebirds, harriers, kestrels, elk, deer and a dozen antelope.

“That’s been one of the great pleasures of the place, to have watched the private lives of all the local birds. They recognize me and they recognize the James Gang who worked on the house. But when strangers come, they get all agitated,” Proulx says.

In addition to the hardcover edition, Bird Cloud is also being released in audio format. When asked if she’s the one reading it, Proulx crisply replies, “Heavens, no! I’m far too busy for that. I did read the introduction for the audiobook, but I left the rest of the book to someone else. I don’t have time for it.”

Does that mean she has another project in the works? Proulx says yes, but offers no details. Just like the men of the Old West she writes about in Bird Cloud, she likes to hold her cards close to her chest until she’s ready to lay ’em down.

Annie Proulx is a bit of a nomad. The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Shipping News and “Brokeback Mountain” moved 20 times as a child, and she’s kept the habit alive as an adult. A constant series of unsatisfactory houses—too big, too small, no bookcases—made her long…

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