Family secrets, obsessions (my middle name), and lost love. The Precious One, the latest stunner from Marisa de los Santos is already racking up raves. (Booklist, in a starred review, called it "Emotionally potent, painfully honest, and delightfully funny.") Marisa began as a poet (From The Bones Out), and is the author of the novels Love Walked in, Belong To Me and Falling Together. I'm so delighted to have her here. Thank you, Marisa!
You write so beautifully about families--in all your books--that I wanted to ask you, what is it about families that is so compelling to you? And why do you think that when women write about families, it is often called “domestic drama,” but when men do it, they are Jonathan Franzen?
Thank you, Caroline! That means the world,
especially coming from you; I return the compliment over and over. You know, I
think of myself as a person with a lot of interests, but nothing fascinates me
as much as human interaction: conversation, touches, looks, inside jokes, what
people say to each other, what they withhold, the little cruelties, the moments
of wild generosity and love, the lies they tell and why. I’m particularly
fascinated by the why of it all. And
family interaction is human interaction turned to full volume. There’s so much
at stake. There’s so much complicated, tangled history behind every word and
gesture. People in families can be breathtakingly kind to each other and also
breathtakingly awful, sometimes in the same day. In my experience, the stories
that arise from these relationships are almost always strange and funny and
moving and full of twists.
As for the “domestic drama” thing, well, I have
tried to let go of my anger about it and just write my books, but if I’m
honest, it bothers me. For one thing, why should the domestic sphere, the
sphere nearly all of us, female and male, spend so much of our time in, be trivialized
or branded as saccharine or quiet or bland? Anyone who has lived in a
neighborhood or in a family knows that as much high drama, tragedy, violence,
heroism can take place inside a house as on the Australian outback or Wall
Street or anywhere. And why do women always have to be seen through the lens of
our gender? Why “women’s fiction” when men just write “fiction”? So maddening. So
so so maddening.
I loved that this book is told in the voices of
the two sisters. How difficult was it to give each a unique voice?
All of my books are told from multiple
perspectives, but this is the first with more than one first-person voice, and
I was pretty nervous about it. In the end, though, it wasn’t as hard as I thought
it would be. I lived with the Taisy and Willow inside my head for a very long
time—months and months—before I wrote a single word. So by the time I had to
speak in their voices, I knew them both incredibly well. I knew all kinds of
details about them that don’t appear in the book, the tiny things that add up
to individual personality, to character, and their voices just rose naturally
out of that intimacy.
What I loved most in The Precious Ones was the
dynamic between the sisters, how they misread each other, and came to
reconfigure their relationship. When you started writing, what did you know
about their relationship? What surprised you about it as you continued to
write?
I knew that they were strangers, that every
single thing they thought they knew about each other was either something
someone had told them or was a product of their own imaginations. And I knew
that they were threatened by each other, Taisy because she’s lived her life
wanting her father’s love and never getting it and Willow because she’s gotten
so much of it that she cannot imagine a world in which she isn’t the absolute
and only center of his life. What I didn’t expect was that Taisy would feel an
odd and immediate tenderness toward Willow, and I don’t think Taisy expected it
either! Once that happened, the surge of tender protectiveness, there was no
going back from it. It was a kind of seismic shift. Yes, she was jealous and
sometimes petty, but her immediate empathy for Willow caused me to shift gears
and rethink all of Taisy’s behavior and emotions from that point on. It happens
all the time, doesn’t it? You think you’ve got it figured out and then your
characters throw you for a loop and you have to re-envision the rest of the
book!
For most writers I know, every book presents a
new challenge. The writing process is almost never the same. How did that process
differ for you in writing The Precious Ones?
Fewer than 100 pages into the book, I found
myself in an odd position, not so much blocked as enervated. I’d lost my joy in
the process and also had sort of lost my nerve, neither of which had ever happened
before. This made me crazy because I believed in the story and the characters
wholeheartedly; I wanted to write the book, yet I was feeling tired and bogged
down. As this was going on, my husband and I started to casually discuss what
we’d write if we ever wrote a book together, just toying with the idea in our
spare time, and eventually it became very clear that we had a book to write, so
we put together a proposal and a couple of sample chapters, and—boom—we sold
it. And suddenly, we were on a very tight deadline. Because it was a co-written
book, with each of writing alternating chapters in alternating voices, and
because it was a pretty complicated plot, the first thing we did was put
together a highly detailed, chapter by chapter outline, something I had never
tried before. Unexpectedly, I loved writing with an outline, and I had so much
fun doing that book with David. I remembered all the things I had always loved
about writing. Once we were finished, I went back to THE PRECIOUS ONE with
renewed energy and passion and with
my new devotion to outlining, and I wrote like a person on fire. It was a good
thing, too, because I hadn’t left myself much time to finish!
What’s obsessing you now and why?
I’m starting a new book, and it’s no exaggeration
to say that I am giddy with excitement about it. It continues with some of the
characters from my first two books, LOVE WALKED IN and BELONG TO ME, and
particularly focuses on Clare Hobbes, who is all grown up and has just
graduated from college. Cornelia, Teo, Dev, Viviana—they’re all in there—and I
am cherishing being in their company again. I’d hoped for a long time that it
would happen, but you just never know. Half the book is in Clare’s voice in the
present, and half is set in the 1950s, so I’m just beginning to be consumed
with researching that decade.
What questions didn’t I ask that I should have?
Here’s the big, burning, all-important question:
So, Marisa, are your dogs in THE PRECIOUS ONE?
Why, yes, Caroline, yes they are! This is my first book with dogs in it—I didn’t have
dogs while I was writing the others—and while their names have been changed
(from Finn and Huxley to Roo and Pidwit), they are my own sweet Yorkies, from
their ears to their tick-tocking tails. People always ask if my characters are
based on real people and the answer has always been no—until now. Since most of
the book was written with Huxley on my lap and Finny in his little bed next to
my desk, it seemed only fair to put them in the book!
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