Jessica Treadway draws her characters into an impossible knot and then expertly teases it apart. Kept me up half the night." Ann Patchett
Jessica Treadway is phenomenal. Her story collection Please Come Back to me received the Flannery O'Connor Award for Best Short Fiction. She is also the author of Absent Without Leave and Give You Peace. I am so thrilled to have her here. Thank you so much, Jessica!
I always want to know, “Why this novel? Why now?” What sparked the writing?
Many years ago, I wrote two different
fragments — beginnings of something — and when I rediscovered them, it occurred
to me that they might work together. One was a scene based on a horrible event
that happened to a family I knew — the parents and three children all went out
ice skating, and the youngest, a nine-year-old girl, fell through the ice. They
all rushed to help her and also fell under, and she slipped away from them,
beneath the ice, and drowned. The others survived, but I was haunted by
imagining what they would remember of that event, and how it would affect them.
The other fragment was about a child who saw Michelangelo's Pieta at the 1964
World's Fair in New York, then was also in the Vatican on the day in 1972 when
the sculpture was attacked by a man with a hammer. I wanted that character to
grow up to be an artist and art teacher. In this novel, I've changed the
accidental drowning to a murder near a frozen pond, and because of historical
timing, I couldn't work the Pieta piece in (I'll use it somewhere else,
someday!), though the murdered girl's mother is an artist and an art teacher.
I loved Lacy Eye, and I loved the even tighter suspense in How Will I Know You?
So, if you had to, what would you say the lessons were that you learned in
writing Lacy Eye and applied to this new novel? Or do you feel that every novel
is starting from scratch? Were there risks that you took?
Thank you, Caroline — that's a true
compliment coming from you. They really were very different novels to write,
for many reasons. In Lacy Eye, I was exploring the question of how much if
anything the narrator might be hiding from herself, whereas How Will I Know
You? contains an actual mystery about who murdered Joy. The information isn't
hidden, but, rather, unknown. In that sense, it's a whodunit, but I hope it's
also more than that because I was most interested in examining the effect of
her death — and her manner of death -- on selected people around her,
especially in the context of the search for her killer.
As for risks, I thought it was a
pretty big one to tell the story from multiple points of view, which I've never
done before. I worried that people would prefer one or two characters'
perspectives over the others, and wish they could be back with those when I
made a detour to the ones they didn't care for so much. I'm sure that will
happen with some readers. But even in the time since I began this novel, I've
noticed many other novels being written now using the same structure, so I take
heart from that and hope that enough readers will like alternating whose mind
they spend time in, throughout the book.
It also felt risky to have one of
the point-of-view characters be a black man; his is the first-person narration,
at that, while the others are third-person. It would be dishonest to say I
didn't feel nervous about this, considering the current sensitivity about
cultural appropriation and who can tell what story. But I've felt similar
nervousness when writing from a maternal point of view, when I am not a mother
myself. And in fact, Martin's voice — and an interior life for him -- came more
easily to me than the interior life of the white male character. He appeared to
me as a black character, and it would have been more wrong of me, I believe, to
reject that instinct out of fear about what someone else might think or say. I
know that however well or poorly I did it, I rendered him in good faith (as I
do with all my characters), and the question of good faith is a primary factor
in how I judge myself and others.
I loved that we get the story from four perspectives, because it’s been proven
that four people can see the same thing and come up with different versions of
what happened—depending on who they are. Was it hard to juggle all these
perspectives?
It was actually easier than I
thought it would be, probably because the four are all so different from one
another. There are two male and two female point-of-view characters, and they
all had distinctly different relationships to Joy, except for Tom, who doesn't
know her before he becomes involved in the investigation. Other than him, we
have her mother, her best friend, and the man arrested for her killing —
Martin, who had been her mother's lover for a time.
Since this book is about secrets, I’m wondering if it has impacted the way you
handle what to divulge and what to keep hidden?
I'm assuming you mean in terms of
the stories I write, and not my personal life (in which I still try to keep
hidden the things I always did). :) As for stories, I'm always interested
in how much a writer tells up front, because it clues the reader in as to what
the novel will be about. In my first novel, 15 years ago (And Give You Peace),
I made the deliberate decision to reveal in the early pages that two characters
had died, and how, because my story was about one of the surviving family
members trying to piece together the why.
But in How Will I Know You?, it was
important to have the murder unsolved because I needed the tension in the small
town, and among the characters who live in it. Their suspicions about who
killed Joy, and the actions they take because of those suspicions, are central
to who they are. And to the question of how well they know the people around
them, even in the most intimate relationships.
What’s obsessing you now and why?
As you know, I received your
questions before the election, and the election was obsessing me then.
Answering them afterward, the election is still obsessing me, as it is so many
of us. If you mean in terms of things literary, I'm having fun working on
something that I have no plan for — I'm "following a whisper," to use
Jayne Anne Phillips' phrase about how she writes.
What question didn’t I ask that I should have.
I don't know what the question
would be (!), but the answer is that I've been thinking a lot about the
"popular vs. literary fiction" debate, both in terms of my own
writing and the novels and stories I read. One of my aims in writing both How
Will I Know You? and Lacy Eye was to do my best to write book that
inhabited both realms — that is, well-crafted prose about full characters
acting to propel a plot. As strange as it might sound, plot was something I've
really only thought about with these last two novels; developing characters,
and evocation of atmosphere, comes more naturally to me. I don't know how well
I ultimately succeeded, but I did have to smile when I was speaking with my
agent shortly after submitting the manuscript of How Will I Know You? , and she
said, "I'm tempted to tell you, Less plot, please." I guess I will
continue to aim for a happy medium.
