Oh! I get to interview a literary heroine! I've loved everything that Julia Glass has written, from her National Book Award winning Three Junes, followed by The Whole World Over, I See You Everywhere, The Widower's Tale, and And the Dark Sacred Night. Her newest, A House Among the Trees obsessed me and was one of those books I did not stop reading. About fame and love and family, A House Among the Trees is so alive, that it practically breathes.
What surprised--and delighted me--so much about this interview is how accessible Julia is, and how very funny! Thank you, thank you, Julia for letting me pester you with questions and for making this one of the most fun interviews, ever.
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A House Among the Trees explores celebrity with
unusual finesse. Did you ever expect your own fame? How has it (or hasn’t it)
changed you?
To the extent that I've ever been "famous," it's
nowhere on the scale of my characters Mort Lear--a genuinely iconic author
based loosely on Maurice Sendak--or Nicholas Greene, a newly minted movie star
whose face is, as my heroine Tommy Daulair observes, "on the racks at the
CVS." For one thing, none of my readers are ever likely to recognize me
walking down the street or even walking into a bookstore. (As I write this, I'm
seated on a plane next to a woman who told me she's a librarian, then dove into
her book. Even if I told her my name, I doubt she'd recognize it.) Another of
my characters in A House Among the Trees remarks that being
"secretly famous" is the best kind of famous there is. In the wake of
my winning the National Book Award, back when I lived in New York's West
Village, that's how I felt. Someone could be reading Three Junes across
from me on the subway but would have no idea the author sat within arm's reach.
That's a delightful experience. So I would answer this question by saying that
if anything changed me at that pivotal point in my life--not that I was going
to change much at age 46!--it was success, not fame. It gave me two precious
gifts: First, thanks to increased royalties, it bought me more time to devote
to writing fiction, rather than the assortment of freelance jobs that kept me
afloat over the previous two decades; second, it gave me a moment in the
limelight that enabled me to meet other writers, including many I revere and
admire, some of whom I now count as friends. So, after years of working in
solitude, I finally found my tribe. For the first time, I got to talk shop! And
I found out something quite reassuring: All good writers are, at some level,
nerds.
Like your other novels, A House Among the Trees is about family dynamics. I know I write
about family because my own was so fractured, but what is it about this unit
that draws you?
On the whole, both the family I was born into and the family
I've made are your average crazy-quilt of blessings and tragedy, of love and
emotional wounds, loyalties and betrayals. The same is generally true of the
families I bring to imaginary existence in my novels. My characters may suffer
grievous losses, but they are all relatively privileged, like me. So why is
family life at the core of my work? Because I have a fundamental belief that
whatever human beings witness and learn in the context of family will greatly
determine the way they grow up and influence the world around them. (I love
that haunting song in Sondheim's Into the Woods, "Children Will
Listen." It's both tender and terrifying.) Not just every artist but every
world leader will always carry, deep within, the child born to his or her
parents in a particular place and time. Whether we honor our parents or rebel
against them, whether we know them for half a century or were abandoned by them
at birth, their shadows loom large. (Ignore those shadows at your peril!) I'm
also fascinated and moved by the many "unconventional" ways in which
people form families, whether out of necessity or choice. Such families make
their way into my stories not through any political agenda but because I want
to write about how resilient and adaptive people are, how decent people always
try to fix what's broken--our hearts included. Sometimes we succeed, sometimes
we don't. Sometimes even the smartest people make foolish choices. How we deal
with the consequences (or don't) is what makes for a riveting tale. In A
House Among the Trees, the initial challenge for all my characters is how
to deal with the highly unanticipated final wishes of a great artist with a
fragile ego. That challenge leads all of them down unexpected alleys into
their past lives and the choices that
have brought them to this crucial moment.
I love the way you jump both time and characters. How did you keep everything mapped out, or
don’t you map out at all? I’m also curious about how you approach each new
novel. Do you feel as if you are starting all over again? Or are you building
on what has come before?
The way I move through time in my novels--which are dense
with flashbacks (even flashbacks within flashbacks!) is entirely organic.
Although I revise obsessively--my Achilles heel is overwriting, so I have to do
a lot of paring down--rarely do I radically restructure the chronological
rhythms that guided me instinctively at the start. Nor do I cut and paste. And I definitely do
not map out a novel in advance; I'd make a terrible general! E. L. Doctorow
said something about writing as if he were taking a long journey by car in the
dark and could see only the road within the range of the headlights . . . yet
had faith it would take him to his destination. What's good about this approach
is that my characters can surprise me. It's much easier to let a character take
on a greater role, or make an unanticipated choice, if there's no road map to
follow. What's not so good is that I sometimes write myself into cul-de-sacs;
backing out can be a challenge (I can almost hear that abrasive beep-beep-beep
of construction vehicles in reverse.)
As for how it feels to start a new novel, sometimes I know
I'll be bringing back a character or two from a previous book, yet even when
I'm certain that I'm starting entirely anew, once in a while a character I
think I've left behind for good comes knocking. Everything, really, is about
the characters. Plot, in my novels, emerges entirely from the nature of their
relationships, their choices, and the consequences of their actions. At the
outset of a novel, I'm always worried that "nothing will happen."
I’m obsessed with the question, How well do we know the
ones we love? It’s not just celebrities who have both a public and a private
side. Can you talk about this, please?
Well, guess what? I'm obsessed with that question, too! I am
a tremendously nosy person, by the way, and yet I'm fully aware that I will
never know "the all of it" even about my husband, whom I've known for
33 years. I know even less about my parents--and increasingly less about my
children as they grow into adulthood. (I can almost feel the watertight
chambers forming in my 21-year-old son's psyche as he forges his independence;
it's a little sad, but it's also right.) I'm also obsessed with how, in any
given family, each member--even among siblings who feel close to one
another--will have dramatically different perceptions of their parents, their
upbringing, the significant events and memories of their early lives. This was
the impetus behind my creation of the three McLeod brothers in Three Junes.
Two years ago, while I was in the middle of writing A House Among the Trees,
my father died. He saved EVERYTHING, and when I discovered an old candy box
filled with diaristic notes and letters from his late teens and early twenties,
it was like meeting another man: my dad before he met my mom, my dad before he
was a dad! I also found boxes of photos he'd taken as a college undergraduate.
I had the painful wish that I'd seen these papers and artifacts--many of them
lovely in their revelations--before he died and that we could have talked about
them. But you know what? I have a feeling he wouldn't have been comfortable
with that. I do wonder, however, if he ever imagined my finding them after his
death.
I loved how your novel probed just what it means to be
gifted, and what it means not to be. At one point, a character says that being
secretly famous is the best kind of famous to be. I love that line. Do you feel
that fame interrupts great art?
Oh, so you noticed
that "secretly famous" line! You know, let me add to what I said
above that I think many people would love to know what it feels like to be
revered, even adored by strangers (as both the author Mort Lear and the film
star Nick Greene are in my novel). Who wouldn't love to turn appreciative heads
or get a standing ovation? I have to confess that I had fun imagining what it
would feel like to become suddenly famous--really famous--in creating
the character Nicholas Greene, who lucks into a role that wins him every screen
award there is. (Why do I feel guilty when writing is fun?!) But yes, I do
think that boldface, magazine-cover fame can threaten the making of great
art--mainly because it would have to force any genuinely introspective artist
to question why his or her art has been "chosen." (Sidebar: Not all
brilliant artists are introspective.) And if you are fortunate enough to
stand on the pinnacle of a mountain, the view may be spectacular, but your perch
is slippery and the only direction from there is back down. Artists who can
both maintain and manage the pressure of that stature over decades are few and
far between, I think. Some of those who succeed do so in part thanks to a
stable, firmly rooted relationship in their lives. Others create a protective
public illusion. (Read Richard Russo's fine new collection, Trajectory,
for a chilling story involving characters clearly based on Robert Redford and
Paul Newman, both of whom Russo has worked with and known.)
A House Among
the Trees is, in part, a cautionary tale about creativity, fame, and ego.
The relationship that the late Mort Lear held dearest (while taking it for
granted) is the one he had with his quietly devoted assistant, Tommy Daulair,
the novel's main protagonist--and of course she is left to weigh the costs of
having allowed this man to keep her so close for the prime years of her
adulthood. Though I never wrote from Lear's point of view, I began to realize
that Tommy was effectively his emotional ballast--yet even so, she could not
save him from the consequences of his own pride.
What’s obsessing you now and why?
Whether I'm going to take up the novel I abandoned midstream
to write A House Among the Trees instead. As a writer, I've always been
a serial monogamist, working on one book and one book only until it's done.
This time, for the first time, I stepped out on a novel when I was 200 pages
in; it felt like I was having an affair! Whether those characters (one of whom
my readers know from The Widower's Tale) will forgive me and take me
back is the burning question in my creative life at the moment.
What question should I have asked that I didn’t? [I think I wrote enough!!]
What question should I have asked that I didn’t? [I think I wrote enough!!]
1 comment:
I love everything about this interview. Just glorious.
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