The New York Times calls her “the talk of librarian circles.” Readers are devoted to her book recommendation. Book Lust was a 2003 bestseller and she even has a Librarian Action Figure modeled in her likeness! She's been a bookseller, librarian and developed "If All of Seattle Read the Same Book," which is now across the country. She has a monthly TV program, Book Lust with Nancy Pearl on the Seattle Channel, talks up reads on National Public Radio’s “Morning Edition” and NPR affiliate stations KUOW in Seattle and KWGS in Tulsa.
In 2004, Pearl became the 50th winner of the Women’s National Book Association Award for her extraordinary contribution to the world of books. Her novel George & Lizzie is sublimely smart, funny and unforgettable, about secrets and the winding path to love, and Nancy has been talking about it and reading about it to standing room only crowds.
And I want to say, she's funny, warm, supportive gracious--and she has GREAT taste in clothes, too. Thank you, Nancy.
First, I absolutely
adore the inventive playfulness of your writing. You alphabetize what either
George or Lizzie likes. You tumble back and forth in time. Even the chapter
headings alone (“What George Loves about Lizzie”) are quite wonderful. How did you come to structure the novel like
this? Did you ever worry that the
chances you took might not pay off (They do, they do.)?
At the beginning, I didn’t even think I was writing a
novel. Book people know me as someone
who recommends good books to read, but when I was (much) younger I defined
myself by my writing. In high school and
college I wrote a lot of poetry, but sometime in my late twenties the lines
started coming as prose rather than poetry.
I started writing short stories, one of which, “The Ride to School,” was
published, in Redbook in 1980, and
the line that came to me was “My mother talked to us all the time,” the first
sentence in the story. (It didn’t seem
to be at all workable for a poem.) That’s similar to the way George & Lizzie began. While I was recovering from minor surgery and
under the influence of a moderate dose of painkillers, two characters appeared
to me. It was clear (although I don’t know how or why) that their names were
George and Lizzie and that they met at a bowling alley in Ann Arbor when Lizzie
accidentally lofted her ball into the lane where George was bowling, ruining
his possibly best game ever.
(Incidentally, I’m sure it was in Redbook that I first read
“Meeting Rozzy Halfway,” and began following, with great pleasure, your writing
career.)
That’s all I knew at the beginning, but I found myself
thinking about them, pretty much all the time.
Slowly I got a sense of their lives, both separate and together—it almost felt like they were telling me their
stories. At some point I just felt a
need to write down what I’d discovered about them both.
I didn’t have any particular writing strategy or even a plan. I’d just write down scenes, or snapshots, as
I came to think about them whenever they occurred to me. For example, I’d be lying in bed before I
fell asleep thinking about George and Lizzie, and something specific about
their lives would seem so especially significant or interesting that I’d get
out of bed, go to my computer, and try to capture it on paper. I gave each of these sections a simple
descriptive title (like, “How They Met”) to remind myself what snapshot I was
describing.
Eventually, I discovered that I’d written a novel of the
sort I most loved to read: very very character-driven, filled with references
to things I love (poetry, novels, football, mandel bread, for example) and a
little bit quirky. It never occurred to
me that I was taking chances – I was just writing about George and Lizzie’s
life for my own entertainment and pleasure.
What kind of writer
are you? Do you outline or follow the characters? Do you have special rituals?
I think I’d call myself an intuitive writer; a less kind
description I might use of myself as a writer might be haphazard. Basically, I followed George and Lizzie and
went where they led me. I’ve always been
interested in people’s lives and would happily spend hours listening to them
describe their backgrounds and upbringings.
So it makes sense to me that I wanted to know everything about George
and Lizzie: all the big and little details of their childhoods, their friends,
their families, what books they loved, what people they loved, why they made
the choices they made. Really, it was
like falling in love with someone and wanting to be inside their skin to
discover how he’s put together. What
made him the person he became and who he is right now.
Sometimes I wish that I had outlined the novel. I think then
it might have been easier (and taken less time) to write. As it was, I had to wait until I learned something
about G and L’s relationship to finally sit down and describe it on (virtual)
paper. And at the point when the
question that had to be answered was whether their marriage was going to
endure, it seemed like I had to wait for them to decide and then let me know,
and it seemed to take months and months for them to figure it all out.
I love that your
characters talk books. Lizzie loves Edna St. Vincent Millay, there’s talk of
A.E. Houseman and Lord Byron. It truly makes me love the characters even more.
How did you go about choosing what books you thought each character might love?
It’s probably no coincidence that the authors and books that
Lizzie loves are the same ones that I love.
I had a very different sort of unhappy childhood than Lizzie’s but books
were always the place I went for comfort and sustenance. I think that Lizzie turns to reading for the
same reasons that I did.
Lizzie suffers with
“announcers in her head” that chastise her for ruining things in life or for
deserving punishment. Since I have those in my head, too, I’d love to know
about the birth of that idea and why you think some people just need those
announcers.
I have those voices, too, constantly, and they’re never
saying anything positive about me: I
always assumed that everyone did until a youngish woman, a writer, who read the
novel in its completed form, asked me if I thought that Lizzie suffered from incipient
schizophrenia. I never thought that
Lizzie had schizophrenia – that would make it a totally different sort of novel
(and a vastly different Lizzie), but it was surprising to discover that there
are evidently some people who aren’t being beat up by these critics in their
head. Like almost everything that
happens in the novel, Lizzie and the voices never seemed to be a decision that
I made: it was just a fact of her life.
This jubilant novel is
a lot about secrets, but what’s fascinating to me is that the person who
suffers from the secrecy is the secret keeper, and not the one to discover it.
Can you talk about that please?
I think that the secrets Lizzie keeps from George—about the
Great Game and her feelings for Jack—are emotionally paralyze her. It’s as though she never got past the way she
felt when she was 19: Her primary feelings are shame and regret, and she’s
furious with herself that she could have been so stupid back then. (But in Lizzie’s defense, weren’t we all
pretty dumb when we were nineteen?) When
George tells her that she has the emotional age of a three year old, he’s
clearly exaggerating in the heat of the Difficult Conversation that they’re in
the midst of, but he’s also not that far wrong.
And keeping those secrets from George isn’t doing their marriage any
favors, is it? It’s created an
insurmountable wall between them, making it impossible to really have an
intimate relationship. I couldn’t imagine
what would ever cause Lizzie to tell George anything really important about
herself, especially about the Great Game or Jack. And honestly, I don’t think she would have
ever told George about Jack if he hadn’t seen the letter from Marla. She was pretty much forced into it by
circumstance. And I think that the cause
of Lizzie’s greatest shame – the Great Game – is something she’ll never tell
George about. I’d say that the secrets
hurt both of them, but in different ways. Can a marriage survive these sorts of
secrets? I’m still not sure.
What I loved most about George was that he believes in the possibility
of happiness. At one point, he tells Lizzie that a particular death is not a
tragedy, that things sometimes just
happen in life. And meanwhile, Lizzie is obsessed with someone from her past
and in a way that clouds her real future.
Again, I’d love for you to talk about this.
George’s beliefs about happiness are completely foreign to
Lizzie: it’s as though he’s speaking in a language that not a huge number of
people know, something on the order of Esperanto or Balto-Slavic. At the same time, I’m pretty sure that Lizzie
knows that her life would be a lot happier if she accepted George’s worldview. It’s very hard for her to do so, mostly
because of her parents. It’s hard to
think you’re a worthwhile person when you’re being treated as though you were a
lab rat, constantly under scrutiny. I
think when readers look at Lizzie and George’s marriage, or the failure of
their marriage to achieve real intimacy, they’ll blame Lizzie. And I can’t deny that Lizzie is not at all
easy to live with: she’s prickly and depressed and keeping those secrets from
George. Worst of all for a marriage, she
sees everything in terms of black and white, a zero-sum game – someone’s always
right and therefore the other person is wrong.
Someone’s good and someone’s bad.
Someone wins and someone loses. But
George also bears some responsibility for the state of his and Lizzie’s relationship. He assumes that Lizzie would be happy if she
only accepted his optimistic view of the world. Though he does that with the
best of motives—because he genuinely wants Lizzie to be happy—it seems to me to
reflect a lack of understanding of how and why people change and (oh George, I
am so sorry to say this) maybe also a lack of sensitivity to who Lizzie
is. I don’t think you can argue someone
into making changes – they have to come to a decision to change on their
own. It’s not until the end of the novel
that I see Lizzie acknowledge that maybe the past, or part of the past, anyway,
has too strong a hold on her and if she lets some of it go, she’d be
happier. But I hope at that point that
she realizes that giving that part of herself up doesn’t make her the loser or
the bad one in the marriage.
What’s obsessing you
now and why?
Like many people, I am obsessed with the current political
situation, which I find both frightening and incomprehensible. I have an M.A. in History and still can’t
understand how we got to this place where the cornerstones of our democracy are
threatened and it’s impossible to find Republican senators and representatives
who will put what’s right for the country above their party affiliation. All that being said, I spend a lot of time
avoiding reading the news because it’s so depressing and instead I am listening
to many sports podcasts and following many sports teams and figures on Twitter,
especially those devoted to basketball and football. I am also obsessed with my grown children’s
happiness and what I will wear on my book tour.
What question didn’t I ask that I should have?
What question didn’t I ask that I should have?
None – I loved these questions – they really made me think.
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