Pamela Redmond talks about inventing the truth and The Possibility of You

Pamela Redmond, as Pamela Redmond Satran, is the amazing author of five novels and the creator of the online fiction world Ho Springs. A New York Times bestselling humor writer, and a Glamour columnist, she's also the force behind the wonderful website Nameberry. And if that's not enough, several of her books have been optioned by Amblin Entertainment (that's the one helmed by Steven Spielberg.) Her new novel, The Possibility of You, about three very different women, grappling with motherhood, is as moving as it is provocative. I'm thrilled to have Pamela's essay here on my blog. Thank you, thank you, thank you, Pamela.

Inventing the Truth

By Pamela Redmond/The Possibility of You

When I was about three-quarters of the way through writing my new novel The Possibility of You, set largely in 1916 New York, I read an interview with E. L. Doctorow.  Since Ragtime was one of the models not only for my own book but for the historical novel as we know it, I was eager to hear what Doctorow had to say about how to meld historical research with characters who feel vivid and contemporary.

His trick, he confessed: He doesn’t do any research.  None.  He just writes the book as if the events are unfolding in a timeless era and place, and only after he’s finished maybe look up some details to throw in for color.  Historical accuracy?  Not so important.

Now he tells me, I thought.  The Possibility of You took me five years to write, partly because of all the historical research I undertook, and partly because I then had to figure out how to make my story come alive in the context of all that research.  The challenge is different from that of a contemporary novel, in which both the writer and the audience share a broad base of knowledge about not only what life is like but about how people typically feel and behave, react and respond.

Writing about the New York of a century ago was a different proposition.  Among the facts I discovered the found their was into my book: 1916 was the year that cars first outnumbered horse-drawn carriages in New York, and there was one stop light in all of Manhattan, at 42^nd Street and Fifth Avenue, that was operated by hand.  Thousands of cats and dogs were drowned in the East River, because of a (mistaken) belief that they carried the polio virus that infected 9000 children and killed 2500 of them that summer in America’s first major outbreak of that disease.  And in 1916, a pioneering woman psychiatrist first translated Jung into English.

There were lots of other squishier details I tried to find out, only sometimes succeeding.  How did the mostly-Irish female servants like the heroine of my book feel about their jobs, about the women they worked for, about their own futures?  I listened to oral histories at the Ellis Island Library, watched movies and books from the eras, read newspapers and hunted down diaries, but there was little from the viewpoints and in the voices of maids and nannies, and when they did talk, they didn’t say much.

If only I’d known before I did all this work that I needn’t have bothered!  And I say that only half-jokingly.  I can’t imagine having written a meaningful story set in World War I era New York without knowing that the first birth control clinic in New York was opened that year, and quickly shut down by police.  Or creating my heroine Bridget without knowing that Irish women were the only ones to immigrate alone – Jewish and Italian young women who came to this country in the same era traveled and lived with their families – and the only ones willing to work as servants.

While I had to learn these facts to create and populate my long-ago world, the research sometimes got in the way.  Sitting in the New York Historical Society, reading every front page of the New York Times for 1916, I’d get caught up in some popular and related event of the time – the pandemic Beautiful Baby parades and contests, for instance – and decide my story needed one of those.  And then I spent a lot of time writing it.  But in the end, engaging as it may have been as an individual scene and as evocative of the 1916 world of mothers and children, it didn’t belong in my book and ended up on the cutting room floor.

There were other historical details that were so wonderful I couldn’t bear to leave them out, as tangential as they may have been.  The goat carts that were a fixture of the time in Central Park, for instance, manned by poor children to be enjoyed by rich ones.  Or the way the rivers circling Manhattan looked back then, clogged with boats chugging black smoke, doing the work now spread among planes and trucks and trains.

But in the end, I had to let go of all my research and let the characters and plot take the lead.  I had to make Bridget a believable, sympathetic heroine independent of her era and her situation, to make the tension and yearning between her and her employer Maude as real and palpable as that between my contemporary heroine Cait and her lover. 

Does that mean that the best tack when writing a historical novel is, like E. L. Doctorow, to eschew research all together?  To simply create your characters and your plot as if they existed independent of time and space? 

I’m not sure I believe that’s even possible, any more than I believe that Stephen King digs up his brilliant plots, as he claimed in his book on writing, like metaphorical diamonds buried in the dirt of his backyard.  But I know that too much research can get in the way of the kind of invention on which every novel depends, the creativity that liberates fiction from reality, and in the process makes it truer than any fact.

Happy Valentines Day! Elizabeth Benedict talks about writers valentines to their mentors

Elizabeth Benedict is an acclaimed, bestselling novelist, editor, teacher and an all together fabulous person to boot. She's the author of five novels, including Almost, and of The Joy of Writing Sex: A Guide for Fiction Writers. Her latest book, Mentors, Muses & Monsters: 30 Writers on the People Who Changed Their Lives, was just published in paperback by Excelsior. (It’s available on Kindle and Nook)  and it's racking up the raves. Chicago Tribune made it an Editor's Choice, and The Christian Science Monitor called it "mesmerizing."  What better Valentine's Day gift than this wonderful essay.

Writers’ Valentines to Their Mentors

This is not news: Writers are famously cranky, infamously jealous, hopelessly self-involved. But several years ago, I unleashed a whole lot of gratitude and love in a group of wonderful writers. 

It happened like this: In 2008, hours after writing a tribute for Tin House to one of my writing mentors who had recently died, Elizabeth Hardwick, with whom I studied at Barnard, I did some on-line research and saw there was there was an important volume missing from the shelves: stories about writers and their mentors, the people who encouraged us, prodded us, gave us the crazy idea that we could become the cranky, jealous, self-involved people we’ve become. There was no such book, no such collection, and only one memoir about a mentor, Alex Wilkinson’s about William Maxwell.

Within an hour, I came up with a title I thought would encompass as many kinds of stories from fiction writers as might be out there – Mentors, Muses and Monsters . I liked the alliteration, and I liked the idea that not all the people who helped us were angels, and not all the stories should be sugar-coated. I knew a story or two about mentors who became, over time, monsters. My criteria for asking contributors: they had to have published at least one work of fiction, and had to know a thing or three about writing essays. Cheryl Strayed’s two astonishing essays in Best American Essays convinced me to ask her. (And what a good idea that turned out to be! She earned a Pushcart Prize and a Notable Mention in the Best American Essays 2010, for her essay on Alice Munro.)

Within weeks of issuing invites, I had several dozen writers who wanted to tell a story. But the categories didn’t break down as I had anticipated. Many had stories of people to tell. Others had books and unmet writers to thank. And several had experiences, jobs, periods in their lives that made the difference. 

Jonathan Safran Foer wanted to acknowledge Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai. Sigrid Nunez wanted to remember Susan Sontag, with whom she lived in her twenties while dating Sontag’s son. Jay Cantor had studied with Bernard Malamud. Jane Smiley was eager to thank her Iowa Writers’ Workshop classmates, among them, Allan Gurganus. John Casey had Peter Taylor, who told him while he was a Harvard law student, that he should forget lawyering and become a writer – much to the chagrin of Casey’s parents.

Months later, with a deadline and a contract from Free Press/Simon & Schuster, the essays began to appear in my computer, and I still remember how dazzled I was to read so many of them. I knew the pieces would be good, but had no idea how good they would be – and how seriously each writer would take this assignment. As the pile grew larger and richer – Michael Cunningham on Virginia Woolf, Joyce Carol Oates on Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Lily Tuck on Gordon Lish, Dinaw Mengestu on running an after-school program in Harlem, Carolyn See on her pornographer father – I realized that these essays fell into a category of their own. 

The gratitude each writer wanted to convey, the recollection of life before and after the mentor’s influence, the unique value of a person or a moment that altered the course of our lives, that gave us purpose and a particular kind of nerve – all of this intensity asked something special of the writers. The meaning and complexity of these people and events asked the writers to devote their best story-telling selves to the task. Each seemed determined to write a piece as powerful as the experience itself. 

Each is a love letter, even those that end with a sprinkle of hard feelings. And I’m honored to have brought this book and these wonderful essays – these complicated Valentine’s to teachers, writers, to books themselves – into being.  

Julianna Baggott talks about the audacious magic of Pure, selling out (or not) and so much more

The first thing you need to know about Julianna Baggott's extraordinary new novel Pure is about the packaging. When the arc came to me, it had a little sticker on it which said (if I'm remembering right), "Surprise inside!" I opened the book and out flew a big vivid blue butterfly! I watched it spin around the living room and then I was so delighted, I promptly rewound it so I could get it to do it again. Pure is both startling, strange, and thought-provoking and such a wonderful read that she had a movie deal with Fox before the book was even published.

I asked Julianna if she would write about the experience, and I want to answer her question. No, Julianna, you haven't sold out. You've burst forth.

Is Baggott a Sell Out? Or How does it feel to write genre?

by Julianna Baggott

So, PURE is my eighteenth book, but, in so many ways, seems like my first. A post-apocalyptic thriller, it's such a huge departure for me, as a writer. I've written literary novels, whimsical novels for younger readers, women-centric fiction and three collections of poetry. I was in Best American Poetry last year and will be there again this upcoming year; I write contemplative personal essays that have appeared in The New York Times, Boston Globe, NPR ...

I've dabbled and waded into genre, into entertainment, yes. But with PURE, I stormed the gates of genre, scared, but with torch in hand. And what did I find there? Well, first, wait. Let me tell you how it felt. 

In a recent blog post for my New Year's Resolution (which was the resolution to have more resolve), I used this line "we're resolving to be bold, professionally (so much I want to do visually, narratively, weirdly, fiercely... gloves off, literary handcuffs gone)" and it felt like a dangerous confession. I was wondering if any of my readers -- many of whom are literary writers and poets -- would wonder what I meant by "literary handcuffs gone". There were a number of responses to the post on Facebook, but no one mentioned literary handcuffs or what I could possibly mean by the fact that I'd shed them.

This is what I meant. As a writer, we have all kinds of shackles. Some want a real readership and cow to that. Others sometimes hold those who want a real readership in disdain, but often they're shackled by the desire for respect. Because without readership, you need at least to garner some respect, right? Let's be honest; many of us want both.

And before you misunderstand and think that I believe both desires to be somewhat corrupt, let me set you straight. Desire is desire. Whatever motivates a write to get to the page is better than no desire at all. It can be rocket fuel. It can be something that burns in you. It probably goes back to our mommies and our daddies. And likely if you have it, it gets you to the page, but what keeps you there is the struggle -- the bear wrestling -- of story, image, character, creating the airtight and beautiful extended lie of fiction and the pressure of white that collects around the poem like so much snow, whispering, "Deserve me."

So, yes, I'd started to feel the chafe of literary shackles on my wrists -- the need to be beautiful line-by-line, to rely on giving the gift of language while sacrificing story, to create an internal structure of images to support the work instead of deep characterization, etc... All of these good things that had kept me at the page for so very long -- they were oppressive.

And what was building up in me was a deep restlessness. I wanted to take on something massive in scale, but to also be urgently intimate in the telling.

And so I stormed the gates of genre because I'd never really seen much of it through the bars. Once inside those gates, what I found were beautiful architectures, old and sturdy ones, ornate and striking. The buttresses and spires and gargoyles. With these structures, I could build the thing I desired.

I was terrified, I should mention that. I'd written a novel in which the main character has a doll-head fused to her fist who hides in an ashen cabinet. I'd written about a boy who escapes a Dome to find his mother. I set two lives on a collision course in a landscape populated by Beasts, Dusts, Groupies ... which I can't even truly explain for you here.

The novel is called PURE, and I've spoken here about the desire for readership, for respect -- these writerly impurities. I don't know -- and never will -- truly understand what makes me write, especially what makes me write so damn much. Sometimes it's as simple as: this is the way I have to process the world, and other times it's much more complicated.

I know that my literary friends will say that I sold out (the film rights to Pure sold before the novel did). But I don't know what that means when, day after day, I labored over this work, not knowing if 431 pages later, anything would come of it. All I know is that it felt good. It felt like a liberation. And now that I've found a way through the gates, I invite literary writers to come for visit. I've got a torch. I know a few of the cobbled streets. Come and see for yourself what's here. 

Pam Houston talks about Contents May Have Shifted, why she loves the publishing business, writing students and much more

Every since I read Cowboys are my Weakness, I've been a deep admirer of Pam Houston's writing. Prickly smart, gorgeously written and wryly moving, her work doesn't just stay with you, it wins prizes, including being part of the Best American Short Stories and nabbing the O'Henry and Pushcart Prize awards. Her latest, Contents May Have Shifted, is a thoughtful and sublimely written look at a life's journey. I'm really thrilled to have Pam here and I can't thank you enough, Pam.

I love the whole idea of your new book, that problems are part of life, and what we do with our “baggage” affects our life. Is this hard-won knowledge or is this something you’ve always known?

That’s such an interesting way to describe my book.  I think in order to more accurately reflect my own experience I would have to change the language just a bit.  First I was numb, then I went to therapy and learned to feel my feelings, which included a lot of extremely unpleasant ones, then I learned to feel the difference between what felt good and what felt bad, and that, more than anything else, changed my life.  Not that I don’t still carry about fifteen suitcases and a couple of trunks of nonproductive sludge around with me, maybe a snowboard and a guitar or two…one of those wedding dresses they won’t let you hang up in the closet on the airplanes anymore…but I digress. 

As I tell my students over and over, we only love the flawed characters, by which I mean the realistic ones.  It is like Ruby says in Contents, ““Oh, Pam, Sofree lives in a hole.  You…me…everybody lives in a hole.  But what’s great is if you go over and tap on the wall of your hole, you find out we’re all connected.” 

What struck me so much about your novel was the voice, which felt different to me than in your other novels (all of which I’ve loved.) Was this a conscious choice? How do you usually find your way into character?

I would be interested in hearing in what ways you think this voice is different.  I’ve grown up some more, I hope.  One always hopes for that.  When I asked myself how I wanted this book to be different I knew what I really wanted was for the language to work harder than ever before.  I read a ton of poetry, and this book in some ways owes itself to the books of poetry I love best.  Once I had the book essentially done, like draft 15, I spent four months doing nothing but compressing the language.  I pulled up all the widows, the words that spilled onto the next line at the end of a paragraph, and the widowed sentences that spilled over onto a new page at the end of each section, seeing how tight I could make it.  There is also something about turning 50, I think, which I did this year.  There is something in me that is tired of hearing my own voice apologizing.  I hope there is less apology in this book, more celebration of voice. 

Can you talk about your process? Do you outline or are you a more organic sort of writer? Do you ever get writer’s block and wish you had become an electrician instead?

Outline is one of those words that makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck.  Likewise: index cards.  If you had to use index cards to be a writer, I would take up watercolors. 

My process is pretty simple, and endlessly renewable.  When I sit down to write I ask myself what out in the world glimmered at me in recent memory…the check out girl at the Tattered Cover with The Incredible Lightness of Being hat tattooed on her chest, the sound of my elderly horse’s thirty year old teeth crunching his sweet feed, the I-phone emoticon that is a pile of shit with a smiley face on it, the sunset pastels on of a rare clear coastal January Oregon sky.  I collect those, until there are so many of them I fear I will start to lose track of them.  Then I find a form to fit them into.  Sometimes that just means I line them up in some kind of semi logical order and make a roughly chronological story out of them.  In the case of Contents, I wanted to see what would happen if I tried to keep them more or less discreet from one another, and arranged them in an order that was governed by association, rather than logic or time.  I believed that narrative progress would happen in spite of my attempts to thwart it, story arc--whatever you want to call it—character growth.  I believed story is a big sleeping dragon that lies under every book and even if you don’t tend it, it will let you know it is there.  I was counting on that this time, and it didn’t let me down.

I have never said the words, I have writers block.  I don’t know exactly what it means, in the same way I don’t know exactly what a nervous breakdown is either, though it is conceivable that I have had one.  It is conceivable that I have both.  It is certainly true that I have gone for long periods of time without writing.  But then one day I just can’t stand myself anymore and I sit down at the computer.  What would I be if not a writer?  Maybe a chef or an organic gardener or a designer of adventure trips for the good natured and well heeled.  Maybe one of those people who teach Border Collies how to run those courses.  Definitely not an electrician. 

You live on a ranch, but you also teach at a bustling university. Do you ever feel shell shocked going from the peace of the ranch to the hustle of a school? And do you feel that teaching helps your own writing?

Teaching does not help my own writing, but I don’t believe it hurts it either, and when I turn my attention to helping others find their voices, it does help me feel like I am doing something of value in the world.  I love to teach.  I love to talk about contemporary literature.  I love to judge contests.  I even love sitting down with a whole pile of student manuscripts—still--love trying to unearth what it is they were going for, and what I might say to help them get there.  I love this whole business.  The book tours.  The book clubs.  Writing reviews and blurbs.  I used to keep my mouth shut about that because I know it is seriously uncool to say so.  But really, I am so grateful to have this occupation where I get to do something different nearly every day, and all of it involving people,  language and story.  I even like the bouncing back and forth between Davis and Creede.  Though in Creede I get accused of being an intellectual elitist, and in Davis they think I am so quaint as to be absurd.

What’s obsessing you now?

I want to write about being 50.  I want to write something about how obvious it is (though no one tells you til you get here) that the 50’s would be, for women, the best decade of all.  It takes a couple of decades to stop making it be all about the men…and then another stretch of years to really own our own successes I think, our own voices…to fess up to the knowledge we have acquired and for God sake to stop apologizing.  I have been 50 for seven days now and I have never felt better, freer, more likely to do just about anything.  

I also have an essay to write about Mongolia, where I spent this last September….that one might have to come first. Travel-wise, I want to go back to Istanbul, and this time travel widely in Turkey.  

What question didn’t I ask that I should have asked?

Oh, I think you did very well…..Thanks!  Pam

Val Frankel talks about Four of a Kind, Writing, Poker and more

Valerie Frankel is quite frankly, a hoot. But not only is she smart and hilarious, she's brave and honest, and the kind of person you want to call at 4 in the morning if you're in trouble. (Don't worry, Val, I won't, I promise!) Her new novel, Four of a Kind, about modern women, mothering and New York friendships should be required reading.  I'm thrilled she's here on my blog.  Thanks, Val!

Lately, you’ve been writing some incredibly great memoirs (Thin is The New Happy, It's Hard Not to Hate You).  Four of a Kind is a return to fiction for you. Which do you prefer doing, and was it hard going back to the novel form?

What I’ve discovered is that one inspires and informs the other. My non-fiction (magazine essays, articles and memoirs) get my brain going in a certain direction, which benefits my novels. Fiction lets me explore relationships that, for whatever reason, I hadn’t let myself delve into too deeply in my personal life, which might trigger an essay idea or chapter in a memoir. It just goes round and round. So I need both. I guess I prefer fiction because writing a novel is like solving a puzzle without having all the pieces in front of you at the start. When it fits together at the end, it feels like a small miracle, as if my subconscious has been writing the story all along.

What I loved about Four of a Kind was the focus on how mothers become friends, even as they navigate the mine fields of New York private school, work while raising kids, and affairs of the heart. Do you think it's gotten easier for modern women?

Have things gotten easier for the modern woman? Definitely NOT! You have to be a genius parent, marathoner, top chef, fashionista, patient spouse, sexual dynamo, high earner, emotional savant, party thrower, AND the red hot center of a vibrant circle of friends. No man would be expected to be two or three of those things, and yet women feel like failures if we fall short in any category. But, God forbid all that pressure makes us unhappy, aka the greatest sin of the decade. Better add “Be happy!” to the list of demands we heap on ourselves. In Four of a Kind, I tried to dramatize the incredible pressure of being a modern woman, and to relieve it with humor and by giving my harried characters what none of them had time for previously or thought possible: unexpected true friendship. 

I have to ask--when did you start playing poker yourself?  How did the poker game come to be such an integral part of the novel?

I wanted to give the characters a reason to sit at a table together for hours besides eating, drinking and talking. I’ve found in my own life that when the hands are busy, the mind’s guard comes down. So I put playing cards in their hands. Since they are frugal moms, I decided that they wouldn’t bet with money. A woman’s currency is her story, the details of her private life. So I had my characters play for each other’s secrets. I sorted out the rules of Brooklyn Hold ‘Em—when/how the players reveal their secrets—and the novel just wrote itself from there.

I had to learn poker along with my characters. We had a similar learning curve: steep. For research, I went to Hurrah’s in Atlantic City and played Texas Hold ‘Em against real players for real money. It was frankly terrifying. I lost all my money in just a few hands. Never again! I’d rather play for secrets anytime.

What's your writing process like?

My greatest gift as a writer is discipline. I sit down, and don’t get up until I’ve hit my word count for the day. The pages might be crap, but they'll lead somewhere eventually. Twice, I had to write a hundred bad pages to get to what should have been page one. Ideally, I’d be able to figure things out in bed or on vacation. But my brain functions more efficiently when my fingers are on the keyboard. The result of habitual  action. When I sit down to write, it’s time to get serious and focus completely on what I’m doing. 

What's obsessing you now?

My daughter is a junior in high school, and I’ve become obsessively going online to look up various colleges’ accepted student SAT and GPA scores. This is NOT HEALTHY. My daughter is not a number. And yet, I can’t stop myself. Culturally, I'm among the millions obsessed with Downtown Abbey. I love how the plot pushes to the point where the stakes might be too high. And then it pulls back to be a near miss. I want dramatic tension, but not tragedy. For my recent birthday, I bought my first iphone, and now I’m obsessed by Angry Birds, a time-wasting computer game. Professionally, I’m obsessed with my new novel. Since I write often about mothers and daughters as a subplot, I thought it’d be interesting to make that sacred relationship—several versions of it—the core of the story (with some romance and mystery throw in for good measure). 

Claire Bidwell Smith talks about the afterlife, loss and writing The Rules of Inheritance

Loss. Love. Write about either one of those things and you have me. Claire Bidwell Smith's The Rules of Inheritance is so raw, so honest, and so gorgeously written that I began to reread parts of it the moment I had finished. I can't tell you how honored I am to have Claire here to talk about her book. Thank you, Claire!

What I loved about your book was how honest it really was. Many novels and memoirs about grief seem to be about "getting over it" quickly, yet your book moves back and forth through time to show how persistent grief is. Did this persistence surprise you?

Ah, the persistence still surprises me. I can't tell you how many times I've thought I was "over" the loss of my parents, and then something comes along in my life like marriage or illness or motherhood, and all the grief just rears up again. I think this is common for so many people who grieve though, and that's what I was trying to show with the book. Ultimately, I think that you never really get over the pain of losing someone you love. You just learn to live with it.

I'm glad you appreciated the honesty in the book. There were so many things I wrote about in these chapters that were hard to admit (i.e. writing about how my mother's body disgusted me when she was very ill), but I knew that to really write a book that would have an impact and be something that could be helpful to others in their process, I had to be as honest as possible. It took a long time for me to forgive myself enough for these thoughts and actions to be able to write about them, but once I did, I wanted to help other people be able to forgive themselves too.

I also loved the structure of the book, the way you moved back and forth through time to tell the story of losing both your parents at a young age. Did you know the structure when you began to write the book or did it take you by surprise?

Yes, I did know the structure. I had been working as a grief counselor in hospice for three years when I started writing this book and initially I intended to write a more educational book about grief -- one that kind of turned Elisabeth Kubler Ross's five stages on their head. As a grief counselor I can't tell you how many people come to me with confusion about the five stages. Regardless of whether the stages are the best grief tools, people really cling to them, yet also have a hard time understanding them. I wanted to show how malleable they really are. I decided that the best way to do that was to just use myself as an example. 

You also deal with grief professionally. As someone who had a very bad grief counselor once, a woman who had never had any losses herself and who told me I was not "getting over it quickly enough", I personally feel that unless you've had to experience grief, you can't really understand the depths and power of it. Do you agree or am I deluded?

You're not deluded. I agree one hundred percent. I truly don't believe you can effectively counsel a grieving person unless you have lost someone very close to you as well. Loss is such a singular experience -- it's unlike anything else that will happen to you in your life. Therefore it's incredibly important to have someone who understands. I also think that grieving is really confusing and really lonely, and that one of the most useful tools for moving through the grieving process is to connect with others who are also grieving, or who have at least been where you are. I'm so sorry you had that experience! I wish I could have been your counselor -- I would have told you to take your time!

Part of the supreme pleasure of the book was seeing the transformation of your world view. You're now a wife and a mother who feels there is "something bigger" out there, a force. Can you talk about how your view of the world has changed a bit more?

My world view has indeed changed completely. I want to point out that it didn't necessarily take becoming a wife and mother to heal myself from the toughest part of grieving, or to adapt a new world view, even though that is where the book ends. Rather it took really sitting with the pain of grief, really letting myself go through the deepest parts of it, which is something I avoided for many years. I think for a long time after my parents died I was incredibly self-obsessed. I was in so much pain that I had a hard time seeing what was going on around me. When I began to emerge from that I was finally able to see how much beauty there was in the world. 

Along my path of healing and transformation there were tiny cracks in the fabric of life that led me to finally begin to seek out a more meaningful belief system. I had to work really hard to adjust to this new way of thinking -- it was like looking at a negative image painting, except the opposite really, because what I was doing was learning to focus on the positive aspects of my life, instead of the terrible ones that I'd obsessed about for so long. Doing this was actually such a relief from the years of depression and pain that I'd experienced that I practically cried with gratitude for a few months. Now it's really easy for me to look around at my life and see what I have, as opposed to what I don't. 

What's obsessing you now?

The afterlife! I'm working on a new book in which I go about trying to figure out what I believe happens next. From psychic mediums and Kabbalah to past-life therapists and Mormonism I've been delving into all kinds of interesting stuff!

What question didn't I ask that I should have?

I think you should have asked me how I'm going to convince people that this isn't a particularly sad book. My answer is that I don't know! But I do know that even if my book sounds sad on the surface -- girl loses parents to cancer by age 25 -- it's really not. It's also about love and sex and travel and coming-of-age and relationships and encounters with people you might never expect to meet. It's about taking chances and finding love and figuring out who you are over and over again. It's about life, just as much as it is about death.

Robert Leleux talks about miracles, aging, Alzheimer's and The Living End

I recently met Robert Leleux at Kathy L. Patrick's phenomenal Pulpwood Queens Girlfriend Weekend book extravaganza. He pops with personality, he's warm, funny, and when he read from The Living End, I was struck by the infinite grace (and hilarious wit) of his writing. I couldn't wait to get him on here and I tracked him down through Kathy (thank you, Kathy), and thank you Robert. I'm truly honored.

You write: tiny, workaday actions can add up to miracles. Indeed, in this extraordinary book, they do. Can you please talk about that?

I can be as cynical as anybody; there’s a part of me that goes through life believing that real change is impossible.  But I can now say that my experience, and the experience of my family, directly contradicts such cynicism.  My mother and my grandmother had always hated each other.  I mean, from the womb.  And then, during the final years of my grandmother’s life, their relationship was entirely healed.  And one of the critical ways that healing occurred was through these teeny, tiny little acts of intimacy that my mother was heroic enough to undertake while caring for my grandmother.  Brushing her hair, polishing her nails, choosing the perfect brooch for her blazer.  Whatever.  And all those little, do-it-without-thinking things that we so often find ourselves doing for the people we love—changing a surgical dressing, changing a diaper, packing a lunch—they became these little stitches of affection that ultimately provided this spectacular healing.  I’m sure all mothers already know this from experience; and I’m sure, on some level, I already knew this, too, from having been a much loved child.  But it was nevertheless quite remarkable to witness the process by which someone comes to feel loved.  The process by which a loving family is formed.  And it was phenomenally un-operatic, you know?  It was a great love story told one Depends diaper at a time.  And it was, maybe, the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.

 OK, I have to ask: Part of the unexpected delight of this book is the way you make Alzheimer's hilariously funny (without, of course, making fun of it.) The humor takes away a lot of the fear people have about this disease. What else do you hope to challenge about peoples' perceptions about aging and disease?

Well, first of all, my grandmother JoAnn was THE funniest person I’ve ever known.  In the words of my godmother, she was “mascara-streaming-down-your-cheeks funny.”  So, it was extremely important to me that when I wrote about her life, it wasn’t gloomy.  You know, just because my grandmother had Alzheimer’s doesn’t mean that Alzheimer’s was the story of her life.  Wit, humor, and style, those were her defining characteristics.  She used those qualities to get through all the lousy stuff life threw her way—depression, The Depression, World War II, male chauvinism.  And to have told her story, even the saddest parts of it, without employing the same strategies would have felt, in some sense, like a violation.  Just as it would have felt like a violation if I’d, in some manner, compromised her dignity by making light of her situation.  But the insight writing this book gave me was that any person’s story is much more than the sum of their experiences.  That the lion’s share of a person’s humanity can’t be conveyed in a biographical sketch.  We’re always so much more than what happens to us.  And I think, in particular, when we’re talking about people who are ill, it’s very easy to forget that illness, any illness, is just this biological phenomenon, just the interaction of cells and germs, but that human beings are this spectacular, mystical, unquantifiable collision of dust and divinity.  So, we can never, never be defined merely by what’s occurring in our bodies.           

What I so loved about your book was the way you looked at and interacted with your grandmother--the family bonds even in the face of Alzheimer’s--a disease which transformed your grandmother JoAnn into a loving person who forgot past hurts. And even with Alzheimer's you were able to learn from her. Can you tell us what you learned and how it changed you?

The most devastating (and probably, the most selfish) thought I had after my grandmother’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis was, “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do without you.  This isn’t fair.  You haven’t finished teaching me yet.”  Because, my grandmother was THE person I called when I needed advice, or had to talk through something.  But what I very, very slowly realized—and we’re talking, over the course of several years here—was that she never stopped educating me, even in the midst of a severe illness.  So many of the BIG lessons—about being present, and not allowing yourself to be limited and hamstrung by the past, and about it never being too late to be surrounded by love—I learned from my grandmother in the final years of her life.  I remember very clearly, there was this moment when I was worrying about some big, awful decision I had to make, and I looked over and saw my grandmother sitting there smiling, and I thought, “Oh, that’s right.  I forgot.  My job, as a human, is to Be Here Now.”  Which is that great Zen lesson I forget about a million times a day.  And then I thought, “She’s entirely present, and quite happy.  Between the two of us, which one of us could be said to be suffering an impairment?”  So, you seen, JoAnn never stopped setting an example for me.

Being a caregiver, the way your mother was to your grandmother JoAnn can be exhausting. What did you learn from watching your mother and how did it impact your life?

There is no more challenging work in the world than that kind of caretaking.  The difficulty of that experience is so all encompassing.  It’s emotional, it’s spiritual, physical.  You just have to experience it to have any kind of understanding of the kind of exhaustion it creates.  It made me realize that not only do people experiencing illness need caretakers, but caretakers need caretakers, too.  You have to check in with these people, and really insist that they care for themselves.  Take them to the movies; insist they take a nap; treat them to a mani-pedi, whatever.  AND it also taught me that there’s no holier work than caring for a loved one.  That the horror and difficulty of it is in direct proportion to the holiness and worthiness of it.  ALSO, I just want to point out that this kind of work is largely unpaid, or at least extremely underpaid, and it’s also almost entirely done by women.  And that’s not a coincidence.  We have, yet again, another scenario where women are expected to do something incredibly difficult for no pay, and really, not much acknowledgement.  I think that, in addition to giving out Purple Hearts and Medals of Freedom to people who’ve been in combat, we need to give them to people who’re undertaking the work of caretaking and healing.  Because what these women are doing is a contribution to the nation as profound and scary and challenging and heroic as any human endeavor.

I love that you wrote, "we are largely whom we pretend to be," which sounds like wonderful advice on how to live your life when you don't feel worthy or loved or any number of things. Care to comment?

Oh, well, my grandmother was this fabulous, over the top Southern lady who lived her life at a sort of non-stop Tennessee Williams pitch.  Reality was never entirely sufficient for her.  So, she always existed on two distinct planes—what was actually happening, and the way she interpreted what was happening.  And that was such a powerful lesson to me—as a person, and as an artist. That we really do have the power to make chicken shit into chicken salad.  She taught me that you can kind of stake a claim for yourself in faith and belief, and that reality, very often, will reconcile itself to your point of view.  So, for instance, if you have crazy self-confidence, very often the world will begin to treat you with the respect you’ve always demanded.  Or, if you believe yourself to be worthy of love, love will quite often come your way.  So, I guess it’s a very powerful argument in favor of being completely delusional.

What's obsessing you now?

Over the past generation, our culture has undergone this compassionate revolution in relating to children with developmental issues.  I remember so clearly how terribly children with autism, for instance, used to be treated.  They were a segregated population, treated as though they were malformed, or mistaken.  And now, thank God, we know that there’s nothing “wrong” with those beautiful kids.  They’re exactly who they are, and where they’re supposed to be, and they have so much to contribute.  And I think we so desperately need to have a similar revolution in our thinking about people going through Alzheimer’s and old-age dementia. What they’re experiencing is completely natural, and we really need to flex our compassion in relating to them.  I mean, their lives aren’t over.  They’re still present and aware and alive.  And we need to work to make their lives as stimulating and affirming, as filled with humanity as possible.  One of the huge light-bulb moments of my life was when I realized that there’s a fundamental difference between “gone” and “missing.”  My grandmother’s Alzheimer’s broke my heart.  I desperately missed the woman she’d been.  But though many parts of her seemed to have disappeared, they weren’t missing.  She was whole and complete, just as she was.  She was fully experiencing a natural passage of life.  And the more fully I absorbed that lesson, the more fully I was able to savor her company, and enjoy the time I had left with her.

Meredith Maran talks about activism, self-doubt, the little engine that could and her extraordinary new novel, A Theory of Small Earthquakes.

Meredith Maran published her first poem at the age of six in Highlights for Kids. How cool is that? She's gone on from that illustrious start to become a journalist, book critic, and absolute knockout writer. (Go read My Lie, her memoir about false memory, immediately if you haven't already.) Her novel,  A Theory of Small Earthquakes, is a breathtakingly smart, funny and heart-wrenching novel about sexuality, family and what we do--or don't do--for love.

I'm honored to have Meredith here. Meredith, I can't thank you enough!

What sparked the idea for this novel?

A decade ago, a friend who shall remain nameless told me a true story about such an alternative family, whose existence required so much forgiveness on the part of all involved, I thought, "If only I were a novelist, that would make a great plot." As I watched the story unfold in real time in my friend's real life, the itch to write it finally overcame my fear of attempting a novel. After a lifetime of writing only nonfiction, that fear was epic—and, as it turned out, well-founded. The novel took two years to write, five years to rewrite, and many gnawed fingernails to sell. And it's been the most thrilling writing experience of my life. Je ne regrette rien.

Your novel is a brilliant exploration of what makes a happy family, what's "normal"  and how do we navigate this new terrain. Do you think, given what's going on politically, that we can ever, as a people, simply let people be whomever they want to be and love whomever they love? 

Sometimes I feel that that unwillingness to be accepting is changing, but often, I feel despair.

Abandon your despair, ye who seek equality! There are discouraging moments, for sure--the current Republican Presidential campaign being a very long, drawn-out, excruciating series of them--but oh, so much progress as well. Let's start here: I'm legally married to a woman. In the State of California, at least. Don't get me started about the thousands of dollars my wife and I spend each year to deal with our lack of federal marriage rights, but hey. We're married!

Having been an activist since the sixties (long before I was IN my sixties!), I've seen the civil rights movements of other groups--women and people of color, to name two--making such creaking, creeping gains. Biracial President notwithstanding, you could argue that things are worse, now, for some folks who have been fighting for their rights since they arrived here on slave ships.

Anyone who knows me will attest to my impatience. But where gay rights are concerned, I'm thrilled with the gains we're making.

I loved the title. Can you talk about it?

Oy, the title.

Over the eons it took to bring this book from concept to publication (see "impatience," above), the novel had at least five working titles, ranging from the original "The Surrogate" to "Boy Girl Boy Girl," which came in a close second to the final. The phrase "A Theory of Small Earthquakes" came to me in a flash, and I loved it, but there were so many factors to consider, and such a big job the title had to do. My dad was a true MadMan, and I grew up naming products at the dinner table, so the marketing concerns were paramount.

I'm a great believer in the meme of "The Little Engine That Could." I'm also more of a realist than an optimist. So I knew my novel faced the danger of, shall we say,  marketplace resistance (i.e., poor sales). Hey, it's a first novel, set in Berkeley, about a child being raised by two women who used to be lovers—and are still, in many ways, lovers—and a man, whom one of the women is married to, who might or might not be the child's biological father. (See "acceptance of gay people," above.) Not as easy a sell as, say, a novel about one of Hemingway's wives, or a novel by Jodi Picoult.

Also, the title had to position the book somewhere along the dread spectrum of "literary" versus "commercial" fiction. I'm doing my next nonfiction book ("Why We Write," out from Penguin in 2013) specifically to demonstrate what harmful bullshit that dichotomy is. I hate it, and the way it limits readers and writers. But it exists. And I knew that My Little Novel That Could needed all the help it could get to make it up the mountain of commercial viability. So the title had to help sell the book to those who enjoy good writing as well as those who enjoy a twisty, turny, plot-driven story.

I worried that "A Theory of Small Earthquakes" was too "arty," too "literary." I worried that people would think it was another nonfiction book by Meredith Maran, who had decided to give Mary Roach a run for her money by becoming a science writer. I worried (did I mention that I'm extremely superstitious?) that giving my novel that title would cause actual earthquakes (which it seems to have done, but at least they were small earthquakes). On the upside, as I said, I loved the phrase. And the earthquake metaphor was so fitting for a book set in the Bay Area, about a woman who hopes that if she discloses enough "small lies," the big lie upon which she's built a family won't blow up in her face.

Here's a little insider info. After we agreed to give the book that title, my brilliant, adored and adoring editor had me put more earthquake content into the book. Craft-wise, the most challenging writing I've ever done was to describe an earthquake on the page in such a way that a reader who's never lived through one would actually know what it feels like.

You're also a book critic as well as an author--does being a critic change the way you look at your own work? Are you ever aware of how a critic might look at your work or do you shut that out as you are writing?
 

Long before I was a book critic, I was the New York Jewish child of New York Jews. 'Nuff said? Who needs outside critics with that DNA? Hearing all the terrible things people might say about my shitty first novel wasn't a job I had to contract out.

As we speak, I've just received my first copy of the actual book. I'm scared to look. (See "New York Jewish Self-Loathing," above.)

On a less serious note (!), being a critic has confirmed my suspicion that the book review is a rigged game. Many reviews I read are about the reviewer, not the book. Reviews of my previous books have proved how rare it is for a reviewer to read, let alone contemplate, the book under review. Even though reviewers are paid abysmally ($200 or less is common), I believe a book review is a service provided to the reader, not a showplace for my own brilliance or maliciousness or brilliant maliciousness; not a way to extract my revenge for being underpaid by a factor of at least ten.

So if I'm asked to review a book I hate, I send it back. I've written one really negative review in my life, and that was of a book whose author was (and still is) dead. Writers have enough mishegass to deal with. I might not get to heaven, but it won't be because I disrespected the effort and integrity of a fellow/sister writer in order to boost my own ego.

Tell us about your writing life. Do you outline or is it more intuitive? Do you keep a schedule?

Very simple schedule. Wake up before the sun. Work happily like a motherfucker till bedtime or "Homeland," whichever comes first. Eat something soupy at desk around 8AM and again around 2PM. Break for two hours for perspective-restoring hike with a writer friend. Go to sleep worrying book won't sell . Wake up worrying book won't sell and I'll never have the chance to do this again. Repeat.

PS I wouldn't trade this life for anything, and I've proved that by refusing to trade this life for anything. Even an actual living wage.

What's obsessing you now?

See "book won't sell," above. Also see "I'll never have the chance to publish another one," above.

What question didn't I ask that I should have?

The question no writer with a fresh book launch wants to be asked, except that I do want to be asked, because it's my current obsession. "What's next?" Another novel!

I'm a total convert. I'm knee-deep into the next novel, about which I'm absolutely thrilled, as is my agent, which is very encouraging. Now I just need to find a space between pimping "Earthquakes" and writing book reviews, so I can finish it. Hint: it's about WEALTHY HETEROSEXUALS. But they have this renegade teenage daughter who holds her parents' hypocrisies up to their faces like a mirror, which helps me not to hold their heterosexuality or their financial success against them. In fact, I'm madly in love with the characters, which I take as the best portent of all.