Hey, I blurbed Douglas Trevor's astonishing new book Girls I know, and called it "Deeply moving and ebulliently funny" and it is. He's also the author of a short story collection, The Thin Tear in the Fabric of Space, which won the 2005 Iowa Short Fiction Award and was a finalist for the 2006 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for First Fiction. He lives in one of my favorite cities on earth, Ann Arbor, where he is an Associate Professor of Renaissance Literature and Creative Writing. I couldn't wait to have Douglas on the blog so I could ask him more about the book and I'm so honored to have him here. Thank you, thank you so much!
Can you
talk about what sparked the idea for this book? Do you prefer one form or the
other?
Girls I know began with a few sparks,
but also with a lot of deliberateness on my part. For instance, I was
determined early on to come up with a story idea for a novel that was eventful. Most of the short stories that
make up my collection, The Thin Tear in
the Fabric of Space, are about people in the throes of grief, but the
losses that shape their grief all occur before the stories themselves. I was a
little self-conscious, I guess, about being typecast as the kind of writer who
thinks a lot about sentences and characters but less about plot, so I invested
quite a bit of time thinking about plot, and reading novels for their plots, which I hadn't really
done before.
The
idea of writing about a restaurant shooting specifically came to me in the
midst of all this. I was sitting in a crowded diner in New York City where I
was supposed to meet with an editor and there was an argument at the front
between the cashier and a customer. I remember thinking, My God, what if this guy pulled out a gun and started shooting people?
And then, almost immediately, I started to think about a novel based on the
aftermath of such an event, and I knew right away that I was going to stick
with the premise, both because I had never tried to write anything like that
before, and also because a restaurant or café seemed like a great vehicle by
which to enter a city.
Even
before I knew exactly what this novel was going to be about, I was determined
to write about Boston. I had been a student there through much of the nineties,
and my final year there I had spent a lot of time walking around in its
different neighborhoods. I spent one afternoon, for example, out in Mattapan
(where the character Flora lives with her sisters and grandmother), simply
because I rode the Red Line until it ended. And I discovered Watertown (where
Mercedes's grandmother lives) by virtue of taking a bus one day from Copley
Plaza that happened to be going there. Of course, I had no way of knowing that
these enclaves would be the focus of so much attention right before Girls I Know came out, due to the
horrific bombings that occurred during the Boston Marathon. Growing up in
Denver, which is a city whose neighborhoods drift into one another, I was
always struck by the distinctness of Boston neighborhoods, so I wanted to
explore that in my fiction. I wanted very much to write about characters from
different ethnic and racial backgrounds as well: both to challenge myself as a
writer and also because writing about America today means, inescapably it seems
to me, writing about diversity.
Girls I Know grew out
of a short story, but were there surprises in making it into a novel?
Oh, there were endless surprises. I think the surprises
are what makes writing fun. I had formulated the characters Walt Steadman and
Ginger Newton very early in the process of thinking about the novel. The story
"Girls I Know" was a trial run to see how they would work. So from
the beginning I imagined the story as a stand-alone chapter in the book.
I
was really encouraged to dive into the novel based on the tremendous feedback I
was fortunate to receive on the story. It came out in the journal Epoch and was subsequently anthologized
by Laura Furman in The O. Henry Prize
Stories and Dave Eggers in The Best
American Nonrequired Reading. I had never had a short story of mine so
widely distributed before, and I had never received emails from so many different
readers of my work. A young man from Iran emailed, for example, and dozens of
young, American women who claimed affinities with Ginger. But when I tried to
write the opening chapter of the book, I immediately found that the
first-person voice I had used in the story wasn't working. The book really had
to be in the third-person if I wanted to inhabit all the different
neighborhoods and perspectives in which I was interested. But third-person also
required me to rethink the characters, or how they would feel from this
slightly over-the-shoulder perspective, and this took time.
Another
huge surprise: wanting to write about Boston to the degree that I did created
some problems with regards to plot. In the earliest version of the book, Ginger
and Walt circle in and around the city to an enormous degree, and this created
a "wandering" narrative.
But
the biggest surprise had to do with the character Mercedes. Early on I knew
that the owners of the restaurant where the shootings occur, John and Natalie
Bittles, would logically have a child, since they were invested in building a
life and a community in Jamaica Plain. So in the first draft of the book I
mentioned their young daughter, Mercedes. Then I more or less forgot all about
her. I drafted the book up through the shooting, at which point the story was
supposed to pivot and become more about Ginger and Walt. But something was
troubling me about this arrangement and I realized it was Mercedes. Following
her parents' deaths, she had been left behind in the story. When I went back to
retrieve her, the book really took its current shape.
What's your
daily writing life like? Do you outline or do you just "follow your
pen"?
I
do detailed outlines that I usually depart from very quickly, but I find the
outlines useful nonetheless. As a writer, regardless of whether the form in
which I'm working is long or short, I need to have some sense of where I'm
starting and where I'm ending. So, for example, I can't work on a story or a
longer piece without having a title in hand, and some sense of a final scene or
a concluding moment. But then, and this is just crucial for me, the characters
weigh in. They refuse to do the things I want them to do. They do something
else. They introduce another character, and so on. For me, that's writing
fiction. If I've predetermined the path of the story then I've also, I fear,
undercut the realness of the characters about which I'm writing. So the process
can be quite messy, but even as the narrative slips out of my hands, I try to
anticipate or have some idea of where we are headed. Which is just to say, I
rewrite my outlines a lot.
And
I rewrite my sentences a lot too. I prefer to work with something, anything,
other than a blank computer screen, so I try to get stuff on the page as
quickly as I can. And then I move things around and rewrite and rewrite—often
by pen. The best work days for me are the ones in which I write early in the
day and then return to what I've written—to fiddle—hours later. But I'm the
kind of writer who tries a lot of different approaches to a given scene or
story, which can feel laborious at times. I'm hesitant to dismiss something
without first trying it out because I'm always curious what I might pick up
along the way.
Boston (my
hometown) is a character itself in your novel. At one point, a character says,
"You can't leave your hometown behind." Do you personally think
that's true? Why or why not?
I
think it's certainly true for John Bittles, who says the line you quote above.
And I think it's true for Walt, even though he denies it. I think it's true for
me too. But I don't think it's the same for everyone. Ginger, for example,
claims her background as a New Yorker repeatedly in the story, but I don't
think a place of origin matters to her, really. She's all about where she's
going. For me, origins matter for sentimental reasons. My relation to my own hometown
changed after my sister died unexpectedly fifteen years ago. I'm not able to
build new memories with her now, so revisiting Denver really matters to me
because I'm reminded of when we were kids and I can see the parks and the
streets we played in and walked alongside. And there is an intuitive
understanding about where you grew up that I think is really valuable as a
writer: a sense of detail and familiarity and intimacy. How you feel about
where you grew up can't be corrected by someone else, or altered even if the
buildings you knew as a child are gone. But, in a way, I feel that you have to
lose or leave your hometown in order to understand its contours. Which leads me
to your next question…
What's
obsessing you now and why?
I'm working now on a novel set in Denver—about a
guy in his twenties who learns that everything he thought was true about his
family growing up was in fact a fabrication. This debunking of his past is
juxtaposed with the novel's re-telling of the history of Colorado and the West,
which has so often been fashioned so as to emphasize rugged individualism,
which is only part of the story. I'm imagining the book as largely constituted
by interlinked but nonetheless freestanding stories, the first of which—chapter
three—is coming out in New Letters this
fall.
What
question didn't I ask that I should have asked?
I thought you might have asked me
more about the structure of Girls I Know.
Sometimes as writers we do things that seem, to the reader, to be very
deliberately done but weren't necessarily. In Girls I Know, for example, the three central characters are all
"coming of age" in different ways: Mercedes is at the cusp of her
teenage years, Ginger is twenty, Walt is about to turn thirty. So how
self-conscious was I of this design of the book?
I really wasn't very conscious of it
at all. I remember thinking very overtly that Walt would need to feel
justifiably—even if in a "young" sort of way—that he was getting
older and needed to start to make some sense of his life. But Ginger and
Mercedes, and even Flora, who waitresses at the Early Bird Café and is
nineteen, are all about to embark on distinctly new phases of their lives. The
same is true for Mrs. Bittles, Mercedes's grandmother, who is left to take care
of Mercedes after her parents are killed. I think yet another thing that novels
can teach us is how we are always growing, always becoming, regardless of age.
There really is no such thing as stasis.
Thank you, Caroline, for the chance to
talk with you about my work!!
