Edges was nominated for the 2006 PEN/Faulkner Award and The PEN/Ernest Hemingway Award by Grace Paley; a National Women Studies Association Conference Selection; a Bloomsbury Review Pick, 2006: “Favorite Books of the Last 25 Years”; a Jewish Book Council Selection, 2005; and won the 2008 Earphones Award for an original audio production narrated by Tovah Feldshuh.Her other novel, Hystera was selected by Princeton University for their "The Fertile Crescent Moon: Women Writers Writing About their Past in the Middle East." It was also the winner of the 2012 USA Book Award and the 2012 Global E-Books Award, as well as a finalist in the International Book Awards and the National Indie Excellence Awards.
I'm so honored to host Leora here! Thank you, Leora!
1. The writer Oscar Hijeulos said: “Edges is an elegantly written,
quite moving novel that has a lot to say about love, identity, history and the
meaning of nationality.” Can you explain why he chose those words to describe Edges?
What
I was trying for was to present Jerusalem to the reader through the eyes of a
young woman whose mother’s grew up in Palestine, now vanishing, but never
talked about it. After my character, Liana’s, father commits suicide she is left
to this wild and fascinating mother who fought in the Jewish underground and
who holds a very unknown past. The mother returns to Israel with her daughter
after the father’s death. For the daughter, it began to feel that this young
Israel and Palestine were coming of age at the same time she was and the
geography and canvas of Jerusalem became a silent guide to how each was
experiencing their growth, reflecting each other in interesting ways. The
language of the body and nature is always important to me. The landscape became
a story-teller all unto itself. What
brings in the meaning of national identity and history is that the mother,
though Jewish and part of a family that had been in Palestine for generations,
can’t find her old home, Palestine when she returns, taking her daughter with
her. The turbulent changes, the wars, the buried history of early Palestine is
repeatedly held hostage to the border hostilities between Arab and Jew, and the
effects of the formation of the state of Israel and all that came with that. So
in a sense the mother is stateless. Identity for both mother and daughter had
to be an internal one, sexual identity of the daughter was also confused by the
lack of borders between her mother and herself, as boundry-less as the
land itself. In this sense, I wanted to ask questions about nationality,
identity, history and of course, love, as the bonds of mother are daughter are
broken by the emergence of an American diplomats son into the story who take
the daughter away from her mother.
2. I always want to know what generates a book for an author, so
what inspired this one?
For
me, this novel was really the work of more than twenty-five years of failures.
I could not understand how to write through my own personal experiences with
Israel and Palestine, the conflicts I had with a troubled mother who was taken
from Palestine to affluent New York and was an outsider there. But when the
Persian Gulf Crisis broke out and the situation for the Palestinians and
Israelis became severely inflamed, I felt had to integrate all I had heard as a
child, if only for myself. The drive was there all along, though when I was taken
as a young child to such a mysterious and often frightening country as Israel
was back then. But when the Persian Gulf Crisis happened, I felt more urgency
for some reason. I don’t think I’m a political person, so that wasn’t it. It
was that I was witnessing the erasure of a whole tribe of people virtually forgotten
as history rang its self-righteous bells. One doesn’t read much about
Palestinian Jews, so I felt like was working from blanks in my own education
too but not in my sensual and very real memory banks which held all those
family stories of early Palestine vital and sensually alive for me.
3. After all critical attention Edges won (and I understand Grace
Paley nominated it for the prestigious PEN/Faulkner award) was it difficult to
write the next book or did it make it easier? Did you find that the whole
process of writing the book was different somehow, and if so, how?
Yes! It was terrible. I
really didn’t have another book to go to! It was hard when Grace died because I
lost all that stalwart support, I felt lost in some forest of others who scared
and intimidated me without Grace. But now, ten years later I’m finishing my new
novel and pleased.
4. You worked closely with Grace Paley. Tell us a little bit about
what that was like.
I wrote an essay about her for the Quarterly
Review a few years back, after she died. I think it told what I knew of her as the
writer. It was called “The Legacy of Grace Paley”. What I most remember about
her personal is her vaudevillian sense of things. She could make the world's horrors
and your own grimest moments, all the dark places luminous, and jokes weren’t
just jokes, but a power to not feel like a leaf in the wind, thrown to the
world’s chaos. Humor was very important to her. And she was quite a
vaudevillian, a real performer. Everything was for the work of either living,
working or writing, just that you came by things honestly. Grace, she could
turn words into a flip and make them tumble around. She was a tumbling expert I
always thought. There were also many Interruptions whenever I visited her but
then she made the interruptions seem fascinating. She was a woman who wrote
about women’s lives, ordinary lives, she wasn’t interested in the famous, and she
was among the first to ever reveal women’s lusts, inner lives, feelings about family
obligations and dailiness with such a clear eye. And no one wanted to read such
stories before Grace! Much more. There will always be much more to say about
Grace.
5. What's
your writing life like? How do you plan your books, or do you?
I’m all over the place, I write doing the dishes. I write when I’m
supposed at a social gathering and paying attention. But I have absolutely no
routine.
5. What’s obsessing you now and why?
I’m obsessed with the culture of celebrity
and consumerist art and writing find myself in. And with the feelings of, being
an outsider and trying to not feel that, but also asking what is an outsider? Can
that be mire meaningful and gratifying in a way? I ’m writing a book set in the
literary 80’s, which I saw as the time when writing books really changed, and
the celebrity cults began. I’m also writing about de-institutionalization,
which happened under Reagan and was tragic. My character is a mentally ill
women who feel ill in her mid twenties and keeps having multiple
hospitalizations but truly finds the people in the hospital and the homeless she
“socializes” with in the streets more meaningful than the places she can’t
belong to or feel comfortable in outside society
7. What
question didn't I ask that I should have?
None, and thank Caroline for having me!