FIRST, the acclaim:
‘Splendid.’
— The New York Times
‘Elegantly imagined, finely tuned work.’
— The Miami Herald
"Hauntingly original, provocative, and dashed with wit—this literary ghost story changed the way I see the world." —Caroline Leavitt, New York Times bestselling author of Pictures of You and Cruel Beautiful World
"Dressler’s chilly new story is one woman's unforgettable fight for visibility."— Booklist
"This poem of a novel, exquisitely written, introduced me to the inner life of a ghost and held me spellbound throughout. . . . I heard whisperings from the attic, from under the bed. M Dressler has written an extraordinary book, poignant and tragic." —Luanne Rice, New York Times bestselling author of The Beautiful Lost
Debuts are always thrilling, and this one was so wonderful, that yes, reader, I blurbed it. I'm so happy to have Ms. Dressler here, and I forgot to ask her, where she got that fabulous hair! Thank you so much for being here and I cannot wait to see what you write next.
I always think that
writers are haunted to write the book they need to write. Was it this way for
you?
Absolutely. I’ve always felt writing is a form of being
haunted, so much so I even wrote this feeling, this awareness, into one of my early
novels. A character, a writer, says about his own characters: “They come to you
. . . It’s very strange, how it happens.
They’re like ghosts, in the beginning . . . but ghosts who haven’t lived yet,
or even been born. So you have to work backwards, looking for clues about them,
about who they might be, from the way they haunt you. And in this way you never
get away from them, and they never leave you.” I’ve never written a book
without that sense of being stalked by someone who won’t come to light if I
don’t sit still enough to pay attention, and who then stays with me . . .
But with The Last To
See Me, a true ghost story, this feeling was even more pronounced. The way
the book “arrived” was so haunting. I was simply sitting next to my husband
looking out the window while we drove up a beautiful, craggy stretch of the
Pacific Coast near Mendocino, California, and all at once I turned to him and
said, “I think someone died here and didn’t want to leave.” I just meant to try
out a story idea on him . . . and then, whoosh, Emma showed up. I could see
her. Plain as day. Black hair. Cleft chin. Strong body in a white shirtwaist
and dark skirt. Black boots. Strong hands. I’d never had that happen to me
before: a character manifest so completely, so quickly. People ask me how I
came up with her character, or how I made her ghost so “solid,” and I can’t remember
anything more than that: Emma just arrived. That was the initial, swift haunting.
The long, slow haunting was trying to live up to her story. It took a long,
long time to write and revise this book. I put it away several times. I didn’t
think I could do justice to Emma and her world—I might talk about the act of writing feeling
like being stalked by a ghost, but I’d never written an actual ghost story before,
or had a clue how to do it. Still I couldn’t imagine shelving her in the dark,
leaving her. Especially because her story is about someone refusing to be
invisible, someone who is a “nobody,” a poor, immigrant, working class girl,
forgotten, demanding to be seen, to be known. In a way, more than any character
I’ve written, she needed to reach an audience.
How scary was it (pun
intended) to write a ghost story that would also be literate and compelling?
That was what took so long. And not because of any dearth of
wonderful models out there, writers who’ve done it so brilliantly—Sarah Waters and
Shirley Jackson and Daphne DuMaurier. It’s because it’s tricky writing a
page-turner that also makes the reader want to linger on the page. With a gothic
novel, you’re wrestling with a tide that wants to go in and out at the same
time. You want the reader to feel both welcome and estranged, to feel
“enjoyably claustrophobic,” as Publishers Weekly put it. And at the same time, you want, or at
least I wanted, to do something much deeper than simply spook readers or make
them feel creepy. I wanted to ask big questions. Who is it and what is it a
culture most wants to erase, not to see, and why? Why are we fascinated by
ghosts, but almost invariably want them, by the end of a story, to vanish? What
does justice for the dead really mean? And how far are we willing to let a
character’s resistance, her fight for justice, go? Ghosts stories are, at their
heart, about controlling boundaries and borders. I tried to write a book that
would make readers feel and shiver against the boundaries, and question them,
too.
I loved the
intertwined real life and afterlife. I’m a big fan of quantum physics and I
know scientists believe that time is a man-made construct, that everything
might be happening at the same time. Do you think we are all forever reliving
bits of our past, present and future all the time? Can you talk about this please?
So glad you asked. I think about time all the time. I think much if not most of what we do as writers is
try to make sense of time by turning it into a story. I was simply sitting next to my husband looking out the window . .
. I spend most of my time trying to organize time on the page, or teaching other
writers how they might do it. I’m also obsessive about time. I organize my
entire life, chronologically, into photo albums so that I can actually see time passing. I love and need schedules
and deadlines. I hate being late. I got very upset, once, when a family member
dismantled a family photo album. And you just don’t get “upset” in this way
unless you have a strong suspicion that underneath it all time is not what it
appears to be but is actually layered and fluid and complex and the only way
you pretend it isn’t is by braking really, really hard every second or so.
Curiously, I’ve had one moment in my life (so far) when the human
construct of time collapsed and for an instant I felt, or I thought I felt,
time differently. It was when I learned that my father had died. I heard the
news, and the floor dropped out from under me, and I floated. For about fifteen
seconds, human time evaporated and I saw and understood my father’s whole life,
his birth and youth and adulthood and death existed simultaneously, as a single
unit, which meant mine did, which means your does, which meant everything does.
I tried so hard to stay in that space of everything-all-at-once, because it was
so powerful and so clear. And then I couldn’t stay there. My mind balked. I
went back to making chronological photo albums.
What kind of writer
are you? Do you map things out, scribble on legal pads, only use the computer,
have rituals?
All of the above. I have legal pads and journals and once
upon a time (not so much anymore) index cards that ideas and stories and scenes
and summaries got scribbled down on, and then I’d spread them out all over the
floor and build a runway toward the computer. Sometimes, when I know a story
really well, I don’t need to map it out so much. The Last To See Me didn’t need many maps. The plot showed up soon
after Emma did. But usually I’m flying over unknown country and I have to leave
maps and outlines all over the place for myself, which is strange because basically
you’re trying to plot a course to a continent that doesn’t exist yet, and half
the time you have to ignore half of what you’ve jotted down, because nothing
but your gut, no note, no index card, tells you that, no, that’s the wrong
direction.
I also have rituals of avoidance. Like jumping onto social
media. Though that’s really a ritual to get me into a word- and world-space
before I start writing. I used to worry social media would be a distraction,
and it can be, but for me it also helps me remember there are real people outside the world of my head
and remember the power of words themselves—you can literally sit and watch people
reacting to language on Facebook and Twitter.
And then there are the rituals—the best kind!—of
celebration. After I finish every draft of a book, I always play the song that
was on the radio when I finished the very first draft of my very first novel,
twenty years ago (I can’t say which song because that’s private and part of the
ritual but I play it really, really loud and dance and whoop all over the house).
And then, when the first printed copies of one of my books arrive, I open up the
box and I take out the top copy and I hold it up to the sky to all my ghosts, to
all the people, like my father, who are no longer with me but who helped me
become a writer and a human being—and I dance and say, See what we did.
What’s obsessing you
now and why?
The next book. Always the next book. I always obsess when I
finish a book and it’s published and I’m ready to start another one. What on earth makes you think you can do it
again? Remember how hard that was? And then, after I’ve decided I’m going
to write another book anyway, the central question: Who is it about? Not what,
but who. There are so many stories that need to be told, so many perspectives
that need to be heard. I try to write from a different perspective or
perspectives every time, while still being aware of the limits and privileges
of my own. I don’t want to tie myself to one type of character or book or genre,
but I want to be very aware of the choices I make and what those choices mean
outside the haunted space of my own head. So I obsess about the choices I’m
making, and, again, I obsess about time. You
only have so much time. Which story are you going to tell next? And then I
decide. And then I get obsessive about all the details surrounding the
story—right now I’m completely obsessed with mining—and all the while I know
the obsessing is just another kind of ritual, because the truth is that the
heart of a book, at least for me, is not the frenzy of obsession but the
calmness of the characters stalking you. They come, they sit down on the
dashboard in front of you as you ride along a lonely piece of coast. And that’s
that.