YES! It was my honor to blurb~And Gail will be live interviewed on A Mighty Blaze on Friday, May 5/8 at 2! How COOL IS THAT?
Literary treasure Godwin’s shimmeringly alive new novel follows a True North female friendship through 41 years of shifting connections, love, tragedy, and the deep drama of a changing world, but it’s also about so much more, like the secrets that can make or break us, and how stories can virtually save our souls, leading us to something we never realized that we needed to know—which is exactly what this gorgeous, heartbreakingly true, and profound novel does. To say I love it is understatement.
Caroline Leavitt, New York Times Bestselling author of
Pictures of You and Cruel Beautiful World
Gail
Godwin is indeed a literary treasure. She’s written 14 novels, two short story
collections, three non-fiction books, and ten libretti. She’s the author of
five bestsellers, three finalists for the National Book Award, and she’s won
the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts.
She’s also one of the most astonishingly kind writers I’ve ever met (people
kept telling me, “she changed my life!” I think I can say that, as well.) I
first met Gail when her publicist called me to ask if I would like to come to
lunch with Gail, her publishing crew and Emily St. John Mandel. I was so
honored! To my delight, the lunch was warm, friendly and from then on, I kept
in touch with Gail.
I’ve
loved her new book, Old Lovegood Girls in a way I can only describe as
passionately. It’s about a lifelong friendship between two writers, about art
and how best we live in the world, what we remember and what we forget, and it’s—in
a word—dazzling.
One of the many things I loved so much about Old Lovegood
Girls is how deeply attached we become to both these women, Feron and Merry.
You uncover both their lives, their hearts, and indeed the souls of them. At one
point, the writer Feron is told she can “glimpse the undersides of peoples’
lives.” I think that is what you absolutely do in this book. Is this a kind of
alchemy that only happens in writing for you, or does it happen in real life,
as well?
“You have more strangeness in you than you are aware of,”
Feron’s writing teacher tells her in their first session. “I would urge you to
cultivate the strangeness. You can glimpse the undersides of people’s lives,
what is going on beneath the realistic narrative.” Her novel in progress is at
an impasse and Cuervo tells her to give it a rest and go to
the library and
study up on fairy tales and then write a modern one of her own.
Years later, after Feron’s Beast and Beauty has been
published, and A Singular Courtship, a successful version of the old
impasse novel, has at long last found its way to fruition, Cuervo tells her,
“You have preserved the strangeness I liked in the original draft.” Feron’s
precarious childhood has sharpened her awareness of the underside because she
was raised in that underside herself. To sustain herself, she has had to ferret
out the motives of others. Through the practice of writing fiction she brings
to light more and more of this underside in herself and others.
When Feron first lays eyes on her roommate, she marvels at
Merry’s “in-one-piece-ness.” (“As though God, when making her, took great pains
to color all of her inside the lines.”) About herself, she thinks, “Feron was
not inside the lines.”
When they are in their sixties, Merry tells Feron, “You
have a sense of the beyond that I just don’t,” after Feron has seen the ghost
of Merry’s dead brother after spending a single night in his room. Later that
morning, while Feron is standing behind a lectern reading a psalm at her aunt’s
funeral, she has a brief moment of looking out at the congregation and seeing
the parts they are hiding. This sudden invasion of “underside” vision scares
her. At first she thinks she is having a fit or a stroke.
A reviewer wrote that I was “a forensically skillful
examiner of my characters’ motives, thoughts, and behavior.” When I am writing,
a character’s singularity will suddenly poke right through the page and
show itself. (This will happen to the mature Feron as she finds herself
lingering over the passages about her husband’s mother.) There is something so
arresting in this material that she resists leaving it. And her decision to
stuck with it as long it attracts her is the right one.
There’s a lot about memory in the book, what we choose to
remember and what we try to bury or at least to keep to ourselves. Can you talk
about this please?
Isn't that
everyone’s dilemma, what we choose to remember and what we choose to forget?
And then there’s what we actually DO forget until someone remembers it for
us. Also there’s what we choose to bury,
or at least keep under wraps, for our own reasons. After Feron is given a new
life by her uncle, she resolves to offer the barest of facts of her old life,
heavily edited, and then to start over on a clean page with every new person
she meets.
Throughout their entire friendship, Merry never tells
anyone, not even Feron, the secret that led to her marriage. Another love
secret is added later, but Merry guards that, too. The one private family story
Merry had told Feron in college, about Merry’s mother’s winter depression
chamber, shows up thirty years later in Feron’s novel, Mr. Blue, even
including the furniture in the depression chamber.
On a happier note, having been friends for so long, Merry
can remind Feron of old conversations they’d had in the dorm.
(“You
would speculate about your uncle’s sex life with his fiancée, sometimes you’d
do their voices. Like, ‘Not yet, Rowan, I’m not ready yet.’ And he would say,
‘Honey is it because you think I’ll respect you less?”
“Merry, I
do not remember one single word of this.”
“That’s
what friends and family are for. Even during my brother’s brief life, we often
remembered entirely different versions of the same event.”)
Can we talk about the writer’s relationship to something
she has written? The usual question: “Did you make that up or did that really
happen?”
And what about the writer’s relationship to something she has written? You are asked “Did you make that up or did it really happen?” If you say I made it all up, are you sure? Or if you say, well, some of it happened, but I changed things around——-if you say this often enough, one day you might yourself lose track of what happened and what didn’t.
This is Feron’s line of reasoning after Merry has asked her
if the “physical part really happened” between Feron and the ex-convict in
Chicago, on whom Beast and Beauty were based. And Feron waffles with a
“well, yes and no.” In real life, Feron tells her, he was unnaturally gallant,
or else impotent, “but in the novel I let her talk him into it the night before
she leaves him.” Because it made a better story. Then she thinks, What if, one
day, you actually lose track of what happened and what didn’t?
What did a book have
to do with your life?
I love the way you have phrased this question. It widens
the answers.
Let’s say it is your own book, the one you are writing.
Cuervo tells Feron that the one book he wrote in his youth, Nito’s Garden, kept
him from committing suicide.
Feron’s Beast and Beauty provides her with a safe
form to express an unsafe experience.
Miss Petrie, Lovegood’s English teacher, passes on her
reverence of Chekov to Merry and Feron who take him as their model. “Miss
Petrie is trying to make us comfortable with uncertainty,” Feron explains. In
their early writings, both ask themselves: “How would Chekov do it?”
What if it is a book you are reading? Merry, who did not
grow up reading the Bible, enters an enlightened world in the company of her
Bible study group. She realizes that this book was written by people like
herself down through the ages who were looking for help. Each of the women in
the group offers up her ideas, her research, and then all of them seek guidance
through the group’s mind.
When a librarian in her apartment building asks Feron
whether she has read all of Jane Austen, she says, “All but one. I couldn’t stand that goody-goody heroine in Mansfield
Park.” But she tries again and finds herself in a different moral place
than the one inhabited by her scornful
younger self. She realizes that Fanny Price’s transplant from low to high on
the privilege scale is painfully similar to her own and the book has much to
say to her now.
So
much of this astonishing novel is also about art, with a very excellent bit of
advice for any writer. Ignore the sponsor—which is anything that has influence or
power over the art you are attempting to make. That’s such a difficult but important
thing to do, especially now where so many writers are dealing with many
sponsors, including social media. Are you yourself able to follow this advice?
Cuervo
tells Feron the true artist learns when to “ignore the sponsor. “Sponsors are
all the influences outside yourself and between you and your work. Sponsors
include the editor, the publisher, the business act of production and
publication, the booksellers and buyers, the readers and reviewers, the
admirers and detractors. Cuervo even includes himself as a sponsor. After his
death, Feron hears him say “out-walk the sponsor! So far, I have failed in my
efforts to ignore my sponsors. But increasingly I try to out-walk them!
I loved that both women are writers. It’s astonishing how
the snippets of their writing reveal the characters even more deeply. How would
you say your writing reveals you?
As writers, Merry and Feron operate out of different needs.
This is evident even back in junior college. Merry wants to fulfill the
assignment responsibly and please her teacher, and she is attracted to material
that touches her emotions. Feron is stimulated by envy and competition and the
desire to impress. On a much deeper level her writing impetus is fed by her
longing to stop feeling she is tainted and has earned the right to acknowledge
she is good enough.
Merry is the first to publish—to Feron’s anguish. When Merry’s
story, “The Curing Barn,” appears in the Atlantic Monthly, Merry is 28.
It is a story in which a sister is slowly coming to terms with her brother’s
death in Viet Nam by retelling herself the story of the family’s annual tobacco
harvest, when the leaves are hung in the curing barn. She recalls how he picked
off the “lugs” (spoiled leaves) when he was a child and gradually has him as a
teenager straddling the rafters of the barn and hauling the leaves up to dry.
Feron’s first publication is her modern fairy tale, Beast and Beauty, when
she is 36. Merry never publishes again in a literary magazine. She spends
several years writing a long piece (for no payment) about tobacco growing for a
state magazine. Then she spends more years working on a novel about Stephen
Slade, the slave who discovered the art of flue-cured tobacco. She abandons it
when she realizes she will never be able to get inside the mind of a black
person let alone a slave. Over the years, she writes and rewrites many stories.
The ones she loves best are her re-imaginings of the love story between her
favorite college teacher, Miss Petrie, and her secret partner Miss Olafson, the
gym teacher. She knows these can’t be published in the 1960’s and seventies.
She never stops writing because the act of doing it makes her happy.
Feron’s Beast and Beauty makes it possible for her
to face the two weeks with the ex-con, another part of her past she has tried
to bury. It will take her almost two more decades to feel her way into the
right way to tell A Singular Courtship, her marriage novel.
The things Merry and Feron choose to write and the way they
go about writing them reveal precious information about their values, their
affinities, and their qualms.
I’m not sure I can
give a satisfactory account of ways my work reveals me. As I get older, I write
shorter and make do with simpler sentences. Like Feron, writing is a practice
to save myself, to learn myself, and to puzzle out why humans do the things
they do. For me, as for Feron, jealousy and competition have served as excellent
stimulants! However, like Merry, the act of writing makes me happy. I have
reached the point where I feel unsettled when I am not writing.
What’s obsessing you now and why?
I used to obsess over Death and Dying. Then Donald Trump
happened.
Since November 9, 1916, I have been circling my Obsession
Corral, asking “How?” and then “Why?”
Obsession is circular. You trot round and round your
little corral. You can go clockwise or counter-clockwise, but there is no exit
gate.
What happened to my country? How
did it happen so quickly? How is it possible that one man...?
Yet history tells us it has
happened like this before and can happen again.
How much longer can the center
hold this time?
How I look forward to getting back to good old Death and
Dying!
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