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Prodigal Summer Questions and Answers
Our Book Club will be reading Prodigal Summer next month. What question would you most like us to discuss?
Answer: You're welcome to read it however you please (that goes for all my books), but if you really want my guidance on Prodigal Summer I'd ask you to read slowly; this is the most challenging book I've ever given my readers. Several reviewers have completely missed what the book is about, because they paid no attention to anything beyond human plot on the shallowest level. This novel is not exclusively-or even mainly-about humans. There is no main character. My agenda is to lure you into thinking about whole systems, not just individual parts. The story asks for a broader grasp of connections and interdependencies than is usual in our culture.
If you have a biologist in your book club, ask for a definition of the scientific field of Ecology; otherwise, look it up. (Hint: it has nothing to do with saving the earth or recycling.) Think about why the story's three main narrators are obsessed with what they call ghosts: extinct animals, dispossessed relatives, the American chestnut. In the networks of life described in this story, notice how the absence of a thing is as important as its presence. Notice the sentence that begins and ends the book: "Solitude is only a human presumption." Getting the picture? Remember there are no wrong answers, and have a great discussion.
Do you have a background in biology or medicine, like the character in Prodigal Summer?
Answer: Prodigal Summer is full of people with biological knowledge, including an entomologist, a wildlife ecologist, an agriculture teacher, and different kinds of farmers. And yes, as a matter of fact, I also have an academic background in biology. I grew up with both feet planted in nature and a house full of field guides; I was a biology major in college (though I also studied and loved music, literature and anthropology); and my graduate degree is in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. My dissertation was on kin selection in termites, and I've worked as a scientist in fields ranging from economic botany to human physiology. Natural history is my avocation. I use my academic training in my writing all the time, particularly in the way I approach and research a novel. (I think of it as a dissertation with a better plot-and permission to create data!) But Prodigal Summer was especially rewarding in this regard, because I was able to work in wonderful nuggets of biological info like the keystone predator concept and the Volterra principle. I've been waiting a long time to do that.
I am really enjoying the omnipresent sense of fertility in Prodigal Summer, and I think you've done a wonderful job of creating an erotic current through the narrative thread... Here's my question: Why is it that Eros seems to have disappeared from modern writing, replaced instead by raunchy sex? How did you manage to address the miracle of human sexuality without making it either pornographic or giggle-inducing?
Answer: I can't say why other modern writers have turned their backs on Eros, but I can guess, because facing her head-on made me pretty nervous at first. Sex in our strange culture is both an utter taboo and the currency of jaded commerce. It's very tricky terrain to write about copulation, when the language seems to be held in the joint custody of pornography and the medical profession. But Prodigal Summer is about life and fecundity, and it could not be an honest book without sex at its very center. For this book to be taken seriously as literature, I realized I would have to invent a new poetry of copulation, and that is what I tried to do. I found it safest to rely heavily on erotic imagery from nature (it seems the doctors and Larry Flynt haven't gotten there yet). I do admit, when I invented a love scene between a woman and a luna moth I wondered if I had perhaps gone around the bend. But it seems to have worked in the end.
If you're still interested, I wrote a whole essay on this subject which was published in the "Writers on Writing" column in the New York Times, 3/27/00, p. 1, Living Arts section.
What made you decide to write about Appalachia? I am from the region and am always interested what draws others there. Did you go to Appalachia or spend time living there to research this book? If not, how did you do research for it?
Answer: I'll answer these questions together, as the answers overlap. My connection to the region is completely personal. I grew up in rural Kentucky with a love for the language, music and forested mountains that rose just to the west of us. When I left the region to go to college and live in other places, I was stunned to discover the world knows almost nothing about "hillbillies," and respects them even less. An undercurrent of defensiveness about this has guided my writing and my life, I think, as I've tried to seek out the voices of marginalized people. I've lived in three continents and all over the US, but no place outside of the rural eastern deciduous woodlands has ever truly and wholly felt like home. After may years in Arizona, I moved back in 2004. My family and I live on a productive farm in the very heart of Appalachia.
Writing Prodigal Summer was a matter of coming home to my own language and culture. The ways these characters speak, their idioms and understated humor, the things they do-stripping tobacco, bringing casseroles to a wake, counting on relatives and looking askance at outsiders-are all utterly familiar to me. I had to do very little research for this book compared with, for example, The Poisonwood Bible, which was set in a year I don't remember, in a place I couldn't go. After the enormous effort of researching that very exotic book, I think I needed the comfort of looking homeward.
Critics have compared your work to that of Henry David Thoreau. Are you, or were you, inspired by his writing?
Answer: I was, and am. I first read Walden as a teenager and was blown away by how carefully this guy paid attention to the details of his immediate surroundings-the seeds, the trees, the behavior of squirrels-and seemed to feel happy and wealthy as a consequence, even though he lived in a tiny house and owned only one chair. It gave me a sense of the indulgence of my own teenage fixations on imagined material deprivations and abstract grievances. I remember writing about this in my journal, consciously readjusting my world view. I've since read most of Thoreau's work, some of it many times, including the posthumously published "Faith in a Seed." He was a rare combination: a good scientist in his time, a spiritual interpreter of life, and a brilliant prose stylist. I would be proud to claim him as an influence.
Why did you start writing? Is it something you've done all your life, or was there one event that sparked your need to write?
Answer: I have no idea why I started, only that I did, at age 8, daily, after somebody gave me for Christmas a small red diary with a tiny pencil and tiny gold lock (easily picked with a bobby pin, turns out). I've continued to write frequently, if not daily, to this day. By the time I reached adolescence I was not just recording my life but also inventing poems and stories. Writing gave me a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction as a way to make sense of things and feel useful, at least to myself. Eventually I wanted to extend that utility to create stories that might be useful to others, in the way that books had been valuable to me. I'm sure the absence of television in my life also caused me to invest more time in both reading and writing. Because I think this was a very good thing in the long run, I've made it a point to keep TV to a minimum in my own children's lives.
Out of all of your books, which is your favorite? is it always the last one you've written?
Answer: This question feels exactly like being asked which of my children is my favorite. All of them! Each book I've written was difficult for its own particular reason (with each new book I set out to tackle some new challenge of craft or scope or content that I'm sure I can't possibly pull off), and each one has succeeded especially well at its own particular thing. I tend to be most preoccupied with my latest-until I become preoccupied with the next one. In this way books are different from children: there will always be a next one.
Do you have any advice for aspiring writers? What is your writing routine-where do you sit, when do you write, what do you wear?
I know these might seem like silly questions, but I think there is a big component for me of picturing myself as a writer, and I am always curious what that would look like!
Answer: If you want to be a writer, don't picture yourself writing. DO writing. It's really that simple. My work routine is the same as any working mother's: I have always written while my children were in someone else's care. I sit down at my desk with a cup of coffee as soon as my household gets quiet and the school bus has been met, and I quit the minute they get home and bounce in through my study door at 3: 40 pm to tell me the new exciting tales of their day. Oftentimes that cup of coffee will still be sitting next to my left hand, cold and forgotten, because I haven't stood up from my desk since I first sat down that morning. (Yes, I do get muscle aches, but a walk or some rigorous gardening is good therapy.) I love to write. For me, it takes discipline to STOP writing and go make dinner or clean up the house. I can't tell you how to love writing, but I think the heart of the matter is that you've got to have some big, true THING you are dying to tell the world.
Did you have to practice or get any kind of training to read the audio of Prodigal Summer?
Answer: Reading Prodigal Summer for the audio book was more fun than a barrel of monkeys. I wanted to do it myself. I didn't trust a hired actor to get those accents right, and I can't abide a fakey, condescending hillbilly accent. For me the accents were easy, since that's my mother tongue, but I also found it surprisingly enjoyable to provide characterizations and vocal inflections to distinguish the characters and keep up the excitement of a scene. I've had years of training in this field, you see, characterizing Piglet and Pooh or Laura Ingalls and Pa at bedtime every night.
Where do the bird songs come from on the audio of Prodigal Summer?
Answer: Those birdsongs were recorded in deep woods in the mountains of southwestern Virginia by my husband, Steven Hopp, an ornithologist who happens to study birdsong. He recorded these guys for other purposes, but when I was in the studio taping Prodigal Summer it dawned on me that the perfect musical interludes between chapters could be provided by Wood Thrushes and Scarlet Tanagers.
Poisonwood Bible Questions and Answers
Could you comment on the research and life experience that helped you to accurately recreate the world of missionaries and Congolese villagers in your latest novel? Your depiction is enthralling!
Answer: Historical fiction is a frightening labor-intensive proposition. It took me many years to write The Poisonwood Bible, most of them spent on research which fell into several categories.
Most obviously, I read a lot of books about the political, social, and natural history of Africa and the Congo. Some of these are listed in a bibliography at the end of the novel; dozens more are not. Sometimes, reading a whole, densely-written book on, say, the formation and dissolution of indigenous political parties during the Congolese independence, or an account of the life histories of Central African venomous snakes, would move me only a sentence or two forward in my understanding of my subject. But every sentence mattered. I knew it would take years, and tried to be patient. Some of my sources were famous and well-written, but most were obscurities, like the quirky self-published memoirs written by missionaries to the Congo in the 50s and 60s, which I'd sometimes find in used book stores. These were gems, rendering clear details of missionary life and attitudes from the era.
I read, and re-read daily, from the King James Bible. It gave me the rhythm of the Price family's speech, the frame of reference for their beliefs, and countless plot ideas.
Likewise, I began nearly every writing day by perusing a huge old two-volume Kikongo-French dictionary, compiled early in the century (by a missionary, of course). Slowly I began to grasp the music and subtlety of this amazing African language, with its infinite capacity for being misunderstood and mistranslated.
One of the novel's challenges was the matter of capturing the language of teenage females from the Southeastern U.S. in the late 1950s. Since I was barely alive then, this was also foreign territory. Teenage speech is stereotyped and notoriously ephemeral; if I'd just guessed, it would have sounded inauthentic. This stumped me, until I hit paydirt in a used book store in Boston: 35 pounds (I had to mail them home) of Life, Look, and Saturday Evening Post magazines from 1958-1961. I spent hours immersed in the news, attitudes, and advertisements of these years. Slowly the voices of my novel began to emerge, and Rachel Price (like Athena) was born fully formed, with every hair in place:
"Aren't you glad you use Dial? Don't you wish everybody did?"
Another kind of research I did, as your question suggests, was in the domain of life experience. I happen to have spent a brief portion of my childhood (1963) in a small village in central Congo, and this undoubtedly gave that place permanent importance in my mind. I have strong sensory memories of playing with village children and exploring the jungle. When I began the novel my parents shared photographs and journals from that time, which helped stir my own memories. My parents were not missionaries, but we met several missionary families in Africa (though none quite like the Prices, I'm happy to report), so I knew a little of that life. But the bottom line is this: I was a child, in 1963, and understood only about a thimbleful of what was happening around me in the Congo. The thematic material of The Poisonwood Bible is serious, adult stuff. I wrote the book, not because of a brief adventure I had in place of second grade, but because as an adult I'm interested in cultural imperialism and post-colonial history. I had to approach the subject in an adult way.
As a research resource, other poeple's books provide only verbally-rendered information. I also needed to know things about Africa that must be learned first-hand. I made research trips into Western and Central Africa (as near as I could get to Mobutu's Zaire), and kept detailed journals on sounds, smells, textures, tastes, and the sort of domestic trivia that seldom shows up in important books. Whenever possible I stayed with residents of the area I was visiting, and I always volunteered to cook dinner so I could walk to a village market with coins in hand and face the daunting, educational experience of bargaining and bringing home the ingredients of a decent meal. I asked a lot of questions that many Africans surely found amusing and too personal, but once in awhile I struck up a friendship. I'm especially grateful for these: the Senegalese mother, the University student in Cotonou who suffered my curiosity for days on end, frankly giving me views on religion, history, and family life that would permanently alter my universe.
I spent time in museums, here and abroad, studying exhibits of African religion and material culture. I lost myself in the amazing Okapi diorama in the American Museum of Natural History. And I spent one unforgettable afternoon in the Reptile House of the San Diego Zoo, watching a green mamba.
If this laundry list of disparate observations seems excessive or odd, I can only say that this is what it means to be a novelist. You have to be madly in love with the details.
This novel, The Poisonwood Bible, seems a departure from your previous work. Why a novel about the Congo?
Answer:This story came from passion, culpability, anger and a long-term fascination with Africa, and my belief that what happened to the Congo is one of the most important political parables of our century. I've been thinking about this story for as long as I've had eyes and a heart. I live in a country that has done awful things, all over the world, in my name. You can't miss that. I didn't make those decisions, but I have benefited from them materially. I live in a society that grew prosperous from exploiting others. England has a strong tradition of postcolonial literature but here in the U.S., we can hardly even say the word "postcolonial." We like to think we're the good guys. So we persist in our denial, and live with a legacy of exploitation and racial arrogance that continues to tear people apart, in a million large and small ways. As long as I have been a writer I've wanted to address this, to try to find a way to own our terrible history honestly and construct some kind of redemption. It's a preposterously outsized ambition. That's why I waited 30 years to write it--who wouldn't? I'd have waited a hundred, but I realized I'd be dead before I was truly smart enough to write this book, so I'd better get it started while I was still kicking.
The evangelist Nathan Price never speaks for himself in this tale, we only see him through the eyes of his wife and daughters. Why did you not give Nathan a voice?
Answer: Because of what the story is about. Some people seem to think this is a male/female issue, but that never even crossed my mind. Nathan obviously doesn't represent maleness! He represents an historical attitude. This book is a political allegory, in which the small incidents of characters' lives shed light on larger events in our world. The Prices carry into Africa a whole collection of beliefs about religion, technology, health, politics, and agriculture, just as industrialized nations have often carried these beliefs into the developing world in an extremely arrogant way, very certain of being right (even to the point of destroying local ideas, religion and leadership), even when it turns out-as it does in this novel-that those attitudes are useless, offensive or inapplicable. I knew most of my readers would feel unsympathetic to that arrogance. We didn't make the awful decisions our government imposed on Africa. We didn't call for the assassination of Lumumba; we hardly even knew about it. We just inherited these decisions, and now have to reconcile them with our sense of who we are. We're the captive witnesses, just like the wife and daughters of Nathan Price. Male or female, we are not like him. That is what I wanted to write about. We got pulled into this mess but we don't identify with that arrogant voice. It's not his story. It's ours.
Are you sympathetic at all to Nathan Price?
Answer: Sympathy isn't the question. He has caused desperate harm--who can sympathize with that? But he's obviously charismatic, and complex. He's the center of his own universe, hard to walk away from. He's a force to be reckoned with.
Do you consider this novel to be antagonistic toward Christianity, or missionaries?
Answer: Some people seem to think that, but I certainly don't, and I took some care to try and make that clear. In fact, my favorite character is Brother Fowles, whose role in the novel is to redeem both Christianity and the notion of mission. I happen to think religion is a wonderful thing -- I'm only opposed to arrogant proselytizing. Nathan Price is, indeed, an arrogant proselytizer, but he's not the only agent of Christianity here. His wife and daughters take different paths toward more open-minded kinds of spirituality, and I called in Brother Fowles specifically to represent Christian mission in a kinder voice. Christianity, like every other major religion, has a million different voices. No single person could represent the whole -- least of all a character in a book, wholse role is to serve a story.
Which character or scene is the most important in the book, in your opinion?
Answer: I know, from reading my mail, that every reader takes something different from this book. Readers have written in their votes for most beloved character and favorite scene, and practically everything gets a vote. (Even the dum-dum Rachel is far more popular than I expected.) Some people's lives were changed by the ants passing through the village eating everything in their path; others said their world view was rocked when they read that many people think democracy is a profoundly unfair political system. (It leaves nearly half the population unsatisfied, all the time.) Every character here (except Nathan) was somebody's favorite. I would never bias my readers by telling them what I think is important. It's all important, or it wouldn't be there. You'll take from it what your life requires. The beauty of literary fiction is that it's acutely personal.
What does this novel say about marriage?
Answer: I wasn't trying to characterize "marriage" in general, as I wrote this. The particular marriage I invented for Nathan and Orleanna is a very unhappy one. It began in passion but became an arrangement of wifely obligation and husbandly domination - obviously a part of the political allegory, but hopefully drawn with enough subtlety that it's also just an interesting marriage to read about. Orleanna has her day, eventually.
Why did you go to all the trouble of telling the story from five different points of view?
Answer: Because it was necessary to the theme of this novel. I conceived the structure this way from the very beginning, even though I knew it would be quite difficult to pull off, from the point of view of craft. I spent almost a year just honing the different voices, practicing telling the same scene from all five different angles, until I had differentiated them to the point that the reader would instantly know who was speaking, just from a sentence or two. So yes, it was hard, but it had to be so. The four sisters and Orleanna represent five separate philosophical positions, not just in their family but also in my political examination of the world. This novel is asking, basically, "What did we do to Africa, and how do we feel about it?" It's a huge question. I'd be insulting my readers to offer only one answer. There are a hundred different answers along a continuum, with absolute paralyzing guilt on the one end and "What, me worry? I didn't do it!" on the other end. Orleanna is the paralyzed one here, and Rachel is "What, me worry?" Leah, Adah, and Ruth May take other positions in between, having to do with social activism, empirical analysis, and spirituality, respectively. That's stating it very baldly and makes them sound boring, which is why I always try to avoid answering the question "What does ____ represent in your book?" In the end, all these characters became more quirky and entertaining than what they represent. One of them reads backwards and writes in palindromes. One of them constantly says things like "It was a tapestry of justice!" and "I felt like Gulliver among the Lepidopterans." What began as a thematic challenge became one of the greatest pleasures of creating the book.
Were you consciously trying to create a parallel to Little Women, in this story of a mother and four daughters?
Answer: Certainly I considered that other famous family of "little women," as I was writing this. It was one of the most beloved books of my childhood. But the parallels don't go too far. Louisa May Alcott didn't put any snakes in her book.
Would you characterize this book as a postcolonial epic, a psychological novel, a family saga, or what?
Answer: Like most artists, I'm wary about categorizing my work - particularly this novel. It's very large. It's political and domestic, symbolic and epic and, I hope, also a heck of a good read. I believe with all my heart in delivering on my contract with my readers. They've got plenty of other things to do, so I had better give them a reason to turn every one of these 550 pages. This is my promise: I solemnly swear I'll make you laugh out loud at least once, cry a little in private, and burn whatever you left on the stove.
One of the greatest challenges a writer faces is creating multi-faceted characters, and that challenge becomes particularly difficult when the character is as one-sided and single-minded as Nathan Price in The Poisonwood Bible. What are your feelings about Nathan? Do you believe you've done him and his faith justice?
Answer: Nathan kept me in thrall for thousands of pages, counting the many drafts of this long novel. Am I pleased with how I rendered him? Of course! I never turn in a manuscript until every character, image, and word is exactly what I want it to be. Nathan is single-minded all right, but hardly one-sided. He's ferocious and cowardly; charismatic and revolting; brilliant and tedious. I'm not sure what you mean by "doing him justice." I certainly don't owe him anything. He's a character, invented by me, for no other purpose than to serve my plot.
As a writer of literary fiction, I count on my readers to have the intelligence and subtlety to understand this relationship between character and theme. Nathan Price doesn't need to represent the missionary profession, any more than Dr. Jekyll represents all physicians or King Lear represents all old men with daughters. The Poisonwood Bible is a political allegory. Nathan Price is a symbolic figure at its center, suggesting many things about the way the U.S. and Europe have approached Africa with a history of cultural arrogance and misunderstanding at every turn. He is meant to be difficult to understand, hard to love, and ultimately, something we must all own up to on some level.
Did I do justice to his faith? I believe so, yes. The soul of the book is its portrayal of the divergent spiritual views of its characters. This is by far the most religious book I've written, and gave me a chance to explore not only African religion, but the spiritual traditions of my own culture. As the very Jesus-like Brother Fowles says, in the novel, "There are Christians, and there are Christians." Nathan Price and Tata Fowles offer an inkling of the extremely wide range of people who use the same name for many different brands of faith and works. The portrayal is complex, I agree. But as surely as Thoreau was suspicious of any endeavor requiring new clothes, I am skeptical of any kind of religion that fits in a sound bite.
Other Questions and Answers
Did you study Latin in high school? If so, do you now find it useful to your work as a writer?
Answer: If my high school had offered Latin, I'm sure I'd have taken four years of it. I was that type.
Alas, my high school didn't. In those days the assets of a school system in Kentucky corresponded directly to the affluence of the community around it. Our high-school had to stretch just a couple of teachers over the whole category of "language." They had their hands full trying to acquaint us with English.
So no Latin for me. But I didn't consider that limitation fatal -- if I noticed it at all. (I'm dismayed by friends who yank their kids out of public high schools because of limited course offerings; don't they know what adolescents actually do in school?) I pursued my fascination with language as far as I could, in every possible direction. I took correspondence courses in French while I was still a teenager, and in college I studied Greek. Since then I've learned French, Spanish and modern Greek by living in countries where those languages are spoken. In used-book stores and on trips I've collected an impressively odd assortment of dictionaries and language references. Here's a peek at one of the bookshelves near my writing desk: The Complete Oxford English Dictionary (complete with magnifying glass); the Random House Unabridged; Cassell's Spanish-English/English-Spanish; Joe Keenan's terrific Breaking Out of Beginner's Spanish; a couple of basic French grammar books and a French-English/English-French dictionary; Elementary Latin Dictionary; Greek-English/English-Greek; a U.S. State Department "Greek Basic Course" handbook devised for the foreign service; German-English/English-German; Cherokee-English Dictionary; Italian-English/English-Italian; English-Catalan; Kikongo-French; Dictionary of Scientific and Technical Terms; and Aphrodite by Isabel Allende. (I think that last one's mis-shelved.)
I love languages because I'm a writer, and vice-versa. I can make better use of the color and weight of a particular word if I know its family history. English is a wild, rich hybrid of its Romantic and Germanic roots -- which means that for just about every important concept we have two different words, one derived from high-minded Latin and one from the sensible German. "Liberty" and "freedom," for example. "Poultry" and "chicken." I love the insights a language can give me into other people's lives and thoughts. (That in Japanese, for example, there are at least a dozen progressively self-effacing ways to say "excuse me.") I love discovering how words are tied together: that a terrapin is terrestrial. That "lapidary" and "dilapidated" are both about stones (in the latter, they're tumbling out). That "religious" and "sacrilegious" contain that tricky spelling difference because they actually come from different roots.
Do you find this soporific? Sorry, I can't help it. I'm a language junkie. Consulta-ho amb el coixi!
Can't your paperbacks be less expensive?
Answer: I honestly don't know. If you actually mean, "Can't you talk your publisher into putting a lower price on your books," the answer is no. Pricing is one of the many aspects of book production over which an author has no control. But you can find most of my books in any good library, if you really don't have two dimes to rub together -- most are available in mass-market paperback -- the smaller, squatter ones sold in drugstores, grocery checkout counters, etc., at roughly half the price of the larger-format trade paperbacks sold in bookstores. Mass-markets cost less because they're smaller, have a cheaper binding (tend to fall apart after one reading), and are printed in enormous quantities.
When publishers set the price of a book, they're striving for a competitive market price that will also cover their production costs, which are many: not just paper, printing, and advertising, but also the salaries of editors, copy editors, publicists, book designers, cover illustrators, sales reps, CEO's, and the guy in the basement who sorts the fan mail. Oh, yes, and also the author's 10 cents out of every dollar on each book sold.
All authors, whether famous or unknown, earn roughly the same ten cents on the dollar. (Actually it's a stairstep arrangement: royalties begin as low as 7% and may go as high as 15% after a large number of books are sold.) Most authors are just as unhappy as you are about the soaring price of the printed word. We have to buy lots of them -- including our own. (This came as a surprise to one of my daughters who, at a tender age, rounded up every Kingsolver title in our local bookstore and headed for the door declaring, "These are all my Mom's!") The blame for rising prices rests in many quarters. A steep rise in the price of paper made its impact a few years ago; other rising costs include the investments that trade publishers now feel they must make in advertising, and high-visibility promotion.
But let's keep things in perspective. I can still go to my local independent bookstore and get the complete poems of Emily Dickinson for less than the price of a mediocre restaurant meal. I'd call that a bargain.
Why do you write mostly about women?
Answer: For the same reason I write mostly about people who live in the U.S., who must work for a living, who have functional eyes, ears, and limbs, who speak English, who are raising children, who face imbalances of power in their relationships and lives.
A novel is a rich collection of details all added together in a way that satisfactorily answers some of life's universal questions. I don't believe the categories I listed above are superior to, for example, men, citizens of other countries, people who have no children, who speak Portuguese, or are disabled. I passionately love to read stories of lives vastly different from my own. But when I write, if I hope to arrive at any convincing answers, I have to begin with characters whose details I know by heart.
This spring while I was driving across the country I listened to High Tide in Tucson on audiotape, and loved it. Why can't I get all your books on tape?
Answer: You can, if you're determined, find all of my books on audiotape, some in several versions. If you look around this website you'll even find ordering information. But please be aware that
those neat little 2-cassette packages with the same cover art as the real book often are "abridged." Subplots, charming minor characters, foreshadowing, metaphors and literary insights just won't fit on a two-hour tape. Here's what fits: the bones of a plot, and a razor-thin modicum of style.
The talking book industry is booming (U.S. consumers buy more of them now than music cassettes), and unabridged versions are increasing available. For about the last ten years I've authorized only unabridged audiobooks of my work, and with one exception I've recorded them myself.
Does it feel strange to get letters praising a book you wrote a decade ago?
Answer: I guess it would feel more uncomfortable to get letters disparaging a book I wrote a decade ago. So I try not to look a gift horse in the mouth. Whether it's praise or brickbats coming in long after the book is written, the issue is that books are more immutable than lives. People change. But once you've fixed your soul to the page and sent it off for publication, you're nailed down. You've committed yourself to an elaborate set of opinions about truth, justice, and the ways of the world. Furthermore, you've set your prose in stone, revealing to the world your stylistic grace and mastery of the fictional form --or not. Presumably, with age and practice, we writers do improve. You might expect that eventually we'd all be embarrassed by our earliest efforts, and cringe at the fan letters that trickle in year after year, as proof that people are still out there reading that book. Surprisingly, it's not usually the case. Most writers I know are still reasonably proud of their early books. The first novel, especially, tends to hold a special place in our hearts. It's the book we carried around unwritten for all those years while we longed to become a Writer. It's the one we wrote after-hours, worn out from the day job, with no cash advance from a publisher or even any real hope of a readership. If it's not frankly autobiographical, it's likely to be (as mine is) a sort of catalogue of the writer's most personal hopes and passions. The first novel is the one you write, not because writing's your job, but because you've just got to do it.
My fondness for my own first novel is enhanced by the fact that I don't ever read it. Ditto for all my other books. Once they're published, I never even glance at the text again. I'd go crazy with a red pencil, striking out redundancies and fine-tuning the metaphors. I'd probably beg my publisher to issue a factory recall. This is not to say the writing in those books is bad; that's just the kind of hairpin I am. I've rewritten the screenplay of almost every movie I've ever seen, driving my husband crazy incidentally, on the way home from the theater (except for the films of John Sayles, which are invariably perfect). I make little mental edits in every book I read, even my favorites. Tolstoy and Virginia Woolf would be delighted to know I have a few tiny suggestions for them. You see what I mean. Best not to crack the spines of my own previous works, but apply that energy to the one in progress and let sleeping dogs lie.
I'm satisfied, basically, that every book I've published is as good as I could make it at the time. I never allowed myself to be hurried, or turned in a manuscript before it was truly finished. While it's stultifying to think too much about the permanent record while you're writing, I do try to bear posterity in mind. This requires special attention to certain kinds of detail: getting your facts straight, avoiding an authorial voice that might later sound outdated, and building story around the sort of current events that will remain relevant after they're history. It also involves leaning on truths you expect to believe in when you're ninety, but choosing material you're competent to handle in your present blush of youth. As writers mature, we tend to deal with increasingly ambitious subjects. That has been my own route to writerly growth, for sure. I began with straight-line narratives, and am steadily working up to more complex geometry. If I have to look back over my shoulder at my early works (and I do, since my first novel is now required reading in countless English classes, and those letters do keep coming), I'd prefer see a simple story told reasonably well, rather than the Great American Novel, botched.
Years ago, when I first started sending my stories to magazines in the hope of seeing my work in print, an editor reminded me of Isak Dinesen's famous caution: "When God wants to punish you, he answers your prayers." I was miffed, but also understood this editor was paying me a compliment. He suspected that I was, or eventually would be, capable of much better work than the story I'd sent him, and that if he published it now I'd live to regret it. He was right. I started paying attention, and realized that if I was embarrassed by things I'd written only weeks before, I wasn't yet ready to publish. So I waited. I worked, thought, wrote, rewrote, and put lots of stories away in my desk drawer. When I could get them out many months later and say, "Wow, this doesn't entirely stink!" then I was ready to get published. That's how it happened.
At the very bottom of that desk drawer lies a novel I wrote in my early twenties, which I sometimes pull out to give myself a good laugh. A good title for it might be: "The Great American Novel, Botched." I'm not getting any letters about that one, ha! Because nobody is ever, ever going to read it.
How do you come up with names for your characters?
Answer: Very carefully. I give almost as much thought to the naming of my principal characters as I did for my children. A name has to be just right: memorable, culturally appropriate, original but not silly. And ideally, it carries some meaning that coincides nicely with the person's intentions and character.
In the case of my children, I had to put something on the birth certificate long before I had a clue about intentions or character. (I named them both for flowering plants -- it seemed safe to assume they'd grow.) But in fiction, I have the advantage of naming people after their whole lives have passed before my eyes. Meaning must be subtle, of course. You can't go around calling all your domineering guys "Victor." But every name has shades to it, and sometimes I test a lot of them on the back of my tongue before finding the right one. Halimeda and Cosima (the Noline sisters, in Animal Dreams) I found in a Name Your Baby book I use often for this purpose -- one of those that gives the meaning and derivation of a million names you never would have thought of yourself. (And your kids are glad you didn't.) Halimeda and Cosima are the kind of names their intellectual, culturally disconnected father would have given these poor girls. And the particular burdens of those names become central to Hallie's and Codi's sense of themselves and each other, throughout the novel. This is how I usually arrive at names, through revision and study. When I was researching Pigs in Heaven, I found the first and last names for my Cherokee attorney, Annawake Fourkiller, on two separate gravestones in a cemetery in Oklahoma. Occasionally, though, a name pops into my head the instant I visualize the character. Taylor Greer was one of those. (In The Bean Trees I had her claim this name for herself after the town where she ran out of gas -- but I already knew the name, so I looked on a map and got her to the right place.)
For main characters I avoid names that are too culturally loaded, like Adolph or Madonna. (Before I could write a single sentence, those two would be off on their own parade through your imagination.) For the same reason, on a more personal level, I try hard to steer clear of first and last names of family members, friends, and colleagues -- which rules out half the Name your Baby books right there. That may be one reason why I tend toward oddball names for my principals: Turtle, Halimeda, Loyd-with-one-L. Names like this also make a character more memorable, and you don't have to worry about them getting teased on the playground. You can just say it builds character. And unlike your children, they won't hold it against you.
I couldn't find Pittman, KY on a map. Does it exist, or did you make it up?
Answer: The writing of fiction is a dance between truth and invention. Pittman, Kentucky, one of the settings for my novel, The Bean Trees, is a very real place that doesn't actually exist. Its character and people are consistent with what you'd find in any number of small towns in the east-central part of Kentucky, including the one where I grew up. I didn't have to invent its weathered look, its party-line phones, its inclination to rally around good gossip or any neighbor in need. Those things I described from experience. But the specific people and events I drew onto that background are entirely imaginary.
If I had set the story in an actual small town in Kentucky, those events would be false: everyone there would know that in the history of their town no man named Hardbine had ever been blown over the Standard Oil sign by an exploding tire, for example. No girl named Taylor Greer had emerged to make a name for herself. Furthermore, every soul in X, Kentucky, would be scouring the pages of this book for themselves and their most irritating neighbors, and undoubtedly finding them too -- never mind that I didn't put them there. And finally, there would be a chance that little old X, while minding its own business, might become a tourist destination for literary voyeurs. I'd hate to be responsible for something like that. Good fiction must preserve the illusion of truth, and the substance of privacy.
But, you might argue, the rest of The Bean Trees is set in Tucson, Arizona, which is very much on the map. Indeed. But it's a big enough city to absorb events and people. As long as you got the weather, the cactus, and the civic character approximately right, the illusion of truth is preserved. I set the story mostly in an imaginary place within Tucson, called Roosevelt Park. We writers are control freaks, you see. I needed a setting that was just so, a park where wisteria vines grow, surrounded by a Chinese grocery, several low-rent duplexes, a porn shop called "Fanny Heaven," and a tire-repair shop called "Jesus Is Lord Used Tires," which doubles as a safe-house for Central American refugees. It's exactly the kind of place you might find near downtown Tucson -- but won't.
So yes, Virginia, there is a Pittman, Kentucky. It exists in your heart and your imagination. So long as its truth sustains you from one page to the next, while a new way of looking at the world settles in beside your own, it's true enough.
Is it possible to become a writer if you don't like to read?
Answer: Not on your life.
Believe it or not, someone really did write to ask me that. (I'm tempted to reply: If you didn't like Dalmatians, would you breed them?) But in all fairness, many more people have asked these interesting questions: Who are your favorite authors? What one book would you take to a desert island? And finally, do you read other people's books while you're writing?
I read as if time were running out, because technically it is. As I grow older I find I'm increasingly impatient with mediocre entertainments: I want books that will take my breath away and realign my vision. As a writer of fiction, I mostly read contemporary fiction, but I also return constantly to the classics. My favorite dead authors are probably George Eliot, Jane Austen, Flannery O'Connor, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty and John Steinbeck. Among my favorite living ones are Doris Lessing, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Annie Dillard, Alice Munro, Isabel Allende, Russell Banks, Linda Hogan, John Irving, Toni Morrison and Reynolds Price. And I rely on Emily Dickinson, Sharon Olds, Pablo Neruda, Dylan Thomas, and William Shakespeare; I immerse myself often in poetry, I guess, for the same reason painters rinse their brushes -- to keep the colors true. I also love memoir if it's truly great, which is to say, about something larger than one person's life (Nabokov's Speak, Memory; Margaret Mead's Blackberry Winter; Nancy Mairs's Waist High in the World), and I'm devoted to good science writing (Darwin for the poetry of his world view; Stephen Jay Gould for the insight).
If I were exiled to that famous island where they only let you take one book, I would cheat and take two: George Eliot's Middlemarch, and Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.
I've heard writers say they don't read other books while they're writing, for fear it will somehow contaminate their style. I don't share this worry. When I'm writing, I read Steinbeck and Shakespeare with all my might, and pray to be contaminated.
To what extent is your fiction based on your own life, and how much of your main character is really you?
Answer: This is far and away the prevailing question I'm asked, and probably that all fiction writers are asked, unless they write about homicidal maniacs, in which case their readers probably wonder but don't actually ask. Every author's answer would be different. Mine is: almost not at all. It's not my life, and none of the characters is me. I figure it's my job to invent lives that are more entertaining, instructive, and perfect than my own. That's the main advantage of fiction over life. You get to control the endings.
I wrote about this at some length in an essay called "Careful What You Let in the Door," in High Tide in Tucson. But the question keeps coming, so I'll try to be more convincing. I can't base fiction on my life. When I begin a novel, I don't start building the story around pre-existing characters or incidents. I begin with theme. I devise a very big question whose answer I believe will be amazing, and maybe shift the world a little bit on its axis. Then I figure out how to create a world in which that question can be asked, and answered. I generally choose a setting I know well, because fiction is nothing but a big old pile of details, and if they're wrong, it's a big old pile of lies. Fiction is invention but it's ultimately about truth. I need to know what my setting looks like, smells like, what flowers are blooming in a particular month. So most of my fiction is set in places I know reasonably well, or can get to know as I research the project.
I populate my setting with characters who'll act out my theme, scratching their heads in wonderment all along the way until their interactions with the world and each other have finally caused them to cry Aha! and my question is answered at last. These characters are my slaves. They have to do exactly what I tell them to do, to illustrate my theme and make the plot work. Obviously I can't use myself or my friends in this scheme. The people I know will hardly even take my advice about perfectly obvious things such as whom they should date. No way would their personalities submit to all the fictional machinations I have in mind. So, I invent people from scratch. I think about what they'll need to do, then work backwards, inventing entire life histories that will render them believable. They have to be the type of people I know, because the details have to be right. So they tend to have jobs and belong to economic classes I have known myself, or closely observed. (I'd have to do a ton of research to write about a World War II submarine crew, for example, or millionaire vacationers in Southampton.) But they aren't people I know.
Do I sometimes meet a person and think: "Whew, right out of a novel!" Sure, but not my novel. My main characters are complex conglomerates of physical and psychological features, all of which I've probably observed somewhere at some time, but which never actually coexisted in one real person on this earth. I may include real public figures in my novels, like Oral Roberts or the president, but these are part of the setting. The characters I must cook up myself. In addition to the practical advantages, I'd never feel comfortable stealing the lives of friends for my own selfish ends. Plus, they'd probably stop being my friends.
I once received a letter from a psychologist in California who demanded, "Come on now! How can you claim you're not writing about yourself? Taylor Greer in The Bean Trees moved from Kentucky to Arizona, just like you did. Codi Noline in Animal Dreams taught biology (you've studied biology) and spent time in Greece (you've lived in Greece). The list goes on. Why do you persist in the infantile need to deny you are writing about yourself?"
Well, jeez. Did I move from Kentucky to Arizona, like Taylor Greer? Yes. (Though not that directly.) Did I acquire an abandoned child which someone left in my car along the way? No. (I acquired both my children in the most ordinary way.) Does my fiction attempt to represent my world view, my political convictions, and the things I've learned from living on this planet? Absolutely. Have I done all the things my characters do, including (but not limited to): driving a train, running from the law, adopting an abused child, entering and dropping out of medical school, having babies at ages 14, 15, 19, 35, and 49, being an expert cockfighter, suffering from advanced Alzheimer's disease, and having great sex in the middle of an Anasazi ruin?
Do I seem that energetic?
Like every infant and child I've ever known, I have a passion for making up stories, and an exacting need for truth. It's a heck of a life.
I just watched a PBS documentary about you, in which you mentioned your "ten rules for writing fiction," but only explained two of them. Would you mind divulging the other eight? No doubt the show's editors cut them without realizing that aspiring writers would hyperventilate at their omission. (Gasp!)
Answer: Okay, slow down and breathe into a paper bag. I'll answer the question, but remember that things are never really so simple as they seem on TV. In that documentary I spoke of taking a class from Francine Prose in which I learned "about ten basic rules for writing fiction." Well, I exaggerated. From Francine I remember learning three specific, helpful things that might qualify as rules. They were:
- Your first sentence (or paragraph) makes a promise that the rest of the story (or novel) will keep.
- Give your reader a reason to turn every page.
- Keep a very large trash can beside your desk.
I follow these faithfully, though I've updated the wastebasket to a recycling box. Now, lest anyone turn blue, I'll offer up a few more things I've figured out over the years which might qualify as rules. Maybe there will be ten. We'll see.
- Show, don't tell. Everybody knows this rule, and most of us still break it in every first draft. Be ruthless. Throw out the interior monologue.
- Be relentlessly descriptive. Use details from every sense you own.
- Set your scenes in places you know well. Otherwise, your details will be bogus.
- Know what your theme is. If you can't express what you intend to get across in a concrete sentence or two (or for a novel, a few paragraphs), do you really think anyone else is going to get it? Write it out for yourself, point blank. Then toss it, and return to your story with a better sense of direction.
- Write with nobody looking over your shoulder. After your book's published, you can worry about whether the subject is commercial, how your mother will like the steamy sex scenes, etc. But while you're writing, your only worthy concern is defining your particular passion and giving it a voice.
- Revise, revise, revise, revise. Fill up that recycling box. A first draft is a work of construction; the seventh one is the work of an artist.
- Don't wait for the muse. She has a lousy work ethic. Writers just write.
I could easily keep going here, but I'd better get back to work. Meanwhile, breathe deeply and kill your television.
An aspiring author from Phoenix has written to ask some practical questions:
- How much money can I expect to make on my first novel, if it's published?
- For a first novel, is any book deal a "good" deal, even if there's no money up front?
- Did you ever get discouraged when first trying to get published?
- Could you read the enclosed section of my book and offer any feedback?
Answer: Okay, I'll answer these in order, and pull no punches.
1. You may hope to make a million on your first novel. What you should expect, if you're subject to the laws of reason, is to earn back the $4.50 it cost to mail your manuscript to your agent. Sorry, but statistically it's the truth. Sure, you can think of a few spectacular first novels that hit the big-time. What you're not thinking of, because you probably never saw them, are the hundreds of beautifully written first novels published each year that sell a handful of copies and quietly go out of print. A friend who had sucha first novel experience told me, when I asked how his book was doing, "My agent said the royalty statements were so depressing she threw them away."
Often, after a brief hardcover run, a first novel just dies. Sometimes it gets a second life in paperback. If it catches the eye of some reviewers or better yet independent booksellers who urge it on their clientele, modest sales can continue and even grow over the years. But to be honest, most writers are poor, or they support themselves with another job. This isn't to say you shouldn't write. It's to say you shouldn't write for money. You should write because you have a story to tell that's so incredibly right or wise or important it keeps you awake nights, and you'd stay up working on it even if no one were ever going to read it. If you're following your heart, follow on. If you're looking to get rich, look somewhere else. You could get rich as a writer, but as far as I can see, the only people who are that great at it are in it for the pure white-knuckle passion for writing. So, the rule still holds.
2. Only one person can say what is a "good" book deal for you: your agent. Definitely, you need one. (Most publishers won't look at a manuscript unless it comes from an agent.) She places your book, negotiates your contract, handles subsidiary rights, scrutinizes your royalty statements, and for all this magic, charges a mere 15% of whatever you earn. (And remember, 15% of $4.50 is... 68 cents.) A good literary agent can look at your manuscript carefully and give you a realistic assessment of its market value, and then will set about getting that for you. She'll try hard to get you an advance -- which means, some amount of money paid to you up front, before the book is published; then when the book begins to sell, the publisher keeps all your royalties (about 10 cents on the dollar for each book sold) until they've recovered that amount. If it never sells enough to make up the advance, well, the publisher loses. Obviously if they've paid you an advance, your publisher will work harder to publicize your book and recover their investment. But they're not fools; they'd rather risk nothing on you, if they can still get your manuscript. That's why you need your agent.
3. I didn't get too discouraged when I first began submitting my work to editors, because I had extremly modest expectations. I started with small literary journals and regional newspapers. I was thrilled each time a pice of my writing reaced an audience. I still am.
4. Sorry, Im not in the business of helping people get published. You need a professional for that.
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