Q&A with Linda Dahl

 

Photo by Geoffrey Doughlin

 

 

Linda Dahl is the author of the new novel Tiny Vices. Her other books include An Upside-Down Sky. She lives in Riverdale, New York. 

 

Q: What inspired you to write Tiny Vices, and how did you create the Talley family?

 

A: Like most of the rest of the book-reading world, I love crime stories – I almost wrote “I love crime.” It’s not the only category I love, but what’s more cozy than being tucked up in bed and snuggling with a good murder mystery (and in my case, a cat or three.)

 

Which leads me to the genesis of Tiny Vices. While having a discussion with a family member – ok, an argument – I realized that in that case I needed to let go of my need to be right. To put it another way, my need to get the other person to admit they were wrong. An old habit (for both of us) and one that ended up with both of us bruised and distanced, before we made up and did it all over again.

 

In thinking about that particular conversation later, I realized that most of the “crimes” that have affected me, or others, are not the flagrant,  heart-stopping acts of violence that sell crime novels and podcasts and endless streaming series.

 

Rather, it’s the smaller stuff, the hurtful remarks born out of envy or fear or anger, the acts of forgetfulness, the refusal to take responsibility: the little peccadillos that cut like a paper knife and if not treated, can add up to a lot of hurt. And because I’m a writer, I thought, there’s a book here. And, I had a lot of material.

 

The writer Michael Ondaatje, including of The English Patient, once told an interviewer that he starts a book with a single image and the rest works itself out from there. It seems that’s how I write fiction too.

 

In the genesis of this novel, an image came to me of one of my sisters sitting on the patio of her home in Tucson, Arizona, late in the day. Before her spreads the garden she has carefully tended for years with appropriately chosen desert foliage. Birds dart in and out of the feeders strategically placed around the property and as the light begins to fade and beyond the fence built to keep it out, a coyote howls.

 

I shivered as this picture came to mind, because in it, I don’t know what my sister sees, or if she remembers seeing it. Because she has early-onset dementia.

 

As if a seed or an egg has cracked, the story begins from there. From that woman on a desert patio emerged a host of other characters – some sprung from real people, others part of the compost heap of the subconscious, of memory, of storytelling.     

 

Q: How was the novel’s title chosen, and what does it signify for you?

 

A: The title came to me like a thought balloon, and I played with it for a while. Tiny vices - when hurtful things happen, people’s cracks show and they are caught in a dilemma. That’s what make them interesting to me as a writer (none more than my own cracks.)

 

So, rather than the grand slam of a mortal sin – say, murder and its massive fallout, I wrote about what the Roman Catholics have delineated as the lesser, or venal, sins – the everyday, messy mistakes that can cause real harm to the doer as well as the receiver.

 

I was also led to the ways in which we often make amends – awkwardly, unwillingly, at times - yet how doing so can change us for the better.

 

With this “theme” in mind, the characters in the book emerged in their interactions - bits and pieces of people I’ve known, and the purely imaginary ones who insist on having their own fictional personalities.

 

Q: What do you think the book says about sibling relationships?

 

A: Without giving away too much of the plot, I think the book explores the complexity of the bond of family in times of stress, or perhaps crisis is the better word. And there’s a lot of that going on in the book. Siblings (I have four, so I claim expertise!) know each other in a way that is unique in human relationships, and that, we know, can be both a curse and a blessing.  

 

Q: What do you hope readers take away from the book?

       

A: I hope they may identify with the struggles of a family whose members are in crisis, their persistence in the face of it and the ways they change in that ongoing process.

 

Q: What are you at work on now?

 

A: I’m on Draft Two of a novel that is a multi-generational saga. It was inspired by my maternal great-grandmother’s experience. An immigrant who married an American man and had several children, she then she did what was unthinkable in the early 1900s: she got a divorce. Divorce was a huge taboo – only about 1,000 were decreed in the entire country in l904, to take one example.

 

In creating a fictionalized series of generations, I depict how that bold and wayward act of my great-grandmother resonates down the decades that follow - even long after the stigma is gone. Unlike my current novel, Tiny Vices, the title of the new book is being coy. It’s hiding somewhere, like my reading glasses always do. I just have to keep looking for it. Maybe it’s down in the couch cushions.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: Well, Tiny Vices is my 10th published book. Readers who are interested in my other books can go to Amazon or to www.lindadahlbooks.com.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Linda Dahl.