August 31, 1916: Journalist Daniel Schorr born.
Saturday, August 31, 2013
Friday, August 30, 2013
Q&A with author Dana Sachs
Dana Sachs's books include The House on Dream Street: Memoir of an American Woman in Vietnam, If You Lived Here, and, most recently, The Secret of the Nightingale Palace. She has written for a variety of publications including National Geographic and The Boston Globe, and she lives in Wilmington, North Carolina.
Q: Vietnam has been a big part of your writing. What about
Vietnam has captured your imagination, and will you continue to write about it?
A: I fell in love with Vietnam when I first travelled there
in 1990, just as it was opening to Americans for the first time since the war
ended. Subsequently, I’ve been lucky enough to live there and visit many times
and it became the subject of my first book The House on Dream Street: Memoir of
an American Woman in Vietnam.
It first captured my imagination because I went there
thinking only of the place as a setting for a terrible war and discovered,
instead, a complex and thriving nation with a dramatic history and rich
culture. If a subject is fertile in your imagination, then the more you learn
about it, the more intriguing it will become to you.
Vietnam’s culture, history, language, and people have continually
inspired me, which is why I returned to it in my novel, If You Lived Here, and
my nonfiction book The Life We Were Given: Operation Babylift, International Adoption, and the Children of War in Vietnam.
My most recent novel, The Secret of the Nightingale Palace,
is not about Vietnam. In fact, I made a promise to myself that the word
“Vietnam” would not appear at all. I know, it’s a weird challenge! I wanted to
see how it felt to write about something else.
Happily, I found other things to
inspire me—Japanese printmaking, 1940s San Francisco, World War II, mid-20th
Century women’s fashion—so I discovered that I can find other subjects that
intrigue me.
I have to add, though, that I couldn’t stay away from
Vietnam for long. In my new novel (see below), one of the main characters is
Vietnamese and another one, an American, lives in Hanoi.
Q: You've also collaborated with your sister, Lynne Sachs,
on a film about Vietnam. How did that project come about, and what was it like
working with a family member?
A: I was living in Hanoi in 1992 and Lynne, who is a
documentary and experimental filmmaker, came to visit me. We never planned to
make a movie, but as we travelled together through the country, she shot film.
After she returned to the States, she called me and said
that she had all this evocative footage. Did I want to make a documentary with
her? So we started working long distance on the film that eventually became Which Way is East. I’d interview people and write sections of the narrative in Hanoi and
she’d work on editing the actual film in the United States. After I returned
home, we finished it.
It was really interesting to work with a family member. As a
writer, I mostly work alone. Filmmaking is more collaborative. The process
actually revealed a lot about our characters as human beings and there was a
natural tension between us (sometimes testy, but usually good-natured.)
I had more of a journalistic attitude, wanting to capture as
much as we could of people’s real-life experience. Lynne was more aesthetic.
She wanted to make sure the film looked and sounded beautiful. I hope that, when
people see it, they’ll feel that the creative tension was productive for the
film, and that it does both.
Q: What changes have you seen in Vietnam over the years that
you've been traveling there?
A: Oh, so many. The obvious are things like the increase of
motorbikes and cars on the streets (almost everyone rode bicycles when I first
went there in 1990), fancy new restaurants, fashionable clothes.
But I think that, in many ways, the most important changes
are less obvious. For example, people used to have so much free time (for
years, very few Vietnamese people had work that actually produced a viable
income). I learned to relax in Vietnam. I mean, really relax, like spending all
afternoon sitting on a front stoop watching the traffic pass by.
My friends
can’t do that any more. They’re really busy. When I go visit, they need to schedule
me in on their iPhones in order to make time to see me. It’s a good sign that
the economy has improved, but I do miss that time on the stoops. I notice that
sense of nostalgia in my friends as well.
Q: The Secret of the Nightingale Palace
centers on a difficult relationship between a grandmother and granddaughter.
How did you create these characters?
A: Well, the grandmother, Goldie, is based on my own
grandmother, Rose, who is 101 years old this year. As people can see when they
read the book, she’s a force of nature: tough, single-minded, outspoken, and
extremely well-dressed.
I started out writing the novel by thinking of my
grandmother and trying to imagine her youth, but the story itself quickly
evolved away from her actual story and into something very different. Goldie’s
personality comes from Rose, but her life story comes from my own imagination.
And, by the way, I did not base the character of the
granddaughter, Anna, on myself. I suppose, though, that all fictional
characters are, in some sense, the offspring of the authors who created them.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: A new novel, which is tentatively titled Happy in
Budapest. An American diplomat begins to show signs of a rare form of dementia,
and his two adult daughters try to figure out what to do to help him.
As you probably
guessed from the title, it takes place in Budapest, and it’s also about art
nouveau design, Raoul Wallenberg, tour guides, neo-Nazis, sperm donors, and an
exceedingly difficult piece of piano music, Franz Liszt’s transcription of
Richard Wagner’s Tannhauser Overture. I’ve been on a research binge to write
it, which has been quite glorious.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: Since this is a conversation about books, and since I
have benefitted from so many great recommendations myself, let me suggest a few
terrific authors. One is the British novelist Jane Gardam, who has written
loads of books but seems to have only recently begun to achieve widespread
fame. I’ve just devoured the first two books in a three-book series, the first
of which is Old Filth.
I also, belatedly, just read my first novel by Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety, which is so wise and beautiful that, after reading
it, I felt I was seeing the world in an entirely new way.
Finally, since my own work has particular focus on Vietnam
and, more recently, Hungary, two really wonderful authors from those countries:
The Hungarian author Imre Kertesz, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature (his
novel Fatelessness is a profound and, oddly enough, often funny take on the
Holocaust) and the Vietnamese author Nguyen Huy Thiep (along with Nguyen Nguyet Cam, I edited Crossing the River, a collection of his short stories translated into English). Like Kertesz, Thiep has
a dry, funny tone that reveals so many layers of complicated humanity that I
find myself turning back to his stories again and again.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb. This interview can also be found on www.hauntinglegacy.com.
Thursday, August 29, 2013
Wednesday, August 28, 2013
Q&A with writer Therese Anne Fowler
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| Therese Anne Fowler, photo by Tom Clark |
Therese Anne Fowler is the author most recently of Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald, and also of the novels Exposure, Souvenir, and Reunion. She lives in North Carolina.
Q: Why did you decide to write about Zelda Fitzgerald, and
why a novel as opposed to a biography?
A: Zelda has been misrepresented in popular culture almost
since the day she and Scott came to New York City to be married in 1920. Some
of this is due to the games she and Scott played with the media at the time,
but most of it has other, less benign origins. She’s been dismissed,
disregarded, underestimated, maligned, turned into a caricature… I found this
unfair and disheartening, and was compelled to write about her in order to help
set the record straight.
Why a novel? Well, some excellent biographies about her
exist already, so I didn’t feel I could add anything by producing another one.
Also, while biographies are wonderful sources of information and insight, they
don’t tell a person’s story the way a novel can—indeed must—do, and I am a
lover of stories, much as Zelda was. The most compelling reason for me to write
about her using fiction, though, was that I wanted to give Zelda a voice, a
chance to tell her side of the story.
Q: How did you do the research for the book, and did your
work on this project change your view of the Fitzgeralds?
A: It’s the good fortune of anyone interested in the
Fitzgeralds that they were great chroniclers of their own lives, and that their
daughter Scottie was generous about sharing their collection of ledgers,
photos, newspaper clippings, letters, and assorted other souvenirs with
biographers, Princeton University, and the public (e.g. The Romantic Egoists).
Biographers have made extensive use of these resources, as I did, and then I
made extensive use of the numerous biographies written about both Zelda and
Scott.
To help me better understand their lives, I also read a
number of biographies and articles about Hemingway, Gerald and Sara Murphy,
Sara Mayfield, Sara Haardt Mencken and her husband H.L. Mencken—really, anyone
who figured prominently in Zelda’s life.
And then of course I read all Zelda’s own writings, as well
as most of Scott’s.
My view of the Fitzgeralds was dramatically altered by all of
this. Scott became less of a literary icon and, instead, more of a flawed,
troubled—but also brilliant, in some ways—human being. Zelda was no longer
simply the “crazy” flapper wife of that icon, the woman who’d supposedly ruined
Scott’s career. She became, instead, the complex, sympathetic woman I’ve
portrayed in the novel.
Q: Z is something of a departure from your previous novels,
which were set more or less in the present time and did not focus on a
particular historical figure. Do you prefer one type of writing to the other,
and if so, why?
A: It’s true that my early novels are all more or less
contemporary stories, made up entirely of fictitious characters, whereas Z is
an historical, biographical novel. I made the change because my own interests
are evolving and I wanted to write novels that are more in line with what I
myself prefer to read.
Q: You have written about how your novel Exposure was based
on an experience your own family faced, when your son was arrested for
"sexting." How difficult was it to write that novel, and what was
your family's response to it?
A: Although everything in Exposure is fiction, there was a
kind of catharsis for me in the writing of it, which occurred in part during
the months in which we were waiting for my son’s case to resolve. (The charges
against him were eventually dismissed.) While things were pending, I couldn’t
discuss the details with anyone but my closest friends, and I had a lot of
frustration about that and the legal process and the situation in general,
which was ludicrous.
I wouldn’t have published the book without my son’s consent
and support. The wider family’s response was positive and supportive as well.
Q: Are you working on another book?
A: Yes, I’ve been researching and have begun writing my next
book. This early in the process, I’m reluctant to say much about it. But I will
tell you that it’s historical and was inspired by one of my all-time favorite
novels, Vladimir Nabokov’s classic Lolita.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: Some fun trivia in connection with my new project:
Nabokov and I share a birth date (April 22) but due to adjustments in the
Gregorian calendar, he elected to celebrate it as April 23rd in order to match
Shakespeare’s probable birth (and actual death) date.
With regard to Z: I’m hearing from readers that they’ve
enjoyed pairing the book with viewings of the new Baz Lurhrmann adaptation of The
Great Gatsby—getting the story behind the story, so to speak. I have to say
that re-reading and watching Gatsby has been a rewarding and intimate
experience for me, too, now that I know both Fitzgeralds so well.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
Tuesday, August 27, 2013
Q&A with author Kim Fay
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| Kim Fay, photo by Julie Fay Ashborn |
Kim Fay is the author of the novel The Map of Lost Memories and the food memoir Communion: A Culinary Journey Through Vietnam. She created and edits the To Asia With Love guidebook series. Fay, who resides in Los Angeles, lived in Vietnam for four years and travels often to Southeast Asia.
Q: How did
you come up with your main character, Irene Blum, in The Map of Lost
Memories?
A: This is always
a difficult question for me to answer. Each character in my novel has a
specific inspiration … with the exception of Irene. One day she simply existed
when I found myself writing a scene about a twelve-year-old girl searching for
“lost treasure” in the manor house of an old family friend.
Because
Irene first came to me in her youth, rather than as the 29-year-old woman she is
throughout the majority of the book, I suspect she owes her existence to Nancy
Drew. As a girl, I admired Nancy’s independence, curiosity and determination. Of
course, Irene is far less noble than Nancy—Nancy would never rob a temple, no
matter how justified she felt!
But I wanted
Irene to be an authentic product of her time. During the 1920s, it was
acceptable for Westerners to appropriate the relics of countries they considered
to be uncivilized and therefore unworthy caretakers of their own cultural treasures,
and so Irene often behaves in ways that are unsavory by today’s standards.
Q: What type
of research did you need to do to evoke Cambodia and Shanghai in the 1920s?
A: This time
period was long familiar to me. My grandpa was a sailor in the South China Sea
in the early 1930s, and his favorite place was Shanghai. Not only did he tell
me stories of his experiences there, he had numerous photographs. As a young
girl I became fascinated with that part of the world, and by the time I started
The Map of Lost Memories, I had been reading about it for decades.
As for
research specific to my novel, I relied on period travel narratives, history
books, old photographs and personal experience—visiting each location in the
novel. Because The Map of Lost Memories was started in the 1990s, many of the
settings in Cambodia, Vietnam and Shanghai still looked as they did in the
1920s. This is not the case today, as many historical buildings have been torn
down.
Q: You also
have written about Vietnamese food. Why did you decide to focus on that topic
in your book Communion?
A: Having
lived in Vietnam for four years, from 1995-1999, I wanted to write a book that
would express my love for the country while giving me the opportunity to deepen
my knowledge of it. While I had many memorable experiences living there, I
didn’t feel that a straightforward memoir was the right path for me to take.
But as a
foodie whose friendships in Vietnam were most often developed in kitchens and
at the table, writing a food book made sense. Once I began researching, I was hooked.
The country’s cuisine turned out to be an ideal way to explore the nuances of
Vietnam’s culture and history.
Q: What
draws you to Southeast Asia, and how did the To Asia With Love
guidebook series come about?
A: As I
mentioned, my grandpa traveled in Asia as a young man, and his stories sparked
my own interest in the region. I first traveled there when I was 22, and I was
smitten. I loved the humidity, the food, the smell of incense at dawn and jasmine
at dusk, the rich histories, the unique cultures and—when I finally moved to
Vietnam—the people. I felt so at home.
While I was living
in Vietnam I started writing for a small specialized magazine called
Destination: Vietnam. The magazine evolved into a website, and the website into
the boutique ThingsAsian Press.
By this time
I had developed a strong working relationship with the publisher, and he asked if
I had any book ideas I would like to pursue. I had been toying with a guidebook
concept for a while—one that combined travel essays with factual information.
Each
book would rely on approximately 50 experts, people who lived in-country or had
traveled to a country often. Each person would write personal stories about
favorite experiences not typically found in guidebooks, and these stories would
be paired with fact files so that readers could follow in the writer’s
footsteps. I was fortunate to have a publisher willing to take chances, and now
the To Asia With Love series is up to eight volumes.
Q: What are
you working on now?
A: There
will be a sequel to The Map of Lost Memories, but it is simmering on the back
burner while I pursue another novel that has been begging for my attention for
a few years. Having studied various aspects of Vietnam’s history, I am
fascinated with the late 1950s, that time of transition between French colonial
rule and America’s ill-guided and fatal meddling.
Using a
pivotal few years as the anchor, my new novel is told from the point-of-view of
an American culinary anthropologist who was born in Vietnam to sociologists in
1937. When her closest friend, the granddaughter of the head chef for Vietnam’s
last emperor, is murdered, she attempts to put the pieces together. As she
solves the mystery, I hope to explore mid-twentieth-century Vietnam while
telling a compelling story at the same time.
Q: Anything
else we should know?
A: The Map
of Lost Memories has been marketed as a literary adventure novel, a suspense
novel and a mystery novel. While it does contain all three of these elements,
it is not a fast-paced book. Its pace reflects the time in which the story
takes place—the 1920s—before jets whisked people halfway around the world in a
day and the Internet put information at our fingertips. It spends a great deal
of time developing characters, exploring history and immersing readers in a sense
of place. As such, this is a novel for those who want to embark on a leisurely
journey through Shanghai, Saigon and the Cambodian jungle.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb. This Q&A also appears on www.hauntinglegacy.com.
Monday, August 26, 2013
Sunday, August 25, 2013
Saturday, August 24, 2013
Friday, August 23, 2013
Q&A with author R. Clifton Spargo
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| R. Clifton Spargo |
Q: Why did you decide to focus
on this particular period in the lives of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald?
A: One of the results — somewhat
unfortunate, as I see it — of the recent Zelda and Scott revival, spurred by
films from Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris to Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby,
is that we’ve focused, yet again, on the young, high-society, recklessly
hard-living couple who stand for the roaring ‘20s in our collective imagination.
Scott and Zelda, they signify
all that is self-absorbed and yet somehow glamorous, beautiful and yet
altogether foolish. It’s a story Scott himself started to spin about the
excesses of the 1920s, well before the Wall Street Crash of October 1929. Americans, he warned as early as 1926, were going
to pay a heavy price for all the fun they were having.
In Beautiful Fools,
I wanted to investigate two famous people after their “fifteen minutes” are up.
Granted, Scott and Zelda would get more than fifteen minutes in the long run. They’ve
become the stuff of legend in American literature and international pop culture.
But, originally, their fame was
relatively short-lived; the fall from grandeur, cruel and devastating. By the
mid 1930s they were forgotten. She, no longer the “it girl” muse,
suffered several mental breakdowns starting in early 1930, spending the rest of
her life in and out of institutions, living most of the next decade in severe
duress. He, no longer the voice of a generation or the “Jazz Age,” suffered
from depression, desperate alcoholic binges, and a precipitously declining
literary star.
What they endured was, in
some sense, their own personal great depression. The analogy is almost too
eerie — Zelda was the age of the century, and broke down only months after the
Wall Street Crash. Scott served up fictional accounts of their story — Babylon Revisited perhaps the finest among this sort — in which he treated their
tragic fall from grace as a kind of punishment tale.
So I decided to enter into
their lives in the 1930s — a prologue set in 1932 in the midst of Zelda’s
second breakdown; the rest of my novel set in the spring of 1939, a year and half
before Scott’s death.
On the surface things appear
to be as bleak as they’ve ever been for Zelda and Scott. Beautiful Fools is a
tragic tale, no shying away from that tag — their lives assume tragic form in
the 1930s, and as a writer I’m highly committed (though hardly exclusively) to
the genre of tragedy.
What I don’t believe,
however, is that we write or read tragedy to relish the punishment of those who’ve
overreached or wished for too much. It’s far too simplifying to say that a
hero’s tragic flaw precipitates his or her ruin, that misfortunes suffered by
the protagonist can be reckoned by a calculus of “deserving what you get.”
As I understand the genre —
and what I’ve tried to do with it in Beautiful Fools — “tragedy” is about the
arbitrariness of misfortune, about external circumstances that conspire with
our own mistakes, about sufferings that speak to us in our real and potential
vulnerabilities. Tragedy is about the gap between what we desire in the world
and what we’re able to achieve.
Tragic heroes, such as
Fitzgerald’s own Gatsby, may often be failed idealists, but that doesn’t mean
they’re wrong for having tried to expand the horizons of their humanity and
ours.
Q: What accounts for people’s
continuing fascination with the Fitzgeralds?
A: Many things really. For
starters, there’s the ongoing attempt to do justice to Zelda in her own right,
not just as the whimsical, beautiful, and reputedly unbalanced famous wife of a
great author. Much of that effort started with Nancy Milford’s magnificent 1970
biography Zelda, and the fascination has ebbed and flowed for decades as so
many things do in American culture.
Still, second-wave feminism
took up Zelda’s cause as a creative personality and force, as frustrated
artist, as someone who was more than just some albatross on her husband’s neck
(the view popularized by Ernest Hemingway), but who was a victim of her own
tragic fate as a true personage.
Milford helped us to see Zelda’s
story as testimony to the historical restraints placed on women as citizens and
as makers of culture. And so much of the
late, late love story of the Fitzgeralds, as I tell it, depends on a dauntless
and endlessly creative Zelda, whose efforts to revive a love affair with her
husband continued to the very end, even after all the internally and externally
motivated adversities their love had weathered.
In some circles, the mythic
force of Zelda’s beguiling if wildly unpredictable personality — perpetuated in
part by Scott’s diverse portraits of Zelda-like women in his fiction — accounts
for the Fitzgeralds’ allure.
Glenn Frey wrote the Eagles’
famous 1970s hit “Witchy Woman,” or so the story goes, after reading Milford’s
biography. And yet, when he sings of a
woman “who drove herself to madness with a silver spoon,” he’s imagining
himself as a Scott Fitzgerald-like man spellbound by seductive charms that are indistinguishable
from madness.
In short, “Witchy Woman” owes
as much to the lore of Zelda perpetuated by Hemingway and John Dos Passos — each
of whom swore, separately, to perceiving Zelda as “off” on first meeting her — as
to the Milford biography.
In a similar fashion, Woody
Allen portrays a young Zelda in Midnight in Paris as wildly uninhibited,
free-associative, and, yes, altogether zany.
That’s the kind of women he falls for, Allen explained in an interview,
in real life and the movies: “I've
always had a... CRUSH on women like Zelda Fitzgerald. Now, this is very self-destructive. I've always selected in my lifetime women who
had that, uh, that uh… sort of streak of insanity in them that she has.”
Maybe we’re drawn to the lore
of Scott and Zelda because their extravagant behavior and often self-destructive
tendencies substitute for the risks — some of them stupid, some of them brave —
we won’t take. A friend said to me after reading my novel, “Everybody thrills
to watch a good train wreck now and then.”
That’s one way of viewing
Zelda and Scott’s story: There but for
the grace of God go I. By embodying our reckless or illicit desires, they
exorcize our capacity for excess. It’s
my sense that there’s a new cultural urgency for us in this kind of story, as
we’ve been living in the greatest recession economy since the Great Depression.
But this fascination with
excess and ruin isn’t a recent phenomenon. It informs, for example, the way we talk
about rock stars from Elvis to Kurt Cobain to Amy Winehouse. We’re fascinated and appalled by creativity
pushed to the extreme of self-indulgence and self-destruction. We stand and admire with stunned ambivalence,
then step back from it all.
As a storyteller, though,
it’s my job to break down — for a little while at least — our sense of being at
a safe distance from the hurt and wreckage. I’m fascinated by the nature and extent
of Zelda’s mental illness, and I want my reader to experience her symptoms as she
might have experienced them.
Maybe that will lead some
among us to intuit the hardships and costs of mental illness, the hurt for the
patient and for loved ones such as Scott; and maybe it will inspire us to rethink
simplifying premises about sanity and our use of lazy, ungenerous slang such as
“crazy” or “psycho.”
Similarly, I want to bring my
reader as close as I can to Scott’s darkest hours so as to experience the toll
his alcoholism and depression must have taken on Zelda, even as I also show his
resilience, the graceful capacity for kindness he always retained.
My favorite book of modern
psychology is Freud’s The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, with its basic
premise that everything Freud learned about those suffering from debilitating
mental illnesses could be applied to himself and the rest of so-called ordinary
folks as a mirror reflecting everyday neuroses in behavior.
Freud believed that our being
was inseparable from the simple psychopathologies through which we experience
the world. Even something as simple as forgetting a neighbor’s name (one we remembered
only yesterday) might hint at the mind’s strange workings, suggesting the
ongoing struggle between retaining and losing our past selves that we undertake
at every minute of every day.
So, again for me, Beautiful
Fools isn’t about the distance we create as readers between ourselves and Zelda
and Scott. It’s about what we can see of – and learn about — ourselves in their
brilliant passion and awful demise.
Q: How did you blend the
historical with the fictional as you wrote Beautiful Fools? What combination of history and fiction did
you feel was right for the story you were telling?
A: Much of what drew me
inside this story were the gaps — or should I say the gaping holes — in the history.
If you read all the biographies about Scott and Zelda, as I’ve done, you come
to the end of their romance only to arrive at Scott’s death by heart attack in
Hollywood in late 1940, and then suddenly you’re flipping back through the
biography in question, whispering to yourself, “Wait, when did they last see
each other?”
And this novel is the story
of that last meeting: on a holiday in
Cuba, in April of 1939, about which biographers or historians know almost
nothing.
History provides the frame, then,
and all of the novelistic detail has to be researched thoroughly and fictionalized
with verisimilitude in the fashion of strong historical fiction.
But there’s space too for the
imagination in the midst of the historical facts. And I was drawn to the
scenario as much as to anything else — the idea of a no-longer-famous couple
getting one last chance to salvage their passionate if highly tumultuous love
affair, all the while not knowing it was to be their last chance. Just that
scenario alone made this a story I had to tell.
I’ve long been fascinated by F. Scott Fitzgerald the writer,
but the novel is the result of my becoming again troubled and then lured by
this “lost chapter” in a great love affair.
You’re probably familiar with
the famous cliché “write what you know,” attributed to Sherwood Anderson, as
advice to William Faulkner; and, it’s true, every writer draws heavily and
intimately on what he or she knows. But as readers of fiction we love to read
for what we don’t know. The best advice I’ve ever heard given to authors is to
write the book you would want to read.
So Beautiful Fools is a
narrative that takes shape from what we simply couldn’t know, factually, about
Zelda and Scott.
What I could invent – as
informed by months and months turning into years of research on the
Fitzgeralds, on Cuba, on fashion and lingo and psychology and cockfights from the
1920s and the 1930s — had to stand imaginatively in the space of all that must
remain a mystery to biographers and historians.
Q: In an article for The
Atlantic, you write that you were "raiding a scene from Fitzgerald’s Gatsby
and the real-life incident behind it for my title Beautiful Fools." Can
you explain why you chose to do that?
A: It’s a slightly ironical
title, in that it refers to Scott’s practice of taking notes on his own life
and pilfering his wife’s phrases in the service of his fiction. And now here I
am, in Beautiful Fools, speculating on a missing chapter from the Fitzgeralds’
lives, this trip to Cuba in 1939 of which there’s almost no record.
Most of us will recall, if properly
prompted, the “beautiful little fool” line from The Great Gatsby, which occurs
in the scene where Daisy reports to her cousin Nick what she said on learning
she’d given birth to a girl: “And I hope she’ll be a fool— that’s the best
thing a girl can be in the world, a beautiful little fool.”
But, as I emphasize in that essay for The Atlantic
you just mentioned, I’m riffing even more so on the inspiration behind the piece
of literary dialogue, the line Scott wrote in his ledger recording what Zelda
said after giving birth to their daughter: “I hope it’s beautiful and a fool — a
beautiful little fool.”
Zelda, still dazed from the
ether, isn’t quite making sense when she coins that phrase. She’s not in
performance mode, like Daisy Buchanan, offering some staged remembrance of her
witticism (though both Zelda and Scott were well known for staging stories
about themselves).
Zelda responds intuitively to
the news, not yet understanding what she means, and on the spur of the moment she
makes that odd pairing of “beautiful” and “fool” that gives rise to my title. Scott
heard the beauty and strangeness in the line, but I have to admit I like
Zelda’s original phrasing even better than the words he attributes to Daisy in The
Great Gatsby.
Q: Anything else we should
know?
With regard to the notion of
“beautiful fools,” I should say that, as with any phrase or witticism, it takes
on new meanings in new contexts. So, as I hear it — and I think this is
consistent with Fitzgerald’s
own Romantic strain, which I do share —
“beautiful fools” are idealists, people who stand on hopes and dreams even past
the point at which they’re likely to be fulfilled. Gatsby is the true
“beautiful fool” of Fitzgerald’s most famous work.
And in my novel, of course, Zelda
and Scott become the beautiful fools, living on the borrowed time of past
glory, yet still believing that adversities might be overcome — they were still
so relatively young! — and that the world might again prove yielding and full
of promise.
So they head for Cuba to see
what can happen. One piece of lore that I incorporate into my novel has Scott
leaving a note on his desk at M-G-M, which reports, simply, “Gone to Cuba.” And
Cuba and the cast of characters from Cuba and war-torn Europe (including a
Spanish Republican refugee from the Spanish Civil War and his French wife)
drive the action of the novel as much as Zelda and Scott do.
Which is to say, much of the
drama in the novel follows from random events and characters, as if fate is
chasing down Zelda and Scott’s demons for them. On that level Cuba — as place so
often functions in fiction — serves almost as a character.
There’s high drama on the
second night in Havana after Scott and Zelda are escorted by a local Cubano
named Matéo Cardoña, a key character in the novel, to a bar that plays Cuban son
music, an Afro-percussive genre of music that might be understood as a kind of
step-cousin to jazz.
Then, on the resort beaches
of Varadero, there’s an erotically infused flirtation between the Fitzgeralds
and a Spanish refugee and the French wife/cousin who rescued him from a refugee
camp.
And, if that’s not enough for
those in search of action, toward the end of the novel there’s a cockfight that
yields plenty of violence inside and outside the ring. In short, I create a
chain of events for this week-long holiday that echoes, as it were, the drama
of Scott and Zelda’s adventurous, always surprising lives.
In all candor, I’d say that I
focus on the late 1930s Fitzgeralds, on holiday in Cuba, because at that point
in time they’re most intriguing to me. As they bear up against the hard knocks,
as they challenge their circumstances with their relentless, sometimes
self-delusional hope — well, for my money, that’s when Zelda and Scott put the love
story in overdrive. As it gets truly messy, the story becomes most compelling
to me.
Ultimately, my rendering of
the Fitzgeralds takes the form an adult love story about a couple that usually
typifies all that is “young” and “youthful” for our youth-obsessed American pop
culture. But Beautiful Fools tells the tale of Zelda and Scott after the crash
in their relationship, and depicts them, for all their idiosyncrasies and
flaws, as still devoted to each other.
In the day to day, they fight
off fate, denying or beating back the increasingly inevitable result of not
ending up together, and somehow the love — in whatever strangely altered form
it must assume — survives.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
Q&A with author Diane S. Nine
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| Diane S. Nine |
Q: How have things changed for authors (and for agents) in
the years you've been working in this field?
A: As an agent for over 25 years now, I have seen a lot of
changes in the literary industry. The biggest change is in the area of technology,
and the advent of ebooks. In fact, the ebook area is the only growing
segment of the book industry. I think we will continue to see growth in
this area, and when all the ebook readers are able to work on the same
technology platform, they will really take off.
On a personal note, when I read for pleasure (as opposed to
work-related reading), I only read ebooks now. I like the fact that you
can have an entire library of books with you – and it saves the bookshelf space
that is becoming quite limited in my home and office!
With all of this said, I don’t think the ebook phenomenon
will result in the disappearance of physical, printed books in my lifetime
– though it might result in decreasing sales of printed books.
The other major change I have seen in the literary area is
in the diminishing number of legitimate publishing houses. This is an
industry constantly in financial trouble – it is a tough industry to earn money
in.
As a result, we are seeing increasing numbers of mergers
among the largest publishers, and more and more smaller publishers are closing
their doors. The latest merger among the big houses is between Random
House and Penguin – which are now part of the same company. This change makes
it harder for agents to locate a publisher for their clients’ books.
Q: What do you think is the most useful way for an author to
find an agent?
A: Word-of-mouth! If you know someone who has had a
good relationship with an agent, this is a sure-fire method of locating an
agent who is honest, and will work hard on your behalf.
If you don’t know any authors, there are a myriad of
websites and books listing agents. My favorite one among these is www.publishersmarketplace.com -- it lists agents by areas of interest, and seems to do an honest job of keeping
the information real. I am wary of sites that rank agents or
complain about agents since anyone can write disparaging things on these sites,
and the reader has no way of knowing if what’s written is true or not.
Q: Would you advise an author to self-publish?
A: There is a place for self-publishing, especially now that
it has become easier. For instance, if you want to write your memoir, yet
you are not well-known, self-publishing may be the only way to actually have a
book. Or, if you have written a book, and have tried unsuccessfully to
interest an agent or publisher, self-publishing may seem like a good option.
However, self-published books still do not garner the
respect of “legitimately” published books. This is because there is a
perception (and even a reality) that self-publishing is not selective. Anyone
can self-publish if you have the money to pay.
As a result, virtually no retailers will agree to carry the
book, and hardly any media will do an interview or review the book. Therefore,
in my opinion, self-publishing should be a last resort.
Q: What are the biggest misconceptions about getting a book
published?
A: There are so many misconceptions in the literary industry
-- I hardly know where to begin! But, I will talk about three of
the “issues” that come up with a lot of frequency.
First, authors seem to believe they will have a choice of
the publishing houses they desire to publish their books. In other words,
they often hold out for their “dream” publisher, bypassing early offers.
In reality, most authors are lucky to even get one offer to
publisher their “masterpiece” – so it is best to highly consider ANY offer
received if it is in the norm of contracts typically offered.
I cannot tell you the number of times one of my clients has
been presented with an offer by a publisher (other than their first choice
publisher), and they have turned down the offer. More often than not, they
don’t get another offer (let alone an offer from their preferred publisher) –
leaving them with an unpublished book. Authors need to know that getting a
book published is highly competitive.
Second, authors don’t understand that most books take 1 – 3
years to see the light of day, and they somehow think that their book should be
published ahead of all the other books their publisher has acquired. Everyone
has a good reason why their book needs to come out sooner, rather than
later.
In reality, most publishers simply put out books in the
order in which they have been acquired – because there is no fairer
method. Authors need to understand that nagging their agent (or the
publisher) about the release date of their book is only
counterproductive. EVERYONE wants to be published tomorrow, but things
move slowly in the publishing world – since things take time.
Most books go through a minimum of three rounds of edits,
proofreading, galleys, jacket design, layout, converting the files for printing
and all the different platforms for ebooks, etc. You can see where this is
time-consuming – and why rushing things usually result in errors. And, it
is not fair to authors patiently waiting their turn to suddenly have another
author’s book put in front of the queue at any stage of the process.
Finally, some authors seem to think that their job is done
when the book is published – assuming, I guess, that books magically sell
themselves. Nothing could be farther from the truth. In fact, I
believe there is a direct correlation between books sold, and authors’ working
to sell books. In other words, in order to have a successful title, it is
necessary for the author to promote their own book.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I have a number of exciting projects. Among these is
a memoir by Cindy Williams. Cindy was the co-star of the television show Laverne
& Shirley (among other things). We met with publishers in New York not
too long ago, and we have a lot of interest. Cindy has rarely, if ever,
told anything about her life – personal or professional – so even I am absorbed
by her writing as she completes chapters of her book!
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: Despite all of the pitfalls in the literary industry, it
can be an intellectually rewarding area to work in. I feel fortunate to
have landed in a job that (most of the time) doesn’t seem much like work, at
all. After all these years, I can honestly say that I love my job 99% of
the time – and that’s more than most people can say!
--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Note: I am currently working with Diane Nine on an upcoming project.
Thursday, August 22, 2013
Wednesday, August 21, 2013
Tuesday, August 20, 2013
Monday, August 19, 2013
Q&A with author Julie Salamon
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| Julie Salamon |
Julie Salamon's books include Hospital, Rambam's Ladder, The Christmas Tree, and, most recently, Wendy and the Lost Boys, a biography of playwright Wendy Wasserstein. A former writer for The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, Salamon lives in Manhattan.
Q: Why did you decide to write a biography of Wendy
Wasserstein?
A: Initially, Ann Godoff—my longtime editor at The Penguin Press—suggested
the project to me. At first I wasn’t sure for several reasons: I wasn’t from
the theater world, would anyone outside that world be interested, was her work
substantial enough to warrant a biography, was her life interesting enough?
After doing some initial research I discovered a potential story of terrific
complexity and was eager to take on the challenge.
Q: Why did you choose "Wendy and the Lost Boys" as your title?
A: For many reasons. During my research, the subject of
Peter Pan kept coming up. Wasserstein was named after the Wendy of J.M.
Barrie’s story, which became an American phenomenon after Mary Martin played
Peter Pan on Broadway in 1954—and then in the 1960 television production.
Many of Wasserstein’s theater friends—including Andre
Bishop, theatrical director of Lincoln Center, and William Ivey Long, the
costume designer—were deeply influenced by the stage production. Wasserstein
performed in many productions of the show in her youth. So there’s that
straightforward connection.
The title also draws on Wasserstein’s innermost circle of
(mainly) men of the theater—her “Lost Boys.” Most of them became quite
successful, so hard to think of them as lost, but when all of them were
newcomers in the New York theater world, they often felt very lost and relied
on their friendships to keep themselves going.
Wasserstein was at the center of this extraordinary group,
who included some of the leading lights of the New York theater world. Besides
Bishop and Ivey Long, they include James Lapine, frequent collaborator of
Stephen Sondheim; celebrated playwrights Christopher Durang and Terrence
Malick; theater critic and columnist Frank Rich. Other “Lost Boys” included
Wasserstein’s brothers—Bruce, who became a billionaire investment banker and
Abner, the damaged brother who became a family secret.
Finally, the biography became a reflection on the Baby Boom
generation, Wasserstein’s primary subject. The large cohort born after World
War II became known as the generation that didn’t want to grow up, and has been
described as the Peter Pan generation.
Q: You write of Wasserstein, "Yet after she was gone, what stunned those closest to her was how much they didn't know" about her life. What particularly surprised you as you conducted your research for the book?
A: Almost every day brought a new surprise! Wasserstein had
a remarkable ability to seem very open. Through her writing she informed her
audiences about the most personal details of her life, mundane and important:
everything from where she had her nails done to an intensely intimate portrait
of giving birth. Yet her openness turned out to be a kind of smokescreen, as
though she was trying to hide in plain sight.
As a biographer, her relationships provided a fascinating
window into the complexity of friendship and revelation. And the story that
kept providing new twists and turns was the tale of the Wasserstein family. As
one of Wendy’s close friends once said: “You were born into great
material.”
Q: Do you have a favorite Wasserstein play, and if so, which one?
A: Before I wrote them the book I would have said The
Sisters Rosensweig, which is a fine play, warm and funny, very smart. But I
have developed a special fondness for Wasserstein’s breakthrough play, Uncommon Women, based on her experience at Mt. Holyoke. For me, the play has
become so intertwined with a turning point in Wasserstein’s life, I always find
new references
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I have just finished a novel for young readers about a
cat who lives in Greenwich Village, being illustrated by Jill Weber, a
wonderful artist with whom I’ve collaborated before (The Christmas Tree). It’s
been a dream experience! Jill is finishing the paintings now. The book will be
published in 2014 by Penguin’s Dial Press for Young Readers.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: Just thank you for your interest! The warm reception for Wendy
and the Lost Boys has been very gratifying.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb