Aug. 31, 1916: Journalist Daniel Schorr born.
Sunday, August 31, 2014
Saturday, August 30, 2014
Friday, August 29, 2014
Q&A with author Thomas Maier
Thomas Maier is the author of Masters of Sex: The Life and Times of William Masters and Virginia Johnson, the Couple Who Taught America How to Love. Masters of Sex has been adapted into a Showtime television series now in its second season. Maier's other books include The Kennedys and Dr. Spock. An investigative reporter for Newsday, he lives on Long Island, N.Y.
Q: Why did you decide to write a biography
of Masters and Johnson?
A: I interviewed Masters in 1994 as an
assignment at Newsday, where I worked as a reporter. I was working on a book
about Dr. Spock, the baby doctor, and then I wrote about the Kennedys. The idea
of writing a book about Masters and Johnson stuck with me for 10 years.
I [eventually] pursued this project;
Masters had died, but I convinced Virginia Johnson to cooperate. Once she did
agree, she provided a great deal of insight. The family of Masters provided me
with his unpublished memoir, and their contemporaries made Bill come alive. The
idea of a man and a woman who studied love and sex, and were emblematic of the
sexual revolution—to me, that was something irresistible.
Q: What did Virginia Johnson think of
the book?
A: Virginia Johnson liked the book. She
didn’t get a chance to look at it until after publication. She was very
generous with her time and with her insights. One of the bigger surprises
[included in the book’s new afterword] was that she finally acknowledged: I
guess I really did love Bill Masters. She had denied it in so many ways in my
initial interviewing of her. Her actions contradicted her claim: I never really
loved him. They were always mesmerized
by each other; they both defined the other.
Q: You write, “The improbable
Pygmalion-like rise from a lowly secretary to medical research partner—though
made possible by Masters—was primarily motivated by Johnson herself…” What did
you learn about the nature of their partnership, and what surprised you most as
you researched the book?
A: I was fascinated by the fact that Masters gave her so
much credit. In many ways, he was the top doctor in his field in St. Louis.
[Dr. Spock’s] wife, Jane, had given help to Dr. Spock, yet he never really
acknowledged it. Masters gave Johnson equal billing. Some people have said that
Bill Masters’ greatest sign of love for Virginia Johnson was his willingness to
share credit. Most men, particularly of his generation, would never have
thought of that.
I was surprised also by [Johnson’s work in] developing their
sex therapy…teaching couples to touch one another [after] so much of their
communication had broken down. Someone who was untrained, without a degree, was
able to come up with this therapy that revolutionized so many things!
Q: In the book, you describe Masters’ and Johnson’s
relationship to feminism. Would you say they were feminists?
A: Virginia Johnson is like a lot of pioneering women who
really made a mark in an almost exclusively men’s world, but don’t necessarily
subscribe to a movement. They see themselves as classic rugged individualists,
not necessarily flag-wavers but iconoclastic individualists….[but] they were
[feminists] by their actions.
Q: What about Masters?
A: Bill Masters clearly was a feminist in his actions by his
willingness, in his greatest work, to give equal credit to a woman. He was
being open-eyed at a time in which Americans’ view of sexuality was dominated
by the Freudian male-dominated view.
[Masters’ and Johnson’s work] showed women had a greater
capacity to be multi-orgasmic. He was brave enough and feminist enough to come
up with a scientific finding that many others would have denied. Their first
book, Human Sexual Response, was two-thirds devoted to findings of female
sexuality.
Being the doctor who opened the eyes of half the world to
their own sexuality, and brought medicine kicking and screaming into the
debate, qualifies him as a feminist, even though he was a registered Republican
and lived in a tony section [of town].
Q: You write that Human Sexual Response “transformed the
public discourse about sex in America, opening a new era of candidness never
seen before in the media.” What was the impact of the book at the time, when
sex was not really a topic of discussion?
A: The impact of Masters’ and Johnson’s work was huge. It
made it acceptable to use clinical medical terms about the human body and
sexual interaction…in newspapers, women’s magazines, popular discourse. There
was a dramatic change between 1966, when the book came out, and five years
later. By 1971, clinical discussions of sex in the mass media was widespread,
due to the acceptability that Masters and Johnson brought to their work.
Q: Did you expect your book to be turned into a television
show, and how would you compare the book and the show?
A: The book was at first a failure by any measure. It came
out in April 2009, and it sold all of 4,000 copies. It was at the very depths
of the recession, and no one was talking about sex, but [instead] about keeping
their jobs. My editor was laid off; my
original editor had died.
It really looked like the book was going to be a major
disappointment. Then The New York Times reviewed Masters of Sex in their daily
and Sunday editions, and it spurred a lot of movie and television interest.
Sony bought the rights, and made an agreement with Showtime. They show it all
around the world, in 30 countries. Television has really transformed the
outcome for this book.
It’s been fun to see how the dramatized interpretation has
really enhanced the overall enjoyment of their story. My book is a nonfiction,
completely on the record version of the truth. The Showtime series is a
fictionalized drama based upon my book. It takes details from the book and
explores them in greater emotional depth. It’s very accurate as it shows the relationship
between Masters and Johnson. Michael Sheen and Lizzy Caplan [the actors portraying them] do a [great] job.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I have a new book coming out, When Lions Roar. It’s a
750-page history of the relationship between the Kennedys and the Churchills. I
am really delighted about that book; there are a lot of surprises in that book.
With the new book, I went back to history with the idea of
somewhat getting away from sex, but the world of the Kennedys and the
Churchills had as much sex in it as Masters of Sex.
Of course, it’s [also] about politics, fathers and sons, and
[the question of] what is greatness.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: It’s amusing that some people have said, Yes, but Masters
and Johnson have had a problem with gay conversion. It’s amusing to me because
I’m the one who reported it in my book!
I’m very proud of the fact that in the last five or six
years since the book came out, that whole discussion about gay conversion
therapy has been revisited. It’s been embraced by right-wing folks, who have
provocatively said to gay people that they can change their orientation, and
they point to the Masters and Johnson 1979 book as “proof.”
Of course, I put the lie to that by showing that the cases
were apparently fabricated by Masters. There’s been a lot of revisiting of that
subject, and the book is given credit…I’m glad it’s had an impact.
For all the discussion about sex, I think the book has
helped provoke a discussion about what is love. In a society awash with sexual
imagery, the eternal question of what draws us to one another is at the heart
of the story of Masters and Johnson.
Their story of being mesmerized by one another in the
workplace setting particularly speaks to today’s generation. The younger
generation knows all the mechanics of sexuality, but is clueless about the
mysteries of love. …
The desire to be understood by another person is at the
heart of the book and the television show, and that’s what is grabbing the
audience.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
Thursday, August 28, 2014
Q&A with author Lucinda Franks
Lucinda Franks is the author of the new memoir Timeless: Love, Morgenthau, and Me, about her marriage to Robert Morgenthau, the longtime Manhattan District Attorney. Her other books include another memoir, My Father's Secret War, a novel, Wild Apples, and the nonfiction work Waiting Out a War: The Exile of Private John Picciano. A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, she has written for The New York Times, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic. She lives in New York City.
Q: Why did you decide to write this memoir about your
marriage?
A: I have to feel my subject before I write an entire book
about a subject. In my last book, I really felt my father. He was a spy in
World War II, and my discovery of this transformed our whole relationship.
One day, I looked at Bob and I felt the same feeling. I
realized Bob was a hero too, but a lot of people didn’t know who he really was;
they only knew the stern, tough prosecutor. I wanted him to be known in all his
humanity.
I asked him, and he looked at me shyly and asked, Do you
think anyone would read it? I said, I think so, sweetheart. He said, You can
try it. I expected him to say no; there had been nothing [personal written]
about him.
Q: What was different and what was similar about the
experience of writing those two books?
A: With my father, it was a voyage of discovery. I found a
Nazi uniform in his belongings. I found a lot of my mother’s pastel satin
nightgowns, and [underneath them], there was a Nazi uniform. I asked my father
about it, and he refused to talk.
[I thought,] My God, did my mother have an affair with a
Nazi? But I realized it would not have been true. Was my father a secret Nazi?
I finally broke him, using every reporter’s trick I knew. I would go to the
Archives, and read about spy missions and spy weapons, and would let something drop
[about a particular weapon].
“What? That was the worst weapon we ever made!” [he would
reply.] After I knew a certain amount, he realized he wasn’t going to be able
to keep the oath of silence.
It was a journey of rediscovery of my father, from a plain,
deadpan man who didn’t relate to adults at all…I realized he was keeping all
those secrets. He liberated the first Holocaust camp [taken] by the Allies, and he
never got over that. This mystery man became real to me, a hero.
It was different with Bob; I already knew him. It’s a matter
of how you know people. So it was a different kind of thing. I also had
feelings [about] Bob that were intact; I didn’t need to rediscover them,
although there is a section in the book about the rediscovery of love. I hope
it will help people.
Q: You write of you and your husband, “We might as well have
sprung from some dimension of No Time; we had no sense that we came from
different generations.” Why do you think that is?
A: He was in his 50s and I was in my 20s. I was totally
different; I was a radical, I was going with a draft dodger. He was an
establishment icon, everything we pledged to overthrow.
We were the most unlikely couple, but when you’re drawn to
each other by chemistry, no matter how appropriate the match is supposed to be,
you can’t walk away from this kind of falling in love. I tried to! This was not
the man of my dreams. The last thing I wanted to do was to marry him. But we
were caught.
Bob was a very young 56. I was a more mature 29 year old. We
just thought the same way. He tolerated my radical politics, until we were
visiting a friend…and the shower curtain was made of an American flag, and he turned
pale, and said it’s time for us to go. We became more like each other
politically. We just have so much fun together.
Q: What does he think of the book?
A: He read it, very closely, several drafts. He found commas
and colons [that he questioned]. He questioned facts. I had kept journals over
the years, and I could point to the journals. But sometimes I was wrong. I’m so
glad he was able to do this. He’s pleased with the book.
Q: As you were working on the book, did anything
particularly surprise you or cause you to view events differently?
A: Yes, I understood a lot more about some of the antics I
was doing. It was an attempt to get his attention and assert my independence….
It was also a discovery of things he had done that I never
knew, [for example] for the Museum of Jewish Heritage or for Holocaust
survivors. He is an incredibly giving and unselfish person in many ways.
It was kind of like [with] my father. I came to the
breakfast table sparkly-eyed because I had discovered something about him!
Q: You’ve written fiction and nonfiction books, in addition
to all your work in journalism. Do you have a preference?
A: I love memoir because you’re allowed, as long as you
stick to broad facts and are authentic to the people and the situation, to use
a style that is novelistic. I’m a fiction writer at heart, but memoir has
captured me. I wish I could write another, but there’s no material left! I
guess I’ll go back to fiction.
Q: That leads to my next question, what are you working on
now?
A: I want to write historical fiction, complete with a
mystery and a situation in history that would be significant, that told
something about America or about the war; you get to explore higher themes than
you can in a memoir.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: This book is about Bob and me, not just about Bob’s
accomplishments…but really about two people who have [had] certain
accomplishments over the years and then meet—how they are able to take in each
other’s professions while separating them.
Bob is really a frustrated journalist, and I’m a frustrated
detective. I loved hearing about his cases, and he loved helping me with my
stories, although we kept a very defined line.
It’s really a book about two people separated by 30 years
that made a marriage work, and work well, and both were able to rise in their
professions despite a marriage that could have tied either down. We blossomed
in each other’s light.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
Wednesday, August 27, 2014
Q&A with authors Chuck McCutcheon and David Mark
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Chuck McCutcheon and David Mark are the co-authors of the new book Dog Whistles, Walk-Backs, & Washington Handshakes: Decoding the Jargon, Slang, and Bluster of American Political Speech. McCutcheon is the co-author of National Journal's Almanac of American Politics, and the co-editor of CQ's Politics in
America 2010. Mark is the author of Going Deep: The Art of Negative Campaigning, and the editor-in-chief of Politix.
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| Chuck McCutcheon (above), David Mark |
Q: How did the two of you come up with the idea for the
book, and how did you decide on the terms to include?
A: As seasoned political journalists and authors – and
friends – we realized we had similar styles and approaches to book-writing. We
played around with various topics, and settled on something related to
political rhetoric. We refined the idea to a dictionary/reference book type of
guide.
Deciding what terms to include was one of the toughest challenges
in writing the book. We wanted to present an original idea with each
definition, which was hard regarding some of the well-known terms like foreign
policy Hawk or Pork (the Capitol Hill, not bacon, variety). We’re confident we
were able to do this in a humorous and informative way, but it took some
thinking.
Some of the terms also came from our interview subjects.
Former Congressman Martin Frost of Texas, who held several Democratic
leadership roles during his 1979-95 tenure, mentioned Minimum High Regard. It’s
a euphemism used by an older generation of members who want to avoid directly
insulting a colleague, while still making their displeasure at an opposing idea
know.
Q: Who do you see as the readership for this book?
A: We’re hoping to get our ideas across to people who are
interested in politics, but don’t necessarily work in it professionally or
follow it obsessively (though we think those folks will like the book, as well).
In addition to the familiar phrases, we introduce some new
ones that may initially cause some head-scratching. That includes Overton
Window (the range of “acceptable” political opinions) and Dead Cat Bounce
(temporary recovery from sagging poll numbers in a political campaign).
We figured readers who had previously scooped up Safire’s Political Dictionary or Mark Leibovich’s This Town would be interested in Dog Whistles.
Though of course we’re not trying to copy the work of anybody else, but present
our ideas in a new and original format.
Academic courses are also a target for us in the book. Dog
Whistles could work well in a college course on political communication, or a
range of other topics. We wrote the book to appeal to both political and
academic audiences.
Q: What are some of your favorite terms that you describe in
the book?
A: Overton Window is high on the list, particularly because
it sounds like it would fit in a Star Trek episode.
Our favorite, though, has to be My Good Friend. C-SPAN viewers
will find the phrase familiar to floor debate in the House and Senate, when
partisans go after each other with verbal gusto, while using the
goodwill-tinged phrase.
Among House members it’s particularly disingenuous. In a
chamber of 435 members it’s unlikely any lawmaker is going to have that many
real friends. In fact, many don’t even know the names of more than a few dozen
colleagues, as we’ve learned in our Capitol Hill reporting over the years.
Another phrase we came to like in the writing process is “We
need to have a conversation about …” It’s a favorite expression of President
Barack Obama’s, though by no means limited to him, as explained in Dog Whistles.
It signifies that a politician wants people to slow down and
listen to their version of something controversial; in Obama’s case, it has
come following Edward Snowden’s revelations of domestic spying, gun control
after the Newtown slayings, or legalizing marijuana after voters in Colorado
and Washington state chose to do so.
Q: How did the two of you divide up the work, and what was
the collaboration process like?
A: We came up with an initial list of words and phrases and
simply split them in half. Inevitably, though, some of these got cut, while
many more got added.
We would write up a batch of definitions – usually seven or
eight at a time – and then send to the other for review. Often one of us
pointed out shortcomings in the write-ups, like being too obvious or familiar.
Or, they were too obscure for a reader who doesn’t deal with these matters each
day.
Another challenge was fitting the definitions into relatively
equal-sized chapters. Some entries were longer than others. We worked together
to move around definitions to different chapters, which often meant adding on
new material.
Valuable editing help also came from Jeff Greenfield, who
wrote the book foreword. He’s an Emmy Award-winning political commentator and
acclaimed author. In sending him the manuscript so he could write the review,
he also found factual issues to clarify, and offered a few – but key –
suggestions on writing style.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: Chuck is updating Almanac of American Politics profiles
on National Journal's website. David is busy with his day job, as
editor-in-chief of Silicon Valley-based Politix. David is spending an
extended period of time in Washington, D.C., this fall for book promotion, from
Sept. 12 through Oct. 10. That begins with the official book launch at Politics and Prose on Sept. 13.
David’s also working on his next book proposal idea.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: We’re confident Dog Whistles will appeal to readers of
all political persuasions. We wrote it in a non-partisan manner, as we’ve
approached our careers.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb. For a previous interview with David Mark, please click here.
Tuesday, August 26, 2014
Q&A with writer Kelly Cherry
Kelly Cherry's most recent book is a story collection, A Kind of Dream. Her many other books include My Life and Dr. Joyce Brothers, Augusta Played, The Society of Friends, and We Can Still Be Friends. She has served as Poet Laureate of Virginia, and is the Eudora Welty Professor Emerita of English and Evjue-Bascom Professor Emerita in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She lives in Virginia.
Q: A Kind of
Dream is the third in a trilogy. Did you know when you started writing about
your character Nina that you'd write more books about her and her friends and
family?
A: I didn't,
Deborah. I wrote the second book because many readers did not understand that
Tavy, the child Nina adopts, was meant to be "the child within" Nina.
("The child within" was a common notion and phrase in the eighties
and nineties.) Since everyone thought she was real, I decided to proceed as if
she were. Next thing I knew, she had a daughter herself.
Q: Did your
feelings about these characters change as you wrote about them over a period of
many years?
A: Yes and
no. I wanted to treat all the characters with respect and--clarity. Each has
his or her ambitions, likes and dislikes, problems, ways of expressing himself
or herself. Each is, I trust, distinct. If my feelings about them changed, it
was because they changed--they grew up, they learned, they experienced, they
traveled, they faced death. It was not easy to let them go. For a little while
I thought about continuing the stories with Callie's life and BB's new child,
but it really was time to let them go.
Q: Why did
you choose to write A Kind of Dream as linked stories rather than as a novel?
A: Linked
stories allow the writer to focus on the characters and themes and dismiss
transitions. The writer Joyce Cary, who wrote two trilogies of novels, used to
write his scenes for each book and put them in manila envelopes; then he'd go
back and stick in the transitions. It's also the case that linked stories offer
a simple way to show various points of view, which can get quite complicated
within a single novel.
Q: You've
written fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Do you have a preference?
A: I love
them all! They offer different satisfactions. Fiction can take a writer way,
way, away from herself. It involves her in a world similar to but importantly
different from her own. That is exciting. Conversations occur that she never
expected to hear. She goes to places she's never been, like Mongolia. She gets
to know people she's never met. She discovers what they feel, what they think.
That's a joy.
Nonfiction
offers the writer an opportunity to approach the world logically. She writes a
paragraph, then another paragraph, and the progression is straightforward and
sensible. Even the strangest nonfiction proceeds step by step. As someone who
did grad work in philosophy, I find nonfiction calming, no matter how personal
or fantastic the material may be, because the process is always clarifying.
As for
poetry, well, it's the conjunction of music and meaning, which means it is
sublime. Poetry is what the world remembers, regardless of how many or how few
people read it. Poetry is what we turn to when we can find no other words. It
is hard, hard work but it takes one inside itself; to concentrate on a poem is
to exist outside of time. There are no clocks, no calendars, no anything except
the poem. Self is lost--or shall we say, self is free. To be free of one's self
is a kind of heaven.
Q: What are
you working on now?
A: I've
always worked on several manuscripts at a time; this permits me to put some on
the back burner, where they can crystallize in the subconscious, while others
are nearing completion. At the moment I am completing a book-length poem. Two
other poetry manuscripts are more or less finished, and I have begun yet
another. A Kelly Cherry Reader is forthcoming, perhaps this fall; it includes
stories, excerpts from novels, essays, and poems. And a collection of
(unlinked) stories, titled Twelve Women in a Country Called America, is due out
from Press 53 in March 2015.
Q: Anything
else we should know?
A: For years
I have had in mind a list of books I wanted to write. I hope I'll be able to
get to all of them. Good, bad, or mediocre, they are my ideas, and I am
obligated to realize them. It's a bonus that writing is so much fun.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
Monday, August 25, 2014
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Sunday, August 24, 2014
Saturday, August 23, 2014
Friday, August 22, 2014
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Thursday, August 21, 2014
Wednesday, August 20, 2014
Q&A with author Debra Pickett
Q: How did you create your main character, Sara Simone?
A: The whole book began with my imagining one scene: a TV
reporter thinking that she's going to do an interview with a grieving mother in
a Mathare shack. It was just one of those odd thoughts that strikes you at an
inappropriate time, like, "Wouldn't that be weird and awful?"
That image stuck in my mind, though, and so I began thinking
about who that reporter would be, how she'd get there. I imagined her awkwardly
coming through the doorway, so she was always quite tall in my mind, which is
somewhat ironic since I'm barely 5 foot 2.
Her identity is somewhat intertwined with my own
personality, kind of who I might have been had I not had other relationships
and influences outside my journalism career. She is pure ambition -- at least
at the start of the book. And, while I can't say she's based on any one person,
I've known a lot of reporters with that element to their personalities.
Q: You've spent time reporting in Africa, as does Sara in
the book. Did you need to do any additional research to write the novel, or was
much of it based on your own experiences?
A: I didn't do a ton of additional research, beyond my own
experiences there. I traveled back and forth to Kenya and Tanzania from Chicago
about a half a dozen times in 2004 and 2005, so I had reasonably good knowledge
of the places I wrote about.
I did have to keep up with news reports from there and to
check my memory on things, especially geography. Still, for the most part, my
time there was so important to me that it's very clear in my mind, even with
the passage of time.
A: The first writer I ever wanted to be like was Ernest Hemingway. I share his birthday and he's always been a literary hero to me.
As I've grown up, I've come to have tremendous respect for
writers like Barbara Kingsolver and Anna Quindlen, who write gorgeous,
compelling novels and also seem to have full lives outside their fiction. I
aspire to create a fictional world that a reader could get lost in, but I don't
want to be lost there myself, so, as I try to grow as a writer, that's my
mission: to write well and live well.
Q: As someone who has worked in journalism, what do you
think of the changes in the news business in recent years?
A: When I left the Sun-Times newsroom in 2007, just after my
son was born in late 2006, I wasn't really ready to go. I loved the energy of
working there and the vital thrill you get from being at the center of events.
But, as it's worked out, I am tremendously happy to have
gotten out of the newspaper industry and gotten a head start on a new career. I
thank my son for that all the time! It's a brutal time for the industry right
now -- really talented, hard working folks can barely get paid for their
writing.
I knew, of course, that things would migrate online -- I
started the Sun-Times' first blog -- and that's still the future of news. But
that future is definitely not fully realized yet: we can do better than
pre-packaged, say-nothing videos and click-through slideshows as
"news."
The newspapers that are adding new subscribers -- The New
York Times and The Washington Post, for example -- are doing so because they are
generating really high quality original reporting. So that gives me hope
- there is a market for what print journalists do. We just haven't really
found the right way to bring that into the digital age and make it profitable.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I'm working on a second novel, which I hope to finish
early next year. The main character is not a reporter; she's a lawyer. And
she's not young and single like Sara, either. She's married and has a daughter.
Still, I think she's a similar kind of heroine, a
"difficult" woman who is wrestling with her ambition and challenge of
being a good person, even if you're not an easily likable one.
If my first book was inspired by my journalism career, this
one is definitely more closely tied to my life today, as a working mom. (My consulting
business has me visiting law firms pretty regularly, so I guess that's where
the setting comes from. But the lawyers I work with are all much nicer than
some of the ones in the book!)
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: The idea for Reporting Lives was born in 2004, with my
first visit to Nairobi. So it's taken 10 years to see it through to
publication. I am so, so pleased that I finally get to share this story with
readers and I hope they find some meaning in it, but I also hope it might provide
a bit of inspiration or reassurance for aspiring writers out there as well. If
you stick with it long enough, you can do this, too!
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
Tuesday, August 19, 2014
Monday, August 18, 2014
Saturday, August 9, 2014
Friday, August 8, 2014
Q&A with author Josh Weil
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Josh Weil, photo by Jilan Carroll Glorfield
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Josh Weil is the author of the new novel The Great Glass Sea. He also has written a novella collection, The New Valley. His work has appeared in a variety of publications, including Granta and The New York Times. He lives in the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas.
Q: You spent time in the U.S.S.R. in 1991 and returned to
Russia in 2010. How did your visits inspire The Great Glass Sea?
A: They were both hugely important. In 1991 I was fourteen and
just discovering who I was and to spend time living with a host family in the
far north of a country that was, at that time, so drastically different from my
own was eye opening and life changing.
I always knew I’d write about it, but didn’t have a way in
that felt natural until this novel came along. Then, after I’d written the
first draft, I went back to Russia to do research and what I experienced there
— the tremendous change from what I’d seen two decades earlier, the way
Russians had grabbed hold of new freedoms and opportunities but also yearned
for a lot that had been lost in the grasping — had a huge effect on the novel.
I wrote 400 pages when I came back from that trip. It
changed the entire plot, the feel of the book, anchored it not only in my
memories of a Russia long past, but in the tensions between that and the one
that exists now. Much of the dramatic tension in the novel comes from exactly
that.
Q: Why did you set the book in an alternative version of
Russia rather than the real thing?
A: First and foremost, I wanted to make it clear that I
wasn’t trying to write a book that would, in some way, claim to know Russia as
well as a Russian author would, a novel that would try to reveal the Russian
soul, or something. I’m an American writer.
But the story required that I write Russian characters (and
not filter it through an American abroad, say). So it was vital to me that I
didn’t try to do more than I could, or perhaps even had a right to do (though I
believe writers have a right to do most anything so long as they do it well
enough — and that’s the rub).
But, of course, the space mirrors that surrounded the story
and drive much of the novel are not present in the real Russia; they
spring from an experiment that the Russians did conduct (sending satellites
into orbit with reflective wings meant to carom sunlight down onto the
nighttime earth in the hope of lighting northern cities overnight and ridding
them of darkness), but the experiment never became more than that. I wanted to
write a story in which it did. And so I had to push beyond what was actually
out there.
That, and, too, the Russia of this novel owes as much to
fables and folklore as it does to the Russia of today and I wanted to write in
a way that allowed the story to inhabit both of those things, and not be bound
to a hard-nosed realistic depiction of every aspect of the country that exists
right this moment.
Q: Why did you decide to make your main characters twin
brothers?
A: The bond between them was always the heart of the novel. And
so I knew I wanted brothers who were very, very close (as I am with my
brother). I thought a lot about whether they should be twins or not and, in the
end, decided to make them twins for two reasons: it was important that their
bond be something beyond the usual if the obsession with holding onto it that
one of them has was going to be understandable, fully felt.
Then, too, it seemed rich with metaphor, given the split
between them, the way they take opposite tracks in the world, the mirrors that
surround the story, the presence of the giant greenhouse that splits the sky in
two and creates two planes upon which the brothers work — all that felt like it
worked well with them being twins.
Q: Which authors have inspired you?
A: Oh, so many, so many. But for this book I’d have to say
Turgenev and Gogol and Pushkin, most. And, stylistically (and simply in my
approach to writing), Annie Proulx and Cormac McCarthy and Toni Morrison and
W.G. Sebald and Marilynne Robinson…and so many more.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: A story collection, The Age of Perpetual Light, that is
actually linked to the novel. I hope it’ll be out in a year or two.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: Perhaps only that the novel is illustrated, and that I
did all the pen and ink drawings (I get asked about that a lot at readings).
There are 30 of them, including the end papers, and I hope
that they give the book something extra, that they help create a feeling upon
entering the story that is like that we had as children first reading fables,
and that they help make this novel a physical object of beauty worth holding in
your hands. I love when books feel that way and wanted very much to make
this one that felt like that.
I’m really proud of what we did — me doing the drawings, a
brilliant designer creating a unique cover, and a brave team at Grove putting
everything into the look and feel of the book.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb