Q&A with Lynn Stegner

 

Photo by Pedro Paredes-Hax

 

Lynn Stegner is the author of the new novel The Half-Life of Guilt. Her other books include the novel Undertow. She lives in San Francisco and in Vermont.

 

Q: What inspired you to write The Half-Life of Guilt, and how did you create your characters Clair and Mason?

 

A: I had been ruminating for some time on the nature of guilt, primarily on the systemic ways in which it can corrupt otherwise happy, meaningful lives – particularly unwarranted guilt, which is the most common category, it seems to me. 

 

Most of us find our way across the landscape of life carrying burdens that by rights should not be ours, and those burdens of guilt leave their imprints and warp experience. Perhaps more importantly, they shape how we perceive ourselves as well as how others perceive us, forever fixing an identity that is very likely false or at least partially false. 

 

So, I wanted to explore how and why that happens, and what each of us might do to set aside unjustified and even real guilt in order to live fully realized lives. This process entails breaking patterns of perception, too – perhaps the more difficult of the jobs.

 

As for Clair and Mason, each of these characters suffers the weight of early guilt, neither deserved but both willingly borne. Such individuals are by necessity highly aware of justice, constantly adjudicating right and wrong. It is part of what attracts them to each other. 

 

At the same time, this extreme attention to justice is also what keeps them from fully accepting love or recognizing that they are worthy of love.

 

Clair has a twin sister, which adds another layer to her excruciating sense of fairness – a sister who at 5 years of age is blamed for a family tragedy. Mason’s birth led to his mother’s death and suffers his own version of original sin. These separate life journeys are, in a sense, efforts to make it up to the world. 

 

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

 

A: The Half-Life of Guilt is a title with a triple meaning. 

 

The first alludes to a scientific formula: the time required for any specified property (e.g. the concentration of a substance in the body) to decrease by half, or for a radioactive element to decay by half its original strength. This can run into the billions of years! 

 

In the case of the novel’s title, that “substance” is guilt – it can take a very long time indeed for guilt to decay by half its force and weight, sometimes the entirety of a life.

 

But that “half-life” also refers to the half lives that those laden with guilt (again, justified or not) often end up living as that long shadow prevents growth and health.

 

Finally, the third allusion summons the unique predicament that twins find themselves in, each living half of the whole they comprised at the outset and, if there is some early tragedy or trauma, the half they give up to protect the other.

Q: The writer Andrea Barrett said of the book, “As Stegner explores both personal responsibility and our responsibility to care for the natural world, she illuminates the ways we love, fail to love, and repair our failures. Her unique sensibility makes for a fascinating read.” What do you think of that description?

 

A: I think it’s an accurate description of two aspects of the narrative, particularly of that singular consequence of guilt, a failure to love that begins with a failure to love oneself and spreads like a virus to loving others. We can spend our lives trying to repair that sort of damage, or jerry-rig something that approximates real love. 

 

Of course, caring for the natural world is an extension, a vast broadening of love, one with vision of both a temporal and spatial nature.

 

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

 

A: Firstly, permission to forgive themselves for real or imagined crimes, to become individuals in full measure, instead of being diminished or worn down by detritus from the past. To be capable of joy. Not everyone is.

 

I also hope that the novel expands the reader’s understanding of the interconnectedness and interdependence among all living things. We need each other and we need each other to be healthy to maintain the web of life. 

 

National borders, industrial and economic interests – these mean little relative to the living ecosystem we call Earth and that we know intimately as home.

 

And I guess I’d like readers to re-appreciate the wonderment that is love – its mystery, strength, and confounding ability to transcend and transform.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: I began something a while ago that initially announced itself as a memoir, but the very idea of it quickly became uncomfortable and so I threw it into the third person, hoping to trick myself out of the inherent squeamishness writing in the first person can produce for those of us who tend to be more curious about others than ourselves. 

 

It’s much easier to explore parts of ourselves when those parts are camouflaged behind fictional characters. 

 

But then I caught myself in the first lies, the first imaginings, speculations, and what-ifs, which means that this may end up fiction. Who knows? At some point, what the narrative wants to be will surface on the page, the masks will come off, and the players stand revealed. Maybe they’ll have birth certificates, maybe not!

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: September 3 is the launch date for The Half-Life of Guilt, and from that point forward I’ll be hop-skipping around the country, giving talks and readings and generally making public what until now has been a private journey. Those events will be listed on my website: www.lynnstegner.com.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb