Photo by Vera Szombathelyi
Gary Lippman is the author of the new book I Wish, Therefore I Am. His other books include We Loved the World But Could Not Stay. He is also a lawyer.
Q: What inspired you to write I Wish, Therefore I Am?
A: Even before I had published my collection of very short stories, I was planning my next book to be a personal “kitchen sink” situation—as in, I’d throw into the text everything except for that proverbial porcelain object.
Memories, fantasies, fears, tastes, anecdotes, opinions, speculations, pearls of wisdom—I wanted my pages bursting at the seams with all that stuff.
Why this desire? I guess it was because I’d turned 60 and was feeling more mortal than ever and figured that if I dropped dead tomorrow, people could get a strong sense of who I was by reading my latest literary production. But what form could contain all that jazz? See immediately below!
Q: The writer and actor Joan Juliet Buck said of the book, “With I Wish, Therefore I Am, Lippman has unleashed a liberating new genre.” What do you think of that description?
A: I’ve long admired the artist Joe Brainard’s unique memoir I Remember, which consists of non-chronological memories in unadorned form, each one starting with the two words of the title.
Doing my new book in this form would not be original of course—but maybe I could instead write a book of regrets? No, too much of a downer. How about, I thought next, a book of wishes?
My brain lit up. Wishes were flexible enough to include regrets, remembrances—just about everything except for that kitchen sink. You could wish for everything from world peace to a cooling breeze on a boiling-hot day, right?
But to whom would such wishes be directed? God? Too corny. How about the goddess of Fortune—Dame Fortune, as she was called in medieval times? My brain lit up again.
And who might continually thwart my wishes? Why, a band of evil ninjas would serve that function quite dramatically! So I was off and running…
Q: How was the book’s title chosen, and what does it signify for you?
A: I’m a title freak, and believe that a good one is the author’s first, and maybe only, invitation to potential readers. Titles should be distinctive yet general enough to connect to said readers. Bonus points if they’re quirky, but only if they’re cleverly so, and of course they should be serious enough to represent a book’s weighty content, if any.
The original title for my novel I Wish, Therefore I Am was “A Wish List for Dame Fortune.” I still like that—which is to say, if I encountered it on a bookshop’s shelf, I’d be curious what book the title was attached to.
But the present title, which popped into my head unbidden during a phone conversation I had with my publisher (he was at his office, presumably, while I was at an Exxon filling station near Brunswick, Georgia), seemed pithier—and pith is another plus for a title.
Then again, I’ve long nursed a guilty pleasure for long titles, as evidenced by the ones I chose for my previous novel and my story collection: Set the Controls for the Heart of Sharon Tate and We Loved the World But Could Not Stay. In the end, giving titles is an art, not a science—and better that way.
Q: What do you hope readers take away from the book?
A: I hope my novel will achieve the four goals that the recently departed American novelist Tom Robbins said each work of fiction should shoot for: it should make you laugh, make you think, make you feel horny, and stir up your sense of wonder.
Not only did Robbins score an A-plus in all of these categories with his books, but he was a laughter-producing, deep-thinking, sexy, and wondrous human being, hence an inspiration to me as both a writer and a fellow person.
He was my friend and I miss him and I wish he was still around to read my book as well as to write more terrific fiction of his own.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: My next book, I hope, will be a poetry collection. When a musician friend asked me to write lyrics for his compositions, I thought, I can’t rhyme to save my life. But I told him, “I’ll get started right away”—I like an artistic challenge, and don’t like to sound defeated from the get-go!
And soon enough I became a happily rhyming fool. My song lyrics turned into poems somewhere along the way, and I still cannot seem to stop writing them.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: In my new book of wishes, I quote a few saucy wisecracks by the 1930s movie icon Mae West, but I also include a simple yet meaningful non-saucy observation of West’s: “You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.”
I wish that my readers will be able to figure out what “doing it right” means for each of them, and that they will then put that knowledge into fruitful practice. I’m certainly attempting to manage the Mae West program for myself.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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