Rebecca Kauffman is the author of the new novel The Reservation. Her other books include I'll Come to You. She lives in Virginia.
Q: What inspired you to write The Reservation, and how did you create your cast of characters?
A: The first spark for this book came in the form of a little collection of first person vignettes that was doomed from the start, although I really enjoyed writing it.
A few of the works related to my time in food service and when I considered the (failed) project on the whole, I recognized that those particular pieces had some energy. That gave me the idea for a novel set in a restaurant, and the rest of the concept followed.
As for the cast, characters almost always rise out of some real life moment that stirs me in some way. My hope is then to take that moment - something fleeting - and turn it into something permanent on the page; something that will hold steady and remain as true as possible to the original moment that inspired me.
By "true" I don't mean an actual representation of the moment I witnessed, but true to the feeling that it gave me.
Q: The writer Marcy Dermansky said of the book, “With The Reservation, Rebecca Kauffman has proven herself to be a master of documenting ordinary life--revealing how complicated, rich, funny, beautiful, and absolutely bittersweet it can be.” What do you think of that description?
A: What a lovely quote from one of the funniest writers alive. It was never a conscious decision to "document ordinary life" but in recent years I have realized that it is indeed not only what I write but why I write: to notice and honor and express the complexity of every life, especially the ones that appear extremely "ordinary" on the surface such as those of a small-town restaurant crew.
Q: You’ve noted that you spent many years working in restaurants. How did that background find its way into the novel?
A: I've worked many, many restaurant jobs - on and off from my teenage years into my 30s, back and front of house, from small-town family restaurants to fine dining in Manhattan. I drew heavily on that experience for things like kitchen lay-out, the sights and smells of a walk-in cooler, side work checklists and so forth.
I don't, however, ever want to recreate an actual person I've known (or observed) on the page - the fiction must be created from shreds or shards of reality, but mostly from inspiration that arrives during the actual act of writing.
In other words, to a certain extent I am of course always drawing on my real life to write, but if I'm drawing on something from my own past, especially where real people are involved, it must undergo a certain dismantling/distancing process in my mind before I'm ready to construct something new on the page.
Q: What do you hope readers take away from the story?
A: I hope readers find some humor in here. I am not a quick-witted person - I assure you, I am never, ever the funniest person in a room despite my lifelong desire to be - the jokes always reach me two hours too late. But when writing, I have time to turn things over in my mind.
I set out to write a book that gets some laughs out of the reader, and I hope I succeed there.
More than that though, I hold the same hope for this book as I do everything I write: that readers will experience a sense of the richness and mystery represented by every single life.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I'm editing a book about a family moving through seasons of hope and heartache as a father takes a thankless janitorial job at a university because of the promise of free tuition for staff offspring; the book spans several decades of the child's life.
And I'm working on a spicy new book about a small group of writers on an unplugged retreat.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: Usually I'm at no loss of things to add, but today the sun is shining and the hyacinths are calling, so I'll leave it here!
--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Rebecca Kauffman.
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