Bonnie Friedman is the author of the new novel Don't Stop. Her other books include Writing Past Dark. She teaches creative writing at the University of North Texas.
Q: What inspired you to write Don’t Stop, and how did you create your character Ina?
A: I want to quote the first line of the novel, which tells something about my inspiration: “When Ina discovered sex at the age of forty-one, her whole life turned upside down.”
I wanted to write about the way that sex can overturn one’s concept of oneself, especially if one has been highly disciplined and intellectual, as the heroine of my novel has been. I wanted to write about someone who has succeeded well-enough in life only, at the midpoint, to be waylaid by aspects of herself that she’d dismissed, disparaged, disallowed.
And I wanted to find language for the ecstatic experiences that sex can sometimes grant, and the way it can provide a kind of pathway to early emotional states and desires.
Ina Rosenbluth is a feminist, and she becomes involved with a man who is highly problematic, to say the least. He’s sexist, a smoker, rarely reads a book – and yet he exerts a sexual thrall over her. How will she give him up?
In creating Ina, I was inspired somewhat by Gail Honeyman’s technique in Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine. I loved that book. I loved its humor. And reviewers have said that my book is funny, which makes me so happy. My husband keeps saying he’s the funny one in our family. I like to tease him by showing that perhaps it’s me.
Q: The writer Alice Elliott Dark called the book “a gorgeous depiction of the journey of a soul.” What do you think of that description?
A: That is my favorite description of the book. I think it’s accurate that the book depicts the journey of a soul (and I am flattered that Alice Elliott Dark called it gorgeous). Ina thinks what she wants is to find out about sex; what she discovers is much more than that.
As in the novels of E. M. Forster, love can involve a journey into greater honesty, into discovering the ways you have been fraudulent and have put pretense over sincerity, which are things that many people in our society do, often without their own awareness.
Ina’s journey brings her out into the world and into a far greater appreciation of others. She ends up having a changed relationship with her sister and her parents and of course her husband, but also a changed relationship with strangers, too.
Many codependents manipulate other people without being aware they are doing so. It is scary to stop doing that after decades of such behavior. But Ina does, at least to some great extent.
Q: How was the novel’s title chosen, and what does it signify for you?
A: While I was writing the book, I thought of it as Chartreuse, which is the alcohol that Ina and Jack drink together at the very start of the novel, with major results.
Ina keeps waiting for the effects of the Chartreuse to wear off. She assumes when it does, she will return to her familiar, moral, balanced, recognizable life. The problem is, weeks and months are going by, and she isn’t returning to sanity, she isn’t able to focus as she was before, she’s subsumed by this new life.
When I sent the book out to my agent, I changed the title to Don’t Stop because I thought Chartreuse didn’t communicate clearly enough what the novel is about. It sounded Victorian and fru-fru, I worried. Although Alice Elliott Dark has told me that she wishes I’d kept the title Chartreuse, and she may be right.
To me, Don’t Stop signifies both a sexual request and also an inner voice that is telling one to see something through, to go where the adventure is leading, not to miss the discovery that the soul wants to make.
Q: Did you know how the novel would end before you started writing it, or did you make many changes along the way?
A: I did not know how the novel would end. I remember the very afternoon I discovered it. Once I had the ending, it never changed, although I worked on the language and developed the last scenes. But the image of the ending didn’t change. Now I can’t think of Ina’s journey ending any other way.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I have a novel in mind concerning a hoarder who lived next door to me on Schermerhorn Street in Brooklyn. She herself was a tidy, immaculately groomed woman in a skirt and cardigan. But she lived in an apartment that was corridors left open between towering walls of stacked yellowing newspapers. She needed to change this because the landlord was coming to inspect. I want to write about her.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: Just that I am grateful to you, Deborah, for the attention you bring to new books and their authors. Thank you!!!
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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