Q&A with Susan Coll

  

 

Susan Coll is the author of the new novel Word Salad. Her other novels include Bookish People. She is an event consultant at Politics & Prose bookstore in Washington, D.C., and is the former president of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation. 

 

Q: Why did you decide to return to your bookstore setting in your new novel, Word Salad?

 

A: Every time I intend to move on to a different landscape, some little incident gets my imagination going, and I’m back to plotting another literary Washington, D.C., novel.

 

In the case of Word Salad, it had to do with the world of public intellectuals, which is a funny concept to begin with. Who is a public intellectual, and what does it take to be labeled as such?

 

As I was thinking about this, I stumbled on a video of a bunch of public intellectuals talking for an hour about…who knows what. It was pure word salad (and I say this as a former student of political theory). I couldn’t quite parse what they were talking about, other than that it was novel-writing gold.

 

Q: Vegetables are a major focus of the book--why did you choose that theme?

 

A: Funny you should ask. In earlier drafts my public intellectual had thought himself a modern-day Nietzsche, but the book was getting a bit too heavy and admittedly incomprehensible.

 

It was itself becoming a bit too word salad-y. I had already quite randomly named my public intellectual Dr. Jordan Rutabaga, so I decided to lean into the root vegetable situation.

 

Q: Your protagonist, Matilda, has synesthesia--how did you research that part of the novel?

 

A: On rare occasions, I see sounds as shapes and colors. While I was working on the novel, I was at a book conference in Atlanta and had a very odd experience.

 

First, an early morning alarm went off in the hotel, and I could see it very clearly as a distinctive yellow squiggly line. Then, later that day, an alarm went off in the airport, and there it was again.

 

I then flew to Vermont that night, and when we pulled into our otherwise quiet condominium complex, a late-night alarm was going off – something to do with the septic tank apparently.

 

It seemed that the sound = color situation was inserting itself into the novel. So, part of Matilda’s experience came from my own observations, but I also read a couple of books on the subject and talked to a friend who is more classically synesthetic in that he sees projected numbers.

 

I didn’t want Matilda’s synesthesia to be central to the story because it is simply part of the way that she perceives the world.

 

Q: How would you describe the relationship between Matilda and her co-worker Sage?

 

A: Haha, I had a lot of fun writing Sage. She is older than most of her colleagues, having gone back to work after her child goes off to college. She views her new job more as a diversion than an obligation and is one of those people who just does whatever she wants -- the opposite of uptight Matilda.

 

Matilda understands that she has no choice but to tolerate Sage---she is a family friend of the bookstore’s owner--- on top of which Matila is kind of fascinated by Sage’s behavior.

 

Sage, for her part, is entirely self-absorbed, so she’s not giving Matilda much thought.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: I am gardening three different ideas and I’m not sure which one will emerge, perhaps none of them and perhaps all three.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Susan Coll.