Lionel Shriver
Author
of
We Need To Talk About Kevin talks with Robert Birnbaum
Lionel Shriver's latest novel, We Need To Talk About Kevin,
is her seventh. Her previous novels are Double Fault, A Perfectly
Good Family, Game Control, The Bleeding Heart, Checker and the Derailleurs
and The Female of the Species. She attended Columbia University
and has lived for many years in Belfast, Northern Ireland and has
written for the Wall Street Journal, The Economist and
the Philadelphia Enquirer. Currently she lives in New York
and is, as one might expect, working on her next novel.
We Need to Talk About Kevin is the story of Eva Khatchadourian's
retrospective account of her son's life up to and beyond the day
he went to his high school and began shooting his classmates. As
Suzy Hansen writes at Salon.com: "What we get …
is an interesting, thoughtful, and surprisingly credible thriller.
We Need to Talk About Kevin is about motherhood and the
possibility that one's ambivalence about breeding might influence
the growth and development of a child. Eva, in her scathingly honest
and often witty recollections of her relationship with Franklin,
her agonized decision to give up a life of traveling for motherhood,
and her painful years with (the truly hideous and apathetic) Kevin,
faces the question head on: Am I responsible for what my child
has done?"
Robert Birnbaum: As you are writing We Need
To Talk About Kevin, do you have a sense of what a minefield
this story is and the issues it raises?
Lionel Shriver: I certainly knew that if I was
going to address a subject of a woman who essentially doesn't like
her own son—I don't think that's a minefield, I think that
it's just a mine— it was an idea that was intrinsically going
to make my main character seem unattractive to most readers. I think
that bond between mother and son is especially inviolable, I would
say even beyond Western culture. That's commonly one of the deepest
and least conditional of relationships. And here I was placing conditions
on it. A mother who wouldn't have picked this person to be her son
and was honest enough to admit that to herself. The main way I got
around the unpleasantness of violating that taboo is by channeling
my energies through that honesty into her forthrightness; her willingness
to look her own unpleasantness in the face.
RB: I would argue that there is more than one mine in this book.
LS: Oh yes, and then there is the whole Columbine business, which
people have strong feelings about. And here I am ultimately trying
to get sympathy for the mother of the killer, not the mother of
somebody who has been killed. You naturally have great sympathy
for someone whose child has been murdered. But someone whose child
has murdered is a little suspect, and that's much more difficult
subject matter.
RB: I have a short bibliography in which bad things happen to children
[Stephen Dixon's Interstate, John Burnham Schwartz' Reservation
Road, Siri
Hustvedt's What I Loved] and some of them I have been
able to read and some I haven't, but always I think about and certainly
in the case of this novel I think about where the writer had to
put themselves to imagine and write such a story. I know the issue
of whether you have children affects how one could write this story.
Was it hard for you to put yourself in the position of Eva Khatchadourian?
LS: It was certainly challenging, partly because I haven't had
children. And so that entailed, if nothing else, trying to flip
around my own experience of being a child—since that's my
only experience of the mother-child relationship in the original
and having to think about my own parent’s perspective. I was
nervous about doing that. I knew that real parents had access to
a whole trove of experience that I could only infer and I took a
certain hard swallow. It has been really gratifying to me speak
to more than one reader, who having not been familiar with my biography,
thought I was a mother. And I thought, "I really pulled off
a magic trick." In the process of writing the book I was truly
under confident. I have respect for original experience and I hate
artifice. I hate fakery. So I had to try to the best of my ability
to imagine what it was like and most of all what it would be like
for someone like me. That was one of the purposes that the writing
of the book served for me. At the time I was wrestling with whether
or not to become a mother. I was getting older. I did have deep
reservations about the idea and wanted to work them out on paper.
It was that sense of having something personally at stake that made
it possible for me to think that hard and, ideally, that well.
RB: Setting aside the personal aspects for writing this book, horrible
things happen in this book. Does that take an emotional toll?
LS: [pause] It takes some emotional toll. I found the writing of
the book very heavy. It wasn't always something I looked forward
to getting back to. There were certain scenes that I was writing
up to that I dreaded, partly because I knew they would be technically
difficult. They would, again, address experience that I didn't have
very much first-hand knowledge of. I knew they would strain my imaginative
powers. And I was glad to have it finished. I found having to read
it over and over again in the proofs and the galleys went on forever.
I have not written a single book that I was not thoroughly sick
of by the time it came out. Sometimes it's a little humorous. There
is enough humor in this book, which I don't think one expects when
picking it up.
RB: That's like Robert Stone saying his books are funny.
LS: Yeah [laughs] I have read all his books. I don't remember
rolling on the floor with Flag For Sunrise—oh, the
nun raping scene, ha ha ha. The humor in my book is dry.
RB: Well, sure funny things happen in life, in passing…
LS: Yeah, regardless of what transpires. In fact, there is something
about tragedy that brings that out. I was with my in-laws recently
when someone in the family died and had been ill for a long time,
and this was right after the death. And they were giddy. It's not
that they didn't care. They cared fantastically. There was this
sense of release and it released a lot of humor.
RB: That's what the Irish do.
LS: They famously get together at wakes and get completely pole
axed and it can be hilarious.
RB: By the time a book is actually a published book you have gone
through its numerous iterations. Now the book is out how is the
talking about it. Do you get sick talking about it?
| Writing
a novel is such an isolated enterprise. And while you are
writing it, you are living with this material every day…
Essentially, you are living in your own little heaven or hell,
depending on what you are writing. It's a little bit like
being asleep all the time, being in a dream all the time. |
LS: Funnily enough, I don't. Writing a novel is
such an isolated enterprise. And while you are writing it, you are
living with this material every day. You may speak a little bit
about it to one or two people. For the most part, because they don't
have access to the text, the telling it doesn't work very well.
Essentially, you are living in your own little heaven or hell, depending
on what you are writing. It's a little bit like being asleep all
the time, being in a dream all the time. It's a relief to get out.
It makes you feel more sane. Finally other people have access to
that world too. It's real to them too. I find it fantastically gratifying
to have people speak to me about my characters as if they were real
people, people who have complexities. And about whom you can disagree
and have different feelings. I am glad to be able to communicate.
Also, a novel has a relatively short shelf life, especially these
days.
RB: Don't believe that.
LS: You don't think so?
RB: I understand that the conventional wisdom of book marketing
views the first six weeks as crucial, but there are lots of ways
that books are perked up, not the least of which is Oprah and the
gaggle of other books clubs. Fifty years from now someone like her
could be touting your book anew.
LS: That's true, but if you sit around counting on it you are in
trouble. As a consequence that brief period that you can count on,
as you said it's essentially a six-week window, when you can, if
every thing is going well, expect someone to talk to you about your
book. Then I am not bored. Because I know I am going to be back
to the salt mines and nobody is going to be talking to me about
anything. So I am delighted to talk to you.
RB: We were talking earlier (off tape) about a Phillip
Weiss article in the New York Observer—which
centers on your being discovered by a group of smart women including
some novelists like Amy Hempel, who had a dinner party for you and
invited a group who didn't know you.
LS: It was incredibly gracious. Amy Hempel and another writer named
Pearson Marx, they didn't know me from Adam personally, but they
just loved the book. It was Amy Hempel who had gone to the trouble
of going to one of my readings and speaking to me afterwards and
I was really moved by that.
RB: Of course, that doesn't show up in the marketing plan that
is created, "Book adopted by a group of smart women and zealously
touted by them."
LS: It couldn't have been designed.
RB: That would be a hopeful sign of many things including a burgeoning
network of people on the Internet. I am amazed at the range of writers
that are talked about on a good cross section of literary websites.
I wanted to bring up the minefield issue, as this is such explosive
material, it seems to me that this is a book that is a litmus test
for one's own values and experiences. And I think that there is
a tendency to obscure what is there, what is actually in the text—with
what their feelings are about some of the issues raised.
LS: What you mean is that issues I am dealing with are so loaded
that people bring to the book much of their own experience, their
own feelings about parenthood and having been a child and…
RB: Not to mention the overarching social concerns …on page
sixty-one you have a pretty comprehensive list of school shootings.
Just seeing that list was a harrowing reminder…
LS: It's sobering. And you recognize the names of all those towns
and you realize that your whole associations with Pearl, Mississippi
is this shooting and that's always what it will mean. There's a
virtually perfect parallel with that phenomenon in Northern Ireland
where I lived for twelve years. And the same thing happens there.
That a town like Enniskillen [The town cenotaph was blown up by
the Provisional IRA in November 1987, killing eleven people, all
civilians, on Remembrance Day, during the memorial service] is a
town where 11 people were blown up and is synonymous with a particular
bombing in 1987 and it always will be. I feel sorry for those places.
RB: Reading the book I wasn't moved to contemplate any larger social
issues. I was inclined to see the specificity of this story —not
as it standing for greater concerns.
LS: I am so pleased.
RB: You are?
LS: That is what I wanted. I wanted to tell a particular story,
and I wanted that story to be real and plausible and specifically
not an explanation for all these other shootings. In fact, when
I was doing the research for the book and reading about all the
real shootings— which is why I was able to put together that
whole list as you read in the book— the news of these shootings
coming in constitutes the events in the book, but I really got my
fill of that kind of research much earlier on than I would have
expected. And it was not that there wasn't more material. In fact,
the amount of material is infinite and horribly redundant. It was
that it wasn't going to help me. It wasn't going to help me at all
except in those little respects where I could fill in the details
of Pearl, Mississippi on Jim Lehrer News Hour. But it was not going
to make my story up for me. It was not going to give to me my characters.
It was not going to tell a tale that reflected the thematic concerns
I had, which have to with motherhood. So in many ways, I threw it
all away [laughs]. I have a stack of printouts from the Internet.
But I never referred to it. I could have used that research to put
together some kind of Frankensteinian composite for a family and
incident that was somehow representative. That was not my ambition.
RB: The question I come away with is that this story is told from
the perspective of the mother, and thus Kevin seems thoroughly sociopathic…
 LS:
As described by her and that's important. There have been some readers
who take to the narrator sufficiently that they believe everything
that she says and that's a mistake. Because I think that when you
pull the camera back you can start registering, especially some
of her early stories—well they seem a very dark and terrible
and this kid is warped. When you start thinking about it more objectively
he didn't do much. He goes to kindergarten, where one of his classmates
has an eczema condition, and they are discovered in the bathroom
together, and she is scratching her skin open, and he is whispering
in her ear. The implication is that he has enticed her into giving
into scraping her arms and legs open against the warnings of her
mother. But there is no real evidence for that. And what does that
mean? The kid is only six years old. Mostly he doesn't stop the
classmate from scratching her arms. In other words, it's small,
but for the mother it's enormous. But her vision is impaired. She
is wearing spectacles that magnify everything.
RB: There is that epigraph by Erma Brombeck in your book…
LS: "A child needs your love most when he deserves it least."
RB: That resonated when this child doesn't breast feed and it was
a very big thing for Eva, the mother…
LS: Who's to say that's his fault. Again, for her, she takes it
personally. It's a rejection. What she infers from it is that not
only does the baby not like her, but he's essentially anti-life.
He doesn't want to be here. She even takes from the fact that a
child was two weeks late— which I gather is not unusual with
a first child, and she is an older mother— that he's reluctant
to come out. She is constantly imputing agency to him when commonly
we don't impute any agency to an infant. It really isn't a fully
formed personality yet. The fact that he cries so incessantly and
yet mysteriously is well behaved when the father comes home. She
sees that as not only ranting at the world in an existential way,
at the indignity of his own existence but it’s also an effort
to come between her and her husband. Because this difference in
his behavior makes her reports about his screaming seem untrustworthy.
RB: As a counterpoint, we have the husband saying, "He's just
a kid." And that's right. Why would readers accept her reporting
on her son?
LS: There are some readers—I hate casting aspersions on any
readers, for which I am so grateful [laughs]—it takes a certain
literary sophistication, the concept of the unreliable narrator
is not one that every reader is familiar with and also the clues
in this book are initially subtle. I have painted a couple of incidents
that deliberately cast doubt on her version of events, and that's
for the naive reader. I am trying to circle that in red. There's
a photograph that goes missing that she immediately assumes he has
ripped into little pieces because he hates her and in truth in turns
out later that he has been carrying it around folded up in his wallet
for years.
RB: Very early in Kevin's infancy Eva observes that he had a "fluctuating
interior life whose subtlety and intensity would diminish with age."
Where would anyone get such a thought about a new infant? What would
be the evidence for such an observation?
LS: It's almost a form of anthropomorphism. That is, you are imbuing
a half-formed being, a child, with fully formed adult traits. In
some way she related to him from the every beginning as a peer.
And that's a mistake. And therefore everything he does she takes
personally in the same way that you and I would take personally
something that a friend of ours did. And doesn't bring to motherhood
sympathy for the state of childhood and the kind of forgiveness
that involves.
RB: This is another book that straddles the divide between people
who have children and those who don't have children. People who
have children may say, "You don't know." Which has certain
validity given the appeal of the authentic experience.
LS: It's a funny this business of treating children as peers, I
know that I have a weakness for it myself. I am not always comfortable
around children. And I am very sensitive about the prospect of being
condescending towards them. I hated being condescended to, when
I was a child. So I always try to speak to them as if we're on the
same level and the same age and they are perfectly intelligent.
Well, they may be perfectly intelligent, but they are not the same
age. As a consequence they have no idea what I am a talking about.
Children do need at certain ages to be talked down to and if you
don't talk down to them or come down to their level, you don't communicate.
RB: Oh sure. Is there a divide between readers who have children
and don't have children? Is it clear that they see this book differently?
LS: This has surprised me because I would have expected that. I
would have expected a clear divide. I was worried that while childless
adults might find the book gratifying perhaps as a validation of
their decision to avoid that kind of risk, that parents might find
it offensive or misrepresentative of their experience. I haven't
found that at all. In fact, I was speaking to one woman who was
very grateful that someone had given voice to the negative sides
of parenthood and she is the mother of a couple of kids. But was
honest about the experience, not that she regretted having them
or anything like that, but that the kind of exasperation that it
involved, the boredom which parents don't talk about.
RB: That would speak to the tendency, which I have no name for,
to not talk about life in a balanced way. People seem to want to
say that it's all totally wonderful or black with despair and angst.
LS: I sense that with my friends that have children and clearly
are glad to have children on balance that when you speak to them
about the experience of parenthood, they are often doing a kind
of a sales pitch. Right? Which clearly involves selling the idea
to themselves, not to me. There is a big downside. There are sacrifices.
After all parenthood has that reputation and thy are constantly
running this patter through their heads convincing themselves that
the sacrifices were worth it. That they loved their children, "Oh,
the world is made anew." It often sounds a little hollow. I
think that parents feel to give voice to what they don't like about
parenthood is to betray their children and that is why I found a
number of woman, in particular, have been grateful for this book.
It's someone giving voice to his or her reservations. And Eva speaks
for them about the things that they have never felt they had permission
to say.
RB: I have for a long time held a view that my parent's generation
was not prepared for parenthood…
I sense that with
my friends that have children and clearly are glad to have
children on balance that when you speak to them about the
experience of parenthood, they are often doing a kind of a
sales pitch… I think that parents feel to give voice
to what they don't like about parenthood is to betray their
children. |
LS: It was a less conscious decision to have children
and it was a less examined experience.
RB: There was an expectation that it just happened and that everything
worked out.
LS: And that parenthood was something that came naturally to people.
It wasn't something you had to study up on or take courses in.
RB: On top of that, the world changed significantly. We grew with
television becoming increasingly influential and a consciousness
of the world that was very different and more influential than the
so-called nuclear family.
LS: And there has been this huge demographic change. We are just
not having as many children. That makes them a much bigger deal.
Most women in this country will, at most, have two kids, and a lot
will only have one. And I gather that the figures are that twenty
five percent in the US are not planning to have any children.
RB: There is the new trend of adopting Chinese baby girls. I'm
a sure that's a wave that you are aware of…
LS: That's because otherwise they bury them in the back yard.
[laughs]
RB: I was disturbed for a time when I saw the way people seemed
to be treating their children as fashion accessories. I remember
being on an airplane and saw a kid who maybe was two or three, wearing
a leather jacket…
LS: Likewise I am very suspicious of this whole phenomenon of women
in their mid forties, as I am, who spend thousands and thousands
of dollars to try to get pregnant. And you talk to these couples
and it becomes this obsessive quest. But it starts to smack of,
you know, there is this Gucci pocketbook that you absolutely must
have.
RB: [laughs]
LS: It is getting something. And it also feels a little competitive
because, "Oh Nancy has a baby. I want one too."
RB: Maybe my parents' generation wasn't so bad?
LS: That casualness is enviable. The middle and upper class in
this country having children is tedious in the extreme and not necessarily
good for the kids. It's too self-conscious, too hands on. These
are the same parents who hardly ever let their kids out of the house
without going with them. That's not the way I grew up. I don't think
I would have ever been a writer if people didn't leave me alone
as a kid.
RB: That's touchy. There are many milk cartons that remind you
what can happen if you don't monitor your kid's whereabouts.
LS: I'm sympathetic to this sense of this most precious commodity,
it's the most precious thing in your life and the idea of just letting
it romp around is terrifying. It's intelligent, in a way. The list
of things that can happen is very long. What actually happens to
you is the thing you left off the list. And it's not just what happens
to children, it's what can happen to you too. But there's a point
that you have to take a psychologically realistic position and also
a profitable philosophical position. Who wants to live like that?
Walking around with a list in your head doesn't save you from anything
at all.
RB: This seems to be one of those irreducible positions that categorizes
some parents. There is no proof that can be offered to move a parent
to reduce their overwrought vigilance.
LS: The alternative model is in Africa where they are completely
fatalistic. They don't worry about anything. You can go too far.
That's one of the reasons the AIDS epidemic has taken off. They
don't think they can help whether they get it. So they don't take
prophylactic measures. But a little dose of fatalism is healthy.
RB: In the writing of this book we are aware of the great tragedy,
and I won't elaborate on what else happens—when you began,
did you want to build up to the horrors?
LS: You do find out the bare bones of the incident on page eight.
I deliberately put the facts of the matter up front. I felt my reader
was sure to be miles ahead of me if I was going to try to pull off
this school-shooting incident as a big surprise. In fact, it would
seem predictable and disappointing. So I decided to head my reader
off at the pass. To also facilitate putting it on the book jacket.
It really is a problem marketing a book where the hook is a secret.
I thought that was tactically wise. It was also tactically wise
in terms of the writing of the book. I was not interested in writing
a thriller where the suspense had to with what exactly happened.
I did reserve something out. I think there was a structural obligation,
if you are going to put the book together that way, to have something
happen at the end, which you don't necessarily know about. I think
I come through with that. What I also set up for myself was that,
the big question in the book was not, "Oh, what's going to
happen?" But "Why? Why did that happen?" The explanation
is much more interesting to me and how did it come about? To what
degree could you see it coming? What's it like to look back on that
history with hindsight and know what happened and revisit lots of
memories, looking for signs of what was going on.
RB: At the very end, we see a sign of a shift with Kevin. Which
is plausible and understandable, but it could easily have gone the
other way. Rather he could have remained unchanged.
LS: Whenever you have a character that presents himself the way
he always have. That's flat. It's not impossible and there are no
rules.
RB: He's a sociopath…
 LS:
And certainly that's one option. And the change in both Eva and
Kevin at the end of the book is delicate. It's at the very end.
I hope it's not overdone in terms of the redemption business that
we have learned to expect with violins playing in the background.
I really hate sentimentality, but I felt that I had come far enough
with these characters to accomplish some transformation that was
hard earned and well earned. My narrator had suffered through so
much self-recrimination for four hundred and whatever pages [pause]
I felt she needed to grant herself a little kindness. And I think
it was partly her ability to be a little softer on herself that
it made it possible to be a little kinder and softer with her son.
I found likewise, Kevin's just beginning to humanize and wonder
why he did it, after all and feel a little bit sorry. It certainly
not this hair-tearing remorse scene. It's a huge relief and this
all happens on the very last page. Honestly, when I was writing
the first draft of this book, it's a vague ambition to get to that
state. On the next to the last page I still wasn't there. When I
did get there in the last line—this sounds terribly pretentious—but
I cried.
RB: Why is that pretentious? Because you hate sentimentality?
LS: Oh, because it's a little…
RB: Can I tell you something? I just had this crystalline realization
when you said I hate sentimentality. You are given to making very
clear and precise statements about what you think and feel both
as the writer of this story and in person. And as a parent it occurs
to me that one change in my perspective is that I no longer hold
the need to be clear and precise about the world. I think that life
is much sloppier that I had considered…
LS: As in, the more precise you are, the more you lie. Because
you have to fit a lot of the amorphous and conflicting thoughts
and feelings into this crystal clear sensibility. It's appealing
in other people.
RB: Sure it has a personal appeal. You would wish the world to
be ordered seemingly comprehensibly.
LS: Yes, but it's a distortion, always.
RB: Did you know it was the last page because of what you had written
and because of your emotional response?
LS: Yes, I did. Once I got that response out of myself. And I heard
from some other readers that they had the same experience, this
huge relief of a dam breaking. Eva—not to blow the ending—
says something like, "Out of exhaustion, loneliness or even
boredom, I love my son." She has been worn down to feeling
and I was really grateful. And it's that kind of moment that writers
have that you live for.
RB: This is your seventh novel. We talked a little off camera about
your brilliant career…
LS: [both laugh] Oh dear. You have to be sardonic…
RB: The publishing game can be a shameless and cruel game and people
take their defeats…
LS: You don't have to tell me that.
RB: So, is there any kind of consistency about your emotional state
at the completion of a novel? Always relief?
LS: It's a complicated combination of relief and
disappointment. It's always a relief to have a completed manuscript.
And this particular book especially. Unlike, many of the books I
have written, I kept feeling as if I was groping my way forward
in the fog, though I had a larger schema for the book. I had this
notion of where I was writing towards. I could still only see immediately,
three inches in front of my nose. I was not sure until I wrote that
last page that the book was going to work at all. I had no idea
if I was working on a white elephant. It just kept getting longer
and longer. It used to be two hundred pages longer. I cut a lot
of it. I thought, "My God, I've created a monster." And
therefore when it rounded into a story that worked for me, even
if it needed a lot of editing, then I had a whole thing that I could
work with. There is always a relief to that. Once you have a first
draft you go from a linear process which is much more akin to sculpture.
You are working with something that is three dimensional and you
go back and touch this up, over here and that over there and shape
it into something that works to the literary eye. That part I always
enjoy. There is a certain security that attaches to it. You can
relax and you can refine things.
RB: Some people like rewriting and editing more than the writing.
LS: I love that part. There are satisfactions that you only get
in the first draft, but it's anxious and very demanding in a way
that you are not always up for.
RB: So sitting where you are now, do you at all think about your
other novels? Do they have any presence in the way you think about
your writing?
I am very suspicious
of this whole phenomenon of women in their mid forties, as
I am, who spend thousands and thousands of dollars to try
to get pregnant. And you talk to these couples and it becomes
this obsessive quest. |
LS: I try to avoid repeating myself, so I keep
a kind of mental file. I don't like my characters to do the same
things for a living. My fourth book is about demography. I am not
likely to do another book about population growth. And I am aware
of having only a limited time on Earth and there is a big world
out there, so I want to get around to as much as possible. The books
themselves, again it's almost like sculptures, they are like little
sculptures in my garden. I am aware of them. I don't think about
them all the time. But they are reliably synonymous with periods
of my life so that I can't think of a book without thinking of where
I was when I wrote it and what that experience was like.
RB: You've been a journalist, yes?
LS: Yes.
RB: And do you write short form fiction?
LS: I never write short stories. The last time I wrote a short
story it turned into a one hundred and four-page novella. [both
laugh]
RB: I get it. You went to Columbia University. For writing?
LS: I did. I got an MFA.
RB: Why did you do that?
LS: For one thing because of my father's association with Union
Theological Seminary I didn't have to pay for it.
RB: You could have studied Chemistry.
LS: I wanted to be a writer since I was seven. Essentially, since
I learned to read. I have always felt a little apologetic about
that degree. It's a soft degree. It's not a very difficult degree
to earn. There is no science to creative writing and it feels very
self-indulgent. I have always have been aware that most of the great
writers of the past didn't go to workshops. It's always seemed a
little embarrassing to me. On the other hand, I did want to get
published. I badly needed some connections, which is why most people
go to these programs. It's not to learn to write finer sentences.
It's because they want the teacher to introduce them to the teacher's
agent. That's it.
RB: [chuckles] If I got it right you went to Columbia and spent
some twelve years, fifteen years in Belfast, Ireland.
LS: I was an adjunct English teacher for a while in a number of
New York colleges and then I went on a six month Western European
bike trip. Then I spent six months in Israel, part of that time
on kibbutz in the Galilee, near Kiriat Shimona. Once I came back
from Israel by that time I had finished my second book and then
I left for Belfast, intending to spend about nine months and didn't
leave for twelve years [laughs]. Some people are slow. Within that
period I returned regularly for summers in New York and also spent
about a year in Nairobi and also three months in Bangkok and Vietnam.
I've traveled a lot.
RB: Can we use the word 'well-traveled'?
LS: Yes. Which is why it would make perfect sense that I would
be attracted to a narrator who did a kind of "Let's Go Travel"
series and has spent a huge amount of time outside the country.
As I have, I have spent most of my adult life outside the country.
It gives you a different perspective.
RB: I'll say. Have you thought much about what you are going to
do next?
LS: I have a book gestating, yes?
RB: When did you finish this book?
LS: A year and half ago. It took so long to sell. And in the mean
time I was doing mostly journalism. So it's overdue for me to get
started, but it took a while for what I wanted to do. I think the
project is in some ways going to be a recoil from this one. I am
happy with the way this book came out. It was a powerful experience
to write it, but I yearn for some sweetness. And recently had the
experience of falling head over heels in love. That's the sweetest
experience on earth. Although it was bound up with the least sweet
experience, which is leaving a wonderful man who didn't deserve
it. I am really fascinated now by this idea of running two parallel
futures with different men, both of whom are nice. But different.
I love the idea of writing a book which has no villain in it. Especially
after this book where everyone is tainted. And I think that's an
interesting authorial exercise. The one I want to write, nobody
is evil, nobody is wrong, and nobody is better or worse. They are
just different…
RB: So it will be much more interior to the characters.
 LS:
It's about romance and what are the implications in your life depending
on whom you marry. Which I think is a very interesting question.
How does your life change? Both in a daily kind of way—what
it's like to live with this person and also the larger wider social
world. And it's one of the biggest decisions you ever make.
RB: Well, there is buying a car.
LS: Although there are sometimes more than once. [laughs]
RB: So now you have a new agent. Is your new agent more assertive
and driven than past agents?
LS: She is more commercial. Which I think is good
for me because I don't mean that in an insulting way. A commercial
agent means that she can get you enough to…
RB: To continue writing…
LS: To survive [laughs]. So I think that's great. She is also not
one of those hand-holding people. And I don't need my hand held
by anyone but my husband. I don't look to an agent to provide me
a lot of editorial help. She's got her literary opinions and she
is intelligent and I trust her judgment, but for the most part she
expects me to deliver a manuscript and she will sell it. And that's
the arrangement that I prefer. And she's a personable, bright, pleasant,
sane person, which is rare in publishing in general [laughs]. So
I am very, very happy with her.
RB: Well, good. Thank you.
|
Posted:
July 24, 2003
