K.M. Soehnlein

An interview with Sarah Schulman, author of "Let The Record Show," a history of ACT UP New York

I interviewed my friend, author Sarah Schulman, about her recently released nonfiction book about ACT UP New York. It's called Let The Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987–1993. You can read an edited version of the interview on Queerty. 

The full interview lasted an hour and a half. I'm making the (lightly edited) version of the transcript available by clicking here: Download Transcription of Interview with Sarah Schulman.Share

 

Seeing Results: Otto Sabotage and Army of Lovers

Today marks one month until publication date for my novel Army of Lovers. It also marks 10 days before the staged reading of a screenplay, Otto Sabotage, co-written with Aron Kantor, which we’re presenting for the first time to the public. These two events are coincidentally happening within a couple weeks of each other, but they took two winding, overlapping journeys to get here. Today I’m taking a little time to reflect on what it has meant to work away in private, alone or with a co-collaborator, without seeing any results for a long time.

I was remembering one of the most important things anyone ever said to me. I was a grad student in creative writing, having moved to San Francisco after a lifetime on the East Coast, doubting whether I had made the right choice. I’d always written, ever since I was a fifth grader with a diary, but taking myself seriously as a writer by embarking on a degree program was new, and it was daunting. I was working three jobs to put myself through grad school, in addition to taking out loans, and I didn’t know if I had made the right choice, if I was any good, if I had what it took to get where I hoped and dreamed I would wind up. What my friend Jack said to me that day was “persevere.“ That’s been my guidepost through the doubts and challenges that followed. No matter how it’s going, persevere.

Army of Lovers began with sketches I started writing about my time living in New York, when I was involved with ACT UP and was part of the group who created Queer Nation. I was documenting events that were personal and historic at once—events still quite close in the rearview mirror. I wrote so I wouldn’t forget. Other projects took over, and I turned to those instead, but I kept returning to these memories of activism in a time of crisis, even though I had yet to fully understand what they meant to me.

What started to take shape was a novel, not a memoir. Things, people, and places I’d known were transformed by imagination into a story through the tools of fiction—character, plot, language, structure. I worked on it steadily until it was ready to be shopped around to mainstream publishers by an established agent. The publishers all said no, the agent faded from my life, and I was left with a manuscript that I didn’t know how to repair and a dream I couldn’t quite let go off.

Enter Aron Kantor, a filmmaker and my friend, asking me to collaborate with him on a screenplay and kicking off a partnership of creativity that has birthed three feature-length scripts and a TV pilot. After a lot of alone time, working as a team was energizing. Aron is a wonderful partner: enthusiastic, open, visionary, and seriously funny. We each have strengths that bolster what the other one needs. We wrote through the isolation of the pandemic, and we’ve been working ever since, through lots of rejection, to find each of these projects a home. Right now Aron is working his tail off to produce Otto Sabotage—a comedic 24-hour odyssey set in San Francisco’s queer nightlife—as an independent feature that he will direct.

At some point, in the midst of all this screenwriting, along came Michael Nava, editor at Amble Press. Michael invited me to show him my ACT UP novel, which I had completely rewritten. I was elated to find that Michael understood the story I was telling and the way I was telling it, and he guided me through a round of revision that became a finished draft. Amble will publish Army of Lovers on October 11.

If you have read this far, thank you. I appreciate that you’re curious about where I’m at right now and what it took to get here. Please support the work! Here’s how:

Come to the staged reading of Otto Sabotage and learn more about what we need to turn it into a film. It’s free, but you can make a reservation. September 21, 7 PM, at SF Oasis in San Francisco.

Pre-order Army of Lovers, either directly at your favorite local bookstore; through the indie bookstore portal bookshop.org; or anywhere you order books online.

After years of hearing No, amid much self-doubt, and through periods of true despair, it seems surreal that suddenly there will be a book, and a presentation of the screenplay, to share with the world. I’m excited! And of course I’m a little scared, because every time you put yourself out to the world you open yourself up to all kinds of things. There’s a lot of vulnerability inside all this excitement. That’s part of persevering as well. Persevering through the vulnerability.

That’s it for now. I look forward to sharing that work with you really soon. Love, Karl.

Happy Lammy-versary to Me

With the great Michelle Tea

20 years ago today! This is me and Michelle Tea on May 31, 2001, beaming with joy after each of us won Lambda Literary Awards – hers for the inimitable, influential, already-a-classic Valencia (Mission San Francisco at its peak queer ’90s explosion) and mine for The World of Normal Boys, my first novel.

What I remember about that night: my heroic, generous editor, John Scognamiglio of Kensington Books, paid for my rented tux; Michelle told a hilarious story about the uptight flight attendant who didn’t want to let her on the airplane to Chicago because she was wearing her “underwear” (“Yes, it’s a slip, but it’s also my dress!”); we sat at the same table as the lovely Krandall Kraus and Paul Borja, also San Francisco-based writers, who won an award that night, too, which made us the winningest, happiest crew in the room.

With my editor, John Scognamiglio of Kensington Books

I also remember being so flat-broke before I flew from SF to Chicago that I was literally turning over couch cushions in my apartment to scavenge coins for extra pocket money. By the end of the night Kevin (then-boyfriend-now-husband) and were I jumping for joy on the bed in my hotel room, not because the award came with any money but because it had been such a long hard road to publishing. Something like 33 publishers rejected The World of Normal Boys before Kensington said yes, and it’s gone on to be the most-read of my books, in its 10th printing, translated into three languages, still coughing out modest but much appreciated royalties and inspiring a sequel (Robin and Ruby), with another one drafted, currently titled Dorothy’s Children. (Publishing goddesses willing, it won't take 33 rejections to get this one into the hands of readers.)

ALSO: This 20-year anniversary is a prime time to announce that I’ve just signed a contract for a novel, Army of Lovers, that I’ve been writing for a long, long time. This is my ACT UP/Queer Nation novel set in the late-’80s / early-’90s in New York. It's a work of fiction but also really personal, about a time in my life when my mother died, when so many comrades fought to stay alive, when a wave of gay-bashing hit my friends and me. And it's a story about falling in love, finding a voice, and speaking truth to power within a political community doing direct action to change the world.

I’m thrilled that Amble Press, a new LGBTQ publishing imprint headed by the brilliant writer and editor Michael Nava, has acquired this novel. (Michael's new novel is called Lies With Man.) The ink on my contract is barely dry, so I don’t yet have a publication date or any juicy details. But you can be sure you’ll be hearing a lot more about it.

So Happy Lammy-versary to Michelle, Krandall, Paul, and me. And good luck to all the nominees for this year’s Lambda Awards, held on June 1, and hosted by the charming and talented Rakesh Satyal.

Why don’tcha go out and get yourself a queer book today?  

Adrienne Rich: "...the worst affliction / is not to know who you are or have been..."

When news of the death of the great lesbian poet Adrienne Rich arrived today in the form of a tweet, I was stunned.

Stunned that this vital poet—still actively publishing in her 82nd year—could be gone. Stunned because Rich's 50 years of poetry—thoughtful, sensual, beautifully composed—is so at odds with the world of social networking, where everything is trivial, inane and sloppy. And stunned because it felt like a kick to the gut, and I had to stop what I'd been doing to figure out why.

 The New York Times reports her books of poems have sold over 800,000 copies—an extraordinary number in a culture that "doesn't get" poetry. For many of us, she was the lesbian feminist poet, the one we were told to read in our youth (by feminist professors, leftist activists and lovers hoping to transmit the passion in her lyrics)—the one we continued to turn to, because she gave voice to outrage and hope, showing us a clear-eyed, moral view of the world.

For those of us who write, she was a model: a commitment to the idea that art is necessary. I doubt I'd be the writer I am today without The Fact of a Doorframe, or Your Native Land, Your Life, or What is Found There, or Dark Fields of the Republic, books that make the case for poetry on every page. I discovered her exactly at the moment when I was trying to figure out what kind of writer I wanted to be. She provided instruction.

Tonight in the literature class I teach at USF, I talked about what she represented. In the classroom, I don't talk enough about the role of the writer. The responsibility of the writer. I talk about craft—characterization, point of view, prose style, tone—as if any of that matters without substance. We ask of the stories we workshop, "What's at stake?" But we don't often ask of ourselves, what's at stake for me as a writer in the world? Why does it matter that I do what I do? 

Tonight, I read this poem to my students. It's from a series in Your Native Land, Your Life called "Contradictions: Tracking Poems," which I believe is one of her masterworks. Each section is numbered, and each tackles the way "our lives will always be / a stew of contradictions." The poet's canvas here is epic—international politics, imprisonment, government corruption—and simultaneously private—"My mouth hovers across your breast / in the short grey winter afternoon." In this section, she turns her attention to Writing:

27.

The Tolstoyans                      the Afro-American slaves

knew this:                  you could be killed

for teaching people to read and write

I used to think the worst affliction

was to be forbidden pencil and paper

well, Ding Ling recited poems to prison walls

for years of the Cultural Revolution

and truly, the magic of written characters

looms and dwindles              shrinks small             grows swollen

depending on where you stand

and what is in your hand

and who can read and why

I think now the worst affliction

is not to know who you are or have been

I have learned this in part

from writers              Reading and writing

aren’t sacred             yet people have been killed

as if they were

 

The daily grind of the internet can be a graveyard, with tombstones of the famous erected as fast as the news hits. But I don't think I've ever seen a poet "trending" on Twitter for twelve hours. Something happened today: we turned to each other and acknowledged that Adrienne Rich's life—her work, her personal-is-political worldview—mattered. Her death is undeniably a tremendous loss, but it is also an opportunity to talk to each other about what she still has to say to us, and where we go from here.

Eleven Writers, One Story Cycle

Introducing Temporary Shelter: a collection of interwoven stories that I edited and wrote with ten writers in my seminar at the University of San Francisco's MFA in Writing Program. 

Buy the book on Lulu.com. If you're in San Francisco, come hear us read on Saturday Dec. 10, from 7-9pm, at Epicenter Cafe.

Below is my introduction to the book, about the process of collectively writing our "story cycle": eleven writers each writing one story set in contemporary San Francisco, with characters and events appearing in multiple stories that crisscross and overlap in all kinds of surprising ways.

--

Introduction: In Need of Rescue

“…what seemed essential to San Francisco was the fog. The sense of this place where a curtain of fog is pulled over and pulled away and then pulled over...it brings with it a feeling that something different is happening. …It's a city where extreme inquiry has always had a place.”—Jennifer Egan 

Tough times lead to tough stories. In 2011, as the writers of this collecton were hard at work, tales of turmoil reached us daily: around the world, protests in the street; in the headlines, further economic collapse. Little earthquakes shook the Bay Area all fall, the planet itself in a state of adjustment.

One night in November, trouble literally arrived at our door. In the middle of class at the University of San Francisco, we heard a bang, then a louder bang and then breaking glass. There on Fulton Street, in full view, a car was upside down, roof on the asphalt, carriage exposed, shattered glass everywhere. A reckless driver had hit a parked car, and the impact flipped his vehicle over. As we went outside to witness, firemen and paramedics arrived on the scene. A man staggered from the wreckage, spitting blood but belligerently refusing the help of responders. That he was intoxicated became clear; whatever else was going on with him, we could only guess.

Life imitates art. This accident came at the exact moment we were discussing our story cycle, the book now in your hands—a collection filled with car crashes and firemen, belligerent drunks and blood on the street. I’m sure I was not the only writer in our group who entertained the magical thought that we had willed this driver and his rescuers to our door—the real San Francisco endorsing our fictional version.

When we, the eleven writers included in Temporary Shelter, began to imagine this project, we found that many of us were drawn to tales of rescue. There were physical rescues—all those firemen, and also children pulled from harm, and drifters dragged in from the cold. There were those in need of emotional rescue—an accident victim in a state of post-traumatic stress, an awkward blind date attempting right itself, an elderly woman recuperating her dignity with an uncharacteristic act of boldness. And there were figures perhaps beyond rescue: a marriage marred by secrets, young men punched bloody, a bird with a broken wing.

Our goal was to create a story cycle, whose pieces could stand alone but were interconnected to suggest a greater whole. Story cycles are usually written by a single author, like Edwidge Danticat’s The Dew Breaker, which charts the Haitian diaspora through disparate lives linked by one family’s brutal past, or Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, with its circle of characters linked to San Francisco’s punk-rock music scene in the late 1970s. We read both of these books, and more, and along the way we created one of our own.

Each story began as an idea—or image, character or event—set in contemporary San Francisco. Each went through multiple drafts, with much sharing of pages and many group discussions aimed at making our stories cohere. Some connections were planned from the start: a startling event in a bar told through the mind of its instigator in one story, appears in another from the point of view of a witness; the couple managing an apartment building near the Panhandle show up in the background of two other stories about the other people living there. Further connections came with revision: a narrator speeding down the freeway notes in passing a roadside accident, featured elsewhere as a central event; the lonely boy who plays his trumpet for money around San Francisco has an encounter with a lonely girl being ignored by her father in Golden Gate Park. What was remarkable to me, the collection’s nominal editor, was how our separate imaginations were drawn to the same themes. As the world shook around us, we seemed most drawn to trouble, to those causing it or those upended by it—characters in need of rescue and shelter.

Our story cycle seems to be asking, Who are we, in the midst of all this trouble, and what do we do about it? Jennifer Egan’s notion of “extreme inquiry” seems right for these tough times, and the authors of the stories in this collection are up to the task. Their renderings of characters in crisis suggest the varieties of action, denial and escape that we embrace when we have no choice but to consider making change. Like all serious fiction, these stories offer points of identification and entry instead of easy answers.

Meanwhile, the fog rolls over San Francisco, and the fog rolls out again, reminding us each time that in the end, all shelter is temporary.

 —K.M. Soehnlein, December 2011

 

 

Reborn This Way

Robin and Ruby turns one today. It was exactly a year ago that my third novel was published in hardcover. What a great year it's been. I made a book trailer, did readings in SF, LA, NYC, Philadelphia, Boston and Berkeley, was interviewed by some smart people, and even got nominated for one website's gay fiction award.

As of this week Robin and Ruby has been reborn as a paperback, with a new cover photograph, a book group guide and some great blurbs to help convince folks to buy it. I hope they do. Book sales are the least of the reasons that motivate my writing, but without moving a few units, what I do becomes unsustainable.

You'd have to have your head in the sand not to know that the publishing industry is going through all kinds of changes, not least of which are shrinking hardcover fiction sales and the increase in E-books to 25% of publishers' overall sales. Though I'm a read-on-paper guy when it comes to my own habits, I don't much care how someone finds my stories, just that they do.

But the big bummer of E-publishing is piracy. Just as music artists suffered ten years ago when everyone started passing around files for free, so too are authors seeing their incomes shrink as pirated versions of their books become disseminated. It's been plenty hard to make any kind of living off writing fiction; things aren't getting easier. I can't tell you how many times I've stumbled upon a website offering a free (i.e. illegal) download of Robin and Ruby, usually for the iPad. (My publisher stays on top of that, in a cease-and-desist way, but it's nearly impossible to stop. They call it "viral" for a reason.)

If you haven't bought a copy of Robin and Ruby yet, this would be a good week to do it, to give the book a little sales bump. And if you have: THANK YOU. The reason I do what I do is because of you—the chance to communicate with a readership hungry for stories.

If you're in the San Francisco Bay Area, I'll be reading at the following events next month. Come by and say hello.

Mon. April 18. 7-9pm. Lost in the Woods: Five Writers off the Beaten Path. At Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby @ MLK, Berkeley. Theater is located across the street from the Ashby BART.

Fri. April 22.7pm. Peninsula Literary Series. 7pm at Gallery House, 320 South California Ave., Palo Alto. 

Jane Smiley, An Appreciation

I delivered these remarks to introduce the writer Jane Smiley at the Lone Mountain Reading Series, held at the University of San Francisco on March 2, 2011. I'm printing them here by request.

All writers need models, not just the ones we admire from history but the ones who walk among us, living the writing-life we aspire to. Tonight I’m very happy to be able to say a few words about a writer who has been such a model for me.

I first encountered Jane Smiley’s fiction as perhaps many of us did, with her breakout 1992 novel A Thousand Acres. I was at that time getting serious about writing, and I went to see Ms. Smiley read at Three Lives Bookstore in the West Village of Manhattan. Three Lives is one of those small wood-paneled stores with indirect lighting that smell like chamomile tea. It was crowded, I sat on the floor, and I listened as she read a series of passages describing the Iowa prairie, the thousand-acres upon which the story took place. She evoked the novel not with a chunk of the plot but with a string of images, opening my eyes to the symbiosis between landscape and story—an early lesson for me in how a place could operate like a character in fiction, alive with active verbs and insistent adjectives. Alive with language.

Language for Smiley is insistently precise, peppered with humor, always demanding your attention. No matter where or what she writes about, I find myself caring an awful lot.

If you only know A Thousand Acres, you’ve got some catching up to do. She’s written a dozen books since then. You need to read her novella, The Age of Grief, in which the marriage between a husband and wife, both dentists, falls apart over the course of six weeks and the husband, our narrator, only 35 years old, tells us:

"It seems to me I have arrived at the age of grief…[when]…the barriers between the circumstances of oneself and of the rest of the world have broken down, after all—all that schooling, all that care…[and] we think, if they were feeling what we were feeling, how could they stand it?"

You need to read Moo, the very funny campus satire which observes of a fictional university:

"The collection of stone buildings had evolved into a web of offices where secretaries sat under bright lights, and near them, much more dimly, sat administrators whose grasp on things was tenuous at best. The secretaries were connected by computer. The only people who talked on the phone anymore were the administrators, whose whole lives, like those of chimps, were made up of nit-picking, stroking, and jockeying for dominance."

And you definitely need to read Horse Heaven, which is what Tolstoy might have written if he’d had a sense of humor and a passion for Thoroughbreds. This novel is expansive and humane and full of insight into the relationship-dynamics up and down the rungs of professional horse racing, which turns out to be an economic and social system so intricate and storied it might as well be the Russian aristocracy. You could call Horse Heaven the Great American Racetrack Novel. Or you could just call it great.

Many of you have read—if you've taken a class with me—13 Ways of Looking at the Novel. It’s a historical survey, an examination of the craft of novel writing and also a kind of moral boost for writers—not so much a how-to as a why-you-must. In it she offers a brief memoir of her attempt, in the wake of 9/11, to overcome writers block by sitting down to read 100 novels in a year.

(I only managed to read 55 books last year, and I was really, really trying.)

But that’s part of what has made Jane Smiley a model to me. She seems to push her intellectual inquiry further, and her curiosity deeper, than so many of contemporary writers bother to go.

I was reminded again of this when she appeared last week on Oprah talking about A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations. Smiley wrote a biography of Charles Dickens—among everything else—and she talked about Dickens as a writer of “extreme states of mind.” She compared Madame Defarge to an abused child—oppressed not necessarily by her family but by a corrupt culture—something that you could see opened up the book all over again for the Oprah audience.

One senses that Jane Smiley cares about her audience, which is certainly related to what makes her such an inspiration. I’m very pleased to be in the audience tonight, to hear her read and answer our questions.

After this Smiley read from her latest novel, Private Life, and then took questions from the audience.

 

Quoted in the NY Times

Today's New York Times casts a spotlight on the literary scene in San Francisco, with nods to the legendary, the up-and-coming, and the hidden secrets. There's even a quote from yours truly in there, where I come off sounding like a cheerleader for the home town team.

“The longer you are in San Francisco, the more you realize it is just one big scene with a lot of different ways of making itself known,” said Mr. Soehnlein, whose own novels, like this year’s “Robin and Ruby,” live on the gay lit shelf. “In S.F. people ask more questions. In New York or L.A. it’s like crickets out there, even if they are very attentive. Do they think they’re too cool to ask questions?”

It's a kick to get quoted in the NY Times, which seems to be the paper that everyone reads, even 3,000 miles away. But it's funny how wrapped up my reputation is with this city, because even though I've lived here for seventeen years (!), I never meant to stay. The initial lure was grad school. I figured I'd finish up my MFA and go back to New York, where I had been before, but then I got a boyfriend, and then I joined a band, and then I got another boyfriend (who eventually became my husband) and a rent stabilized apartment and...

But I’m deeply connected to NYC, and when I visit once or twice a year, I feel my heart beating at a faster, and what seems like a more natural rate. New York is lodged under my skin, forever. So it's ironic that I'm dissing New Yorkers in that quote as "think[ing] they’re too cool." The context for that was a discussion about book readings. I'd just finished my book tour for Robin and Ruby, and I'd noted to the writer how many questions came from the audience during the Q&A in San Francisco, compared to how difficult it was to get folks to ask questions after the reading in NY. (Same was true for LA, when I read there.)

But I don't think "coolness" is really the issue. There's something in the literary culture of San Francisco that invites more dialogue between author and writer. Without the infrastructure of the publishing industry here, as in NY, the center of a writer’s world is not the book deal but the public reading; not the author-agent-editor triad but the author-workshop-bookstore.

Being a writer in San Francisco means, I think, getting close to your readers, feeling like you know them. There are so many opportunities to read your work in public that you can be a very visible author here having published very little, or to little renown. True, away from the deals and the publishers, SF is not the most viable place to earn money for your writing. But it's possibly one of the best places to be a writer if you want your art to reach an engaged audience, and, in return, to hear what they have to say about it. And that’s pretty cool. 

 

Letting Franny Speak: Taking Inspiration from Salinger

 Everyone knows The Catcher in the Rye, but the J.D. Salinger book that’s meant the most to me is Franny and Zooey, in part because it’s literature’s greatest brother-sister story. Classic fiction gives us plenty of brothers-in-arms; contemporary novels have pushed sisterhood to the forefront. But fiction about the brother-sister dynamic is rare. I say this as someone who spent the last three years writing a novel about a brother and a sister, looking for models beyond Franny and Zooey—a book I’ve loved since high school and long wanted to emulate—but finding nothing else out there.

 The Catcher in the Rye has been universally embraced (just yesterday, the NY Times' Michiko Kakutani dubbed it a “pitch-perfect portrait of adolescence”). But it’s always struck me as an unlikely classic: the portrait of an almost tragic figure with broken mind, possibly one that won’t be repaired. Holden Caulfield narrates his story from an institution, where he’s come to “take it easy”; at the end of the book, despite a hint that his rest-cure has worked, he’s still unable to commit to what he’s going to do next. This is a novel that puts the isolated hero through a series of tests that in the end seem to be stronger than he is. 

In contrast, Franny and Zooey details a spiritual crisis that is confronted—apparently successfully—by a family forced to take care of one of its own. Ex-vaudevillian parents and their seven brilliant children, former stars of a radio quiz show called “It’s a Wise Child,” (I wish I could have heard that broadcast, just once!), the Glass family is shattered by death. There’s a brother lost to World War II, and more centrally, there’s saintly Seymour, a kind of depressed, childlike guru—he’s the one in Salinger’s “A Perfect Day for Bananafish ” who shoots himself in the head while his wife sleeps in bed next to him.

Franny and Zooey tells of the youngest Glass siblings over the course of two episodes: Franny’s nervous collapse in a restaurant, followed by her convalescence on the couch in the family’s ramshackle Upper East Side apartment. Zooey is at first reluctant to address his sister as she mutters a half-coherent mantra on the couch. But in the conversation that is the centerpiece of the book, handsome Zooey, with his stylish flop of black hair and his cigarette balanced on the soap dish, sits in the bathtub, as his comical mother, Bessie, in her bathrobe on the other side of the shower curtain, rattles on in her musical, italicized speech (“You could use a haircut, young man. You’re getting to look like one of those crazy Hungarians or something getting out of a swimming pool.”) 

It’s Bessie, a heroic mother if ever there was one, who convinces Zooey that Franny’s situation can’t be ignored; it’s Zooey who determines the plan that will restore Franny to vigor. Then brother and sister, each too smart for their own good, banter back and forth, pushing each other's emotional buttons in a way that only siblings can.

In the book’s final pages, redemption emerges in the form of Salinger’s hybrid-Buddhist/Christian/Jewish philosophy of kindness and oneness. Salinger plays on the old aphorism, “It ain’t over ’til the Fat Lady sings,” by giving Zooey the words to convince Franny of her connection to the world: “There isn’t anyone out there who isn’t…the Fat Lady.”

I haven’t made much of a secret about the fact that I undertook my new novel, Robin and Ruby , inspired by Franny and Zooey—wanting to capture the simplicity and elegance of its form, the compressed period of time it covers, the microscopic attention to gestures and conversations. But as I wrote, I started to feel that there was something unsatisfactory in the way that Franny’s collapse was a problem that had to be solved by Zooey; it was too much like the hysteria always befalling brilliant women in mid-20th-centruy fiction (think The Bell Jar or The Interior Castle). Did we need one more book about an unstable woman being saved by one of the men in her life? 

None of the women I knew were in need of rescue. It seemed I had to respond to Salinger on my own terms. My story was set decades later, on the other side of feminism; my Ruby was going to be taking women’s studies classes in college; she was going to tell her boyfriend if she was unhappy with him (unlike Franny, who tells her beau how much she misses him while guiltily thinking that she doesn’t miss him at all). Ruby would do what Franny couldn’t, which is get herself out of her own trouble, and perhaps even hand over a bit of wisdom, or at least a fuck-you, to her bossy older brother.

It’s perhaps too didactic—to self-consciously corrective—to claim that writing Ruby’s story was a way of “letting Franny speak.” I had other inspirations as well—the 1980s as a social moment, the Jersey Shore as a setting. But it’s absolutely true that over the past three years of writing this novel, I’ve felt myself involved in a long conversation with J.D. Salinger, in particular the Salinger dedicated to exploring how a brother and sister might muddle their way through their early twenties together. Perhaps that’s why his death yesterday felt like a kick to the gut; even though the man had retreated from the world long ago, his novel remains, despite some of its last-century elements, so vital.

Franny and Zooey gave the world a cast of characters that Holden Caulfield might deem phonies or snobs. But I’m not sure Holden’s opinion is the one that matters to me. The Salinger tale that ends in institutionalization or suicide leaves me cold. The Salinger that ends with its heroine recognizing “just what to do next,” as Franny does here, is the one I return to again and again. You can follow Holden to the duck pond; I’d rather be in that cluttered Upper East Side apartment, smoking cigarettes in the bathtub and bantering with Bessie, doing my part to help get Franny off the couch.

 

 

A Knife in the Eye

RedRoom asked writers to blog about their favorite short story. 

If you’ve read Jesus’ Son—Denis Johnson’s collection that follows around a drug-addled drifter named Fuckhead—you probably know "Emergency." It’s the one with the guy who walks into an emergency room in the middle of the night with a knife sticking out of his face: "The blade was buried to the hilt in the outside corner of his left eye."

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Learning to Love Your Work

Learning to love your own work--it's a struggle for a lot of writers I know. You get a burst of first-draft energy, blast out a few pages, print them and walk away smiling. And then after the celebratory beer, or a restful night of sleep, you go back and look at what you've written, and you question what the f@#* you were thinking. The prose seems lifeless, or cliché, or confusing. Characters who were so alive in your mind are inert on the page. The euphoria of composition flattens out under the weighty need for revision. So you get to work again, but the deeper you get into it, the less sure you are of yourself. In your uncertainty, you turn against the writing--or rather, you feel that it has turned against you. Instead of a beautiful bloom you've planted, it's a poisonous plant that will kill you if you get too close. Maybe you abandon the whole thing to a folder on your desktop. Maybe you keep at it, draft after draft, remembering the delight you took in that initial blossoming but, as in a relationship whose passion has wilted, wondering if you'll ever feel the early excitement again.

During the four years I spent writing Robin and Ruby, I suffered this in a big way. I started the book as a kind of challenge to myself: to write from Ruby MacKenzie's point of view, rescuing her from her "supporting" status in The World of Normal Boys, giving her the star treatment I always thought she deserved. I loved the idea of writing from a young woman's point of view, something I hadn't done much of before. I liked the idea of taking a break from the "gay fiction" of my previous two novels. And I was excited to set a story in the mid-1980s, amid New Wave music and Reagan-era politics and all that uptight fashion.

But somewhere along the way, I lost my trust in the story. What I thought would be a short novel was growing into something full-length. In order to tell Ruby's story, I needed her brother Robin, and suddenly he was taking over (it seemed I had a gay male protagonist, after all). The '80s turned out to be pretty complicated, too: I had to go back to the terrors of AIDS, to the confusions of emerging identity politics, to places in my own youth that weren't comfortable.

Worst of all, writing a sequel was hard work. Though I wasn't making up characters from scratch, I did have a lot of back-story to fill in (the two books take place eight years apart). In letting the characters grow up, I questioned if I was being true to them. Would readers of the first book--many of whom had written to me over the years, asking for a sequel--connect with this story? Would I let them down? The pressure of expectations started to overshadow the writing of the story, and I lost track of what I wanted to say and why I was even bothering. I fell out of love with Ruby and with Robin, and in the darkest hours, I lost faith in myself as a writer.

The key was perseverance--and the support of some of my close friends, who read the early drafts and encouraged me even when I was resistant to believing them. Along the way, it was important to take some time away from the manuscript, letting it solidify away from my judgmental editorial eye. There's really no better way to see your own work clearly than to leave it alone for a while. It's much easier to revise a chapter if the memory of having spent an entire weekend working on it isn't so immediate.

Last week I received the typeset page-proofs of Robin and Ruby (title page pictured above). It's finally starting to look like a novel. I can see how all that struggle, support and perseverance has created something concrete. The story is much bigger than I imagined it would be--and also more emotionally intimate. I think I might even be falling back in love with it again.