Q: STILL LIFE WITH HUSBAND is your debut novel. Where did the idea come from? And how long have you been working on it?
A: I
had the idea for this novel several years ago. It struck me that men
who cheat on their partners receive so much attention in literature and
popular culture, but, aside from a few obvious examples women who stray
are sort of ignored. I know people whose relationships have been
affected by infidelity, and it’s not always the men who are guilty. I
started to wonder if I could tell a sympathetic story about a woman who
has an affair.
It took me five years to write this book, but I
had a baby in the middle of that time period, so I took a brief
two-year break to wallow in a cesspool of hormonal muck, then to run
around after a kamikaze toddler, then finally, when things were
slightly more under control, to sit and stare at the computer screen
and wonder where my brain had gone…
Q: So your narrator is
a young married woman. You are a young married woman. Your narrator
freelances for magazines. You freelance for magazines. You see where
I’m going with this? You’re writing about infidelity. Are you worried
you will be confused with your narrator?
A: Yeah, and I lifted
many, many more superficial details from my life and plopped them into
Emily’s story—she lives in my apartment, hangs out at my favorite
places, and she has my frizzy hair. Maybe I was looking for a fictional
thrill. In fact, I think that, because this was my first novel, I did
rely on a lot of those surface elements because they made it easier for
me to delve into the heart and mind of someone who’s not like me at
all. Fiction is fiction. If I had called the book STILL LIFE WITH
HUSBAND: A MEMOIR, well, that would be another story altogether —a much
more boring story.
Q: Since I already know you are a happily
married woman, how did you come to the idea of writing about
infidelity? What parts of it proved to be challenging?
A: The
whole idea was challenging and complicated and even a little bit
painful, and I think those are the things that drew me to it. The pull
between loyalty and desire, between what’s ethical and what seems
crucial for your own survival, and the decision to hurt someone you
love—those are really interesting struggles to me, and I liked
spelunking in Emily’s psyche, figuring out what decisions she would
come to based on what she thought she needed most. I really grew to
like her, and sometimes as I was writing the novel, I’d think, “Oh,
Emily, don’t do it!” And then, of course, I’d make her do it.
Q: I heard a rumor that your husband didn’t see the manuscript until it was completed. Is this true?
A: Absolutely.
My husband is an insightful reader and a careful critic, but I just
couldn’t make good use of his skills while I was writing this book.
“Honey, could you read the passage where the wife— hmm, yes, I guess
she does look like me!—decides to sleep with another man, and tell me
if you think the verbs are strong enough?” In fact, though, hardly
anybody saw the manuscript while I was working on it. I felt that I
would be too susceptible to criticism. I felt protective of Emily and
her complicated world, and I wasn’t ready for anyone to mess with it
until I was finished.
Q: You started this book before you
were a mother, and completed it after. Do you think the birth of your
daughter had any influence on the book’s resolution, and do you think
it will influence your writing in the future?
A: Having a child
made me a more productive writer, because when I know I only have
ninety minutes to work, I tend not to fiddle around the way I used to
when I had the whole day stretching out in front of me. You can’t spend
three hours reading about the history of lentils when preschool pickup
time is 11:15. As children do, my daughter has also changed the way I
think about myself. I’m much less invested in my success or failure as
a writer, which has freed me to write exactly what I want to write.
I
don’t think that my daughter’s birth affected the resolution of this
novel specifically, but it is true that, toward the end of the writing
of the book, I was closer to the experience of pregnancy and able to
imagine that aspect of Emily’s experience more fully.
One thing
I’ve noticed since my daughter was born is that I find it much harder
to think about, much less write about, really awful, sad things. I’m
planning to focus on musical comedies from now on.
Q: You earned your MFA from the University of Minnesota. Have you always known you wanted to be a writer?
A: When
I was young, when everyone else was outside playing, I was holed up in
my bedroom, filling notebooks with tragic rhyming poems about horses
dying in barn fires (“And sometimes in my dreams / I can still hear
their screams”) and sentimental tales of blind orphans triumphing over
adversity. Also, I’m spectacularly untalented at just about everything:
I’m klutzy and bad with numbers and really frighteningly disorganized,
and I’m the kind of person you feel sorry for when I try public
speaking. It made the choice to be a writer an easy one.
Q: What other writers do you admire / who are your literary influences?
A: I
like writers who play tug of war between humor and sorrow in their
work, and I also appreciate a really excellent literary page-turner. So
I love Michael Chabon and Lorrie Moore, Alice Munro, Graham Greene,
William Trevor (especially The Story of Lucy Gault) and Ian McEwan
(particularly Enduring Love and Atonement).
Q: The best friendship between Emily and Meg is one most women will recognize. Do you have a real life Meg?
A: I’m
lucky to have more than one Meg in my life. I have several brilliant,
beautiful, hilarious and kind friends whose affection I constantly
aspire to deserve. They’re like editors of my daily life: they laugh at
the good jokes, help me make sense of the complicated parts, and they
tell me when I’m spouting nonsense. Meg is a composite of these women.
More than one friend who has read the book has informed me that she
knows she is Meg. One actually refers to herself as Meg. I just nod.
Q: What’s next for you?
A: I’m
working on another novel. It’s about three close friends, two of whom
are married to each other, and the messiness of friendship and
betrayal.
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