Still Life with Husband: Q&A with the Author, Lauren Fox. March 4, 2009

Still Life with Husband Written by Lauren Fox Hardcover February 2007 $22.95 978-0-307-26491-6 (0-307-26491-2) 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.

October Chick Lit Book Choice September 30, 2008

Queen of the Road: The True Tale of 47 States, 22,000 Miles, 200 Shoes, 2 Cats, 1 Poodle, a Husband, and a Bus with a Will of Its Own by Doreen Orion

A pampered Long Island princess hits the road in a converted bus with her wilderness-loving husband, travels the country for one year, and brings it all hilariously to life in this offbeat and romantic memoir.

Doreen and Tim are married psychiatrists with a twist: She’s a self-proclaimed Long Island princess, grouchy couch potato, and shoe addict. He’s an affable, though driven, outdoorsman. When Tim suggests “chucking it all” to travel cross-country in a converted bus, Doreen asks, “Why can’t you be like a normal husband in a midlife crisis and have an affair or buy a Corvette?” But she soon shocks them both, agreeing to set forth with their sixty-pound dog, two querulous cats—and no agenda—in a 340-square-foot bus.

Queen of the Road is Doreen’s offbeat and romantic tale about refusing to settle; about choosing the unconventional road with all the misadventures it brings (fire, flood, armed robbery, and finding themselves in a nudist RV park, to name just a few). The marvelous places they visit and delightful people they encounter have a life-changing effect on all the travelers, as Doreen grows to appreciate the simple life, Tim mellows, and even the pets pull together. Best of all, readers get to go along for the ride through forty-seven states in this often hilarious and always entertaining memoir, in which a boisterous marriage of polar opposites becomes stronger than ever.

Discussion Questions for Garcia Girls… September 23, 2008

Discussion questions

How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents by Julia Alvarez

Note to readers: These questions are meant to get your conversations about the book started. But remember, it’s a discussion, not a test!

• How does the story of the Garcia Girls relate to your own experience, either as an immigrant or someone with friends and neighbors from other countries?
• The story is about how the daughters adjusted to American life. What’s your impression of how the parents adapted and changed as Americans? [e.g. relationships to and expectations of their daughters]
• What did you think of the structure of the book, starting in the present and working backward in time? If you were to tell your own story of, e.g. coming to Cambridge, where would start? (e.g. present, immediate past, childhood?)
• What impact did the Trujillo dictatorship have on the girls while they were in the Dominican Republic? [E.g. how aware were they, how frightened, did they accept the situation as normal?]
• Who is telling the story of the Garcia Girls? [Voices change from first to third person, subheads identify the person whose story is being told, but who in your opinion is telling the story?]
• What are some of the customs of the Dominican Republic that are different from American customs? [e.g. parental roles, expectations for marriage, degree of freedom of expression, etc.?]
• Which stories in the book did you feel were the most interesting takes on American society, and why? [E.g. school, dating, respect for [parents, sisterhood, etc.]
• What are your thoughts, based on the book, about how Dominican and Haitian people differ? [e.g., religion, politics, oppression, class structure]
• What are your general impressions of the four sisters? [How would you characterize them? Who changed the most in America?]
• Two of the daughters in the story spent some time in mental hospitals. Do you think the move to American was in some way the cause of their dysfunction?
• What is the significance of the last story in the book- Yolanda’s encounter with the kitten and the ghost cat?)