Thanks to Lindsey Crittenden for inviting me to participate
in this blog chain. I met Lindsey at the
Glen Workshop; she is the author of The Water Will Hold You: A Skeptic Learns to Pray and The View From Below: Stories.
Lindsey lives in San Francisco
and teaches creative writing at UC Berkeley Extension.
Although the title of this post promises a new project, I’d
like to talk instead about my little-known but almost-award-winning
novella. It was a finalist in the 2010Miami University Press Novella Contest, and since only the first-place novella
was published as part of the prize, I’m still looking for a home for mine.
What is the title of your book?
When the Aged Are Reverently, Passionately Waiting,
after a line in W.H. Auden’s poem, “Musee Des Beaux Arts”
 |
| Me at my old desk in Fairfax |
A friend told me about a woman in an assisted living
facility who had a distant relative move into the same facility. The problem was, the woman had never been especially
fond of this relative and wasn’t thrilled about her moving in. I found myself fascinated with that idea of
how you just get stuck with some people in your life, and that often it seems
the people you want to avoid are the hardest to get away from.
What genre does your book fall under?
Literary fiction
How long did it take to write the first draft?
I intended to write a short story. I’d received two hand-written rejections from
The Missouri Review, and I wanted to follow up with something better
than what I already had in my small arsenal of short stories (I’ve never been
much for short forms). Sixty pages
later, I realized this really wasn’t a short story. Still, the composition went surprisingly
quickly, as I find it does when the subject really clicks with me. I had the revised version finished within
three months of starting.
What is a one-sentence synopsis of your book?
When Louise’s sister-in-law Shirley moves in to the same
assisted living facility, Louise broods over the plague that Shirley has been
to her life, nursing a hatred born of believing Shirley had ruined herself with
another man before marrying Louise’s late brother; this memory, however, is
undermined by Shirley’s own contradiction and worsening dementia, and Louise
finds herself left alone against a void of not-knowing and extinction. (Yes, I
cheated with that semi-colon…)
What actors would you use for a movie rendition of your
book?
I’m terrible with actors, but I can tell you that Julie
Christie very convincingly and movingly portrays a woman with Alzheimers in Away
from Her. In my novella, Shirley is
the character with dementia; I’m not sure who would play my leading lady,
Louise.
Will it be self published or represented by an agency?
I hope to find a home for it in a lit mag.
Who or what inspired you to write this book?
I was working on a novel about love at the time. I didn’t sit down intending to write a story
about hate, but when I was finished, I saw that that was what I had on my
hands. Louise hates her sister-in-law to
the very last, which, from what I know about long-standing grudges, seems truer
to life than any sort of Hallmark realization that her sister-in-law is in fact
empathetic and dear. So in a way, maybe
this was an inverse urge to that which was prompting me to write my novel on
love.
More
specifically, many of the details of the assisted living setting and especially
the nursing ward were taken from my own memories of my maternal grandparents’
tenure in such places.
What other books would you compare this story to within your
genre?
The only book that readily comes to mind is Alice Munro’s Away
from Her, about a woman and her husband dealing with her worsening
Alzheimers.
The judge
of the Miami University contest, David Schloss, called my novella’s premise Rashomon-like,
by which he meant that the question as to Louise’s particular memory of a past
event involving her sister-in-law—and the contradictory memory Shirley herself
has, along with the reader’s own judgment—creates a scenario in which there are
multiple narratives of the same event, rendering the truth of that event
unknowable.
What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?
Although my first novel took years of labor and got me an
agent, I feel this novella is, from a craft standpoint, the best thing I’ve
written to date. I used close
third-person in a way I hadn’t before, veering into Louise’s own indirect
discourse without ever losing narrative control. It was one of the best experiences of my
writing career so far to have Mr. Schloss, in post-contest correspondence,
assure me that my work had been “understood, and appreciated.”
Please stay tuned for links to the next writers I’ve invited
to take part in this blog chain…. First up is the talented Rion Scott, a fellow alumni of the George Mason MFA program:
Rion Amilcar Scott lives and writes in Beltsville, MD. More info on his work: http://forgottentunneltv.
Rion Amilcar Scott lives and writes in Beltsville, MD. More info on his work: http://forgottentunneltv.
