On the unlikely chance that anyone’s missed THE LIARS CLUB, or CHERRY, Mary Karr is the best memoirist in the country, period.  LIT is harrowing and amazing, and very different from the earlier two; this story is about the descent into alcoholism and the search for god.  Both of which feel new in Karr’s hands, and which inspired me to think a great deal about my own search.  I’ll keep this brief, but one of the things LIT made me think about was this: that I really ought to stop stalking the world looking for forgiveness for everything I have befouled, because the only person who can forgive me is me.

Mary has a lovely line in one of her poems (in the collection, “Viper Rum”). Empty your self of self/Kneel down and listen.

LIT also made me think about my own ethos as a memoirist– her search for truth is her great north star. Whereas for me, I always knew the truth, but feared that no one would believe me.  Also, if you say “I’m searching for god’s love,” or “I”m an alcoholic,”  people know what you’re talking about.  But if you say, “I’m transgender,” lots of people will say, “What’s that?” or even, “No you’re not. You’re crazy.”   So as a writer I have had to walk a tightrope, being comic about things that are deadly serious, in order to win folks over.  I am very proud of my two nonfiction books, but writing them was grueling.  I have more stories to tell, but I don’t think I can write any more memoir; I can’t imagine going back to that raw and vulnerable place again in order to do the writing… and then the subsequent public spectacles in order to sell the book, having to be so vulnerable while the television lights shine down.  It all makes me exhausted.

The coolest twist about reading LIT, for me, was coming home (we’d been at my mom’s house) after Xmas to find a package waiting for me on the front step. And there was a signed copy of the book, sent to me by a fellow who’s a mutual friend of mine and the author’s– a lovely man whose father plays a part in the book, a professor who managed, in part, to save Mary’s life when she was young and lost.  On the title page, she’d written, To Jenny Boylan.  STAY LIT.

I will.

Jennifer Finney Boylan is Professor of English at Colby College and the author of the bestseller She’s Not There, as well as the acclaimed novels The Planets and Getting In. A three-time guest of The Oprah Winfrey Show, she has also appeared on Larry King Live, Today, and 48 Hours, and has played herself on ABC’s All My Children. She lives in Belgrade Lakes, Maine.

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Describe your latest project.

I’m Looking through You is a memoir about growing up in a haunted house — and an examination of what it means to be “haunted.” In addition to the traditional ghosts — a woman who appeared in a mirror; a mysterious “conductor” who walked the halls; clouds of moving mist and footsteps in the attic — the house had other spirits beneath its roof. My diffident, wry father and my complex, unpredictable sister became ghosts, in time, as well. In the end the book is about making peace with all our ghosts — between the people we have been and the people we become; with our loved ones; and with the uncanny boundaries between men and women.

What’s the strangest or most interesting job you’ve ever had?

As a journalist for Condé Nast Traveller magazine, I got to go to Easter Island and see all those mysterious big heads. On the way down from the volcano, my Rapa Nui native guide began to flirt with me. He asked a question which sounded like, “Juliqee Tombettee?” Which turned out to be, “Do you like Tom Petty?” Then he saw the ring on my finger and asked, “Ju married?” Thinking quickly — and not really wanting to go into the whole sex-change thing — I said, “I kept the ring. Got rid of the man.” My guide, whose name was Senga, thought this over, then smiled broadly and gave me the double thumbs-up sign.

Offer a favorite sentence or passage from another writer.

I like the story of James Thurber, who met a woman at a party in Paris. She told him how much funnier his work was in French, and he said, “Yes, I know. It does tend to lose something in the original.” Somehow, this strikes me as the perfect metaphor for thinking about transgendered people.

How do you relax?

I’m a member of a not-so-terrible rock-and-roll band in central Maine, Strangebrew. I play the keyboards — organ and piano. This puts me in lots of crappy bars in rural Maine, where guys often like to buy me drinks like the Warsaw Waffle (Maine maple syrup with a shot of vodka) or the Fart in the Ocean (tequila and 7UP, served with a prune). On the whole, men generally like that I’m “one of the guys,” that I am a woman who likes to tell jokes and play loud music. At least they like it until someone tells them I used to be a man myself, at which point they look kind of like a boy who realizes that the thing he’s just purchased as “sea monkeys” have really turned out to be brine shrimp.

Have you ever made a literary pilgrimage?

I have found myself at a number of writers’ graves — Thurber‘s, Keats‘s, Shelley‘s, Poe‘s. But my most interesting pilgrimage might be to Jan Morris‘s old house in Venice, which you can see just off the Accademia Bridge. Morris — then James — used to stand on the balcony of the Palazzo by the Grand Canal and wave to “his” children as they crossed the bridge. I stood there and looked at Morris’s old house and then I waved. I guess my feeling was that, in a way, I am one of her children, too.

Dogs, cats, budgies, or turtles?

Dogs. I have two black Labs. I am sorry to tell you they sleep in the bed with me and my partner. Recently we realized that there wasn’t enough room in the bed for two adults and two grown Labs. So we did the logical thing. We got a bigger bed. Edward Albee, who at one point owned seven Irish wolfhounds, claims that he once got six wolfhounds into a king-size bed with himself and his partner. I would like to have seen that.

In the For-All-Eternity category, what will be your final thought?

Everyone on this earth deserves to be treated with love, and the things we all have in common are more important than the things that make us different.

Make a question of your own, then answer it.

Q: Jennifer Boylan, is there anything you miss about being a man?

A: Yeah. Pockets. Women’s clothes never have pockets. I miss pockets. Other than that, not much.

Recommend five or more books on a single subject of personal interest or expertise.

Five or six memoirs about gender and gender variance:

My Husband Betty and She’s Not the Man I Married by Helen Boyd

Whipping Girl by Julia Serano

Running with Scissors by Augusten Burroughs

Cherry by Mary Karr

Queen of the Black Black by Megan Kelso (graphic novel/memoir)

Jenny Boylan:  Doug, I loved your book.  One of the things I found so engaging about it was the tension between the realism of the police/detective sections, on the one hand, and the more invented and imagined sensibilities of the zombies.  Did you have a hard time balancing the two?

DougDorst:balancing the two storylines (living folks dead folks) was by far the most difficult part of writing the novel. In the first draft (which was about 900 pages), the dead people ran away with the story, largely because I was having such a good time inhabiting their world. I had developed a Root-based economy for them, along with some pruno-bootlegging wars, and… well, it’d take me about 900 pages to describe it. I’ll just say that it was a bit of a mess.

In the second draft, I cut the dead folks back to the point that they were no more than grace notes in the narrative–which pretty much stripped them of any purpose for being in the book at all. My editor helped me find more of a balance in the third draft, but I was still trying to fine-tune it until the last minute.

Jenny Boylan: I wonder, sometimes, if there is less of a difference between the laws of writing “horror” fiction, as a genre, and writing “realism,” than readers–and writers–think.   Did you feel like you were encountering a whole different set of rules, in terms of what your reader might be willing to believe, when you switched from zombies to cops?  Or did you find that your cops and your zombies both were constructed from the same writers’ toolkit? (I’ll note, as an aside, something my friend Richard Russo once said to me;  I’d been working on an allegedly comic scene in which some guy winds up wearing pants made out of ice cream (don’t ask), and he just shook his head and said, “See, the sad thing is,  given the way your mind works, Boylan, you think this is realism.)  Anyway:  cops? zombies? Same approach to both for you as a writer?  Which one was harder to make real?

Doug Dorst: Wait– ice cream pants aren’t real? I begged my parents for them when I was in middle school. I suppose it’s for the best that they said no.

Anyway: Same toolkit, different tools, I think–say, socket wrench vs. crescent wrench. I mean, character is character, regardless of genre, don’t you think? Either that person-on-the-page’s experience feels emotionally true in some way–even if it’s not perfectly grounded in everyday realism–or it doesn’t.

The living characters were more challenging because they had to experience a range of emotions truthfully. The dead were drawn a bit more simply– my intent was for them still to be motivated by the sorts of things that motivate the rest of us, but in an amplified or distorted way. (You’ve got Phineas Gage, for example, with his monomaniacal need to possess this object that he needs in order to feel whole.) If the underlying emotions feel somehow recognizable, then I think you have a lot of latitude to play around with the sort of world the character is operating in. (And “play” is the right word there… one of the reasons I wanted to work in the world of Colma’s dead was that I thought it’d be fun–a big ol’ sandbox where I had thousands of cool toys and got to make all the rules, too.)

As for what readers might be willing to believe: I didn’t overthink it, and it’s probably for the best that I didn’t. I was aware that I was writing a strange little (well, sprawling) book that straddled genres and made use of both the everyday and the fantastic. At some point, after a great deal of worrying, I figured that there was no way for me to predict how readers (who no doubt would have different tastes or sets of expectations) were going to respond and that I should just follow the characters wherever they took me. In retrospect, that was the best decision I could’ve made, although I didn’t fully understand why at the time.

So, yeah: character. I think it’s what makes realist fiction work, and I think it’s what makes the very best genre fiction work–e.g., The Shining (Stephen King’s book, I mean. The film is terrifying, but for different reasons.). I figure it’s what makes all the stuff in between work, too. In short: whether our person-on-the-page’s trousers are made of denim or Rocky Road (ouch), what matters is that we believe in his experience of wearing them.

I would love to see that ice cream pants scene, by the way. Any chance I can convince you to share it?

Jenny Boylan: Doug, as you well know, some drafts are better left unshared.  Although I can tell you that the key line I kept straining to get at in that story was this: One person has forced our hero to wear the pants made out of ice cream–which, if I recall right, were one leg vanilla, one leg chocolate, and the crotch strawberry–making these “Neapolitan” pants– and then says, sadistically, “So!  How do you LIKE wearing these pants made our of ice cream NOW?” And our hero says– and this is the single phrase I was reaching for– and I quote, “They’re cold!”

To change the subject a little, I’m curious about the way you leave some questions unanswered in ALIVE IN NECROPOLIS–and other questions are answered, but only slowly.  Was this part of a conscious  plan, following Dickens’ motto of, “Make’em laugh, make’em cry, make’em wait?”  Or was the difference between your 900 page first draft and your much-shorter final draft the difference between answering all questions, and leaving some open?  Do I smell a sequel?

Doug Dorst: I don’t think that it was a strategic decision to “make ‘em wait”. It was more that I was having a lot of fun working on a large canvas, and I made my peace early on with the fact that the novel was going to be a little shaggy and sprawly. I think one certainly could do a much shorter, tighter, and more action-focused cut of the book — and who knows, maybe that’d be a better book –but it wouldn’t have been the book I wanted to write. Or, more precisely, it wouldn’t have been the one I wanted as much to write at the time I was writing it.

As for the unanswered questions: some were definitely a result of my having to cut the manuscript in half. Some things I chose to scale back, and some things I chose to cut out. (There are also a couple of things that I chose to cut, but I screwed up and didn’t cut them out completely– so, yeah, there are a couple of sore thumbs in there that make me cringe a little. Live and learn.)

Another big struggle for me was the ending. When I finished the third draft, I realized with some horror that the book went on for over a hundred pages after the climax of the action because I had so many ends to tie up. I decided that I couldn’t subject the reader to a hundred pages of denouement and that I’d have to make some sacrifices in order to bring the proceedings to a close more quickly. In retrospect, did I make all of the best choices? Probably not. But again, all you can do is make your peace with the idea that the book is what it is, move on to the next project, and try to turn your regrets into learning experiences.

How about you– any tales of post-publication regret? And if so, how did you deal with it?

Jenny Boylan: I think there are different kinds of post-publication regret.  There’s the little kind, where you find something you missed– a copy-editing mistake, or a vestigial trace of an earlier draft you forgot to sand down;  those make me sad, but not for long.  Then there’s the other kind, where you look at a whole book you’ve published, and say, kind of resentfully, “Oh jeez. What’d you all go and let me do that for?”  There’s at least one book of mine I’m still wondering, What  was I thinking?  Fortunately, nearly fifteen years later, it’s out of print, so the damage at this hour  is somewhat  contained.

On the other hand, as someone who’s been well published over the years, I have to say that post-publication regret is a luxury.  It’s no-publication regret that breaks my heart.  I remember what it was like to keep getting those rejection slips. Anybody who survives long enough to publish a book–even one riddled with mistakes, as mine always are– should still be grateful. Period.

I like your comments about “writing past the ending.”  I have heard both Stephen King and Richard Russo talk about this.  It’s funny, we always think of ourselves as writers struggling to come up with the satisfying ending– but we think less about the not-uncommon affliction of writing right past that ending and coming up with chapters and chapters more stuff.  I think this is why they have closing times in pubs, in Ireland, anyhow.  There are a number of projects I’ve found myself at the 700 page mark where I wish someone would ring the bell and say, “Hurry up please, it’s time.”

I’m actually at about the 650 page mark on my own next project– is this where I get to plug it? This is a young adult series, commencing with volume one, FALCON QUINN AND THE BLACK MIRROR, which is a book about monsters.  The quick pitch:  when kids in a certain town reach thirteen, they start turning into monsters: Banshees, vampires, mummies, the works.  So they get sent to a “school” where they’re taught how to disguise themselves, how to pretend to be humans, in order to survive.  So the question becomes:  What’s the right thing:  to pretend to be something you’re not, in order to live? Or to embrace your  “true self”, even if your true self is, say, a zombie.

Which I hope will be a gas for young people to read– I wrote FALCON QUINN with and for my middle-school age boys–but you don’t have to squint real hard to see that these books are sort of about some of the same issues I’ve been writing about for the last seven years, only in a more oblique and playful way.  It’s very freeing, writing about zombies.  I should  have done it years ago.

I guess this is a good place to leave things, unless you want another chance to dodge the question about a sequel to ALIVE.  What next for Doug Dorst, besides faculty meetings and syllabi?   A novel about bugs and spiders, maybe?  Tell you what, next time YOU have the sex change, and I’ll write about SF cops and–as Groucho Marx once noted, “outside of the improvement, you’ll never notice the difference.”

Doug Dorst: Whoops— didn’t mean to dodge the sequel question. I suppose the ending of Necropolis might work well as a bridge to a second book, but that wasn’t my intent, and I don’t currently have plans to write a sequel. Every now and then, though, I do find myself wondering what the next chapter in Mike Mercer’s life might be like. So who knows? If the right “Mercer 2.0” story finds me, I’ll write it. For now, though, there are other projects I’m excited to be working on. One of these is the short-story collection (The Surf Guru) that’s coming out next year, which I’m putting the finishing touches on as we speak.

As for the next novel: will there be dead people in it? There aren’t yet, but, again, who knows? (I’m a big fan of William Kennedy’s work, and dead folks slip into his novels all the time.) I agree that it’s freeing to write dead characters—I wonder if it’s because you somehow have more license to super-size their desires and their quirks. Or maybe it’s just fun to refuse to play by the rules of everyday reality. Whatever the reason, when I was writing Necropolis, it was usually the dead-person storyline that would get me excited about writing again after a dry spell. And believe me, there were some dry spells.

The next novel will definitely have its share of horrible, crawly bugs and spiders and other critters. Some of it takes place in Central America, and if there’s one thing that moving to Texas has taught me, it’s that the farther south you go, the scarier the insects are. I hadn’t planned on any of the characters (or the author) having a sex change, although I now think you’ve just given me a way to liven up the third act.

Falcon Quinn sounds like a blast—and a great way of approaching what I think is the most fundamental question a person can face: how to harmonize who you are with who you present yourself to be. (And middle school is right about the time that it gets excruciatingly difficult.) In a way, that’s the very issue that Mercer and Jude struggle with throughout Necropolis. Anyway: I’ve got a place on my bookshelf reserved for Mr. Falcon Quinn, and I look forward to meeting him on the page.

As a final thought, I just want to echo my agreement with something that you put quite well: post-publishing regrets are a luxury. Writing is a hard gig, especially in this economy, and I know a lot of incredibly talented writers who are having trouble getting their work out. I’ve caught more than my share of breaks, especially lately. Case in point, OneCity One Book—in which I get to have my book widely read in the city I love most, and through which I’m getting the chance to talk to a lot of amazing, talented, and inspiring people about words and stories and writing. Case in point, Jenny Boylan.

Jenny Boylan: Well, case in point, your own damn self.  Thanks for this exchange, Doug, and I do hope I get to see some of your Texas bugs some day. Although, just out of home-state pride, allow me note that  while Maine blackflies might be small, they do get the job done.  Congratulations on a fine book, and good luck with the next one!  J.

My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Steven King’s ON WRITING is part memoir, part Elements of Style; it’s also one of the most modest, generous, thoughtful, and succinct books on fiction writing I’ve ever read. Most how-to books on writing are full of blarney and mustard; Steve’s book focuses on a few important stylistic and structural insights, and makes their value clear. The book also sheds useful light on the role writing has played in his own life, and shines light on his struggle with “the drink.” And it winds up with a harrowing re-telling of his awful 1998 accident, and the way he managed to find his way back to the world, mainly due to the love of his wife Tabby–and the muse itself. A short, brilliant, clarifying work. It brought me new appreciation for all of King’s fiction, and sent me immediately into re-reading his work. Which means, guess what, right now, I’m deep into THE STAND…. hope I don’t “come down” with anything….

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I don’t know if people who are not writers can relate to this at all, but I wanted to linger over this moment with you here. Right now, the world of the book I’m writing is really all I care about. It’s what I can’t wait to do once I get up in the morning, and when I’m doing it, I”m about as happy as I can be, and when I’m finished, I start to think about what I’m going to write tomorrow. Each tiny block of pages brings me closer and closer to the end. I know a lot of what’s going to happen, but not exactly, and there’s still room to be surprised, both for better and for ill. But this particular place– the home stretch–is such a delight.

I have hopes to be done with this first draft by summer’s end, which would truly be impressive (and tidy, since it means I wouldn’t be dragging summer projects into the academic year.) I am such a confused flibbertygibbet of a writer that I really have to go through two drafts, just to have a first draft, because even at my most careful, I am still capable of writing, “A hole fell out of the wall.” (The HarperCollins copyeditor actually caught this one recently; with deep chagrin I had to change it to, OF COURSE, “a stone fell out of the wall, leaving a hole.”) And so on. It is so easy to get blind, in the whirlwind of this part of writing.

Steve King encourages writers to write 2000 words a day, if possible, and to spend no more than 3 months on a first draft. I’m a fast writer, but i’ve never been THAT fast. Still, these fantasy books I’m writing have come faster, and been more fun, than almost anything I’ve ever done. The problem is that, every 200 pages or so, I have to completely stop and go back and fix all the things i’ve screwed up because only writing the story lets me know what the story is. And while this might well be a crazy way of writing (rather than planning it all out in advance), I’ve NEVER been able to do that; for me it’s always writing blindly but with hope, and then going back, and fixing it, and fixing it.

So coming down the home stretch is especially exciting because the options narrow, and I’m less likely to go off down a blind alley. AT this point, I’ve been down so many of them that the number of false moves has been reduced– because I’ve already taken so many of them.

This particular project, by the way, is FALCON QUINN AND THE (SOMETHING SOMETHING) (we’re keeping the something something secret for now). It’s book two of the Falcon Quinn project, and i’ve just learned that book one, FALCON QUINN AND THE BLACK MIRROR (the cover for which is here) is now slated for April publication. I’ve had such a ball with these books, and even now I am still doing what I started doing two years ago with book one– doing a morning’s writing, and then reading the day’s work to my boys at day’s end. Zach and Sean continue to be some of my best critics, especially with this book, which I’ve written for (and in many cases, with) them.

It’s funny, though, I will end book Two before Book One has come out yet, so I wont’ know whether there will be books Three and up (and yeah, I have a pretty specific idea of how many of these there will be) when I have to hand them in. So I have to come up with an ending for Book Two that will end the series if we end at two, but also provides an opening if we go more than that, which I surely hope we do.

At any rate, I am not at all sure that this makes me a very fun or pleasant person to be around right now, because my mind is really drifting away to Shadow Island and the world of the story all the time. Deedie is long suffering and patient about this, having long ago decided that the best way to deal with a writer-spouse is to pretend I’m normal. The boys, meanwhile, want to CONSTANTLY talk about the latest twists and turns in the story. It’s such a fun and fulfilling place to be.

There are times I wish I could stay in this frame of mind forever. But that’d be no fun, because then I’d never find out how the story ends. And I’d be denied the even scarier, even more amazing prospect, of staring something new.

My rating: 5 of 5 stars Rick Russo’s new book contains some familiar, beloved elements for Russo-philes– a devoted, exhausted wife; a smart, snarky daughter; an irritating mother who doesn’t stop meddling, even after death–and at the center, a restless, loving soul, this time the professor Griffin, who wrestles with life’s meaning, love, and legacy. But there’s new ground here too, not least in the brevity and economy of the story. Plus, at times CAPE MAGIC is more laugh out loud funny than any Russo book in recent memory. Above all, I found the faint whiff of mortality hovering over these pages, which gave the tale a sense of gravity and sobriety even in the midst of its comic moments. Russo, of course, is my dear friend, and so I’m biased. But I think he’s one of the best American novelists, ever, and CAPE MAGIC is one of his best. Russo departs today on a multi-city book tour, so catch him if you can. View all my reviews >>

The tension between the two aspects of the tale remains in a fun, unsettling balance for most of the book, which means that this supernatural detective story is kind of unlike anything i’ve ever read before. Strange, funny, creepy, unsettling– by turns ALIVE IN NECROPOLIS is all of these. Does Dorst answer all the questions he raises? Not by a long shot. But the dark joke, and earnest quest-for-meaning at the heart of the tale still made it a fine book to read.

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The bar’s been set high for the reading tomorrow! Come on up to the 82nd St. Barnes & Noble and see if I crack from the pressure! Can’t wait!

Richard Russo sent me to this fine novel. I’m essentially on the Rick Russo book club right now, having read THE GOOD THIEF at his urging just before this one. Enjoying Ferris’ high-wire act in this book a great deal, especially the wild 1st person plural narration.

The book captures the reality of working in an office, and if that sounds too tedious to be the heart of a novel, then you underestimate Ferris’ imagination and invention.  I worked in big office towers in Manhattan throughout much of my 20s, and the drama and intrigue–and trauma– of a working life is surely worthy of fiction.  We spend so much of our lives at work– it’s curious that most of our fiction takes place in our “other” lives; but then perhaps this is no surprise, given the fact that its only in those other lives that we feel our “real” stories take place.  Still,  does this means that the majority of our working lives are devoid of mythology?  Hell no.  And Ferris’ wild, heartbreaking book captures that reality nicely.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to head down to the fifty-first floor–where most of the cubicles are empty– for a cry and a smoke…

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