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Is it possible to be a good writer without being a good reader? I’m a person who likes to believe in possibilities, so I hate to allow that anything might be absolutely impossible, but as Doris Lessig said in her Nobel speech, “Writing, writers, do not come out of houses without books.” Perhaps someone who comes from a background rich in oral storytelling could do it; all the writers I know, though, wrote and read passionately for years before being published. According to a report of the Independent Book Publishing Association, over five million American adults belong to reading groups. What, do you believe, is the basis for this country’s love for literature and books? I couldn’t hope to answer this one better than C.S. Lewis, who said, "We read to know that we are not alone." I think we gather in book clubs for much the same reason. Seeing ourselves understood in the pages of a book makes us more comfortable with ourselves, and often leaves us with a better understanding of who we are. The company the book provides often leaves us more willing—and even anxious—to share our inner selves with others. And a book group—the right book group, anyway, with thoughtful readers—is an ideal forum for exploring and sharing the little bits of ourselves that we have uncovered or come to better understand. Have you ever belonged to a reading group? My neighborhood book group has been meeting one Wednesday evening each month, more or less, since January of 2004. The funny thing is that we didn’t know each other for the most part when we first started: someone just had the idea that a book group would be a fun way to connect us to our neighbors. The word spread, and now we count more than twenty members—and friends! What advice do you have for reading group members when it comes to selecting books for discussion? Well-written books with some emotional depth to them make for the best discussions. My neighborhood group recently read a popular novel set in the 1940s, and though it was an easy read that everyone finished, our discussion kept coming back to an earlier read, Peter Ho Davies The Welsh Girl. It explored some of the same emotional turf much more intricately and complexly, and felt more real to us, and so left us talking about issues like cowardice and loyalty and the meaning of “home” in a much more satisfying way. What book(s) are you reading now or planning to read? After I finished the first draft of The Wednesday Sisters, I reread Graham Swift’s Last Orders, because I felt I could learn a lot about how to make my novel better by reading that incredibly well-done story about friendship. Similarly, after I finish the first draft of the novel I’m working on now, “The Ms Bradwells,” I plan to go back and reread Alice McDermott’s Charming Billy and Michelle Richmond’s No One You Know—two powerful novels that deal with the intersection of story and memory, which is one thing I find myself exploring in “The Ms Bradwells.” If you were stuck on a deserted island and could only bring one book with you to read, what would it be and why? Middlemarch by George Eliot, because it’s plenty long, and the characters are so real I would feel I had company even if I were alone. If you could have dinner with 3 writers (dead or alive) who would they be and why? Dinner? Well, I won’t order the French onion soup so I won’t spill it on myself. And since this question has a genie-in-a-bottle feel to it, I’m going to go with dead writers. One of the great things about the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, which I’ve attended and highly recommend for aspiring writers, is that one actually does dine (not just dinner, but breakfast and lunch, too!) with amazing writers like Alice McDermott and Tim O’Brien. So I don’t have to spend my genie wishes on them. So my three: George Eliot for sure, because I feel any writer could learn so much from her, and because she must have been such an interesting character, too: a woman who broke with societal conventions, not just mingling with male literary society but actually living with a man out of wedlock. But would I call her Ms Eliot or Ms Evans? Well, I’d probably be too tongue tied to say a word, anyway. Jane Austen, because I love her work, because surely she would add humor to the gathering, and because I’d be quite interested to see what she and Eliot would think of each other, and of each other’s work. The third is harder—so many amazing writers! But perhaps Elizabeth Bishop, because she has written so many breathtaking, heartbreaking lines. Her poem, “The Moose,” is my current favorite poem for reason I can’t begin to understand, much less explain, but which surely go deeper than the fact that she captures the awe I felt when I first saw a moose, through a bus window late at night like in the poem. Surely if Bishop were there, we’d have a lovely dinner in a room with a view of a “folded sunset, still quite warm.” And I’d be thinking, “Oh, must we dream our dreams / and have them, too?” Have you ever read anything you're too embarrassed to admit (except in this interview)? One of the nicest aspects of being a writer is that you can justify anything you read as “research,” “learning where the market is,” or “learning from the mistakes of others”—so you never need be embarrassed by anything you read. You can also call reading out on the back porch on a beautiful afternoon “work,” and staying up all night to finish a good one “an all-nighter” (which in my days as a lawyer was a sadly macho thing). Favorite book when you were a child: Probably A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine l’Engle. Both my sons, Chris and Nick, were great readers from very young, so it was hard to read long books to them: we’d start them together at night before bedtime, and they’d finish the books themselves the next afternoon before dinner, much less bedtime. My younger son, Nick, read WIT himself (as did I), but I certainly bought it for him. My favorites to read to them before they could read themselves were the Beatrix Potter books (especially Jeremy Fisher, Mrs. Tittlemouse and Ginger and Pickles) and, when they were a little older, the Beverly Cleary and Roald Dahl books—all cleverly funny stories that made them laugh and laugh. Also Harriet the Spy: Chris loved it so much that he put together a swanky spy costume, complete with camera sunglasses and a notebook in which he noted whatever it was he spied. I should probably find those notebooks and burn them! I also loved reading them the first Harry Potter. We had to order the second one from England, because Nick couldn’t wait for the U.S. version. (Chris was tearing through the Redwall series by then, so he was more patient.) And we have two copies of the rest of the series, so neither would have to wait for the other to finish. Favorite heroine in literature and why: Dorothea Brooke from Middlemarch, because she wants to do so much good, and society wants her to do so little, and in the end she chucks society’s expectations for her—and a substantial fortune along with them—in favor of what she knows is right for her and society. And Eliot created Dorothea at a time when women simply didn’t. I so admire what Eliot did in that book, on every level. But I’m also a big fan of Elizabeth Bennett. I love her spunk. Favorite hero in literature and why: I suppose I’d go with Pierre Bezukhov from War and Peace. He’s so big-hearted and open and unpretentious, even if he is a bit of a lug and, in the early part of the book, far too much of a party boy. Like Dorothea in Middlemarch, he has this idea that life should have some meaning beyond drawing room conversation, and he feels the responsibility to find it. Plus, you’ve got to love a guy who’ll enter a duel to protect the honor of a woman as dishonorable as Elena. Favorite first line from a book: “It’s a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.” – from Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen Favorite last line from a book: “Then I throw the last handful and the seagulls come back on a second chance and I hold up the jar, shaking it, like I should chuck it out to the sea too, a message in a bottle, Jack Arthur Dodds, save our souls, and the ash that I carried in my hands, which was the Jack who once walked around, is carried away by the wind, is whirled away by the wind till the ash becomes wind and the wind becomes Jack what we’re made of.” – from Graham Swift’s Last Orders Book that changed your life: I read two books over the same summer that made a big difference for me. In Harper Lee’s wonderful To Kill a Mockingbird, a girl who is a tomboy, like me, and who adores her older brother, like I did, not only solves the mystery of Boo Radley, but tells the whole darn story. In A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle, a girl who is as much of a math geek as I was, who is a bit of a misfit (I was incredibly shy, and had just moved to California the summer I read the book)—and is even named Meg!—is the hero. It’s a funny thing, how much identifying with a fictional character can do for a real-life kid. Those books made me a reader, and made me want to be a writer, and gave me a sense that girls like me could be something special, even if they couldn’t, as I was just discovering, be astronauts or presidents or priests. Words to Live By: “Where there is great love, there are always miracles.” – from Death Comes for the Archbishop, by Willa Cather and "We need to be the change we wish to see in the world." – Mahatma Gandhi I think the two go together quite well, don’t you?
Copyright © 2010 Reading Group Choices
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