An Interview with Laurie Frankel
An interview with Laurie Frankel, originally published in Little Patuxent Review in 2018.
Gesticulating wildly, Laurie Frankel paced before 150 students and faculty last year and told them her secret to writing novels.
“Kill your data plan,” she said.
The collective intake of breath lasted for one long, shocked beat while the audience absorbed that advice. Then Frankel was off again, ranting against Facebook and its time-wasting and capitalism-feeding nature. Social media is destroying reading, nullifying writing, negating privacy, she explained, and when you shun that world, you have lots more time to write.
With three novels written and another novel on its way, plus a television script in process and a few essays in the New York Times and The Guardian, Frankel’s plan seems to be working.
Appearing at Howard Community College in Maryland, Frankel told the students another piece of heartfelt wisdom.
“You have to tell your story in a lasting way that makes a difference,” Frankel said.
Frankel fervently believes literature can make a difference in the world. The surface topicalities of each of her three novels – unplanned pregnancy (The Atlas of Love), technology run rampant (Goodbye for Now) and parenting a transgender child (This is How It Always Is) – are stealthy inroads to novels with universal themes of family and identity and death.
When she was a graduate student studying Shakespeare – just before she dropped out -- she started writing The Atlas of Love, in which one of three graduate students gets pregnant and the friends decide to raise the baby together. Both joy and trouble ensue. That seems to be Frankel’s method as a novelist: Present a trending situation, handle it tenderly and humorously with empathetic characters, then stand back to let things fizz.
A native of Columbia, Maryland, Frankel won the 2013 Endeavor award for science fiction/fantasy for her second novel, Goodbye for Now, in which a software engineer creates a program that allows people to email and video chat with their dead loved ones. Doesn’t seem so farfetched now. This is How It Always Is focuses on a family handling the transition of a young boy who becomes a girl.
“In every other way, it’s made up, except that I have a transgender daughter,” Frankel explained.
Frankel’s writing process – ignoring social media, typing notes on her phone constantly, reading voraciously, editing copiously, and weeping occasionally – has led to novels with excellent reviews and sales. This Is How It Always Is, Kirkus Reviews wrote, is “well-plotted, well-researched, and unflaggingly interesting … As thought-provoking a domestic novel as we have seen this year.”
I interviewed Frankel by phone from her home in Seattle, where I assume she was talking with her hands waving frenetically.
__________
Susan Thornton Hobby: What did voracious early novel reading do for you?
Laurie Frankel: It’s hard to say, but it seems to me that it got me -- exactly -- here. When my kid was learning how to read I was saying to her, “This is the single most useful skill I ever learned.” And I think that’s true. It put me in incredibly good stead. Of all the skills that you learned growing up, that you can master, but you can also love, I feel like that’s the one you want. It’s hard for me to say, because that’s the one I got. For all I know, loving and mastering math would have been very useful to me, but I want to argue that it’s reading, because it’s what allows everything else. It made school better, it made learning better, it made lying on the beach better. Sometimes people say to me that they don’t read, and I think, among other things, well, what do you do? Because I spend hours every day doing this. And I could certainly spend that time doing other things, but I doubt it would be as wonderful.
STH: You studied Shakespeare in graduate school. Can you explain your attraction to his work and what close study of his plays gave your writing?
LF: Yes, for hours, I could talk about that. Shakespeare, it’s hard not to make an argument for the language. But as far as studying it and teaching it, I think what’s so wonderful about it is that it’s endlessly, endlessly renewable. I have seen “Hamlet” a hundred times, maybe, read it twice that, I’ve taught it again and again and again. And every time, I notice things that I just didn’t notice before. And sometimes that’s because it’s dense and it’s long, and I had not read it that way, or remembered reading it that way, but also because I changed, my world changed, my perspective changed, and that times infinity is what I feel you get with Shakespeare.
Shakespeare is a lovely metaphor for theater, generally, and that’s harder to see when you are dealing with contemporary plays and playwrights, but Shakespeare is also old, so it’s obvious the ways in which you can take this very old play, a play which was a story that was already old for Shakespeare’s audience, and tell it in a new way that makes it relevant for now, is I think endlessly fascinating, and fun to play with, and that’s how theater should be. It should be fun --it’s live, you go with a group of people, you sit in the dark together and have this experience. You’re also paying attention to “what about this story is timeless?” and “what about this story is timely? And how?” There’s no canon that’s better for that than Shakespeare. Plus you get the language. It doesn’t get any better than that.
STH: Tell me about this idea of keeping a log of the things you read and then your reactions to the writing.
LF: This is my best piece of advice, frankly, for aspiring writers and aspiring humans, for people who read generally. One of the things that is interesting is the more you read, the less it sticks with you sometimes. I will read about a book and think, oh, I would love to read that book. And not only is it on my shelf, but I have marked it all up. I have no recollection of this. In some ways, it’s depressing, but in some ways, it’s good, because it means you’re reading a lot and widely. And they can’t all stick with you, because of limited brain space. This helps me keep track of them [books] as a reader, but mostly, it’s most helpful for writing. I was not sure whether or not I could write a novel until I wrote a novel, but what I knew was that I had read a lot of them, and that was going to be pretty good training to give it a shot. I don’t have an MFA, I don’t have writing classes. … But what I had was years and years and years of reading novels.
What I find really useful is to read them as a writer, and to think really clearly and specifically and consciously and conscientiously, about what works and how it was made to work, and what didn’t work, and why not, and how that applies to my writing in general and my project in particular. I try to be as specific as I possibly can, because it’s not helpful if you’re like, “Well, this writing is really beautiful, and my writing is terrible, so I should try to write better.” That is not a useful piece of criticism for yourself. But what is helpful is to look at a book and say, “This book has lots of characters and my book also has lots of characters. How did this writer help the reader keep track of all the characters? And how can I do that too?” … I find it endlessly useful, and I’ve been doing it for years and years. I do it religiously.
STH: Has that ruined the magic of reading novels for you?
LF:[laughs] You’d think, right? It’s true, I was sitting in my cousin’s kitchen a few years ago reading a novel with a pencil in my hand and making notes and she said, “What are you reading that for?” And I said, “Nothing, I’m just reading it for fun.” And she was like, “I’m so happy I don’t have to read books that way.” But in fact, I still enjoy it. It is true that I can’t turn off that critical part of my brain. ... But also, I really like reading. So I like it enough to overcome the analytical part of it. I also, of course, am endlessly fascinated by that critical, analytical approach to books, because that’s what I do. I kind of geek out on that. I find this exercise to be so useful that I always have my students do it, and often my students complain about exactly that. Well, too bad.
STH: You seem to write novels about issues that are trending before they’re trending. How do you manage that?
LF: Dumb luck. I think it’s dumb luck. Because it just takes years for novels to come out. So it’s not clear that they’re going to be hot topics when I write them. I suppose there’s also an argument to be made about that’s why I’ve been able to get them published. But I mostly think it’s just luck. I also think there’s an extent to which, for me, these topics are metaphors. So they’re going to be vaguely timely.
You know, like technology, it doesn’t take much prescience to hit that. We’ve certainly been talking about it in a variety of ways for years and years and years. I actually think Goodbye for Now has become more timely than when it came out in the first place, just because social media has become even more ubiquitous … . [Frankel departs on a small but significant rant about social media here.]
STH: Can you explain the genesis of the idea for Goodbye for Now?
LF: There are a couple of answers to that question, as there always are. One of them is that my grandmother died and she and I had emailed one another a lot. We only lived 20 minutes apart, so I saw her pretty regularly, so it was not particularly in-depth emailing, but it was still frequent enough. After she passed, I kept thinking that somebody should invent a way to read all her emails and then I could correspond with that, and they could fake her persuasively and that would make me feel better.
I kept saying this to my husband -- who is a software engineer -- what a great idea this was, and was this possible, and he kept saying, “No.” I sat with the idea for two and a half years before I realized that it isn’t a good idea, I don’t have the ability to execute it, I don’t know what I’m talking about, but I’m a novelist. So while it was a bad idea in real life, it was a good idea for a book, something I should have realized right away, but did not. Then the other thing is that I hate Facebook. It would be really nice if it were a more romantic answer, but really just hate Facebook. I really, really dislike social media. I was under pressure to do a good bit of it to promote my first novel, and I thought, I really dislike this, and it’s ruining everything for everybody.
[The idea of an electronic conversation with dead loved ones] was pretty obvious to me when I sat down and thought about it: “Boy, are there lots of ways this could go wrong.” I think that everybody else was a few years in when they thought, Hey, Facebook is free, so how are they making money? Wait a minute, they’re making money off of me, I’m the product here! I remember when that revelation went around on social media, and I was like, yeah, that was immediately clear to me. Really, not because I’m wise or anything, just because I disliked it so viscerally.
STH: Since technology has almost caught up to your fiction, I assume you find it a little alarming and creepy?
LF: Yes, I find it alarming and creepy, that is exactly right. This technology now exists. This technology that I made up, and really made up as an object lesson in things that we should be warned about and paying attention to, has in fact since come to pass. This book won an award for science fiction/fantasy and it isn’t anymore, even at all. And I find that really, really alarming. Because my point was, this is possible and is it desirable? And what we have found is that people have answered the first question but not the second. And that’s what I, frankly, find alarming about social media in general is we are using it constantly. But we’re thinking about it almost not at all. In fact, it is training our brains to do that. It is not an accident that we are not critically considering it; we are prevented from doing so. Even as we are almost unable to not engage with it at this point. And that scares the hell out of me.
STH: All those tiny little dopamine hits …
LF: Right. I get that. I think that’s the struggle with the internet generally. We were promised connectivity and we have it in spades and it’s great. Access and connectivity have been paid off and it’s fantastic. It’s just that there’s a significant but there. And we’re not talking about it enough and in fact we’re discouraged from doing so.
STH: Your third novel, This is How It Always Is, centers on a family with a transgender child, but mostly it seems to be about parenting.
LF: Yes, exactly. As I was saying, for me these things are always a metaphor. When I came up with the idea for this book, that’s what it was: The way in which having a transgender child is actually just like having ... a child. And it seems like there are these moments that this is very anomalous, and it is in some ways, but not in most ways. Mostly I feel like this is how it always is, and that’s where the title comes from. I think it is a book about parenting.
STH: But it has the topic that is becoming something many people are discussing and many transgender children are coming out at this point and seeing this as a possibility, and it’s exciting, but it also makes them so vulnerable. That’s what I saw in your book is the vulnerability that they were so worried about.
LF: Yes, indeed. It is a little bit self-fulfilling, or at least I hope that it will be a little bit self-fulfilling. I think it’s true in the book, but I hope it’s also true in the world. That, as more and more kids realize that this is a possibility, are willing to have a conversation about it, are willing to tell their parents their reality and have that not shouted down, as more and more parents share this experience, as more people realize that this is out there and it happens, it will happen more and more. Because there have been transgender kids and transgender adults, who realize very young they are transgender, for all of time. The question is really just what happens to them when the reaction to them is something other than horror or terror or fear. And that’s how that story changes, for everyone.
STH: I know you don’t like to talk about your next novel, but you’ve said it also addresses gender. So let’s be general here. Why is gender such a rich vein for a novelist to mine?
LF: I want to argue that narrative is almost always about gender. It’s another thing I love about Shakespeare. In Shakespeare it is always about gender. When you think that the plays were written for boys to play the women’s roles, they’re really just all about gender in the most interesting ways. That’s some of what I love about that. … It’s hard for me to think about writing a novel that isn’t about gender somehow. Among other things it remains -- unfortunately, insanely -- subversive to write, say, a strong female character, or to write female characters and not say what they look like. … There are certainly some people who are going to write books that really explore no issues of gender at all, but those people are never going to be me.
STH: Can you talk about the truth of fiction, not whether a story is factual, but whether it’s true?
LF: Fiction is true. I actually find successful fiction to be more true than nonfiction, almost without fail. People will tell me sometimes that they only read nonfiction because they wouldn’t waste their time with fiction because it isn’t true. And I actually feel exactly the opposite. I think that nonfiction, as soon as you put it in book form, it already is biased, it already is dated, it has already has left a bunch of things out, it already has had a bunch of things spun by the publisher. And all those things happen in fiction too, but because it wasn’t purporting to be per se factual, there’s a lot more leeway in all of that.
I find nonfiction to be really restrictive, because you can only talk about things which actually happened. And I don’t actually care what actually happened. It’s not nearly as truthful to me as being able to make it up, as far as narrative goes. …
[Fiction] is just a more interesting version of events usually. You know how you’re having a conversation and you get home later and you realize, ‘No, here’s how I should have put this. Here’s how I should have said it.’ This is the witty response that I couldn’t come up with on my toes, this is the insightful metaphor I couldn’t come up with off the top of my head. The beauty of fiction is that the dialogue is all perfect and the seeds all sprout and it all reveals perfectly the exact thing that you hoped that it would. Life is not like that. But fiction is, eventually, if you edit it enough.
STH: You’ve written that you’d like to raise your child to “be a strong, smart, happy, successful human in the world and to write words that make the world a better place.” How can words make the world a better place? … This a softball question, go ahead.
LF: [laughs] So much so that I’m not sure how to answer it. It just seems so obvious to me. I suppose there is the obvious way. I have gotten a lot of email and response from this book [This is How It Always Is] that say, “Thank you, I thought I was the only one.” Or “Thank you, I thought these people were really gross, and now I don’t.” … I feel 100% that storytelling changes the world. In fact, it does it better than anything else. I think that you tell a new story and you convince people of the validity of that story and the world becomes a better place. Absolutely, I believe that.
Five steps back from the high-falutin-ness of it, I just think that books are great. They teach people and they make people feel empathetic and they allow you to live a life that you’re never going to lead, of a person who you’re never going to be. And that’s what makes us creative humans, and empathetic humans and loving of one another and understanding of worlds which are not our own and understanding that those worlds actually are our own, we just don’t happen to be living that particular life.
It is some of what bothers me so much about social media is that it’s replacing books. They’re taking that hour before bed that people used to spend reading a novel and now they’re just going through their Facebook feed. And it’s very difficult for me to see how that’s not an enormous loss. Reading helps you to be loving, it helps you to be critical. It helps you to be able to tell the difference between that which is true and sensical and that which is lying and manipulative, and gosh, I think that is a good skill for all of us to have.
Gesticulating wildly, Laurie Frankel paced before 150 students and faculty last year and told them her secret to writing novels.
“Kill your data plan,” she said.
The collective intake of breath lasted for one long, shocked beat while the audience absorbed that advice. Then Frankel was off again, ranting against Facebook and its time-wasting and capitalism-feeding nature. Social media is destroying reading, nullifying writing, negating privacy, she explained, and when you shun that world, you have lots more time to write.
With three novels written and another novel on its way, plus a television script in process and a few essays in the New York Times and The Guardian, Frankel’s plan seems to be working.
Appearing at Howard Community College in Maryland, Frankel told the students another piece of heartfelt wisdom.
“You have to tell your story in a lasting way that makes a difference,” Frankel said.
Frankel fervently believes literature can make a difference in the world. The surface topicalities of each of her three novels – unplanned pregnancy (The Atlas of Love), technology run rampant (Goodbye for Now) and parenting a transgender child (This is How It Always Is) – are stealthy inroads to novels with universal themes of family and identity and death.
When she was a graduate student studying Shakespeare – just before she dropped out -- she started writing The Atlas of Love, in which one of three graduate students gets pregnant and the friends decide to raise the baby together. Both joy and trouble ensue. That seems to be Frankel’s method as a novelist: Present a trending situation, handle it tenderly and humorously with empathetic characters, then stand back to let things fizz.
A native of Columbia, Maryland, Frankel won the 2013 Endeavor award for science fiction/fantasy for her second novel, Goodbye for Now, in which a software engineer creates a program that allows people to email and video chat with their dead loved ones. Doesn’t seem so farfetched now. This is How It Always Is focuses on a family handling the transition of a young boy who becomes a girl.
“In every other way, it’s made up, except that I have a transgender daughter,” Frankel explained.
Frankel’s writing process – ignoring social media, typing notes on her phone constantly, reading voraciously, editing copiously, and weeping occasionally – has led to novels with excellent reviews and sales. This Is How It Always Is, Kirkus Reviews wrote, is “well-plotted, well-researched, and unflaggingly interesting … As thought-provoking a domestic novel as we have seen this year.”
I interviewed Frankel by phone from her home in Seattle, where I assume she was talking with her hands waving frenetically.
Susan Thornton Hobby: What did voracious early novel reading do for you?
Laurie Frankel: It’s hard to say, but it seems to me that it got me -- exactly -- here. When my kid was learning how to read I was saying to her, “This is the single most useful skill I ever learned.” And I think that’s true. It put me in incredibly good stead. Of all the skills that you learned growing up, that you can master, but you can also love, I feel like that’s the one you want. It’s hard for me to say, because that’s the one I got. For all I know, loving and mastering math would have been very useful to me, but I want to argue that it’s reading, because it’s what allows everything else. It made school better, it made learning better, it made lying on the beach better. Sometimes people say to me that they don’t read, and I think, among other things, well, what do you do? Because I spend hours every day doing this. And I could certainly spend that time doing other things, but I doubt it would be as wonderful.
STH: You studied Shakespeare in graduate school. Can you explain your attraction to his work and what close study of his plays gave your writing?
LF: Yes, for hours, I could talk about that. Shakespeare, it’s hard not to make an argument for the language. But as far as studying it and teaching it, I think what’s so wonderful about it is that it’s endlessly, endlessly renewable. I have seen “Hamlet” a hundred times, maybe, read it twice that, I’ve taught it again and again and again. And every time, I notice things that I just didn’t notice before. And sometimes that’s because it’s dense and it’s long, and I had not read it that way, or remembered reading it that way, but also because I changed, my world changed, my perspective changed, and that times infinity is what I feel you get with Shakespeare.
Shakespeare is a lovely metaphor for theater, generally, and that’s harder to see when you are dealing with contemporary plays and playwrights, but Shakespeare is also old, so it’s obvious the ways in which you can take this very old play, a play which was a story that was already old for Shakespeare’s audience, and tell it in a new way that makes it relevant for now, is I think endlessly fascinating, and fun to play with, and that’s how theater should be. It should be fun --it’s live, you go with a group of people, you sit in the dark together and have this experience. You’re also paying attention to “what about this story is timeless?” and “what about this story is timely? And how?” There’s no canon that’s better for that than Shakespeare. Plus you get the language. It doesn’t get any better than that.
STH: Tell me about this idea of keeping a log of the things you read and then your reactions to the writing.
LF: This is my best piece of advice, frankly, for aspiring writers and aspiring humans, for people who read generally. One of the things that is interesting is the more you read, the less it sticks with you sometimes. I will read about a book and think, oh, I would love to read that book. And not only is it on my shelf, but I have marked it all up. I have no recollection of this. In some ways, it’s depressing, but in some ways, it’s good, because it means you’re reading a lot and widely. And they can’t all stick with you, because of limited brain space. This helps me keep track of them [books] as a reader, but mostly, it’s most helpful for writing. I was not sure whether or not I could write a novel until I wrote a novel, but what I knew was that I had read a lot of them, and that was going to be pretty good training to give it a shot. I don’t have an MFA, I don’t have writing classes. … But what I had was years and years and years of reading novels.
What I find really useful is to read them as a writer, and to think really clearly and specifically and consciously and conscientiously, about what works and how it was made to work, and what didn’t work, and why not, and how that applies to my writing in general and my project in particular. I try to be as specific as I possibly can, because it’s not helpful if you’re like, “Well, this writing is really beautiful, and my writing is terrible, so I should try to write better.” That is not a useful piece of criticism for yourself. But what is helpful is to look at a book and say, “This book has lots of characters and my book also has lots of characters. How did this writer help the reader keep track of all the characters? And how can I do that too?” … I find it endlessly useful, and I’ve been doing it for years and years. I do it religiously.
STH: Has that ruined the magic of reading novels for you?
LF:[laughs] You’d think, right? It’s true, I was sitting in my cousin’s kitchen a few years ago reading a novel with a pencil in my hand and making notes and she said, “What are you reading that for?” And I said, “Nothing, I’m just reading it for fun.” And she was like, “I’m so happy I don’t have to read books that way.” But in fact, I still enjoy it. It is true that I can’t turn off that critical part of my brain. ... But also, I really like reading. So I like it enough to overcome the analytical part of it. I also, of course, am endlessly fascinated by that critical, analytical approach to books, because that’s what I do. I kind of geek out on that. I find this exercise to be so useful that I always have my students do it, and often my students complain about exactly that. Well, too bad.
STH: You seem to write novels about issues that are trending before they’re trending. How do you manage that?
LF: Dumb luck. I think it’s dumb luck. Because it just takes years for novels to come out. So it’s not clear that they’re going to be hot topics when I write them. I suppose there’s also an argument to be made about that’s why I’ve been able to get them published. But I mostly think it’s just luck. I also think there’s an extent to which, for me, these topics are metaphors. So they’re going to be vaguely timely.
You know, like technology, it doesn’t take much prescience to hit that. We’ve certainly been talking about it in a variety of ways for years and years and years. I actually think Goodbye for Now has become more timely than when it came out in the first place, just because social media has become even more ubiquitous … . [Frankel departs on a small but significant rant about social media here.]
STH: Can you explain the genesis of the idea for Goodbye for Now?
LF: There are a couple of answers to that question, as there always are. One of them is that my grandmother died and she and I had emailed one another a lot. We only lived 20 minutes apart, so I saw her pretty regularly, so it was not particularly in-depth emailing, but it was still frequent enough. After she passed, I kept thinking that somebody should invent a way to read all her emails and then I could correspond with that, and they could fake her persuasively and that would make me feel better.
I kept saying this to my husband -- who is a software engineer -- what a great idea this was, and was this possible, and he kept saying, “No.” I sat with the idea for two and a half years before I realized that it isn’t a good idea, I don’t have the ability to execute it, I don’t know what I’m talking about, but I’m a novelist. So while it was a bad idea in real life, it was a good idea for a book, something I should have realized right away, but did not. Then the other thing is that I hate Facebook. It would be really nice if it were a more romantic answer, but really just hate Facebook. I really, really dislike social media. I was under pressure to do a good bit of it to promote my first novel, and I thought, I really dislike this, and it’s ruining everything for everybody.
[The idea of an electronic conversation with dead loved ones] was pretty obvious to me when I sat down and thought about it: “Boy, are there lots of ways this could go wrong.” I think that everybody else was a few years in when they thought, Hey, Facebook is free, so how are they making money? Wait a minute, they’re making money off of me, I’m the product here! I remember when that revelation went around on social media, and I was like, yeah, that was immediately clear to me. Really, not because I’m wise or anything, just because I disliked it so viscerally.
STH: Since technology has almost caught up to your fiction, I assume you find it a little alarming and creepy?
LF: Yes, I find it alarming and creepy, that is exactly right. This technology now exists. This technology that I made up, and really made up as an object lesson in things that we should be warned about and paying attention to, has in fact since come to pass. This book won an award for science fiction/fantasy and it isn’t anymore, even at all. And I find that really, really alarming. Because my point was, this is possible and is it desirable? And what we have found is that people have answered the first question but not the second. And that’s what I, frankly, find alarming about social media in general is we are using it constantly. But we’re thinking about it almost not at all. In fact, it is training our brains to do that. It is not an accident that we are not critically considering it; we are prevented from doing so. Even as we are almost unable to not engage with it at this point. And that scares the hell out of me.
STH: All those tiny little dopamine hits …
LF: Right. I get that. I think that’s the struggle with the internet generally. We were promised connectivity and we have it in spades and it’s great. Access and connectivity have been paid off and it’s fantastic. It’s just that there’s a significant but there. And we’re not talking about it enough and in fact we’re discouraged from doing so.
STH: Your third novel, This is How It Always Is, centers on a family with a transgender child, but mostly it seems to be about parenting.
LF: Yes, exactly. As I was saying, for me these things are always a metaphor. When I came up with the idea for this book, that’s what it was: The way in which having a transgender child is actually just like having ... a child. And it seems like there are these moments that this is very anomalous, and it is in some ways, but not in most ways. Mostly I feel like this is how it always is, and that’s where the title comes from. I think it is a book about parenting.
STH: But it has the topic that is becoming something many people are discussing and many transgender children are coming out at this point and seeing this as a possibility, and it’s exciting, but it also makes them so vulnerable. That’s what I saw in your book is the vulnerability that they were so worried about.
LF: Yes, indeed. It is a little bit self-fulfilling, or at least I hope that it will be a little bit self-fulfilling. I think it’s true in the book, but I hope it’s also true in the world. That, as more and more kids realize that this is a possibility, are willing to have a conversation about it, are willing to tell their parents their reality and have that not shouted down, as more and more parents share this experience, as more people realize that this is out there and it happens, it will happen more and more. Because there have been transgender kids and transgender adults, who realize very young they are transgender, for all of time. The question is really just what happens to them when the reaction to them is something other than horror or terror or fear. And that’s how that story changes, for everyone.
STH: I know you don’t like to talk about your next novel, but you’ve said it also addresses gender. So let’s be general here. Why is gender such a rich vein for a novelist to mine?
LF: I want to argue that narrative is almost always about gender. It’s another thing I love about Shakespeare. In Shakespeare it is always about gender. When you think that the plays were written for boys to play the women’s roles, they’re really just all about gender in the most interesting ways. That’s some of what I love about that. … It’s hard for me to think about writing a novel that isn’t about gender somehow. Among other things it remains -- unfortunately, insanely -- subversive to write, say, a strong female character, or to write female characters and not say what they look like. … There are certainly some people who are going to write books that really explore no issues of gender at all, but those people are never going to be me.
STH: Can you talk about the truth of fiction, not whether a story is factual, but whether it’s true?
LF: Fiction is true. I actually find successful fiction to be more true than nonfiction, almost without fail. People will tell me sometimes that they only read nonfiction because they wouldn’t waste their time with fiction because it isn’t true. And I actually feel exactly the opposite. I think that nonfiction, as soon as you put it in book form, it already is biased, it already is dated, it has already has left a bunch of things out, it already has had a bunch of things spun by the publisher. And all those things happen in fiction too, but because it wasn’t purporting to be per se factual, there’s a lot more leeway in all of that.
I find nonfiction to be really restrictive, because you can only talk about things which actually happened. And I don’t actually care what actually happened. It’s not nearly as truthful to me as being able to make it up, as far as narrative goes. …
[Fiction] is just a more interesting version of events usually. You know how you’re having a conversation and you get home later and you realize, ‘No, here’s how I should have put this. Here’s how I should have said it.’ This is the witty response that I couldn’t come up with on my toes, this is the insightful metaphor I couldn’t come up with off the top of my head. The beauty of fiction is that the dialogue is all perfect and the seeds all sprout and it all reveals perfectly the exact thing that you hoped that it would. Life is not like that. But fiction is, eventually, if you edit it enough.
STH: You’ve written that you’d like to raise your child to “be a strong, smart, happy, successful human in the world and to write words that make the world a better place.” How can words make the world a better place? … This a softball question, go ahead.
LF: [laughs] So much so that I’m not sure how to answer it. It just seems so obvious to me. I suppose there is the obvious way. I have gotten a lot of email and response from this book [This is How It Always Is] that say, “Thank you, I thought I was the only one.” Or “Thank you, I thought these people were really gross, and now I don’t.” … I feel 100% that storytelling changes the world. In fact, it does it better than anything else. I think that you tell a new story and you convince people of the validity of that story and the world becomes a better place. Absolutely, I believe that.
Five steps back from the high-falutin-ness of it, I just think that books are great. They teach people and they make people feel empathetic and they allow you to live a life that you’re never going to lead, of a person who you’re never going to be. And that’s what makes us creative humans, and empathetic humans and loving of one another and understanding of worlds which are not our own and understanding that those worlds actually are our own, we just don’t happen to be living that particular life.
It is some of what bothers me so much about social media is that it’s replacing books. They’re taking that hour before bed that people used to spend reading a novel and now they’re just going through their Facebook feed. And it’s very difficult for me to see how that’s not an enormous loss. Reading helps you to be loving, it helps you to be critical. It helps you to be able to tell the difference between that which is true and sensical and that which is lying and manipulative, and gosh, I think that is a good skill for all of us to have.
