That’s a lot of exposure for the author of Refresh, Refresh and The Wilding, two well-received books published by Graywolf Press, and The Language of Elk, his debut story collection originally published by a university press. As of this writing, Red Moon is in the top 20 of several Amazon.com categories, including “Literary Fiction” and “Fantasy,” so that exposure, backed up by a national book tour and Grand Central’s hardworking publicity department, seems to be working.

Percy, whose fiction has appeared in the Paris Review and Best American Short Stories, is among a select group of critically-acclaimed writers — among them Justin Cronin (The Passage) and Colson Whitehead (Zone One) — who are now finding large audiences with horror fiction. He took time at the end of his recent national book tour to answer my questions about this stage in his life as a writer.<

The Millions: Red Moon, like the werewolves at the heart of its story, is a shapeshifting hybrid — a literary horror novel. In what tradition do you place this book?

Benjamin Percy: If people want to call it a literary horror novel, that’s fine. I know it makes them feel better in a neat-freaky sort of way. Like balling their socks and organizing them in a drawer according to color. And I know it’s a talking point, a frame for discussion. But really, people, it doesn’t matter. These are phantom barricades. What is Margaret Atwood? Or Kate Atkinson? Or Cormac McCarthy? You could argue them into several different corners of the bookstore. If I’m going to align myself with anyone, it’s them. And Peter Straub and Dan Chaon and Larry McMurtry and Ursula K. LeGuin and Tom Franklin and Susanna Clarke and anyone else who makes an effort to be both a writer and a storyteller, someone who puts their muscle into artful technique and compulsive readability.

TM: A few prominent literary writers have published horror-related or –themed novels in the last few years. Like them, you received much praise for your earliest work, but this novel will reach the largest audience. Do you worry that readers will tire of the literary crossover novel?

BP: Realism is the trend. That’s what people seem to forget. Look back on the long hoof-marked trail of literature. The beastly majority of stories contain elements of the fantastic. It’s only very recently that realism has become the dominant mode. And that’s changing. Thanks to people like Michael Chabon and Jonathan Lethem, who have been cheerleaders for the Avengerization of literature, and thanks to writers like George Saunders and Karen Russell and Kevin Brockemeier and Matt Bell and Kate Bernheimer, who have a kind of hybridized vigor and playfulness to their work that makes them neither fish nor fowl, both literary and genre.

Some people have referred to Red Moon as a departure for me. It’s no departure except stylistically: I have written an epic, sweeping novel (whereas my previous work has been compact). I grew up on genre and even my so-called literary work is plotted and employs the tropes of horror. “Crash” is a ghost story. So is “Unearthed.” “The Caves in Oregon” is a haunted house story. “The Killing” is a pulpy tale of revenge. “When the Bear Came” and “The Woods” are creature-in-the-forest stories. My short story “Refresh, Refresh” was originally a fantasy in which the boys transformed into their fathers by the end. My novel The Wilding originally contained an ending that revealed a supernatural monster. Both were edited into realism.

There is no crossover. Red Moon isn’t some dalliance. This is the kind of book I’ve been working toward writing my whole life and this is the kind of book you’ll be seeing from me from here on out.

TM: You’ve had a lot of new experiences related to the publication of Red Moon — meetings at Amazon headquarters, a trip to the United Kingdom to promote the book, and an appearance at the Texas International Comic Con (Comicpalooza). What has surprised you most about this stage of your career?

BP: I’m in a constant state of surprise. I don’t take anything for granted. In part that’s because of the way I was raised. And in part that’s because I faced a steady stream of rejection for years before finding any sort of success. Every publication, every award, every event is gravy. There is no point in my life when I have thought, “I’ve made it.” I don’t think there ever will be. I’m constantly amazed (and almost embarrassed) by good news. And I’m constantly certain that something terrible will befall me. On a daily basis, I think about back-up jobs. Like, postal carrier. I think that would be a killer job. Just walk around, whistling, tucking letters into mailboxes, thinking up stories. And I might be considering something like this — how I’m going to pay the bills, how I’m going to get my kids through college — right after I walk out of Amazon’s offices or off a stage at Comicpalooza.

Because that’s the way my mind works, I have to remind myself to enjoy the moment. My buddy Jess Walter — novelist and zenmaster — is really good at this. I get on the phone with him and he tells me to chill out, look around, appreciate how the hard work has paid off. And for a few minutes I’m like, “Yeah! You’re right, Jess Walter!” And then I go back to grinding my teeth down to nubs.

TM: Is it true that your agent, Katherine Fausset, sold the novel before it was written? She’s also thanked in the back of your first book, a story collection published by a university press. At what point did you start to work with her? Has working with her affected or influenced how you approach writing fiction?

BP: Katherine sold Red Moon based on seventy pages, accompanied by a twenty-page outline. Same goes for the next novel, The Dead Lands, which releases in June 2014, a post-apocalyptic reimagining of the Lewis and Clark passage. She’s the perfect combination of tough, smart, witty, and sweet — as an editor, advisor, champion, friend. We began working together in 2004. At the time, I had “sold” my first book on my own to Carnegie Mellon University Press, after soliciting many agents and editors and hearing the same thing from all of them: “Get in touch when you have a novel.” After I signed the contract, I made a ballsy move, posting the deal on Publishers Marketplace, describing it in the most flattering terms possible. My inbox flooded with emails from Warner Brothers, the Paris Review, Albin Michel (who remain my French publisher), and a long list of agents who noticed I wasn’t represented. I was in the fortunate position to get on the phone and talk to all of them before deciding that Katherine was the best match. She’s my first line of defense, the person I send my manuscripts to before they head off into the wild world, and she always has an insightful response, editorial and business savvy.

TM: What is your work day like when you’re at home? Are you able to write while you travel?

BP: On an ideal day, I wake up at six, box up some lunches, ship the kids off to school, then brew a pot of coffee and head downstairs to the cobwebby dungeon where I work. I’ll spend six to eight hours hammering the keyboard and then — come mid-afternoon — I’ll climb out of the dark to play with my kids, hang with my wife, catch up on chores, help cook dinner. When I travel, I’m reading on planes, writing in hotel rooms, which doesn’t suit me, but I make it work. A quiet routine is the best friend of a writer.

TM: Grand Central just reissued your first book, The Language of Elk, as an eBook. What will readers of Red Moon think of that book or Refresh, Refresh, your second story collection?

BP: I wrote the stories in The Language of Elk when I was twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four. This was my time in grad school. Once I “sold” the collection, it took another two years to come out. People might be interested in them archaeologically — to see how far I’ve come stylistically, thematically. Of the stories in there, “Swans” and “Unearthed” are the ones I’m most proud of, but even they make me cringe. I wish I could go back in time and workshop myself violently. But that’s how I am with all of my writing. I’m immediately dissatisfied with it. I’ll edit myself even when standing behind a lectern, reading to a room full of people. I’m glad for that — it means I’m always chasing something better, never plateauing.

TM: Aside from length, what do you perceive to be the essential differences between the short story and novel forms? Do you see yourself continuing to write short stories?

BP: I have another collection ready, but Katherine wants to wait and shop it after I have a few more novels out. I love short stories — writing them, reading them — but over the past few years my mind has rewired and I think almost exclusively in the long form. The differences between novels and short stories are legion, but to break it down as simply and generally as possible: a short story is a stylistically vigorous glimpse of a life.

TM: The Wilding, your first novel, is about a son, father, and grandfather who find trouble during a hunting and fishing trip into the mountains. The role of Karen, the wife/mother back at home, is less important — it’s a subplot. The majority of your short stories are about men or boys. At what point did you decide to make Red Moon’s protagonist a teenage girl?

BP: Red Moon has a huge cast — and I’d say six of them are identifiable as protagonists. They are men and women, young and old, the infected and the uninfected — from all different geographic and cultural and political backgrounds. I wanted these myriad perspectives to tangle together, contradict each other, supply a complicated vision of complicated subjects: xenophobia, terrorism.

With that said, Claire and Miriam are my two favorite characters in the novel. Red Moon has more in common with X-Men than it does Twilight, but I did have Bella in the back of my mind when writing. I’m disturbed by how she — emotionally and physically abused by the man/vampire she falls in love with and sacrifices herself to — became a role model for so many. I’m surrounded by fiercely strong women. My mother is a warrior. My wife is a force, and our daughter is like a miniature version of her. All of my bosses (department chair, editors, agent) are tough as hell, smart as hell. So I was thinking more about them when building the characters of Claire and Miriam, who are stronger than any of the men in the novel.

TM: In an interview several years ago, you mentioned having abandoned earlier novels, but that The Wilding played to your strengths. What do you see as your strengths now?

BP: I didn’t abandon any novels. I completed four — all failures — and buried them. Most writers have a similar arc: you get the bad writing out of your system. Throw away a few thousand pages. The Wilding, my first published novel, was a negotiation between the short and long form — in that it has a small time frame, follows a small cast, takes place on a small stage. It was a gateway to the epic sweep of Red Moon (which is a novel that follows many characters over many years in many different places). I’ve always loved the epic — the immersive reading experience provided by T.H. White’s The Once and Future King, Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, Stephen King’s The Stand — and I’m excited to have conquered something of this scope. It’s the same exhausted satisfaction that comes from completing a 10,000-piece jigsaw puzzle. With that said, I know I can do better — and plan to in the next novel.

TM: You’ve published a number of articles about the craft of fiction writing, including several for Poets & Writers, and a craft book, Thrill Me, is on the way. How do you answer critics who say it’s too soon for you to publish a book of writing advice? That it’s too early in your career to assume that role? Stephen King, a writer you admire, had been publishing novels for twenty years before On Writing.

BP: Writing a craft book is such a small pebble tossed in the big lake of letters, I can’t imagine anyone even noticing or caring. Dozens of people will be outraged by the dozens of people who read my writing advice!

I’ve been teaching writing for over a decade — including time served in MFA programs, among them the Iowa Writers’ Workshop — and I’m a regular on the conference and festival circuit. And people use my Poets & Writers columns regularly in classes, so I guess I must have at least a few nuggets of half-assed wisdom to share.

What distinguishes the book is this: I’m not going through the standard motions, talking about character, setting, point of view, and blah blah blah. I’m looking at genre through a literary lens and focusing especially on how to ramp up suspense and momentum. Hopefully it will be helpful.

TM: Young writers are often told that teaching will take time away from their writing, but it doesn’t seem to have hindered you much.

BP: I’ve had some killer teaching loads. The 4/4, with four different preps a semester. All writing classes of thirty students or more, so that I was grading what amounted to two thousand pages a semester. And doing service. And raising kids. And renovating a house. But if you know me — like, live near me, see me regularly — you know that I’m no fun. All I do is work. I’m obsessed. Writing is my obsession. And when I had those heavy teaching loads, I would sleep four hours a night in order to get the writing done. The writing has always been the priority. Everything else is what I need to do, but writing is what I must do. If you don’t have that mindset, then you’re always going to be prepping class or grading papers before you’re building worlds, pushing sentences around.

TM: You’re adapting The Wilding for the screen, working with producer Shana Eddy and director Guillermo Arriaga (Babel, 21 Grams). To my knowledge, this is your first screenwriting job. How did this opportunity unfold, and what have you learned during the process?

BP: I’ve written a few original screenplays that didn’t go the distance, but taught me quite a lot. But yeah, this is my first job as a screenwriter. If you look at Arriaga’s Twitter bio, you’ll see that he describes himself first as a hunter, then a storyteller. When Shana read about the book, she thought it would match his sensibility.

It’s been fun, getting a second chance on a novel. And playing around with the form. Arriaga always employs a non-linear design and he wants me to do the same.  So I’ve rearranged the narrative in a way that contributes to suspense and gives the viewer the sense of being lost in the woods.

TM: The magazine writers I know work hard — they’re word hustlers — but they don’t have major book contracts and movie deals and a university position. Maybe one of those, sometimes two, but not all three. Why do you write for magazines? What do you get out of it?

BP: I’ve never had writer’s block because I keep a lot of irons in the fire. When I get sick of the novel, I write a short story, fiddle with a screenplay or comic script, hammer out a craft essay, pitch an article. Then I return to the novel, which is always my central concern, with renewed energy and a fresh perspective. So there’s that — this compulsion I feel to dabble in all different forms of storytelling — and there’s this: magazine writing is fun. I typically take on some sort of challenge (like, jump out of a plane, raft a river, hang-glide off a mountain, climb a 250-foot old-growth tree and spend the night in it, go on a crazy detox diet in which I drink only water and eat only fruits and veggies for 21 days). Usually it’s something I want to do or need to do, and then I scam an article out of it. When writing fiction, I’m visiting faraway places and meeting new people, but only in my mind. Magazine writing puts me in new and uncomfortable situations, introduces me to interesting people, exposes me to danger—all of which I’ll probably find a way to channel into my fiction as well.

TM: “Refresh, Refresh” was adapted into a graphic novel by the talented Danica Novdorgoff. Do you have plans to write an original graphic novel or comic book series?

BP: I’ve talked to Vertigo [an imprint of DC Comics] several times — we’ll see if something flies there — and I’ve just finished a graphic novel that M.K. Perker will be illustrating.

TM: What would you go back and tell young Ben Percy, the boy just beginning to dream of becoming a writer?

BP: I was going to say something like, “This is going to be a long painful apprenticeship. Be ready to put in your 10,000 hours at the keyboard before you produce anything of note,” or “Read your brains out and write your brains out,” or “If you want to go the distance, you’ll need the right balance of ego and humility,” but I learned all of that without anyone whispering Yoda-esque platitudes in my ear. So I guess I’d say what Jess Walter is always saying to me, “Don’t forget to enjoy yourself.” Not that I’d listen.

In an effort to nuance current coverage of Card, I chose to ask him questions about writing and his identity as a writer. He provided detailed answers by e-mail — what follows is an edited version of his replies.

(My own discussion of the gay marriage controversy is here.)

1. The practice of writing

The Millions: What does your workspace look like?

Orson Scott Card: I’m in an attic room, with walls that quickly turn into slanting ceiling. Very little room for art on the walls, but books completely lining the walls up to where the ceiling starts. These are my research books — history, daily life, archeology, language, reference works. A few old things that I never use but haven’t had time to purge — old software disks that no machine could read now, outdated almanacs.

My desk is against the north gable. From my window I can see the top of the neighbor’s house, the tops of trees, the sky. Nothing too distracting. Doesn’t matter — the computers have plenty of distractions. Both the desktop in front of me and the laptop on a table behind me have constantly changing wallpaper that cycles through thousands of images I’ve collected over the years. My private art gallery.

All around me are stacked CDs I mean to rip one of these days, to join the thousands of MP3s already on my computer. (My first hard drive had ten megabytes — if MP3s had existed then, my computer would have held exactly two songs, plus the software to play them.) Art books and magazines I mean to scan. Old bits of hardware. Books I intend to review. And notes about things I need to do Right Now (some of them two or three years old). Chaos. But I can get to the keyboard, the mouse, the screen. I can work.

TM: What are the main problems with creative writing education today? How do you address those problems at your writing “boot camp”?

OSC: Such a long, long list. Pre-college creative writing seems to be a sort of group therapy — gush out your feelings and nobody can criticize them because you’re being “creative.” Nobody teaches you the bones of the language. Nobody teaches you forms. Imagine trying to learn to play violin if no one taught you pitch and fingering, if you never practiced. But that’s what we do to children.

Then they get to college, where the ones whose native language abilities survived the uselessness of primary and secondary education begin to think they might become writers. Then they become the captives of the elitists, who teach them to write in such a way that their work can only have meaning to those who do not so much read as decode. Their symbols are obvious because they’re the only thing going on. They “shock” their readers — but only if their readers are still living in 1915. They learn to be “experimental” in exactly the way the Modernists were experimental. They are all style, no substance; all code, no message. I hear them doing their readings and it makes me sad, because some of them really are talented, but if they ever get an audience, it will be because they did not follow what they were taught by their writing teachers.

Specifics? First person present tense — a convention that makes sense in French, which hates its preterite, but none in English, where our real present is present progressive: Not “I pick up the envelope from the table” but “I am picking up the envelope from the table.” Who could bear to read a story, let alone a novel, in the true present tense of natural spoken English? So we get stories written in this artificial, impossible voice. The voice we use for jokes and anecdotes — “A guy walks into a bar, see” — but not the voice we use for truth — “No, he really did.” As soon as we want to be believed, we move to the past tense. But our most pretentious fiction is in the language of jokes.

Regular readers generally know they’re being excluded when present tense is used for narrative. It’s a shibboleth for the overeducated, the true believers.

The sad thing is that because young readers don’t yet recognize the shibboleths, overtaught but underskilled writers of YA fiction often get away with first person present tense. It worked for Hunger Games because the story was so powerful; but the choice hampered the sequels. It’s simply not a natural narrative choice in English; most writers confess that they are faking it because they use pluperfect for the narrative past when the past of present-tense narrative is the simple preterite or present perfect.

TM: In your How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy you talk at length about the “wise reader.” In brief: What characterizes the wise reader and how can writers find one to critique their work?

OSC: I warn my writing students not to submit their work to English majors, who are likely to be true believers in the anti-communication school of literature, unless they plan to do the opposite of whatever such readers suggest. Nor should they keep showing their work to the same writing group — after a year, you’ve learned everything they have to teach you, and you have nothing of value left to offer them.

Most such critiquers are like doctors who walk into the patient’s room, and without asking a question, glance at the sufferer and prescribe something in Latin and then move on.

The wise reader, on the other hand, prescribes nothing — ever. The wise reader merely reports to the writer on the experience of reading, which boils down to three questions: So what? Oh yeah? Huh?

When the wise reader catches her mind wandering, thinking about something else, she puts a line in the margin at the point in the text where she noticed she was thinking of something else. It means she lost interest — so what?

When the wise reader finds herself doubting — oh, would he really do that? — then she puts another mark in the margin. It means she cannot suspend her disbelief at this point — oh yeah?

When the wise reader finds herself confused, having to read a paragraph again, or look back through the text to see how she missed some fact now taken for granted (when did that happen?), then there is a flaw in clarity of narrative. Huh?

These boil down to belief, concern, and clarity — or, to help readers of the Pauline epistles remember it, faith, hope, and clarity. And the greatest of these, as Paul said, is clarity.

The wise reader then points out these marginal marks to the writer and says, Here I didn’t believe; there I was confused; in this spot I found I was thinking of grocery shopping. It is the writer’s job to figure out what in the text caused these poor responses, and then to figure out how to fix the problems. Foolish writers argue with the wise reader, pointing out how it’s perfectly clear, or this really happened once so it’s definitely believable, or how can you not care! Such writers don’t deserve a wise reader. The good writer thanks the wise reader and then reinvents the story so belief and concern are not lost, and edits the language so that the narrative is perfectly clear and never, never, never confusing.

2. The meaning of your work

TM: Some readers have understood the Ender saga and the Homecoming saga as “feminist.” Would you agree with that characterization?

OSC: As the child of a working mother, I thought of myself as feminist until the word took on a narrow political meaning that bore no relation to the reality of the human species. I have no program of “feminism,” though I do treat my female and male characters as equally human and equally interesting.

TM: In Xenocide, the godspoken on Path are actually victims of government genetic modification meant to control them. When I was young, I read this as a powerful critique of the origins of religious belief. Was that your intention? Are doubt and self-reflective questioning an important part of faith?

OSC: No one has any answers until they’ve asked the questions. No one knows anything until they have taken into account their own needs and drives and hungers, and those of the culture around them. What people often miss in Xenocide is that the young heroine responds to the drives built into her genes in order to control her by becoming obsessively and perfectly obedient to them. Not everyone responds that way. Even when we are genetically modified (and we all are; it simply is nature rather than government that usually does the modifying), our self is distinguished by what we choose to do about our drives and impulses, our weaknesses and strengths.

There is no human being without religion. I am amused by those who consider themselves post-religious, who sneer at religions or religious people. All they are really saying is, “What you believe is ‘religion’; what I believe is truth.” This is the way all fanatics think. And see how they behave, trying to silence those who don’t share their unbelief! We live in an age of inquisitions and puritanism, and the inquisitors and puritans all believe themselves to be “above” religion even as they try to enforce their ignorant faith using the power of the state.

All knowledge that we believe so firmly that we act upon it is faith, and almost none of it is based on our personal experience. We believe what others have told us, and consider “sane” those who agree with the people we agree with. I have watched with amusement, then sadness, as “education” has become indoctrination; as students are taught that conformity to a set of received ideas is the same as being “smart,” and nonconformity is “stupidity.” Yet it is those who receive these “smart” ideas without question who are most stupid. This kind of stupidity is common in religious communities; it is equally common in universities. So many idiotic ideas are believed without question — and without evidence — while anyone who questions them is ridiculed, their arguments answered with character assassination.

So yes, Xenocide is a critique of unquestioning faith — but not of “religion” as it is normally spoken of. Since “religion” is an artifact of all human communities, and there are no human beings without it, I am no more anti-religious than I am anti-oxygen. I only suggest that perhaps we will do better if we earn our beliefs by rigorous examination of our beliefs and a constant process of holding our belief in abeyance, acting on that which we believe to be true, but always ready to change our minds when better information is available.

TM: You have written that “good artists do their best to sustain that which is good though their art, and call for the correction of that which is destructive of happiness.” Can you give examples of how your work tries to accomplish that mission?

OSC: I don’t consciously attempt to do any such thing. I’m not prescribing in that statement, I’m merely describing. Without any conscious thought at all, artists select the subject and the medium, the matter and the manner of their art. The very choices they make declare what they value and believe to be important. Artists are at their least effective when they try to make conscious statements through their art (they’re always free to write essays to make their case); the conscious statements are as obvious and empty and ineffective as “Rosebud,” while the unconscious statements are powerful because they are rarely noticed by the audience even as they have their effects.

Every work of art is an attempt to create a community; any artist who claims to create only for himself is a liar, unless he never showed his work to another soul. Every work of art is mostly a reflection of the artist’s culture, unconsciously passed along because the artist has never thought the world could work any other way; yet every work of art, even the most conformist, is still different from any other’s work, and so it challenges the status quo to some degree, however minuscule.

I love to work in science fiction and fantasy because we deliberately rewrite the rules of reality. Sadly, of course, even in our field we tend to converge on consensus realities, as Bruce Sterling once pointed out before he himself joined a new consensus reality. So even we keep searching for new writers to re-envision the world around our characters. Yet even in the most relentlessly conformist of the just-like-every-other-post-modernist fiction, there are glimmers of individuality — even creative writing programs can’t stamp out every vestige of it, try as they might. Whether you are openly reinventing reality, you reinvent it; whether you are deliberately championing certain cultural values, you champion at least the ones you have not yet thought to question.

I have learned to trust my unconscious mind. In my many years at this trade, I have had a chance to see what many readers have found in all my stories, and I am sometimes astonished at the personal and cultural meanings they found in them. Yet I cannot, and would not wish to, challenge their readings as long as they conform to the text

3. Art and society

TM: Last year Christopher Tolkien decried the commercialization of his father’s work, saying that it has “reduced the aesthetic and philosophical impact of the creation to nothing.” You are a fan (albeit with some misgivings) of Peter Jackson’s films. Do you think commercialization can have a negative impact on art? Do you fear it with your own work?

OSC: Commercialization does not erase one word of the original work. Lord of the Rings is still available in its entirety — and with wonderful commentaries by superb scholars like Tom Shippey. All adaptations and translations will leave out or overemphasize things in ways that others will resent or regret; this is true when you translate LOTR into German or Japanese, just as when you translate it into film. I once adapted LOTR (with permission) into a public reading script, three hours per volume, and performed it once at NorWesCon in Seattle and again at MythCon at Pepperdine University. Perforce I left out things that others loved; I left in things that Peter Jackson left out of the movie. I think all my choices were right and where he differed with me, he was wrong. But his movie got made and showed us many wonderful things, even though he also added several foolish things and left out what I think of as the heart of the movie. He obviously considers my view wrong.

So what? The book is still there. Let’s remember that most people don’t read books. So the commercialization brings a translation of the story to an audience that would otherwise never receive it. Some of them will go on to read the book, which they might not otherwise have done. Most will not. But in our culture, though film is the highest-prestige medium (“That story was so good they oughta make it a movie!”), the text of the novel has the highest authority. Where the two disagree, nobody will ever say that the film shows what really happened; that will only be said of the book.

All readings, all viewing, all hearings of art are edited by the listener anyway. No two members of the audience receive or remember the same work. Yet with repetition we converge on the most authoritative source, which should be, and usually is, the original. Christopher Tolkien has nothing to fear. Commercialization is a symptom of success; it does not harm anyone’s ability to receive the original.

For that matter, even the written text of LOTR is an inferior way to receive it, because readers almost invariably skim over the songs and poems which were so important to Tolkien and which show so much of his mastery of language and cultures. So for me, the supreme way of receiving LOTR is the audiobook. It gives you every word of every song and poem, right along; you cannot easily skip it. It is the most complete way to experience Tolkien’s original. Yet one might also think of the audiobook as part of the commercialization of LOTR.

Ender’s Game is an unfilmable book. Yet it is being filmed. All such translations are inadequate. But the film, if it is a good film, and regardless of its degree of faithfulness to the book, will bring new readers to the book; they will then discover the authoritative version of the story. Some will prefer the movie. So what? That group would never have read the book without having seen the movie, so Ender’s Game will have lost no part of its natural audience.

Decrying the commercialization of a successful work of art is like famous actors complaining about the annoyances of fame. The annoyances are real enough, but they are also a symptom of success. Which would you rather have? Less annoyance and less success? Or the greater success with the greater annoyance?

TM: You’ve long been interested in video games and have even written for some. Recently you expressed frustration with the unreflective and poorly researched blaming of violent video games for social ills. Is there any kind of art you do think is dangerous?

OSC: All art both affirms and critiques the artist’s culture and community, whether she intends either outcome or not. Art that negates the strengths of a good community is bad; but art that negates the strengths of a bad community would be good. It gets very complicated, and few people are able to agree on the goodness or badness of any long list of attributes of a culture, or their relative weight. We might say, yes, this that you attack is bad, but not as bad as that, which you do not mention. As if every artist should observe the same things, and share the same values!

Yet that is precisely what many people insist on. They are sure that art they do not like causes harm, while art they enjoy is harmless. They are always partly wrong and partly right. But which part, and to what degree?

We promote freedom of speech and expression precisely so that we can openly disagree about what our culture should be and should value. We vote by admitting certain works to our memory and insisting that our friends also read, listen to, or look at it. Works that are beloved by many have a proportionate effect on the culture; works that are loved by fewer, but with greater intensity, may have an equal or greater effect. It is impossible to measure.

A work may indeed be dangerous, but the counter is not often to censor it, it is to offer an alternative. Yet puritans of one stripe or another invariably insist on censorship. Just as the Puritans of Political Correctness ban any speech by their opponents on most American university campuses merely because they do not agree with them, so also the Puritans of anti-violence would ban videogames merely because they do not enjoy them.

In fact we have actual data about the effects of videogames; even the most harmful are relatively harmless, in terms of any direct cause and effect on real-world violence. Pornography, on the other hand, has been proven to be a rehearsal for real-world acting-out of the scripts thus depicted. Yet the very people who would ban videogames are often the ones most insistent on protecting the freedom of pornographers. Research makes no difference to them; actual facts rarely influence people’s visceral decisions.

My problem is that I understand the arguments for and against censorship. There are things that I believe damage society — pornography among them — but I’m not absolutely sure that I’m right, or that a ban, if once instituted, would be limited to what I would call “pornography.” Once we admit censorship, the definition of the thing censored will always be expanded to include unintended objects.

It is best, in a free society, if one view never absolutely prevails. In a perpetual struggle between freedom and protection, and between this and that set of values, we have our best likelihood of achieving reasonable balances. Alas that we live in a time when no group can stay in business while accepting reasonable balances. You only get donations for extreme positions.

We’d be better off if, instead of banning censorship, we constantly argued about the definitions of what is or is not censorable, with the boundary constantly shifting back and forth. It is when the boundary is moved all the way to one extreme and stays there that we are endangered.

But that is only my opinion. I might be wrong. So even in my absolutely correct moderation I am not sure that I ought to prevail…

TM: According to your website, our society is becoming less free in matters of speech, press, and religion. You also say “art which is destructive of the values of a decent society is deserving of no special privilege or protection.” Should a society interested in free speech also protect art that it considers destructive?

OSC: It’s in the definition of a “decent society” that the monster hides.

That said, I think it’s more than slightly ridiculous to put “art” on a pedestal as if it existed above the realm of ordinary commerce and conversation. Freedom of the press and of speech and of belief are vital to a free society, for political reasons. But art?

What makes the whole argument ludicrous is that the very people who would protect works that some consider obscene, are perfectly happy to ban works that they consider to be racist. Everybody seems to accept censorship — they just disagree about the list of people-never-to-be-offended. Most people who champion the use of “fuck” would crucify you for saying “nigger” — they are no more in favor of “free speech” than those who believe the reverse, or who would ban both. And those who would ban neither invariably have their own private list of forbidden words. If we did not have such a list locked away in our brains, how would Tourette’s Syndrome even be possible?

Where I find the whole argument becomes offensive is when artists demand public funding for work that is deliberately offensive to taxpayers. Take your artistic freedom as you can — but pay for it yourself. When you expect the public to pay for it with money taken by threat of force, you are demanding that your art become a sort of established religion; and to oppose public funding for your art is not censorship; it is not even like censorship. When you take money from a sponsor, you surrender your freedom; if you want the freedom to be offensive, don’t dip into the pockets of unwilling people who are not free to resist your taking.

At Squaw, Ramona Ausubel and I were assigned the same workshop. At that time, Ramona was a student at UC Irvine’s MFA program, and I befriended her that first morning because I liked her clothes (priorities, people!). I soon discovered that aside from being stylish and amiable, she was also an insightful and generous reader. And then, on the last day of workshop, it was her turn to submit, and she turned in a kind-hearted, dazzling, and odd story, the kind of story that makes you think, “Wow, what a voice!” Sharing my work with Ramona, and getting to read her work, was one of the highlights of my time at Squaw. Years later, I would still recall her story’s whimsical tone, and the world she created: like our own, but stranger, and more absurd, but not any less cruel or complicated or joyful. That story, “Catch and Release,” is in her beguiling and elegantly written collection of short stories called A Guide To Being Born, which is, simply put, a pleasure to read. It’s been so much fun to see my talented friend publish and receive acclaim for her work. She deserves it.

Ramona answered a few questions via email. I am sure she was wearing something fabulous as she did so.

The Millions: For some reason, I didn’t expect these stories to be so funny. There’s this wonderful, amused tone to much of your work, whether it be a bunch of grandmothers who, upon mysteriously finding themselves on a ship, call out, Does anyone have a compass? and then, I’m from the DC area!, or a teenage girl’s mother eating a “low-this high-that salad.” It made me wonder how you regard the comic in fiction, and how you balance it with more serious subject matter. Can you talk a little about this?

Ramona Ausubel: For me, humor is totally necessary, in the way that a certain organ is necessary, yet you have no idea how it works. I don’t think about humor logically, as in, I don’t see a dark place in a story and think, “I could use some comic relief here.” It’s much more instinctual than that, and actually I think that’s a feature of humor in general. We need it, even, or especially, in the hardest situations. Sometimes it’s an escape, but just as often it’s a way of actually feeling the sad or hard thing, which might be too big to wrap one’s brain around otherwise. Plus, when you get your reader to laugh, they become involved in the story in a new way, they are a participant, and I like that. I like it when everyone’s got their hands in the mud-pile together.

 TM: This collection is separated into four parts, Birth, Gestation, Conception, and Love. How did you conceive (ha!) of this organization, and why did you decide to move backwards, from birth to love? Can you discuss the formation of these stories into a collection?

RA: It’s always amazing to me how long you can go along, not realizing your own obsessions. I first wrote these stories as individuals and not as a book, and then I looked back at the stack and the themes jumped right out at me. There was a moment where I actually felt deflated by this, worrying that my range seemed limited or something. Then someone said to me, “No, that’s what a book is.” After that, I decided to really push the question of what it is to be born again and again throughout one’s life, and that’s where the ordering and sections came in. I wanted to get at the idea that we are in one long cycle, and at the same time we are each in a constant state of transformation and mutation.

TM: There are some interesting echoes throughout the book. Grandmothers find themselves on a ship in “Safe Passage,” and then, later in the collection, in “Magniloquence,” professors wait for a Nobel Laureate lecture that never happens. Both stories are about death, and though they feature a main character, the narrative alights on many others who are also captive to their peculiar situation. Magical bodies abound: a man with drawers growing out of his chest; arms that sprout each time someone falls in love; a girl imagining she’s giving birth to a giraffe. And there are also a lot of family secrets, particularly surrounding a child’s absent parent. Did these echoes happen consciously, or did you step back later and see the return of certain themes and images?

RA: I would say I was semi-conscious of themes and recurring images. I don’t find I do very interesting work when I’m navigating with logic, so I try to let themes rise up if they rise up, rather than setting out to write a book about such-and-such. I know I’m going to write a story if I have a crush on the idea — the fluttery heartbeat, the staring off into space and thinking about it when other people are talking, etc. It’s driven by desire and instincts and all those animal-brain forces, which maybe explains why things get weird and also why I keep coming back to certain questions in different ways.

On the specifics: I like the tension between the unique experience of an individual and the pull of group-think. These won’t be the last stories about groups that you’ll see from me, I predict. And I’m totally fascinated with storytelling and with stories as actual things that affect the people who tell or hear them. A story is much longer-lived than the fleeting moment in reality that birthed it, and I love exploring the chemistry between fiction and reality. As for the fantastical elements — yes, I recognize that no one has ever grown another arm when they fell in love, but our real, actual bodies are very, very strange and amazing, even though we’re used to them, and love is very, very strange and amazing. So even though I was writing about an unreal variation, to me the magical elements are simply a magnification of what we’re all in the throws of all the time.

TM: I’m a pretty pure realist when I make up stories. Even when I’m playing pretend with my son, I’m far more likely to have us imagining we’re cowboys rather than, say, dragon-slayers. Or I have us pretend we’re at the post office. (Fun, right? Stamps! Envelopes!) This collection made me even more aware of my leanings — there is so much nutty stuff in your work, and I like it! Can you talk about these elements of fantasy and the magical in fiction?

RA: Thanks for sticking with the nuttiness! That’s definitely the way I’m wired. I love realism, too (I love anything that shows me the world again, whether it’s a world where crazy-crazy things happen or crazy-normal things happen). Some stories in the collection do not contain anything fantastical, yet I find I write most fruitfully when things are at least a little bit elevated or exaggerated. There are lots of conversations in the world about writing which focus on the benefit of the reader and what works for him or her, and of course all writers should care about that, but at the same time, the magic act of making something out of nothing is happening in the writer’s head, and it’s that brain that needs to be tended to first. I try to make sure I’m pushing stories in directions that make the brightest electric storms in my head, and hope that a reader on the other end is susceptible that same kind of lightning.

TM: I love the grace of your sentences. How do you approach prose when you’re writing a story? Does your sentence-making change when you’re writing a story versus a novel?

RA: Thank you! I often feel like I’m working when it comes to plot — I really have to put my back into it — yet when it comes to writing sentences and paragraphs, I’m the one getting paid. That part is (almost) pure pleasure, and it makes the whole job doable.

I don’t know if my approach is consciously different when writing a novel vs. writing stories, although I’m sure there are more workaday sentences in No One is Here Except All of Us and in the new novel I’m working on, simply because there is more story to tell. Now I’m curious about this too! I’ll pay attention and we can talk about this again later!

 TM: Because this is The Millions, I must ask you: What’s the last great book you read?

RA: I’m finally reading Pale Fire by Nabokov, which is, unsurprisingly, really good. It’s weird and puzzling and there are many great, bizarre moments. I also just read a great first novel: A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra, which takes place in Chechnya and is about war and joy and survival and love. The writing is gorgeous, and though the subject matter is sometimes horrible and hard to read, the book is also funny and wise.

But I met her by way of an early read of her second novel, On Sal Mal Lane, which debuted May 14. The novel begins in Sri Lanka — Freeman’s birthplace — in 1979 and chronicles the years leading up to the country’s two-decade civil war.

I came to the novel knowing, vaguely, where Sri Lanka was on a map. I also knew something about a civil war. But beyond that, my experience of the country, its culture and people, was limited.

That didn’t matter.

A mere page and a half in, I was swept onto the verandas of Sal Mal Lane’s homes, caught up in the games of French cricket children played and hearing the tinkling of a piano drift through an open window. I was, also, all-too aware of the mounting political tension surrounding this small dirt lane and its inhabitants.

I finished the novel — and not without a few pauses to collect myself — with a deeper respect for the human spirit, despite what politics, violence, and loss can do to it.

Here’s my conversation with Freeman on writing On Sal Mal Lane and also what it means to be a writer and activist.

The Millions: Publisher’s Weekly calls you a “social justice activist and freelance journalist.” What does it mean to you to be an activist, journalist and novelist? How do those worlds intersect (or remain distinct)?

Ru Freeman: Everything I write is immersed in everything I live, so in that sense there is no separation. However they remain distinct to the extent that the political journalism that I do is intended to further a cause or agenda that I espouse, whereas the fiction is an effort to create a safe bridge between what I think and what other people might think — a bridge both they and I can cross without fear.

As far as the activism — to live is, for me, to be engaged with the world around me. While I go away to write, tuning out everything, the inspiration for all that I do comes from that world and I am deeply, insanely, completely open to that world. I let it into my head and my heart in every way I can; it stands to reason then that I cannot help but want to assist that world along in whatever way I can, to nudge people this way or that, whether it is through writing or marching or simply having a conversation.

TM: On Sal Mal Lane was initially conceived as a magazine assignment. Though that didn’t ultimately work out, how did you begin to think about the novel as a result?

RF: The novel is much better and it accomplishes what that article never could have done: it brings people, characters into the light and it asks people to live with them for a while, to feel as they might have felt, to walk down that street with them, to be shattered and repaired the way they were. The magazine assignment would have been just another piece people read and forgot, too linear and simplified to ever convey the complexity of a time and place, or to allow a reader to look around them, wherever they are, and see that it is possible to end a war, that there is hope, that reconciliation and peace are possible and within grasp.

TM: You were born in Colombo and experienced the early years of the civil war. Was writing about your childhood memories/experiences of it always something you wanted to do?

RF: Everything a person lives is part of what shows up in writing. Whether it is written about directly, as I have done in this book, or obliquely, as I did in the previous novel, A Disobedient Girl, (Atria/Simon & Schuster, 2009), there is a part of a writer’s history, their evolution, in everything they write. That isn’t to say it is autobiographical, but that it would be foolish to claim that the autobiographical facts are not a part of what we write. I didn’t set out to write this book or the previous novel or the new one I’m working on now; the stories are just the ones that rise to the surface and seem to resonate with where I am as I begin to write.

TM: What was the easiest part of the On Sal Mal Lane to write? The hardest?

RF: Devi was the easiest to write; she is the quintessential youngest child, adored, indulged, often to her own detriment, but mostly to her good in terms of the way those kids grow up very assured of their place in the world, as able to break rules as they are to trust that everybody loves them. All the others took more work, Sonna more than them all. He is my favorite, and it was hard not to give in to the temptation to wave the magic writerly wand and bless his life. It was hard not to allow him to be no more and no less than what he was.

TM: Tell us how you chose the point of view. Were there any other options you were considering early on, or ones you tried?

RF: I had the prologue, and then I went on to write the story, so there was some essential element of that voice in the book from the start. But, it was in re-working that prologue that it became stronger, the voice that I wanted for the whole book. I wanted to have some distance for myself, as the writer, from the events that I was describing, since I had lived through that time in Sri Lanka, but I also wanted the intimacy of being right there with all those characters. This voice, of the street, worked really well for that.

TM: How did you balance writing the story with the need for some historical/cultural context for readers who may be unaware of Sri Lanka and its history?

RF: I really do not like novels that give us the political-events fillers, that pause in order to point to this or that historical moment in its entirety. I always want what I write to reflect the consciousness of the characters. I feel that if I can tell the story of how a certain time affected fully-realized people, then the reader will go do their own research about the background. There is some detail in here, but it is organic to what is going on, to the interplay of relationships — between Mr. Herath and his children, between Mr. Niles and Nihil, between the children themselves — rather than as A Small Treatise On The History of Sri Lanka’s Ethnic Conflict.

TM: Wallace Stegner has said a writer is a (wo)man in search of an audience. Did you have a particular reader or audience in mind as you wrote On Sal Mal Lane?

RF: I have a responsibility as a Sri Lankan writer, to tell the stories of my country with a clear understanding that mine may be — for many people in the United States certainly — the only voice they hear with regard to those stories. I keep that in sight when I write. I have no wish to whitewash the mess of things, to portray my country as the jewel that it is to me, but rather to say here is a story from this place, here are the people who lived there, here is one tale about what happened to some of them. I also have Sri Lanka herself in mind, what is good for my country, what is good for her people. My words, written or spoken, are always in service to the greater good of the people of my country. To what they have lost, to what they may yet have again.

TM: Were there certain works you read while working on On Sal Mal Lane that helped you with character development, the overall story or, simply, moved you?

RF: There was a moment when I was thinking about this book that another writer suggested I read Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. I don’t know so much that I used any technique or related things from that book, but rather that there was an immersion in a moment in Biafran history that captured my imagination. I felt an “it can be done” sense when I finished reading it. The other books that I read were My Brother, by Jamaica Kincaid, and those on technique: Robert Boswell’s The Half-Known World, (Graywolf, 2008), and Charlie Baxter’s The Art of Subtext (Graywolf, 2007). If there was something I was grappling with, I’d turn to these texts and read through some relevant section, take notes, and, each night, think about if/how it might apply. The next morning, I’d go back to work.

TM: You’ve talked about how “the exercise of writing both fiction and opinion is reflective of a passionate attempt to contribute to our common human enterprise whether that is quiet, personal, public, political or all of these.” Why is this important to you?

RF: I write and my writing comes from being a human being, from inhabiting my very human, socially inter-connected, inter-dependent world. What else should I be engaged with? To eschew human experience — by turning into a recluse, by hiding from the world, keeping physical, emotional distance — but then to ask that world to read what I have written, hear what I have to say…this isn’t an equal exchange to me. If I lived that way then I fully expect you to consider my take on things to be entirely irrelevant.

I don’t like hierarchies, I don’t like the notion of the exalted thinker/writer who gazes from a distance. I don’t like people writing about worms without spending some time taking in the worm’s view of life.

How do you know what things look like to ordinary people if you don’t immerse yourself in that ordinariness? If you can’t acknowledge your own ordinariness? And if you aren’t putting yourself in service of furthering the well-being of such people, our people — whether it is through health care or a meaningful education or a living wage or access to the arts, or telling the stories of our experience? That is why it is important to me.

Ms. Silver was kind enough to answer my questions via email.

The Millions: With a novel like this, with three different characters and story lines, I am always curious how it was put together. Was this a case of what Madison Smartt Bell calls “modular design” where you fit these pieces together, mosaic-like, discovering, as you went along, how they fit, working not off of linear cause-and-effect, but something more thematic and intuitive? Or did you always know what order the stories would be told in, and did you write them in that order? How did the shape of this book emerge over time? What are the benefits and challenges of this kind of storytelling?

Marisa Silver: Structure is both an intuitive and an intellectual preoccupation for me, a tool of narrative propulsion as well as a fundamental aspect of the story itself. If I construct a piece of fiction correctly, the structure should, in a sense, tell the story. The three intersecting stories in Mary Coin, the story of Mary, the subject of the photograph, Vera Dare, the photographer, and Walker Dodge, the modern day historian, had to be interwoven in ways that not only created tension and movement, but that also reflected the overarching theme of the book, which has to do with how the historic moment changes over time, and how it is reinterpreted and repurposed to serve contemporary yearnings for the past. So, as I played around with the structure, I thought first about allowing the reader to settle into a story line so that he or she would feel invested in the character and in the drama. Then I thought about how to step away from that story at a moment when the reader would want to know what might happen next and yet not be disappointed to switch gears and points of view. And then I thought about how what comes before will impact the understanding of what comes next, even if what comes next takes place 50 years later or a 100 years before and focuses on a set of characters that might not be obviously related to those the reader has just read about. So it’s a question of collage — two things contain their independent meanings when viewed separately. Yet when they are juxtaposed, something new is created, new emotions are stirred, and, hopefully, something greater than its component parts is created. Structure in and of itself can be used to create suspense and a sense of urgency on the part of the reader. What is left out is as powerful as what is left in. The tantalizing sense of absence can draw a reader through a novel just as much as a pounding plot might.

Since the book is so much about history, it is also, necessarily, a book about time and the emotional ruptures created when time is broken up, when things are forgotten. A photograph captures a moment of time, but then time itself moves past that moment into the future. When we look at a photograph, we are looking at time stilled, at a moment that has died. And we are also looking at the space between things, between a moment past and the present moment we live in. And so a kind of emotional yearning is part of that experience, the deep desire for something that cannot be fully possessed. In the same way, a structure that moves around in time tells the story of that rupture and creates the experience of yearning that is also the subject of the text. My hope was the structural choices I made would be part of the experience of the novel’s central ideas.

TM: How much of this book is based in the real-life stories of Dorothea Lange and the woman she photographed? I am curious about the research that went into the book, and how that balanced with your imagined versions of these lives. The book wrestles with  notions of representation and exploitation in photographs, and Mary Coin and her family never benefit financially from the image Vera takes; it’s both Mary and not-Mary in that image. I wonder, did you struggle with similar questions of representation in creating these fictive depictions of real-life people? What do you owe a real-life person, when creating narrative?

MS: The issues surrounding appropriation and representation are central to the book itself and were, as you suggest, ideas I wrestled with as a writer. I began the process by doing a lot of research into the lives of Dorothea Lange and Florence Owens Thompson, the woman in the photograph. And, of course, I did more general research about the various time periods the book covers, wandering off into the eddies of subject matter that writing always leads me to explore. How was lumber cut and milled in the 1920s? What might a person’s hands look like if she pulled cotton eight hours a day? But I knew from the very beginning that my interest in taking on this subject was not about faithful recreation of the lives of the women who inspired the book. Rather, I was interested in the very idea of appropriation and how my own handling of the material would address that subject. I recognized early on that in fictionalizing this story, in layering onto the facts a kind of lyric inventiveness, I was doing exactly what any viewer of that photograph does: he brings his subjectivity to the viewing, along with the mores of the time he or she lives in, a social ethics and point of view that are formed by the now. In this way, the image viewed has as much to do with the actual documented moment as it does with reinterpretation and reinvention, the space fiction occupies.

What do I owe the real people upon whom I based my characters? I think I owed them the seriousness of my purpose, a deep consideration, and clarity, suggested within the work, about the fact that I was not endeavoring or presuming to write their lives, but that I was using their fascinating examples as inspiration for fiction. And I think I owed them affection, which I felt and continue to feel.

TM: All three of these story lines explore the pain, struggle, and rewards of parenting. Mary Coin has seven children to care for as a migrant farm worker and widow. The choices she makes in the book are heartbreaking — and are they even choices? For years, Vera Dare puts her family before her work, and then, when money is tight, she and her painter husband send their two young sons to live with a babysitter so that they can continue to work to support them. Later, she travels to photograph poor farmers and doesn’t see her sons for long stretches. Throughout, the making of photographs, and the life of a photo, are compared to parenting. In the modern-day storyline, Walker is a divorced father who struggles to see his two children for who they are, for who they’re striving to be. This novel succinctly depicts the sweet pain of parenting, which I really connected with. I was also struck by how money and the harsh reality of the economy dictates parental choices in the novel. Can you talk a little bit about these themes?

MS: The Lange photograph, “Migrant Mother,” is powerful for many reasons, not least of which is the fact that it evokes an image so embedded in our collective consciousness: Mary, the maternal ideal, holding infant Jesus while two angels look over her shoulders. I am fascinated by the tenacity of the ideal of the “good mother.” Despite the obvious ways in which a woman’s place in society has changed over the last half century, I think we still have a knee jerk notion that if a mother isn’t all-loving and all-caring, and if her decisions don’t always prioritize the child, then she is worthy of our judgment. When I started to engage with my characters as parents, and particularly Mary and Vera as mothers, I wanted to suspend judgment and simply look at the facts of their lives. Mary has seven kids. One could say that she is irresponsible having so many children when her situation is so dire. But it was less interesting to me to judge that choice than to think about why she makes that choice, and what her relationship is to her kids and to her idea of herself as a mother. In the same way, Vera sends her children to live away from her home so that she can work. The choice is a complicated one for her and I wanted to explore the ramifications for the character and for the story from her very subjective standpoint. All three parents in the story, Mary, Vera, and Walker, deal with the fact that, in various ways, they abandon their children. I think the idea of abandonment is central to the idea of parenting. Even if a parent doesn’t literally leave her child, there are other sorts of abandonments, ending with the final abandonment, which in most cases is the death of a parent. The idea of the missing, in both the sense of what is absent and what is longed for, is an underlying current that runs through the book.

TM: I want to describe the prose in this novel as “clean,” but that seems to barely capture what makes it so pleasing to read. The other word I want to use is “unsentimental.” There is something so spare and well-here-it-is about your depiction of the world, particularly when describing Mary Coin’s life of hardship. The moment when she tells Charles Dodge that she’s pregnant is a great example: “She could tell by his reaction that although he was curious about the particulars of her past, he would not be interested in her future.” The chapter ends there, like a knife in the gut. Can you talk about sentence-making and how it relates to the development of the story and your characters?

MS: Writing a good sentence is having to hit the bull’s-eye each and every time. A sentence has to serve so many purposes. It has to provide forward momentum. It has to tell us what we need to know. It has to suggest character. It has to stand at a correct distance from the characters in order to let the reader know the authorial attitude. It has to have within it a kind of kinetic energy that reflects the book’s or a character’s tone. Its construction has to illuminate the larger preoccupations of the book. It has to be disciplined and cannot be beautiful for the sake of beauty. The rhythmic interplay between sentences determines length and sound, smoothness versus percussiveness, which words end one sentence and which begin the next. I think it is my nature to subtract, to try to boil something down to its essentials so that only what needs to be said is said. I want to provide enough space around important words and ideas so that they have the impact I want them to have. I also think about a character’s behavior, or his actions, as being part and parcel of the sentence, and not simply because the sentence describes that action. In other words, what a character says and what he does have to be in dialogue with one another, hopefully a kind of itchy, incongruent dialogue. Then things get interesting.

Do I write spare, unsentimental prose? I always remind myself that what I am doing is reporting on what is happening in my imagination. The facts, ma’am. Just the facts.

TM: There’s a lot of rich material in the novel about photography and the power, posterity, and myths of an image. You were a screenwriter and a director before you published fiction. How does that background come into play with this book?

MS: When I was 20 years old, I made a film with the great documentary filmmaker, Richard Leacock, for PBS — it was my first real job. We made a film about a family of fundamental Christians who lived in Indiana. The people Ricky and I filmed agreed to take part, and we tried to be as true to them as we could, but I understood that both of these propositions — their agreement and our desire to film the “truth” — were fraught. I think it is very difficult for anyone to understand just how exposing it is to be the subject of a film or a photograph. And the minute a filmmaker or photographer puts a frame around reality, chooses a particular composition, and makes editing choices of what to show and what to leave out, the truth becomes a casualty. That experience made me think about what both my characters, Mary Coin and Vera Dare, might have felt as the subject and maker of the photograph in the novel. Ricky died during the time I was working on the book. I thought so much about the film we made together and about the impact he had on my creative life. We’d be filming a scene and suddenly, I’d look over, and Ricky’s camera would have strayed from the overt “subject” of the moment in order to film something seemingly inconsequential that was happening “over there.” And that thing, whatever it was — a cat dozing in the corner, or a kid stringing a lanyard — would become the shot that exploded the scene and gave it dimension and resonance. He taught me that it was as important to look at what was within the frame as it was to look outside it, that what I think is the point of a scene may not be the point at all. He taught me to look askance.

TM: Since this is The Millions, I must ask: What was the last great book you read?

MS: The last great book I read was The Flamethrowers by my friend Rachel Kushner. Oh, and The Scarlet Letter. I read it again. I was amazed by it again.

In her latest book, Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal, Mary Roach finally explores all that happens after you take that bite — not as an entertaining sideshow, but as the focus of 17 entertaining and occasionally bizarre chapters. Megacolons, stimulated saliva, death by constipation, and of course the scientists who study this stuff with aplomb (and an occasional apology): it is, as it were, all in there.

I interviewed her while she was in Seattle for her book tour.

The Millions: Your past work has focused on bringing topics that are creepy or lurid or awe-inspiring back down to earth. This one’s primarily about overcoming disgust. Did you find it challenging to make digestion and excretion palatable for your audience?

Mary Roach: Well, I think digestion is another lurid, taboo subject — particularly from the navel down. But even what goes on in the mouth is an unthinkable, revolting thing that no one wants to think about. There was a sense that this was right up my stinky little alley.

TM: Packing for Mars came out the same year that NASA retired the Shuttles and the Opportunity rover broke records for the longest Mars mission. Stiff came out around the same time that shows about forensic science became the hot new thing…

MR: And Six Feet Under.

TM: Right. Was there something that made you decide: yes, 2013 is the time to publish a book about the digestive tract?

MR: You know, I think the whole obsession with food had hit an unprecedented level, in terms of people photographing every meal and posting it on Instagram. Food has moved so far away from just a way to stay alive and take in sustenance to a point where it’s now almost high culture. So it makes sense to look past the borders of the lips and take a peek at what goes on after the food leaves the plate.

On the tour, my publicist set up events with people like Chris Kimball and Ted Allen, which makes for a really interesting conversation. We tend to elevate food to a sensual, cultural place, but for someone like Chris Kimball, he’s looking at food as chemistry. And eating is biology.

TM: Two of the most memorable people in your book were William Beaumont, the physician who made a career out of his patient’s stomach fistula, and Andries van der Bilt, the chewing scientist at Utrecht who will probably be the last researcher of his kind at the university. In other words, in the book you go from the early days of science virtuosos to very specialized people doing narrow and admittedly gross stuff. Is that how the field of gastro-intestinal science looks right now?

MR: It’s really hard to get funding for pure science just for the sake of figuring out how things work. It’s a lot easier to get funded if you have a practical application for things. Also, a lot of it’s been figured out.

I’m not a scientist, so I’m going out on a limb here, but I do get the sense that the more you know, the more you realize you don’t know very much, and there isn’t an end point. So there’s always more to be done — there’s just not as much funding for it anymore. It’s more science in the service of the food industry.

But even in that world, there are characters like Erika Silletti, who are so awed and amazed by what they’re discovering. She has this infectious enthusiasm for…spit!

TM: You’re in the middle of your book tour now. What do you like to present at your events?

MR: I don’t do a lot of readings when I do talks. Some of them are billed as readings, but I wouldn’t call them that, really. I find that if you read to non-fiction to people for more than a paragraph, people will glaze over. So I’ll read footnotes.

Once of my favorite footnotes in Gulp is where I’m talking about per anum, which is through the anus, and per annum, which is yearly. And I did a Google search for instances where people meant per annum but wrote per anum, and that’s one of my favorites. How many childbirths occur per anum, that sort of thing.

TM: Do you find that people are more squeamish to ask you questions about the digestive tract than they were on your earlier book tours, when the topic was the afterlife or space?

MR: Oh no, no. Once you open the door for them, people want to know all kinds of things. Sometimes people want to know, “I have a mucoid plaque, can you tell me what to do,” and I have to say, “I don’t have an M.D., I can’t dispense medical advice — nor do I really want to.”

But people have great questions. The other day I was doing an author lunch at Google; people had a lot of questions about rectal smuggling.

TM: Early on in the book, you find out that your palate isn’t developed enough for you to be on a professional olive oil tasting panel. Any other potential avenues of research that never worked out?

MR: I wanted to go to Food Valley when someone was actually involved in an experiment, but I couldn’t seem to time it right. There were a couple subjects, but most were not particularly interesting. There’s someone there with a tube hooked in mouth, and it squirts in something that they’re tasting, and they make a note of it. It’s not particularly scintillating, and it didn’t make it into the book.

There’s a woman who studies pica (people who ingest non-food) and she studies in Zanzibar with women who eat a variety of clays. I wanted to do that, partly because I really wanted to go to Zanzibar — that really lies at the bottom of a lot of what I do, I really want to go there, what could I find there? — but it felt a little…off unto itself. When you go all the way to Zanzibar, you want to spend a lot of time on that subject, not just a few paragraphs.

TM: When you first started writing, I think one of your pieces was about the IRS. Then you moved on to the afterlife, cadavers, space travel. What sort of writers made you think, I want to write about things that are kind of out there, or that people might not think about all that often?

MR: The writer who I glommed on to and loved his style was Bill Bryson, when he wrote The Lost Continent. This was before A Walk in the Woods, before he started going huge. I remember reading his books, and I admired his ability to combine information and humor and character. It was inspirational. Every now and then I put a little homage to passages that really got in my head from writers like him, inside jokes to myself.

When I was writing Gulp, I had just read Patti Smith’s Just Kids, and when she did something outrageous or pathetic, Mapplethorpe would say to her, “Patti, no.” And when I was with Sue Langston, who’s a sensory analyst — the nose woman — and I asked her, “if you had to choose between a Budweiser and an IPA right now, what would you choose?” and she said, “I would take the Bud,” and I said, “Sue, no.” That was my little homage to Mapplethorpe and that book.

TM: In 2011 you edited the Best American Science and Nature Writing, so I’m hoping you might pontificate about science writing in general for a second. When you write your books, or when you evaluate science writing, what are you looking for — what should a good science piece accomplish?

MR: I don’t know if the genre of “science writing” should really exist. We don’t classify “religion writing” or “political writing” as an entirely different register of writing. There’s such a wide range — material that simply explains, others that are strongly narrative. In The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, you learn a lot about cell culturing, but it’s still primarily a story.

For that collection in particular, I tried to do a mix. The Atul Gawande essay, I thought, was beautiful. For someone in that community to stand up — or I should say, sit down and write — about how far the discussion about end-of-life care needs to go in order to really help people. And then the Oliver Sacks piece about prosopagnosia, he’s just a wonderful thinker/writer, he’s more reporting rather than recommending.

For me, there are a lot of valid ways to write about science, and when I was judging that book it was really just what pulled me in and kept my interest and taught me something. There are so many ways to do that.

Elizabeth Winder’s new biography, Pain, Parties, Work, documents this crucial time, drawing from new research and bringing a fresh, almost sunny perspective to a subject whose life is usually painted in shades of gray. The Plath we meet in Winder’s book is a frivolous, fashion-forward girl; a girl addicted to tanning and Revlon’s new Fire & Ice lipstick; a girl for whom “a shopping list was a poem.” To uncover this new version of Plath, Winder interviewed her contemporaries, the 19 other “Millies” who lived and worked with Plath. To these women, Plath was just another girl trying to make it in Manhattan, not a tortured, soul-bearing artist. “I could never have imagined the life she had ahead of her,” one Millie told Winder. “She seemed just like me.”

I spoke to Winder by phone a few weeks before her book’s release. We talked about getting to know the Millies, eating 1950s diner food, the joys of researching perfume, and the virtues of composing sentences on index cards.

The Millions: What inspired you to write this book?

Elizabeth Winder: I’ve read everything that Sylvia Plath has written and everything’s that’s been written about her. And I was always surprised that this time in her life is skimmed over, even as it’s always mentioned as the month that leads to that breakdown. And also, the whole Sylvia Plath life story has been approached in a reductionist way. I wanted to do something different. Because when I read her journals I see someone who’s so lively, so hungry for life, and really engaged in the world in a relatable way.

TM: How do you think she’s been unfairly portrayed?

EW: Depressed, pathological, humorless. Neurotic — well, she probably was neurotic. Competitive. Delusional — ambitious in a delusional way. And then later on, as sort of like a nagging wife. And then on another level, I think that she’s also diminished because of the way she looks. It’s not like she was some great beauty, but she fit in with the cultural standards of the time. Somehow, we always have a problem with a woman who’s a writer who also wears make-up and likes lipstick. That’s always been included as part of her pathology. People pathologize everything with Plath and that’s always rubbed me the wrong way.

TM: Tell me about the Millies. Did you know, from the get-go, that you would get in touch with them?

EW: No, I didn’t. I wrote the proposal and then I got the book deal and it overwhelmed me. When I sat down to do the research for the book I thought, oh my god, what am I going to do? Sylvia didn’t even write about this month in her journals! And I just started googling the names of the women — because they had been listed in biographies — and I wrote them letters.

TM: What was their reaction when you told them about your project? Did anyone refuse to meet with you?

EW: They were really interested for the most part. Excited, curious. They had so much fun going back to the past and reliving that stuff. Most of them I talked with on the phone or corresponded by letter. I was really careful. For me, the absolute most important part was being respectful and courteous with those interviews.

TM: What was most surprising thing about talking with them?

EW: I know the thing that I liked the most…they were just so smart and so funny. Some of them talk like writers, like really good writers. Well, some of them are. The way they remembered the month and all of the wonderful details, like the clothes that they wore. And what they were eating and the way the carpet felt and the little scenes that happened in the office. It made me feel like I was there and it just brought everything to life. In the process of writing it, I just sort of left the world. I felt like I was living in some Technicolor dream of the 1950s. And it was because of them and their generosity that I was able to completely enter that world.

TM: Did you have any other source materials? Did you get old magazines or watch movies from the period?

EW: I got a copy of the original magazine that they worked on. Neva, one of the Millies I interviewed, sent me one of her copies. I also went on Ebay and bought some other old magazines from the period. I got a Mademoiselle from 1952. And I went to some archives and looked at the magazines I couldn’t buy. I love fashion history, it’s always been an interest of mine. I learned a lot from looking at the advertisements, and I got a book on the history of make-up. Immersing myself in that period was so interesting. I got samples of some of the old perfumes. Sylvia wore Tigress. I tried on Youth Dew, too, which I think is kind of repulsive. I even started eating 1950s diner food. Like the salad with all the mayonnaise and frozen peas and things like that. Maraschino cherries. I was sort of method acting, I guess.

TM: As you reconstructed that month, were there gaps in the narrative that you were unable to fill?

EW: There were gaps, there were tons of gaps. But I’m kind of detail-oriented — at least in this way — and I considered it a gap if I didn’t know the exact shade of the carpet. I mean, I spent days figuring out what perfume Sylvia wore. I wanted to know what she was wearing every single day, I wanted to know what everyone else was wearing. I kind of kept researching until there was nothing left.

TM: This book is full of sidebars, describing different products from the time period, or interesting tidbits from Sylvia’s life and journals. Why did you choose to structure it that way? To make it more like a magazine?

EW: I didn’t, but I hope it kind of looks that way. I did that because I’m not too fond of just straight narrative. I like little asides. And because I wanted to get into all the details of the culture that she was so steeped in, because Sylvia Plath was so much of her time. She wasn’t backwards, she wasn’t pushing forward, she was just right in it. How do you fit the details of Halo shampoo, how do you fit it in? You have to reduce it and squash it, and I wanted all those products, all those glittery details.

TM: What you just said about Sylvia being so much of her time strikes me as true, but yet people think of her as a contemporary. Why do you think that is?

EW: First, because her poetry is so contemporary. You read it and it kind of exists outside of time. Somehow it’s so fresh to the point of being scary. Anytime I read her poetry, I feel it’s happening right now. So that’s one reason. The other reason is that she died when she was so young. And when your image is of someone being thirty years old, I think you can be inclined to think that they still exist in some way. She died when she was younger than I am right now. So I guess you kind of think, she’s still thirty, she’s still here. If she were alive now, she’d be eighty years old.

TM: Did your reading of The Bell Jar change after researching this time in Plath’s life?

EW: I think it made The Bell Jar more real for me and this kind of goes back to my experience interviewing all those really great women…when you ask two different people about something you get two different stories. More importantly, if you ask the same person on two different days, you get a different story. I guess what I mean is — and this has to do with being 32 versus being 15 and reading The Bell Jar — what talking with those women brought to light was how a really intense experience can be so thrilling and just so heartbreaking at the same time. It was so important to Sylvia to make the most of her life in that classic sort of post-World War II way, if you know what I mean. To make every moment shine.

TM: You write in Pain, Parties, Work that some of the Millies felt betrayed by The Bell Jar. Did you think Plath betrayed them?

EW: No, I don’t think so. Because…well, because it’s fiction. And because she changed their names. And also, when I read The Bell Jar, the character that I completely fell in love with wasn’t the narrator; it was Doreen, who was Sylvia’s best friend. She’s so glamorous and cool and she knows exactly how much to tip the bellhop. So I feel like the portraits that she did of the women were kind of flattering. If anyone would feel betrayed it would be Aurelia Plath, Sylvia’s mother. But Doreen is still the best thing about the book for me. She’s so glamorous in the coolest way possible.

TM: You’re a poet. What is your relationship to Plath’s work?

EW: She’s one of the first poets I started reading seriously as a young teenager. That really sharp and fresh way she uses language is so deeply personal and so vivid. And every time I read her poems I feel like I’m in some crazy movie. That’s exactly how I want to feel when I read anything. She’s been a huge influence on how I perceive language. She lived and breathed words. She didn’t treat them delicately or with some kind of academic reverence. She just dove right in, like they were a bathtub or food. That’s the first thing I noticed about her writing.

TM: I think your book portrays that, actually. The way you describe her world and her love of fashion, of food, of the feeling of fabrics or the smell of certain perfumes. I can see how that translates into her work.

EW: That’s the most important thing to me. It’s that deep, deep love of beauty. And that ability to spot it and to play with it.

TM: This is your first piece of nonfiction. How was writing it different from writing poetry?

EW: Before I wrote this book I barely wrote complete sentences. When I was an undergrad, I was the worst English major in the world. I loved reading the books but I just couldn’t write about them. And I’m sure I could never write fiction. I had zero experience with prose. The part that was excruciatingly hard was piecing it together in a way that makes logical sense. The way I wrote it was the way I write poems, which was writing words, and then writing words around them into phrases, and then writing sentences. But I don’t write any of these things in any kind of order. So then I just had like, a hundred typed pages that I had to arrange. And then at some point I was just in a room with a bunch of index cards…because that’s the only way I know how to write. So it was a piecing together.

TM: There is so much written on Plath; were you at all intimidated by the amount of previous scholarship?

EW: No. Maybe I should have been. But maybe I wasn’t because I knew from the very beginning that I wanted to do something so different. I wanted to write a book that was very intensely feminine. I think that there’s this impulse in society to kind of neutralize women who write and take away their femininity as if that detracts from them in some way. And I don’t like that.

TM: Why do you think it matters what Plath looked like?

EW: If you want to read a book about someone’s life, you want to know how they experience the world. And the physical world is a huge part of that, for so many different reasons. Especially for women, the way that we look hugely determines certain aspects of how we move through the world. My personality would probably be completely different if I were five inches taller. Or if I had different color hair. I actually think that’s true. I get mad at books that don’t give me more physical details. Because if I’m interested in a subject, I want to know the color of the wall, exactly what they’re wearing, what they had for lunch, I want to know all that stuff. And physical appearance fits into that. You can’t bring someone to life without describing how they look. You’d just be dealing with Slyvia Plath the name, not Sylvia Plath the human.

This interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

My assumption was that Rideout had found something new in the love letters between Mallory and his wife. I wanted to interview her to learn about her findings. What did she uncover in those letters that made her account seem credible?

As I interviewed Rideout, first by email and then in person, I came to realize I had it all wrong. As an author, with two collections of poetry, Delineation and the forthcoming Arguments with the Lake and a role as Poet Laureate for Lake Ontario, she puts the story first. In Above All Things, the historical figure of Mallory leaves the realm of fact and becomes hers. That’s why he feels so true.

The Millions: What do you write about?

Tanis Rideout: My three books fit well together, though I didn’t realize that when I was working on them. I look at them now and think, “here are my issues I’m working out.”

I’m particularly interested in obsession. Prior to Above All Things I wrote a collection of poems, Delineation, about comic book superheroes and the women that love them. What ran through that was certainly obsession – romantic obsession, obsession for revenge, for justice. There’s a line in it that: I have become obsessed with obsession. That describes me.

George Mallory and Everest, in my novel, are a good repository for this “obsession with obsession.” So are two main characters in my next book of poetry, Arguments with the Lake. It is the imagined relationship between Marilyn Bell, who was the first person to swim across Lake Ontario in 1954 and became a hero, and Shirley Campbell, who failed to do the same and her life spiraled out of control. They had such different outcomes from the same attempt.

TM: This is another theme in your writing, differences in perception or point of view?

TR: Yes, I got interested in this when I worked for an organization called Literature for Life where I led reading circles in shelters and youth homes. We would read a book together and discuss it. I’d ask things like, “what would you do in those circumstances?” Why did a character make this choice? The idea is to engage with literature to help develop empathy. If you had a fight with someone, how did they see it from their side? It was like narrative therapy in that way.

TM: You mean the idea that life is a story you tell yourself?

TR: Exactly. Are you a victim in your story or how do you position yourself? I have a story of my life that I tell myself in which I don’t win things. I’ve never won a raffle or a draw. One time I had a friend buy me a ticket and then I won. And that’s my narrative.

I’m sure that it’s not true. I probably have won things, but I’ve just decided to ignore those instances. That’s the story that I tell, that I don’t win. It’s a small example, but we can do that on a much grander scale. I like to think that we can go back and revise the story. We can find the parts that don’t support a narrative and rebuild a story. It can be the start of a new outlook on life.

TM: Is that why you write?

TR: That is something I am interested in. There is a story in the novel about George and Ruth’s first meeting, which is based on my first meeting with my now husband. He swears that I was wearing a red dress. I swear that I didn’t own a red dress. One of us is clearly wrong.

Ultimately it doesn’t matter for us, but things like that split an experience. It interests me and is why I write. Is there a truth and does it matter? Or is it just about story? I tend to err on that side. It’s just about story.

TM: Is that the first responsibility of a fiction writer, story?

TR: Absolutely. Other people would argue that you could write good fiction and stay within the facts. Maybe it takes a better writer than me to do that? Hilary Mantel recently said, “I will make up the thoughts of a man’s heart, but I will not make up the color of his wallpaper” Her idea with the Cromwell books, Wolf Hall and Bringing Up the Bodies, is that she stuck to what is known.

I think that is hugely admirable, but as a fiction writer that isn’t of interest to me. I always assume everything that I read is fiction, even if it’s in the non-fiction section. The very notion of putting something on paper means that you are creating a narrative.

TM: Do the true facts behind a story change an experience for a reader?

TR: Is reading something “true” more emotionally valid? I don’t see why.

Either the story moved you or it didn’t. You went with the author or not. Learning if the facts of a story are true or not after the fact doesn’t need to make a difference to how you were moved.

TM: So you changed Mallory’s wallpaper?

TR: I changed Mallory’s wallpaper and then some. I renovated his house.

TM:  That is brave?

TR: I could have changed the names and had cart blanche.

TM: Why didn’t you?

TR: It didn’t occur to me to be honest.

TM: Maybe we live in a time where we believe less in the rational mind? Even economists have given up pretending that people make rational decisions. Perhaps collecting facts doesn’t necessarily get us to the truth?

TR: My version of Mallory is not the historical figure. I disregarded things that other people might think are important. That was in service of telling a good story.

I wanted to tell a story about a woman, a man, and a mountain and the tug of obsession. The facts of what happened are beside the point.

TM: But you did use the real love letters written between George and Ruth Mallory to write the story?

TR: I used them less to write the story than to color the story. The letters gave me language, gave me small incidents and events, gave texture to the world, the space, the time, in a way that is harder to gather from secondary sources – it’s a turn of phrase, it’s even the physical shape and size of letters – how someone has crammed in writing on every last space, or used an extra page for only a line or two.

They are less the big picture defining of the world – I already had the shape of that, the shape of the story – and more a way to shade the story in, to make it whole.

TM: So reading the letters helped you breathe life into the characters?

TR: In a weird way, reading the letters was a fantastic experience, and really did allow me to let go of the “facts” far more than just reading books, watching movies, etc. had. Suddenly I was able to imagine these characters more fully and as characters, as opposed to the characters that had already been built by previous researchers. They became a tremendous jumping off point to imagine beyond the letters. What wasn’t in them, etc. It really was a letting go – because there was so much color in the letters, etc.

TM: Did using the letters give you a responsibility to the people who wrote them?

TR: I’m a fiction writer, first and foremost – what matters to me most is story. I didn’t set out to write something historically accurate – those things exist, the world doesn’t/didn’t need it from me.

These are real people, real lives that I decided to fictionalize. I don’t think, personally, that fiction writers have a responsibility – which isn’t to say that sometimes there isn’t some discomfort around that – but I think I certainly fall on the Wayne Johnston side of the spectrum – in that he doesn’t believe there’s any obligation to the “factual” truth.

TM: Mallory’s death is a mystery. Did the letters help you find any truth about what happened?

TR: The “truth” of it largely comes out of my own experiences – the way I am in the world. I think they help lend veracity – I’m not sure that’s the same. Details can often cover lies.

TM: So do you write about yourself or other people?

TR: It’s absolutely about you as the writer. There’s no way to get around that. When I first started thinking about writing this novel, my life was so vastly different than now. I could chart my life in the different drafts of the book. This is what I was working through in this section, so therefore there is too much of whatever.

The relationship between George and Ruth changed so much because I went through a terrible break up and I finished the first draft the summer that my husband and I started seeing each other. I moved into a positive, good relationship and that shaped the novel.

TM: Then what can a love letter tell you about a person?

TR: Any letter – love letters or otherwise – betray so much I think. So much of it is in the language, or even in how the paper is used – is it cramped and tight fitting in as much as possible – empty and blank? What kind of language is used, do the same addresses occur to multiple people? It’s reading so much more into it than just the simple words. I think it opens up a lot about people, opens up a window into desires and hopes and disappointments.

TM: Did reading the letters make you feel like a snoop?

TR: At first – yes. It’s a very strange thing to sit there and read someone else’s letters – but as a writer, I think we’re snoops anyway – we eavesdrop and steal and borrow – I got over it pretty quickly.

TM: Will letters always play a significant role in your work?

TR: Letters are such an interesting window in to characters – or people, depending how you want to think of them. I prefer to think of them as characters.

I’m already planning a research trip to get access to some archives for work I am beginning, to just be able to “hear” more of the characters own languages.

Letters are a throwback – but receiving something written, in the mail – always such a lovely thing.

TM: So are you now more self-conscious when writing letters or emails?

TR: Ha, it is true! I had a friend years ago swear that if I died tragically she’d burn my old journals. Something I still think of doing. It’s strange in the days of emails – we certainly don’t hold on to our everyday correspondence in the same way. But yes – I would worry about someone reading my personal secret thoughts and sharing with the world. I know that’s hugely hypocritical, but it is true.

Orange is a journalist and film critic whose writing has appeared in a variety of publications including McSweeney’s, The Nation, The Village Voice, and The New York Times. I met with her at a Brooklyn coffee shop where we talked for the better part of an hour about movies, deadlines, discipline, Facebook, and of course, her new book. The below interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

The Millions: Tell me a little about your career and how you came to write This Is Running For Your Life.

Michelle Orange: I turned to writing full time seriously after moving here [New York City] in 2003. I’d been writing before that since I’d graduated and getting paid intermittently. I’d been doing stuff for McSweeney’s when they were just sort of setting up their website, and that intrigued me and was rewarding to me. When I decided to move here to go to graduate school to study film, I kept up as much writing as I could. And then after I graduated I really tried to make a go of being a freelancer. Because of a couple connections I made at school, that meant I was writing a lot about film — but always keeping in mind that I had these other ambitions.

I don’t think I had a full sense of my ambitions until quite recently, actually. I spent a few years really just trying to make a living. And I felt time passing in a way that was really sort of alarming. I graduated in 2005 and around 2008, 2009, it just seemed like I could keep…spending all of my time writing about film. And that wasn’t something I had ever decided to do…so the book really was an effort to pivot and really concentrate for a while on what it is I like to write about and how I like to write about it.

TM: Some of these essays were published in different forms before they made it into the book, right?

MO: Two of them started out as essays for The Rumpus, around late 2009. Steve Elliot was starting up the site and he was asking some of his friends for ideas and help and I’d been in the recession for about a year at that point, so I had a lot of time on my hands…Steve said, “Do whatever you want” so suddenly I got my brain back in do-whatever-I-want mode. So, two of them started out as Rumpus essays and then one was in the The Rumpus book they put out, Rumpus Women, and one of them was in the VQR — so, four were published.

TM: And when you were structuring the book, were you structuring it around those essays that you’d already written?

MO: I had a bunch of ideas. Steve wanted me to do a column for The Rumpus, so the third one, which appeared in Rumpus Women [“Have a Beautiful Corpse”], actually started out as an idea for the web column, but it just kept growing and wound up becoming too big for a website. But I had a lot of other ambitions and ideas in that vein and my sense was that they were connected. I wasn’t sure exactly how but that’s what I wanted to explore. I wanted to cut myself out some time and figure it out. The structure, interestingly — in terms of just the order of the essays — came very late in the game, and even two of the ideas, two of the essays, were swapped in after I had a contract to write it. When I realized that they were really going to let me do whatever I wanted to do, I was like, “Well, shit, let me rethink this…”

TM: When did you realize that you had free rein?

MO: Well, I mean it’s so weird trying to put a book together like that as a proposal… But once I met the FSG people — and they were really the only ones who not only liked it as it was, but were also interested in whatever I was interested in — I just had the sense that it would be okay if I did it. So I booked the flights to Hawaii and to San Diego and I thought, I just really want to try this. After I’d made the trips I sort of said to them, “So…I have these other ideas.” And they said, “That sounds good — yeah, do that.” So, it feels like a unique experience.

TM: Well, those essays in particular were very strange — in a good way. When I reading them, I thought, “I don’t know who would publish these.” Especially the one in Hawaii, [War and Well-Being, 21° 19’N., 157° 52’W] because it wasn’t like you were taking a stance for or against the new DSMV and it was more interesting because of that.

MO: That’s the thing, that’s how I tend to think about things. I don’t have a lot of magazine writing experience, I guess is the thing, so I don’t really know any other way other than the story that kind of works for me. So yeah, they’re weird. They’re definitely weird.

TM: In a couple essays you write about your ambivalence about writing for a living. Is it just that you get caught up in meeting deadlines and you don’t have time to stretch out and do something weird? Or is it more complicated than that?

MO: No, I think that’s really just it. It’s kind of an obnoxious thing to be ambivalent about, I guess. But it’s what I mentioned before, my sense of just not having decided that this was what I was going to do…especially writing about movies, movies were something that I had a very natural love for, but I’d never had an ambition to be a critic or to write about them on a week-in, week-out basis. So, yeah, it was just a feeling of coming to a moment in my life — I needed to just make a decision. To not just be carried along by the tides. That was probably the bigger part of my ambivalence. But there’s also just feeling burnt out. You know, when you’re hitting deadlines three or four or five times a week… I don’t feel like I’m that kind of writer. I’m not good at that. I didn’t feel like I was doing the best work I could be doing.

TM: While we’re on the subject of movies, I really liked your essay “The Dream (Girl) Is Over” which traces the cinematic feminine ideal from Marilyn Monroe to the “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” as embodied, most recently, in Zooey Deschanel. After reading it, I have to know what you think about Jennifer Lawrence in Silver Linings Playbook. Does she function as an MPDG in that movie?

MO: You know, when I saw the trailer, I was really nervous. The thing about her, though, is that she’s a star. So, I think the specs of the character, you could easily put her into that archetype, but I feel like as an actress she has so much of her own charisma. And the movie was such that it transcended it somehow. I don’t think she fits exactly.

TM: How did that essay come about?

MO: That’s the one essay in the book that was not my idea. It actually came out of a conversation with my agent, who is also my friend. We were at a bar one night or something and I went off on a rant about this phenomenon and she said, “Oh you should write about that.” At the time I was still working on the proposal. And I said, “Really, I don’t know that I have much more to add. I think my two-beer rant was pretty much it.” I was actually pretty reluctant to do it. I thought, “Well, once I get it in there, I can get rid of it.” But then, they were excited about it, too. So suddenly I had to write this thing. And ultimately it was sort of a matter of finding a story and then persuading myself of it. And it wound up being — although I really did not enjoy the writing of it —it wound up being rewarding in that sense, because I did actually persuade myself of it.

TM: Your essays are a mix of memoir and criticism, which a lot of young writers are publishing right now. How did you come to that format? Do you notice that as something that’s happening right now?

MO: I guess I have noticed it, a bit more. But, it felt like a more honest way, for me, to make sense of things, to think about things, was to think about how I experience the world and things I’m exposed to, and the way that they manifest in my life. And I felt like I couldn’t be alone in that. I felt that other people might have those same feelings. It just felt like a natural way to think about the culture that I live in.

TM: You write a lot about time and the way technology changes our relationship to time. I’m assuming you didn’t grow up with the internet or digital photography. Do you think not having that as a kid makes you a better judge of technology now, or do you think it makes you a worse judge?

MO: Probably both. You mean a judge of the impact?

TM: Yeah, I mean can you be more objective about it since you didn’t have it at one point?

MO: When you think about my parents, it was the same with television, and the generation before that, it was the same with the movies. It’s just a question of quantity, I think. But I don’t feel like the internet and television can even be compared because the scale has just expanded a million times over…I feel like it is a very interesting position to be in — having that sort of before and after feeling. And I think it may give you a better feeling of what the impact has been. I think that would have to be self-evident, whereas someone who grew up with it literally doesn’t know anything else. But, they also don’t have the same qualms or reservations, which is sort of a necessity…although I do get the sense with younger people and even with teenagers that they do feel some alarm. It can be overwhelming to most people. Do you feel like you have a better sense?

TM: Well, I notice that people just five years younger than me do not have the same hang-ups that I do.

MO: That is really weird. I recently heard someone refer to someone literally five years younger than him as from a different generation. It’s like, can we at least just agree on what a generation is? I’m imagining it’s like 20 years, but suddenly there are these crazy little micro distinctions. And they’re real…I will be really interested as the next generation of young people moves into their thirties and gets a little older — how their relationship to technology changes. I have a friend who has this theory that the internet culture will wend all the way to one extreme and then there will be a correction like, en masse, and we’ll become a little wiser…a little more judicious about the place in our lives almost naturally. I don’t know if I believe that. But it has been my experience, at least with something like e-mail. When I was in university, that’s when e-mail came out. Everyone just gorged on it. We would just e-mail all day. For years. Writing books. Writing these epics poems to each other. And for me, it really did just reach a point where I was like, I can’t do it anymore… Maybe in order to get a sense of where the balance is you have to take a measure of the other extreme.

TM: What is your balance? Do you only answer e-mails certain times of day?

MO: I wish I had more of it, honestly. My schedule is to get up, try to answer e-mails in the morning, go for a run, make lunch and then start working for the afternoon. I have to get better about just turning the internet off. I did it with the book, I did it religiously because it was the only way to get things done. But it’s so easy to just slide back. I have a smart phone. I don’t like the fact that I have it. But it was sort of given to me as a gift and then I didn’t give it back, so I can’t really pretend that I have no interest. I went and got the plan. But I’m not on Facebook. I don’t engage in long drawn out e-mail correspondences anymore. That might sound a little stupid, but it was a really big part of my life. And I feel like with writers especially, that was not uncommon. It became a real thing for a while there. So I really avoid that…the way it can suck up time is alarming. It really is a lesson in discipline. I’m so undisciplined when it comes to the internet. It’s terrible.

TM: That kind of brings me to your last essay “Ways of Escape,” which is about discipline — well, it’s about a lot of things, but it’s partially about running and discipline. To me it read like a coming of age story and I wondered if you thought about fictionalizing it. You wrote at the beginning of the essay that you had struggled a long time with this time in your life — how to think about it, how to write about it.

MO: Yeah, I hadn’t thought specifically about fictionalizing it because I really avoided thinking about it at all. I really did. And so, I guess with this book I felt like it would be an opportunity to try to figure out that period of my life. And give myself a story at least, that I could hang onto. But I actually was quite reluctant to do that. That seems to be a pattern for me. It’s like, why did I propose writing about it? But I did. But when it came to actually writing it, it turned out much, much different.

TM: What was your proposal for it? How did you describe it? As an essay about being obsessed with running?

MO: Yeah. It was about four paragraphs. It would be interesting to look at it again because it didn’t have anything to do with the person I ended up writing about and only a little bit to do with going to the movies obsessively and alone and nothing to do with my relationship to my faith or anything like that. It was sort of like a big gulp moment when I realized that if I was going to write about that time, then I had to write about all those things because those were the things that started coming out when I was thinking about it and writing about it.

TM: Did you write that essay last? Is that why it comes last?

MO: I think I did write it last because I didn’t want to write it. And then, in terms of the order, I obviously had a better sense of what the book would be and particularly with the first essay, I thought they made an interesting frame — dealing with time and my changing relationship to it. And struggling with it to a certain extent. So I thought it would be a good final one. And also because it’s the most personal one, for me. It just seemed like an intuitive place for it.

TM: To me the first essay is about an older person talking about how quickly time goes by and then the last essay is about a younger person with so much time on her hands she doesn’t know what to do with herself.

MO: Exactly. It’s like, how did that happen? At least there’s a book in between. But yeah, that’s how it feels, right? It’s not a new feeling and yet no one seems to anticipate it happening to them.

The Millions: Schroder is receiving positive reviews and even being described as your breakout book. Does that have any meaning for you as a writer? Was the experience of writing and publishing Schroder any different for you than it was for O My Darling or The Folded World?

Amity Gaige: Breaking out sounds wonderful. If it means that lots of people read Schroder, then I will be happy to call it my breakout book. My other books were written with the same goal as Schroder — to write as well as possible about deeply felt themes. But maybe it’s significant that I wrote Schroder very quickly — it felt “channeled.” If you want to talk about the publishing side, that’s been a very different experience, too. I have an editor and publicist at Twelve who’ve been focused like assassins on each stage and challenge of bringing out a book. They responded to the book with gut responses, they hand-delivered it to people, they approached everything creatively and passionately. As for reviews, critical reaction is and always will be something I value highly as a writer — somebody serious and intelligent talking back to me after a long writerly confinement, if you will. But I also value hearing from readers, booksellers, librarians, total strangers. I’ve gotten some interesting emails asking for help with parenting or custody arrangements. I don’t mind. I get energy from the feedback.

TM: Along the same lines, how do you see your writing evolving over the course of your career? In what ways are you a different writer than you were in 2005 when O My Darling was published?

AG: Writing O My Darling felt like chiseling stone — hard and painstaking. It took me a long time to realize that I was simply learning how to write a book, an activity that isn’t inborn. I say while knocking on wood that each book has been easier to write than the next. My 30s have been a heady time personally. Having children, losing loved ones, coming to larger understandings about life; if these things change me, then I hope they change and broaden my writing.

TM: In your novels, a recurring theme is the strength of relationships and the ways they are tested. You recently described Schroder as “a pro-marriage book; a balled-up and then uncrumpled valentine.” Can you talk a little about the importance of this theme in your work and how your take on it in Schroder is different than in your other novels?

AG: A smart piece of recent criticism said that the book does not use the 19th-century marriage plot but the “twenty-first century divorce plot.” Schroder concerns what happens after love is over — or in this case, discredited. I’ve always been preoccupied by the transience or ephemerality of experience, good and bad. As a minor character in the book says, there is the temptation to try and “box up” experience and “keep it.” But happiness — and love — cannot be possessed, controlled, quarantined…In Eric’s case, he’s dealing with the unwieldy fact that he still loves his ex-wife even though she has completely washed her hands of him. She thinks that because he’s a liar, he lied about loving her. But I don’t think he lied about loving her, and I guess that’s the uncrumpled part of the valentine.

I didn’t really answer the question, though. I’m not sure why I keep writing about marriage. Marriage is just a metaphor for human relationships in general. It’s the relationship in which we live or die in terms of our own self-concept, in terms of our reputations with ourselves.

TM: Let’s talk about Erik Kennedy/Schroder. You’ve said you feel “a lot of ambivalence towards him” and certainly navigate between his good qualities and his terrible qualities when portraying him to readers. Was this a difficult balance to achieve? A lot of importance is often placed on the “likability” of characters. Was this something you thought about as you were writing Schroder?

AG: Well I find Eric likeable, but in the way you love a classic naïf. The narrator of Updike’s “A & P” or Dowell in The Good Soldier. You think, wow, what a limited person, but at least he cares about something. If I had to choose between the extremes of sentimentality and cynicism, I’d always choose the former.

But yes, I do feel ambivalence towards Eric. What he does in lying to his wife is unconscionable. And I think part of the poignancy of the father-daughter relationship here is that his daughter is fated to wise up, and to eventually be really furious at him. She loves him now because he’s all she knows. But how messed up would Meadow be as a grown-up? Schroder suggests, I think, pretty messed up.

TM: Was it difficult to write Erik’s young daughter, Meadow? What are the challenges you faced portraying a child?

AG: My son was probably about four when I started writing Schroder. I poured all the love, amusement, and self-doubt I felt on a daily level as a parent into the characterization of Meadow. Also, my son just said a lot of fabulous things, and I wrote them down word for word and gave them to Meadow.  When people cite their favorite lines from the book — and these are often Meadow’s lines — I have to laugh and say, Let’s face it, the best lines in this book were written by a six year old.

TM: You’ve said the book was in some part inspired by the Clark Rockefeller case and what he said about some of the happiest moments of his life being spent with his daughter after he abducted her. How did the idea for Schroder come about and evolve as you wrote the novel?

AG: As you mention, Schroder began with the seed from that now-infamous ripped-from-the-headlines story, one I deliberately never followed. But that story was relevant only in that I was already preoccupied its themes: identity, parenthood, immigration, self-invention…Can you be a fraud and still love others sincerely? Can you be a troubled soul and also a loving parent? I am of the Chekhov school in regards to literature “posing questions correctly” as opposed to answering them. Wondering now if I have — even privately — answered these questions — I think no, not conclusively. Eric is still new to me, and as I travel around reading from the book, my attitude towards him alternates between compassion and bitterness.

TM: Schroder functions as an apology/confession from a man with an elaborate false identity. Both of those elements have a rich literary history. How does your novel fit into that literary landscape?

AG: I am sure there is a buried influence of Dostoevsky, even Poe, both of whom I read at a fairly young age, probably assuming these men were describing the inevitable lunacy of adulthood…I loved the hair-tearing confessions of deeply inconscient madmen-narrators, driven by guilt to confess. But Schroder is probably my agon-with-Nabokov book. Nobody writes like Nabokov; nobody ever will. What I would give to write one sentence like Vladimir! I adore Lolita, but I am more conscious of the influence of Pale Fire. Maybe it’s a minor point, but the fact that Eric’s document is “written” is so important to the novel, just as “written-ness” is central to Kinbote’s confessions in Pale Fire. This is where I saw the need, in Schroder, for footnotes, playlets, questionnaires…But of course all these examples I give were written by men. I think it’s true that I simultaneously “honor, update, and reject” some of these literary antecedents with Eric Kennedy/Schroder. (I’m referring to a statement here in Kathryn Shultz’s lively New York Magazine review.) I think I give Eric a softer side than most of these men-written-by-men. My gender seeps in between the lines, in the ways I judge him or his effect on the women in his life, in the sadness I feel about what remains an essential otherness…

TM: The writing of female authors — particularly those who write about relationships — is often marginalized into two categories: “chick lit” or “women’s fiction.” As a woman and author of literary fiction, is this something you ever think about when writing? Do you think the perception/reception of novels by women is changing at all?

AG: No, I never think about it in regards to my own work. But do I think the perception/reception of novels by women is changing at all? Not sure. The contemporary woman novelist still faces some troubling assumptions when she tries to publish. However, I was recently on two different panels with extraordinary women writers (Claire Messud and Victoria Redel, Karen Russell and Claire Vaye Watkins). All of these women are acclaimed writers, not to mention inspiring speakers. I like to think of their confidence — and success — as a bellwether.

TM: You once advised “stay[ing] true to your artistic vision, even if you fail in other ways” — also noting a quote from Mario Vargas Llosa: “That is what authenticity or sincerity is for the novelist: the acceptance of his own demons and the decision to serve them as well as possible.” Can you talk about how accepting your demons/decisions and staying true to your vision has served you over the course of your career?

AG: I think many writers write out of a longing to be understood — to be heard, legitimized, respectabilized. So if you’re not staying true to your artistic vision, what good is it for that vision to be legitimized? It’s not going to be gratifying. Of course, in some ways, you don’t have a choice about sticking to your artistic vision. Llosa says this, too — that writers don’t choose their themes, but rather that these themes are foisted upon them by personal history; Updike even said the same thing about style, that a writer’s style is inherent to him, simply the written equivalent to how the world “hits his or her nerves.” I don’t mean to say you should ignore criticism, especially when it’s made repeatedly, nor should you cling to some unbending, macho notion of integrity. For some people, compromise is radical. I say, surround yourself with trustworthy people, put your knife between your teeth, unplug, stop talking, and write.

TM: What are you working on now?

AG: Playing with my baby daughter. Wondering what her future will be like for her.