But there are compensatons, like the extra week of summer that appeared out of no where last week. And the annual used book sale. As always, I present a photo of my haul. I am most excited by the five Rowan magazines I got for 10 cents each, and Ekaterina Sedia’s Secret History of Moscow, which I have been seeking for a while. The books are all used and have been read before by people who came to their end and discarded them. But they offer a new beginning to me.

Anyway, I was reminded of a passage from one of my favourite books, A Big Storm Knocked it Over, by one of my favourite authors, Laurie Colwin, taken from us much to soon. And taken from her own small daughter much too soon too, as I recall more often than one might expect. Jane Louise has just left her baby, Miranda, alone with her husband for the first time and is returning from spending time with a friend:

It was nearing the end of the academic year. Everywhere she looked students were lugging boxes of books, clothes, and standing lamps out of their dorms. She stood on the sidewalk and watched a serious young boy load two duffel bags into the trunk of his father’s car and dash into a building. His father, a gray-haired man with a wide chest and a linen sports jacket, was loading the trunk. Jane Louise stood perfectly still, blinded by the sunny glare. Hazy light poured down around her.
Some day Miranda would grow up and go to college. day would follow day: She would lose her baby teeth. Her adult teeth would come in. She would go to school, learn to read, go to high school, have boyfriends, leave home. To her amazement, jane Louise found herself in tears. Her throat got hot, and tears poured down her cheeks. She felt powerless to brush them away.
The gray-haired man walked past her, carrying a pair of suitcases. When he saw her, he stopped and set the cases down.
“Are you okay?” he said.
“I was just thinking about my child going to college,” Jane Louise said.
“How old is your child?” the man asked gently.
“Just five months old,” said Jane Louise, and she began to sob. “You must think I’m a nut.”
The man looked at her thoughtfully. “When my kid went to sleep-away camp for the first time, I wanted to lie down in the driveway and eat dirt,” he said.
Jane Louise looked up at him. He filled her vision entirely. The hazy sunshine swirled around them. She grabbed his wrist, and kissed his hand. He was wearing a beautiful gold watch.
“Thank you,” she said. “Oh thank you.”
Then she collected herself. The man picked up the suitcases.
“It’ll be all right,” he said. “You’ll grow into it.”

He hands me my wine.  And I tell him that his cartoons are beautiful and funny and true.

He smiles.

I ask him what else the review of his dreams says about him.  He likes this question.  He thinks.  Then he says, “Robert Wexler is a goofball in search of truth.”

I think, I’m a truthball in search of goof, and I realize that I can say whatever I want now.  And I do.

Why do these lines stick in my head so.  A goofball in search of truth.  A truthball in search of goof.  I am still not sure which one of these I am, and it is a question I have pondered often.

Which are you?

Anyway, my favourite story is the second last one in the book, “You Could be Anyone.” It marks a shift in tone from the rest of collection, both because it is written in the second person, and because it tells the story of how Jane discovers she has breast cancer while she is dating not the right man. The relationship ends, and radiation treatments begin. Jane sees a therapist.

It was easier when the menace came from the outside, you tell a therapist; she nods, neither agreeing nor disagreeing. Thursday after Thursday, you tell her about your relationship with him. You talk and talk, waiting for the cure. After a while, though, it occurs to you that even a perfect understanding of failed love is the booby prize.

So what did I learn? I learned that I can write academic prose and fiction in the same month, though not at the same time. It doesn’t matter if I have “free time” to write the other in while I am writing the first. If my headspace is occupied with one project, it can’t divide itself in two for another.

I have a good seven chapters begun on the new novel, and I feel like it is solid stuff. Many of the things I learned were things relearned from previous NaNos. Writing 2 000 words per day does not mean you have to sacrifice quality. It does mean your story will live in your head 24-7 and will generate connections and developments seemingly without your involvement. That is always fun. Characters will grow before your eyes.

I think I do my best writing under this regime. I think 2,000/day is too much for me to sustain for longer than a month, every day with no break. But I know that when i get in a rhythm of writing, say 1,000 a day, the work stays fresh.

I already can’t wait for next year.

I’ve been doing this since 2005, with more, or mostly less, success. The first year I cracked 50,000, and the second year I finished a novel. Since then, other deadlines have got in the way and though the discipline of the month got me moving, I wasn’t able to go full out. That’s not the case this month. I’m beginning a new project one I am really excited about — medieval historical fiction as usual, but with a great fantasy twist — and the discipline of daily writing will be perfect for starting me on my way.
Good luck to all fellow WriMos!

Another year, another Hyde Park Used Book Sale. This was my haul (click the photo to see titles). I’m pretty excited abut it. Two Mary Stewarts that I have never read before? Is that possible? A bunch of Alice Hoffmans. A few for my son. And many others that I have been curious about, and have wanted to check out for a while. All to benefit the local Neighbourhood* Club, which does so much good work. Combined with lovely out of town guests and a turkey for (Canadian) Thanksgiving, it made for a wonderful weekend.

*I guess they’d call it a Neighborhood Club here.

The events of 1938 and 1939 unfold through the eyes of Marta, the governess, a woman uncertain of her own origins.  Why did you decide to make her the viewpoint character?

Good question. Truthfully I can almost never remember why I did anything in a particular way, beyond the fact that it felt intuitively right. But the idea of an unreliable narrator was appealing. I often turn to Jack Hodgins’ ‘A Passion for Narrative,’ – my novelists’ bible – and I think it was his suggestion to view the main characters, in my case Pavel and Anneliese, through outside eyes. That said, through the process of writing Marta grew to become a main character herself. She is a liminal character, not Jewish but close with Jews (and, as you point out, unsure of her origins, so with the possibility of being one); not the mother of a child sent away but close enough to understand a mother’s perspective. She is both on the Bauers’ side and, if only accidentally, against them. I wanted this tension to work in concert with the plot so the reader wouldn’t be certain what they could trust. The desire to keep reading would be to discover how the story turns out but also how Marta—who is still young and naïve—resolves as a person.

Once being Jewish starts to become a problem in Czechoslovakia, Marta spends a good deal of time thinking about what it means to be Jewish, what makes a Jew, a Jew, and what it means that her employers are Jewish.  Have you figured out what makes a Jew, a Jew?

The short answer is that no, I have not. Every attempt I make – that it’s a religion, that it’s a race, a faith, a way of being in the world, an ethnicity—seems to come up short. And the other obvious answer–that it’s a combination of all of the above – seems somehow too easy. To further complicate matters, I know from my own experience that feeling Jewish and being accepted as Jewish by other Jews are two different things. After connecting with my own patrilineal Judaism and with a Jewish community in Toronto, it was still made clear to me in ways both subtle and overt that I was not actually Jewish and wouldn’t be without a formal ritual (and even then, of course, there are those who still wouldn’t accept me).  My own self-identification, in other words, wasn’t enough. I hasten to add that this is different between countries, and even cities. If I’d been a New Yorker with a Jewish father my experience would have been totally different. I would have had many more options available to me.

Long before I knew anything about Shabbat, my husband Degan and I were practicing what we called “24 hours unplugged” in our home – we’d pick a day on the weekend, turn off the computers, unplug the phones, make a nice meal, go for a long walk, spend quality time together. So what is that? Is it something in my genes that remembers a ritual not practiced in our family for generations? Is it a lucky coincidence? Happily for me, asking questions is central to Judaism so this is one that I will continue to ask and to wrestle with as my experience as a Jew grows and as I feel my way through raising my daughter in the tradition.

Your novel connects the past to the present in an unexpected way.  What was it like living and travelling in Czechoslovakia so many years after our family was forced to flee?  Did you perceive echoes and remnants of our family’s past there?  Or has that world vanished completely and for good?

I was searching for echoes, longing for them even, but I don’t think I was honestly able to hear them. More than anything I wish I’d been older, or maybe more mature, when we traveled there with Granny before she died. I’d love another chance to hear (and remember) what she had to say about where and how she lived. At this point the best I was able to do was soak in the little details: the food, the language, the landscape.

When I read novels by people I know well, I am always struck by the little bits of their lives that I find within the story.  How do you as an author decide what of your own life can become grist for a novel?  What is tabu?

Anything goes, as far as I’m concerned, with the proviso that it be in service to the overall narrative. In fiction, the author has the liberty to include whatever “truths” they want with the knowledge that it will be taken as fiction (versus with poetry, where everything is assumed to be autobiographical, especially if written in the first person). That said, I have friends and colleagues who have seriously offended family members who recognized themselves disguised in novels and short stories, and who have vowed to write differently the next time around. When I was writing my first novel, The Sweet Edge, I drew heavily on an old friend from my teenaged years for the character of Ellen. What still amazes me is that I did so entirely unconsciously. When my friend confronted me with it (she was flattered, thankfully, rather than offended) I was blown away that my psyche had acted thus without my knowing it.

It looks like my next book will be a memoir, very confessional in nature, and I think these questions will come more into play for me in that genre. There’s a gut instinct to censor out the most personal and revealing details, which, paradoxically, are often the ones to which a reader can most relate, and which make the book most compelling. Before having started to actually write I’m already coddling myself along, telling myself if I write the “truth” (or my version of it) I can always change names and details at a later date.

I loved the way you built up the layers of historical detail in the book, not just the facts about the political forces that were shaping your characters’ lives, but the depiction of things like what they ate and what kinds of spaces they moved through.  How were you able to do that?

Plagiarism! But really, I read as widely as possible on the time and place and reminded myself of the notion that there are only really seven main plots in the world and the famous saying, “‘Good writers borrow from other writers. Great writers steal from them outright.” I was lucky to come into several unpublished memoirs by people who had grown up in Czechoslovakia, so they were incredibly helpful to that end, as were books by writers like Alan Furst who write about the Old World as I was doing. I did also draw on the memories I do have of our grandparents—what they wore, what they smoked, how they spoke—especially of Granny who was alive into my adult years.

Everyone I know who has read this novel has said that they read it almost compulsively, scarcely able to put it down.  But as the narrator tells us, it is not a happy story.  Were there some parts that were especially difficult to write, either because of the motions and events they described, or because of their technical challenges?  How do you write those scenes?

First: thank you. To hear that someone read the book compulsively is one of the best compliments, almost as nice as hearing that it made them cry! Which might sound odd, but I take it to mean that the book is working as it’s meant to, and that the reader is, even momentarily, invested in the fiction as in reality.

In terms of the writing, the whole thing was a challenge for me, and I wrote many drafts (of course), but the section from Pepik’s perspective was especially so. The perspective changes abruptly, from female to male, adult to child, and I didn’t want that to feel jarring for the reader. I wanted the voice of the child to seem authentic, and not having spent much time around small boys, I worked hard at that. I wonder, actually, if I would have written it differently now that I have a child of my own. I’m already looking forward to starting my next novel—down the road—and to the new perspective that parenthood will bring.

We will all be looking forward to reading the next thing you write. Thanks so much for participating in this interview, Alison!

There’s one that made me tear up a little:

5. Same-sex love and intimacy “are well-documented in human history.”

Thank you, John Boswell. Sometimes even a medievalist can have an impact that lasts beyond his death.