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gods of Alabama |
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How
did you come up with the title? It
comes from the first sentence of the book, "There are gods in
Alabama: Jack Daniels, high school quarterbacks, trucks, big tits, and
also Jesus," That line is repeated in several forms throughout the
novel. The narrator, Arlene Fleet, at one point says "There are
gods in Alabama, I know because I killed one."
The working title was Gone to Bones, a reference to both
poor Jim Beverly and the kudzu. Every winter kudzu drops all its leaves
and becomes a twining skeleton of itself. It reveals the outline of
whatever it’s been smothering. It’s creepy as hell. You can see the
ghosts of the trees it has killed under it, or the outlines of old cars.
That's a theme in the book, the true shapes of things being revealed,
secrets being exposed. I
liked it, but The Lovely Bones came out and took off like a
rocket, and also Gone to Bones sounds a little like a forensic
pathologist/ thriller/ CSI kind of book. My agent suggested peeling the
title out of the first sentence, and I thought, “Oh, of course. That’s
exactly right.?nbsp; What
writers have influenced you? I read constantly and eclectically. Of course I am a rabid fan of great southern fiction: Flannery O'Conner and William Faulkner and Eudora Welty and Lee Smith. But I can't read them when I am working---a truly great Southern book like To Kill a Mockingbird can put me on the floor, foaming and biting at the carpet, yelling “WHY, LORD, WHY! WHY DO I EVEN TRY TO WRITE WHEN HARPER LEE ALREADY SAID EVERYTHING WORTH SAYING PERFECTLY!?So when I am working—especially when I am drafting new material---I will read anything BUT Southern fiction. My favorite contemporary writers are Ann Patchett and Michael Chabon. They can slay me with a single phrase. I like reading debut novels in any genre, sci-fi, cosies, literary fiction, the kind of smart horror Stephen King often writes. In gods in Alabama, my main character’s boyfriend is hooked on legal thrillers, and that's actually a tick of mine. I also like cops and private detectives when they are exceptionally well written---I’ll read anything by Dennis LeHane or Robert K. Tannenbaum. I think you can see the influence of that kind of reading in gods, which borrows the same sort of engine that’s used to drive murder mysteries. As a kid I read weird stuff. I had an older brother who claimed he’d glued all the pages of Charlotte’s Web together and he wouldn’t replace it until I agreed to read one of his books. Then he handed me Conan the Conqueror. He got me hooked on classic pulp at about 8 years old. I read everything Robert E. Howard ever wrote before I was 10, also Edgar Rice Burroughs, H.P. Lovecraft, and Heinlein’s early space opera stuff. By the time I was twelve I was reading back and forth between my dad’s J.R.R. Tolkien and my mother’s Jane Austen, my brother’s Michael Moorcock and the neighbor lady’s complete collection of Harlequin Romances (but she’d only loan me the ones that were written before 1972, when the guidelines changed and all of a sudden the characters went running way past second base). Have
you always wanted to be a writer? Pretty much. My mother says that as young as first grade, people would ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up, and I would say, “I’m going to write The Great American Novel.?And in the attic she has quite a few “books?I wrote and illustrated and stapled together. Reading was always my favorite escape---it still is. When I am reading something good, people can enter the room, talk to me, put up wallpaper, commit murder... I am not likely to notice. Now I have son, eight, who walks into walls and tumbles down the stairs because he has his nose buried so deeply in Lemony Snicket he can’t be bothered by pesky old reality. I love that. Whenever I see faults in him that I know he got directly from me---we both constantly lose things, break things, we worry, we are frothingly impatient--- I say to myself, “At least I was able to pass on my reading obsession! He got SOMETHING good out of my half of his genetic legacy!?/font> I did spend some time working in theatre, mostly acting, but even then my primary interest was playwriting. Except for the part about being the greatest genius the western world has ever birthed, I’m a lot like Samuel Beckett. Or, actually, a reversed Beckett. He wanted so badly to be a novelist, but... He never caught Joyce, not by half. And yet he is the best playwright to ever grace this planet, bar none. I wanted to write plays, but I’d get twenty pages in, and 90% of what I had written would be in italics or parenthesis, stage directions and scene/character descriptions with very few actual lines. I’d realize I was once again trying to stuff a natural born novel into a play. Are
any of the characters based on people you know? It doesn’t really work that way for me---there are no absolute or even easy parallels. There are parts of me in all the characters, and there are things in all of them that are absolutely foreign to my nature, but I know how they work because I have seen pieces of them in other people. Burr is probably closer to my husband than any other character is to a real person in my life. As for plot, that’s tricky. The book is geographically autobiographical. Arlene and I both had military fathers, so we moved around a lot during our most formative years, and then by the time we were in third grade or so, we had both settled permanently in the South. We both went to grad school in Chicago and then returned home. But trust me, we had very different reasons. My father retired; Arlene’s father died. Arlene headed to Illinois because she was running away from a boy in her past. I was running to one. I fell pretty hard for a hometown guy I had known since I was a teenager. I followed him 800 miles into the frozen north. (It ended up being the right decision---I married him and we had two exceptionally fine babies and here, over a decade later, I still like him very best.) So even though nothing that actually happens in the book is true or even based on truth, it is a journey that Arlene and I have taken together. I know what the culture shock feels like. And I have... let’s call them “thematic affinities? with Arlene. I’m interested in redemption, in how grace works. I’m interested in The Epic Journey Home. Arlene is not me, but she is certainly a reflection of a lot of ideas and hopes and fears that are very close to my center. Also, odd little facts and memories and objects that have personal meaning show up in my fiction, tucked into odd corners. For example, I really do have an Aunt Niner, now deceased, and I stuck her old rocking chair in Mama’s room. I don’t remember anything about Niner’s personality, her likes or dislikes, and I can’t hear her voice or remember a single thing she said. She died when I was a child. But I can see her big-knuckled hands and her bony wrists and the hard lines of her angular face perfectly. Aunt Florence looks like her, so much so that my father recognized Niner from the descriptions of Florence. What’s
next? I just finished a new novel called Between, Georgia. Like gods in Alabama, it’s a strange blend of humor and violence, but it has a little bit more of a love story. I’m very excited about it---I love the characters. I especially love my main character’s mother. She has Ushers syndrome, which means she was born Deaf and gradually went blind. She was an extremely challenging character to write --- I did more research reading and interviews to create Mama Frett than I think I did for everything else in the book combined. You can read all about the new book here: Between, Georgia |
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