Soli has created an epic war novel, with an ambitious scope that spans years, characters, and countries. Her book belongs in the upper eschelon of the Vietnam canon. Here, Vietnam is more than a war. We see urbanites and expats in Saigon, farmers and fishermen in small villages, the Killing Fields of Cambodia, journalists with a range of motives, as well as protesters and grieving parents in the States.

With a strong woman behind the lens and under fire, Soli bridges the gap between the soldiers in the field and the observers around the dining room table. The book is at once a tremendous document of a historical era and a timeless story of love and aspiration. The Lotus Eaters isn’t just about how we fight wars; it’s about how we live with them, how we watch them, and how we turn them into history.

From the author’s website: Tatjana Soli is a novelist and short story writer. Born in Salzburg, Austria, she attended Stanford University and the Warren Wilson MFA Program. Her stories have appeared in The Sun, StoryQuarterly, Gulf Coast, Other Voices, Third Coast, Carolina Quarterly, and North Dakota Quarterly among other publications. Her work has been twice listed in the 100 Distinguished Stories in Best American Short Stories and nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She was awarded the Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Prize, the Dana Award, finalist for the Bellwether Prize, and received scholarships to the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She lives with her husband in Orange County, California, and teaches at the Gotham Writers’ Workshop.

Interview:

At the risk of sounding obvious: Why Vietnam? What is it about that war that captured your imagination?

My mother worked as an interpreter for NATO in Italy in the late sixties. From there, we moved to Fort Ord in Monterey, CA. As a young girl, living on a military base, I was surrounded by this frightening thing that was happening. My friends’ fathers would be shipped off, and there would be tears. Sometimes a car would pull up to a house, and I remember the dread on all the faces around me. A few days later the family would disappear. So the war in its mysteriousness haunted me from an early age, and when I grew up, I read every account I could, trying to come to some conclusion about what happened.

Why do you think that episode in our history continues to fascinate us and demand reinterpretation?

Marine Crossfire by Eddie Adams

Well, there are still plenty of novels being written about WWII. But Vietnam is unique in that it made people distrust their own government, totally reject the establishment. People became cynical and disillusioned by the lies they were fed about the necessity of the war, about the sacrifices being made, but there was also this great power in knowing the truth, in agitating for change. The access photojournalists had in that war was one of the reasons the truth came out. That freedom, by the way, no longer exists. I see many parallels to the situation today in Iraq and Afghanistan, but there is an apathy on the part of the public compared to the 60’s and 70’s.

As far as reinterpretation, the seminal works about Vietnam for me are Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried and Going After Cacciato, Robert Stone’s Dog Soldiers, and Michael Herr’s Dispatches. All focus on the disconnect between the official line our government gave us and the reality those on the ground faced. Those writers moved past the obvious “war is hell” theme. For me, the reinterpretation came with introducing the particularities of place into the war. War doesn’t occur in a vacuum, it occurs in someone’s birthplace, it destroys their home, their family.

I’m really glad you mentioned the “lies about the necessity of war.” One of the things that I find most interesting about The Lotus Eaters is Helen’s agency—the fact that she chooses to go and to stay and to go again. So much of our mythology of Vietnam (and other wars) is wrapped up in the draft—young Americans who have no choice. In your novel, many of the characters are opportunists who choose go there to advance their careers. In fact, the only characters that truly have no choice in the matter are the Vietnamese. Were you trying to show that a sort of adventure/glory-seeking is a part of war? That there is always a choice, on somebody’s part?

War photographer James Natchwey

Journalists are a special case, and one of the reasons that writing the book fascinated me. They go of their own volition; they put their life on the line on a daily basis. And the reasons are as complex and varied as the individuals. The biggest reason I came across, again and again, both in Vietnam and in more recent conflicts, is this desire to be there to record history in the making. The adventure/glory of getting the image, the story, that comes to define an event. It’s almost become a truism that without the recording of an event, it disappears. Margaret Moth said that in her opinion it was the best job in the world. But there is a price to be paid: the danger physically, the burnout mentally. You have to make that part of your choice. And if you go back knowing the risks, is that addiction to danger, or acknowledging that the risk is worth the greater good of knowledge? I’m immensely grateful to the men and women who take these risks, who bring us back these stories that perhaps wouldn’t get told otherwise.

Could you talk about your research process for this novel? It feels incredibly well-informed. Was there a historical Helen Adams? Were any other characters based on real people?

In retrospect, I would say that ignorance is bliss. Not only did I have to figure out how to write my first novel, but then I had to write about a time and culture that required extensive research, and then because this is well-known territory, I had to be accurate for people who had actually experienced the war, but still make it my own.

Dickey Chapelle

I spent almost a year gathering facts, tidbits, ideas, pictures, music. I filled notebooks and notebooks, wrote a first draft that was fairly dry. And then I kind of let it all go, allowed myself to remember the research that stuck with me, forget the rest, so that it became more organic to the story. I went back to telling a story, creating characters, and that changed much of the plot, did away with lots of hard-won research. Painful, but necessary. Research has to be in service of the story, and not vice-versa.

Catherine Leroy

There were a handful of female photojournalists in Vietnam. The ones that particularly intrigued me were Dickey Chapelle and Catherine Leroy. But I took my character farther in terms of being consumed by the war, consumed by the country, the complexities of combat photojournalism. There was a real Vietnamese spy, Pham Xuan An, who worked undercover for Time magazine that I used for part of the story of Linh. But these “facts” are peripheral to the main thrust of the story.

I have received many letters from people who served in Vietnam, both in civilian capacity and military, who said that the book brought the time back to them. I’m incredibly proud of those letters. But I’ve also received letters from people who had fathers, uncles, husbands, etc. who served, and they said that the book helped them understand what those loved ones went through.

Did you travel to Vietnam (and/or Cambodia) in the course of writing this book?

I traveled in Asia briefly with my husband years before I thought of writing the book. Once I was deep into the research, I planned a trip to Vietnam that had to be cancelled due to a family emergency. But then a strange thing happened once I had the first draft down—I had this particular place so strong in my head, it was literally feeding the story. I was afraid that if I went to Vietnam that the difference between what was in my imagination and what I found in contemporary Vietnam would break the dream of the story for me. Going back to your research question, I found the right detail set off a chain of events; that was its value rather than strictly providing verisimilitude for the book. I liken it to the movie Apocalypse Now. That is a fever dream of Vietnam, Coppola’s dream of Vietnam. You aren’t going to find that place on a tour. The Saigon of the book is one made from my characters: Helen, Linh, and Darrow. I’m happy beyond belief when I have people tell me that they were there, and the book brings the time back to them, but the setting is foremost an organic thing intertwined with the characters. I’m planning on finally taking the trip this winter. I think it will be an amazing experience.

This must’ve been a very daunting project to undertake. Did you find it intimidating to write about a subject that (a) had been tackled by so many literary heavyweights, and that (b) many of your readers might have experienced firsthand?

I did find it intimidating. But I really believe that if the story is important to you as a writer, you will find a way to make it your own. I don’t think you can cynically choose a subject because it is topical and hope to pull it off. It has to come from inside, be a passion. Actually, I had the opposite problem with Vietnam. Both agents and editors told me it was a small, niche market, dominated exclusively by military books for a male audience. But that was precisely the reason I thought there was room for a bigger, more inclusive story, that I could tell.

I think readers who actually were there firsthand accept the book because of whatever story truth I was able to convey, which is different than fact truth. Although I tried to be faithful to the general facts, this is not a non-fiction book. The primary focus here is on the effect of the war on characters, who are entirely fictional.

Speaking of characters, I was hoping we could talk a little about Linh—who I found to be remarkable. I guess what fascinates me is how much he defies any sort of easy categorization—in terms of his role, his allegiances, etc. What was the origin of this character? What can he tell us about the Vietnam War and other, subsequent conflicts?

Little Saigon via heatkernel

The one common thread in most accounts of vets returning to Vietnam is how accepting the Vietnamese people are. There is very little hostility over the war. And the vets often find healing by exchanging stories with their military counterparts, realizing that under all the slurs, the stereotyping, these people are essentially the same as they are. What was amazing about the access that journalists had in Vietnam is how it did at least show us to some extent the civilian toll. From what I’ve been able to read from various journalists in today’s wars, that freedom no longer exists in the same way. I worry that we are not getting the equivalent of Linh’s story in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Could you tell me about the title of The Lotus Eaters? That’s from Homer, is it not?

The title does come from The Odyssey:

Those who ate the honeyed fruit of the plant lost any wish to come back and bring us news. All they now wanted was to stay where they were with the Lotus-eaters, to browse on the lotus, and to forget all thoughts of return.

17th c. etching Lotus Eaters

To take things in a bit of a craft direction, I wanted to go back to what you said earlier about the emphasis on character as opposed to fact. What would you say is the novel’s role, in a world where narrative nonfiction—and unreliable journalism—are so prevalent? Do you have any advice for writers who struggle to incorporate history (or current events) into their work?

books via austinevans

Speaking of research, your descriptions of photography are very well-informed and convincing. Was this another area of research for you? Have you worked as a photojournalist or photographer?

via Dan Newton

I did do research on basic photography, and, especially, tried to convey the hardships these photographers worked under. Film got destroyed all the time – whether under the conditions out in the field, or back in the less than optimal darkrooms. Often film was sent out on planes to avoid censorship. Sometimes it wouldn’t make it through. So the medium almost became a metaphor itself. And what is really fascinating is that this is all historical research now. With digital photography, a picture can be sent around the world in seconds. An amazing change. Although apparently the desert conditions of Iraq and Afghanistan wreak havoc with computer equipment.

You mentioned that you wrote several short stories about Vietnam before writing The Lotus Eaters. Do you feel a sense of closure on this subject? Will you write about Vietnam again?

That’s funny that you ask that because until recently I would have answered that I had finished with the war. But a new non-fiction book came out that I had missed, and I started reading it and immediately I plunged back into that time. It felt like home.

I wrote many stories about the Vietnamese immigrants as I gathered my research for the war. I had so many ideas that the original book started splitting in two different directions, which my editor wisely convinced me to delete. But I still have those hundred pages in my files. I would love to develop that story some day. Right now I’m finishing up my second novel set in contemporary California, but at some point in the future I’ll definitely go back to Vietnam.

Can you tell me a bit about the new novel?

Well, I had bitten off so much with the first book, so intense in research in so many different areas, that I wanted a completely different challenge as a writer this time. I’m superstitious about saying too much, but it is set on an isolated citrus ranch in Southern California. Although it is an entirely different kind of book, I think some of the same themes are there: issues of race, dislocation, healing. It’s providing the right kind of stretch for me as a writer in terms of content and craft. I’m very engaged with the story, which I kind of doubted after the obsession of writing the first book. The great gift of writing a second novel is that even when things feel hopeless, you know you’ve gotten through it one time before.

Do you have any advice for aspiring fiction writers and novelists?

Hemingway at work via LIFE

I definitely understand the temptation to chase trends, to write something with an eye to an audience, but ultimately, I don’t think that it will fulfill you over a whole career. A short story writer who I interviewed for an article on the writer career track works as a doctor, and his belief is that you’ve got to have a career that financially sustains you other than writing. If you give up that dream, you are free to write what you want and not worry about your bank account. He also makes the point that having a life away from the computer is a good thing. By necessity, most of us have that, but I think rather than resent these intrusions into our writing time, which I know I did, look at that time as making you the kind of person who has something to say when you get to the keyboard.

Further Resources:

• Tatjana Soli will appear at the Carmel Public Library on Saturday September 7, and as part of “Between the Pages” at Town Hall in Seattle on September 16. For full details of those events and 7 more appearances on the West Coast visit her website.
• Read Soli’s essay for Three Guys One Book, titled “Loneliness, Love and Hemingway,” about the influence of The Sun Also Rises on her as a reader and writer.
• Listen to Soli discuss The Lotus Eaters and some of the history behind it, including archival footage of the Vietnam War, in this video:

Margaret Lazarus Dean: photo credit Joe Vaughn

Margaret Lazarus Dean’s The Time It Takes to Fall takes place in the early 80’s in Cape Canaveral, a space town, during a time when NASA and shuttle launches were still a part of the American story of success.  The main character of the novel, Dolores Gray, is an exceptionally bright student who is determined to be an astronaut when she grows up.  Dolores’s father works as a technician for NASA, and he takes Dolores to every shuttle launch, the details of which Dolores then meticulously records in her space journal, her scrapbook of all things NASA.

Dolores has also recently found herself befriended by Eric Biersdoffer, the son of NASA’s Director of Launch Safety, the smartest, but also most unpopular boy in school.   Dolores’ struggle between her desire for popularity and her secret love of math and science make life difficult for her.  However, her life becomes even more trying when her father’s job at NASA is threatened along with her parent’s marriage.  Then, when the Challenger explosion occurs on the morning of January 28, 1986, a launch that had been highly anticipated as it was the first launch ever to include a teacher in its crew, her world turns completely upside down. And Dolores not only makes it her goal to figure out what went wrong on the launch, but also hopes that by doing so she can both save her father’s job and bring her family back together again.  Seeking out difficult answers to difficult questions becomes part of the process of growing up for Dolores, whose loss of innocence mirrors America’s loss of faith in space travel.

Since meeting Margaret ten years ago at the University of Michigan, where she received her MFA in 2001 and subsequently taught writing before accepting her current position at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, I have been impressed by how much she has lived inside this project.  From her intense knowledge of NASA trivia to her set of NASA drinking glasses to her astronaut kitchen magnets, she has immersed herself in this world.  She even enrolled willingly in a physics class for the summer so that she could do the space math needed in this novel.  But this book goes beyond the NASA facts to make a universe full of memorable places and characters that deeply move me, and I wanted to hear more about what went into creating characters against the backdrop of such a tragic historical event.

Interview:

I’ll start off with the most obvious questions. Why NASA?  Why the Challenger?  And why NASA and the Challenger now?

Challenger Explosion: January 28, 1986

I’ll take the second question first: the idea of writing about Challenger was the impetus for the book from the beginning. I remember seeing that disaster and thinking, this is the worst thing that has ever happened—and it was, for people in my generation, the worst thing we had ever witnessed. This was a disaster that affected children more than it did adults, because we (children) were sold on the excitement of having a schoolteacher on board. Within a few weeks, adults seemed to have adopted the attitude that this was very sad, but it was the price of progress, yet children were still walking around with this look of betrayal in their eyes. We had been told that spaceflight was so safe they could send up a schoolteacher, and then they blew it up, with the schoolteacher on it, while we were watching live. We did not bounce back as quickly.

I’d been interested in NASA and spaceflight since I was a little kid, largely due to the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum. My father took my brother and me there on visitation weekends starting when I was seven, so I’ve been there approximately one million times. Visiting this museum a lot as a kid was really a great education—I have a lot of images and impressions in my head, knowledge acquired in a disorganized way, which I think is good for fiction. I can close my eyes and picture the lunar modules that put the astronauts down on the moon, or the spacesuits, or the little packets of food they ate. Of course, all this was before the shuttle program got going, so in a weird way I was more familiar with Apollo-era spaceflight, which took place before I was born, than I was with the space shuttle era, which didn’t start until I was nine.

But I think it was useful to see and believe in spaceflight in this way, through artifacts rather than through books or learning it at school. The idea that these were things designed by people, that it was people who went to space, is crucial to the way I think about NASA, and is strangely missing from the way a lot of people think about spaceflight. I don’t think you can believe in a lunar hoax conspiracy theory, for instance, if you are really aware of the huge number of people who worked on each of these missions.The idea that they weren’t actually doing what they were purported to have been doing, that they would all keep this dark secret, is ludicrous. You can only believe that if you picture NASA as this faceless, inhuman entity. And I think that human quality is crucial to the way I portrayed NASA in the book—the rockets were assembled by people, and one of those people was Dolores’s father.

Why NASA and Challenger now? I didn’t intend it to be particularly timely; early in my attempts to write something good, I seized on this material and my own memories of what happened, and the more I learned about the disaster the more convinced I was that I wanted to write about it.  I did experience some doubt in September 2001, when a disaster of completely different proportions occurred. I wondered whether readers might ever again be stirred to care about a disaster that had killed only seven people—all of them people who had accepted the risk of this inherently dangerous undertaking. As a tragedy, it pales in comparison to 3000 normal people dying in office buildings and on planes. But I came to believe that writing about a smaller disaster was still worthwhile, because it’s still true that Challenger was the worst thing that had ever happened for kids in our generation, and as such it still bears looking at. I’m also interested in the way that disasters all have certain things in common, the way that literature about disasters has certain common themes, even if the disasters are deeply different, which is why I obsessively read fiction and nonfiction about 9/11, about Katrina, about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in 1911, about Columbine.

There is a definite awareness that this is a novel about space, even in the imagery as the opening prologue offers us a birds-eye view of the Florida landscape and by the epilogue that view is so complicated: then we’re clearly looking down through the eyes of the astronauts.  I love this theme of “watching from above” throughout, though it’s eerie to think about.

Thanks, that’s a cool way of reading it. I didn’t think consciously to start with this helicopter shot of central Florida and then moving back up into the sky again at the end, but I guess that has a nice symmetry, accidentally.

Challenger Crew: photo from NASA website

I did assume, for most of the time I was working on the book, that I wouldn’t ever enter the astronauts’ point of view, because that seemed fraught with ethical issues. They are real people, and they are dead and so can’t speak up for themselves if they don’t like what I’ve written. But the more I learned about the disaster, the more I learned about the seven people on the Challenger crew, the more I came to genuinely like them, and that made me more comfortable entering into a scene with them. Plus, the more I learned about what they experienced that day, especially in those minutes after the explosion, the more I thought that scene needed to be part of the book.

I find myself so visually enticed by so many of the elements in the novel, from the mother’s hair to launch-side bleachers to the schoolyard.  I feel like you direct my eye so specifically.  I know fiction should “show” but your way of showing is so vivid and precise—as if images could attach us to a past or place for good.  Did you intend to be so visual?  For example, there’s that scene in the book which I recall as vividly as if I had been there.  The mom is in the backyard refinishing the table because they are having important dinner guests, and she’s quite a sight.  Here a quote from the passage:

. . .her forehead tight, [she] squinted meanly at the table, moving her lips now and then.  She wore yellow rubber gloves up to the elbows and a set of pink pajamas.  Our father had shrunk them in the wash and the sleeves came to just past her elbows, the bottoms strained over her hips.  The top with its lace edging was now streaked with red wood stain in a way that seemed obscene.  Her hair escaped from her ponytail in frizzy black drifts that hung in her eyes and swayed to the rhythm of her work.

That’s a nice thing to say about it, thanks. I didn’t consciously think about the style as being especially visual—I think I wrote this way partly because my own memories of being a child are intensely visual. I remember staring at things until they sort of defamiliarized and took on outsized level of detail, especially in stressful or traumatic situations. So it just made sense to me for Dolores to see things that way too. I also like the way visual descriptions can take on so much emotional and thematic weight without feeling overly weighty.

Recent Shuttle Launch: Photo Credit Margaret Lazarus Dean

I’m always telling my students to take advantage of the things that literature can do that other art forms, especially film, cannot, and this is one of them: we can inflect descriptions, whereas movies can only show physical objects more or less as they are. I can describe a pack of cigarettes or a space shuttle as my character would see it, as distinct from the way anyone else in the world would see it. And not only that, I can describe it as she would see it on this particular day, at this particular moment in her life. (Incidentally, this is why Lolita can never be made into a film successfully—because Humbert’s descriptions of Lolita are so inflected through his pedophilia and his love for her. You can’t point a camera at a 13-year-old girl and have that produce the same effect as his descriptions, because the camera can never see her the way that he does. That can only be constructed through language.)

How did that impulse toward imagery relate to the Challenger explosion, which was truly a visual icon?  Or how did it feel to write about such an iconic image?

Yeah, I think most people remember the Challenger disaster as a visual image, and for people in our generation, who were kids at the time, it’s sort of burned into our brains. In terms of using it in the book, I think it was actually more difficult to write about an image that everyone already knows so well. I sort of imagined that readers would be anticipating that image as the story approached that point, but also not wanting to be bored by reading a description of something they’re already very familiar with. At the same time, some readers, like my youngest siblings, were not around for that and don’t have that image filed away, so I couldn’t depend on that to be in the reader’s mind either. I think the key I discovered to making it work was the inflection thing I was talking about earlier—to write about that moment in a way that would feel specific to that character’s experience, not just anyone’s.

Early Cover Design

As a side note, an early proposal for the book’s cover included the image of the explosion, and I’m glad that we didn’t wind up going with that. I think that smoke signature should kind of lurk in the imagination rather than sitting on the cover of the book.

The final cover I felt reflected the novel perfectly with the child-like stars.  It reminded me of one of the pages of Dolores’ space notebook.  Did you enjoy writing from a child’s perspective?  What choices did you have to make in choosing that kind of unreliable narrator?

I did enjoy writing from the point of view of a child, because children are so perceptive but are also often overlooked, which makes them great narrators. I wanted Dolores to be unreliable in certain ways, but not in others, which is not as tricky as it might sound. She’s always right on about math, science, and the details of spaceflight, but doesn’t always understand the emotional dynamics around her, especially her parents’. I hope readers will understand that intuitively.

Some readers have been put off by Dolores, by her honesty and imperfections (for instance, that she doesn’t always behave honorably). I think people are used to children being portrayed as very good and innocent, a purer version of adults, and that’s just not the case. I like Dolores and I think she’s a good kid, but her being a child doesn’t mean she isn’t sometimes selfish or mean.

I assigned your novel as part of my first-year writing class and my students really connected to it.  In honor of them I thought I would ask the question that they often asked, the question I used to hate because it seemed too unliterary, but that I learned to love because it showed how connected they felt to the individuals: “Why did the characters do this thing and not the other thing?”  (This was often followed with “They should have or shouldn’t have done that.”) Did you ever imagine different endings for Dolores?

I think it’s an interesting question, because it goes deep to the heart of the craft of fiction. What are the things that we can decide for our characters, and what are the things we have to wait to hear about from them? I think when I write I make a few key decisions about characters early on, and then I feel pretty helpless after that. I started this book with the idea that it would revolve around the Challenger disaster, and that children were more affected by it than adults. So Dolores is thirteen. Then I found a couple of ways to make her more affected by it than most kids would be—her father is laid off from his job at NASA as a result of the disaster, there is some suspicion that he might have been at fault in some way, and her own dream of becoming an astronaut is crushed. Having set these things in motion for her (and having made similar key decisions about other characters) I couldn’t then move her and the other people around like chess pieces. I had to follow them and find out what happened rather than making it up. Which was sometimes very frustrating.

I often hear writers use these expressions about their characters, like “He up and ran off and got into this crazy mischief!” as if our characters are naughty children. And that sometimes sounds kind of cheesy and contrived to me, but I think what I’m saying here is the same thing—once you set them in motion, you’re sort of running after them taking notes, rather than making their decisions for them.

I don’t know what kind of “should have” comments you hear—the one I hear most often is that Dolores shouldn’t have had sex with Josh [an older boy, in a scene that depicts an encounter that is technically statutory rape]. And that makes me try to untangle the way we use “should have”—because I agree that she “shouldn’t have” in the sense that it wasn’t a wise decision, but I insist that she would have, and did, and that it’s to the benefit of the story that she did.

That was definitely one of the “shouldn’t haves.”  What else do you want readers to consider about these characters that you lived with for so long?  Do you want us to forgive them or understand more subtle motives that underlie what we see on the surface?

I like questions about the characters because I came to really like these people, and I sort of miss them, so it’s fun to get to talk about them because it’s like I get to visit with them a bit. I really like the questions like “What ever happened to __?” even though they make no sense. A lot of people ask me if Dolores ever became an astronaut, what happened with Eric Biersdorfer, stuff like that. The questions can’t be answered, but I like the way the questions imply that readers have come to believe in these people beyond what they see on the page, because I do too.

Florida: Photo Credit Margaret Lazarus Dean

Of all the characters, I think I’m still most interested in Deborah, Dolores’s mother, because she changed the most for me over the years I worked on the book. I had the idea early on that she would be involved in these machinations, only half understood by Dolores, to try to get Frank’s job back, and that made her sort of a cartoonishly conniving figure. I went through a process with Dolores similar to the one many writers do when writing creative non-fiction— the first versions were somewhat exaggerated to show Dolores’s perception of her, but as I got further into the book, I kept wondering, why does this woman seem so one-dimensional? And the answer was: Oh yeah, it’s that I’m not considering any sort of life or even consciousness for her outside of her function in the plot. I had to force myself to take a closer look at her and think about her motivations—why would she behave the way she does? What are the things that make her real, rather than being just a figure in Dolores’s life? What was her childhood like, what does she think about when her husband is at work and her kids are at school? Now that I’m a mother, I’m more aware of the way that mothers often get treated as large appliances, both in literature and in life, and that makes me glad I decided to take some extra time with Deborah to figure her out a bit more.

It’s funny to think of mothers as large appliances!  You did a great job making Deborah very real. Even when she is absent in the novel she seems real.  Do people ever wonder if this novel is autobiographical?

When the book first came out, I reacted pretty snottily to the question, “How much of the book is autobiographical?” (Although that is apparently a lot of people’s favorite question for an author.) I dismissed that as the least interesting way to read fiction—trying to match it up with some “truth”—and I also felt (and still do) that it’s more rudely intrusive than askers seem to realize. These people were essentially asking me, “Did your mother ever cheat on your father to try to help him get his job back? Did you have sex with an adult as a 13-year-old to try to establish your own identity?” To which the answers are: no, and also: wow, none of your business.

But I’ve been forced to be a little less snotty about this recently, because there is one person who I stole from real life for the book, whom I hadn’t seen for more than twenty years, and that person subsequently became my Facebook friend. And when he was like, What have you been up to? Looks like you wrote a book! Maybe I’ll check it out!, I panicked. And I thought: It turns out I’m a huge hypocrite. I won’t tell the whole story here, because I’m working on an essay about it, but it’s interesting to reflect on the way I always just rejected that autobiography question without having to admit that the characters I create, by necessity, are based on what I know of people, and that is based, by necessity, on the people I have known.

Florida: Photo Credit Margaret Lazarus Dean

One of the things that draws me in again and again to this novel is that it’s a period piece of a period for which I have some fondness: the 80s. The period details aren’t overly blatant or gimmicky at all, but I love when I am reminded that this is America in the 80s. I could even feel in the novel how the characters, and even the houses, cling to the 70s in their sad way while trying to be up-to-date.  Even though this is a disaster novel did you enjoy writing about all that cool 80s stuff like the pop music and the shoes?

I did enjoy that—it’s been weird seeing the 80s come back into fashion again, in a way that I really don’t connect to my own experience of being alive then. It bothers me (and fascinates me) that we’ve chosen to see this era as one huge joke about neon stretch pants and synth pop. I’m not sure why it is that for some eras the music and fashion and cultural obsessions that survive are the most innovative and profound, but for the eighties we’ve chosen to remember it as cheesy and emptily self-important. But I don’t think it’s possible that people are smarter or dumber in certain historical eras (I say this over the objections of those who came of age in the sixties and have enshrined the superiority of that era in what I believe to be a very self-congratulatory way). There must be some sort of national shame about the things that were going on in the eighties for us to be so mocking of that time.

But, yeah, in the book I would often work on chapters for long periods of time without thinking specifically about the era, and then looking at it again I’d feel like I should eighties it up a little bit. But that’s a delicate thing to do—you can’t just hand your character a Rubik’s cube and put white sunglasses on her and call it a day. I had to really try to separate the stereotyped ideas that have developed since then from my actual memories of what people wore and how they talked. At the same time, some clichés are clichés because they are true, and I wanted to be honest about those things as well. Like, I do remember wearing black leggings with a huge T-shirt and boots and thinking the combination was quite fetching.

After the book came out, I was asked to make a playlist of music related to the book and write about it for a music site called Largehearted Boy, which was actually a great opportunity for me to reflect on the music of that time and opine about it a little bit. Some of the songs I wrote about there are songs everyone knows because they’re on the 80s compilations, but some of them aren’t, and it was nice to reflect on mix of music that Dolores might have listened to. It also gave me a chance to try to articulate my love for Prince, which can never truly be articulated.

I know you did a lot of research to get Florida right, but how important was it to get these artifacts right?

Florida: Photo Credit Margaret Lazarus Dean

Super important. I always sort of imagined a Florida native reading the book and saying, “She’s clearly not from here.” And this was the standard I tried to hold myself to, though it’s sort of an impossible one—to satisfy someone who lived where my characters lived and worked where they worked, for it to feel completely real to them. Place is very important to me, and I felt like a trespasser in many ways writing this book—I kept imagining if someone who grew up in Florida tried to set a book in Minnesota, how I would react to that, and the answer was: probably not kindly. If I could have moved this story to Minnesota, I would have, but unfortunately for me, Cape Canaveral cannot be moved.

So I did a lot of research, and I visited the area twice (and got to see a space shuttle launch), but ultimately, I relied a lot on imagination, and I wish the word “imagination” did not have such childish and unserious associations, because it’s hard work and it should be taken seriously.

Kennedy Space Center: Photo Credit Margaret Lazarus Dean

I have heard from a number of readers who grew up in that area, including one reader who grew up there in a NASA family, still lives there, and now has a job working on the space shuttle at the Kennedy Space Center himself—so he’s sort of like my nightmare of a reader. He politely pointed out a couple of inaccuracies, but he’s generally a fan of the book and has invited me to visit for an insider tour. So I kind of passed the test.

The idea of “getting it right” seems to be a theme throughout the novel.  And it seems to be deeper than your average need to be respected or fit in as the novel also brings in math, something that can be “gotten right” in a definite way.  What does it mean for these characters to get it right?

I think most of the characters in the book are pretty committed to “getting it right” in the ways that count to them—except for Delia, whom I love for that reason. The dad of course is also interested in “getting things right” at his job and at home: I think he’s meticulous about his work, and never forgets that people will be riding on the rockets he’s working on. He also really tries to be a good father, and I think he is. But he doesn’t have a sense of trying to “get it right” for his own gain, of trying to reach for something beyond what he currently has. Maybe this is another way of saying that Dolores and her mother are ambitious and he is not, and now that we’re talking about it I think this is one of the things some readers find off-putting about Dolores and especially the mother—that they are ambitious and it shows. They try to make things happen for themselves rather than just waiting politely. It’s interesting, because this is a quality I think Americans tend to value and admire a lot, but it can also easily tip in the wrong direction and then we really punish that person for it.

Talk about getting it right—the mall! The characters say that though “they didn’t talk about it” the mall changed the way they live.  You nailed that mall.  The way we didn’t talk about it, but it was so huge.  Even the way there were the strip malls and then there was the mall.  We analyzed the passage about the mall to death in class because I love it so much.  It seems to mirror the novel’s progress.  Please talk about the mall.

The Mall: Photo Credit Margaret Lazarus Dean

The mall is one of those things that generally gets treated like a joke, a joke about adolescence or a joke about the eighties or both, but it’s an interesting experiment in fiction to try taking things seriously that we are supposed to be flip and mean about. What are we trying to hide by being so flip? What’s in there that makes us uncomfortable that we turn mean?

My own experiences of visiting malls when they first started to appear in the eighties was not at all like Dolores’s—I lived in a suburb of a big city at that time, so we had a lot more options than the Grays did for shopping, eating, and generally getting out of the house, including smaller, seventies-style malls. But I imagine that in small towns like the one where Dolores lived, the introduction of the big mall would really transform their lives, how they spent time as a family, what they ate for dinner. I also remember really acutely the dire importance of having the right clothes at Dolores’s age (twelve and thirteen). Adults are surprisingly condescending about adolescents’ interest in clothes—but that interest is not nearly as much about materialism or status as adults seem to think.  I think it’s more about having the power to construct your own appearance, to look on the outside like the person you want to become. Anyway, the mall is where clothes happen, so I wanted to reflect the importance of that for Dolores too.

I had a note in my notebook for a long time to return to the same mall years later, in the nineties or early 00s, when it’s grubby and dated and maybe even a little dangerous. But there was never a cause to jump that far forward in time.

Speaking of jumping forward, what about your future work?  Does your next novel take on any other disaster themes?

Why yes, it does! The novel I’m working on now takes place in the late nineties and early 00s, and it has to do with the year 2000 disaster, which many people prepared for but never happened, and 9/11, which no one was prepared for and did happen. I’m interested in the contrast between those two and how they have shaped our thinking about disaster in our era.

Kennedy Space Center: Photo Credit Margaret Lazarus Dean

For Further Reading:

If you’re interested in good fiction that deals with disaster, Margaret recommends the following: Haruki Murakami’s novel After the Quake (earthquake in Kobe, Japan); Lorrie Moore’s novel A Gate at the Stairs and Martin Amis’s story “The Last Days of Mohammed Atta” (terrorist attacks of 2001); Ann Patchett’s novel Bel Canto (Japanese embassy hostage crisis in Lima, Peru), and Katharine Weber’s novel Triangle (Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire).

For more on The Time It Takes to Fall, here is a 2007 review from Blookslut. You can also visit the author’s homepage for more links to reviews. Or follow the author on The Time It Takes to Blog.

Also be sure to read Margaret’s wonderful interview with famed blogger Mimi Smartypants, which FWR published last August. Here is as excerpt from the introduction to their conversation:

Readers are constantly being reminded that the act of reading is dying out, with “reading” being defined as “reading books published in the traditional manner.” And one of the forces cited as driving us away from the endangered Book, of course, is the Internet. But I always wonder: what does it mean that time spent on the Internet is largely time spent—well—reading? Like many writers, I do a lot of my reading on the Internet as well as in published books, and one of my favorite writers right now is a Chicago woman we know only as Mimi Smartypants. She has been writing an online diary since 1999, and in over 1000 posts she has detailed her everyday life, sharing with the world (anonymously) anecdotes about public transportation, meditations on the workings of her own psyche, and accounts of the joys and frustrations of raising her daughter, Nora, now a kindergartner.