|
•
|
|
An Interview with Carolyn See
by
Carolyn See’s latest book, Making a Literary Life, is the only how-to book that shows writers not just how to write, but how to enter the literary world. In this interview, we hear some of the ideas behind some of See’s work – Making a Literary Life, Dreaming (her memoir), and The Handyman (her most recent novel) – and in the process, we get to hear the story behind her uniquely elevating prose. I met Carolyn at one o'clock on a Wednesday – at a Mexican restaurant called Lulu's where we sat on the outdoor patio with salty margaritas and a bowl of chips. A bird flew to our table and then took off with a chip as big as he was. Flowers hung above us, and they kept shedding petals as we talked. CS: One of my first interview assignments was for the LA Times Sunday Magazine, and I think it was the second assignment I ever did, and I was down interviewing girls at something called the “Job Corps,” which was a well-intentioned project. KP: I think I’ve heard of it. CS: Where people with no education got to sit around, and they had board and room, and they learned how to be civilized, and they learned how to have a job. You were so calm and collected. I was so—I mean, my hands were shaking. My voice was shaking. And this 60-year-old, poverty stricken, very obese African American lady said, “Just relax, honey. It’ll be okay.” I just couldn’t do it. KP: Did that make you feel better? CS: Well, it made me feel worse, really. KP: Oh, did it? CS: Sure, I just wanted to put my head down and cry, because I was trying to—I had on my high heeled shoes, or whatever. You know, I was trying to be a professional journalist. She just saw right through me. So anyway, ask me a question. KP: Okay. So how did you know that you wanted to write, and that the literary life is what you wanted? CS: My dad always wanted to be a writer, and he and my mother didn’t get along very well, I guess, is one way of putting it. So he left when I was eleven, but it’s not like a story of being abandoned by your dad. He was, in fact, a very devoted dad, and he took me out every week. He liked me a lot, and I adored him. My dad had always wanted to be a writer. When he grew up, he had only a high school education. They were very poor, and it was in the Depression, and things were very tough on both of them. So within a period of about a year, he published six short stories for western pulp magazines. He got all excited, and he thought, “I don’t have to live this nightmare life. can leave this raving lunatic I’m married to.” So he went off to live the writing life, and he took the records, the books, the pictures, and the fun. And he left my mother, the house, and me. So she was really enraged, and I don’t blame her. He would take me to literary parties in Los Angeles, when I was like eleven years old. And I saw, as opposed to my poor mother, who I see now was in really, probably, severe clinical depression and was broken because this guy had left her, which made her fiendish. She was a fiendish woman. I’d have six days of living with a fiendish woman, and then I’d go out to a literary party where guys would actually put their elbows up on the mantelpiece and smoke a pipe and say, “Well, it seems to me…,” and they’d drink and laugh and write and talk about writing and carry on about writing, and the irony was, my dad didn’t write again for a long time. He had some weekday columns in neighborhood newspapers, but he didn’t write again until he was sixty-nine, when he started writing hard-core pornography. My mother had hexed him. But he had such a reverence for the intellectual life, and so I knew I wanted to be like him, because he was where the fun was, and he was where the intelligent conversation was. He was where the jokes were, as opposed to some dead, drunk woman who’s been drinking bad whisky saying, “The trouble with you is…” and then a long list. So it was very easy. It wasn’t so much that I knew that I wanted to write, but I knew I wanted to get away from the life that I had. That was the only direction—the only direction I knew or could see. Because when you’re growing up, you only have your family and your relatives. I wanted to be like my dad. KP: Besides the tools of craft, what do you think it takes for a person to be a writer and to make a literary life? CS: There are a lot of people in the world who say you must write, you have to want to write more than life itself, and that’s certainly true, but I think, also, it helps if you’re a natural storyteller. That’s not saying being a genius or even having talent, but just something happens to you, and you think of it in terms of story. You know, you see a story, and then you tell it as a story, which, in another way of thinking of things, is being a liar, of course. Some people are just tone deaf to the aspects of story, and I have to say, yesterday, there was a woman called me, who’s had a very interesting experience. Her husband died. The husband was manic-depressive. It was a long, hard life. She’s a woman, probably seventy, and she began having fun with her grief counselor. She said that nothing bad happened. You know, “bad” in quotes. Nothing “bad” happened, but she would say, “Can’t we just meet in the park, instead of the office?” “Can’t we just go swimming after we have our meeting?” And so her kids staged an intervention, said you must never see this man again. So she was just, “I think I could write a book about this, but I really don’t know how.” And, in a sense, I could hear that truly, she didn’t know how. She could only see the events. She couldn’t see the curl of the story. I do know people who just don’t get it, the story. You know, they don’t get it the same way I can’t hear the different parts in a symphony. I just can’t. I listen with intention, but I can’t hear what’s going on. So I think that’s the main thing, you know, and I don’t think it has to do with talent or genius, although it might, or it could. But I think it’s more like, when you see something happening, somehow, automatically, it turns into story, as it’s happening to you, or as you go through it. KP: Do you think a person has to have good stories in her life to be a good writer—suffer a lot? CS: No, I hope not. I mean, I think some interesting stuff ought to happen, but not necessarily because what’s that wonderful man? Nicholson Baker. He did a really interesting novel [A Box of Matches] about just waking up every morning at six o’clock, starting the fire, and thinking. In one of his best days, one of his best pages was about watching the numbers turn over in a gas station, how fun it is to watch those numbers turn over. But again, that shows he sees a story wherever he is. But his whole point is, nothing happens. In one of the other mornings, his wife, trying to be nice, had put out the dry coffee grounds for him to drink the coffee, but he was so used to throwing out the wet coffee grounds, that he just pitched them out. Nothing happens in the book, except that it tells about what it’s like to be alive. So no, I don’t think anything really interesting has to happen in your life. I mean, everything interesting is happening all the time. KP: It’s hard to go through life without a lot of pain. CS: Well, just even stuff that you find interesting. Doesn’t have to be sad. There doesn’t have to be suffering at all. Just stuff that’s happening. I went to the races last Sunday with my brother, on closing day. There was one horse I bet on, and it was an amazing moment. He was the favorite. There was no reason for him to be the favorite, no reason that you could tell by reading. He got a disgracefully bad start. He was way behind everybody else, dead last. And then as they rounded the last four turns, he came up and won. And the people at the track went wild. That wonderful lady who wrote Seabiscuit wrote a whole book about it. The drama—he’s just a new horse, nobody knows what he’s doing, but somebody knows what he’s doing. He starts out last, then he wins. So that’s not suffering. It’s just like wow! An amazing story. Just an amazing thing to see, and then to see all the people around who are either happy or sad. KP: A race is a good metaphor for a story. It’s like a little story in itself. CS: Exactly. KP: How did you come to write Making a Literary Life? CS: When I started, I was a woman on the West Coast who didn’t have any clue about what was going on in the East. My first editor said, “Your only real competition is going to be Joan Didion.” I was like, “Who’s Joan Didion?” But Joan Didion had, of course, spent all of her time in the East, enough to absolutely get ahead. I had no clue about what was going on in the publishing world, so I had to teach myself how to—not just get a book published, but how to get it reviewed, how to get it sold, how to keep your head above water, how to not die of embarrassment in New York, all that stuff. It was as though I really was inventing the wheel, for a certain segment of society at a certain moment in time. And so, enough people called me over the years, where they would say, “My book has come out. Nobody’s reviewed it. They don’t have it in the bookstores. Tell me what to do.” And I would say, “When did it come out?” and they’d say, “Three months ago.” KP: Oh, it’s over. CS: I know, to have to say that. “It’s dead!” It was horrible for me to have to say it, and then other people began to say, “Why don’t you write a book?” It’s very primitive stuff. It’s not subtle. It’s not highly nuanced. But if you don’t know it, you have to know it. Even the thing about a mailing list. Nobody will ever say, you need a mailing list. But you have to have a mailing list. It must be there, or you’re going to sink and die. So I just thought I would start telling the stuff that I was telling people on the phone. These long, terrible, two hour conversations that were too late anyway. And of course, that's the strength of the book. The middle part, about the writing, is absolutely primer prose. I know that, and it really is for just total beginners, but the stuff on either side is the stuff that hasn’t been written before and is the stuff that will make the difference. KP: You don’t necessarily learn that in an MFA program either. CS: No, I know you don’t, because I gave a little graduation talk once, and they all came up and said, “We never heard any of that.” That’s not right. I mean, well, it’s not like it’s immoral, but it’s wrong. And I know at some schools, the policy is to keep the information to themselves. They say, “This is not your problem at this point in time. Your problem is to write the most beautiful prose possible. Don’t worry your pretty little head about selling anything.” KP: Yikes. CS: I know. KP: Do you think any of that has to do with the competition in publishing? CS: Sure. Of course. It’s like a chef giving a wonderful recipe, but leaving out some crucial ingredients. They’re only human. I mean, why would they? They don’t want to have students who are more successful than they are. They’d have to be saints. KP: That’s really sad. CS: No. It’s just life. So then you’ll find somebody who takes a special interest in you, and they’ll tell you some stuff, but in general, they’re not going to tell everybody. KP: What made you want to tell everybody? CS: I think the irritation of living in California. I have a little bit of irritation about New York, and I have a little bit of irritation about why isn’t this process easier? And why can’t we demystify it a little bit? And then I guess, I have some missionary zeal. You know, you too can succeed! Even if you live in Victorville. Even if you live in Mossman, Australia. There’s no reason why you should be shut out of the process. So, in New York, the book got a bad review. In Washington and Wyoming and San Francisco, it got incredible reviews. But the people in New York were like, “Ugh! Who is this woman?” They were just appalled. I guess what I’m saying is that there are different ways. They come in through Yale Drama School, or NYU, or whatever. They summer in the Hamptons. They do all of that. But there are a bunch of other ways. KP: It’s so encouraging. CS: And I wonder, because it’s not like it’s impossible. Somebody like Barbara Kingsolver, for instance, who was just rotting out in Arizona, but writing and did well, and got published and is fine. KP: Who says everyone has to be from New York? CS: That’s it. It’s just that that’s where publishing is. KP: Which sort of leads us into the next question. There’s so much discouragement out there—not from anywhere specific—just a vibe among would-be authors. You’ll never get published. It’s so hard. But in reading your book, you talk about rejection from such a positive standpoint. I was wondering how you came to such a proactive way of doing this? CS: When I started writing, I was really a hippie chick in a tiny little cabin in Topanga with not even a road to the house, a tram line, a switchback path, all of that. I was so out of it. Obviously, I didn’t know what I was doing, and the thing that I talk about in Making a Literary Life, about sending everything to Michael Curtis at the Atlantic? It shows how out to lunch I was, that I would think that the Atlantic would want anything from me. Why would they want anything from me? But I just kept sending him stuff, and pretty bad stuff. And then he got cranky, as it says in the book. When I would get these rejections, I would cry for days. But I just got this idea to put together an album, and it made me stop crying. And I sent it to him, and instead of saying something snippy, all he could say is, “Very funny, Carolyn.” He didn’t have a comeback. Again, I don’t know where my mind was, that I thought I could do this, but I tried to get an assignment from Esquire. I kept writing these postcards, and then an editor put one of these postcards up on his bulletin board, and another writer came in and said, “Oh, I know her, she’s swell.” And that got me an assignment. So then I began. Writing notes was a way to say, “I exist! I’m here! You’re not going to get rid of me, so just forget about it!” I would say, “My ambition is to be published in your pages. I take a whole lot of vitamins, so I’m not going to die for a long time.” But it’s like you’re presenting an intention. I would be lecturing, and people would come up to me afterwards and say, “I sent out a story once. I never heard back.” If you apply that attitude, for instance, to sexuality, the whole world would be extinct. You can’t bolt just on the strength of one rejection. You know, you just can’t. It’s a game. KP: It’s also a more powerful way of looking at it. I’ve been trying your idea myself, as my rejections come. CS: Write them back, I hope? KP: Yes. CS: Good. Because the main thing is, you want to make friends with the editor. That’s so much more important than “getting published.” It’s just the most important thing. Because the editors will move from place to place, and you can follow them wherever they go. Generally speaking, if they’re any good, they’ll go up. And you’ll go up with them. It’s just a very important thing. KP: Like networking? CS: Networking, but at a cosmic level. It’s not like, “Here, take my car.” It’s more like, “I’m just so crazy about your prose style!” or “This is what I’m trying to do. Is this what you’re trying to do?” or “This is what I want out of my life, what do you want out of yours?” KP: The next question is about 18-hour chili. CS: Ah, yes. KP: How did you choose a chili that takes eighteen hours to make as your metaphor for Making a Literary Life? CS: There are a lot of other ways you could say it. I mean, you could use housekeeping as a metaphor and say, if you make the bed and do the dishes in the morning, no one will be able to reproach you. Which is certainly true, and I absolutely believe in it. You know, you make the bed, do the dishes, and put on clean underwear before you go out in the car, and you’re all right. But that’s only the break-even place. If you want to have a palace, instead of a three bedroom home in the suburbs, you need to do more. And I’m not even sure what that stuff is, because I can’t follow that metaphor out, but the break-even place is perfectly respectable. There are days where you can say, “Look, I made the bed. I did the dishes. I changed my underwear. I didn’t kill anybody. I broke even.” You know, I broke even in life. But sometimes you need to do a little bit more to get to where you want, and sometimes it’s a little unseemly, or sometimes it’s a little unconventional. Tony Bill, the producer, once gave a talk. He talked about somebody putting a moving van in front of Frank Sinatra’s house, with the door open, and then the moving van, inside, was completely furnished as a beautiful, enticing den, and there was a floor lamp and a beautiful chair, and a manuscript. So, Frank Sinatra went in and read the manuscript. KP: Wow. CS: Sometimes you have to think how to entice, and how to be imaginative, how to woo the person that you’re trying to get to. KP: Not just with standard chili, but with amazing chili. CS: Exactly, where people weep when they eat it. You know, it’s just the extra stuff, whatever that is. I was involved in a little fender bender two days ago, and nobody was hurt. Nothing was dented, but I sent her a dozen roses. The dozen roses took it up to the next place. She called back and said, “I want you to hit my car more often.” You know, so it’s really those other things, just like trying to use your imagination to move your work into places where it will be read. The terrible review I got in New York, for Making a Literary Life was from Mr. Walcott. And he works at Vanity Fair, so I sent him a dozen white roses, saying “Cheer up, buttercup!” And then I just felt—I mean, I don’t know how he felt, but I felt better, like don’t worry about it. It’s just only playing. Let’s just play. So mainly the 18-hour stuff is to make yourself feel better about what you’re doing, because so much of the time you’re writing in isolation, and you’re prone to melancholy and all that stuff. And these are things to just make yourself feel better, and everybody else, too, if you can do it. KP: And it’s true. Since I starting writing my little charming notes, I’ve felt a lot better. CS: That’s it. They might pay attention or not, but you feel better. You just feel better. I mean, especially the answers to the rejections. It’s like sunburn lotion. Putting cold vinegar on sunburn. It just takes the burn away, and then you don’t feel so terrible. KP: And then you can write again. CS: Exactly. KP: It’s quite a gift to give people, I think. CS: I learned a lot of that stuff from this kind of cheesy, consciousness raiser named Leo Sunshine. I think he’s the second best teacher I’ve ever had. Probably John Espy would be my most profound teacher. But Leo was just really my teacher, because he just had a way of looking at the world as though it were this wacky game, and if we’re playing it, we might as well have some fun doing it. And if magic worked, to just go ahead and see what happens. Often it works, not always. But there’s no point in not doing it. He was like a little sociopath who died, they say, in a shoot-out in Deli. He was a convict. I was going to say he could have done better for the world, but he did great for the people he did good to, and then the criminal part of his mind took over. KP: That was one of my questions coming up—whether Leo (mentioned in the memoir) was the influence for some of this. CS: Oh, sure. That goes also back to New Thought, which is a form of primitive Protestantism in Midwestern America, in about 1880, when things weren’t going all that well, in Midwestern America in 1880. Somehow or other, they just kind of got the idea. And of course it goes down through Norman Vincent Peale, The Power of Positive Thinking. My stepmother gave me that book when I was young, and I was ready to kill her, and of course I hate that guy’s style. On the other hand, he’s on to something. You know, he’s really on to something—the idea of let’s not focus on the tragedy. Let’s focus on something that might make things a little better. Leo made it all just fun. KP: What element do you think luck plays in creating a literary life? CS: Leo would say, trust in God, but tie up your camel. Or trust in God, but row to shore. Luck plays every kind of role, but work plays every kind of role, too. They are absolutely, completely intertwined. The thing is, if you’ve done everything you can, then if you have bad luck, you don’t have to worry about it. I mean, if you’ve done everything you can, it’s just literally the luck of the draw. If you haven’t done everything you can, then you have to think, “If I’d only done this, if I’d only done that. If I’d only handed in that article on time. If I hadn’t thrown that drink on the assistant editor.” You know, whatever it is. That’s why I think the whole idea of the thousand words a day and the one charming note is so important. And it’s just a metaphor. It just means do some work and one outside thing. And if you do that, and then you end up in the gutter—you did your part, and maybe it’s just not your turn. You can’t have the luck if you haven’t done the work. I think that’s really true. I think so. It seems true. KP: Because work itself creates luck? CS: Exactly. KP: In reading your memoir, I was struck by your strength—by your ambition as a writer, but more so, your ambition to be happy, despite all the odds. CS: My favorite scene in Dreaming is when Uncle Bob sets himself on fire. Actually, my second husband loves that story too. He remembers it in a slightly different way, that after Uncle Bob was doused, I got up and delivered a raging rant, “How can you people live this way?” which I have no memory of at all. I just left that out, or don’t remember it. But that time of bad behavior becomes so incredibly boring. It becomes boring very early, even as it’s painful, you’re also like, I’m not only being hurt by this, but I’m so bored by their rhetoric. Couldn’t we do something else? It took me a long time to get it. I mean, it took me two marriages to get it, and I behaved very badly. I’m not going to say that I was a saint in either one of these marriages. I behaved very badly. Even as Tom and I were fighting, we would say we don’t want to end up like our parents. Well, we had already ended up like our parents. But we didn’t have the imagination, the secret lock, to get out of the box. I didn’t want to be as unhappy as my mother, and there’s a lot of suicide in our family and all that stuff, and I just didn’t want to continue that, and I didn’t want it for my kids either. So I have to say, everybody really tried to change their way of living. And that would be, of course, John and me, but it would also be Lisa, her husband, Clara and her husband. And then Tom and Richard and I are on very civil terms. But everybody just was like, they just took a look, and saw that we went down the wrong road. We have to turn. We have to do another thing. I think most of us are quite happy, whatever that means—imperatively happy, okay, not wrecking ourselves. I’m not looking for ecstatic, although I wouldn’t say no to it, but I’m so happy every day that things are okay. KP: Actually, that sounds like what happiness really is—at least in America. CS: Yeah. And also to be, I think, really taken up with some kind of project. When I’m not taken up with a project, I feel kind of blue. When I am taken up with a project, I feel fine. I feel much better. I don’t know if that’s an answer, but I’ve come a far way, from both sides of my family, who made—I hate the word valorized—but that valorized sorrow. And I just could never buy it. I don’t buy it. KP: That applies to a lot of things, doesn’t it? The next question is about the American dream. After reading Dreaming, it seems that there was something much bigger there than what you find in a lot of memoirs about hard lives and how things can be okay after all. There was a lot of hope, and it seemed, at the end, that you can make the American dream for yourself. Not “the American Dream,” but you can make a dream for yourself. Then I was going to ask you about Leo CS: I wanted to talk about my brother. At the end of Dreaming, remember he runs out by Jackie’s swimming pool, and he has a bag over his head, so she won’t see that it’s him? And then he falls and hurts himself, because he’s been drinking, and then he says, “I just fell down while I was doing my laundry.” I’d really like to think that he was so entranced with doing his laundry that he fell and hurt himself, but I just can’t buy it. And at some level, I hope he wasn’t doing his laundry, because so many of our best stories come from our mishaps and our sins and our peccadilloes. I saw him the other day, and I don’t see him too often, but I love him so much, and here we were at the track, and we'd both gained a lot of weight. He’s like, “Oh, I just feel, back in the old days, I’d do anything to get laid. I’d starve myself. But now I just feel I have to eat.” We’re driving along, and his little dark glasses and his blue blazer. He said at one point, “I’ve lost my ambition.” But he didn’t sound very heartbroken about it. My stepmother, who is a dear friend of mine, was lecturing us both on our weight and our drinking. My brother smokes, but I don’t. She was saying, “You inherited those genes from George.” And then she said, “Oh, I don’t mean to say that you’re fat. I didn’t mean that.” But I mean, she really meant it. But within that, you have this raw material, whatever raw material it is. Then you can make it a tragedy or comedy or something in between. They talk about the American Dream, and 3-car garage, an SUV. But I don’t think that has anything to do with it. I think it’s more being able to create yourself and see how that turns out. KP: It’s a much more fun way of looking at it. CS: Sure. When they say you can be what you want to be, you really can be. You worked for a female comedian. Not many of those are around. But she wanted to be it, and she was it, and you were her assistant. KP: You can be anything. Even a writer. CS: Even a comedian. Even a writer. Even a criminal. Even a good mother. Even a bad mother. KP: I’m interested in the Alcoholics Anonymous narrative that you mention in the memoir—the AA pitch and how it aids in transformation? I wonder if novels and writing can be used in a similar way? CS: Well, in the New York Times review about Dreaming, the reviewer said some nice things, but she also said that the book was really structured around the AA approach. And of course that makes sense. I was in trouble here, then I had a transformation here, and I feel better here, and that was the AA pitch. Do you know much about AA? KP: I don’t. CS: I didn’t think of AA when I started writing the book. But I think the idea of the memoir—you start off in terrible shape and then you get better—is the form of the AA pitch, and also the form of a lot of stories, just in general. You start off in terrible shape, and then you get better. And they’re also fascinating. I went to many meetings when I was a little kid, and they were great stories. For example, my stepmother went in to the top of the Lark, with her third husband, I think, and she had a beautiful dress, buttoned down the front with something called Salk buttons, which were buttons made from the fabric of the dress, and he was in Naval uniform, and they were a beautiful couple and they knew it, and they were taken to a prominent place in the restaurant, and he pulled off her coat, but that made her Salk buttons fall apart, so there was her chest, and she wasn’t very fond of underwear, so there was her chest, so she was trying to keep her coat on, and he was trying to be Mr. Chivalrous, pull her coat off. Everybody else in the restaurant was like, this is an amazing thing we’re seeing. Again, saying earlier that these are natural stories, it doesn’t necessarily take talent or genius, but just to have a feeling of what a natural story is. I don’t like the salvation aspect of AA. I don’t think we need to be saved, that we have a soul. But these stories of salvation are very—they’re endlessly interesting. I didn’t realize when I was doing Dreaming, but now I can see, it is like an AA pitch. KP: You mentioned in the book that the obsession with drugs and alcohol could be a result of not getting the American Dream. CS: I think it’s a class struggle, more than any other kind of struggle. My dad and his family came to America in 1620, and I’m the first person from his side of the family to go to college. My mother’s folks came over also very early. They were Maine hunting guides. They didn’t get paid with money. They got paid with kegs of rum. Money was only for the upper middle classes during the early part of this country. It was barter, you know. But mainly, you paid the lower classes with alcohol, which is a very smart way of keeping the underclass under. And so my great-granddad would be in Maine in a snow storm with a keg of rum. I know for myself, if you have a bottle of white wine, and you need to do some work, I know for myself, I’m just going to head for the wine and let the work go. This is the part that the New York Times said was wrong. They said it was presumptuous to think that the government would ever do anything to keep the underclass under. But the more I see, that’s all they ever do, is keep the underclass under. Today, there was an op-ed piece in the LA Times about Afghanistan, where opium is the huge crop, so what are the soldiers going to do? They’re bored to death, and it’s another way to keep the underclass down. I’m not saying there’s a fiendish person at the top of everything saying, “Let’s do it.” I’m just saying, in the course of things. KP: My version of The Handyman had an interview with you in the back, and in that interview, you mentioned that you’d originally written the book in the 3rd person, and then switched to the first person? CS: I don’t know. The editor in chief of Random House at that time was Ann Godoff, and she said “We’ll only buy it if you move the whole fellowship application from the end, and if you change it from third person to first.” At that time, she was Ann Godoff, and now she’s fired. And you can say that on ZinkZine. She’s fired. They fired her ass. But I had no recourse. She was who she was. I wasn’t going to argue with her, because she was a goddess at that time. It made me very angry to have to do it, but I don’t feel, finally, that there’s anything all that wrong with the book. It’s okay. It’s all right. And I can see the point that I don’t know how men’s minds work, but I’ve heard them talk a lot, so then maybe if you go back to first person, you’re hearing them talk a lot. I hated having the grant be in the first part, because I thought it was unreadable. I thought nobody was going to read this thing. But it was not for me to argue with her, because she was Ann Godoff. She was a fine editor. She is willful and I was very angry, but what are you going to do? And it was at a time when I talked to my agent about it, and she said, people aren’t buying stuff at all, so. KP: It would have been hard to shop it somewhere else? CS: Exactly. So I don’t mind it. Either way, it’s all right. She was the editor, also the editor-in-chief, but now they fired her ass, and I’m not all that sorry. But I think she was willful about it. KP: The New York Daily News called Handyman a “shamelessly uplifting novel.” I thought that was pretty great. CS: I know. I love it. I can’t remember who wrote that one, but yeah. I mean, it was. It’s supposed to be. It’s like a companion to Making a Literary Life. If you take a ticket for a lottery, anyone can win. I just love the feeling that came from the revision. The total hope. What he did was his material, and it was perfect, and it was exactly what the world needed. It’s sappy, but— KP: I wouldn’t call it sappy at all. It seemed very real, I thought. CS: It’s based on a friend of Clara’s, based on a real guy, who came with this wonderful song about the waves on the lake. The people who wrote it were so poor. They had nothing around but a lake, and they wrote about the waves. The waves on the lake. He just takes what he has and lifts it to something else, and that’s what I would like to do. I’m not sure that I have. But that’s what I would like to do, in my long, manic phases. KP: I actually thought it was really rare to read an uplifting novel, and I should say an uplifting literary novel. The last question is just, is there anything else you want to add? CS: I would just say that when I was younger, I thought books were the most important thing in my life, but about ten or fifteen years ago, I began to realize that my family was the most important thing in my life, especially my children, my brother. It is the most important thing in my life, and now I have three wonderful grandchildren and one is at Stanford, one is at MIT, they’re just really—but my youngest grandson is autistic, and I sort of feel like the rest of my life is not so much going to be about writing as about trying to find out about what this means and how we can help people with that, when that happens. I would have scorned myself forty years ago, if I’d said that. You know, I would have just been, “Oh, please! Send out the Hallmark cards!” But that’s all I really care about now, my daughters and my grandsons. So that’s it. To read more about Carolyn See and her books, <<click here>> To visit Carolyn's website, <<click here>> To buy Carolyn's books, <<click here>>
|