Issue 42 - Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art

the room and see what everyone's thinking? I am more cominitted to
being faithful to what I feel is good writing and a true sentence and
writing about the things that matter than I am to any particular form
or format. I don't want to make fast food. There's nothing wrong
with fast food - I eat it, I just don't want to make it. I feel it's very
hard to write a really good book with no heart. There's that great line
of John Gardner's in which he says the sin of 19th-century literature
is sentimentality, whereas the sin of modern literature is that it has no
heart. To me the besetting sin now is a mixture of sentimentality and
irony the worst of both worlds. You read some of this stuff and
you go: Oh my God, so let's see, it's all about you and how Inuch
you are better than everybody around you, but you don't want anybody
to think that so you write in a really self-deprecating way but
with enough irony that it will be apparent to us that the point of this
is poor me. I'd rather read Little Dorrit. Or something with a great antihero
like The Eustace Diamonds. She [Lizzie GreystockYs just bad to
the bone, but Trollope actually sympathizes with her. And she's not
bad to the bone in an arch, unrealistic, winking way. She's just a bad
person, and I think that's a great character. The truth is, we are not so
much aware of bad writers of previous centuries because they don't
last. And I can promise you, 75 years from now people are not going
to be discussing most of the books in that window and saying, oh
that was a bad crop. No one will have read it and nobody will care.
e: Would you agree that fiction is not true to life, but truer than it?
I think that's what one hopes for. You hope that people can't tell
the difference between the thing that happened and the thing that
didn't. I always take it as a great compliment when people argue with
me. They'll say, I know you must have a summer hOlne in Maine ­
I'm like no, actually, never been to Maine. When Come To Me came
out, there's a story in it about a girl with a psychotic sister. I have an
older sister who's a lawyer, a very slim, fierce, attractive brunette. I'd
read "Silver Water" and people would COlne up to me crying and
sympathizing and saying, "I'm so sorry you lost your sister." And my
sister'd be sitting in the back going, "I'm fine, I'm just fine." That's
why we call it fiction. But it's a great complhnent. You want people to
feel that it's truer than life only in the sense that you are given more to
hold onto and contemplate. In life things either happen so slowly one
can hardly bear to live through them, or so quickly you hardly notice
thein. In fiction, you try to split the difference.
G: SO doesn't that make changing characters Inore difficult than
changing the action in a story?
AB: As in real life. If somebody I know well does something that makes
no sense, I either have to say to myself I didn't really know her very
"well, or I have to conclude that I've misunderstood or misinterpreted
the action. In fiction, if I have my nice, quiet, good-hearted and generous
character take a kitten in off the street, give it a bowl of milk and
eviscerate it (I guess I think that would be interesting), I have a problem.
Because either the character is genuinely good-hearted - in which
case the action is impossible - or I have lied to you and led you to
believe that she is good-hearted but she is not - in which case I have
no business telling you she's good-hearted. I can indicate to you that
she appears to be good-hearted, but that's different. If the behavior
doesn't fit the character, then you have a responsibility to understand
who you have created. I think a lot of time, people don't create sufficiently
three-dimensional characters for it to even arise as a difficulty. If
you have a character that's sufficiently big, they can do almost anything
- which is great for plot, but lousy for staYing power.
G: Did you grow up in a literary household? Who were some of your
literary influences?
I didn't really experience it as such, but there were books in the
house, and we went to the library every week. Nobody cared what I
read. It was a literary household in the most passive way - in the way
it was a middle-class household, or in the way in which I had my own
bedroom. Most of the books in the house were in my Dad's library: lots
of Leon Uris and James Michener. I was very attached to his post­
World War II library - John O'Hara, Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley,
S.J. Perelman, Ring Lardner, Saki, John Collier. I don't think I'm as
funny as S01l1e of those people, or as fey and adorably odd as John
Collier or Saki. But there is a fundamental sense in all of those writers
that it is better to call things as they are that sentiment actually was
pretty funny, but it didn't mean that it didn't matter. I'm very big on
dead writers, and poets. And I don't mind if the poets are living,
because their lives are so hard. You can always say to yourself, at least
I'm not a poet.
C: You began, and still are active, in the field of psychotherapy.
Yes, and I still have a small practice. Really I began as a waitress.
And I worked in a theater company for a while. Then I went to
graduate school, then I became a shrink, then I started writing.