Issue 42 - Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art

c: How did that last transition occur?
AB: I was on my way to becoming a psychoanalyst. I had a meeting
with the guy who was going to be my training analyst; we had a very
nice chat. As I was coming home I drove past Wesleyan University,
which is where I'd gone to college, and I remembered how I had bartended
an event at the President's house when I was an undergraduate.
I remembered all these old guys sitting on the settee - 95-year-old
alums - and I thought it would be so funny if one of them just died.
That led to the idea for a mystery. My kids had left their McDonald's
hamburger boxes in the front seat, so I wrote some notes on the hamburger
boxes. When I got home I took out my little Olivetti typewriter
and I had about 15 pages of story and I was like, Oh look at that, story!
I guess I'll do that for a while. So I called the guy who was going to be
my analyst and said, "You know, it looks like I have something else to
do." So then I started writing this mystery, which I was probably
drawn to because I understood the conventions of a mystery - I wasn't
very good at them, but I understood them. And then the short stories
started showing up, so I wrote them. The very first story I wrote­
I don't even remember the name of it, it's in Come to Me, when Galen is
in love with Henry and decides not to leave her husband David. That
["The Sight of You"] is the first story I ever wrote. And the second
story was "Love Is Not a Pie," which got published, and the third story
I wrote was "Silver Water."
C: How should a story balance showing and telling?
AB: In a short story, you don't want to shortchange yourself. You don't
want to not have the great narrative moments, but still you want to
make most things happen right in front of the eyes of the reader. I
don't think any story is interesting unless more than one story is being
told. Otherwise it's missing the great thing that Will Durant said ­
that history is the lives lived on the riverbanks, the fire, the children
born, the old people who die, meals made, people making love, people
doing laundry, and the river of blood that runs between the banks of
the river, which is famine and war and catastrophe and cruelty. You
can't tell the history about the lives on the riverbanks and the river
without these.
C: At some point when you're writing about the riverbank and the
river, do you feel a story becomes its own story?
AB: It does become its own story. You leap off from the characters or the
impulse or the moment in your own real life. I feel perfectly capable of
getting my point across in real life without resorting to fiction. I don't
think a lot of people don't know what I think. So why would I have to
put it on the page if it's going to mess up the novel? Things can creep
into your fiction but by and large, I would rather protect my family.
C: In "Love Is Not a Pie," you begin with the narrator at her mother's
funeral and then go back to the summer when, as a teenager, she discovers
the dynamics of her parents' relationship, which happens to
include a lover. Why do you think it's important to have a reason to
set the reminiscence in motion in a story in which much of the narrative
is told in flashback?
AB: I think that story began with the opening line and emerged in my
head in the present. And there were two points of view I could tell the
story from. I could tell it from the woman having the affair, but she's
either going to be indifferent to the pain she's causing or she's going to
need a lot of self-justification. Whereas a kid for whom life is idyllic
and turns out to be much more complicated, that is more interesting to
me. I've always been interested in how we try to make sense of what
we've seen - where what we see is not what we thought we saw.
What people do in response to the event is how you know who they
are. It's never the event. Four people get hit by a bus - one of them is
going to be in a wheelchair, one is going to walk away unharmed, one
is going to walk away unharmed but be so psychologically struck he'll
be in a wheelchair, and somebody else will take it as a sign from God
that they should go become a priest. It's not the bus hitting you, it's
what people do in response. II