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How did you begin writing Third
Girl from the Left?
Third Girl from the Left was born of a short story that I wrote more
than ten years ago in grad school. The story
is entitled “Show
Business,” and it’s in the anthology
Mending the World, edited by Rosemarie Robotham.
Very early New York–dwelling versions of
Angela and Tamara, two of the novel’s protagonists,
can be found in that story. Angela really stayed
with me — this woman who wanted so much
and never quite got it, and the feeling of working
hard at a job that isn’t really feeding
your soul as an artist but having to do it anyway.
So after I wrote The Fall
of Rome, when it was
time to begin another book I began to think about
Angela and her daughter, and one thing led to
another.
And what kept you going on that mother-daughter
path?
Well, though I was and remained very interested
in Angela, I also wondered what it would be like
to be her child. What would it be like to have
a mother who perhaps never meant or particularly
wanted to have a child? I got very curious about
characters that are somewhat ambivalent about
motherhood — how would they negotiate it?
Mildred, Angela’s mother, was born out
of that same impulse — where would a woman
like Angela come from? Once I introduced the
Tulsa race riot into the novel, I also wanted
to have a character who had lived through it,
and Angela was too young to have done so. I wanted
to explore how living through a historical trauma
like that plays out through the generations,
how it would affect the kind of parent you were
and the kind of parent you raised.
I also wondered about the ways in which women — and
African-American women in particular — are
silenced and silence themselves, especially in
terms of artistic expression (which doesn’t
pay, doesn’t “produce,” and
isn’t “practical”). One of
my literary heroes, Toni Morrison, has explored
this idea brilliantly, especially in her early
work. I don’t compare my work to hers,
but I am interested in that question. By having
each character make a different sort of decision
about this issue (consciously or not), I hope
I raised some good questions. I also liked the
idea that all these obscure actors and actresses
that one sees in films have histories, aspirations,
lives beyond the screen. Finally, I really tried
to tell a good story. To me, that’s one
of the primary joys of fiction — having
big questions raised through full, rich human
beings who you just plain wonder about and want
to spend time with, even if you don’t always
like what they do.
Can you tell me a little more about the Tulsa
riot in the context of the novel?
Well, again, as I was working on the book I
thought a lot about what it means to live more
or less divorced from history and how history
weighs on you anyway, particularly as an African-American.
One of the main themes of the novel is the weight
of history or lack thereof within a family. I
was particularly interested in how that affected
these women as women. The Tulsa riot felt like
a good way to investigate some of those notions.
I should also give credit to the playwright-screenwriter
Richard Wesley, whom I interviewed very early
on in the writing of Third
Girl and who, through
some carefully placed questions, helped me make
the link between my character and the Tulsa riot.
Thanks, Richard!
What sort of research did you do?
I like to find my characters before I do research;
then, once I have a strong sense of them, I begin
reading and figuring out what’s important
to know and what needs to be in the novel. I
also found after a time that I wanted to have
a sense of play with the history that exists
in the novel — people shouldn’t look
to this book for an accounting of fact. E. L.
Doctorow’s Ragtime, with its free play
between fictional characters and real, historical
ones, gave me a lot of courage to just play around
and do whatever the story needed.
That said, I did begin to research once I was
well into the writing. I found a number of books
helpful. Among them, Riot
and Remembrance by
James Hirsch was a very cogent and useful history
of the 1921 Tulsa race riot; Easy
Riders, Raging Bulls by Peter Biskind tells about the real,
crazy deal on the film industry of the 1970s;
The Bunny Years, by Kathryn Leigh Scott taught
me a lot about the life of a Playboy Bunny (and
therefore Angela’s). I didn’t travel
to research at all — still haven’t
been to Tulsa. I love making stuff up and getting
the feel of it right anyway. I hope that I did.
What drew you to the world of “blaxploitation” films — and
what is “blaxploitation” anyway?
For those who don’t know, “blaxploitation” was
a term coined by the ever inventive copyeditors
at Variety magazine to describe the wildly lucrative
black-cast action films of the early to mid-1970s.
When I wrote the story “Show Business,” I
was pretty surprised to find myself writing about
a woman who had acted in those films. Though
I find them extraordinary historical documents,
I’m not obsessively in love with them.
But I went with it. I like to be surprised when
I write. That’s a big part of the fun.
Tamara, Angela’s daughter, also gave me
a rich way to examine filmmaking and what I imagine
to be a filmmaker’s temperament.
There is a lot of sex in this book — good,
bad, and indifferent. Can you talk some more
about that?
I surprised myself a bit when I found Angela
so frankly using sex for so many different reasons — not
all of them good. And I was quite surprised when
the love of her life turned out to be Sheila.
I can’t say I had this all planned out,
but I found that I did want to try writing about
a black woman who was unapologetically sexual,
contrary to her upbringing, and who doesn’t
end up losing everything because of it. At the
same time, I didn’t want to ignore the
fact that sex as commerce does have its costs.
I just wanted, primarily, to create a really
complicated picture. I didn’t want people
to be able to say “Aha, that’s why
she’s such and so.” Sometimes people
do unwise things just because they do. Sometimes
it all works out anyway. Sometimes it doesn’t.
I wanted Angela’s random sexuality to work
that way.
And what about that lesbian/not lesbian subtext?
That was tough. When I got Angela and Sheila
together it felt right, but at the same time
it also felt as though a self-deluding soul like
Angela (and Sheila too to some extent) wouldn’t
exactly be out in the streets proclaiming, “I’m
here, I’m queer. Get used to it!” Some
people would label Angela as self-hating — her
denial is based in her own homophobia, but she
is also unwilling to face up to her own life
choices in a lot of areas, not just here. She’s
a big denier. Being a lesbian makes her uncomfortable.
So she decides she’s just not going to
think about it or label it. This decision isn’t
a great thing for Tamara, but it doesn’t
destroy her. Part of Tamara’s desire to
tell the whole story comes from this murky, “I’m
not dealing with it” attitude. Part of
her coming of age is deciding to tell as much
of the truth of her life and her mother’s
life as she can manage. Seeing My
Architect (Nathaniel
Kahn’s beautiful film about his difficult
father, Louis Kahn) was a big inspiration for
me in thinking about how to handle Tamara’s
transition. It was a tricky balance to maintain
in terms of narrative. I hope I did it successfully.
And what about Mildred’s affair? How come
she doesn’t run off with William?
Oh, I guess because I think extramarital affairs
are rarely as simple as people think they are — even
the people who are having them. Usually, the
other person has called up something in you that
you needed called upon, a part of you that this
other person allows you to recognize. But once
you go to live with them, their socks on the
floor annoy you as much as your previous partner’s
did. Mildred’s just not the running type.
William does set her free in some ways. But in
so many others, she’s so constrained, by
her history, her community, her own mind — that
things probably wouldn’t have worked out
for them anyway. It would have been a different
story, you know? I think she did what she had
to do to live with herself. But I also think
that she really had to have that relationship
with William. I don’t condemn her for it.
I remember when I saw The
Turning Point when
I was sixteen: the Shirley MacLaine character
has an affair and it doesn’t end her marriage
and it’s not the point of the movie and
she doesn’t get punished for it. I think
that’s really interesting. Life has so
many more gray areas than most people want to
admit. Mildred’s affair, for me, lives
in one of those.
In your author questionnaire, you said
that you — and some “fellow writers like
Colson Whitehead, Edward P. Jones, ZZ Packer — represent
a new wave in African-American writing.” Can
you talk about what you meant by that, share
your thoughts about where African-American fiction
is going and how you fit in?
Hoo, weighty question. Let me first say that
I am no expert on this subject. I just have opinions.
But it’s my sense that mainstream publishing
right now is remarkably segregated as far as
black and white go. There is a lot of very commercial,
sexy fiction by black writers (Zane and others),
and that’s making tons of money and read
just about exclusively by black people. Then
there are folks like the ones I cite above (whose
company I guess I’d put myself into), who
are writers of greater literary ambition who
are read in varying degrees by African-Americans
and a little bit more by white readers. I’d
like everybody to read my book. I like to think
that the characters are real and full enough
to interest you no matter what race you are.
And I think ambitious fiction by African-Americans
is too often treated as though it’s a slightly
different and less universally interesting animal
than ambitious fiction by white Americans. I
think that’s a shame. I’d like to
hear ZZ and Colson and Jonathan Franzen and Jeffrey
Eugenides and the like all in the cultural discourse
together. It’s all ambitious, skillful,
American fiction. That’s the important
thing. That’s the company I’d like
to be in. I hope that I can keep developing as
an artist with each successive novel.
How did you come to write this book?
I
started it about seven years ago, in the most
mundane way-in a fiction class, not a burst
of inspiration. For this class I was in, we were
asked to take a sort of professorial, distant
tone and write a page or two, and, thus, Jerome was
born. The first page of the novel is pretty much
a description of the campus of Hawken, the
day school I went to in Cleveland. Hawken, though
it is a day school, not a boarding school,
differs from New York City private schools
greatly in the lavishness of its grounds. It's
on about 150 rolling-green acres of someone's
former estate in an exurb of Cleveland called
Gates Mills. It was a boys' school until 1978, when 20 other girls
and I attended. My experience there definitely laid the groundwork
for me to come up with a
story like The Fall of Rome.
Anyway, out of my description of the campus,
this character suddenly started speaking.
There was definitely no one at Hawken like Jerome.
I grew interested in him because he was
so odd, and my interest in him kept me going for
a long time. Obviously, the novel also came out
of some my own experience at this prep school.
I strongly identify with both Jerome and Rashid's
feeling of discomfort with themselves. While
at Hawken, I went
through the final stages of a real sort of transition in terms of race and
class. I really came face-to-face with race issues there. My family was
educated, largely through their own efforts, but my father was a teacher
and then a public-school librarian and didn't make that much money. I
lived in an all-black neighborhood. Hawken was composed of mostly white, mostly wealthier
families in the Cleveland area. I came to it from the gifted program at
my inner-city middle school and it was just quite a change.
The characters of Jerome and Jana are written in first person,
while Rashid's sections are written in third person. Why did you
choose to write them this way?
I had somebody say to me that they thought that I had chosen to write
Rashid in third person because he's more objectified that way
and in fact, that's an interesting and I think, valid, reading-but
I can't take credit for having thought it up. In fact, writing
the book the way I did was largely a technical choice for me.
I found that Rashid's story was richer and easier to tell if he wasn't
telling it directly. Jerome was the first voice and always the most consistent
voice — I never questioned whether to write him in first or third person,
he just kept talking. Jana was initially in third person and I went
back and rewrote her in first person because it helped her to
become a fuller character. The whole process was very trial and
error. The only one I didn't mess around with was Jerome.
What is the significance of the relationship between Jerome
and Jana?
I guess on one level, it was an opportunity for both of them to step
out of bounds. He had been wrapped really tight for a really long
time, and she touches him emotionally so deeply that he begins
to lose control in many
areas of his life. For her, too, her relationship with him is a way
to step beyond the bounds of her life, post-divorce, which she
feels is getting sort of narrow and entrenched.
Who were your greatest literary influences in writing this
book?
I thought all the time of Kazuo Ishiguro's The
Remains of the Day,
while I was writing this book. His skill in creating the character
of Stevens was very influential for me. I also greatly admire
Michael Cunningham's The Hours, and Martha Cooley's The
Archivist,
for their skill in handling multiple points of view. Some of my
other favorite writers are Toni Morrison, Jane Smiley, William
Faulkner, and Junot Diaz.
What do you hope readers will come away with after reading The
Fall of Rome?
I hope that they will have enjoyed reading it, have been engaged by
the characters. I hope that they will get the sense of the difficulty
inherent in stepping beyond the boundaries that are set up in
this country around race or class or gender. Going beyond those
boundaries isn't all bad but it can be difficult. Rashid is forced
to change a great deal and to some extent sever his ties with
his home, but I don't see it as something he will regret in the future. I
guess I'd like people to be aware of both the big and little things
— the mundane difficulties, such as Kofi not being able to get
his hair cut by any barbers near his school because there aren't
barbers that know how to cut kinky hair — and the big difficulties
that lead someone like Jerome to warp his
personality to try to conform. I would like people to come away from the book,
thinking about that situation, especially those who might never have experienced
it. I hope that the book awakens people to their own lives — to what
might be lost and what might be gained by stepping out of the situation in
which society has placed them.
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