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.