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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
Are you married?
I'm not.
Have you been?
The answer to that is complicated ... I just experienced a regime change. But while I was writing the book I was in a long-term relationship.
Did he want to have a child?
He was horribly flexible on the point. I say "horribly" because I'm convinced I could have talked him into either course and as a consequence it put the entire question in my lap. I would have almost preferred that he had a firm position to which I could have taken a relationship, even if it was oppositional.
Did you interview or talk to mothers who have actually regretted having children?
I only talked to a couple of people who actually admitted it.
They actually said, "I wish I never had children"?
No one ever puts it in terms of wishing the presence of their child away. But perhaps they are still attached to the version of their future -- one in which they never had kids -- that they never got to experience. By and large, there's a big taboo against saying that, even when couched in very careful terms.
I know. We tried to get someone to write about that.
I bet you couldn't, could you?
Nobody.
You would have to find someone who had such a dreadful experience of parenthood that they severed the relationship with their child, that it was in a state of total collapse.
Because that's the only way a mother would admit that?
That's the only way anybody's going to go on the Web about it. Otherwise it's too hurtful.
Which came first, the idea to write about a school shooting or the desire to write about your anxieties? Because I'm wondering why you made it so extreme -- a mother's worst nightmare.
It was a confluence of forces. It had to do with the fact that I was getting older. I was running out of time to have any kids, so I really had to start getting practical instead of theoretical about it. At the same time, this was when all of these shootings were taking place -- 1998 and 1999 especially. There was a real hot and heavy period, and I had a strong reaction to them.
Why? Did it in some way make you feel better about your decision?
No. I wouldn't say it made me feel better. But I did feel a lot of sympathy for the parents of the killers. Even more so than the parents of the ones who were killed. Not that I was unsympathetic to the victims, but ironically, there's a cleanliness to that -- it's horrible, it's wasteful, it's tragic. But your own kid didn't do anything wrong, it doesn't reflect badly on you, there's a kind of purity to the loss. In our culture, blaming your parents for everything that's wrong with you is a national sport. It's one in which I have indulged, myself. After writing the book, I realized that was petty and unfair.
When you researched all these killings, was that one of the main points of discussion -- whether it was the parents' fault?
It came up a lot. Oh, yes, it did. There were a number of parental-negligence suits filed of the sort that I give you little snapshots of in the book. There were parents who sued everybody. I think it was the Paducah, Ky., incident where a group of parents sued 50 different parties, including the makers of "The Basketball Diaries" and the Doom video game and the principal and everybody else. I was relieved when that case came to court and the judge threw the whole thing out lock, stock and barrel and said, no, the person who committed the murders is the person who's responsible.
I thought it was interesting that you let Eva be contemptuous of Mary Woolford, who sued Eva after Kevin killed her daughter. Eva wasn't simply feeling terrible for all of these parents. Eva is a very strong and opinionated and has a lacerating sense of humor. I'm wondering if readers will hate her for scorning the other mothers.
I hope she doesn't come off unsympathetic to the parents, though she obviously has an antagonism -- once you put it all together, you can understand where it comes from.
I won't spoil it.
I realize that Eva is not 100 percent sympathetic and I did not intend her to be. She does not wish to be. She's not completely sympathetic with herself. I wanted to write about someone who was very self-suspicious and who was not entirely proud of the kind of mother she's been. She's gone through the motions, she baked the cookies, but she hasn't really been passionately loving. And she's been preferential.
To the daughter, Celia. About Kevin vs. Celia -- do you actually believe that there are people born -- I don't want to say "evil" -- let's say "bad." Even as a baby, he has "beady little eyes," and he's slackjawed, and he's not interested in rolling a ball across the floor with his mom. Do you believe that people are born that way? Even better, do you know people who were born that way?
