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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
Is it the same drive that moves you to perform a rant, write a noir thriller, and write sex stories?
I'm a little more emotionally developed than I was when I was writing rants. What I write now is more psychologically complex. That's a result of growing up. But it all comes from the same feeling: If I don't do this, I'm gonna snap.
Do you get a particular thrill out of working in traditionally lowbrow genres and rendering them in your own highbrow style?
I love that. It's so perverse. Being at Yaddo right now, my fellow colonists are like, "Oh, your books come out in paperback?" I hate the highbrow-lowbrow distinction. I think it's classist and ignorant. It contributes to why people don't read books anymore. There's nothing wrong with writing a book that people actually want to read.
"Hex" and "Gargantuan" seem to fit the bill -- and the Times even liked them.
I don't know how many people consider Burroughs accessible, but he and those other guys at Naropa transcended the notion of literature as a stuffy and exclusive thing. Reading Bukowski, Jean Genet, all those folks with their wild confessional exuberance, opened a lot of doors.
The Ruby Murphy mysteries are written in the first-person voices of several narrators. Have you ever felt trapped in that form?
I've hit a point where I can't get everything I need accomplished in the first person, so I'm abandoning it. I wrote three-quarters of "Flamethrower," then I scrapped it and switched to third-person. [Laughs.] Yet again, it's a case of "I mastered that. Let's move on." I'm really taking pleasure in the scope of the third person right now.
Your editor's OK with that -- changing horses midstream, so to speak?
She lets me do what I want. It's been our experience together that I stagger along, and if I start down the wrong path I catch myself. She hasn't really had to rein me in. So to speak. My editor at Miramax is going to be more iron-fisted, I can tell. Nonfiction is a whole different thing.
What do your accomplishments say about the benefits of an unstable, crazy childhood?
I wouldn't trade any of it. Not for 20 million bucks. [Pauses.] Well ... maybe for 20 million. My parents didn't know what they were doing, but they did love me. That's all that really matters. Unless you're getting abused, it's better to have a bizarre childhood.
You're a devoted and frequent art-colony resident. How does that contribute to your ever evolving literary identity?
I love Yaddo. I don't have to answer the phone. I don't have to feed my dog. More importantly, I don't have to feed myself, which is the bane of my existence. You go to dinner here, there are 30 people, the best and the brightest, sitting next to you. It makes me go back to my room and work really hard. It inspires the shit out of me. And they have the nicest piano on the face of this earth ... I tend to go to a colony for a month in summer and a month in winter. It focuses me, and I come home with excellent work habits. That lasts for a few months. Then I start to get distracted, start spending too much time riding my bike and going to the racetrack. Then I go to another colony.
Right now you're working on two books at once: the third in the Ruby Murphy series and the new book of nonfiction.
The new book happened because I fell in love with Smarty Jones. Every time he won a race, I thought, "Someone's gonna write a book about him." When he won the Derby I thought, "I could write a book about him." I wrote a proposal and we got a bunch of offers. Then bad things happened. The horse lost the last race of the Triple Crown. I talked to his humans and they wanted money to tell their story.
I had this nice new book contract but nothing was going right. I went and talked to my new editor, who happens to have grown up around horse racing. He said, "Why don't we do an overview of racing in the U.S.?" I jumped up and hugged him, because I realized that's exactly the book I've been wanting to write for a long time: the rise and slow decline of racing in America.
Once again, new genre, new challenges.
I'm a little nervous about it. But I'm still in the meandering, delicious stage of researching, reading, going to the racing museum. Once I have to start actually organizing it I'm sure I'll panic. But you know what? It'll probably be fine. I love reading about racing, and I love going to the track. Plus, I don't have to talk to too many living people, which is not my forte and which I would have had to do if Smarty had won that race.
What do you want to be when you grow up?
[Laughs for a long time.] The first female winner of the Tour de France.
