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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
It seems like this looser structure allowed you to play around with language, too. All of your books have touches of lyricism, but here it's foregrounded.
Carrying a linear story requires some straight factual delivery, but this one didn't have those requirements. You know, you can wax lyrical about how a nuclear bomb is like an exploding sun and ask what it means that we've invented all these miniature suns that rain death on Earth. But you also have to explain nuclear fission and uranium, and sometimes you have to shut up with the damn lyricism. One of the big transformations for me came when I was working on my second book, "Savage Dreams," which is about the Nevada Test Site and Yosemite National Park. I had been writing in these distinct voices, the sort of personal, essayistic voice, the voice of criticism, the voice of environmental journalism. And the test site was such a complex subject that I realized I needed all of them, that it was just an artifice, and an unhelpful artifice at that, to keep them separate. One of the models for me ever since has been conversation. I have these wonderful conversations with friends where we'll stop and say, "Wait, how did we end up talking about this?" I think everybody has them; it's how we experience life. We're always doing this sort of associational jazz riffing, in thoughts and conversation. The rules in writing are usually that you have to be more linear, but, you know, why?
Given that you used your personal history as source material, was there a therapeutic quality to the writing? Any moments of discovery or surprise, where you realized you had stumbled upon terrain you weren't necessarily prepared to confront?
"Field Guide" is a very melancholic, private book, but the deaths and dissolutions it talks about were distant enough that it wasn't cathartic. So it wasn't therapeutic in that sense. The most shocking moment for me was when I was writing the third chapter, about my grandmother and great-grandmother. That was the first time I realized that the middle name I'd given up when I was 13 was the name of this great-grandmother who disappeared, a woman whose name I'd never known, or thought I'd never known. Which I kind of love, because it made me complicit in the disappearance in some ways.
You write that "some people inherit values and practices as a house they inhabit; some of us have to burn down that house, find our own ground, build from scratch." Do you identify with that metaphor?
Oh, absolutely. I've probably burned down at least a dozen houses in the course of figuring out who I want to be and what my values are and shedding all the stuff that I inherited that didn't really work. I think most people go through some version of that. Some people don't question it because they had a fabulous childhood and their parents gave them exactly the belief system that works for them -- which actually seems kind of dull to me, but it does happen. And some people don't question it even though it doesn't work that well and they're not that comfortable in the house. I left home young and did a lot of torching along the way. But I didn't run away, because running away always implies that someone is trying to stop you. My parents were busy getting divorced at the time, and sometimes it seemed they hardly noticed. It was like, "Oh, you're independent, that's great. Send us a postcard." And that was sort of it for being parented, more or less.
You left San Francisco for Paris at age 17. That must have been a primary experience at being lost in the world, though it doesn't figure in the book. Why?
Well, I might write about it some other time. I thought about including it, but for various reasons it didn't fit, maybe because it was so literal. But yeah, I started making plans to leave home when I was in the single digits, and at 17 I catapulted myself out. I didn't go to high school -- I managed to slither around the torment that would have been for a geeky girl like me. I had taken a year of French in junior college, and I'd read all that modernist expatriate literature and had fallen in love with Romanesque and Gothic architecture, and I just knew there was more to life than California suburbia. So I went off to Paris. I was a conservative revolutionary, though. I enrolled in the American University in Paris because I wanted some anchor when I got there. I had never been to Continental Europe, hadn't traveled by myself in any meaningful way. This was all terra incognita, which, had I been smarter and more informed, should have been terrifying. But it was just that funny way kids are -- like, "Oh, pet the lion!"
What did you make of your time there?
It was quite an exhilarating year. I hadn't really been educated before that, aside from the year in junior college and two years in alternative school, where we mostly talked and hung out, so my education began there. I had wonderful teachers who taught me to read art and literature on multiple levels, and there was nobody to remind me who I was supposed to be, the way your family and the people who grow up with you often do. I think of Paris as getting a sense of a bigger world, of being open, being resourceful. I was really poor -- not in some horrific, deprived way, but in a sense in which every cup of coffee, every pair of socks, was a big financial decision. When you're under 18 in Paris every museum is free, so I could just wander into any museum and see anything I wanted whenever they were open. And just walking the city was a revelation. In some ways the roots of "Wanderlust" were laid in those long meanders in the city. I was still very solitary then, so much that I didn't realize it was kind of pathetic. I did start coming out of it a bit, but I still had a long way to go.
