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I think
any fiction writer who says her work is not autobiographical
is deluded. Autobiography doesn’t need to spring from
story: it can simply explore emotional terrain. My
work, in terms of plot, ranges from pure recounting of experience
to tiny anecdotes or quotes from my own life. But the way
my protagonists work out psychological issues—and
the way their antagonists come across as villainous—is
the therapeutic part of the writing process. And for a person
like me who loves dark comedy, it’s the most fun part.
Sometimes I say I write for vindication, sometimes for vindictiveness.
But I say it darkly.
The issues I work out
for myself through writing are personal, social, and ideological,
though of course the three overlap. For instance, I’m
considered a Southern writer because I live in New Orleans,
and I’m considered a Jewish writer because my name
is Friedmann. A Southern Jew—no matter how unSouthern
or unJewish she is—is a strange hybrid who’s guaranteed
to be an oddball from birth. And certainly being an oddball
is a prerequisite for being a novelist. Growing up in Catholic
New Orleans, where public school friends left class early
for catechism, was a good start; going from Louisiana to
Smith College in New England was a good finish. I’d
say that the sensibility of a misfit pervades my work as
much as my dark, Jesus-less Flannery O’Connor-freak
world view. And misfits face a lot of discrimination. In
my newest book, Secondhand Smoke, I address bigotry
head-on, and some of it comes from personal experience.
When I became engaged to my first husband, his mother wrote,
“I don’t know anything about this girl, if she’s
a Jew or a Negro or what.” I made sure to put those
words in a character’s mouth.
That character turns
out to be the focal figure in the book, but a protagonist
has to do some growing before the story ends, so it’s
all right if she comes across as unsympathetic when we first
meet her. I was truly hurt when my then-mother-in-law-to-be
wrote those words over 20 years ago. (Unfortunately I wasn’t
hurt enough to run away from what obviously was going to
be a dismal future.) The memory of a writer is a force to
be reckoned with, and I held onto that one for a long time
until I had a chance to work it into a novel. The woman
who said that is dead now, but it doesn’t matter to
me. I’ve made her look bad in print, even if no one
else knows her identity.
I admit that using
such fragments from past moments of pain is vindictive.
But most of what I write is more a vindication of myself
as a goofy outsider. The very first book I ever had published
was a humor book titled Too Smart to Be Rich. It
was the handbook for “yuffies”— young urban failures.
Everyone I knew in the 80s was a yuppie; I was eating beans
and rice and trying to write fiction. The book was a cult
classic—and it was syndicated by the New York Times.
I made being impecunious and artistic sound good and materialism
sound bad, no mean feat during the Reagan years. In essence
I vindicated myself. And with the publication of that book,
I had the entree to have a first novel accepted. It was
as close to a roman a clef as I could write without
shaming myself as a person claiming to have an imagination.
In 1975 I had chosen to have a child alone, another no-no
in those times. It’s a movie-star sort of act now,
but back then I caught a lot of flak and rejection. By creating
a protagonist in my situation, then giving her a much feistier
personality than my own, I worked out the emotional wear
and tear I’d gone through, much of it inflicted by
my own mother. The Exact Image of Mother took its
title from the Jules Feiffer cartoon in which a woman laments
that, having used the opposite child rearing practices from
her mother, she finds her own daughter has turned into Mother’s
“exact image.” The protagonist, Darby Cooper,
soldiers on bravely and has her head held high at the end
of the book, a proud single mother; it was a good way for
me to work out how I wished I’d conducted myself. Instead,
of course, I’d married the son of a woman who had a
racial epithet for everyone. I worked through that marriage
in Odds. Although Odds is purely a fictional
story line, its narrator has an abusive husband, and she,
too, will walk away, head held high, at the end. I have
lived vicariously through my characters more than once,
and by pretending to be those women I’ve made myself
feel more triumphant than I have been in real life.
Financial flop, unwed
mother, abused wife: I have done a lot of unconventional
living that has led to a lot of storytelling. So it is no
surprise that often people say that I write about crazy
women. I jokingly respond, “Well, what’s funny
about mental health?” Yet Eleanor Rushing (of
Eleanor Rushing) is my only character who deserves
a place in the DSM-IVR (the compendium of psychiatric
disorders). All the rest are idiosyncratic and uncensored:
it’s because they are outside the norm of sweet, good
behavior that conventional people might label them crazy.
Anna Riggs (Odds) is driven to disturbed behavior,
uncontrolled gambling, by circumstances, the death of a
child. And Jerusha Bailey in Secondhand Smoke: she’s
a big-mouthed product of her environment who needs to learn
some hard lessons. Emotional deviance enriches my character
development, but this is literary fiction, so it does a
more important job. Eleanor’s problems make us explore
the fickleness of memory; Anna’s raise questions of
chance and determinism; Jerusha’s force us to deal
with the nature of responsibility. All these slightly skewed
women are people I have grown to love deeply, probably because
I’m pretty skewed myself, and I’ll take any
grounds that rationalize my own attitude toward icons.
If I range wide thematically,
I have noticed I have one common thread in my emotional
exploration. All of my books show I’m fascinated by
nurturing issues, and in each subsequent work I feel I probe
more deeply. In Exact Image, I explored generation-skipping
mothering styles. In Eleanor, I allowed a woman to
grow up completely delusional because she has lost her parents.
In Odds, not only does the protagonist grapple with
a hideous “Sophie’s choice,” but she also
must forge an identity different from the one her own mother
planned for her from the time she was very small.
Now that I have arrived
at Secondhand Smoke, I feel that I’ve had my
last say on this issue. The epigraph of Secondhand Smoke
comes from Plato’s “myth of the metals”—what
the Republic must do if a golden child [is born] of silver
parents.” Plato is sure how to slot such anomalies
socially; I’m not so certain. This is why Jerusha Bailey
has a pair of antithetical children. Jerusha is boldly,
proudly, crassly working-class: her son Wilson from an early
age rails against his origins, preferring classical music
and polysyllables; daughter Zib is perfectly content to
work out her adult life in a supermarket. But the true test
of Zib’s and Wilson’s respect for their upbringing
is each one’s parenting choice: determined to outperform
his parents, Wilson does a painfully shabby job with too
many children; Zib doesn’t even have a cat. In the
end Wilson and Zib don’t turn out quite the way we
expect. I think the reason that this is the last book in
which I will deal with motherhood is that I’ve reached
a stage where I have a degree of peace about myself as a
product of my childhood, siblings and all. Eleanor
was dedicated to my sister, who’s an attorney; Secondhand
Smoke is dedicated to my brother, who’s a rabbi.
In between the two books, Odds was dedicated to my
mother, who died suddenly just as the book was going to
press. Somewhere in these frantic three years of novel-publishing,
I’ve come to a visceral understanding that I’m
not the family goofball anymore. My next novel is about
being a Southern Jew.
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