Newtonville Author Questionnaire
Newtonville Books, June 2009, Interview with Jaime Clarke and Mary Cotton, co-owners:
NB: Name a childhood hero.
CE: In childhood, I think I had more heroes than pairs of underwear--fortunately or unfortunately, some things never change. But as a little girl, the shortlist of my heroes included: Annie Oakley, Amelia Earhart, Lauren Hutton, and, for a couple years, sometime around 1981, I became completely obsessed with Eleanor of Aquitaine, who was, at one point, the richest woman in the world, not to mention queen of England and queen of France. I mean, for a while there, I was like Raingirl, the way I could spout off facts about her marriages to Louis VII and Henry II and her son Richard the Lionhearted and on and on … But it wasn’t any of that that caused my obsession, actually, it was Eleanor’s portrayal as penned by James Goldman and embodied by the stunning Katharine Hepburn in The Lion in Winter. A particularly classic Eleanor quip I’ve always loved:
“I even made poor Louis take me on Crusade. How’s that for blasphemy. I dressed my maids as Amazons and rode bare-breasted halfway to Damascus. Louis had a seizure and I damn near died of windburn … but the troops were dazzled.”
Now that — that, gentlemen, is how you win hearts and minds. And the first time I watched Hepburn recite those lines was the moment I realized the sheer power of words, language — what it meant when people said the pen was mightier than the sword, yes.
NB: Name a work you wished you’d written.
CE: Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion. For the seeming effortlessness with which it makes these technically daring leaps of faith, shifting back and forth from first-person to third-person narrative; its total disinterest in conventional plot devices; the sheer density achieved with such sparse language; dialogue cut like diamonds; and the way in which the author redefined the meaning of a “chapter” every single page. All that, and it’s set in Los Angeles, in Hollywood, for god sake? Honestly, I’ve read it fifty times, easily, and still have no idea how Didion pulled it off. For me, it was the book that completely changed my concept of what a novel was, not to mention the possibility of what a novel could be.
NB: Name a writer in history you would’ve like to have been a contemporary of and why.
CE: Many great writers/periods immediately come to mind, from George Eliot to Flannery O’Connor, Jane Bowles to Virginia Woolf to Isaak Denison. However, obviously, as a writer living in these times, here’s the problem when I think about those women and living in those times: I’m a lousy excuse for a Catholic in any age, I cannot imagine writing under a pseudonym, forget contracting venereal disease from my philandering husband and/or drowning myself with rocks in my pockets.
To open up the question, well, many of the writers I most admire are musicians, songwriters and poets, equally, and I admire them for the honesty, individuality, and passion of their voices and their words. That list would include the likes of: Janis Joplin, Chrissie Hynde, and, of course, Patti Smith. But, I guess if I had to choose just one, I would want to live as a contemporary of Patti Smith, New York City in the early seventies, because it was such a dangerous and magical time and place to be a female artist trying to break new ground.
NB: Name a work of yours whose reception you’ve been surprised about and why.
CE: I think I’ve been most surprised that my novella, ‘The Former World Record Holder Settles Down’, was translated into French and published there as a novel. That, and the fact that the book was well received in France, of all places, was pretty shocking. But when I was invited to visit in 2006, I kept getting asked all these questions about bowling — the story mentions bowling and baseball, equally — the French were fascinated with bowling and baseball not at all. Had anyone asked me, I would have gladly shared endless mind-numbing details about, say, oh, Jackie Robinson or Don Zimmer, the Buddha of Baseball, but the history of bowling in the United States? Well. Obviously I didn’t do my research. And I felt like such an asshole for that reason and too many others to name.
NB: Correct a misperception about you as a writer in fifty words or less.
CE: Well, I think it’s generous, not to mention a little presumptuous, to think that any reader has a perception of me, period. So, really, if there were misperceptions, at this point, I guess I’d have to side with the all-publicity-is-good-publicity rule. Come on: I’ve written a collection of short stories and one novel, let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
NB: Name a trait you deplore in other writers.
CE: Easy: envy. But that’s a trait I deplore in myself as a writer, first and foremost.
NB: Name a regret, literary or otherwise.
CE: Professionally, I regret how much time I’ve wasted — and still waste on occasion — worrying what others will think of my writing. Personally, I deeply regret how I’ve handled certain relationships, and times, even now, when I don’t know how to correct my mistakes. Fiction is far easier in that respect.
NB: Name your greatest struggle as a writer.
CE: Earning a living.
Juked
Juked #6, Spring 2009, Interview with Lindsay Walker (print edition only, but check out juked.com)
LW: In the Acknowledgments you credit the artist Robert Szot and his painting exhibit from which the title of the novel (presumably) comes. Was there something about that painting, or exhibit, or artist that inspired you? Were there other titles you considered?
CE: I’ve never actually met Robert Szot, and I have only seen a handful of his paintings. Szot was a friend of an ex of mine, who was storing some of Rob’s paintings for him. This was in December 2004, I think, and my ex had a warehouse space in Brooklyn at the time, and after looking at a few of his paintings, which were maybe five foot by five foot canvases, I asked about the artist, and that’s when my ex- told me the title of Szot’s exhibit was, “The Generosity of Women”. Which was just so … so you-cheeky-little-art-boy-you, but at the same time, I was humored. I couldn’t help laughing, really. And over the course of the next year or two, that title kept coming back to me. That was how the book began about a year later, with a title that I wanted to turn inside out.