Original Essays
by Jennifer Gilmore, April 30, 2010 11:28 PM
Why set a novel in 1979? Because 1979 seemed like a seminal moment in history, fraught with endless fictional possibilities. Jimmy Carter was in the White House, the Iranian hostage crisis was in full bloom, there had been a nuclear accident at Three Mile Island. Disco was dying, and so was punk rock in its hardcore form, culminating with the death of Sid Vicious. And, yet, punk's more popularized version had reached our shores with the release of the Clash's London Calling. Women's oppression seemed to be waning, made concrete by Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party, shown that year at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Culturally, the world was in bloom: Styron's Sophie's Choice and Mailer's The Executioner's Song were released in 1979. So was Manhattan, The Rose, Apocalypse Now and Breaking Away. Then, on Christmas Day, Soviet deployment of its army into Afghanistan began. And, on January 4, 1980, Carter announced the U.S. grain embargo against the Soviet Union. Which is when my novel begins. With the grain embargo? Every person involved with this book has raised an eyebrow and asked me to please not pin a novel's hopes and dreams on embargoed grain and President Carter. But the grain embargo! It had grand significance in my life because my father is an economist who worked in foreign food policy in Washington, D.C., where I grew up. When the embargo was announced ? I was nine at the time ? it was a big deal in our house. And it's what started me writing this particular book, strangely enough, because as a kid who knew the difference between USAID and USDA (an effect of a Washington, D.C., childhood), and as a girl growing up in a world informed by images of thinness, I was intrigued by the way food played out domestically, in the house, and also outside, in the real world. That compels me now, as a grown-up writer. Well, in 1979, according to my father, the outside world was on the brink of starvation, though this was thanks to Nixon. But now Carter was going to starve nations ? in this case, a punitive act against Soviet aggression in Afghanistan ? into submission. I am not an economist, but I do know now that it doesn't work this way. An embargo is hard to enforce. Even U.S. allies could sneak the "enemy" grain. And if we knew the grain embargo was coming, mightn't the Soviets? They could have been stockpiling it in preparation. But even our most technologically advanced satellite imaging system at the time ?Landsat sensors ? couldn't discern if this was true. The long and short of it was that for the first time in history a nation was using food to swing politics. We were using food as a weapon. Food as a weapon. World starvation. The Soviet Union. Terrorism in Iran. An Invasion in Afghanistan. The more I wrote my way into the politics of that era, the more it was impossible to ignore the way history repeats itself, and, in this case, as it has proved to be in fashion, in 30-year cycles. (Footage from that era might surprise you: everyone ? standing around in their tight gym clothes, their sneakers, their loose, big hair ? looks like a version of Michael Cera.) So, here we are now, the start of 2010, and Afghanistan hasn't exactly faded from memory. I remember sitting around the dinner table ? and that this book deals so much with food and its political implications is partially because most of the high drama in my house took place at that dinner table ? and hearing this kind of talk between my parents. Well, we're handing the Soviet Union their Vietnam, aren't we? We're funding the mujahideen. The anti-communists. Judy, pass the salt. We see clearly now that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was a failure; it can be argued fairly easily that it tore apart that country and helped paved the way for religious fanaticism and that the fear and hate that resulted from the upheaval made Afghanistan and neighboring Pakistan a base for terrorists. That the U.S. helped fund the Afghan resistance ? the mujahideen were anti-Communist but they soon became resistance fighters, proclaiming Jihad on the Soviets ? might have seemed like the right idea at the time. Now, of course, as the U.S. goes into those harsh, rugged mountains to try to undo that rage, soldiers are being met with U.S. guns. "Our people are losing faith," Carter said in his famous 1979 speech about the country's malaise, just four months before the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, just as "we" knew they would. It's a contrast to the way our president ? and many among you have compared Barack Obama to Jimmy Carter ? now speaks. Or is "Change We Can Believe In," the slogan that helped deliver him the White House, just that same notion, turned around? In July 2008, I was coming to the end of my novel ? which, at its heart, is really about a family living within the context of the world, just as we are all here, now ? and, in a pre-recession panic, food prices peaked. Even rice ? that old standby ? was expensive, in the same way prices skyrocketed at the end of the seventies, in anticipation of the embargo. We were all told in 2008, the peak in prices had something to do with ethanol and oil. Did I mention the gas lines in 1979? For those of you too young to remember, they wound around the block. And, for those of you who were there, that was some line, with a simple cause: when the Ayatollah gained control of Iran early in 1979 there were huge protests against the Iranian oil sector. Oil was still exported, but at a reduced quantity, forcing prices up. In stepped Saudi Arabia ? we would certainly be seeing Saudi Arabia again ? to offset loss, and though the loss was not significant, panic ensued, driving up the price. Well, for anyone who tried to drive somewhere last summer, I'm sure the staggering price of gas is not something you'll soon forget. Needless to say. The links are incredible, only in that they're not incredible. But what's amazing to me, not as a historian or an economist or a politician but as a fiction writer who sees the world filtered through novels and stories (and sees the world clearly nonetheless), is that there is rarely any public talk made of that connection. Yes, we say, we really need to rid ourselves of this dependence on foreign oil. It's really bringing us down. We really need to have jobs here. We need to pay the farmers so that they can grow food here, HERE. While those in the fashion industry might say the bellbottom is sure to return (well, maybe not the bellbottom), we are a country that makes massive historical decisions based on the future. Really, though ? and this is largely what I was attempting to do with my characters in this novel ? the past sits next to us at every moment. We're tethered to the past as a nation, just as we're chained to our happy or our sad childhoods. The parallels with life and fiction when writing a novel are always uncanny. A character stubs her toe, and, oh my god, I just stubbed my toe, too! Can you believe it? Truth imitates
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by Jennifer Gilmore, September 1, 2006 8:52 AM
The last blog. A bit of a relief, I always feel like I'm boring everyone to tears... Reviews are starting to come in, in earnest, and, bad or terrific, it's really strange to read about one's own book. The kind of book you think you wrote is not the kind of book other people think you wrote. It's bound to happen. It's that "go out into the world and make your way" thing. This idea of the American Dream that reviewers and readers have been referring to about my novel has been interesting. I've always thought I wrote about failure. Even before I started this book, it is the undercurrent, emotionally anyway, of what brings me to material, this feeling of dashed dreams, never fulfilled ones. The story to me for a character is in all the things he can never have, or everything she's lost. In many ways, as we've learned in school over and over, the American Dream was often unattainable, unreal, non-existent, a nightmare, but when do we know our dreams come true? This, I reason, is why I can't get enough of the theater. And musical theater. Musical theater (several of the characters in my novel are involved in the business) is this great American tradition ? Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Rogers and Hammerstein. And all my favorites ? Guys and Dolls, Gigi, Annie, whatever ? are about starting with nothing and getting everything. (The girl, the girl, the money, parents...) I met Joel Stein's granddaughter in a Brooklyn boutique the other day ? he wrote Fiddler on the Roof ? and it struck me how the beginning of the reign of Broadway was not that long ago. When I was writing, I wished for the musical: the too muchness of things on the page, be it emotion, plot, a joke, whatever, in a musical this is the signal to burst into song. Of course this is impossible on the page, but then, carrying this a bit further, I kept thinking of the stage as the great immigrant experience. The stage name is like the name we change or the name given to us when we get stamped at Ellis Island. And then the transforming into character ? assimilating, perhaps ? though the actor comes back to himself, in theory, after a performance. What happens to the immigrant? Does she get lost in a culture or does she, in her children or grandchildren even, come back in some way as herself again? I was reading this article on stage fright in last week's New Yorker ? it was remarkable because ultimately what happens when an actor suffers from stage fright, is he or she becomes more and more himself. This is what causes the sweating and shaking and the inability to perform at all. The more the body reacts, of course, the less possible it is to go on. And he is left with only himself in front of an entire audience, with nowhere to hide. Perhaps the rest of us feel this every day without our characters to hide behind and beneath. And I imagine why we have the highly developed personas ? some more developed than others ? to get us through our days. Poor writers. They're forced to read from their books, and though the characters are them per se, they are only themselves reading. I'm sure by now you can see where this is going... This has been a great week ? thanks so much for
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by Jennifer Gilmore, August 31, 2006 9:28 AM
I forgot to write about yesterday's dream. In it, my hair went completely white, so white that even though it had been dyed brown, the white white roots kept coming through. It was as if no matter what I did to cover it over, the inevitability of the gray, and my aging, was in front of me. Hmmm... I had taken Maddie out earlier and walked through my neighborhood in the rain when I remembered the dream of seeing myself in the mirror, unable to control time. I live in Carroll Gardens, in Brooklyn, right near the Gowanus Canal (which many a gangster has thrown many a sad sack into) and the neighborhood is completely gentrifying. More like gentrified, though this particular section of the neighborhood still holds some of the old factories and warehouses, a contrast to the brownstones and newly-renovated spaces to the West. My block is industrial meets Italian neighborhood, but I have lived in or around this neighborhood for nearly a decade. My first apartment was the bottom of a brownstone and I had the most tremendous garden, but the ceilings of the apartment were nearly as low as my forehead. That time I associate as laying low, crouching down so as not to constantly bang my head. My bed was next to the window and I remember thinking, someone could just reach in. I remember lying there at night wondering what I'd do if I saw some big impending hand hovering over me. At one time you could barely get a slice of pizza on Smith Street, and now it's known for its swanky restaurants and boutiques. And the real estate, well, it's the same old story. Real estate real estate, there is probably little more boring than the discussion of New York real estate, but no matter what neighborhood you're in, the discussion goes on and on. A crumbling mass on a busy corner with no outside space next to a car lot went for 1.8 million. Everyone shakes their head and wonders how long we will be able to stay here. But I love Brooklyn, it's perfect, and, though this kind of sweeping positive statement is not really in character for me, I'd never want to live anywhere else. It's hard to imagine horses shitting the streets, ice carriages knocking by, the street lamps being lit at twilight. And yet it isn't that hard to imagine. What I love about Brooklyn ? and about the Lower East Side as well ? is that with all these changes, the bankers moving in, all the women with their rolled up yoga mats padding by, the strollers, the lounges and coffee shops and fancy restaurants, you can still see beneath that glittery veneer to what the place once was. The social clubs (My favorite local one: the Brooklyn Social on Smith Street where Ivan makes a fine Old Fashioned...) that have become hipster hangouts still have the feeling of what it once had to have been like to be a man coming in from the cold for a game of craps and a drink with friends. You can imagine the candy stores and the boys in their tilted caps waiting on the corners. Just go on any rooftop and Brooklyn has to look exactly as it once was, down to the linens and shirts and undergarments blowing on the clotheslines. All the generations at one time in a way, that's Brooklyn. That's New York also ? but all the little anecdotes of the first Broadway theater, the first Times Square restaurant (which soon did in Madison Square Park as the place to go and be seen) disappears for me beneath the drama and scope of what's been built over it. But the grandness of Central Park, Rockefeller Center, 5th Avenue, Grand Central Station still catches me. I never quite get over it. The East and West Village, the Lower East Side, these parts feel more human, despite their constant state of transition. Back to the present, another day of rain ? so cold for August! ? another day of going to and from work, trying not to think about the Big Book Tour. I can't believe how fast time is going, that Next Week is already almost here. A mental note: don't forget to make an appointment, to makes sure none of that inevitable gray shows
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by Jennifer Gilmore, August 30, 2006 10:43 AM
I'm doing lots of logistical things this week, like booking travel for the Big Book Tour, and sorting out more travel for the Jewish Community Center tour in November. I notice all of these events say Q&A with the author to follow. I am still amazed that the author is me. How will I answer? Or what will be asked? And then, of course, will anyone ask? It's all fairly ominous... I have several interviews scheduled, and said Q&As, and I want to try to answer in an intelligent and truthful way the basic question that I have already been asked many times: what made me write my book. I've never answered this properly and I'm finding this terribly difficult, partially because that's a fairly complex question. It's also hard for me to imagine that anyone would really care... I think people want a one line answer, or I would like to be able to give one, but there is never really one reason ? one things leads to another, and another, years pass by and then you are a million years away from where you started. I'm realizing I can talk about anyone else's book, novels I've admired, short stories that I loved despite their glaring flaws, but I can't talk very well about my own book. I used to teach a Jewish American Literature class at Cornell, where I went to graduate school, and I remember finding certain tropes and themes of all the books so fascinating. For one, how Yezierska, and Abraham Cahan and Delmore Schwartz and Roth (both of them) were unmistakably Jewish writers, but there was little, if any, reference to religion at all. How did they pull this off? And what made them unquestionably Jewish? What makes anyone so? This is not a new question, I know. Identity, like so many things that make us up as individuals, as characters, is dependent on our communities, what we eat (without fail this discussion always makes me think of Alfred Kazin's A Walker in the City...), our family life. And often that is so different from where we are now as individuals ? I think this is why Irving Howe made the claim ? I paraphrase here, or more likely misquote ? that Jewish American literature was dead in a sense. It had once brought European Jewishness to America, but then all the Jews moved to the suburbs; how would this experience, one of dilution really, and assimilation, be of interest? The difference between the generations is so marked with immigrants, and this almost unbearable distance between the people who came over and their children who were raised here, as well as these issues of identity, began to kind of obsess me when I was teaching that course. My grandmother, who was alive then and who was born here, got a kick of me asking her questions: why did your family come? Her answer: Ecch, they were bored. Why Portland, Maine? Because this is where the boat landed. I was asking her what we were doing here, how we got here, but this was never an interesting ? and therefore answer-worthy ? question for her. She felt from Maine. And then I serendipitously found a self-published book by the widow of the man who had invented Lestoil, the first real household cleanser. (Remember?) It turns out I was related to him by marriage, and his story began to fascinate me. This man came over from Russia, was a door-to-door salesman, and then got rich inventing a cleanser he mixed in his kid's bathtub. That could only happen here, at that time, when people were inventing things they needed to get through the day. Sugar packets? Sugar dispensers congealed with crystallized particles and wouldn't close. Depletory creams? You can only imagine. Now, we go further daily with technology, but the inventions of these very necessary things seem a thing of the past. There was something so nostalgic about all of it. Novel-worthy, even. And there was something satisfying about finding my family's roots. I consider myself 1,000% Jewish, but this can also translate into cultural and historical identification. Well, that helped a little... Now back to the every day, walking through Madison Square Park on the way to lunch and watching all the dogs in the run, which of course makes me think of Maddie, my springer spaniel, and how once upon a time I used to be home all day with her. Nice that my husband is home with her now ? he has a studio in the first floor of our apartment and they are completely inseparable. Of course of course, I'm jealous. And then, sitting down at my desk, which is incidentally beneath one of the paintings Pedro made of "me" (which is to say, he's not exactly a figurative painter), and thumbing through the unduly large September Vogue (still thinking about what to pitch, still thinking it would be just too great to have a piece in Vogue), and I come across a review of my friend (and Portland writer) Jon Raymond's (and Kelly Reichard's, who directed and helped adapt it) movie, Old Joy. I saw the film in the New York Film Festival at MOMA last spring, but it has distribution now. It's this wonderful quiet unsettling movie about friendship and alienation based on one of Jon's short stories. I love it when the people I know and love make beautiful, moving things... Which of course leads back to me and: what will I make next? When will I get back to writing my newly started and yet dreaded next book, in earnest? For now, I'll just flip back to the
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by Jennifer Gilmore, August 29, 2006 9:29 AM
No dreams last night, none that I can recall anyway. Woke up several times due to the dog, heavy on my legs, which always leads to: what will I read, what if no one comes to readings, what if, with all these new flying regulations, I die of dehydration on the plane out west? So I can describe how bizarre my life feels right now, let me start with a bit about last week. I have two essays coming out in anthologies (I know, there have been many many anthologies lately) in the next year, and edits on both were due last week. I found out that the Washington Post and the New York Times Book Review and USA Today and People Magazine are scheduled (this is key word, one never knows what can happen) to review my novel. I got a call about pitching a story to Vogue. What will I pitch? When will I get to these edits? My life feels like it's completely crowding in on me, I don't have time to do anything. But I forget to take a minute to think, This is exciting! Isn't this what I've always wanted? It is: to be part of the land of the living. I never knew it would be this difficult to manage. I also realize in this whole process, how it is the unexpected surprises that are the best bits. What comes in unanticipated is really the rewarding part. Strangely, when I saw the reading group guide Scribner did, I got teary. I just had never imagined a discussion about my book taking place with me not in it to say: This is what I meant, this is where that comes from, this character reminds me of whosewutz. But the finished book? I'd already seen it so many times as an advanced reading copy (I can't say enough wonderful things about the cover or the Scribner art director who made it), and so it was lost on me a bit. Then I felt horrible. Holding The Book is supposed to be the Best Part. It's like a wedding ? the good bits, or perhaps I should say the real bits, are never what they seem. The Best Part of the book for me, I realize now, was really a fairly writerly conceit: it was once I'd sold the book and was working with my editor to make it the best it could be. The first time I saw it bound up was wonderful, but seeing it in a bookstore? It just looked so small and lost! Though all this book/writing stuff is consuming me, the world seems to be spinning along, same as always. Why stop for me? Life at work doesn't cease. There was much fallout when Gunter Grass decided to reveal in an interview with a German newspaper that he was a member of the Waffen-SS. Harcourt publishes Gunter Grass in the States, and, as publicity director, it's my job to deal with the media. Now: there is probably not much I want to discuss with the media less. This is not a dialogue I in any way want to engage in. But how does one discuss this without saying what he did was wrong or he only should have said something sooner or what he did was no different than a zillion other boys at that time? These were some of the many many reactions. Put aside my background growing up Jewish in this country, or that my book deals with, among other things, the Jewish immigrant experience, how does one stay neutral? The calls and e-mails are still coming in. Life at home doesn't stop either. My husband, Pedro Barbeito, is a painter, and he is preparing for a solo show in Madrid in October. The timing could not be worse ? we are both nearly flammable; one spark, the whole house could go down in flames. Aside from all the family dynamics, which I will not regale you with, it's interesting because he's had many solo shows here in New York, and watching him prepare for each one has really changed over the years. The way he makes the work and the way he steels himself when the paintings leave his studio. It also makes me realize that the art world is for such a small select group of people. One has to go to the gallery to see it; one has to be fairly rich to buy art. The publishing world is far more universal ? I just got a call from a friend in California that she had seen my book in Palo Alto. I still haven't gotten used to that. But making the work remains the same. You are alone with your art until you are no longer alone with it. Then it goes out into the world. This is what I am trying my best to do now: appreciate the small, good bits, and just let it
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by Jennifer Gilmore, August 28, 2006 10:41 AM
Today, I kid you not, I woke up from a dream that I was in some "bookstore" (that looked much more like my elementary school gym) and I was supposed to do a reading after the person before me. Who was taking FOREVER. By the time I got up there, half the people had left. I couldn't find my place. For about half an hour ? dream time and real time ? I turned pages and stammered. Finally I started making stuff up: and my feeling of being a total fraud matched by the disappointing faces of the few people in the audience, threw me out of my dream state and into morning. A cliché? Perhaps ? I am heading off on my book tour for my first novel on September 5th. I am fortunate to even have a book tour, and I'm lucky that my pre-publication reviews and long lead reviews have been so good, that I'm published by a wonderful house, that I have lots of reviews and media lined up. For a first time author, this is amazing. But clearly that does not a calm author make. I should know, I send authors on the road almost every day. As head of publicity at a different publishing house, I always thought I knew what authors went through. While I was toiling away ? for six years! ? on my book, and new authors were publishing theirs, I thought I understood the creative process, the highs and lows, the crippling fears, the unmanageable expectations. And I did. I had no idea, though, what it actually feels like to sit and wait for the reviews to come, to figure out what exactly to read in front of a group of people that include your mother, father, and little cousins, to prepare for an interview and how to manage everything without coming unglued. Because in the end, despite my experience in publishing, my experience in media (I used to have a radio show in Seattle where I interviewed fiction writers), my knowledge of the book business and how things go, I'm just an author who managed to write a novel without letting all this knowledge and my time spent working in it completely crowd out my time with my book. How I did this I still don't know. I think it was Peter Carey who said something to the effect of: I have no idea what I wrote or why I wrote that, was it me?, I think I must have been drunk. What was expected of me, and what has been expected of a lot of "young" (and I use this term fairly loosely) women writers is to write something fun and light and fun and light and fun. Call it chic lit, don't call it chic lit, it doesn't matter the name of it, but women haven't really written books with big scopes, for innumerable reasons. This is changing and it's changing fast. (Just look on the new arrivals table at any bookstore this fall.) More on this later, I think, but for now, I need to remember and get back to the quietest moments of sitting at my desk at 5:30 in the morning all alone before anyone had read a word. I need to remember sitting with my characters (there are so many Scribner put a family tree in the front matter of the book), and really, hearing my grandparents' voices. My close relationship with them was what made me want to write a book that takes place from the 1920s to the 1960s ? I think I wanted to write something that took place when they were young. I didn't know where those voices would take me, if anywhere, but going back that way opened up an entire world I had not before seen as a fictional possibility. Now I'm off to work, at Harcourt, where I have a 2007 budget to do (my anxiety dream could also have to do with having to face even one number), a lot of which consists of author tours. Where will Andrew O'Hagan and Moshin Hamid travel for their new novels, out next spring? (A shameless plug, I can't help myself…) But I will have to know these cities today, so they can make it into the catalog. Writing and then heading into work is always so bizarre ? getting on to the subway platform in Brooklyn and heading in to the city, I always start to feel myself transforming, sometimes melting away, as the working girl rushes for a seat on the subway. Meanwhile, I will I have to remember what I wrote and why as I head out to talk to people about my novel. Now I'm calling in favors from all my pill-popping friends and relatives. (Who knew how many?) My doctor's idea of a prescription is a ginger steam, so I need to get on the phone soon to find a way to face my fears ? and my dreams, I'd guess I'd say ? which, as my book details, I am finding can be exactly the same
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