The Book that Changed Melissa Fay Greene's Life
Dave Weich, Powells.com
First Haregewoin Teferra lost her husband. Then she lost a daughter. She had just about lost her will to live when, without warning, a nearby church in Addis Ababa asked her to take in a fifteen-year-old girl.
 Eleven percent of the children in Ethiopia are orphans. Twelve million children in Sub-Saharan Africa have lost their parents. In 2000, the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS predicted that the disease would take sixty-eight million more lives on the continent by 2020.
When Melissa Fay Greene's child packed for college, she and her husband began to research international adoption agencies. (She jokes, "My husband says we're backfilling.") In the process, she confronted a tragedy like none she could have imagined. As a mother, she wanted to know, "Who is going to raise all those kids?"
Greene's first two books are vivid, oral histories of the civil rights movement in Georgia. Praying for Sheetrock is "a monumental social history," says the Boston Globe, a portrait of rural McIntosh County, practically untouched by civil rights into the 1970s. The Temple Bombing makes for a gripping crime drama and a stunning portrait of urbanizing, post-war Atlanta.
In Last Man Out, the two-time National Book Award finalist went north to Canada — to Nova Scotia, specifically — and brought back the story of nineteen men who survived for a week one mile underground after a disaster in Springhill's No. 2 mine.
What unites her subjects, Greene believes, "is the theme [of] people intuiting justice who have never seen it." There Is No Me without You, which introduces Haregewoin Teferra, describes "a world that values patent rights above universal right to health" and an impoverished nation where one grieving widow has saved three hundred children and counting.
"Like the very best literature, There Is No Me without You charts the human condition in all its extremes," applauded the San Diego Union-Tribune. "It harnesses the most potent of all human forces: the bond between parent and child."
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"If Greene did not have such lovely (and true) stories to share, the heartwrenching facts about Africa's AIDs orphans outlined in this book would be more than the average reader could bear....For anyone concerned about children's issues, anyone who has ever considered international adoption, or those of us who simply like to believe that one individual can shine a healing light in the dark, this is a story not to be missed." Marjorie Kehe, The Christian Science Monitor
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"Greene takes a very close look at what appears to be the fringe of an important social event and illuminates the entire subject.... Even as some of the orphans find happy endings in American homes, Greene keeps the urgency of the greater crisis before us in this moving, impassioned narrative." Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)
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"A monumental social history...Through a combinaton of oral history and interpretive narrative, Greene has created a work of great drama, a chorus of voices that is both disturbing and inspiring." The Boston Globe
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"Reads like a gripping, bestselling novel.... How and why this horrific bombing transpired is the book's main subject. Unraveling who would do such a thing becomes a psychological thriller in Greene's hands." San Francisco Chronicle
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"With every book, Greene further refines her art of rich, literary nonfiction. And she continues to find these perfect stories ..." Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Dave: When I describe There Is No Me without You, I start by saying, "It's about AIDS and the orphan crisis in Africa — twelve million orphans
already." But I always explain that you approach
the story as a mother, asking how
millions of children are going to grow up without
parents.
That puts the crisis onto a scale we can fathom.
The story might have been completely unbearable
otherwise, given the scope of the tragedy. What
brought you to that perspective? How did you come
to write the book this way?
Melissa Fay Greene: My family is
interested in adoption. When our oldest daughter,
Molly, who is now twenty-five, suddenly decided
to grow up and leave home for college, we
panicked. The idea of having only three children
at home felt like empty nest to us. We
whimsically thought about adoption. I took the
fateful step of typing the word adoption
into a search engine.
There is almost no turning back from that. I
don't know what to compare it to. Images of
children appear on the screen. This was in '98.
Bulgaria used to post photographs of orphanage
children. They don't anymore; the government got
alarmed about the Internet. But you used to be
able to see faces of children. We saw the face of
a little boy and ended up going through all the
legal steps in America and in Bulgaria to adopt
him. He came in 1999 — Jesse.
A couple years later, our son Seth announced he
was also growing up and leaving home. We started
thinking about adoption again. My husband says
we're backfilling.
By then, the U.N. was calling Africa "a continent
of orphans." It was the combination of these two
factors, this impartial, horrific news with data
like twelve million orphans and our personal
thought: We could bring in another kid.
Could you adopt from there? That reaction was not
so different than a journalist settling on one
story. I can't tell twelve million stories. No
one can process twelve million stories. Can I
tell one?
We enjoy having lots of
little kids around the house, but our friends
increasingly think that we're insane. People
already thought we were crazy when I gave birth
to a fourth child. Everyone was stopping after
one or two. The friends I raised our oldest two
with, they're not living in Florida yet but they're long into empty nest. Every year when the
teachers see me sitting on one of those little
chairs in the kindergarten room, I hear them
laughing all the way down the hall. She's
back?!
Luckily, I've always had newspapers willing to
send me places to tell me stories. I've had a
cover. I didn't tell anyone we were adopting
Jesse from Bulgaria. Instead, it so happened I
was working on an article for the New
Yorker, for which a side trip to Bulgaria was
not out of the question; that was within the
subject. So I went to Bulgaria for the New
Yorker and came back with a little boy.
When I then wanted to go to Ethiopia — by
then, we were matched with Helen, a five-year-old
girl — just
around then the New York Times Magazine
called and said, "Would you like to do something
for us? It's been a while." And I said, "Send me
to Ethiopia."
So the New York Times sent me to Ethiopia.
It was my first time there. It was my first
time to meet Helen — and I wrote about what I saw. Humbly. And being sure
that they were clear on the fact that I'm not a
health professional, I'm not a demographer, I'm
not an epidemiologist; it wasn't going to be one
of those stories. But I know kids. I could write
about kids in the orphanages.
That article seemed to make a huge impact. I
still hear from people who read it. I
don't know how many adoptions it generated; I
couldn't even estimate. Many, although that
wasn't necessarily the goal.
Consequently, I was invited to steer seventy-five
thousand dollars toward the crisis in Ethiopia,
and with that money I helped attract an
international NGO that opened a clinic in Addis
Ababa and started giving anti-AIDS drugs to
HIV-positive orphans. They were some of the first
children in the country to get the drugs.
Children I met when I was reporting for the
New York Times, many of them are still
alive as a result. Otherwise they were going to
die. Some of them have died since then. My
daughter's best friend died of AIDS.
All that gave me a certain courage. I wanted to
go back — because by then we had been
matched with a ten-year-old boy, and I still
wanted the cover. My friends still thought my
reporting was coming first.
Dave: No one noticed a trend?
Greene: They thought it was risky for me
to go to countries with unclaimed children, I
think, but they still thought the reporting was
coming first. You know, Who in their right
mind would do this?
I was under contract to Good Housekeeping,
another periodical I wrote for regularly, and I
asked if they'd like a story about a woman in
Ethiopia. By then I'd heard of Mrs. Haregewoin
— Teferra — but I hadn't met her yet. I
thought she'd maybe make a good story for Good
Housekeeping. Good Housekeeping said,
"We've never done an international story." I
said, "Let's do this one. I'm sure she has a
lovely home."
So I wrote about her, and there was a tremendous
response from Good Housekeeping readers.
People, mostly women, sent ten and twenty dollars
at a time with little notes, saying, "Thank you.
We didn't know." They raised over a hundred
thousand dollars. With that, all sorts of good
things were able to happen there. We were able to
help Haregewoin move out of the very muddy, small
compound she was in. Now she has two houses. She
got a van. She leased a bed and breakfast that
she could use to earn money for the orphanages.
All of this increased my confidence that there
might be a place for this, that it would not be a
work of epidemiology, that there was a place for
storytelling. As a result of the magazine
articles, especially the Times article, I
was invited to speak to groups of
epidemiologists; a group within the World Bank
invited me to speak. I said, "Me? You're the one
with the PowerPoint presentations." They said
that they liked to hear the stories because they
get lost in the big numbers and the molecules and
the blood testing and so on.
Dave: I read your new book before going
back to the older ones. This is the first time
you've framed so much of a book around the
future, instead of looking back. There Is No Me points to what could happen,
the path we're on. Also, it's a contemporary
story. How did those differences change the
writing?
Greene: I felt I was in a great hurry.
Although I love research and I love, love
writing — my favorite is when the research
is mostly done and I face a stack of blank
notebooks and blank mornings and get to just
write the book — I've had such a sense of
urgency about this project. I have it right now.
That has felt really different.
It's also my first book that's first-person. I
wrote most of it third-person, but then I ran
into a journalistic problem: I had affected what
I was looking at. The Good Housekeeping
money flowing into Haregewoin's life changed the
nature of her project and changed the way she
looked at herself. There was no explaining that
windfall. And part of the trouble she gets into
late in the story is the result of coming into
all this money. Where the hell did that come
from? People with no concept that there could
be twenty-five million readers of Good
Housekeeping magazine across the sea thought,
Is she selling babies? It generated all
kinds of problems. It also got me into
trouble. The book is so contemporary that the
story was changing even as I was changing the
book.
Dave: I read that you got a phone call the
day before the book was due.
Greene: It was actually about two weeks.
The book was due at the end of December. On
December 15th, Haregewoin called from prison.
She'd been arrested.
I wasn't sure how I was going to end the book, in
terms of which story I'd use, but this was not
what I had in mind. The first thing was to make
phone calls and make sure the children were okay.
Is there food? Is there medicine? Okay.
The second thing was for me to storm around the
house going, "I wrote this book already," because
in Praying for Sheetrock, the hero, Thurnell
Alston, ends up in jail; at the end of that book
he's in jail, and I wasn't planning on doing that
again.
The third thing was that I had to call
Bloomsbury. I had to speak to the
editor-in-chief. She picks up the phone:
"Melissa! How's it going!?" She's expecting the
manuscript.
I said, "Good. It's good. I'm fine. But... things
have gotten a little weird in Ethiopia." It was
awful. I was furious at Haregewoin. I was
bitterly disappointed in her.
Dave: You'd been researching this for
years. You knew this person. You knew the story.
How did that affect your confidence as a writer?
You'd already written the book.
Greene: It was terrible. I felt like,
Who the hell is this? I'd spent years with
her. I was very plugged in. I knew that there had
been accusations of child molestation. I was with
her when those were surfacing, and she looked me
in the eye and explained that it had not
happened. I believed her.
She had a very plausible explanation, and she
described for me events. I was confident that
things had happened in a certain way. A child had
woken up scared in the night, a child who most
likely had been abused at an earlier placement;
he had woken up scared, half out of a nightmare,
half from a young adult male moving around near
him, and had been hysterical. But she had calmed
it, and it was over. Okay. I had that much in the
book. That was there.
But the story got bigger. It turned out that two
other boys had come forward and said, "He did us
that way, too. He slept with us like women." And
she had tried to deeply bury it.
If it had been child molestation of a male with
girls, she would have known how to handle it, but
child molestation of a man with boys was way
beyond anything she had ever heard of. She
couldn't have anticipated it, and she didn't know
what to do with it, so she chased the young man
accused away, and she said, "That's it. Never
speak of it again. This is over."
But an American volunteer befriended one of the
boys, got the story, or got his own version of
the story, or elaborated on the story, or stirred
up the story. More stuff was happening, and it
spun out of Haregewoin's control and led to her
being arrested.
I was so upset. I felt that she had lied to me,
that she was trying to cover it up, that she was
trying to manipulate me in some way. I was in
despair. Now it was the end of December, and I
was thinking, Screw it. I don't even have a
book now. I was in a tailspin. The editors
were trying to be nice, but they couldn't help
calling every six hours to say, "How's it
coming?" I didn't know where I was with it. I
wasn't going to be able to fly over and see her
in jail. I tried to help get her out of jail, but
that's hard to do in a country without a criminal
justice system.
A friend of mine one day said, "You know, they
say even Mother Theresa was no Mother Theresa."
And I clung to that. It was a lifeline to me. I'd
never heard that before. Have you ever heard
someone say that?
Dave: No.
Greene: It was a lifeline. And I just held
onto it. I had to rethink everything I had done.
Had I thought I was writing about a saint? Maybe
I had, in a way. I had to revisit the whole book
and start over from the beginning, but first I
had to see what was happening.
I can't even believe at this moment that I'm
on the book tour because I wasn't sure this was
going to happen, and certainly not by pub date.
In early February, just this past February, I
flew over to see her, paralyzed by the thought
that she was going to say, "No. You cannot write
about this." If she had said that, what was I
going to do?
Before flying over, I asked Karen Rinaldi at
Bloomsbury, "What if I wrote this with a
pseudonym?" I was thinking about The Bookseller of Kabul. "If she says I can't
write about this, can we change her name?" Karen
said, "Don't panic. Just go see what's
happening."
Because I thought, What if my choice is
between writing an ethical work of journalism or
preserving everything Haregewoin has built,
including these houses that are homes to more
than sixty children? What if accuracy in
reporting leads to her losing everything through
this scandal of homosexual child molestation?
But. When I went over she had been quite calmed
by the prison experience. She had been
reprimanded. She was not punished; mostly she was
reprimanded. I sat down with her, and I got out
my pen and paper. I said, "I have to write
about this." And she said, "Yes."
Then I sort of fell in love with her again. I had
almost hated her for a couple months. Then,
beginning again and seeing it through her eyes...
I've never written a book about people who
don't speak English. Having to do everything in
translation in a very different culture —
although Haregewoin's English is excellent —
there were constant reminders of cultural bridges
that have to be crossed. Mostly I've gotten
pretty good at not judging. Just wait and see
what the story is. This is not how life looks in
urban Atlanta. She told me the whole story
then, a story that I could believe, and I was
able to confirm it with a number of people who
had been holding back. I even interviewed
confidentially some of the boys who had been
accusing the young man. I felt like I had the
whole story.
So she's flawed. She's no Mother Theresa. And now
I say, from the start, "This is not about a
saint." Which turns out to be good news for the
book and for all of us. Alright, she's not a
saint, but she's saved about three hundred
children.
Dave: In the beginning of the book you
note that too often we elevate others to
sainthood, which lets us off the hook...
Greene: For us to think of her as a saint
excuses us, yes. As if she's different. I'm
not that.
Dave: Each of your books involves
prejudice and, to deconstruct a bit further, the
notion of Other. One type of Other is threatening
on a very personal, immediate level. It's "Blacks (or Hispanics, pick your minority) are getting all our jobs!" or "Jews
are taking over the banks!" But there is another
kind of Other that people can ignore entirely,
for example these AIDS victims dying in Africa.
You can't see them, so you're free to pretend
they don't exist.
It struck me in reading the books that there's
not so much difference between the two. In There Is No Me without You, you're writing
specifically about family, but in all of your
books what we see is how people excuse themselves
to judge others that are distant or different from
their own kin. You are not me, therefore I can
treat you differently.
Greene: This is what it’s like when you're
interviewed by someone who's read the book and
thought about it. That's amazing, what you just
said. I've never thought about it like that. I
think that's absolutely true. It sort of gave me
chills when you said that.
Dave: Why? What does it make you think of?
Greene: It's a thread running through the
books I never recognized.
At one point, this book began with a scene that
is now deeper in the book, the scene in which a
father knocks at the door of Haregewoin's
compound in the middle of the night. He has a
little daughter with him. His wife has died. He's
a surveyor. He was educated at Addis Ababa
University. He says, "Here, you may see how she
was before," and he reaches into his pocket,
pulls out his wallet, and flips it open — I
saw this — and he's got pictures of his
daughter when she took ballet. His wallet is full
of pictures. This fat, little girl in her tutu.
It was taken in a professional photographer's
studio, and she's in her ballet dress.
Now he's widowed, he's HIV-positive, and she's
HIV-positive. Even though the pictures weren't
taken so long ago, that world is gone, of them being
a middle class, happy family with a daughter who
takes ballet lessons and gets professional
photographs. He puts the wallet back in his
pocket, and he gives Haregewoin his child.
He comes back and visits her, and every time he
comes he's moving a little more slowly; and then
she's moving a little more slowly. I think my
final scene with them is her making her way very
slowly across the courtyard to him, and he
doesn't even have the strength to go greet her.
The two of them just sit and watch the healthy
children play. I opened the book that way initially because
he's a university educated surveyor. They were a
middle class family. And they're being decimated.
A good friend I grew up with, when I sent
her opening chapters, she said that scene
had gripped her and for just the reason you're
saying. This notion of AIDS in Africa killing all
these people, it's become a sort of background
noise, but you don't really think of it as being
someone who is educated and carries his
daughter's pictures in his wallet. If we were to
admit that they're parents just like us and that
they love their children every bit as much as we
love our children, and when they die the children
are as sad as our children would be if we died,
the pain becomes unbearable.
Maybe that's why it gave me chills — because
I think that's right. That's my main hope for the
book, that people might read it and realize
they're not Other. You might think they are, but
isn't this what you recognize about parenthood
and love and family?
A lot of the design of the book went into trying
not to scare people away. This is a very scary
subject. For example, I can't get on morning TV
shows, although producers reply to Bloomsbury,
"We love it. We love Melissa. It's a great book.
But we can't figure out how to package it."
Dave: It doesn't go well with breakfast.
Greene: Yes, but I think they're wrong. I
think about the responses that I got from Good
Housekeeping readers, and I think about the
responses I'm getting all the time from readers.
Gratitude is part of the response. It's not about
me. It's just a matter of letting truth come out.
The back of the book, that beautiful photographic
image of the little girl — that's the cover
of the British edition. In the judgment of the
American publisher, it would scare American
readers away; they wouldn't pick it up. So we
have a beautiful bright color, a fabric —
it's Ethiopian fabric — and this ambiguous
title. The idea is, Just pick it up. If
you can just get it into your hands...
I'm the same when I speak to audiences. I'm not
at all grim. It's very light. I mean, it's awful.
I'll be at a party and someone says, "What are
you working on?" "AIDS in Africa!" It's like,
"Goodbye."
That was why the publisher wanted it to be
first-person. The editor said, "We need you
there." I said, "You don't. You can do this.
Haregewoin is not such a stranger. Look, she
speaks English. She's friendly, she loves
children." But no; it was, "Come with us."
One of my friends said, "You're our Mars probe."
It's such a foreign landscape. For me, it's not
— it's like my own backyard now. But
alright, you need company, I'll come.
A few years ago, all the nonfiction books were
first-person. A few in particular, I felt like
screaming, "Down in front! I'm interested in what
you're telling me, but not in you. I can't even
see what you're telling me."
I didn't want to do that. Most of the book was
written third-person, so I went back in to add
these first-person touches to say, You're not
alone. There's a white person there. I'm
hoping that I didn't block the view.
Dave: You were quoted in an interview with
Bloomsbury online, saying, "I'm not sure Africa
feels as far away to our children as it did to
most of us in childhood." Could you expand on
that?
Greene: I could probably get the
statistics for you, but this is by far the most
diverse generation, growing up in this country
right now, that the world has ever known.
My son was editor-in-chief of his high school
yearbook last year before he graduated, and he
did a survey asking how many countries were
represented in the school. Just a redbrick,
Atlanta public high school. Fifty-seven.
Fifty-seven different countries were birthplaces
of students there.
When Helen first came to America, she had a small
circle of best friends right away. Helen is
Ethiopian. One best friend was an
African-American girl. Another was a blond,
blue-eyed, Southern white girl. Helen was
bilingual. Another was a bilingual Korean girl
whose parents were from Seoul. The fifth was a
bilingual French girl who was born in Paris. It
looked like United Colors of Benetton — and
this was a group of girls playing little ponies.
They weren't trying to look like the future, but
they did.
What if we elect Barack Obama? We are going to leap over so
many generations. Suddenly we could have a
President whose father is from Kenya. That would
be an amazing thing.
When I was growing up, black and white was a big
deal. Integration — whoa! Two different
races under one roof! And of course in The Temple Bombing I write about Jews being
the exotic outsider in the South because everyone
else was black or white. Now, you'll find every
people on Earth in Atlanta.
The other day I talked to folks calling me from
Pierre, South Dakota. They wanted to learn about
adoption from Ethiopia. I said, "Are there any
people of color where you live?" And they said,
"Yes. This is Pierre." Well, c'mon! They
said, "There are Ethiopian restaurants here."
Bingo. That's it. If you have Ethiopians there, a
child isn't going to feel like he or she landed
on the far side of the moon.
Dave: I'm curious about your interviewing
techniques. You talked earlier about not getting
in the way of your story. In Praying for Sheetrock and The Temple Bombing, your subjects talk and
digress on all sorts of topics. At points, the
mode reminded me a bit of Studs Terkel. Those books are collections of
voices more than sharply focused studies.
What are you looking for when you're
interviewing? How do you guide your subjects?
Greene: I'll go way out of my way for a
good story. I love good storytellers. The first
two books were stories unfolding among
Southerners. Praying for Sheetrock, in particular, was
built out of stories told to me by elderly, rural
Southerners. It just doesn't get better than
that. You ask a question, and two days later the
old man is still perfecting and finalizing his
answer. Such great language, black and white.
When I first started learning how to write
nonfiction, I was in my mid-twenties. I was
living in Savannah, Georgia. I interviewed an old
man named Buck Buckley who lived on Tybee Island.
He told me what Tybee Island had looked like back
in the days of Guy Lombardo and The Dorsey Brothers. Now you drive out on a
paved road, but in those days there was a train
that took you out.
He was trying to describe the bathing suits worn
by the women, which were very complicated affairs
that involved bloomers and belts. And he said,
"Of course, in that day, I didn't know much about
the wherewithal and nomenclature of the female."
I've treasured that my whole life, that he said
that. He was not in one of my books, but if he
had been that line would have gone in it, even if
the book wasn't about ocean life.
I was so lucky with the first two books. And
then, god knows why, I decided to do a book about
Nova Scotia coal miners [Last Man Out]. There are no more tight-lipped
human beings on Earth. These are not Southerners.
Suddenly, I'm in Nova Scotia with these men who
just say, "A-yup." Or, "Nope." I can't get them
to talk. So I'm asking, "Was it like this? When
you were underground, was it like this?" "Nope."
I saw, near the edge of town in Springhill, a
bench that said "Liars' Bench" on it. So I'd say
to these guys, "You've got a Liars' Bench here?"
"Yup." "Did people tell stories on it?" "Yup."
"Are any of them still alive?" "Nope." I said,
"Do you remember any of the stories they told?"
— just the thought that there could have
been a coal miner that talked. "Yup." "Can you
tell me one?" "Nope."
I was really in trouble with that book. I
couldn't get anyone to talk, so I couldn't tell
what anything was like. The old guys took me down
into the mine, and I could see what it was like,
but I didn't know what it was like for
them. What saved me was discovering that
in-depth interviews had been done with all the
survivors right after rescue in 1958 by a group
of psychologists and sociologists affiliated with
Nova Scotia universities. They came back in 1959
and interviewed them all again, all the eighteen
men who were rescued; and then they came back in
1960 and did it again.
Some of those men had been talkers. It just so
happened that by the time I got there the talkers
had all died. But here were these tapes — I
had them transcribed. Even though I didn't know
these men personally, they'd been interviewed in
great depth right after being rescued, and
suddenly I had the voices of men who noticed the
quality of light and noticed what social
relations were like, who was trying to edge ahead
and who was resentful. I thought, This is a
treasure. Now I can write the book. I do love
voice.
Dave: You must have conducted hours of
interviews with George Bright for The Temple Bombing.
Greene: How crazy was that guy?
Dave: But you don't need to say he's
crazy. You just print what he's saying and let
readers decide. He was very forthcoming with
opinions.
Greene: He was.
Dave: Have you talked to him since the
book was published?
Greene: He died just a couple years ago.
After the book was published, he was interviewed
by the local paper. They asked, "Why did you talk
to her?" And he said, "Well, I figured she was
after the truth, same as me." And I thought,
Good enough.
I learned in Praying for Sheetrock, when I interviewed
hostile witnesses, basically, I told them, "I
can't promise you'll like the finished product,
but I promise to be faithful to your words and
not twist your words out of context. I will relay
your words as you're telling me, and I'll relay
your story as you present it." And I do something
that I know a lot of writers don't: I send the
quotes to the people I've interviewed. "Is this
it? Is this correct?" I did the same with George
Bright.
With Praying for Sheetrock, many people
in the white community really did not want
to talk to me — because it was the white
community that had committed the crimes. I
said, "Just talk to me. I will not publish
anything with your name without permission. If
you'll just talk to me, I'll clear everything
with you. And when you see your words, if you
don't want your name attached to them, I'll make
it anonymous."
For The Temple Bombing, George Bright was the
breakthrough. I reached some of the other white
supremacists, and they instantly asked, "Are you a
Jew?" I told them [mumbling], "Yes." And
they said goodbye. "You think I'm going to talk
to you? Forget it." But Bright didn't ask me.
Dave: If you were to create the Melissa
Fay Greene Hall of Fame for the authors that were
most important to you in each decade of your
life, who comes to mind?
Greene: Each decade of my life? First
decade, James
Barrie and A.
A. Milne. And Ginger Pie by Eleanore Estes.
Second decade, age ten to twenty, that spans a
huge development, but at the beginning,
unquestionably, like a bright and shining light
was The Once and Future King by T. H. White. That book was absolutely life
shaping for me. I don't think a month
goes by that I don't think about it. I became aware of
the notion of an inchoate sense of justice from
that book. I was a kid, but the notion of King
Arthur, as seen through T. H. White, trying to
envision what justice would look like —
that's become a theme for me.
That for me is the theme that secretly runs
through my books: people intuiting justice who
have never seen it. In Praying for Sheetrock, it's the black leaders
trying to create a community among equals in
rural, Southern, McIntosh County. They've never
seen it before, but they can feel that it must
exist. Rabbi Rothschild in The Temple Bombing having a similar ideal. In
Last Man Out, the fact that there is briefly
equality a mile underground in the mine during
this disaster when the lights go out; suddenly
the Afro-Canadian miner becomes the leader —
he has the powerful voice and, without looking at
him, his moral force becomes a source of strength
for them. But when the lights go on, when they're
rescued, he's segregated. And in There Is No Me without You, the absence of global justice, and the
consequences of a world that values patent
rights above universal right to health.
So The Once and Future King and then J. D. Salinger. I memorized Seymour: An Introduction. I think I've been
coping my entire adult life with trying to undo
what that did to my prose style. I probably could
have recited it. Catcher in the Rye was fine; I discovered J. D. Salinger because my parents came home one day
and said there was a very dirty book and I should
never read it. I'm sure by sundown the next day I
had it. Then, being a questing young autodidact,
I suppose Salinger gave way to Camus, Jean Paul Sartre, Hegel... By then I was in college and trying to
understand large, abstract thoughts.
In my twenties, Homer... Ezra Pound — not the poetry as much as the
ABC of Reading and his anthologies of poetry.
I felt that I gave myself my own graduate-level
poetry course by reading Ezra Pound's writings
and then reading what he wrote about. Maybe I
should put Pound before Homer because probably I
returned to The Odyssey after seeing what Pound wrote
about it, and then I tried to read my way through
the western canon under his guidance. So Homer and Dante, Chaucer, and Anglo-Saxon poetry, those rough, noun-filled sentences.
I don't know what I was reading in my thirties.
This is too many decades. Do you want more
decades?
Dave: You can stop whenever you like.
Greene: I could just say authors I've
loved in the next couple decades — Saul Bellow, Philip Roth... Back to the twenties, Dostoevsky, but Tolstoy above Dostoevsky, and Anna Karenina above all. Also in my twenties,
the Russian poets. Osip Mandelstam. Anna Akhmatova. Marina Tsvetaeva, Akhmatova's good friend.
I had Russian friends, and one in particular; she
was desperately homesick and understood that I
loved literature. She needed me to know these
poets even though they weren't in translation
yet. She would read aloud to me Russian poets in
Russian. She could have been reading the
Leningrad phone directory, I wouldn't have known.
But I watched for them when they started to be
translated. Also Pasternak.
I love poetry. In
fact I was at Powell's last night, and I bought
two books I didn't have by Louise Glück. I love Stanley Kunitz. I'm trying to picture my
bookshelves. I read poetry before I write. It's
the anti-Salinger effect. I still love him but
you just can't be that wordy.
The book I'm incredibly excited about right now
is The Master by Colm Tóibín. In fact I tried to email him
this morning from the computer in the lobby at
the Benson. It is a magnificent book. I was in
Dublin last week for my book — which sounds
so cool to say, and I've never got to say it
before — so I bought it in Dublin; he's an
Irish writer and now I have an Irish edition. It
is a page-turner for me.
I emailed the man this morning. I'll
probably never hear from him, but I said,
"I cannot find the source of what is gripping
about this, and I can't put it down. I can't wait
to get into bed at night to read this." I'm
reading it over a hamburger at lunch, but I can't
find the source of the tension. It is the
quietest book. Will he be able to rent the
home? Will he find the letters of his late
sister? I can't put it down.
The other thing I bought last night at Powell's
was a bunch of Henry James. I've got them, but I felt I had to
have them again last night. I'm finding The Master to be one of those books that you
start to slow yourself down. I don't want to
finish it, and I'll feel lonely on my book tour
when I finish it, so now I'm trying to break it
up with the master himself, Henry James.
Thomas Hardy. I'll put that in for the
twenties-thirties-forties — I don't have to
give my age, do I? — Thomas Hardy's poetry
and novels.
When I turned in the draft of Praying for Sheetrock, I worked with a younger
editor. We were talking about individual
adjectives. Is this the right adjective? I
was like, Damn, this is easy. Is this it?
We wasted months like that, until the
editor-in-chief got a hold of it, Jane Isay
— this was at Addison-Wesley — and she
was like, "Holy shit! This book is not ready to
go. What the hell have you been doing?" I
definitely had the impression that someone was in
trouble, but it wasn't me. Jane called one day,
trying to control the tension in her voice —
I didn't yet know the woman. She said, "Can you
come up here? Right now." I had to come to New
York for emergency editing because she didn't
like anything that had gone on. Nothing had gone
on; we'd been padding adjectives into place.
This is a nice noun. Yes, it's a good one.
And so we had to start over. I loved the work;
and I still love Jane. We had the whole
manuscript in pages. She'd say to me, for
example, "Of the Victorians, who do you like?"
And I'd say, "Thomas Hardy. I love Thomas Hardy."
And she'd say, "That's why we've got all the
landscape. Alright, this is what we're going to
do...." Every time she came to landscape, she
said, "Thank you, Thomas Hardy." She had a whole
pile that she called "Thank you, Thomas Hardy."
As we'd go through, she'd ask, "Of the Russians?"
I'd say, "Tolstoy." She'd say, "Alright, you know
what he did in this scene?" "Yes." "Do that
here." We went through it like that.
And then she would say, "What we need right here
is something mythic, something epic." And so I
wrote down epic, mythic. Later she would
say, "Here we need something sparkly, something
snappy." Sparkly, snappy. I said later to
my husband, it was like she was ordering Chinese
food: epic, mythic, sparkly...
We arranged it all from the beginning, and then
she said, "Alright, Melissa, you can pick one
thing from 'Thank you, Thomas Hardy,' but just
one." I'd say, "Can I have the salt marsh."
"Yes." We'd go deeper, and she'd allow me
another. "The coastal forest? Can I please have
the coastal forest?" "Yes."
Dave: What else do people need to hear
about before I let you go?
Greene: I'd love them to know about the
book web site. There
are pictures, and a slide show with music.
This book has been completely life changing. It
has altered my family and is part of a project
that I think I'll be involved in for the rest of
my life. We have adopted two children from
Ethiopia, and we're in the process of adopting
two boys now. They live at Haregewoin's. They're
coming this fall. They're ten and twelve.
Brothers. It's become my life story, this
unfolding story.
Dave: Will you be writing another magazine
article to collect the boys?
Greene: It was going to happen while I was
on book tour, and so my husband was going to go
— he hasn't been before — and he was
going to take Helen, who is ten now and wants to
go back and visit. And our son Lee is spending
the year in Israel, working with Ethiopian Jewish
kids because he speaks Amharic now. He's going to
come over and meet them in Addis Ababa. So I
might not go this time.
I'll tell you something else cool. Two days ago,
we learned that Haregewoin has won the Fervent
Global Love of Lives Award from Taiwan. She and I
are invited to come and spend ten days in Taiwan
in May and meet the President. I don't think I
can go because I think it's when my son is
graduating from Conservatory, but Haregewoin
should go.
Melissa Fay Greene visited
Powells.com on October 26, 2006, before a reading
at our Hawthorne store.
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