Lucinda Rosenfeld converses with her mother, Lucy Davidson Rosenfeld, writer of books on art and architecture.
Lucy Davidson Rosenfeld: Is Phoebe’s father, Leonard, patterned after Dad [a professional cellist], or is Leonard supposed to typify classical musicians in general?
Lucinda Rosenfeld: Well, there’s a little of Dad in Leonard, but Leonard is much ditzier than Dad, whom I think of as very competent. Also, I’ve always—probably unfairly—assumed that oboists were borderline insane, whereas cellists are rarely crazy. In fact, they’re often the ladies’ men of the classical music world.
LDR: Okay, what about Roberta Fine? As a mother, am I that annoying?
LR: Never.
LDR: Speaking of annoying, is Phoebe gloomy and difficult just to irritate her parents?
LR: No! Where did you get that idea? Phoebe isn’t trying to make any impression on her parents. Sometimes, they just annoy her—so she acts difficult in return. She loves them, of course, too.
LDR: Well, if Phoebe has ostensibly fled New York City to get away from the world of the cool and the trendy—and her parents are clearly very uncool—why don’t they please her more?
LR: They do please her! She enjoys thrift shopping with her mother. She takes pleasure in attending her father’s concerts. At some point in the book I say that Phoebe better enjoys socializing with her parents than with any of her old friends. But she’s also a troubled person, easily wounded and easily disappointed by and in the world, and, unfortunately, that world includes her parents. In short, no one’s immune.
LDR: So you’re saying that Phoebe’s negative experience in New York City is mostly the product of her bad attitude rather than bad luck?
LR: Well, maybe a little of both. She tends to seek out negative experiences that reinforce her alienation. It’s one of her worst qualities.
LDR: Would you say that, by the end of the novel, Phoebe revises her soured view of the world?
LR: Somewhat. Maybe a little more than somewhat.
LDR: Let’s move on to some general questions. What did Dad and I do that helped turn you into a writer?
LR: You kept a lot of books around the house, for one. Though, in all honesty, growing up, I was never a voluminous reader. I generally preferred making things with my hands and playing sports. I guess the most important thing you did was leave me alone to think and daydream and do chemistry experiments with toothpaste and whatever else it was I did to fill the time. I’m deeply opposed to parents who over-schedule their children.
LDR: Would you say that you feel liberated by writing?
LR: As an overly sensitive person who’s always feeling slighted by one person or another, I can definitely say that writing helps me process all the emotions I feel during the day. In that sense, yes, it’s liberating.
LDR: How does the fiction writer take the people and events she knows in real life and turn them into characters and scenes?
LR: Writing is a process of distillation. It’s also a process of transformation. So it doesn’t really matter if the origination point is real or lifted out of the sky; wherever you end up will be radically different from where you started, anyway. The important thing is to keep honing in on the kernel at the center. In other words, what is this story really about? Sometimes, the way things “really happened” can get in the way of that question.
LDR: In those instances when you have cannibalized real-life events, is it even possible to think of them now as anything but part of a novel?
LR: That’s too personal a question. I’ll pass.
LDR: Let’s move on to Phoebe’s love life. I feared that Phoebe was just settling for Roget. Or does she really love him?
LR: One of the most surprising things about publishing Why She Went Home was the reaction I got to Roget. Almost no one I talked to thought he was good enough for Phoebe. I had one reader who urged me to write a third installment of the Phoebe Fine Chronicles, if only so Phoebe and Roget could have a quick divorce and she could find someone better! But yes, I think she does love him.
LDR: I was going to ask you later, but since you raise the question: Are you planning a third Phoebe Fine book?
LR: Right now, I’m renovating. At least, that’s my excuse. Ask me in six months.
LDR: Does writing a novel have anything in common with building or renovating a house?
LR: Well, in the same way that, when you’re renovating, it’s difficult to see what the room will look like until there’s paint on the walls, and furniture on the floor, with a book, you simply can’t know what you’ve written until the last “i” has been dotted (to use a convenient cliché). Before then, outline or no outline, it’s just an amorphous, undefined blob. That’s probably why writers look so demoralized all the time.
LDR: Let’s get back to Roget. Is Phoebe attracted to him because he’s awful to her and therefore plays into her low selfesteem? Or does she see better things in him than we do?
LR: Wow, I guess you disliked him too! I intended Roget to be direct, talented, and passionate—even if he lacks polish and sophistication. One hopes that he’ll improve his manners under Phoebe’s influence.
LDR: So, Roget is the “anti–New York” man? Or does he wish for the success on the bigger stage of, say, Lincoln Center or Carnegie Hall?
LR: That’s an interesting question, and I’m not sure of the answer. Does anyone ever turn down the opportunity to be famous and wealthy? I’m not sure anyone does—or, maybe, knows how.
LDR: Well, if Roget stays in his second-rate position at the Newark Symphony, will Phoebe be satisfied?
LR: Yes, I think so. She’s given up on the New York definition of success, in favor of something smaller-scale, but possibly sweeter.
LDR: Let’s talk some more about the New York–New Jersey divide. Which elements of Phoebe’s story do you consider suburban in nature? Or are they all just rejections of the outside world?
LR: That’s another hard question. I think Phoebe genuinely likes New Jersey. At the risk of sounding pretentious, she likes its lionization of the practical and the mundane, over the beautiful and the dramatic. Would she be just as happy in Wyoming? Probably not. The real thing New Jersey has going for it is that she grew up there. Having failed to find a satisfying adult life for herself, she still thinks of Whitehead as home.
LDR: So how does returning to a childhood environment help Phoebe to grow up? Or is she simply regressing?
LR: Well, I think she has to regress to realize that she’s regressing—if that makes sense.
LDR: Okay, what about Phoebe’s desire to collect her neighbors’ trash? Are we supposed to understand it as some kind of grand metaphor for her life? If so, I admit it went slightly over my head.
LR: Well, people generally throw things out that they no longer need or want. In that sense, collecting their garbage is a way of peering into their pasts and, really, the past in general, which is debatably Phoebe’s main problem in life. So, yes, I guess it’s a metaphor.
LDR: Another topic: How much do the clothes each character wears suggest his or her personality?
LR: Looking back, I realize that I used clothes as shorthand for how invested each character is in the world of appearances, as represented by New York. As the reader can clearly see, Phoebe is positively schizophrenic on the subject. She hates to care how things look, but she does care. Immensely.
LDR: Who is your favorite character in the book—aside from Phoebe?
LR: My favorite characters are always the ones who do and say the most embarrassing things. I guess I relate to them! In Why She Went Home, the award would have to go to Leonard.
LDR: What does Halloween have to do with Phoebe’s many disguises?
LR: Hmm. The connection never occurred to me until just now, proving that critics (and mothers) are smarter than writers (and daughters). But yes, disguise is central to Phoebe’s sense of uncertainty and frequent changes of persona.
LDR: And finally, are you Phoebe?
LR: No! At the same time, yes. But ultimately, no. I’m much more ambitious than Phoebe. She’s my defeatist side. Also, for the record, I left northern New Jersey at seventeen, for college, and have never moved back. Instead, I’ve lived in Brooklyn, New York, since 1993.
From the Trade Paperback edition.