Tag: memoir

interview

Monogamist Writing: An Interview with Author (and GLB September Guest) Danielle Trussoni

by Julie Chibbaro

We are lucky to live in the Hudson Valley near the Hudson River, which attracts many artists and writers to its luscious shores. Danielle Trussoni, along with her filmmaker husband Hadrien and her two children, is a recent transplant. Danielle will be our Get Lit Beacon guest in September 2018.

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Danielle is a phenomenal writer; she’s an award-winning memoirist and novelist, the author of the New York Times and international bestsellers Angelology and Angelopolis, as well as the memoirs Falling Through the Earth and The Fortress. She has also written under a pen name. Her books have been translated into over thirty languages. In addition to writing, Danielle co-hosts, along with Walter Kirn, “Writerly,” a podcast devoted to the practical aspects of the writing life.

I recently had the chance to catch up with Danielle, and asked her about the monogamist approach to writing, how and if becoming a parent affected her as a writer, and what part giving birth played in writing her books.

GLB: Your fiction has a wonderful mix of history, mystery, magic, and the imaginary wrapped in a tight literary package. You’re quite prolific; along with fiction, you’ve written memoir and essays. Your latest, Home Sweet Maison, published under the pen name Danielle Postel-Vinay, is a handbook on how to create a beautiful home like the French. My question is: Are you a monogamist writer—meaning, do you work on one project at a time? Or do you dip into various projects all at the same time?5189JQ6eAAL._SX381_BO1,204,203,200_

Danielle: I am definitely a one project at a time kind of writer. I need to concentrate fully on whatever I am working on. I try to be very clear in my mind about what I am doing and when I will be doing it. I am a planner. I have a journal that I keep in which I write down the number of words I write each day. I give myself a timeline for each project, and work to stay within that schedule. I am rigorous when it comes to keeping myself healthy, both physically and mentally. That means that I don’t drink much (if at all) when I’m working on a book. I exercise. I get lots of sleep. And then I show up every day at 8AM at my desk, ready to see where the road leads me.

When you’re writing, you must create your own day every day. It is important to be realistic, but also to challenge yourself. I’m always impressed by writers who are able to produce great work consistently. I believe that happens by keeping focused through desire, discipline and a strict schedule.

GLB: You have a new baby. Do you find that the publishing world treats mothers differently, as a “woman writer” with a baby who is therefore somehow less focused? Did you notice that attitudes were different in France when you lived there toward the question of work-life balance?

Danielle: I chose to keep my pregnancy a secret for the most part. And now that my daughter has been born I don’t post about her or go into the details of motherhood on social media. I don’t believe that my choice to have a baby should affect my work, and I have never allowed it to stand in the way of what I’m doing. I wrote a novel while I was pregnant. I was back at my desk three weeks after my daughter was born. Being a mother has made me more focused. That said, this doesn’t seem to be the case for everyone. I have worked with women agents and editors who have disappeared or become less focused after having a child. This served to make me more determined to keep my career on track.81wdN9coEaL

Another added benefit of having a child is that it allows you to see the world from a different point of view. Suddenly, you are caring for and protecting a very vulnerable human being, one who cannot fend for herself. This shift in perspective is inherently good for fiction writing, as it allows you to examine your perceptions and how they alter.

GLB: You run the podcast “Writerly,” in which you discuss all sorts of subjects of interest to writers. Why did you start this podcast? What do you hope listeners will take away from it?

Danielle: I found that I wanted to talk about writing, but that I was so tired of formulating written sentences by the end of my writing day that I couldn’t begin a blog. I also really hate the word “blog,” and couldn’t bring myself to create something with such a horrible name. Starting a podcast was a way to free myself from the computer screen and still discuss my ideas about writing in language, without being tied to my computer. It is very collaborative, as I co-host Writerly with the author Walter Kirn, and every episode is a kind of riff on a theme related to writing.

My favorite part of the podcast is that it is giving new writers a window into what it is like to be a working writer. It is like sitting in on two professionals having coffee and talking about their days. I wish that I had something like this when I was an MFA student, as it would have given me such a different perspective about what I was doing. I love getting messages from listeners, and sometimes we even read them (and answer them) on the show.

We now have nearly sixty episodes and we’re still finding important topics to discuss. It seems that it will be a never-ending endeavor! You can find the podcast in your app store or at www.writerlypodcast.com.

 

The One

Paul Lisicky: An Essay, a Poem, a Story, and a Song

By Flora Stadler

Author Paul Lisicky’s memoir The Narrow Door reads like a scrapbook elegy—its loss archived in love notes, fragments of feeling, snapshots of memory. The book (a New York Times Editors’ Choice) documents the death of his longtime friend and fellow writer, Denise Gess, and the disintegration of his relationship with his ex-husband, writer Mark Doty. There’s emotional enormity in his remembering, the placement of personal and natural disaster side by side—cancer and the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helen; isolation and the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. I love the structure and sensibility of this book, and that’s why I asked him:

What was the one thing you didn’t want to do when writing The Narrow Door?


“This is a great question but a tough one for me too, because I don’t think I ever consciously write out of negation. With The Narrow Door in particular, I was trying to see how much life I could get on the page without destroying it, without making some incomprehensible mess. I say that knowing so many of my favorite visual artists and writers make amazing work out of subtraction—in other words, limiting their work to the use of a few terms. Think of songwriters who write songs built of two chords, or graphic novelists who use only black and white. I’m fascinated by that approach, but I seem to be after trying to accommodate my too-muchness, always asking myself how much can I put out there? Can this feel like an essay, a poem, a story, and a song all at the same time? Can I create a sense of simultaneity, a sense of the connections between disparate people, who are never really all that separate if we hold them side by side?

So I never really go into any project overtly thinking about what I’m not going to do. It’s much more intuitive than that. It’s more like writing thirty pages and thinking, maybe—hmm. This feels more like F minor when I need three chord changes here. Or: this feels bright yellow when it needs some darker yellow and gold and bright green. Or: my friend was a hell of a lot sillier than this self-dramatizing person I’ve conjured up. Start again. So a lot of different moods are tried on until I find something that feels remotely accurate. I’m sure at a certain point in The Narrow Door I must have been thinking of other grief books. I must have been thinking, Man, this could be an awful slog, some guy’s feelings in the wake of his friend’s death. Who would want to read that? Haven’t other people done that better? The shock was the book started evolving into its own creature over time. Even the most crushing stuff, say, the climate catastrophes, had a weird kind of awe and alertness about it, and the book was so much less about death and mourning than it was, well, the texture of going through the day in the middle of trouble. But that never felt chosen. What better way to kill a book before it’s even had a chance to breathe? At least for me, I should say. I don’t want to make it sound like I’m tossing out some maxim that should be true for everyone.

But back to your question. I think all of my work is written out of some desire not to write the book that’s already on the shelf, but I don’t want to repeat myself either, which is a hell of a lot harder to do than it sounds. Joy Williams says: ‘The moment a writer knows how to achieve a certain effect, the method must be abandoned. Effects repeated become false, mannered.’ That’s sort of religion to me. Those words might sound scrupulous to the point of scary, but I don’t think there’s any better way to stay alive as an artist, a person.”

The Narrow Door: A Memoir of Friendship, along with Paul Lisicky’s other books, is available at Indiebound. His next novel, Later, is coming in 2020 from Graywolf Press.