Counterbalance

LATFOB Panel - Fiction: Novel Lives

The second panel I attended at the LA Times Festival of Books was Fiction: Novel Lives. The panel was moderated by Robert Roper and included Jill Bialosky, Nicholas Delbanco, Brian Hall and Marianne Wiggins. This was perhaps one of the only in panels that truly stuck to the theme, as each novel discussed was, literally, about well-known personages (real or fictional).

Brian Hall's book, Fall of Frost, is a novel told from Robert Frost's perspective.  Jill Bialosky's book, The Life Room, includes Anna Karenina as a character. The Shadow Catcher, by Marianne Wiggins, takes its subject matter directly from the life of 20th century icon/photographer Edward Curtis and Nicholas Delbanco's The Count of Concord examines the life and accomplishments of Benjamin Thompson, a contemporary of Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson.

Bialosky talks of what inspired her book: She was enchanted by female protagonists (a la Wharton's The Awakening) who, when faced with a choice in the struggle between passion and responsibility decide to kill themselves. Why do they end their lives for their passions?, Jill asked aloud.  Much has been made of her book an it's Anna Karenina character, but she points out that she is not the central voice, not the central character. Her original title for the book was The Interior Life of Eleanor Cahn and her editor made her change it.  She's not thrilled, although admits that The Life Room sounds cooler.

Wiggins speaks of her inspiration for her latest book and how these idea fragments eventually interest her: You must ask yourself, can an idea sustain the structure of a novel? She had been thinking about Shadow Catcher and the photographer Edward Curtis for years. She wanted to write about his work, but couldn't find an interior tension that would sustain the work. She did some research. She learned that he wanted to photograph all the Indian tribes before they were extinct. Interesting, stuff, but still no tension. She then learned that he couldn't get funding for the project and eventually accepted money from J.P. Morgan (directly involved the reason the Indians kicked-off their land) to complete his historic photographic journey. Bingo! That's was the moment. When he made the deal with the devil, that's when I knew I had the necessary tension to sustain the novel.

Delbanco finds it fascinating that his fellow panelists all began their novels about well-known figures by being engrossed in their lives, whereas he began his out of irritation.  He became aware of Benjamin Thompson and some of his accomplishments (many inventions now used every day in our homes) and worked on the book for 22 years. Yet the man was pompous and quite an ass, and Delbanco didn't really like him.  Eventually, he realized that there was an odd tension in the fact that Thompson was designing tools to better mankind, yet he wanted nothing to do with people and was horrible to them in his personal life. Eventually, all the pieces fell into place.

Roper asks the panelist about the responsibilities inherent in writing about historical figures. How do you buy permission from readers to break from the historical novel form?

Hall: I didn't want to change the facts of his life. So the idea was, what is it as a novelist, what can I bring to it? By exploding the chronology (rather then outlining Frost's life in chronological order) I can focus on his ideas, can focus on his intimate life and how it shaped his poetry. Since it's about poetry and I'm a prose writer, I wrote short chapters to make it feel is immediate as poetry.

Wiggins: I make a contract with my writing: I'm the only person in the room.  I take it very seriously. My job is this: I'm going to tell you a story and I'm going to make you laugh and I'm going to make you cry. I'm going to change your life.

Bialosky: I kept thinking about an adulterous woman. I create as a need to understand. I had no idea what she was going to do - it kept me interested until the end.

Hall: I inhabited Frost to write this book.  He points out, though, that it is a terrible challenge to put your prose against Frost's poetry.

Bialosky is also an editor and she points out that she has edited many historical novels. She recently edited The Last Summer of The World by Emily Mitchell, a novel about photographer Edward Steichen. During the editing process, the question kept coming up - what liberties can you take? Bialosky has come to believe that if you are a novelist, it is entirely up to you how much of their real lives you use vs. fabricate.

Hall agrees that the license is up to you, but bemoans how intimidating it was to write dialogue for someone as literate and eloquent as Frost. Wiggins offers up that she had the opposite problem in writing dialogue for Edward Curtis as he was notoriously short on words and quite a cold man.

Someone from the audience asks the question I've been wondering about: why did Wiggins put herself in the novel as a character named Marianne Wiggins? She says she didn't start out with herself in the novel and didn't take the decision lightly. After trying to write whole sections of the book over and over and trying to come up with the right way to tell the story - this solution (adding herself in) emerged. She fought against it and tried still other approaches.  To her own discomfort, it worked. It was the only way to tell that story. She says that as a novelist she has never mined her own life for her work and that it was a difficult and painful process, one she isn't interested in repeating.

The session ends with a question about family estates and if anyone had difficulty getting their work approved or blessed or whathaveyou by living family members.  Roper defers to Hall in this moment, as it seems there was quite a struggle with the Frost estate over Hall's book. Half the family was for the book, half were against it. Several didn't feel he was portraying Frost in the best light and they wanted to protect the Frost image.  In the end, he had to remove several lines of poetry that were still under copyright and re-work the order of the novel accordingly. He believes it resulted in an even tighter work.  His book is just out, he reminds us, so we can see for ourselves.

Take-away: This was far more interesting than I expected it to be, if only because I rarely read historical novels.  On a completely personal note, I was heartened by the way in which each writer came to their subject matter and how they stuck with it, slowly collecting enough pieces to make a novel, trusting the process and that it might take years before they had enough fragments to tell a compelling story that interested them enough to write it over a possibly longer period of time.

I was once captivated by Sub-commander Marcos via a small item I read in the San Diego Tribune about a recent march through a town square in San Cristobal de las Casas.  That one small mention in the paper on a Sunday morning set my mind ablaze and I wrote 30 pages straight away. I then did more research and was convinced that this was a story - an outsider perspective on the whole movement - that I had to write. It worked its way into my brain for months and I wrote whatever came out.

At some point, I fell back on the oh-so-awful norm of far-too-many writing workshops: write what you know. I stopped myself one day and thought: who the hell do you think you are writing about Mexico and Chiapas and the Zapatistas and all of these politics that you know nothing about. How could you ever do this world justice? It also seemed so far beyond my grasp - something I couldn't do. Too ambitious. An easier book on relationship insights, all witty and sly, seemed a better bet for me. Also - I don't even read books like that, so where was this burning desire to write one coming from?

I dropped my research then and there and never wrote about it again.  But, but. In the past two years, there have been "signs" that I've chosen not to follow: my new filmmaker neighbor who interviewed Sub-commander Marcos, a random email I received from someone who has researched and written extensively about Marcos, the treasure trove of Chiapas books I found at an estate sale.  I've filed these bits and bobs away and haven't done anything with them. But they haunt me. There is a story there to tell, with a unique perspective (that of the total outsider), which I, at some point, felt compelled to write.

I'm not saying I've dusted off the books and jumped headlong back into the Zapatista rebel world to resurrect this book. What I am saying, is that this panel brought all of this back to the fore, both reminding me that I had once had this passion for a subject that seemed so outside myself and chiding me for not having enough faith in my own abilities and the writing process to give it a proper go.

LATFOB Panel - Fiction: Grace Under Pressure

The first panel of the book fest I attended was Fiction: Grace Under Pressure. Barbara Isenberg was the moderator and she guided a lively discussion between Bruce Bauman, Gina Nahai, Andrew O'Hagan and Arthur Phillips.

As Gina Nahai breezes in, perfectly pulled together in black sling backs and a white linen shift dress that has nary a wrinkle, despite the 100 degree heat, I am struck by how fresh all the authors look. How light-hearted, how freshly pressed and pleasant they seem. I am also struck by how the audience sits a few feet away from these well turned-out writers and is anything but freshly pressed.  The audience is clammy, sweaty, smelly. Even this early in the day. The only relief is the panel auditorium, which is so intensely air-conditioned that the clammy, sweaty, smelly bunch is at once freeze-dried, all brow sweat stopped in time. We could not be more different from they.  Yet I realize that this is how the audience wants to see their authors - as visions, freshly pressed. A perfect panel of perfect authors to take them out of the (thankfully) air-conditioned rooms and up, up and away. Wouldn't it sort of kill the dream if a writer appeared sweaty, dripping onto his notes, armpit stains growing with each question?

The book fest crew in their Kelly green t-shirts worries about who is allowed to sit where and they are religious in their efforts to maintain the "media" and "VIP" sections that are cordoned off by the ever-powerful, no-getting-past-it, masking tape.  The tape must be unattached and re-attached repeatedly to allow those deemed worthy into the taped-off inner sanctum. Moments before the panel begins, the inner-sanctum contains fourteen seats, only three of them are full. But no one, NO ONE, is to question this or ask to be let in.  Someone very important might arrive and what would happen if they could not sit in the front row? Oh, the repercussions.

Barbara Isenberg begins the proceedings with a brief introduction about each writer and their work. She is lovely as she reads her opening remarks (without her reading glasses) and it is her introduction of Bruce Bauman that sets in motion a recurring joke for the rest of the panel. Isenberg's bio of Bauman includes his work, and his background and then this zinger: "He grew up in publishing..."  Bauman's face skews and his head cocks to one side, as if to say "I wish I had grown up in publishing but that is simply not the case." Isenberg stops for a moment, says "Oh, let me put on my reading glasses" and re-reads that phrase. On the second try, it goes like this: "He grew up in Flushing, Queens."  As if on cue, the audience roars, the panelists giggle with glee.  Publishing, Flushing. An easy mistake without one's reading glasses, eh?

With that, we are off and running.

Bauman talks of how his book, And The Word Was, is based on mythology. Phillips (who is quite dashing and who is also a 5-time Jeopardy champion...who knew?) talks about his novel, Angelica, and how it deals with good behavior vs. bad behavior and with issues of who is right (both morally and factually). He makes an open plea to the audience: buyer beware, my book does not contain a clever ending, in fact many have told him his ending seems to be missing pages. He assures us, there are no missing pages, as he likes novels that don't wrap things up too perfectly. He neatly ties all this back to the theme of the panel (I hate the panel themes) by asking aloud: so who is graceful under pressure in my novel? It's up to you.

Gina Nahai talks about Caspian Rain and its focus on loss and how we deal with loss and the stark differences between America's concept of dealing with loss vs. Iran's.   

Andrew O'Hagan jumps in with his this excellent tidbit: Grace is always under pressure, that's why it's called grace. He then talks a bit more about works he has always loved - the kind where there is both internal and external pressures, novels with moral drama like Fitzgerald's or the work of Keats that deals in beauty and truth. He then describes his process in developing the drama within his LA Times Book Prize-winning novel, Be Near Me. He talks of seeing a character and hearing voices and having always to ask aloud, "is this an irritating aspect of myself coming out, or is this a character?"  (It is here that my crush with O'Hagan begins, as in one fell swoop he has relieved me of the notion that I am insane.)

He talks of two specific events that struck him over the years and how these events seemed unrelated until they began to pile on and become part of a larger framework, something he couldn't stop thinking about and so had to write about. The first event involved the angry mobs in Scotland who went in search of pedophiles, banging on their doors and rioting in large crowds below windows of those they believed to be criminals. (Heavy stuff, but O'Hagan brings levity by pointing out that it was a terrible mess when the angry mobs accidentally knocked on the doors of pediatricians.)  He had to see what these mobs were all about, had to witness it for himself.  So he went with a crowd that ended up in front of a priest's home, banging on the door and rioting in the street. What surprised him most was that despite the seriousness of the occasion, people were enjoying themselves...they had even brought their children. As he stood there, he noticed a slight movement of a curtain in an upstairs window and he was just gutted - he knew that the priest was up there, watching the mob below. It occurred to him that a whole life existed behind that window and he began to wonder what that would be like...how one becomes that priest at that window and lives through it.

Later (I'm not sure how much later, here my notes fail me), O'Hagan is in a cafe in Paris on the Rue de Balzac and he is quietly drinking coffee and reading when he notices a priest sitting alone in a corner. He watches him for some time and then notices one tear running down his face. O'Hagan's excellent quote on this matter: "For a novelist, that is gold. There is a whole universe of possibility in that."

Nahai jumps in with her take on loss, prompted by Isenberg's question about the famed jar of tears in Iranian culture. She describes the jar of tears as something that you cry into during times of great sorrow and that it was handed down from generation to generation - as a daughter gets married, her family gives her the jar of all their past sorrows. She contrasts this beautifully with how the West deals with loss and how our view is always about being happy, shedding our sorrows to become stronger.  We would never think to have a new bride's married life begin by saddling her with the years of sorrow that came before - we are a society of "happiness", of starting a new, with a clean slate. She points out that America is the only country she is aware of that is founded on this very principle, the pursuit of happiness.  I've never thought of Americans this quote way but I agree with her entirely and must now read her book.

Isenberg asks Phillips what is was like to create a ghost story and if conjuring that time and that place was difficult for him as he wasn't from that time or place. Deadpan, Phillips responds: "I knew nothing of that time period. Ignorance is my great strength." He jokingly (but perhaps not?) says he wrote the entire book as he saw it and then went back and "removed all the references to Blackberries." He was reading a lot of Dickens at the time and said the final result was a blend of "research and faking it" as, he is, after all "in the faking business."  The story that came to him begged to be set in 1800's London. He didn't feel it was his right as a writer to change the nature of the story because it would be difficult to write about 1800's London. "The story I envisioned was set in 1800's London. Now that becomes my problem to solve." 

Of process, he says: Novels come out of those moments of gold (that O'Hagan referred to earlier), out of that machine in your brain that makes those connections. Some of the best moments of my life are when those moments become something larger.

Bauman does a nice riff on the importance and beauty of Fitzgerald and he invokes The Great Gatsby, noting that he re-reads it every year (just like someone else we know). Phillips interjects with: "Rosebud is a sled, right?" Bauman continues: "I've never written anything without thinking of Fitzgerald, because he understood his characters." He begins this exchange, of course, with this intro..."Well, given my upbringing in a vast publishing empire..."  Laughs all around.

Isenberg asks the panelists if they feel that acting is similar to creating characters and if they ever read their work aloud during the writing process to "act out" the scenes they've just written. O'Hagan relays a wonderful anecdote about Bruce Chatwin who was at a writer's retreat in Italy.  A maid had apparently run out of the villa, freaking out about strange noises coming from upstairs. She was shrieking about the noises of animals and small children and that some very strange, odd party seemed to be taking place and it scared her. The reply to the maid: "Oh, that's just Bruce writing his novel."  O'Hagan notes that he, too, does a lot of shouting while writing. "I can't believe the sentences until I hear them out loud."

He then talks of Norman Mailer - say what you will about the man, but he was fearless as a stylist. He asked Mailer during an interview (the last interview of Mailer's life, it turned out) what profession he felt writing was most like and Mailer said acting. O'Hagan then asked Mailer which actor he was most like and Mailer said "Warren Beatty."  Loud chuckles all around.

Phillips on acting: I was a speech writer which is a fantastic foray into fiction. He also reads his work aloud. "You're trying to hear what this thing is going to sound like."

Nahai: "As a novelist, we all hear voices and often it starts not with a voice but an image. 90% of my books are true and I add more to it." She relates a funny incident with her editors on her first book when she was asked to make the men in her book more likeable. With each revision, it seems, she made them less likeable and eventually they had to go with the first draft.

Phillips then jumps in on process with a wonderful point: Your first go-to is what have I seen and what have I done, how would I react in this situation. The magic comes when you think of other characters outside yourself. What have they seen, what have they done, how would they react in this situation. Write what you don't know.

O'Hagan picks up this thread and invokes A Farewell to Arms: In those first lines of the book, Hemingway persuades you to have emotions that you don't understand at the time. O'Hagan believes this to be writing at it's best.

O'Hagan then talks of process again: Empathy for your characters is the cornerstone of novel writing. Of his character in Be Near Me, he says he was so shocked by his character's own deluded nature and he had to continually remind himself that he had created this deluded character, so how could it be a surprise. He says he was terribly unhappy about how ill one of his characters was becoming - that he was in a state for days about it - but that "I was the one who made her that sick." Phillips agrees that it is when your characters do things you don't like, you know it's working. When they take over, you know you're on the right path.

O'Hagan then says that you have to be true to what you've planted, you must water it and give it sun so that it can grow.

When asked by an audience member how you know you're done with a book, Phillips answers: You live with your characters as long as it takes. You only know you're done when you've finally figured them out. Then the book is done.

Take-away: It was an excellent first panel - full of wonderful writerly nuggets about process and character development. Just the kind of thing the hometown crowd wants to see and it was well-received.  I was struck by how fascinating it is to be introduced to a writer you've not read, but after hearing them talk about process, you become interested in reading their work. For me, the work nearly always comes first. I hear of a novel and I want to read it. It is a lovely twist when I see the writer, like what they have to say, and then want to read their work. Writers I now want to read not based on what I've heard of their work, but based on how they talk about process: O'Hagan, Phillips, Nahai, Bauman.

Also, if I'm entirely truthful, I must share that I teared up a bit when O'Hagan spoke of those "golden moments" and how important it is to listen to them, to hear them, to honor them and that entire worlds can open up for you if you're a writer and you pay attention and recognize those moments for what they are.

Wise words indeed, and this panel set a high bar for the rest of the festival.

LA Times Book Fest - Calm Before the Coverage Storm

Recovery from an intensely bookish weekend is quite sweet, but recovery is indeed needed.  I'll be tackling the eight panels I attended one at a time and will reserve additional posts each day for those I met and enjoyed, and those I met who had me trembling, nearly forgetting my name, because I couldn't believe I had the opportunity to chat them up. 

That's what's so divine about the book fest - it is, for the most part (obviously there are vast exceptions wherein authors have issues with one another), a mutual admiration society. We're all such book nerds that it's very nearly a bookish nirvana.

Consider this the week of post-LATFOB coverage - when all my notes (with so many money quotes it will bring tears to your eyes) will be set loose from their spiral bound confines and alight on the (blog) page.

Until then, you can check out John's excellent author interviews at Book Fox.

Junot Diaz Does LAist

My life is in a constant state of insane and I'm working crazy hours.  What does this mean? It means no blogging, no book reading, no author events and certainly no author interviews.  Sad for me - but does not have to be sad for you as my venerable LAist colleagues are mightily picking up my slack. Case in point: Junot Diaz in the house.

Carrie Meatherell and Osmany Rodriguez held court with Diaz only a few short days before the Pulitzer Prizes were announced. Talk about timing!  It's a great interview and demonstrates the intense love of life that makes Diaz a favorite writer to read, to watch, to listen to.

Please go on over and take a peek. It will be well worth your time and is far, far better than anything you've read here in weeks. Really.

(And for those of you kind enough to inquire about my well-being via email - thank you!  I've got a warm-up post ready for tomorrow and come Monday, I'll be back in the saddle!)

Jami Attenberg Interview

My brief interview with Jami Attenberg, author of the excellent debut novel The Kept Man, is up at LAist.

Sneak peek excerpt:

"Sometimes taking pictures feels almost like cheating, because now I can have this visual record of something, so I don't have to remember every little details all the time.  For example, there are a few scenes in the book that take place at Mount St. Helens, and I had actually visited there a few months before writing the scenes with the intention of using the location in the book.  When I actually sat down to write those scenes I pulled out the pictures as a reference, and described what I saw in those photos in the voice of my narrator, Jarvis.  It flowed very naturally and I remember it being a thrilling creative moment for me, to be able to combine the two passions.  It doesn't happen like that all that often, but when it does it's a real rush."

Jami will be reading at 4pm on Sunday @ Book Soup and at 8pm @ Mountain Bar for Jim Ruland's deliciously irreverent Vermin on the Mount, where she'll be joined by Veronica Gonzalez, Doug Cordell and Sam Quinones.

UPDATE: This is what happens when you have a fever and leave 1000+ posts unread in your Google reader for three days: Ed and Maud also have excellent interviews with Jami. Alas, I'm late to the dance! Fever be damned!

David Plante on Bookworm Today @ 2:30pm

David Plante will be discussing his book ABC with Michael Silverblatt today on Bookworm at 2:30pm.

While I've not had the pleasure of reading his latest, the first two paragraphs certainly set a mood, no?:

"From the canoe, stilled on the still cove of the lake, the land was reflected in detail in the water: branches and leaves and pinecones, berry bushes, and the stone-and-timber house on the steep bank among trees. The house was abandoned. For all the ten years Gerard had been spending his summers on the other side of the lake in the house his wife, Peggy, had inherited from a rich uncle, the cove with the abandoned house overlooking it had been the end of every canoe ride. The cove, as calm and warm and peaceful as it was, instilled in them the calm and warmth and peace that they went out on the water for: Peggy at the front of the canoe, Gerard at the back, their dripping paddles resting lengthwise across the sides, and sitting on a cushion on the bottom halfway between them was their six-year-old son, Harry, who seemed to be in the same drifting state as the canoe, or so Gerard imagined.

For the first time, Gerard was struck by how Harry’s bones, which he had up until now seen as delicate, were beginning to enlarge, his vertebrae pronounced, his shoulder blades almost disproportionately large in the way they stuck out, and yet his shoulders were small and smooth. Harry was motionless, which meant he must have been thinking, drifting, Gerard again imagined, on his thinking. Gerard liked to drift on his thoughts, and his son, he was sure, took enough after him to like to too—that is, until Peggy, as Gerard always counted on her doing, stopped the drifting. She did so now by dipping her paddle into the water, a sign for Gerard to get to it and paddle. He did, and they continued in slow ripples deeper into the cove, towards the abandoned house, some of whose wide, many-paned windows on the second story were broken."

Should make for an interesting, if not overly-thinking, discussion.

UPDATE: I did listen and it's worth your time. Intense, of course, but I have a heightened respect for Plante after listening to him talk about his work.

Boldtype #51 = Yum

The latest issue of Boldtype is out and it's a good one!  So good, in fact, that I've come out of my fever-coughing-aching half-slumber to post about it!

Reviews:
Musicophilia:Tales of Music and the Brain by Oliver Sacks
Love and Sex with Robots by David Levy
The Horla by Guy de Maupassant
The Dream Life of Sukhanov by Olga Grushin
Zeroville by Steve Erickson
Among Other Things, I've Taken Up Smoking by Aoibheann Sweeney
Night Life by Laurie Anderson

Interviews:
Lyida Millet!

All good stuff. Oh so good. Do go check it out.

A Few Questions Over Coffee

Questions are asked of some interesting folks:

• Dwight Garner has a quick chat with one of my favorite translators, Natasha Wimmer (she recently translated The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño)
• Powell's has some quick questions for Taylor Clark about Starbucked
• Dave Hickey is interviewed by Sheila Heti for The Believer
• Mara Naselli interviews Tara McKelvey about Monstering at Identity Theory
• LA Weekly interviews Daniel Day-Lewis and he talks of film like I think of writers who write a book, then go on tour, then write another book:

“Something that has been suggested on my behalf is that I live an almost bipolar existence, with the public life of filmmaking on one side and a sort of reclusive, almost misanthropic life on the other.” (This has been suggested most often in the British press, which has “grossly misrepresented my life,” he says.) “But it never appears to me that there’s any chasm, any rift, between those two worlds. My life to me contains both the professional and the personal very easily. But because you tend to be written about when you’re for whatever reason in the public eye, then they depict you as having left and returned.

“But it’s not a return to me. I never went away. I never left myself. I simply need the time I spend not working in films, the time away, to do the work that I love to do in the way that I love to do it.”

Steve Erickson on Bookworm Today @ 2:30pm

Steve Erickson, he of the Zeroville genius, will be discussing the book (and who knows what else) with Michael Silverblatt today at 2:30pm on Bookworm. I suspect this will be a good one and well worth your time.

I, on the other hand, have been thinking of certain passages from Erickson's Our Ecstatic Days as I am under such insane deadlines (six consecutive 18 hour days, I'm slowly losing my mind) and want little more than to succumb:

"As she lies in the bottom of the gondola in the night of her mind, with the cool night breeze blowing in her face, the lake is much bigger, a vast ocean aswirl, because even here in her mind the lake is going down its drain. ... Bubbles rise at the center of the whirlpool -- and finally the gondola's passengers feel themselves caught in the current of the vortex and begin the long journey down to the whirlpool's center."

Eudora Welty on Galley Shock

While this is not a problem I've yet had to tackle (but oh I hope to face it in the coming years!), many of you recently-published authors have been very honest about the shock that inevitably comes when you see your work in galley form for the first time.  As I dipped back in to The Paris Review Interviews, Volume II last night (after finishing Farewell, Shangai...more on that later), I discovered Eudora Welty's thoughts on the subject and was delighted that her description was so spot-on with what you've all said. Of course, she adds her Welty charm that made me laugh out loud:

A: It's [writing] so much an inward thing that reading the proofs later can be a real shock. When I received them for my first book--no, I guess it was for Delta Wedding-- I thought, I didn't write this. It was a page of dialogue--I might as well have never seen it before. I wrote to my editor, John Woodburn, and told him something had happend to that page in the typesetting. He was kind, not even surprised--maybe this happens to all writers. He called me up and read me from the manuscript, word for word what the proofs said. Proofs don't shock me any longer, yet there's still a strange moment with every book when I move from the position of writer to the position of reader, and I suddenly see my words with the eyes of the cold public. It gives me a terrible sense of exposure, as if I'd gotten sunburned.

Q: Do you make changes in the galleys?

A: I correct or change words, but I can't rewrite a scene or make a major change because there's a sense then of someone looking over my shoulder. It's necessary, anyway, to trust that moment when you were sure you had done all you could, done your best for that time. When it's finally in print, you're delivered--you don't ever have to look at it again. It's too late to worry about its failings. I'll have to apply any lessons this book has taught me toward writing the next one.