W. W. Norton & Company, 7/2011
You've led quite
an interesting life and I was wondering which specific experiences helped shape
the background of Once Upon a River
and Margo's experiences?
Compared to
most of my stories, Once Upon a River contains very little autobiographical material. Probably
the main inspiration from my life was my experiences growing up on a stream and
a river. Behind my mother’s house runs a stream, and so my brothers and sister
and neighborhood friends spent a lot of our time Spring to Fall in the water.
There we learned about minnows, muck, snapping turtles, blood suckers, and
adventures traveling upstream. And
my grandparents lived an hour away on a tiny island in the St. Joseph River;
there we spent lots of time swimming, canoeing, rowing, fishing and playing in
and around the swift current. There were water snakes, painted turtles, ducks,
nighthawks, herons, and heronries.
We met all kinds of interesting river folk, too, lots of people who knew
how to make things and fix things.
I appreciate that while
Margo has had a very traumatic life, she does not succumb to being a victim. In
fact, her ability to overcome these things is what makes her such a strong
character. But the question in my mind as I kept reading was if Margo is
autistic. The length of her emotional process, her sharpshooting, that stubborn
determination to live a very out-of-date lifestyle: these are all marks of
someone with high-functioning autism (or perhaps something else?). Am I just
the child of a psychologist overanalyzing it, or was this indeed a part of the
character?
You are not
the first person to ask me this question, about whether Margo is autistic, but
I’m afraid I don’t know enough to answer the question. I didn’t specifically set out to create
an autistic narrator, but perhaps I have done that—it would take a
diagnostician to determine such a thing, I guess. Hey, maybe we can bring in a
psychologist just for fun!
If it is a part of the
character, what was its impetus? And could you talk about the process of
developing Margo since it affects everything about her, from her reactions to
what her uncle did to her to her struggle later on in the book on whether to
have an abortion or not?
We writers
develop characters the way parents raise children; we nourish them and study
them and take note of their traits, skills, and sensibilities. Maybe the difference is that we writers
don’t want to fix our characters’ flaws—instead we want to understand the
consequences of having these character traits. Margo’s slow deliberateness in
making decisions and in understanding new stimuli is something I wanted to
explore, in part because it’s a problem I have myself, and also because it
seems very much at odds with a contemporary existence, in which we are called
upon to constantly make decisions and adapt. Like parents, we writers can be
ignorant about the ones in our charge.
I revise a
lot. Maybe that’s where my own
slowness at decision making works to my advantage. I tend to read my own scenes over and over to see if they
feel true and true to the characters in them. The scene with Cal and the scene at the family planning
clinic scene were ones that worked on endlessly, asking myself, “What is it
like to be Margo now?” and, “What
would Margo do?”
If it's not part of
the character, what was your thought process for the above particular character
traits as you wrote them because they're fascinating, especially since most of Margo's narrative is
internal.
One of the
greatest challenges of this book was that I was writing a character who didn’t
talk very much and who was alone most of the time. I was desperate to tell Margo’s story, but there were many
stages of writing this book at which I decided that it was going to be
impossible to make Margo interesting. So thank you for telling me I succeeded.
For me,
developing a character is sort of intuitive, like learning to dance or to sing
or to ride a horse, or how to talk to a new friend. I write what I know the character does or thinks, and then I
spend time with the character on the page, and that helps me know what else she
is capable of or might enjoy. When
I think about doing it, it seems very difficult and strange; when I sit down to
do it on the page, it feels like the most natural thing.
Booklist called Margo the
female Huck Finn. How do you feel about that comparison?
Bless the
book reviewers. They’ve got a short time to live with a book and a small space
in which to say something that will guide readers, and comparisons can be
helpful in situating a book in the imagination. I will say that Margo is temperamentally nothing like Huck
Finn. He’s a trickster and a
huckster and a fun-seeker, while Margo is just trying to survive and understand
the world around her in her quiet, thoughtful way. Compared to Huck, she’s kind of dull—or perhaps I should
say, Huck would be more fun at a party.
However, there are some similarities. Both kids are motherless teenagers forced to flee home after
the deaths of their fathers. Both are determined to survive. Neither are primarily victims, though both
of their situations are filled with trouble and strife that they did not bring
onto themselves. Both books are
episodic; my book owes some of that to the Odyssey, and we can guess that is
the case for Huck Finn as well.
Finally, what couldn't make it into
the book that was most difficult for you to leave out?
Much of
what I had to cut from the book was more of everything. I had more of the Indian, more of her
mother living on the lake, more about Smoke. My editor, Jill Bialosky, had to remind me at some parts of
the book that this was Margo’s story, not the Indian’s and not her mother’s.
Thank you so much for
taking the time to talk to us about Once Upon a River! We're excited to share your interview with our customers
on our website.
Thank you
for the opportunity to talk about Once Upon a River.
It’s been my pleasure.
Cheers!
