YOU ARE WHAT YOU READ: AN INTERVIEW WITH
SHARI GOLDHAGEN
Shari Goldhagen is the author of the highly acclaimed new novel, Family and Other Accidents. She hails from Ohio, but lives in New York City now, where she teaches writing and is a freelance writer. Recently I had the chance to ask her about her novel and the process of writing it.
What was the first thing you ever tried to write? Do you still have it?
SG: When I was about three-years-old, I'd dictate stories to my mother for her to write down. They were usually about Batgirl and Batman. I suspect that those early writings are casualties to all the moving my family did when I was younger, which is probably better for the world, really.
Music comes up a lot in your book - there almost seems to be a soundtrack running through it at times, along with the wonderful rhythm of the prose. Are there certain artists or songs you associate with certain characters? Or anything special you listened to while writing specific characters or scenes?
SG: I did have specific songs playing in the background when I was writing certain chapters. I have to preface this by saying that I'm notorious for having awful taste in music.
When I was writing that first chapter where Connor is contemplating sex with his girlfriend, I kept listening to Simon and Garfunkel's "America." It was the right bittersweet tone, I kept hearing in my head. With Jack I kept hearing the Talking Heads; it just seemed like a band he would have been into the last time he was into a band. When I was writing Laine, who's parents had a big messy divorce, I played Ani DiFranco's "I'm Not Angry Anymore." And of course there was always lots of Springsteen -- at all times.
It's funny some of the songs made it into the book, while others are kind of like my little secret.
Your writing is as finely compressed as the best short stories. Do you write many short stories? If so, do you plan to write more?
SG: The book actually started as a short story. It's the chapter early on when Jack and Mona are on vacation and it's going badly. I wrote a very early version of it when I was an undergrad a zillion years ago. But I just kept thinking about them, and so I wrote more and more shorter pieces about these characters until it made sense to turn it into a novel.
The book I'm working on now is structured sort of the same way, a novel where some of the parts can stand alone. It's a lot easier for me to mentally manage the trajectory of a short story than for a novel-not that means it's easier to actually write short stories.
Long after I put the book down I was thinking about Jack, Mona, Connor, and the others. When you finish writing a book like this, one that spans decades, with so many fully realized characters, is it hard to say goodbye? What was it like when you had to hand in the final version to the publisher?
SG: To be fair, this is the only book I've written to date. But it was a bit hard to give those people up. A part of me was like, what if I never get to write about new people, maybe I should stick with these guys.
For me the hardest part wasn't giving it to my editor but deciding I was done enough to send it to agents. I'd just been tweaking it for so long, it was hard to see that I wasn't really making any real changes in the manuscript anymore.
Finally, what have you been reading lately?
SG: At BEA, I got an advanced copy of Richard Ford's new book -- it's the third installment of The Sportswriter series, so I've been re-reading the first two as a refresher.
I just finished Michelle Wildgen's You're Not You. It's about a caregiver and a woman with ALS. I thought that I would hate it, but I didn't.
And I'm still telling everyone about my friend Jami Attenberg's short story collection out in June. It's called Instant Love, and I adored it ... instantly!
Thanks very much.
