Blog
Feb 29, 2011
Margot Livesey is a writer, professor and editor of the award-winning Ploughshares. She is the author of, most recently, The Flight of Gemma Hardy, a novel about a spirited young woman orphaned at the age of ten and her pursuit of a better life in 1960s Scotland. In our interview, Ms. Livesey shared her thoughts on the writing craft, guilty pleasures and soufflés.
Q: Eight books after your debut, does the process of writing a novel continue to surprise you, and, if so, what’s one thing you learned about the craft while writing your most recent novel?
A: I still find it surprising that writing unlike, say, making a cheese soufflé or playing table tennis, doesn’t get easier. One thing I learned, or relearned, in writing The Flight of Gemma Hardy was how much the setting of a novel governs the action.
Q: Can you share an example of one of the ways in which your experiences as an editor have informed the decisions you make in your own writing?
A: Working as a fiction editor at Ploughshares I get to read a number of very accomplished stories and it’s interesting to see how certain images or turns of plot become clichés. I will never again write “all the oxygen seemed to leave the room.”
Q: A contemporary writer whose prose style you envy. Who? And what are you going to do about it?
A: Alice Munro. I plan to keep reading her obsessively.
Q: As a reader, what’s your guiltiest pleasure?
A: Personal ads in The New York Review of Books and even better the London Review of Books.
Q: What is one subject, theme, or point of view relevant to your life experience that you haven’t yet tackled in your own writing? Why do you think that is?
A: Living in a foreign country. I think it’s quite hard to write about the US as an outsider because people already have so many opinions about this country unlike, say, Belgium.
Q: Kurt Vonnegut once advised writers to “write to please just one person.” Do you feel this advice applies to you? If it does, who do you write to please?
A: My dear friend, the wonderful writer Andrea Barrett.
Q: Set the scene. What has been the happiest moment in your writing life so far?
A: A tiny note, six inches by four, from Cynthia Good, an editor at Penguin Books in Canada, saying yes, she would like to publish the stories I’d sent her. I just had to write some more.
– Dustin Martin
Nelson Algren’s birthday is today. If you haven’t read The Man with the Golden Arm you cannot be friends with me. (You: Ugh, I was dyyyyiinnggg to be friends with her! Now what?)
Hey, this new book by Alex Gilvarry looks amusing. Let’s all read it. Also from the Times, J.G. Ballard’s last novel is finally out in the U.S.
Book Bench has an interview with American hero George Saunders about The Believer’s amazing-sounding advice column. Saunders on the best and worst advice he ever received: “I remember this old guy once telling me, “To thine own self be true.” And I was like: “Yeah, well, I’ve got some advice for you, pal: use real words that are actual words in our time right here, for starters.” And then he, red-faced, said: “O.K., well, so… be true to your own self.” The worst advice I’ve ever received was—well, it was that same advice. I tried being true to my own self for a few months but it was such a hassle. Honesty, self-disclosure, closely considering my own motivations? Ugh. I got absolutely nothing done. And once I started faking it again, everything got easy.” Saunders!
Here’s a list of books about real murders if that’s your thing. Me, I get too spooked. But enjoy your dreams of an ax murderer chasing you through the hallways of Columbine nude on 9/11 and you didn’t memorize all your lines for The Crucible or whatever.
Look, a previously unpublished scene from unfinished DFW novel The Pale King! Cue ecstatic squealing and jumping around from me and roughly one other person on earth (optimistic estimate).
Also from The Millions (that blog is excellent), a review of John D’Agata’s book The Lifespan of a Fact. Actual thing D’Agata said when a fact checker questioned the veracity of an article, “It’s called art, d***head.” Aha, yes! Write it on his headstone.
Steven Millhauser beat out Don DeLillo for the 2011 Story Prize and his reward was a silver bowl. (Millhauser: Dope bowl, you guys! I needed one of these. [Turns to DeLillo] It’s called art, d***head.)
–Erin Somers
Make sure to check out two new poems by Jillian Mukavetz under the poetry tab! Are they your new favorite poems? Yes, they are your new favorite poems. Will you be reciting them to your friends and relatives all weekend long? Yes, you will definitely be doing that.
Sunday is Tennessee Williams‘ birthday you guys. Come over to my house for make your own sundaes and an impromptu performance of A Streetcar Named Desire w/ you as Stanley Kowalski!
Zany old Vlad Putin is at it again. He proposed a new literary canon of 100 books that all Russians will be required to read. And if they don’t, the Thought Police will get em.
This is your brain. This is your brain on fiction [delicious egg sizzles in frying pan]. ANY QUESTIONS???
In hilarious stoner news, the feds intercepted two boxes full of eleven pounds of marijuana being mailed to New York publisher St. Martin’s Press. Munchies were arriving by Fedex.
The spring Paris Review is out! It’s got an essay by the always excellent John Jeremiah Sullivan and new fiction from Lorrie Moore. A perfect storm of everything you love: JJS, Lorrie Moore, and perfect storms! Plus: Bret Easton Ellis on the art of fiction and poems by Adrienne Rich, Rowan Ricardo Phillips, and Susan Barbour, who are people, apparently.
Horror king H.P. Lovecraft has been dead for 75 years. Here’s a thing about that. Also, if Lovecraft’s your boy, you should read this book on him by curmudgeon par excellence Michel Houellebecq. It’s great stuff.
Are you guys following this Mike Daisey thing? No? Get the net, jeez.
Hunger Games the movie is opening this weekend. Are you camped out in front of your local theater right now? You: “Just lying in a tent outside Lowes checking in with Barnstorm on my mobile device. Normal Wednesday.”
–Erin Somers
Happy belated to L. Ron Hubbard, author of totally plausible book of hard facts Dianetics.
There’s a new biography out about your college boyfriend’s hero. And so it goes.
Are you guys following this Fifty Shades of Grey thing? Real quick: it’s super porny and started out as Twilight fan fic (like all the best literature). Here’s a piece on the ethics of that.
Amie Barrodale won the Paris Review’s Plimpton Prize and Adam Wilson won their Terry Southern Prize for Humor. Commence seething with jealousy.
Uh oh, dust-up in India over a Salmon Rusdie appearance.
Hey?! It’s the 50th anniversary of the interrobang?! Do you love it?!
–Erin Somers
Happy belated to Gabriel Garcia Marquez who turned 84 this week. 84 more years of solitude!
Saul Bellow’s personal life was juicy.
New Junot Diaz collection out this September, you guys! Reason number one million to look forward to summer.
Walnut Surprise (it’s what I call Jonathan Franzen, please learn it) is up in arms about Twitter: “Twitter is unspeakably irritating. Twitter stands for everything I oppose… it’s hard to cite facts or create an argument in 140 characters… it’s like if Kafka had decided to make a video semaphoring The Metamorphosis. Or it’s like writing a novel without the letter ‘P’… It’s the ultimate irresponsible medium.” That’s one grumpy Walnut!
Winter sale of those great NYRB books. Gotta catch em all! (Barnstorm: your number one online source for Pokemon jokes)
Speaking of NYRB, here’s a review of Michel Houellebecq’s new Prix Goncourt-winning book, which is finally out in the U.S. It’s about a moody misanthrope chafing against modern society, quelle suprise.
Christoph Niemann’s Times Magazine column Abstract Sunday is the best thing maybe in the entire world. And now they’re all in a book that is coming out in April!
Oral histories are sooo trendy right now. Oral histories are the most popular girl in class.
–Erin Somers
By Larry Clow
Mike Doughty’s The Book of Drugs is the sort of book that you read in long, marathon gulps. It’s not light so much as concise–a carefully chosen word or phrase that does the work of a couple pages. Doughty’s released around a half-dozen albums since he began his solo career back in 2000, but he’s still best known as the front-man for Soul Coughing, a mid-90s alternative band that fused Doughty’s poetry with hip-hop grooves and eclectic samples from the Andrews Sisters to Raymond Scott and everything inbetween.
The Book of Drugs chronicles Doughty’s drug years, which roughly coincide with his years in the band. The memoir is a reckoning for both, and amazingly, the drugs come out looking slightly better than Doughty’s bandmates. It’s a brutally honest book, one that dishes some dirt, but does so in a way that’s profoundly unsexy. It doesn’t offer the sort of celebration of excess that comes with most rock memoirs and it doesn’t offer a tidy arc of addiction in redemption. The Book of Drugs isn’t the sort of memoir in which the writer has it all figured out and is now reflecting back. Instead, it reads like an ongoing transmission from someone who’s still figuring it out, but wants to share his story along the way.
As a songwriter, Doughty has a knack for crafting unlikely hooks; you might forget the chorus of aDoughty song, but odds are you’ll remember a particular line that just digs down into your brain and doesn’t leave. There are little bombs like this throughout the book. Doughty deploys themcarefully and they stick with you. Early on, he describes his father, who served in Vietnam and becamean instructor at West Point: “He tightened like a fist.”
Doughty brings that same talent to his memoir. He’s a droll, self-deprecating writer; he’s adept at calling himself out in a way that’s funny and brutally honest. Doughty is given to tangents and digressive asides, but they don’t feel manufactured or manic. (Fans of Doughty’s work–both his Soul Coughing output and his solo stuff–will find The Book of Drugs to be something of a Rosetta Stone for some of his songs.)
The book works on a few different levels. It’s an addiction memoir first and foremost. Drugs–first alcohol and pot and then later coke, heroin, and everything else–helped Doughty cope with his dysfunctional, emotionally-abusive parents and later, with his dysfunctional, emotionally-abusive band. “Maybe,” he writes, “You want to read salacious tales of the debased guy,” and, yeah,the book has that element–there’s plenty of dirty and dirty stories. But Doughty is so matter-of-fact and unglamorous in his descriptions of his days of debauchery that a reverse narrative develops. You don’t read on to find out what sort of awful thing happens next, but to see if, against the odds, he makes it out alive.
He does, of course, but barely. By the time Doughty quit Soul Coughing in 2000, he was a 135-pound heroin addict. He got clean and started touring the country, selling copies of his solo acoustic album, “Skittish,” in plain white sleeves. If drugs occupy, say, 51 percent of the psychic landscape of The Book of Drugs, then Soul Coughing occupies a good 40 percent. For years, Doughty, in interviews and on the internet, has been frank about his dislike of his time in the band and the albums they made. “I’m full-bore bat-shit crazy with regards to Soul Coughing,” he writes. “If somebody says they love Soul Coughing, I hear fuck you.”
Based on the stories that Doughty recounts, there’s good reasons for that. But the middle third of the book gets bogged down in anecdotes of how Doughty’s bandmates mistreated him. Doughty is such an adept, incisive writer that the series of anecdotes get to be too much; they cross the line from servingDoughty’s story to becoming excessive. In other spots in the book, Doughty excels at crafting complex characters with a choice word or short description, but when it comes to the band, Doughty reduces them to one-note bastards. The empathy that you can hear in the rest of the book (and that hums throughout Doughty’s songs) is gone in these sections. It’s clear he’s got plenty of axes to grind, and with good reason, but they don’t all need to show up in the narrative.
Buried within the traumatic band story is a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at the music industry inthe mid-1990s, when labels were investing in any alternative band they could find and landing a video on MTV still meant something. There’s plenty of industry gossip (and cameos by Ani DiFranco and Jeff Buckley), but Doughty also gives a thorough accounting of what it was like to be a working, touring musician during those boom years. The Book of Drugs doubles as a post-mortem of those years,dissecting what went wrong not just with Doughty’s band, but with the industry as a whole.
One of the most interesting angles Doughty pursues is how, nearly 12 years later, he’s still trying to free himself from the shadow of Soul Coughing. Is it possible for an artist to escape his past work? When the artist is famous (or even semi-famous, or, as Doughty describes Soul Coughing, a “cult band”), does he get to define himself, or do the fans get to define him? What happens to art when an artist disavows it? Doughty touches on each of these questions, and his answers reveal the sort of frustration that comes from an artist who found his true voice after years of struggle. “There was something great here,” he writes of his time in Soul Coughing, “but we failed to let you hear it.” The Book of Drugs is Doughty’sway to make amends, not with his old band or jilted Soul Coughing fans, but with his own artistic voice, his own spirit. It’s a funny, messy book, sometimes lyrical and sometimes discordant, but through it all, it’s got the unmistakable ring of a man being honest with himself.
Tom Wolfe and John Irving have birthdays on Thursday. Did you get the e-vite to their joint bday party at Dave & Busters?
Eight songs from the musical based on Bright Lights, Big City. This is just a very good musical, you guys. Sample lyrics from the opening number: ”Are you ready to roll?” “Where are we rolling?” “Into the heart of the night!”
You have until the end of the day to day to enter the NYT City Room’s 2012 New York Pulp Fiction Contest. It’s just 150 words. Go do it!
A lost Eugene O’Neill play about his suicide attempt is being published for the first time. Promises to be a droll spoof aimed more at the heart than the head.
The longlist is out for the Best Translated Book Award.
Here’s an interview with Cheever biographer Scott Donaldson about how difficult his job is.
An interesting read about e-books from n+1. Read it it on your e-sofa under an e-afghan drinking e-cocoa.
This just in, John D’Agata stretches the truth!
–Erin Somers
Nathan Englander’s new collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Thinking About Referencing Raymond Carver looks good right?
Brb, gotta go camp outside the bookstore til Foxy Knoxy’s tell all comes out.
You know what’s cool? International graphic novels.
Fallen hero David Foster Wallace would have turned 50 yesterday. The Awl’s got a nice piece about what to read to honor it. Myself, I’d start with this letter to Don DeLillo.
Sorry, it’s Wallace day. Here’s a thing about DFW and Franzen. It’s got everything: Friendship! Realism! Bandanas!
The Millions dug up Invasion of the Space Invaders, a weird little book about video games Martin Amis dashed off in 1982. Intro by Steven Spielberg, like all the best literature.
Poetry International’s second February issue’s got poets from Ireland and Iran.
In honor of Presidents Day, some lunatics built a tower of books about Lincoln. Pshaw that’s nothing, you should see my yurt made of books about Coolidge.
–Erin Somers
The Barnstorm staff on their New Years resolution reads. Barnstorm New Years resolution for 2013: get New Years resolutions together before mid-February.
Caro Clark, Events
The Stones of Summer, Dow Mossman
By the time The Stones of Summer hit bookshelves in 1972, Dow Mossman had landed himself in a psych ward and the publisher went bankrupt. Fast-forward thirty years, and Mark Moskowitz resurrected enough interest in the book through his documentary, Stone Reader, to warrant a reissue. The 600-page novel is hailed as a sort of psychotic, poetic masterpiece. It’s my new years resolution to read it, and if I don’t experience a literary epiphany or spend at least a few days strapped to a hospital bed, let’s just say my disappointment will be more than mild.
Kathleen Cobb, Poetry Editor
poems by Jean Valentine
My semester reading list is full of poets and books I’ve been itching to read for too long. At the top of the list is Jean Valentine. Her spare, urgent poems open into vast space. Read one.
Ambre F. Earp, Nonfiction Editor
In Zanesville, Jo Ann Beard; Play It As It Lays, Joan Didion
This semester I am taking my first-ever fiction workshop. Beginning in January, I started studying up on short stories, and I am looking for more. Suggestions, anyone? I also decided to read fiction written by people I usually think of as nonfiction writers, like In Zanesville by Jo Ann Beard, Play It As It Lays, by Joan Didion, and maybe something by Anne Lamott as well. Remember, resolutions are made to be broken so just in case we see each other in December, I’ll make you a deal: I won’t ask you if you don’t ask me.
Jennifer Latson, Nonfiction Editor
Blue Nights, Joan Didion
I gave Nonfiction Co-Editor Ambre Earp a copy of Blue Nights for Christmas, and I also bought a copy for myself, because Didion is my all-time favorite author. Ambre read it first, though, and told me she had to put it down because the more she read, the more she became convinced that life was not worth living. So I’m steeling myself to read it by mustering all my psychological strength. Because if Didion doesn’t think life is worth living, it will be hard to disagree. She’s very persuasive.
Dustin Martin, Editor in Chief
My book-related resolution this year is to stop reading. Or, rather, to stop starting to read any new books. I confess I’m a bit of a first-chapter junkie, among other things. This year I’d like to revisit and finish some titles I’ve previously lacked the time, gumption or self-loathing to see through the end. Some of the books I’m embarrassed to admit rank among the forlorn include The World According to Garp, Salinger’s Nine Stories, Carver’s Where I’m Calling From, collections of stories by Kafka and Borges, Joyce’s Dubliners, anything by Nietzsche, the Bible, Plato’s Republic, and, like, the last 50 pages of The Shining. What is wrong with me? Seriously?
Kayleigh Merritt, Public Relations
The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien
Okay, look: in sixth grade, I started The Fellowship of the Ring and slogged through the first 100 pages. Then, right when I got to the good stuff, my teacher decided I was taking too long and made me stop reading it. I was emotionally scarred, Tolkien and I had a fight, and I never quite picked up the pieces. But I think now, fourteen years later, the time has come to have another go.
Marc Paltrineri, Poetry Editor
What is Amazing, Heather Christle; The Collected Poems of Kenneth Patchen
Because last year I promised to read Infinite Jest and most definitely didn’t, for this new year I made no attempts at any big book resolutions. I got an email today notifying me that Heather Christle’s new book, What is Amazing, has shipped and is heading towards me. I will most certainly read that. And also today I checked out an old hard-bound copy of The Collected Poems of Kenneth Patchen, which I will most certainly read some of, if not a lot of, but most likely not all of and, well, that seems good enough to me.
Erin Somers, Blog Editor
Mason & Dixon, Thomas Pynchon
Pynchon is a punisher, but I try to read one of the really brutal ones per year. I read Against the Day last year and I wouldn’t be able to tell you very much about it: there’s a World’s Fair and some sort of flying machine? an appearance by Nikola Tesla and a ragtag group of adventurers called the Chums of Chance? Okay I’m going to start Mason & Dixon today and not leave the house until I finish. It’s 773 pages long. See you guys in one million days.
Michael Thompson, Fiction Editor
Wild Child, T.C. Boyle
I don’t remember ordering this book but it arrived today and I am going to read it. I am going to read it because I have never read an entire T.C. Boyle book and I don’t know why. I think I like him. I remember a story about a cloned dog in Best American a few years ago. That was a good story. I hope I like this collection of stories at least as much as I liked that story.
