Welcome to the book show A Celebration of Reading and Writers. I'm Joe Donaue.
Andre Debuse III is the author of the critically acclaimed novel House of Sand and Fog in the
memoir Towney. In his new collection of novellas, Dirty Love, he tells stories of love tainted
and gone wrong. A bartender cheats on his pregnant wife. A program manager finds out his
wife is having an affair. And in the title story, a young woman takes refuge with her
great uncle after a picture of her performing sexual acts goes online. Again, the new book
is Dirty Love and it's a great pleasure to welcome Andre Debuse III to this week's
book show. Thank you very much for being with us as always. We love talking to you.
Well, Joe, thank you for having me. It's good to see you. It's good to see you. What brought
you down this road, do you think? These are novellas, their stories, but they certainly
are ultimately linked. I would say abject fear, pain, longing, regret, and the
haunted memories of my youth. All the good stuff. All the good stuff. And all that's true
and it's probably not true. You know, you and I have talked about this before, but for me,
the writing of fiction is this descent into the dream world and the dream world is full of
surprises, right? And then they're not a surprise. You know, you see something and you think,
oh, what would make sense that came out of me? You know, I've been married for 25 years
and I'm seeing a lot of our friends, our friends marriages are falling apart after 25,
30 years and kind of haunted by that on a personal level. And I think I'm looking
harder at just how difficult it is and challenging it is to love someone well and be loved well.
And there's that aspect to it, of course. And then there's also the aspect of having
children at that age as well. Right. And what impact that has on the relationship?
Yeah, I mean, my own view is that nothing's better than having a child, but nothing's harder
on the couple that had them in some ways, although in other ways it gives you a bond, you
wouldn't have had otherwise. Yeah, it's a rich stew, man. I mean, I can see where some
writers would only write about family and domestic stories for their whole artistic lives,
because there's so much material to mine there. Did you always set out to have this be
separate? Nevelle's? Nevelle's? No, what strangers, they came over a long period of time.
The oldest one is the bartender, which I published in 1999. And that was the Phoenix that
rose from the ashes of a novel that failed. I wanted to write about a certain kind of predator.
I went back in time to see who his father and mother were and the father became this
corousing, self deceitful, drinking, cheating poet want to be bartender. And he had far more
life than the predator I wanted to write about. So I wrote that and then spent five years writing
my novel, The Garden of the Last Days, and then came Marla, this lonely woman working in a bank,
looking for love and having a hard time finding it. She was going to be my predator's first victim.
And when I got into her point of view, she was so much more alive than the predator, I ended up
ditching the predator again and just going with Marla. You know, if I've learned nothing over the
years writing fiction, I've learned that just because you the writer want to write about a,
doesn't mean a wants to be written about by you that along the way you find something that has
more life or more truth or more energy and you really have to go with that. Whether you want to
or not, I don't want to get all psychological on you. However, I do wonder if coming out of writing
a memoir does it get you thinking about these issues? And as you say, a lot of it is a surprise,
however, maturity and time allow you to look back on those. Does it focus you a little bit more
to be able to connect the dots in a fictional sense? It's interesting you say that. The focus,
I, yeah, I think it did because I came back to the writing of fiction after writing my memoir
Tony with a renewed joy of sinking into the private life of another human being. You know,
it really felt like like slipping into a hot bath after getting bruised in a street fight.
It just felt it was so much more enjoyable for me to write about other people than myself. Even
on glad I wrote my memoir, it was really lovely to become other people again. And galvanizing,
you're right, there's a level of concentration you have to have if you're trying to write honestly
from the point of view of other people without injecting your own views or your own experience.
I try not to do that. But as you say or as you suggest, the writers always revealing him or
herself in their fiction. And I know I'm all through this book, although I don't know exactly where.
But it seems to be a mature or perhaps more mature view in the sense of
in reading this doesn't seem like something good right in your 20s.
Yeah, it's an older writer's book. Yeah, thank you for saying that. I think so. And you know,
one of the things I think I'm proud of it. And I use that word sparingly because it's not a,
it's not a feeling I have very often after finishing a book. There's always this haunting sense that
a better writer would have done better, but it's the best I can do. And I think that's fairly normal
for a lot of writers. But I do like that there's no physical violence in this book. It's the first
book of fiction I've written where physical violence doesn't happen. There's the thread of it.
There's the sense that it may happen. And it's strange, you know, by writing about
in the last book being towny, by having written about the real violence I experience both as a
victim and a perpetrator as a young man, by writing directly about the violence of my own life.
I somehow freed myself to not have to write about it in the next work of fiction, which is
interesting to me, but it does make it feel more mature to me. In writing these stories, as you say,
some of them have, have start dates that go back a ways. So to revisit them and to, and to look
at them with a more mature eye. And once you have the pieces, if you will, of starting to work with
them, does that make it any more pleasurable in the sense of even more artistic than starting from scratch?
Yeah, I think so. Well, for me, you're nailing the most essential joy of writing for me as a revision.
And it's an important part of the process. Look, I enjoy all aspects of writing. Him and
Wake called it the sweet labor. And it is a very sweet labor to write those original sentences
in that white space. I forget who said this, a woman writer whose work I respect, she said,
if a novel is a steel bridge over a river, in those first drafts, you're actually creating the
iron with which to make the steel bridge. And I love once I have that bridge over the river,
and I'm really just messing with that design. And it's deeply pleasurable. And those are the
sessions I can do 10, 12 hours a day with when I'm building the iron from scratch or to mix metaphors
putting the clay in the table, I can't work more in two or three hours. My level of concentration
starts to fade after that. In the stories that you tell in this book, there is a, as you say,
there isn't that physical violence, but there is a menace always there, isn't there? Yeah,
there is, huh? You know, I think you especially feel it, well, no, it's kind of all through there,
especially I think in the first story, listening carefully as our options have changed, you've got a
couple in their mid-50s, 25 years of marriage. She strays and starts to have an affair with a man
she met at the gym. The main character Mark Welch, who is a detective, who films just what Mark
fears were most. And then the menace is really after it's been discovered, right? We don't know
if how Mark's going to continue to melt down. He's going to actually pick up that lead pipe in the
garage and use it. And it really has melt down seems to be far more internal self-destructive,
but it seems to lead to an insight that maybe she wasn't such the bad guy that he thought she was.
Maybe he's got his own flaws and maybe he's got a hand in her drifting away from him a little bit.
There's certainly, and I think in any kind of domestic situation, there is, okay, well,
it's this guy's fault, it's this woman's fault. And you take a, you balance that very nicely in
all these stories. Thank you. I'm glad to hear you say that because I just don't believe in the villain.
I don't even believe in protagonists and antagonists. I just do not believe anybody is above anyone
else. I think we are all capable of the most base behavior or all cable, the most saintly,
godly behavior. I love this line from Tom Waits from his song Heart Attack and Vine. There is no
devil. There's just God when he's drunk. And that's blasting me to some ears, but man, I just think
that we all are born full of light and love and we screw it up. And then we're always working our
way back to where we began, which was more pure than we'll ever be again. I was in bad reading this
book. My wife is next to me reading her book. And I was, I made kind of a sigh. And she said,
what is it? And I said, I don't know how comfortable I would be if you wrote this.
And I'm wondering of examining your marriage and thinking about it. Does it, because it has to
come up, doesn't it? Well, it's interesting. I mean, my wife is just so secure in so many ways.
It's shocking. Yeah, I'd feel the same way if she wrote it. You felt it. But I don't, but my
wife, I'm telling you does not feel that way about me. I'm very fortunate to report, you know,
I've been a monogamous guy for 25 years. I'm pretty sure she's been a monogamous woman. But
and I'm not patting myself on the back. And I'd, by the way, don't judge people who stray. We all
have our path. We all learn what we have to learn. But it is an active imagination. It really is.
So much of what's in there. There's a lot of self-destructed behavior. And hopefully, you know,
slivers of hope here and there too. But you, you, you raise a good point. You know, when you're,
when you're mate, you're lover, your partner goes into the dream world and pulls up all this
naked stuff, you start to wonder literally, so how'd you know that? So. And what did I, and why did I
miss this? Yeah. And why did I see this? The sooner end that the, and in many cases, and
cheating brothers that other where you have a completely other life and how are you
deplisted us without the other person knowing? Yeah, one of the things that I found interesting
in discovering in that big infidelity story, the first one is, it's just how much a role our day,
our day lives have when we, when we work, when we come home. And, um, you know, the fact
that he's a project manager, which is a very controlling job. And when he comes home, he actually
controls his wife far more than he ever thought he did. You know, has a real hand in alienating
her from him. And that's just part of our lives. We, we drift. And especially when you have got,
when you've got two careers and you spend all day long with other people, you know, and by the
way, the best hours of your day, when you have the most energy, the most cheerful, you know,
just grumblingly getting out of bed and heading off and you're not just going to bed tired. You
know, we save those parts of the day for our partners and they get the loziest part of us.
They get the distracted stress one in the morning and they get the tired stress one at night.
And it's amazing. We have any kind of relationship at all.
Andre DeBussel III is the author of the new collection, Dirty Love. I'm hoping you can
read from one of my favorite stories in the book, which is the bartender. Sure. I'm just going to
read a brief passage. Robert DeBussel is married to Althea. She's pregnant. He's a bartender.
I'll just, it's set on Hampton Beach, New Hampshire. On days with no sea breeze, the cabin filled with
the smell of sewage from the marsh and Althea would usually feel nauseated and they would leave for a
walk down the boulevard, which is almost worse with its canned wrap and rock blaring from the shops.
The sidewalks crowded with sun, beaten tourists. The smells of fried dough and teriyaki
steak from the fryer ladders and grills. The roar of a Harley Davidson out on the street,
a gang of seagulls shrieking from above. Althea would squeeze his hand holding her protruding belly
with the other and soon Robert and his wife would have to go into a restaurant for a bathroom
where she might throw up and Robert would sneak a quick tequila shot or two at the bar while he
ordered two coaks, one to hide the tequila, a fiery friend and confidant in his gut, the other for her.
They would sit in a booth or at a small table in the shadows away from the bright street and she
would sit her coak stoically staring at the rug or sometimes just at Robert's hand or chest,
which left him feeling she was a bit simple, taking her pain and unquestioning in almost bovine way.
He would think of the heifers on his father's dairy farm, the vague indifference in their eyes as
his father loaded the breeding gun with thalb bullsemen, his entire arm covered with a lubricated
plastic sleeve. But other times, the surreptitious tequila shots spreading out in his belly like a
purging grass fire, Robert would feel moved at his silent suffering and he would lean over and
give and kiss her clammy hand. This pregnant woman he was beginning to bronze in a maternal cast
only. Andre debuts the third reading from Story The Bartender in Dirty Love published by Norton.
You said a moment ago that you seldom use the word pride in looking back at your work.
At what point is there a sense of pride in writing a particular sentence? There's some beautiful
writing and just what you read. No, thank you. I'm just really worried. I'm very wary of the word
pride because there's a sense for me that when I'm writing well, that I'm tapping into something,
that I'm finding something, that the writing is larger than I am and it's allowed me in.
And so to all of a sudden turn that around and pat myself on the back for having done it feels
counterintuitive and against what just happened. So does that make sense? To me, to me, this whole notion of
creating art or at least it's also very Irish. Yeah, it's very, yeah, yeah, you know, I've got a
French name but I'm three quarters. I mean, there's like, I know it well. Maybe there's guilt,
shame. I know I cannot take too much credit. But yeah, well, here's the real Irish part. But if
you trash that book, I'll take total blame for it not being any good. Yeah, so it's not like it's
all I had nothing to do with it. But I do, I do take satisfaction in writing a sentence and,
of course, you rewrite it a hundred times sometimes. Often, we feel like, you know, I think I may
have captured that moment. And that is deeply satisfying. And frankly, it's, that's one of the
reasons why I write in the first place at all. But well, on the micro level, on the macro level,
you write enough of those true sentences where you feel you've captured the experience of the
character, you're going to go into that character and capture something thematic about our time,
maybe, or, you know, something much larger than that one person. And that is deeply satisfying.
And that's really why I write to get to those moments of discovery where you think,
man, I may have captured what it's like to be a father in 2013. And you know, that's, you know,
I never, I'm never sure I have. But what you start to get this sensation that you're in true
waters. And that's really a thrill, really. In, I was going to say one of my favorite stories. And I
really, I enjoyed all of these stories. And, but Marla, I think, is one that's stuck with me.
For a while, there's something there about that character that is troubling and so true that it
sticks with you. How did you come? You spoke a moment ago about how suddenly,
she appeared and then you were, you were off to the races. Well, you know, it's, it's so weird about
it all. I was visiting my sister, Suzanne, down in Miami about 25 years ago. And she was working in a
bank. We were both in her early 20s. And I was walking this summer in Miami. And I was walking
across a baking hot asphalt parking lot of a bank. And, and I, and I just glance at the drive
through a window, which is just this air, air condition, little glass bulb that one woman was
sitting in this bubble. And I glanced out of from maybe half a second. And I kept walking into the
bank. And she was large, kind of pretty. And she looks so solitary in that bubble. And 20 something
years later, she shows up under my pencil in this story, Marla. And I know it came from that
half second I glanced a stranger working a drive through. And I just could feel her, her solitary.
Well, and it wasn't just solitude. It was loneliness in the solitude. And I started to write myself
in and, and I realized I was writing about a lot of women and men I've met over the years. Far
more than you would have, that I think a lot of us imagine, who kind of missed that love train.
They don't get on it. They haven't made love. They go deep into their, they're still in their
adulthood. And they have not even had a sexual life. And I found that I cared about her far more than,
you know, again, the predator who's point of view I wanted to write from. And I just jettisoned him
and went with her. And I found this woman who, when she does find love, realizes that's where the
true. Now she's a member of a couple, which is something she always craved. Now, you know,
deeper, deeper challenges present themselves. The title story is dirty love. And again, very much
you're exploring sexuality. Yeah. That one's told from two points of view. It's the longest
one in the book, as you know, about 150 pages. And it's told from the point of view of 18-year-old
Devon, who's fleeing a pornographic, you know, short film of her that boys who put online against her will.
And she's living with the only man she's ever felt really loved by. And that's her 81-year-old
great uncle, Francis, her father's uncle, who was a recovered alcoholic and Korean war veteran,
veteran and newly widowed living alone. And I was really, you know, that one began with, I could just
sense, it was, you know, it's very intuitive this creator writing stuff, right? I could just sense
a young woman, girl slash woman, and an old man. And I sense they both loved each other very much.
And it was very healthy, but they were in a house together. And I wasn't sure why. And then
they revealed themselves, but your right sex comes up a lot. Devon's in this kind of pornographic
age where I think girls are being objectified more than ever. And I think it has to do, frankly,
with the internet. And he's from his generation, man, he's from the 40s, and he has a whole different
view of women and girls and boys and what marriage is supposed to be. Yeah, I really enjoyed exploring
those two together. And again, there's no pride in what I write, but I was relieved to find so much
healthy love in that story. I think there's a lot of good tenderness in that story.
There certainly is. And when you see the older perspective, it's not as if it is, oh, the good old days.
Yeah, he's not romanticizing anything. In fact, he was traumatized in wars in 19-year-old. He
witnessed a massacre based entirely on fact, by the way. And he carried that demons into
into the states where he became a really heavy drinking alcoholic until round age 53. He stopped.
So in his own his own marriage to his wife was not perfect as none are. And he feels guilty in fact
that even though he mourns the loss of his wife for 43 years, there's a part of him relieved to be
free of her daily nagging. And he feels great guilt about this. And of course, he'll never tell
anybody that. So he's a complicated guy and he lives in a complicated time. And I really enjoyed
trying to see if those two could ever find a way to communicate over that chasm generationally.
I don't know if they ever do, but they love each other anyway. And even an understanding of
technology in the world we're in. Yeah, because Devon, one of the things she does is you know,
she gets on chat roulette every night as a way to sort of, I wasn't sure why she was getting
on chat roulette every night. Seeing she was sort of ruralized by the internet. But it's her way
to get her power back. She'll press a button and there'll be some strange man in a foreign country
or far away state. And she'll just stare at him and give him nothing while he wants something.
It's usually sexual. When when you complete something like this, are you what's next? Are you
thinking novel or are you thinking? No, I'm deep into a novel. I think it's the longer form seems
to be my more natural inclination creatively. And I finished writing a screenplay too, though,
an original screenplay based on an inmate in the mass system. It's a very interesting,
real true life story called the citizen. But I worked on that for years. But I'm about,
I've got both feet into a novel. I'm about four months in and the cells are multiplying and
dividing. And I'm just trying to keep a dark lid on it and let it go where it wants to go. And
already it's a scare in the hell out of me. You know, honestly, I'm writing about something I
don't even want to write about again. What is it? What are the advantages for you as a writer to
keep the dark lid on it? Well, many. And I actually talk to young writers and try to advise them to
try to do that. Here's the problem, especially if you're in graduate school. If you're in an MFA
program and I taught in one for nine years and I traveled to a lot of them, well, what are you
going to do? What are you going to talk about when you're drinking beer at the end of the day with
your colleagues? You tend to talk about what you're working on. And to me, it's a mistake, at least
for me. And I think it may be a mistake for people who don't think it might be. To me, it's like
masturbating before making love. Why would you do that? You want to keep that tension and bring it
to the act. You need that that that tension of the untold. You need that story to be still not
unfolded yet inside you so that, you know, it's hard to show up at the desk for years at a time to
write a long story. And you want to keep all that tension. And also, you know, look, you know,
I think whether you're male or female, when you're writing a story, you're pregnant with that
story. And the cells are multiplying and dividing inside the writer and your job is just to get
blood to the baby prematurely showing a draft to someone. And by the way, I think we usually do that
with transparent reasons. We usually do it because we want people to tell us how great it is.
But usually people aren't going to say that. And so I don't think it's helpful to cut open the
mother and poke around and say, I don't know. People don't really like brown eyes anymore. You know,
blue eyes are in now. It's not helpful to the baby. It's not helpful to the mother. So, man, I'll
spend four or five years on a novel. My wife won't know one thing about it. I just never talk about
it to anybody. Even my editor, which frustrates her, but she allows it. You know, I'm grateful for that.
And it allows, I assume, for you, a freedom that you're not, you're not nailed down to anything,
because you haven't committed yourself. Yeah, all I've committed to is I'm going to write daily.
Well, in this sense, I mean, it does get problematic when at the professional level, you start to
sign contracts and you owe a novel because I've written many novels that have turned into short stories.
So there's there's a bits of an issue there, Joe. That's when you just, you know, hold your breath
and trust and dive in. It's going to be what it's going to be. But I'm telling you, I hope I never
write a novel that doesn't want to be a novel just to fulfill a contract. And I haven't had to do
that yet. The new collection of novellas is dirty love that is published by Norton Andre DeBuse.
It's a great pleasure to see you as always. Thank you. You too, Joe. Thank you.
I want to thank you for joining us for the book show. We enjoy hearing from our listeners about
the show. You can email us at book at wamc.org. And you can listen again to this or find past book
at wamc.org. Sarah Laduc produces our program. The show was recorded at Argo Studios in New York City.
My thanks to their team. Book Marcus for next week and thanks for listening for the book show. I'm Joe Donnelly.
