Welcome to the book show, A Celebration of Reading and Writers. I'm Joe Donnie.
Readers prize and patch it for her inspired fiction with novels such as
State of Wonder and Bel canto. But since the beginning of her career she has
written nonfiction pieces. In her new book this is the story of a happy marriage
patch it has selected some of her finest pieces, carefully curating a
collection that reads almost like a memoir and welcomes us into her world from
childhood to today. And it's a great pleasure to welcome and patch it to this
week's book show. Thank you very much for being with us. What a great pleasure.
I'm glad to be here. Thank you. When you think about your writing career and of
course as I mentioned in the introduction most people certainly know you for
your fiction work is the nonfiction always been kind of A the beginning and B the
go to where you can explore different ideas and thoughts. Well for a long time
nonfiction was how I made a living. I had taught for a while it did not seem
time efficient to try and teach and then go home at night and write a novel. And
so I figured out I was really good at doing nonfiction and I could do it fast
and I could make money. So that that's where it started which is actually a good
place to have started because I have always associated it with something that
was easy with something that came naturally and with something that's just
sort of a pure pleasure. And over the years I wound up doing more interesting
pieces and more serious pieces but I really got my start at 17 magazine and
bridal guide and I wrote a ton of junk. Writing a ton of junk it makes you a
better writer though doesn't it? Well it sure makes me a better workhorse and I
think it probably does make me a better writer because I paid a lot of
attention to whatever the magazine wanted. I learned how to fit my voice to the
readership and I learned how to get rid of anything that was superfluous. I
mean it's not it's not so much about working on a deadline for me because I've
got no problems with deadlines. I'm not a procrastinator but it's that if
somebody says I want 800 words I want 1200 words I want 2000 words it was all
about writing to the shape of the piece and in fiction you can just go on and on
forever but actually that can make for really sloppy fiction. So the non-fiction
kind of made me more disciplined. As you mentioned you did much of the non-fiction
to get paid and to get a paycheck. Was writing fiction always the always the goal
to have that luxury? Oh sure sure and I kind of grew up believing that writing
fiction wasn't anything I was ever going to get paid for. I mean I had a very
labo-m view of life as an artist and I thought that it meant starving to death
and so I never was trying to write commercial fiction I really just wrote the
kind of fiction I wanted to read but I did very commercial non-fiction. It was a
nice balance. And at what point do you then find that you have an audience?
The people are following you. Well for fiction it's really easy to tell because
you look at your numbers. They have a spreadsheet and they'll tell you exactly
how many copies of the book you sold. So you know I could pretty much walk you
through how many copies each of the books is sold and my first three novels I
was what we call a mid-list author a modest mid-list author which was you know
my book sold in the 10,000 range in hard back and a little better maybe 20,000
in paperback and then with Belcanto that was my quote breakout book and then I
started selling a lot more books. So it wasn't until Belcanto that I could have
made my living writing fiction. Before that while I wrote my first three books
that was that was love that was what I really wanted to be doing but I was doing
non-fiction to support it and then once I didn't have to write non-fiction
anymore I suddenly realized that I loved it and and then I started really
having fun with it because I was just taking the assignments that I wanted.
Can you go crazy thinking about why or what it is about that book about Belcanto
that that struck a chord? No I know exactly what it is about Belcanto that
struck a chord. It was published in June of 2001 and it's you know very
nominally a book about terrorism and people being taken hostage and when
September 11th happened that was really when the book became popular and I
think that not unlike the kite runner which was a book that was set in
Afghanistan after September 11th that book came out at about the same time.
People were suddenly very interested in reading about Afghanistan we were
going to war in Afghanistan and it became very popular. Certainly there was
nothing in Belcanto that would tell anybody anything about what had happened to
our country on September 11th but people started reading it in book groups
because they felt they wanted to talk about these issues. In talking about those
issues did it change you in the sense of things that you wanted to talk about
and in open up avenues to realize that you had an audience to discuss very
important topics. Not really I mean I don't think that that experience changed me
as a writer. There were things that I really wanted to talk about in my first
three books that I did when nobody particularly was reading them and and after I
still don't think people read my books. I have a funny mental block about that.
I sort of secretly believe that people are buying them in large numbers and
building extra bathrooms on the side of their house out of copies of Belcanto
or state of wonder. Whenever I meet somebody who says oh I've read all your
books I think really like are we related and that's probably I think very healthy
that I don't sit down to write with an image of people reading my books. I'm
still just writing about the things that are interesting to me and that always
changes book to book. And another way of saying that you would write that book
whether there was an audience or not. So there isn't you can't be concerned if
there are if there are a hundred thousand people who are buying that book great
if there are four people getting that book it would be the same for you because
it's the work that you're doing. Absolutely and I don't sell my books before I'm
finished with them which is pretty unusual for somebody kind of at my career
level and I don't show them to anybody until I'm absolutely finished with them.
So it really is the book I want to read for myself. It's it's what's
interesting to me and I can remember before I wrote Belcanto when I was putting
it together and I had lunch with the Quirk Smith who had been my editor for
Magicians Assistant which was my third book and he said so you know what are
you gonna do next and I said I want to write this book it's set in Peru and
it's about a hostage crisis and opera and I sort of talk him through the
plot that's in my head and he looks at me and he leans over and he pats my hand
and he said let's keep this one under our hats kitten and I think that all of
my books sound horrible in advance you know who wants to read a book set in
South America about terrorism and opera that's a really bad idea for a book so
you know you don't think wow this is a great idea for a book and it's really
gonna sell I that's just not the way I work. At what point did you think that it
would be appropriate that you wanted to put together a collection of the
nonfiction pieces? I have a friend and named Nikki Castle who is a young woman who
used to babysit my sister's kids when she was in college and my family has kind
of taken her in we've always loved Nikki she moved to New York and worked for my
agent for several years got tired of New York and she called me and she said
she wanted to move to Nashville and she moved to Nashville and she didn't have a
job and so I said you can come and work for me I've never had an assistant you
can work for me until you find a job and and I think that she worked for me for
about two months and there was really nothing to do she reorganized my
file she reorganized my closet and then she went into this big Tupperware box
that I had of tear sheets from all of the magazine work I had done in the last
25 years and she said I'm gonna put together a book of essays and I said I
don't want to I don't want to write a book of essays I don't want to do that and
she said well you know I'm out of things to do and this is what I'm gonna do so
she went through she read all of the articles and there were really literally
hundreds of articles and she put together a book she made me read it which I
put that off for months I didn't want to read it and I could see the way she
had shaped it it could be a good book but I thought a lot of what she had
chosen wasn't good and so I got rid of those pieces but then I started to
think well what's missing what piece do I want to write to fill this narrative
arc and I kept writing new pieces and taking pieces out and writing new pieces
and taking pieces out and Nikki kept looking at it but really when I think back
on this book if it hadn't been for her quitting her job in New York and moving
to Nashville there's really no way I would have ever gone into that Tupperware
box myself and put this book together and that said I love the book I'm really
happy with it I just needed somebody to force me to do it and I see in
some of the early word of the book that it is wabelled as as memoir there is
certainly there are certainly pieces in here that would qualify as that but
it's certainly not a standard memoir I think it's a book that is about the
things in my life that I feel profoundly committed to when I read a book of
essays that somebody else has written the problem so often is there will be
two or three or four fantastic essays and then the rest of the book feels like
filler you know letters to the editor and shopping lists and whatever they
can put in there to pat it out to 180 pages to make it a book length and so I
was really interested in the idea of what if I had a book of essays that had a
theme that had a kind of narrative arc so that it would read like a novel and
my point was what are the things that I care passionately about and they were
books and bookselling I own a bookstore in Nashville writing and making art
marriage dogs family friends some things that I did for example trying out for
the Los Angeles Police Department that were things that I just really really
cared passionately about at the time and trying to put those things in order to
kind of make a hole and like the novels is it something that you are assigned to
write or you decide you write it and then find a home for it it's kind of neither
I mean in the early days it was assignments it was definitely assignments but now
it's that magazines or different places will call me and say we want you to do
something what are you interested in doing I actually never have the
experience of I just sit down and write an essay and then I take it and try to
place it but for example the title story this is a story of a happy marriage
which is a really really long piece audible which is the audio book company
called me and they said they wanted to do their first audible original so they
wanted either a piece of nonfiction or fiction that would be quite long I think
it was 40 or 50 pages and it would just be produced for audible and I said okay
I can do that and they said what do you want to write about and I decided after
thinking about a lot of different things that I wanted to write about marriage so
that's kind of how these days I come mostly to assignments I like the story
because well you write about Saratoga in that story and yeah yeah I do I do I
was at Yado I was 25 years old and that's kind of where my first marriage fell
apart and where my life got a much better start and went on from there but
Saratoga Springs does figure into that piece a lot is it almost easier to have
a channeled for you or do you do you feel the the compulsion sometimes to
write about something that you want to explore or play with yeah you know I
certainly that's the way I do with fiction that's the way I feel about fiction I
know I have an idea there's something I'm really interested in working out
solving thinking deeply about but in nonfiction I find for whatever reason that
I need to know where the piece is going and I think that it's because I worked
so hard when I was starting out doing nonfiction writing for particular
venues that in my mind I really need somebody to say you know we need this two
weeks from Thursday it needs to be 3,000 words it needs to be about X those
parameters I've kind of come to rely on in nonfiction and the fact is nonfiction
assignments straight up assignments where somebody just called said do you want
to do this have taken me to some incredibly interesting places there's a piece
in the book called My Road to Hell was paved and that was an assignment from
outside magazine in which they gave me a Winnebago and asked me to drive through
the badlands and out to Yellowstone and kind of infiltrate Winnebago culture and
expose it for the horrible underbelly that it really was of the hiking society
and it turns out I had a fantastic time I loved it I loved my Winnebago outside
magazine didn't like the piece they weren't happy because they wanted me to write
about how horrible Winnebago's were so I wound up writing about how horrible they
were but then when I was putting this book together I thought you know that was
a fantastic trip and I didn't write about anything that really happened or
anything that was fantastic about it because I wasn't supposed to be loving
Winnebago's so I went back through the piece out and then re-wrote it the way I
wished I had written it for the magazine so also this book was full of second
chances for me given where you are as you say in your career do you still do you
block that idea of being edited and changing of how you feel and how your
thoughts on a subject are portrayed no I've never blocked it being edited
unless and this doesn't happen very often and it always floors me when it
does every now and then I'll turn a piece in and somebody will say oh that's
fine this doesn't really happen now but it used to happen all the time and then
the magazine comes out and I think man I didn't write this you know they just
re-wrote it and kept my name on it so there's a difference between editing and
just rewriting somebody and if somebody says you know we want you to work on
this or we want you to change this and it's a dialogue I'm not a sensitive
person and I'm really open to being edited as long as I'm involved in the
process you mentioned a few moments ago and it's certainly well known in the
book world that you are a co-owner of pernassist books in Nashville Tennessee you
write about it a few times in the book including an essay entitled The Bookstore
Strikes Back what led you to bookselling well you know like so many other
cities in America I just walked up one morning and my bookstores were gone they
had closed they were big 30,000 square feet bookstores one of them was a
borders and of course the entire borders chain went under the other one was a
bookstore called Davis Kid which when I was coming along in Nashville had been
one of our much loved local independence but it had been bought out by a chain
in Ohio and they moved it into the mall and it was now 30,000 square feet and
it wasn't independent anymore and both of those bookstores closed within six
months of each other so suddenly Nashville didn't have a bookstore I didn't
want to open a bookstore it never really occurred to me for a long time that
this was my job but everybody was talking about it nobody was getting anything
done I met Karen Hayes we were introduced by a mutual friend as the two
people who really wanted to make sure there was going to be a bookstore in
town and so we threw in together and opened a bookstore and it just wouldn't
ever have been possible for me unless I was working with Karen because I
don't work in the bookstore that's not my job I don't draw a paycheck and she
really is the person who's there all the time ordering the books hiring the
staff you know making sure the trains run on time and I'm the person who paid
for the bookstore and I do a lot of publicity and I know every writer out
there so it's been very easy for me to make sure that my friends come down and
give readings and that's a great way to keep bookstores alive
anything about the process that has surprised you a lot of things have surprised
me mainly I've just been surprised by how much I love it and what a joy it's been
I I went into it sort of feeling like it was my duty like I have to do this for
Nashville I love Nashville it needs a bookstore I guess it's gonna be me I
didn't really think about how much fun it would be and the thing that I love
well probably the thing that I love most is I love the staff I love the people
who work there you know it's like hiring a group of people who are smart and
funny and fantastic readers and getting to go over there every day and talk to
them that's the greatest joy in the world but also the joy of recommending books
I think that anybody who really loves to read takes such pleasure in being able
to say to people you've got to read this book Karen Joy Fowlers we are all
completely beside ourselves I love that book the Good Lord Bird Jim McBride I
love that book Anthony Mara's book a constellation of vital phenomenon you
know just anytime I'm in front of people I want to push books on them and I've
always felt that way so owning a book bookstore is pretty genius because I can
walk into the store and walk up to any stranger and say have you read this book
did you read where'd you go Bernadette you're gonna love this book and people buy
it and read it and come back and say I love that book I want another one now what
should I read next you write in that piece you may have heard the news that the
independent bookstore is dead that books are dead that maybe even reading is dead
to which I say pull up a chair friend I have a story to tell why do you think we
got that rap that that books were in some way dying I think it was a slow
news day and I think that they came out with e readers and a lot of people
switched over to the e reader to which I say great what I care about is that
people read I don't care what device they read on but if 40% of new books are
being sold on e readers then the media says well you know obviously books are
dead and in two years nobody will have a paper book and there won't be such a
thing as a paper book and that's ridiculous you know it's kind of like women
are allowed to wear pants so let's just throw out all the dresses and skirts
because obviously we're moving forward and they're never gonna wear a dress
again it's it's it's just a matter of choice we have more choices now and I
think that that's a positive thing and it's true we may not ever need a 30
thousand square foot bookstore again but we are always gonna need a 3,000
square foot bookstore because the things that bookstores provide for
communities are things that you're just never gonna get online and I mean you
tell a great story in the book about being on the Colbert report and Stephen
Colbert holds up the book and says you can get it on Amazon and then suddenly
without thinking you say no get it at
pronestusbooks.net and I'll sign it for you and a lot of people did and we had
been open for I don't know like a couple of months we did not have the whole
male order thing down at all we were rambling and so many orders came in and
we were filling them out of my house because there wasn't room to do it in the
bookstore and I can remember staying up there people from the bookstore
coming over and working my mother friends everybody's stuffing envelopes I'm
madly signing books and I kept taking the orders off the computer and I was
handwriting out all the labels and we were making the packages I mean it was
truly hysterical the extent to which we didn't know what we were doing but I
couldn't figure out why it was that no matter how many names I took off the
list on the website for book orders I couldn't decrease the number and I
didn't know if I wasn't deleting them after I had written them down what was
I doing wrong and at some point like two days later I was just panic
stricken I am not techno savvy it was just that orders kept coming in it was
that no matter how many I took off there was just this never ending tide
coming in and you know now fortunately we know how to deal with these things
the most important thing I think this is so basic it's real estate it really is
about the size of the store and the rent and you know is that sustainable in
this economy my main message though is if you want to use Amazon use Amazon that's
fine if you like the things that a bookstore gives you which is a place to go
with your family after dinner a place to take your kids to hear story hour a
place to go and meet famous authors who come in to give readings a place to
meet other readers and get book recommendations if you want to use what the
store offers then you need to support your local bookstore or your local
plant shop or your local liquor store or your local hardware store if you're
getting something from a business in your community and you want that business
to stay this isn't rocket science then you have to go out and spend your money
there and make sure that it remains a healthy and viable business what is not
okay ever is to go to your local gardening store and spend an hour saying what
plants grow best in shade what plants grow best in sun what fertilizer should I
use and then go over to Home Depot and buy them for a third less in the same way
you are not allowed to come into my bookstore and talk to the people and say you
know what do you recommend what do you like what should I get pick up the books
read the flap copy mill around go to story hour and then go home and buy that book
on Amazon for five dollars less that's not good manners again the name of the
new book is this is the story of a happy marriage it is published by Harper 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 shows at wamc.org
Sarah Laduke produces our program bookmarkers for next week and thanks for
listening for the book show I'm Joe Donaue
