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Interview: November 1997

IN AQUAMARINE YOU GAVE A SINGLE CHARACTER THREE PARALLEL LIVES. DOES SEVEN MOVES ALSO BEND THE NOVEL FORM IN SOME WAY?

No, I wanted to work with a straightforward narrative this time. I’d become interested in novels that were serious fiction and at the same time compelling stories. Also, I’d seen a lot of books about people who run away, but not many about the people they leave behind. If someone you love suddenly disappeared, this would, I think, push you onto the hardest ground of your self, and I wanted to explore this constellation of event and emotion.

WHY DID YOU MAKE THE MAIN CHARACTERS OF SEVEN MOVES GAY WOMEN?

Well, it’s the world I live in, a world I feel has not been written about enough. I tried to create a sort of panoramic view of urban lesbian life to show how we’re very much like straight people, and also very different. By setting the book in Chicago, and addressing issues of intimacy, isolation and loss that have come up in my own life, I feel more vulnerable and exposed with this book than with Aquamarine. In Aquamarine I created a protagonist quite unlike myself who lives several lives very different from my own.

HOW DID YOU BECOME A NOVELIST IN THE FIRST PLACE?

My mother tells me I tried to write my first book when I was six, but didn’t know enough words. I came to writing through reading. I’d go to the library, look for titles I liked, bring home these stacks of books. And since they were novels, that’s what I wanted to write. I was really in a cave by myself during this time, through adolescence and into my 20s. I had little in the way of formal education, didn’t know anyone who wrote fiction. I just kept reading and writing, teaching myself as I went along.

WHAT AREYOU WORKING ON NOW?

I have the beginnings of a new novel in mind, also a short story titled “The Mystery of the Jungle Airstrip,” which isn’t a mystery and doesn’t feature either a jungle or an airstrip.