Schroder - A Conversation with Amity Gaige and Judy Frank
Amith Gaige (AG): Hi Judy.
JF: First of all, congratulations on the success of this book. It must have taken even you by surprise, I think. Very few of us set out to write a book and imagined the kind of success that it’s had so far.
AG: Thank you so much. I appreciate that.
JF: I’m going to ask some nerdy, craft questions, and then some questions maybe about parenthood and about bringing this book into the market place.
AG: That sounds great.
JF: So first, a first-person book. Can you talk about some of the challenges for you of writing in first person?
AG: This was my first, first-person book, and until I heard Eric’s voice, Eric is the name of my protagonist, I never thought I would really write in first-person. It can be a very limiting point of view because you only get the one consciousness through the book. That consciousness has to be interesting enough to bear the whole book. I really felt that hearing Eric’s voice was important because it was in a sense something that felt, after I heard him, somewhat channeled. I don’t want to get too mystical about it but it did as you know writers sometimes they say they hear the voice. I felt that. Once I had that voice, it was easier to write it than I had thought. I think I was waiting for a first person voice to come to me. It is an unreliable perspective mostly because I think that every first-person voice is unreliable in its limitations. But I do play with that concept of an unreliable narrator, and I asked the reader to collude with me in some ways and interpreting what Eric says and seeing around him. Because, of course, in some ways he’s offering self-justifications, he’s highlighting things and downplaying certain things in his own effort to come off a certain way. So we have to see around him. And that was a challenge for me as a writer but it was also fun. I noticed that when I abandoned all pretense that he would be reliable and objective and honest and earnest, then I just had fun with the different layers of interpretation.
JF: You teach a course at Amherst called Unreliablities and I was wondering what you’ve learned through that course that helped you write Schoder or what might have inspired you?
AG: I learned a lot. I was attracted to the unreliable narrator before I started teaching Unreliabilties. Then Unreliabilities helped me try to articulate the different aspects of an unreliable narration and why it’s an interesting special child of literature. I think that the text that I’ve taught in Unreliabilities, since I’ve taught them several times, they have found their influence, they trickled into the books. For example I teach The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford, and that book has a narrator who, like Eric is at times sweet, at times hysterical, at times very honest, at time dishonest. I think I’ve learned a lot from studying that one over and over. There’s a part in Unreliabilities where I ask the students to go find a story with an unreliable narrator. They’ve brought to my attention stories I hadn’t studied before. For example in class just last week someone brought in a story by Mark Twain called Eve’s Diary. I have never read this before. It’s in the point of view of Eve as in Adam and Eve. She’s an incredibly complex, in a sense naïve, a complicated narrator I never found before. I’ve gotten a lot from having the students bring those things to me. I’ve learned a lot teaching the course.
JF: I’ve never written in first-person also and worry about its limitations. I really admired this a lot. I tell my students, for example, you can’t say “I looked at my Rolex watch,” that detail just doesn’t sound right. Whereas in third person if you wanted to say that your character was wearing it you can do that. There’s a lot of information that just sounds like you’re pouring out information if you give it through first person.
AG: Right, right.
JF: I think students tend towards wanting to write in first person, and thinking that’s going to be more natural for them. It never has seemed more natural to me.
AG: Well, it’s true. I got a word from some other writer, I don’t remember whom, but it was the word “inflection”. When I teach first-person either in the literature course or novel course or fiction writing course, I teach this concept of inflecting the first person voice. It’s fun, it’s a way of making that voice sounded “voiced” so you would know how to read it, it has personality, it has texture. I think that a lot of students think that first-person voice is supposed straight forward, but really it’s much more fun if it’s inflected. In whatever way, based on your region, your dialect, your history, your ethnicity, all of those things influence inflection.
JF: Can you teach me how to do that?
AG: No problem. 10 minutes.
JF: If we had a date, that’d be great. What made you decide to write it as a document that he’s writing? What did you feel that that gave you that just writing in first-person wouldn’t. He says at one point “I’ve got a legal obligation to humanize myself” which I think is great.
AG: The truth is that might just be literary influence and reviews have mentioned “jailhouse confession” as if it’s a genre I wasn’t fully aware of entering. There are reasons for that. But I would say a book, one book that influence the written nature of this book was probably Pale Fire by Nabokov. That is an explication. The text of the novel is an explication of a poem that’s fake, that Nabokov wrote but ascribed to a character in the novel. I love that book. I love the metafictional way that you can play with a written document. In Schroder there are footnotes for example. I really enjoyed Eric speaking, or writing, really, and then have an opportunity for him to create a footnote as if it were a real document. There’s a point in which he poses a questionnaire, and he says “send your answers to prison!” where he is. Which someone could really do. I’m actually waiting for some reader to send a response to the questionnaire to the Albany County Correctional Institution. Various things like that that were pleasant to me to play with and I couldn’t have done without this being a written document. Because usually the convention is, this is being spoken in a way to the universal you to some invisible reader. But that leaves out so many interesting things to play with.
JF: I also heard a little bit of Jennifer Eagan, a little bit of David Foster Wallace in the footnotes.
AG: Certainly. I don’t think you can write footnotes without calling him to mind. And I feel like he owns the footnote. Let’s admit it. I actually started with these footnotes being endnotes and I think it was my own way of trying to escape not so much his influence, his ghost, his footprint. They were endnotes. I submitted the manuscript with the footnotes as endnotes. The feedback I got from my publisher and other readers in his house was that “no one’s going to stop reading the text, flip pages, read the endnotes, flip back, it’s just distracting and irritating.” So I changed them to the bottom of the page and I also got rid of some of them. I shoved them into the primary text and moments where that was the more important choice rather than this play that I was doing, this playfulness. It was more important that there be a more solid place for them in the text.
JF: I can see that. I can see the temptation for the footnote just as the excess, “and another thing I just thought of by the way…” the extra.
AG: They can be endless. I want to say that my intention with them was play and also layers and texture. But also I wanted the footnotes to have their own narrative. This is something I hope is successful, I’m not sure it’s up to the reader to determine. Eric starts his footnotes, they are very academic and pretentious, and as the story goes on they become more personal. And sometimes antifootnotes, random things that don’t need to be a footnote. And then finally, stories of his German childhood. It was important to me that they had that second parallel narrative.
JF: What brought this story to your mind? What prompted it? Where did it come from?
AG: There are so many influences. When I talk about it I realize how many more there were than I was aware of. I would say primary influences were personal. My coming into my own as a parent, my transition from being a person who took care of only herself to a person who took care of someone else, and who was trying to do the right thing by this new very alert consciousness that I had brought into the world, trying to say and do the right thing by him, my son. I started this book when he was 3 and that was just when he was starting to speak and observe and make points that were a little too close to home. So I was curious about how I was doing on one level. Also there were other personal factors. My parents had a very late stage separation. Soon after that my father’s illness and his passing. And then also thrown into this mix, many other things. There’s my mother’s own immigrant story which I threw into here too. My mother is an immigrant from Latvia, we’re not German. The final influence, and the thing that really sparked the narrative, was a knowledge of the Clark Rockefeller story, and he’s this guy who a lot of people have heard of by now, but when I read about him in 2008 I didn’t realize it would be such a known story but Clark Rockefeller was a con man and a fraud, a guy who said he was a Rockefeller but was a German immigrant. There were some crucial things I borrowed like immigrant, iconic American name, divorce. I took those, and I left the rest. It’s not a novelization of that story. I really did need that spark of “ok, this is kind of dovetailing with some of my own themes that I was at work at already. This guy made the sparked a larger idea for me.
JF: It’s interesting that as you were thinking about your own being a mother that you decide to write about a father, that’s an interesting piece of it. I was going to ask you to read a passage. It’s one of the things that I really love about this book is that it’s such a great book about parenthood and I think probably about fatherhood as well. He so walks the border between being a really excellent dad; his being present, the way he turns the laser beam of his attention onto his child, and being a pathological father. Both of those things. What I love about that is parenthood is always about walking that line between being great at it and being terrible at it. The passage I like so much is where the recession has hit. He has lost his job as a Realtor and he’s going to now be the stay at home dad for his daughter, Meadow. So if you wouldn’t mind reading the beginning…
AG: Of course.
“Do I remember my first days alone with Meadow? I sure do. I remember looking down at her, her thumb snug in her mouth, her Stinky Blanket under the other arm, and me filled with complete terror. The neighborhood was as silent as a tomb. The leaves on the oak trees were still. An acorn pinged off the hood of a car. I could hear my own blood in my ears. I waited for someone to approach down the street – anyone. I longed to make the sort of meaningless small talk I was so good at. How would we fill a day, two people with such a different sense of fun? I felt overwhelming pressure to do something outrageous or entertaining. I worried that she would just pick up Stinky Blanket and walk away from me. What I didn’t know was that she was helplessly bound to me already. It was me who could have wandered away from her. I could have left her outside of the fire station and walked away and – after a year or two of effortful self-justification – would barely have thought of her again. My daughter stood barely looking at me, as if embarrassed by her position, the ligature of her polka-dotted underpants visible above the elastic of her corduroy rompers. My heart flipped. How abandonable a child is. With this vague gleaning of one another’s vulnerabilities, we were off.”
JF: Thank you. “How would we fill a day, two people with such a different sense of fun?” I thought it was the understatement of the century. A fantastic line, I really loved that.
AG: You relate to that.
JF: Yes I can relate to that. Also it just gets to the way that you’re even bound to a child that he could walk away and after a year or two of effortful self-justification, not think of her again. Somebody who’s new in your life, how parenting veers between that on the one hand and this incredible bond on the other hand, I hadn’t heard that expressed like that before and I really loved that. There’s this moment later “that afternoon, I was every kind of monster,” where he plays very creatively all different kinds of monsters for her. Also monster as fun, monster as he is kind of a monster, I thought that was terrific as well. I’ve told you this before, but this to me sounds like a really wonderful companion piece to Emma Donoghue’s novel Room. Room is a novel about a woman who has been kidnapped and for years had her child in this tiny room. It’s a tour de force as well, it’s really great. Room is the space of motherhood in a sense that it’s claustrophobic, she’s still nursing when he’s five. She is his entire world, and that kind of responsibility. Here, the version that’s about fatherhood is he kidnaps the child and goes on the road, as though that’s the fatherhood version of parenthood. She is repeatedly raped; he flirts with women and has sex, that’s the difference. The fact that they’re both about kidnapping is kind of amazing that they’re these sort of essential novels about parenting and they’re about kidnapping, one about being kidnapped the other about kidnapping. I love these two together. When we talked you had not thought about room as you were writing you said.
AG: I really admire the book, like you, I just think it’s fabulous. There’s something about that book; it goes to a place that is uncomfortable, which is aside from just the difficulty of reading about her abuse. I’m talking about what’s uncomfortable is that sense of almost claustrophobic relationship and the way there’s in that room there’s no other air and no other influence. So it’s taking to an extreme degree the mother-child bond as it really is, as it really could be. If we don’t allow our child some space, if allow ourselves some space or any other influence. I think that what I would share with her in terms of theme if I had to look hard would be I do feel that childhood is a very emotionally precarious place for the child to love the parent and need the parent, and I have a lot of sympathy for that. I put Meadow into Eric’s hands and I hope that I show her position and what it might feel like to be her even though we don’t go into her mind. We see her love for him, we also see her gradually fall apart. Her hair, first of all, wild and blonde and also just dirty and sick. And then we see the consequences of his actions upon her. I have a lot of sympathy for that state of that childhood vulnerability. There’s one line that Meadow says to Eric at one point, “You’re my home.” This is actually a line that my son said to me once. And while it was beautiful on the one hand, it took me days to figure out what he was trying to say and how that might feel to him. And I gave that line to Meadow at a certain critical juncture. So I feel the thematic resonance and am flattered by that comparison, definitely.
I know that he’s a father and I see the way he has, especially when contrasted to Room, so much more agency and freedom and confidence and irresponsibility than the protagonist, the mother in Room can have. But I do relate to him as a parent the way you’re saying, the scene you asked me to read from, you can identify with those feelings. I very much identify with his feelings even though he’s not the same gender as I am. I felt a lot of those things myself. There’s a very painful love that you feel for your child, it’s almost like you love them too much. And this is a universal that a mother can feel this and I think a father can feel this. One thing I think that is changing a bit with parenting, that is definitely different from my parents’ generation, was that there are stay at home fathers, and stay at home whomevers. And whoever is responsible for the child is the one who is building this daily bond with them and who’s learning intimately who they are and who’s starting to care about their successes and failures. And I think that can be a mother, father, could be a grandparent. I think there’s universals in there.
JF: What were some of your biggest challenges writing this? Did you get stuck at any point?
AG: You know, I didn’t, which blows my mind, considering that’s a unique experience for me. I chiseled away at my first novel for 7 years, and this one was written really in like a year, a year and a half, when I look back at my notes. I had the idea, then waited a while, then wrote it quickly. I needed to get all of those influences in a line before I could write it. The challenges as I wrote it were the challenges of life; how to get the time from the family. I both needed the family as inspiration..
JF: Material
AG: and as material. And I also needed to get away from the family for the solitary aspects of the writing life. I had the support from my husband and my mother helped a lot too, some writing colonies were crucial. Once I had that time away I found that, since I’ve had children that I can be much more efficient when I’m away than I was on a daily level before I had children. Those were real challenges. There’s a lot of research in the book too that hopefully doesn’t feel like research, but there’s a lot in there and I had to do a lot of studying about divorce law and Germany and many other things. Albany, all these locations that a lot of them I’ve never been to before.
JF: Did you pick Albany for any particular reason?
AG: I don’t remember my reasoning. I just knew they were going to go on a road trip. I do have a genuine love of New England that’s developed over my many years here. I moved up here for college and then I stayed here with a brief sojourn to the Midwest for grad school then came back here and feel really at home here. One thing that was very influential, speaking of influences, was the very beauty of the New England landscape. I hadn’t been to Albany but I had spent some time in Saratoga Springs. I remembered Lake George and I remembered all that. It was beautiful up there. And then there’s all these mountains; the Adirondacks, the Berkshires, Green, White, what mountains aren’t there up here and so I started to visualize him just going north. I also needed him to get closer to Canada.
JF: I was going to say then you have borders also.
AG: Exactly. I needed that to be, in some ways, his unconscious goal. Then I got in the car and drove around and I realized in some ways I was both following him and creating him at the same time. I went to Albany, spent a day or so there, and kind of got enough of a sense of it. This is where they of course live when they’re happy when they’re all married and Meadow is happy with them. Then they take off and go to of course upstate New York, Vermont, New Hampshire and finally Boston. I really enjoyed writing those places.
JF: Can you talk about in what sense this is an immigrant story?
AG: It may be a very specific kind of immigrant story that is borrowed from my personal history. I think that it’s more of an influence than I realize when my mother left Latvia when she was just a child and then there was this gap when she in displaced persons camp before she came to the United States, and was about 11, I mean very similar in age though it was a totally different time period than as Eric who arrives here I think when he’s 9. What I remember from my mom talking about this was that she was leaving WWII which destroyed so many lives and so many cultures in a way, too. She had left everything, a beautiful, idyllic childhood but then a very rocky transition; she had arrived here with this heavy accent and she was teased. What a mix of emotions for a child to bear. She should be grateful, she made it here alive, because Latvians were persecuted by the invading Soviet army. Yet she wasn’t happy here. Her parents weren’t either, because they never really assimilated. My grandmother and grandfather never really learned English. I had a relationship with people I couldn’t actually speak to for a long time. I remember my grandfather, he would say “How is de poetry” (in a heavy accent). This was all he could say. And I would say “Great, it’s great. Thank you. How is church?” My mother was in between identities; this Latvian identity that they tried to move here whole, and American identity which was supposed to be nicer. I think a lot of immigrants deal with feeling torn between the old country and the new, not being sure which one they belong in and finally feeling that they don’t belong in either. Eric feels that way. I don’t know if we’ve said yet to the listeners that he calls himself Eric Kennedy, yet his real name is Eric Schroder. Eric Kennedy is a persona he chooses for himself in order to get into a boys summer camp and become a different person during the summer times in essence so that he can just be happier and not be a heavily accented immigrant. With not a lot of money or prestige.
JF: there’s also Germany being split is another extra split right? There’s the split between the old and the new and coming to America but also Germany itself.
AG: Absolutely. I like that as a metaphor. I think for Europeans, and the book is coming out in Europe and I did get one review was sort of like “well, we all know that. We know that metaphor.” But I think for me as an American it was a novel one. I did contemplate giving him a different ethnicity other than German in some ways to differentiate it from the Clark Rockefeller story. I’m glad I didn’t because I do like that metaphor of the divided Germany and giving that extra layer of detachment, disassociation that he feels. For me it could have been many other ethnic identities. But I do choose that German identity. And there’s much more there for me to know or learn about what it really feels to be from that country. What a unique identity in this modern day.
JF: It’s unique because you can smell the other side, because in some ways it’s so close.
AG: History must be extremely powerful in that country.
JF: Could you talk a little bit about Eric’s mother? He says at one point, one of his biggest sources of anguish is not knowing whether or not she’s still alive, right? His relationship with his mother is a little bit muted; much of the novel is about his relationship with his father with whom he came over. There’s a scene in which his father wants to tell him, he’s trying to tell him some things about his mother but he cannot listen, he can’t hear it. Can you talk about that relationship a little bit?
AG: He leaves East Germany without his mother, and that’s pretty much all we know for most of the book. Eventually, without giving too much away, I think it weighs on him more and more. Part of what we see that maybe he doesn’t see is the impact of that mystery upon his life and his psyche. He avoids it and runs away from it, but we know that he can’t. He can’t run away from that because you can’t run away from yourself. Perhaps I’m suggesting that part of why he’s creating this identity is to run away from that pain. Yes, I do think that, that is why sometimes people pretend and fantasize to escape psychic pain.
JF: I wanted to ask you a question about his research in silence. We’ve been talking about dialogue in Fiction and Writing 1, and about something that Anne Lamott writes which I think is really crucial for writers to absorb which is that “what isn’t said is as important as what is said” in dialogue. For him, silence is actually a topic of research, right? Pausology. Was that in the book from the beginning? Did you add it as it went? What made you think about…
AG: I knew that I wanted Eric to be at work on a manuscript. I don’t know why, I think it’s a type, the autodidact that I’ve always been termed by the person who has esoteric, scholarly interest but not necessarily the learning or discipline to really follow through. That’s Eric. He's got this emotional interest in silence, which we can analyze being many different kinds of silences in his life; the silence of his mother, the silence of his father, his parents together, the silences between he and his wife as their marriage is falling apart. He’s trying to see them and he’s trying to study them as if somehow one can do that. There’s some amusing irony, at least for me, that he’s trying to attempt one scholarly pursuit that is almost impossible. As he says, “What I was trying to collect is completely undocumented”; he’s trying to collect these famous, notable pauses or silences. I think I both admired his hubristic desire to do that and also find it sad. It’s an impossible research project.
JF: It’s great that it’s a little grandiose. A little grandiose, a little impossible, a little stupid.
AG: Don’t you know somebody too, like an uncle or whomever who has some crazy book that they’ve been working on their whole lives. I feel like I know a lot of those people. And maybe I feel that way about myself sometimes too. The writer, you’re never sure.
JF: It just comes out of your head.
AG: You’re just never sure if you’re delusional.
JF: Let’s talk a little bit about the business end of writing. There’s this moment where the piece of art you’ve been working on, investing in for years confronts the market. It confronts a whole world of agencies, publishers, editors, and marketing people. How much of the market places in your mind as you write these days, and did anything surprise you about the way the market place greeted your book, the way it came into the market.
AG: Yes. I think that Schroder has more, what I like to call profluence, or a dynamic narrative, than my first two works. But I didn’t set out with that in mind, it happened felicitously, we shall say, and I’m glad about that. But no I didn’t intend for it to be what a couple of people have said a “breakout book.” “Oh is this your breakout book?” If you set out to write your breakout out book I think you’re going to do the opposite. “Break in” book. I didn’t think of that. I think you do have to shut that out, hard as it is, while you’re writing. But now, talking about it as much as I am and being so conscious, trying to become conscious of what I was doing, or see it now with some distance, I think that there was certainly the hope that people would engage with him and engage with me and I knew that there were some risks I was taken too because he is a dad kidnapping a girl, and I didn’t want people to be frightened by that. I didn’t want him to seem like a monster or an abuser, and he is not. But I know that there is the scariness of that. But I wanted to go there. I was very close with my father. He really helped me very much as a writer, and was kind of my coach and teacher in the way Eric is a little with Meadow. Part of that was my homage to him. In some ways a healthy father and daughter relationship. But I knew that there’s a lot of assumptions around that.
Fortunately, I ended up finding an editor who went there with me. He from the get go, his name is Cary Goldstein, he’s the editor and publisher of Twelve Books which is an imprint of his Hachette Books. He just read the book, responded enthusiastically. He wrote an email to my agent saying “I cried, twice, reading this book.” Not with like sadness, I think with like fear. And some bitter sweetness. I feel very grateful and respected by him that he took a book that takes some risks. It certainly takes some risks with content. It also takes some risks formally. And just supported it. I could not imagine a better publishing experience. I talked to Cary and to Brian my publicist almost every day. And we’re texting and emailing, and mostly because there’s out of necessity fortunately, things to do. They publicized the book before it even came out by reaching out to book sellers in a way I haven’t seen before. So I was meeting book sellers, mostly of independent book shops, because that’s the structure these days and there’s not that many chains left, really, and trying to get them to read my book and separate it from the huge pile of other books that they had to read. And that helped. Cary and Brian were also very deliberate about getting the book to certain newspapers or reviewers and giving them a personal introduction to it… All of these ways in which they carefully, and creatively, tried to get people to read it, and what they found, what they tell me, is that there was a response and maybe partially because they got them to the right people, but it wasn’t met with indifference, let’s say. People had strong feelings about it. I think that gave them an indication that oh, at the very least this book is a good one to discuss. I’m certainly hoping that book clubs take it on. I think it’s a great book certainly. And book clubs are often women but there’s certainly coed book clubs, and I’ve even been to an all men book club or two. It’s a really good book to use as a discussion, to jump off from, in terms of discussion like parenting, immigration, identity, marriage, things like that. I have found that people do, the readers that I’ve come into contact with have a lot to say and strong feelings. I think that’s good. I’m glad about that.
JF: Thank you for discussing this novel, again. I know you’re doing that as a full time job these days talking about Schroder.
AG: No complaints!
JF: And I know you’ve been up since 4 this morning as well.
AG: That’s correct.
JF: Thank you so much.
AG: I truly enjoyed talking to you.
JF: I’m glad.