“the lava of essential forces flowing beneath human life.”

But her greatest virtues as a writer

of fiction are old-fashioned: exquisitely constructed sentences,

a capacious moral imagination and a depth of feeling for human

frailty, a near-hallucinatory precision in describing physical phenomena as well as emotional states, interpersonal dynamics, and

shifts in consciousness so minute that they approach abstraction.

.........

The irony, of course, was that there was a child molester right

down the street who worked with my father, and who preyed on

me right under my parents’ noses. I can recall things happening

to me outdoors, in a public place where I could hear voices in the

distance. My mother would let me go to the park with him because

in her mind he wasn’t one of those people—he was a family man,

she was friends with his wife, his child played with us sometimes.

When I told her what was happening, she didn’t believe me, and

when I confronted her about it later, she said one of the reasons

she didn’t was that I always seemed to really like him, and that I

would climb into his lap. I do remember being very aware of how

much pain he was in—it is incredible how empathic children can

be—and of the depth of suffering that people could experience,

that it could seem to go on forever and that no pity could erase it.

Hell, to me, was clearly a story about that.

..............

After that, I went to

Berkeley with this guy, a twenty-five-year-old draft dodger—I worked

in a massage parlor and sold underground newspapers there—and

back to Canada, where I sold flowers outside liquor stores and bars.

I sold jewelry, too, and later I was a stripper for a while. I was in

touch with my parents all this time, by the way. I let them know

where I was and that I was okay. They were mad at me, they yelled,

but they somehow accepted this. I could also go home and visit—

it was in a sense the best of both worlds.

Sometimes I wish I had been more protected—that I had not felt

like I had to leave home, that I’d had a better formal education. But

the upside is that I met a lot of people that I wouldn’t have encountered if I had stayed in Michigan. It was great exposure to different cultures and ways of being, and I learned how to read people physically, which was very practical. I realized that when really bad

things happened, it was after I’d gotten clear warnings from people’s

eyes and body language and tone that I hadn’t paid attention to. I

learned to understand people through things beyond the words they

were saying. That was very, very good for me as a writer, because I

was tuned in to that kind of detail.

..........

At a certain point, it occurred to me that I didn’t even know

proper grammar, so I decided to go back to school, which meant

community college. I think one of the main reasons I was able

to pursue writing at that age is that I had no idea how difficult it

would be—I was just really ignorant. When I went on from community college to the University of Michigan, I was utterly lacking in any kind of intellectual sophistication. I didn’t know how to

translate anything I’d learned to that environment, which was very

competitive in a way I hadn’t experienced till then. The people I’d

met when I was selling jewelry on the street or working as a stripper

were more relaxed—I think that when I say I did these things, you

might imagine something brutish and dull, but most everyone was

culturally bright and curious. My best friend in the stripping world,

Rene, lived with a guy who was one of the best commercial photographers in Toronto, and he taught her how to take pictures. Rene

had run away from home too and had been a stripper since she was

thirteen years old, and she protected me. She was fascinated that I

wanted to be a writer and that I read things, and she wasn’t at all

intimidated by that—she was really open. Whereas my classmates at

Ann Arbor were all much younger than me, and I found them boring. The graduate students and other people hanging around had

mostly been to Europe and knew more, but in a predictable way.

.......

When I was out on my own and not going to school, a lot of junk—

though some high-end junk, like Looking for Mr. Goodbar. I was

living in Toronto then, so my attention was on Canadian writers—

Leonard Cohen, Margaret Atwood. I also had a thing for D. H.

Lawrence, whose writing seemed more passionate and more raw

than most of the stuff I was reading—although even as a kid I

could see the comedy in the Sturm und Drang over sex. I liked

Erica Jong’s first novel. And Tom Wolfe—I don’t mean the old guy,

I mean The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

Later, I loved Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, Joy Williams.

I didn’t want to like Norman Mailer, but I secretly did. I could

sense, although I didn’t have words for this at the time, something

bigger underneath the misogyny—a willingness to go deep into

what I’ve called, in an essay about him, “the lava of essential

forces flowing beneath human life.” Plus, he wasn’t worried about

offending people or being ugly or gross or anything—he was like

an animal. I think I secretly figured he had to be that way, to get to

the lava.

........

I read Lolita when I was twenty-three, and I was just overwhelmed

by the beauty of the prose and the depth of feeling, by that tension

between what you’re supposed to want and what you do want—

the wish for an ideal experience, whether it’s sexual or anything

else, and how the fixation on that ideal can become violent, how

the instinct to love can be so intimately related to real evil and

aggression. Humbert’s is an extreme case, but it’s the extreme cases

that make us understand ourselves best, whether we realize it or

not. I think I knew that Nabokov was a don’t-try-this-at-home kind

of thing—he was way above my skill level—but Lolita opened up

my senses, and my sense of what was possible.

........

I find it hard to talk about influence, because it’s mostly unconscious and unpredictable—it can come from things that we

don’t especially admire as well as from the things we love. I’d say

my work is strongly influenced by music, for example, but it would

be very hard to explain how. I used to play certain pieces of music

before sitting down to write. A recent example would be the second

Cream album, before writing an essay on Pale Fire. And when I was

writing Veronica, I deliberately read things that I thought would

affect the voice in a good way—such as Housekeeping by Marilynne

Robinson. But in general, as I got more mature, I began to avoid

work that might influence me while I was writing, because it can

take you off your own instincts.

.....

He was the first person to

reinforce my intuition that style was a valid thing to care about, that

it’s not simply for decoration—it’s how your story is given shape,

how you allow the clarity and force of your ideas to come through

and draw out the deepest possible meaning.

......

(I struggled with) trying to describe accurately what I’m wanting to say. So much is

happening in any given moment, both internally and externally—

so much of life is not about words.

..

Re Ayn Rand:

Two Girls went in a very different direction than I’d pictured

initially. I’d meant to make it more like a satire of Ayn Rand. At

the Strand I’d had a coworker I was friendly with who was probably

technically a narcissist—you could be walking down the street with

him and he’d just stop and be transfixed, looking at his reflection

in a window—and he barely read but he loved Rand, he believed in

her message. At the cardiologist’s office, too, I’d met someone who

was profoundly affected by her writing, just raving about it while

I was doing an EKG on him. I was surprised that these people who

seemed so ordinary would be susceptible to something like that,

that it could create such powerful emotional reactions. I began to

read about this cult she had around her, and I interviewed other

devotees who also seemed completely normal—not at all fanatical,

very nice and sincere. I actually wrote an article about this for

Mother Jones, but it didn’t get published. The character of Dorothy

is based on a woman I spoke to who’d worked for Rand very briefly.

When I asked why Rand meant so much to her, she said, “Because

I was raped by my father at a very young age, and Ayn Rand was

the only thing that helped me hold on to any sanity.” I’d planned to

include a counternarrative to the story of Justine and Dorothy—an

imaginary Rand-esque novel—but I lost interest in that and got

more into their childhoods.

...

How much can you write on a good day?

Sometimes it’s only a paragraph. I think the most I’ve ever written

in one go is four pages. I can’t remember the last time that happened.

....