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[ interview ]
Interview with Rachel Pastan
by Trevor Newberry
Q: I suppose it’s inevitable that I’ll ask, “How and when did you decide to be a writer?” So, I guess, how did you?
I always wanted to be a writer—and I also, thank goodness, always wanted to write. My mother is a writer, so I thought it was a normal thing to be. It took me many years to realize that this was not so, and also that most writers use their choice of profession as a form of rebellion against their families. I had to find other forms.
Q: I’ve read many times that fiction is the toughest market to break into. For example, legendary literary agent, Nat Sobel, in an interview for Poets & Writers was quoted as saying, “We keep hearing this phrase, ‘What’s the platform?’ . . . ‘What the fuck is a platform? What is she talking about?’ Well, what it is is this: What does the author bring to the table? Talent is not enough.”
So, what do you think you “bring to the table?”
My new novel, Lady of the Snakes, is very much about the work-family morass in which many women find themselves, and I think it feels relevant for many readers because of that. When I started writing this book eleven years ago (!), there were very few books about the experience of life with small children, let alone novels where the ambivalence of working mothers was expressed. When my children were young, I was hungry for books like that, and I think that hunger is still out there.
That said, the necessity of having a platform sucks.
Q: In your novel, Lady of the Snakes, nineteenth century Russian literature is central to Jane’s (the protagonist’s) identity. How did your interest in literature—or disinterest—lead you to make this artistic decision? In other words, how did this attribute find its way to Jane?
People keep asking me that, and the truth is that I can’t remember. I used to have two protagonists, and one was a herpatologist. I did lots of research into herpatology (the study of reptiles and amphibians)—I took a course!—and then I ended up axing that character.
Around the same time I think I was reading a biography of Leo and Sophie Tolstoy, and I found their relationship amazing in an awful kind of way. Since I was already reading about the Russians, it was easy to have Jane study that. Ultimately, as the novel evolved into a literary mystery, that part turned into the narrative hook.
Q: On a similar note, is Russian lit your expertise, or did you have to buckle down in a dank library somewhere with towering heaps of difficult-to-pronounce, leather-bound tomes, researching this body of work?
I had read a lot of Russian novels in college, and I’ve always loved them. Then I did do some research, but mostly I just made things up. There’s a terrific Russian professor, Sibelan Forrester, at Swarthmore College, who read the book for me to make sure I didn’t screw things up too badly, and who did some translation so it could sneak a little Russian language into the novel. It’s amazing what people will do for you if you ask them to, especially people in academia and in libraries.
Q: Do you, as an accomplished academic female, see anything of yourself in Jane? Her aspirations? Her unrelenting ambition?
I’m not an academic at all! I don’t have a PhD, though my husband does, and many of my closest friends do, and sometimes they gang up on me.
But I do share Jane’s passion for the work she does; or rather, I gave her my passion, my sense that, when I’m not working, I’m not entirely myself. I do have a lot of ambition, but I would not describe it as unrelenting. I would describe it, in fact, as relenting ambition. I think, when you have children, it’s important to know how to relent.
Q: And, for our readers’ senses of well being, what’s next on the agenda? Any projects currently penciled in on your writing calendar?
I’m about 150 pages into a novel about a lesbian family raising children in a small town in Pennsylvania. It’s in three voices: the 40-something lesbian mom; her paraplegic father; and her 13-year-old, sperm-donor daughter. My early readers say I’m doing the dad and the daughter just fine, but that I’m having trouble pulling off the arty suburban mom. I don’t know what that means.
Q: Finally, what are some tips and tricks you could offer to burgeoning, young fiction writers? How does one “bring things to the table?” Also, who helped you set your table, so to speak? In other words, whom can our young writers turn for to inspiration?
I think about plot a lot, which was the hardest thing for me to learn as a writer. Sometimes it’s hard for young writers to know if they have a plot or not. It’s important to understand what it is that sets your story in motion, and to understand what changes for or in the protagonist at the end, and to make sure those things are sufficiently tied to each other.
On the other end of the spectrum, the emotional tension of the individual sentence is the thing I care most deeply about. As in so much, Alice Munro is the model for me. I read her most mornings before I start working, hoping to channel a little of that remarkable verbal (but non-showy) power.
Okay, here are a few James-Lipton-y questions for you to answer. They’re short and sweet, and hopefully, not too painful. And since they’re short and sweet, your answers can be as brief as you like: a word, a phrase, a sentence . . .
Q: Is there a writer out there whose work is currently making you jealous?
I still have not moved on from being jealous of Jane Austen writing Pride and Prejudice at 21.
Q: How about a writer who you wish would just disappear?
Um, a few.
Q: What kind of child were you?
Quiet, obedient, spoiled, with a high opinion of herself.
Q: What's your relationship with rejection like?
I’m very good at rejection. It’s one of the qualities that has been most useful to me in this profession.
Q: Did you suffer in the process of writing this book? How?
Yes! There was not being able to find a plot for years; there was childbirth; there was not having time to write; there was not being able to find decent childcare so I could have time to write; there was much rejection; there was spending two years rewriting the book against the advice of my agent; there was my agent telling me, at the end of those two years, that I had to cut a hundred pages or he wouldn’t submit it. But it all worked out in the end.
Q: What was the greatest surprise for you in writing Lady of the Snakes?
That the bad guy, Otto Sigelman, who does some horrible things, was truly my favorite character.
Q: Do you have a writerly habit you'd like to break?
I have a tendency to be too lyrical, but I try to be ruthless about it.
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Copyright © 2008 The Southeast Review
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