An Interview with Deb Olin Unferth
WEST 10TH: Your novel Vacation interweaves several different narrative voices. Were all of the narrators and their stories—and how they intersected—developed in your mind when you began writing? Or did you create some as the novel progressed?
DEB OLIN UNFERTH: Well, Myers, for example, my protagonist, leaves his wife and goes off in search of the man he believes is responsible for the dissolution of his marriage. At some point, as I wrote, I had to ask myself, who the hell was the man Myers was searching for? And that man, Gray, wound up with his own story. And once I had Gray, then I realized if it were my book, I’d want to know what happened to his daughter—and, of course, it was my book. So the daughter wound up in there. It seemed like each draft, a new character emerged. For most of them, I just heard their voices. The admin assistant in the embassy office, for example, or the woman who was taking care of Gray, or the sexy lady in the bikini, or Spoke, these characters were just voices that popped into my head as I wrote.
Some characters were modeled off of people I knew. The dolphin untrainer is modeled off of Rick O’Barry, the famous dolphin rescuer, for example. I’d met him on Corn Island and he took me out on one of his dolphin releases, pretty much exactly like I describe in the book. He’s a man of action, an actual real live hero, sharply different from the characters in my book; I liked the contrast.
WEST 10TH: Going off that last question, how did you balance the different characters’ sub-plotlines in order to make them cohere into one grand scheme? Did it require much planning beforehand or editing afterward?
UNFERTH: It was a mess for months, that’s all I can say. For one long summer I had the book printed out on notecards that I moved around in notecard boxes, one paragraph per notecard, with colored sticky notes to identify the characters. I wanted the different voices to be creating patterns, to be speaking to each other, even if they actually weren’t. I wanted there to be twinning among the characters, and repeating themes and situations, so that what might rise off the page was a sense of the universality of the problems and questions these characters had. What is home? Why do we seem to run to and from something at once? How can we allow ourselves to be seen?
I remember seeing a production of the Ionesco play, The Plague. In one scene, two couples sat in different rooms and spoke to each other about death and losing each other. The couples said their lines at the exact same time—that is, one person from each couple would deliver a line in unison, and then the other person from each couple would respond with a line in unison. I remember feeling as if by this one move, this scene was no longer about these two couples, but about coupledom, about everyone, then and now, facing the horror of losing their beloved. I was very moved and wanted to try something like that in Vacation.
WEST 10TH: One of the things I admired most about Revolution was the way you were able to preserve the voice of your younger self while allowing your older self to look back and observe her from a distance. Did you find that your experience writing Vacation—with its many distinct voices—helped keep these two characters from merging too much?
UNFERTH: It’s more likely that I was able to do it because that problem is perhaps my main fascination with the memoir form: the dubious fact of identity. That girl who left school and ran off with her boyfriend to Central America, she seems so far away—why can I still call her “me”? Revolution is a study of that younger self, but I wanted, again, for it to carry a universal feel, to be a study of younger selves in general by the study of this particular younger self, me.
WEST 10TH: In Revolution you briefly describe your writing process, saying that these were the stories that you kept returning to, writing and rewriting. Can you talk about the impact of these unwritten or problematic stories on your development as a young writer? Did your first novel feel like an attempt to deal with them, or was that something separate?
UNFERTH: The first time I attempted to write a novel, I wrote about fifty pages. It was a sort of Nicholson Baker knock-off about a man who is trying to put tape on the handlebars of his bicycle for a better grip. I was in graduate school at Syracuse University at the time. Junot Díaz was the visiting writer. I gave him the first twenty pages to look at. He returned it to me, and he had drawn a straight line down the middle of each page and written a neat little “no” at the bottom of the last page and made no other marks on the manuscript. So I’m guessing that first attempt wasn’t very good.
The second novel I tried to write I spent three years on and then abandoned forever, and it certainly was an attempt to deal with the problematic time I spent in Central America. That second novel was like being in a bad marriage and then getting a messy divorce. After it was over, I said I’d never write again, much like people say they’ll never love again. I did write again though (and most people fall in love again). Vacation was supposed to be a novel that had nothing to do with Central America, out of spite for the book I’d abandoned. But of course by the end of Vacation, most of the characters wind up in Central America or die trying to get there.
WEST 10TH: Can you speak about the difference between crafting a scene from memory and creating a fictional scene? Do you have a strategy for clearing up fogginess from the past?
UNFERTH: When I first began writing my memoir, I was writing happily away, thinking, “Wow this is easy! This is fun!” Then I stopped and looked back at what I’d done and I realized with a shock that most of it hadn’t happened. I’d just made it up as I went along. So I had to be very firm with myself, go through line by line, saying to myself sternly, “Now, did this happen? Do you remember this? Is this written in a journal?” and so on, because it is easy to simply slide in what sounds good. In the end I found I enjoyed the restriction of sticking only to the truth as I remembered it.
John D’Agata and his former editor recently published a book, Lifespan of a Fact, about this problem, about taking artistic license, making up little things to make your point or to create an artful sentence, and so on. It’s a fascinating book, quite horrifying and also very funny.
WEST 10TH: Were there any preconceptions about memoirs that the experience of writing Revolution overturned for you? Did writing a memoir change the way you will approach writing fiction?
UNFERTH: I published my “Memoir Manifesto” in Guernica Magazine online. There, I describe how I resisted writing a memoir because I felt it was a lower art form. But then I began reading memoirs, starting with the early modernist autobiographies, then going through the memoir precursors of the sixties, then through the memoir boom of the eighties, to now. I discovered the dignity and elegance of the form, how it necessarily is a philosophical investigation of memory, time, and time’s fault lines. It’s a young form, worthy of innovation and investigation. I do think my approach to writing has changed since I wrote Revolution, though I think every book changes how I write, as does every life experience.
WEST 10TH: In Revolution, how did you balance wanting to tell a story about a place you loved, and also wanting to tell a story about yourself? I was struck by how vivid the land is in both Vacation and Revolution. How important was that aspect of the story in your writing process?
UNFERTH: Well, I didn’t want to write a “place” story. I didn’t want to write a story about going to a foreign land, and how interesting and complex and beautiful and unknowable the land is and therefore myself and ourselves. All those things are true, of course, but it’s too easy of a formulation. In Vacation, Myers is very aware of how he can’t see the land, so clouded is his mind by his mission and how crowded is his sight by other tourists. In Revolution, it is similar in some ways. But of course these countries are so surprising and do have so much energy and beauty and complexity bursting out of them, the characters (and I) can’t help but be swept away by them.
WEST 10TH: Now for a question that I think many young writers find themselves asking: Do you ever change what you write based on the knowledge that people you know and love will read it and recognize themselves in the story? Do you have any advice for writers navigating these waters?
UNFERTH: Yes, I do change what I write sometimes, but not often. In writing Revolution I showed the manuscript to my parents and asked them to let me know if they objected to anything. My mother had several minor objections, most of which I wrote right into the book. There’s a little chapter called “Wonderful,” for example, where I add her corrections. She also asked me to take one thing out, which I dutifully did, so you will never know what that one thing was.
I have been known to write revenge stories. These feel extremely good and can give you lots of good laughs later. I’m not sure about a downside to revenge stories, unless they really are cruel.
My first husband, when we divorced, came to me and said, “I swear I will never write about this,” and then he published an entire book of stories about our break up. Ah well.
WEST 10TH: You teach creative writing at Wesleyan University. Is there any one mistake you’ve noticed that writers, particularly student writers, consistently make and should work to avoid? In other words, any sage advice for us young writers?
UNFERTH:
Write what feels urgent to you.
Don’t let your endings be punch lines.
The phrase “make one’s way,” as in “he made his way across the room,” is a cliché.
Go easy on the stories that use the second person.
There is a time and place for using name brands and names of TV shows and movie stars and so on, but not if you are using them in place of having to describe a person or location. That’s cheating. Proper names shouldn’t do characterization work for you.
WEST 10TH: What are you currently reading?
UNFERTH: The Lifespan of a Fact, John D’Agata and Jim Fingal (in the middle of ); Wise Blood, Flannery O’Connor (in the middle of ); Of Parrots and People, Mira Tweti ( just finished); Collected Stories of Franz Kafka (am sort of always reading)
WEST 10TH: Do you have any projects in the works?
UNFERTH: Yes, I’m finishing a graphic novel (I hope).
Deb Olin Unferth is the author of a collection of short stories, Minor Robberies, and a novel, Vacation, both published by McSweeney’s. In 2011 she published a memoir, Revolution, which was a finalist for the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award. She is a two-time recipient of the Pushcart Prize, and she has been published in Harper’s, NOON, The New York Times, and numerous other publications. Unferth currently teaches at Wesleyan University.