The origins of Julianna Baggott's debut novel, Girl Talk, lie
in a short story she'd written about a young woman recalling the night during
her fifteenth summer when her mother woke her up and they drove together
to the house where her father was having an affair with another woman. Now,
nearly fifteen years later, Lissy Jablonski is recalling the rest of that summer,
and the secrets she learned about her family, even as she faces new crises of
her own. Baggott's tale is heartfelt, but laced with persistent humor,
particularly from the supporting characters. It's a skill that she's worked at
quite diligently. "When I was writing this," she told me over lunch, "I was
constantly going back to John Irving's A Prayer for Owen Meany and
Michael Chabon's The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. They were the ones
where I could open the book, start reading, and know what my voice had to
aspire to." Julianna Baggott aims high, and she does a darn good job of
reaching her target.
RH: One of the technical challenges you faced in Girl
Talk was juggling three separate timelines, the present,
a flashback, and a flashback within that flashback. How did
you keep track of those three tracks?
JB: I really wrote them much more choppily than they appear
in the book. That's a reflection of what was going on in my life: I had
to write small, short things because I only had small bursts of time.
It wasn't until later that I pulled things together to make chapters so
that there wasn't so much back and forth. And I kept color-coded
charts to keep track of when I was talking about each time period. I
didn't want it to be symmetric, like perfectly juggling three balls in
the air, but I wanted to be in control of when I was delving into one
[time] and balancing it with another.
RH: You were writing this novel as you were about to
turn thirty, and your protagonist is just about to turn
thirty. The novel is definitely not autobiographical in the
literal sense, but how much of it is autobiographical in an
emotional sense?
JB: I wasn't the only person turning thirty then--all my
friends were turning thirty, too. So much of the conversation that
was going on at that time in my life was about that. A lot of the lines
were taken from friends, from me, talking about how we were
feeling about all this.
When my mom first read the short story [on which the novel is
based], she'd give it to friends to read and say, "I'm the mother.
That's me." That was difficult for them--it's not a flattering portrayal
of her, and if you extend that to my father, it's not a very flattering
portrayal of him. And none of it is anything that ever
happened in their lives. They've always been sickeningly happily
married. But the conversations that the mother has with the
daughter, the elements of their relationship... When my mother gets
mad, she has a Southern accent; the mother in the novel has a
Bayonne accent that comes out. So there are things that are kind of
autobiographical, sure. And some of the facts are autobiographical. I
went to Loyola, Lissy went to Loyola. That was partly laziness. I
didn't want to research another school, so I picked Loyola. It was
easy; it was right there.
RH: Girl Talk has a lot of humor. Do you write
towards the jokes, or do they emerge naturally out of the
situation?
JB: I'm very open to the moment. I'm open to what's going on
around me. The modern section was the hardest section to write, so
when I was stalling out--writing a lot of characters that I later
pulled--a friend of mine said to me, "We were supposed to have an
intervention for my brother this weekend, but we never got around
to it, because nobody wanted to bring it up." And I said, "OK, I gotta
go," then hung up and basically wrote that chapter.
Every once in a while, though, I'll find myself writing towards my
jokes, and I know that it's "wrong." I know from reading Neil Simon
that he's very clear on that; he allows the characters to wind their
way into the humor. But every once in a while I cheat. I know a line
I want and I work towards it.
RH: This is a unique time for young women writers.
There have been a lot more opportunities for young women
to get published because of recent successes like Helen
Fielding or Melissa Bank.
JB: I couldn't get my collection of short stories published, and
I was very frustrated. I was never going to be a novelist. I had read
Andre Dubus's Broken Vessels, I believed in the purity of the
American short story as a form, and I was very strict with my
discipline. The novel was a thing that was out there... it was money
and power, you know what I mean? I wasn't there, I wasn't
interested, and I never thought I'd sustain a novel. But I couldn't get
the stories published, I couldn't get the poems published, and I was
at a weak moment when an agent called and asked if I was working
on a novel. I said, "Yeah, and I can have the first fifty pages to you in
a month. It just so happens that short story you saw in a literary
magazine and liked, that's the novel."
Then I figured, once I get a contract, I can get him to sell the stories.
Of course, he was never interested in the stories. I considered writing
the novel when I first started as selling out. For me, it was a
commercial venture to create a coattail for my short stories and
poems to ride on. When I sat down to write it, I felt like I could do
this, I could do what other writers were doing out there. I can be
funny and hip and... But as I was writing the novel, I really fell in
love with the genre. It's very intoxicating. And when all is said is
done, it's a literary book. It just happens to be in a bright pink dust
jacket. I'm hoping, though, that the cotton candy cover tricks people
into eating their vegetables all the way through to the end.
RH: You've sold a second novel, and you've started a
third, so you've obviously come to terms with novel
writing. How do you feel about short stories these days?
JB: Short stories, since I wrote the novel, have become
extremely binding. They've become very demanding because they're
so tightly structured, and much harder for me to write. I feel like
Harry Houdini when I'm in one, and I can't remember how I used to
get out of this.
RH: But you continue to write poetry.
JB: You're only allowed so many epiphanies in a novel, and I
still get into moods where I'd like to have a lot of epiphanies. Poems
are an outlet for that. And there's the extreme attention to language.
I've dabbled in screenplays, and I couldn't stand to write only in that
format, because the language is almost completely unimportant. It
doesn't become something, it only relates something.
I really love getting to choose, getting to fall in love with something
in the world, something I see or hear, and being able to decide what
form [of writing] it's best suited for. Sometimes you feel like having
the quick high of writing a poem, but I don't think I could sustain the
up and down, up and down, of writing poetry. There's a comfort to
being three-quarters of the way through a novel and knowing the
ending; it's just the most heavenly place to be. But you can't maintain
that, either. I like to be able to cross-train.
RH: You have three small children. How do you find the
time to write?
JB: With Girl Talk, it was hard. That's another reason I
got into poetry. I shrunk into poetry because I had less time, and I
thought that was something I could do more easily. But for Girl
Talk, my husband gave me the entire weekend, I could write at
night, and I'd have an hour and a half twice a week that I could
count on, when the kids were in preschool. I had a few sitters while I
was writing the second half, but not always. Then when I sold the
novel, I could afford babysitters more. But I'm still in the house. I'm
upstairs, they're downstairs, and they're constantly interrupting me,
but you get used to it.
