I met Heidi Julavits at a book reading at Park Slope, a reading for
somebody else now that I think of it. (Since moving to Brooklyn, I've learned
that there definitely is a writer's community here, and I'm constantly
running into writers at other people's bookstore appearances.) Then I met her
at the same bookstore a month later for one of her readings, then again a
month later at Housing Works in Manhattan, and finally, a few weeks later, we
were able to get together for lunch in Boerum Hill and talk about her debut
novel, The Mineral Palace. While many younger writers tend to stick to a
very close interpretation of "write what you know," Julavits sets her story in
Depression-era Pueblo. "I actually do a lot better with things that I don't know
that much about," she confesses, adding, "presuming that I'm self aware, that
would leave myself out of the equation. Anything that seems to relate directly
to reality that I'm trying to transpose into fiction seems like more of a
challenge to me than actually having something that I don't really know that
much about. In order for me to find out about it, I have to imagine it. That
feels a lot more liberating to me, a lot less constricted."
RH: How did you end up writing about Depression-era
Colorado?
HJ: My grandmother had lived in Colorado in the '30s, which was not
why I chose the time period, but was why I chose Colorado. There are a
lot of cosmetic details about the main character's life that parallel my
grandmother's life at that time. She had lived in Pueblo. She was from
Minnesota. She was married to a doctor. She had one small son at that time.
And she had always told me how much she hated Pueblo. I mean, she really,
really hated Pueblo. She cried every day, and she's otherwise a very stoic,
almost aggressively cheerful person. It was unthinkable to me that she would
cry every day; I somehow thought that there must be something about this
place where she lived that must have really struck a chord with her. So I went
down and spent five days and did some research.
I think I chose the '30s because it gave me a lot more behavioral leeway with
the characters, because... I had this sense that I wanted this dramatic act to
occur but I wanted it to be sympathetic. I wanted it to be understandable. And
I felt that the climate of the '30s enabled a certain sympathy with the
characters and enabled a certain sense to be made of the act, that possibly in
another time period would have been more challenging.
RH: Pueblo in the '30s is a modern city in some ways, but it's
still basically out on the fringes.
HJ: And still is, frankly. It's sort of even more remote than it was
before, because for a while, it was an important crossroads, was being
considered for the capital of Colorado, so a lot of money was down there, a lot of
political influence. Then the influence all shifted north and Denver ended up
being the capital. Pueblo's population was greater in the '30s than it is today.
It's definitely on the fade.
RH: So, when you started imagining this story, did you pretty
much just have the basic situation and then discover things about
the characters in the same way that Bena did?
HJ: Bena was actually the hardest for me to discover. In a strange
way, she came last, even though she was first. It was easy for me to discover
all these other people through her, but then I had this hole in the center of
the book, so I really did have to go back and discover her on my own.
I don't have outlines. I don't work knowing very much. I start at Point A and
I have a Point Z, and I don't know anything in the middle. You're sort of going
in a general direction. You decide on the direction you're going but you have
no idea if you'll get there or what's going to happen in the meantime. It would
probably help if I were a little more strategic than that. It might require me
to do a lot less rewriting.
RH: You've been writing short fiction for a while now. Had you
always planned to write a novel?
HJ: Definitely. I feel like I've always been more suited for novels than
short stories. This is obviously an arbitrary decision that you make about
yourself, as much as the decisions you make when you're a kid, like you're a
math person or not a math person, but I have never read a lot of short stories.
I find myself much more readily able to dive into a humongous book, knowing
that the investment is going to be 800 pages long. So I feel that my
imagination has been trained to think novelistically.
It proved to be a real challenge to me to write short stories. I'd never really
written a lot of them until I got to grad school, and then you kind of have to
write short stories. It was good to learn how to do that, but my short stories
started out being like 35 or 40 pages long. I slowly learned to bring it down,
bring it down, bring it down....but I think that actually my first inclination
was always to write novels and to write short stories was actually a step back...
because they're very different, in fact, totally impossible, as far as I'm
concerned.
RH: How much time did you spend on The Mineral
Palace?
HJ: Well, it took a couple of years to really figure out what I was doing.
Basically that entailed making some decisions that at the time I didn't realize
you had to consciously make, like tone, perspective--all these very nuts-and-
bolts decisions that I just hadn't made and therefore ended up writing a lot, a
lot, a lot, until finally I was forced to make a decision or something felt right. I
would also say that I was not prepared to write a novel when I started, so I
spent a good two years doing what amounted to exercises, none of which is
included in the final book. In some ways, there's absolutely no relation
whatsoever between those two years and the final book. But they definitely
were part of the prep work. Once I focused in and figured out what I was doing,
did my research trip, after that, it took about three years to write. So three or
five, depending on how you look at it, depending on how bad you want to make
people feel, you know?
RH: It sounds like, with the lessons you've learned, the next
book might not take three to five years.
HJ: It won't. I'm much clearer on this one. But again, there's a
certain way in which you have to make these decisions but you really can't
just make them. You know? You have to work a while, enough to develop a
problem, and then you have to solve it. You kind of can't foresee the problem
before it exists. It's hard to really preempt that sort of stuff. So you work your
way into having a problem, and then you live with the problem for a while,
and then you solve the problem. At least I'm a little more conscious of it. I
don't know if it will make it less tortuous to write this one, but we'll see.
RH: And again, it's about something completely different.
HJ: What are we going to say about this? It's plausible but bizarre. As
it is right now, it's a little bit too absurd and I want it to be more plausible. I
want to write a story that will rein me in a little bit. I felt like I got really
carried away in The Mineral Palace, with the landscape and the time
period. There were just so many details; it ended up making the book strong,
but made the writing of the book very difficult. And I like detail so much that
I could just waste tons of time on it; I could theoretically be writing but I would
essentially just be describing stuff and not advancing the story at all. And I
wanted to eliminate that built-in procrastination, so I decided to basically
eliminate landscape. So the next book takes place almost entirely on an
airplane--there's not so much for me to describe and it's driving me into
people psychologically.
RH: Who are some of your favorite writers?
HJ: God, I can never answer this question! I never could. I never can
remember. It's so funny. I never can remember what I've read, which is so
embarrassing to say, but I really can't. And my books have been in storage for
so many years. I just got them out, and I'm going to unpack them when my
bookshelves arrive.
I read a couple of people this summer I really liked.I like people who make me
underline things. I hardly ever underline, but when you get to do it, it's
really fantastic. I actually just read The Good Soldier, by Ford Maddox
Ford. He had a lot of good, underlinable sentences. And I very much admire
Evan S. Connell's Mr. Bridge and Mrs. Bridge. There's
Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates. . . The bleakness of his aesthetic is
so admirable, he takes things down in a way that few people are able to.
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