Author2Author: Mario Acevedo & Marta Acosta

It made sense for Mario Acevedo and Marta Acosta to launch a blog together last year. After all, Marta writes, when she was shopping around her debut novel, Happy Hour at Casa Dracula, “it got declined by someone who said he already had a similar project. And I was like, yeah, sure, there’s another comic Latino vampire novelist out there. Then I found out that Mario had a three-book deal for wacky Latino vampire novels. Whoda thunk?”

Since both of them have recently come out with their second novels—X-Rated Bloodsuckers for Mario, Midnight Brunch for Marta—I thought it would be a fun idea to bring them together for an Author2Author chat, even though the blog they created with fellow vampire novelist Jeanne Stein, Biting Edge has evolved into a new permutation, with Marta leaving to concentrate on a new blog called Vampire Wire. And here they are!

Mario Acevedo: Marta, you’ve written a contemporary novel about a Latina and a vampire, but what binds the story is your humor. How hard is it for you to use humor as a literary device? Are you a naturally funny person? If someone was reading your book and started laughing, what would be your reaction?

Marta Acosta: I grew up in a family with three boys, and we all told funny stories and jokes. I didn’t realize that “chicks aren’t funny” until I got older. As much as I love serious literature, I also love jokesters, from Mel Brooks to Monty Python, Richard Pryor to Dave Chappell, Will Shakespeare to P.G. Wodehouse. I will make a joke about anything, and humor is absolutely essential to the way in which I deal with the world and its attendant sorrows and tragedies. Or maybe I’m justifying my essential silliness, whatever.

I was always trying to reconcile my compulsion to make jokes with my love of good writing. I’m from the working class, and I dislike the elitism of some in the literary world who often seem more interested in internecine battling over who is the most sensitive when sleeping on 20 mattresses set atop an Oprah Book Club selection than in books themselves. I really honed my comic voice when I wasted my work time on a company e-forum. My greatest thrill was when wrote something that entertained everyone, from the young receptionists to the Ph.Ds. It was an easy step going from there to writing humorous columns in newspapers.

What I didn’t anticipate is the resistance to women as humorists. Guys are all, “Women don’t have a sense of humor. It’s chick lit crap.” So I’m all, “Yeah, we do, but our humor extends beyond the scatological, you jackass.”

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24 May 2007 | author2author |

Author2Author: Wendy Salinger & Miranda Beverly-Whittemore

Miranda Beverly-Whittemore and Wendy Salinger have been friends ever since they met at the 92 Street Y’s Unterberg Poetry Center, where Salinger ran the Schools Project for many years, while Beverly-Whittemore helped curate the Center’s excellent reading series. When Salinger’s memoir, Listen, came out last year, the two of them got together to talk about their writing experiences. At the time, Beverly-Whittemore had seen her first novel, The Effects of Light, published the year before; her latest book, Set Me Free, has just been published.

Wendy Salinger: Your first novel is loosely based on your own experience, while my memoir uses some fictional techniques to tell the story of my childhood. Do you think there’s anything new in the current debate about truth in memoir, or is it just about fundamental ambiguities between genres? I mean, is there anything left to say about the James Frey scandal?

Miranda Beverly-Whittemore: You write on the copyright page of Listen, “Because remembering is an act of the imagination, the only real name I’ve used in this book is my own.” Reading that, I thought a lot about the responsibility of the writer when she takes on incidents from her own life. I first read Listen when it was still a novel entitled Victor Dying, and I know that it was a winding road for you to see the book as a memoir, and that in doing so, you knew you needed to give your family some degree of anonymity.

Although my novel has an entirely made-up plot, the jumping-off place for that plot was based in my real-life experience of being photographed by a close family artist friend. Because the real photographs of this friend have been misrepresented and misinterpreted by the religious right, I knew I had to be very cautious about separating the made-up photographs in my book from the real photographs in the world, and the photographer in my novel from the photographer in my life—for my sake, for the sake of my readership, and, perhaps most importantly, for the photographer and my family. I did that by making sure that everyone close to me who had the potential be hurt by my book’s subject matter had the chance to read the book and talk to me about it. It was ultimately essential to me that I approached them. Not because I was asking their permission, but because they were fabulous resources.

In light of all that, what fascinates me about the James Frey stuff is that the debate was dumbed down to the lowest common denominator, that is, Oprah’s berating of James Frey for “lying.” A lot of good could have come out of all of this with some interesting discussion about blurred lines between genre, about what memoir is, about exactly why Oprah was so angry—what that says about her as a cultural bellwether. I get that she was embarrassed. But I also believe that Frey was punished for something that’s a central issue in our country right now; our President lied to get us to war, for God’s sakes. It’s no surprise that this is what we’re dealing with right now, culturally: Kaavya Viswanathan, JT Leroy, James Frey—I think they just happen to be the literary versions of the lying all around us. At least something’s prompting a discussion about lying!

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21 March 2007 | author2author |