Q: Your first book, Short People, was a collection of short
stories. What's
it like to make the jump from short stories to a novel?
The process of writing
a novel is utterly different from that of writing a short story. I'd
heard other authors describe the process, mostly in terms of form and
structure - how the rigor of the story form demands an authorial control
that novel writing does not; how in a novel the author can meander freely
through his or her imagination. But none of this prepared me for writing
my own novel.
I did not feel liberated.
What I felt instead was
a pressure to both expand my thematic concerns and control a narrative
that seemed always on the verge of spiraling away from itself. As the
months, then years, of writing slid by, I grew less and less sure of
the story I was trying to tell. Unlike the short stories I'd written
whose formal aspects revealed themselves as the writing progressed,
my novel seemed to grow baggier with each successive day of work. After
two years I reread what I had and threw out all but twenty-five of the
two hundred fifty pages I'd amassed.
I began to write fragments
of scene - whatever I could conceive of my characters doing, regardless
of how these moments might relate to each other. And somehow, by letting
go of my concern with the form the book would take, the writing became
both easier and better. Eventually, the story began to emerge and the
novel took on the shape it needed.
I've written short stories,
plays and screenplays, but writing a novel was by far the hardest thing
I've done as a writer. The other forms I've worked in require craft
and execution, along with a certain amount of inspiration. A novel requires
something more than this. Corny as it sounds, a novel requires faith
and humility.
Q: The Los Angeles
Times wrote of Short People, "Furst makes it all explicit-the cruelty, the astonishment, the treachery, the rapture-and
in doing so creates a thoughtful if disturbing portrait of what it means
to be a child." While that book focused on the lives of children, this
focuses on the lives of an adolescent girl and her mother. It's worth pointing out
you're not a child, nor a woman. How are you so comfortable writing from these points of view so different from your own?
Writing fiction is an
act of transformation. You begin with a fragment of idea, an emotion,
some nebulous concern you don't really understand but can't stop
obsessing over. You have a need to tell, but what to tell, exactly,
isn't quite clear. And as you toss this slippery notion around in
your head, details begin to adhere to it. Some of them rise from your
own experience, some of them are pinched from the lives of people you
know or things you've observed. Some you make up completely. As the
idea grows and becomes clearer, as you get closer to articulating this
thing that for a thousand reasons is essential to your understanding
of the world, you begin to find that the vehicle through which you're
expressing yourself looks nothing like your own experience. There's
something deeply autobiographical in everything I write, but the relationship
between the narratives I create and the facts of my life is not one
to one.
So, when I write from
the point of view of a woman, or that of a child - or any other point
of view, for that matter -I do so because the story demands it. I try
not to focus on questions of legitimacy and authority. The reality of
a suburban mother in Minneapolis is no less alien to me than, say, the
reality of a hedge-fund manager or an itinerant worker or the law-school
student living in the apartment below mine. The process by which I go
about creating my characters remains consistent, regardless of the differences
between them and me. I try to draw them as individuals, and as such
their personalities, thoughts and feelings are defined not by assumptions
on my part about this or that type of person - generalizations that
may or may not be true - but by who they are as singular beings.
Q: The central relationship in The Sabotage Cafe is between a mother and her
daughter. What did you find compelling about the mother/daughter dynamic?
Since I'll never be
either, I'm leery of making proclamations about mother/daughter relationships,
but I can speak to the specific mother/daughter relationship within
the book. One of the guiding principles in The Sabotage Cafe is the notion of empathy, its
limits and its uses.
Having raised Cheryl,
Julia has been both a witness to and an active agent in her daughter's
developing consciousness. After sixteen years, her wishes for her daughter
are inseparable from her wishes for herself; she no longer knows where
her own experience ends and her daughter's begins. She depends on
her daughter's belief in her virtue - in her ability to provide more
forgiving options than her own parents did - for her emotional and psychological
well-being.
Cheryl, of course, sees
things completely differently. She's acutely aware of the bond between
her mother and herself, but instead of cherishing and cultivating it,
she feels imprisoned by the responsibility it places on her shoulders.
To become an individual in her own right, she must sever this bond without
regard for the pain her abandonment might cause.
Q. How did you choose
to focus on this relationship?
Why this particular conflict
of wills needed to be played out between a mother and a daughter rather
than one of the other parent/child configurations is hard for me to
explain. Of the relationships I could have focused on, this seemed the
most complex.
Q. Did you use a real
relationship as your guide?
I wasn't attempting
to fictionally recreate the lives of any of my relatives or friends,
if that's what you mean. I do know many women, though, and within
my limited abilities I try to understand them and how they see the world.
Q: There is a fictitious
band in the novel called Nobody's Fool. You write:
"Of all the bands to rise out of the '80s bubble, they were the
one that best melded the chaos of second-wave American punk with the catchy melodic
sense of the Stones, the Beatles and the Clash." Did you have a
real band in mind while describing Nobody's Fool?
Nobody's Fool was loosely
inspired by The Replacements, my favorite band of that era, which is
to say that they, too, are a scruffy bunch who hailed from the Twin
Cities. The two bands actually have little in common. I can only imagine
that The Replacements were much nicer guys than the ones in my band.
Q: How does music play
an important role in The Sabotage Cafe?
For the teenagers in my
book, music serves as a coded form of communication. It not only provides
the soundtrack against which they mold their self-images, but also informs
them - or they imagine it does - of a hidden, long-lived struggle for
what they, in their grander moments, might call liberation. In certain
strains of punk music - what might loosely and not altogether accurately
be grouped under the rubric hardcore - they detect the promise
of an anarchic alternative to the consumer culture that surrounds them.
Of course, there's an
ironic element to all this. The attitudes of the bands and the attitudes
of the kids who construct their identities in emulation of these bands
don't necessarily mirror each other, and this is one of the themes
I explore in the book.
Q: The scene in the book that I'm still thinking about is where a dog
is beaten and killed. What was it like to write that?
Hard. For a long time
I tried to avoid writing that scene. It's a central turning point
in the book and I knew I had to pitch it exactly right if it was going
to have the intended effect. The brutality of the action wasn't what
concerned me, though. Much of my work is dark and at this point I don't
flinch easily. My major concern in writing this scene was how to convey
Julia's fragile state of mind. She�s less worried at this point
about the dog's safety than she is about her daughter's safety,
but contemplating the possibility that something terrible has happened
to Cheryl is beyond her capability. What she is capable of is projecting
her fears onto a proxy. Added to this is the fact that throughout the
book Julia is to a large degree attributing her own past to her daughter - telling
the story of her own wild youth as though it is Cheryl's experience - and
this scene is one of the major instances of slippage in her narrative.
Accomplishing all these goals without stating them outright proved to
be rather difficult.
Q: You write about the underground scene in Minneapolis with a great
deal of authority and knowledge. Do you have first-hand experience with
this or how did you go about researching a counter-culture?
I've never lived in
Minneapolis, but I did spend many of my formative years across the river
in Wisconsin. I've visited the city many times and for some reason
a disproportionate number of my friends were raised there. My teenage
years coincide with the heyday of the 80s DIY music scene, and though
I wasn't involved in the movement, I was an avid fan. I absorbed the
lore and, from my isolated small town in the middle of the heartland,
imagined myself to be part of this society to which I had no access.
My friends and I would drive to Madison whenever we could in hopes of
finding a way into this world.
Later, in the early 90's,
while I was living in Alphabet City, I found myself in much closer proximity
to the counter-cultural fringe. While I wasn't a gutter punk myself,
the streets I walked down were swarming with them. They in turn fascinated,
infuriated, inspired and frightened me.
Since then, I've noticed
that almost every large city in America contains at least a handful
of these kids. The scenes on the coasts - New York, DC, Berkeley, Portland,
Seattle - are well documented, but the landlocked cities, where the
despair is greater because the options seem so much farther away, aren't
talked about. The Midwest is more diverse than people often assume it
to be; alongside the proverbial polite, friendly people live radical,
independent thinkers. I felt it was important to give credence to these
less visible elements in the center of the country.
Rather than researching
the actual scene in Minneapolis, I attempted in The Sabotage Cafe to create a plausible counter-culture
in which my characters could live.
Q: Who are your literary influences, both contemporary and classic?
When I'm working on
a project, I find myself searching out other work containing similar
themes and ideas. I like to imagine that to some degree I�m not only
engaged in telling a story but also taking part in a conversation with
my fellow writers, both my contemporaries and those who�ve come before
me. The Sabotage Cafe, with its themes of social and
political transgression, is to some degree a response to Dostoyevsky's
THE POSSESSED and the drug-fueled books of Kerouac and the Beats. Certain
questions informed my work: How do I write a rock and roll book that's
not about a band trying to hit the big time? How do I write a book about
transgression that doesn't fall into the formulaic drugs-and-recovery
mode. Among the contemporary writers who loomed large in my writing
of this book are Mary Gaitskill, Denis Johnson and Nick Flynn.
That said, I suspect that
whatever I write next will draw on an entirely different set of influences.
Q: What can we expect
to see next from you?
I've been messing around
with a number ideas, trying to figure out which project is most necessary
for me to focus on now. My writing process is such that I bounce around
a lot until, eventually, I find myself deep in the middle of an urgent
idea. What I can say with certainty is that my characters are growing
older. I think I'm pretty much done with kids for a while.