Interview with Caroline Leavitt and myself

Caroline L:  I always think there is a reason to write, something haunting you. What's your reason?

Kristin McC:  I absolutely agree.  That something is haunting me is the reason to write the book.

If I could sum it up in one paragraph, I'd just do a brief essay.  The struggle through the thickets of consciousness, subconsciousness and the dreamland of unconsciousness is why I write; there is something, some answer, I am trying to achieve, or completely explore.

     In Velocity, it was the wild but perfectly, as I saw it, logical connection of grief to sexual obsession. It was a way this particular young woman dealt with the loss of her mother, and along with that, the loss of her capacity to communicate with her father.  It's about authority, the need for it, the defiance of it, and all the old wounds of adolescence.  It's about doing anything except feel the pain of death – or being orphaned.
     It's also about the realms of worlds that have always existed around you/one/her as a child that my character, Ellie Lowell, was somehow unaware of – eg, people like Jesse (a biker, half Cherokee, who deals with but is not a Hell's Angel, squatting in some ramble-down shack – living by his rules entirely, trusting not white man, not Indian – but perhaps, very briefly, this little white girl who clings to his every move).
It's about going home and finding it utterly foreign; it's about risk over security, breaking rather than keeping the rules, about sexuality that in a flash seems to steal your soul, body first.  Of building a world of illusion and wanting to literally die when it crumbles.
And for me as a first-time novelist, the challenge was to write with equal force about the terrifying nihilism of death, of losing one's mother, and the crazed pull to sex – to write about sex graphically without ever veering into the porno-.

      For Some Girls, it was about trying to understand how it is that we learn to be women by studying the way other women become so – mothers, sisters, friends, and finally, lovers.  It was about the romance that only women can make when they're together, and the fluidity of gender (this was waaaay back in the Dark Ages of 1989, Manhattan), the terror of seeing oneself in a way one never would have imagined, the struggle to assimilate new aspects of one's being – and one's sexual identity is the cornerstone, I have nearly always found (why 'Pat' of SNL was such a disturbing character!) of identity.
I also wanted to write about the way only women can appreciate certain other women's beauty, and most of all, how one becomes captivated by a singular intelligence, sensuality, and soul.  How deep that attraction goes.  It was me walking a tightrope between 'coming out' vs simply (as if!) 'falling in love', perhaps just once, with perhaps only this one woman; does this make her bi?  Technically, I guess so, though it's not how I think of her/them.  
It is also, crucially, my love letter to Manhattan; once I got it all down on paper, there was this sense:  I can rest now.

And with Hollywood Savage I wanted to explore the theme of fidelity and in/  from the male point of view, for reasons that made a strangely sympathetic autobiographical sense to me.  I wanted to write about Hollywood and its delirious illogic, its addiction to cliché, creative run by bureaucrats, and the difficulty of converting novel to script.
It was a contrast between cities, and an exploration (inspired in some odd degree Proust's The Captive) of passion, jealousy, the need to hold, to have, to keep.  It's about the humiliation of having someone else seduce your Other, and the weird need for revenge; and it was about two very different women who nevertheless have a whole world (one man) in common.

        The older I get, the more every book is really about New York.  In the first, it's about a girl who left to find herself, did, then came back home, very briefly, for a life-changing summer in North Carolina.
In Some Etc, it's about a young woman's flight to NYC to become someone more like her next door neighbor, and in Hollywood Savage it's about living on the other end of the country and looking back, with extreme homesickness, at the place you finally, with great effort, made your own.
I miss New York could be the name of all my books, I sometimes think (but – NAH).

CL:  What kind of writer are you?

KMc:  I don't outline unless I get lost in the morass (see:  work in progress).  I crave the Muse, love Elizabeth Gilbert's take on it, pray to James Salter for help, and read his work along with Amy Hempel's and Don DeLillo's and Antoine St. Exupery's and Jayne Anne Phillip' short stories, Joy Williams' earlier work, as well as Michael Ondaatje and Marguerite Duras for inspiration when I feel I'm just going through the motions.

What question didn't I ask that I should have?

Only this:  why is it that people will ascribe 'James Salter' –like qualities to male writers simply because they write about men and women, but never see his influence in any women??  (See hero not named above.  Who needs to give herself away that badly.  TMI, ri???)

(Yeah maybe not include that last bit; don't wanna give myself away entirely).

Please let me know if there's anything else you need, or want from me.
Again, Caroline:  thank you.