Editor’s Note: Last fall, after publication of their most recent novels At Last and The Gossip Columnist’s Daughter, Marisa Silver and Peter Orner participated in a back and forth about the books, the art of long-form fiction, and the necessity of literary community. Both are exemplars of what might be described as a kind of encompassing generosity, a sense that writing doesn’t exist in isolation but rather as a means of connection. A conversation, if you will. This is true not only of the way they carry themselves, their engagement with and enthusiasm for literature, but also in the way their work operates. These are writers, in other words, whose generosity extends to their readers because it comes out of their own experience of reading itself. In this conversation, they range widely across a variety of subjects but what stands out most fully is a shared capaciousness, in which reading and writing grow out of a similar space, a similar impulse, and language, in all its many permutations, is paramount.

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Marisa Silver: Peter, we’ve been friends and teaching colleagues for a long time, but I think this might be the first time we’ve published books practically simultaneously and the first time we’ve been able to share the publishing experience in real time. For me, something wonderful about this has been that my bowled-over excitement about your latest novel, and the way I’ve felt this sort of urgent compulsion to tell everyone I know to read it, has reminded me about the sheer excitement of new work coming into the world. And this feeling goes a long way as I experience the inevitable ups and downs of putting a new book out there. I think at one point you and I thought of prefacing each section of this conversation with our most harrowing book tour stories. But despite those moments of, hmm, humbling, the fact of putting a book out that might reach someone the way your book reached me…well, it matters. 

 

Peter Orner: Let me tell you about the one guy at a reading I had in Seattle. A postman who’d come in out of the rain. Nice guy. I gave him my own copy. Is there anything more humbling than putting a book out into the world? You can stand in a bookstore (if they carry the book) and watch someone look over your book like it’s a piece of roadkill. Ah, but there’s a new Dan Brown! I listened to a podcast interview the other day with a famous streaker. Feels a bit like that, but less proud, you know what I mean? A streaker owns it. My inclination is to hide, which is completely counterintuitive. Maybe I should consider streaking.

No writer has been more supportive than you, Marisa. I think we first met in Los Angeles in 2006 after my first novel, The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo, came out. The working title was An Ordinary Drought. Part of me regrets that I allowed my publisher to talk me out of the original. Anyway, you saw something in a book I’d poured my heart and soul into, and I’ve been immensely grateful ever since. But far more than this, what I’m grateful for are the characters you’ve peopled the world with. That’s a weird sentence but I’m going to let it stand. I’ve been reading you since Babe in Paradise, a sacred text and one my favorite story collections of all time. Your people are, as in only the very best fiction, utterly multidimensional, surprising, so vulnerably human on the page. Gallant, Munro, Taylor, Silver. That’s the level I’m talking about. And this new book—Evelyn! Helene! Francie. Ruth. Tom…Even the little thief. They’re alive and now I’m carrying their lives around with me. And that’s what this is about. Not that we don’t forget this as we endure the tribulations—and occasional rare triumphs—of putting a book out into the world. That we are in this weird business of putting fictional people out into the world. Does the world need them? I’ve got to believe it does…One character at a time. But about that wet postman in Seattle…

 

MS: I see your wet postman and raise you four people and a dog, which was the crowd I once drew at a bookstore in Healdsburg, California. The dog sat in a chair, which I thought was nice because it made me think I was actually reading to an audience of five. But here’s the thing: I was recently talking to my son, who’s a grad student and teaches at his university, and we were discussing the problem of students paying more attention to whatever is happening on their screens than to the lecturer. He said he teaches to the kids who show up to listen and learn. And I think that’s a pretty good way to think about book events, too. Sure, it’s great to talk to forty or sixty people, but it’s also great to talk to five because they showed up, ready to listen. (Well, maybe not the dog.)

The intimacy of that—well, sometimes I forget that what’s really going on when we publish is that we are having a very intimate relationship with each person who reads our books. It’s a one-to-one relationship. We mostly have no idea who those readers are, but that somehow makes that intimacy even more intriguing. So, even before we met, I felt I was already in a conversation with you because I had read Esther Stories which was unlike anything I’d encountered in terms of the fullness of the worlds and characters you summoned with this elegant compression that felt like sleight of hand magic, and the most exquisite and dead-on accurate use of language. And then I read Mavala Shikongo and because she was such a brilliantly complicated character (I don’t think it’s possible for you to write a character who doesn’t feel like they have blood flowing through them), I was completely bound up with her. 

So maybe there’s some way that fictional characters remind us what it means to take people’s emotional worlds into our own, to give them our consideration and our care. Sometimes readers might say “I didn’t like that character” or “I wouldn’t have made the choices she made.” But I think the beauty of fiction, and of being drawn in to the complicated interiority of astonishing inventions like Irv and Essie and Babs and Lou from your new novel, who feel to me as alive and perplexing and filled with unrecognized longings as anyone I know, is that a book asks you not to dismiss but to do the work of understanding. Which is probably what we ought to be doing more of in real life, too.

You and I did an event together in Massachusetts and I wanted to ask you about something I started thinking about after we were finished. I think writers are often asked to describe what their book is about, and this has gotten me thinking about the question of “aboutness” and also the question of meaning. It’s commonplace to say that meaning is in the eye of the beholder—in this case, the reader—but I wanted to ask about your sense of meaning as you write. For me, I have no real idea what I’m writing about or what it means while I write (and sometimes, even after I write). I start with a shred of an idea. 

I had a memory from childhood when one of my grandmothers said to me: “You love me more than your other grandmother, don’t you?” That moment has stayed with me for decades and it was the shred with which I began At Last. I didn’t know my grandmothers well enough to write about them, so I wrote about two invented women and tried to explore what the dynamic might be between two people to provoke one of them to say such a thing.

So, yeah, I guess the novel is nominally “about” two grandmothers who compete fiercely with each other for love. But as for what the novel means? I’m not sure I’d want to reduce it by naming meaning. I certainly didn’t write toward meaning. I just wrote about characters in situations and tried to see what choices they made when confronted by obstacles and how those choices suggested their ideas about themselves and how those ideas are shaped by their times. And how the accumulation of choices added up to whole lives. I guess one of my goals is to find a shapely way to contain the unruly messiness of life.

I wondered what your relationship is to meaning?

 

PO: Wow, pretty wild to hear that this majestic family novel grew out of one line of remembered dialogue. So much in that, in the fact that you held on to it, that one of your grandmothers said it. Still, to think that Evelyn and Helene came to be because of one loaded question…Amazing. 

“What’s your book about?” I dread the question and always try to duck it. How to reduce all these years of work to, well, it’s about blah blah blah. Usually, and maybe this is the cynic in me, I don’t know that people listen to the answer. Lately, I’ve been keeping it simple. What’s your new book about? It’s about generational revenge.

But meaning? That’s a tougher one. I love what you say about trying to contain the unruly messiness of life. That resonates a lot. That our job is to put some of that messiness between a couple of covers. I’d also say that for me, it’s about memory. My memories, my character’s memories—what to do with them? How to reconcile the fact that every step we take is for better or worse encumbered by something we remember? 

You’ve got a line, late in At Last, “The problem with memories, she thought as she sat down to wait, was that they were as exasperating as children: totally uncontrollable and always interrupting you…” That says it. I think everything I’ve tried to say on the page wrestles with this uncontrollable narrative in my head, in my characters’ heads. Why can’t we shake certain memories? Few of my own memories are part of The Gossip Columnist’s Daughter, but there’s one, about Jed wearing a sailor suit. Jed’s not me, but I was, for a very brief time, forced to wear a fucking sailor suit as my dress up clothes. I was miserable in that stupid get-up, but it sure as hell gave me something to remember later.

My question back at you:

I was so drawn into this extended family, to Francie, to Evelyn, to Helene, Ruth, Tom, Jenny. And some of the more minor characters, like Scotty. So deeply enmeshed in their lives and so moved as they all get older and move on, at least some of them, with their lives. Sticking with meaning: What did these fictional people come to mean to you? Were you bereft when you had to leave them to it? 

 

MS: I laughed at your answer because, even though I try never to conflate author and character, I did imagine little Peter Orner in a sailor suit. And I love this idea about memory. In your novel, you write, “the pivotal episode of our lives happens before we even exist.” Maybe our memories play incessantly because we are trying to grasp that original episode. 

You write about this so stirringly with Jed’s obsession with Cookie’s death, his desire to recreate the relationship between his grandparents and Cookie’s parents, his passionate excavation of their mid-century life in Chicago and somehow (and this is one of the masterstrokes of your novel) you make me see why all this has to do with his sense of being at sea in his life. At one point Jed says of Cookie, “She’s my loneliness.” Which is a line that stopped me in my tracks.  

And maybe this idea of the past’s hold on the present is a very roundabout way of answering your question about what my characters mean to me. My answer has a bit to do with my interest in whole-life narratives. My novel tracks the lives of Helene and Evelyn from their youths to their deaths or near deaths. I like how this kind of narrative can dignify the not-so-simple fact of ordinary endurance. I loved writing these women because they each have a very strong self-mythology they hold onto as they try so hard to control any situation they are in. They keep running at their predicaments, armed with the certainty that they are right about everything, only to find themselves a little more banged up than they were before. I wasn’t sad when I left them—there’s always a moment where I know I’ve told a story and there’s no more to tell—but I loved living inside their emotional worlds and finding ways for them to make awkward stabs at self-knowledge.

I’ve been so eager to talk to you about the astonishing structure of your book,  which delivers a lot of the emotional impact of the novel in terms of the powerful and unexpected way you allowed me to come to ever more complex understandings of the characters and what drives them. The book felt like a spiral that moved both outward and inward at the same time, and certain stories—I’m thinking about the stalwart and heartbreaking Sol, and Judith, the little seen but pivotal character—are background action until you bring them into sharp focus. How did you figure this out?

 

PO: (…somewhere there is a picture of me in that fucking sailor suit.)

I love what you say about Helen and Evelyn and the certainty they carry around with them, “only to find themselves more banged up than they were before.” Doesn’t this say it all? Isn’t this what we see when we sit down and talk to an old friend we haven’t seen in years? That life will bang up anybody. And there it is, while you sit across from each other having coffee. Even Helene and Evelyn who at times seem so invincible. They endure such knocks, and we are there, readers, watching them make all these mistakes that make up their lives. Maybe it comes from not forcing meaning? 

What I take above all from your new book is that there is no road map, period. That certainty is an illusion. And maybe the best we can do as writers is just pay a little attention to the people we didn’t pay enough attention to in life. That’s the case with the very distant real-life models of both Solly and Judith. Family members I never paid much attention to until years later, after they were gone. It’s sad, but the truth of it. And we all do it, because how much bandwidth have we got to pay a whole lot of attention beyond, at a certain point, our immediate families? 

So, yeah, Solly and Judith, characters based on people I knew as a kid and hardly noticed. But then, years later, there they are. And you realize something you should have known long ago, that should have been obvious, that they had their own full lives and their own memories that died with them. All that buried drama, including moments of exhilaration—the lost days when Solly fell in love, for instance—are totally erased from the record. 

For this new book, I had a crazy notion that the people you think are peripheral are actually the key… For some reason, it makes me think of your wonderful scene with the horse, Mary Lou, who stumbles and then gets up and runs like all hell. A scene I read three times over to see how you did it. Evelyn, watching Mary Lou with this guy Burl—talk about memorable minor characters—feels something in the horse’s crazy freedom. The scene made me think of all these moments our people—our actual people and our characters—carry around. Moments that get lost. Or, like you say, those awkward stabs of self-knowledge, again that get so lost. Do you think this is sort of what we do? Become archivists of other people’s memories? Above all, I felt that At Last was about memory…Was this a conscious thing? Or just where you landed after imagining these people so long? 

 

MS: I think a lot about how we see the “story” of a life, and how we give it, for better or worse, narrative shape and meaning, but only when we can stand at a distance from it and have the perspective time affords. I think of this as the obit version of a life. Life in the moment it’s being lived is, as you say, mapless. But at the same time, we are constantly sourcing back to memory in an effort, very subconsciously, to comfort ourselves with the idea that there is a coherence, and that we are grounded in a long-term narrative that gives us a sense of purpose. 

I’m suspicious—that might be too gentle a word—of the cause and effect version of life, i.e., we behave the way we do because of something that happened in our past. The therapeutic version of memory. I don’t think life is such a neat syllogism. And from a fiction-making perspective, this way of thinking, for me at least, creates a flattened experience for the reader. An answer is, paradoxically, a dead end. Which is why the ending of your book is so fantastic. I will not give it away, only to say that it posits an answer of sorts but the emotional complexity of the novel and the way you paint these lives that are richly contradictory tell us that the so-called answer is not an answer at all. It’s only a door opening onto a whole new set of questions. 

But back to memory: I think the challenge, and a challenge you master in your novel, is to understand how memory really functions. Why do we remember what we do when we do? The reasons have little to do with cause and effect. They are far more elusive. The associations that we make that draw our minds to the past come at us askance and unbidden. The dimensionality of what’s going on in a mind is pretty amazing. And your book is such a fantastic illustration of that, the way Jed sources backwards and forwards constantly. If I were to sit down and look at why he remembers what he does when he does (or why he imagines what he does when he does)—if I tried to map the structure, in other words—I think I would be no closer to understanding those elusive connections because they don’t work in some obvious intellectual way. They work in the ungraspable way the mind works. Which is part of what’s so arresting about your novel.

Something else I loved was the way the novel integrates the idea of memory with the imagined. Because of course Jed is not present in the past that he explores and narrates, the past of Cookie’s death and what happened to her parents and Jed’s grandparents as a result. He has some information from family lore, from photographs, and from his childhood interactions with his grandparents and Cookie’s parents. But the novel seamlessly shifts between so-called verifiable memory and fully imagined sequences of the past. And what’s so fantastic is that we barely clock those transitions, which to me, speaks to the way the distinctions we draw between memory and invention are arbitrary and maybe not useful.

I wonder how you think about a book after it is written and released into the world. What feelings does the whole process leave you with, not the publication process, but the fact of having spent these years with these characters, of having figured out the shape their story takes. I guess what I’m asking you (and maybe me, too) is what does it mean to us having written the books we’ve written?

 

PO: Pretty floored by the generosity of your thoughts, Marisa, thank you. You help me make a little sense of what’s already sort of in the rearview mirror, you know what I mean? That’s the weird thing, we invest all these hours, all these years and then poof—we’re no longer working, our characters float away to be read or not read. Right? And of course we’re happy, for a little while maybe. A book gets done and there it is, and there’s that momentary euphoria. 

But that euphoria, at least for me, gives way to a kind of depression, not that I’m necessarily missing the characters, though I do. It’s more that I miss the work, the day-to-day figuring it out, or not figuring it out. Maybe I miss the confusion. Which is why what you say pulls me out of my funk a little. Here you are talking about Cookie and her parents and goofy Jed trying to claw his way back in time. Like my versions of them are at least momentarily real, and it warms a lonely heart a little. A lot. That sounds cheesy, but I’m going to own it. 

I was so struck by how you put it. That we are constantly sourcing back to memory in order to give us some coherence that may or may not be false, but we do it anyway. And it seems to me the idea is so much a part of the fabric of At Last, and what makes it so moving, speaking of endings…I kept thinking what are we left with at the end of the day, when everything else falls away. Our struggles with our careers, our social lives or whatever. When all that’s done and gone. Our inheritances we all know have very little to do with money. (Though I can’t resist mentioning here: easy for me to say since I was disinherited.) 

Back to my point. I think we inherit above all unanswered questions. I think of a passage early in your book, “In the months and years to come, Helene could sometimes convince herself that it didn’t matter about Irina, or whether she had been loved by Emil in a way that Helene had not. She would never know the circumstances that led him to leave her behind and come to America….” The paragraph ends, devastatingly, with: “And despite her desire to make her success in life apparent with her cashmere sweaters, and her beads, and her fine house, there were only ever questions. Why did the prick of a flower poison her sister? Why, on a muggy summer night, did her brother leap into the darkness?” There’s more wisdom and soul and honesty in this paragraph than a lot of novels, hell, a lot of lives. So yeah we put these words, words that somehow make a story, out into the world—and what a fucking world—and maybe we hope that questions like these will continue to reverberate for strangers as they do for Helene here. And do they? For those people they reach, they do.