Ellen Hawley is the author of Other People Manage. Her latest novel, A Decent World, was published by Swift Press on 15 June 2023.
Ellen kindly answered a few of my questions.
1. Tell us about A Decent World.
Josie Dawidowitz is a loving grandmother, a dedicated teacher, and a lifelong Communist. After she dies, Summer–the granddaughter she raised–is left to reckon with her emotional and political legacy. Will Summer break off contact with the mother who abandoned her? Will she accept the return of Josie's brother, who Josie excluded from the family? Does she want to return to the polyamorous household she lived in before she moved home to care for Josie? And above all, does she still believe that a small group of ordinary people can change the world?
2. What inspired the book?
All I had at the beginning was the image of a woman standing on the sidewalk outside a music venue–a bar, probably, but it might've been a club–where her estranged daughter was performing. Or maybe it was the daughter was outside and the mother was performing. The image was that uncertain. Either way, she couldn't bring herself to go in–the estrangement ran too deep.
That moment never made it into the book, and as the story developed it turned out that the daughter wouldn't have gone anywhere near her mother's performances if she could avoid it. She was past wanting a reconciliation.
I have no idea why that moment came to me or why it had the emotional power to hold me. I'm neither of those women. The writing process is full of mysteries. The trick, for me, is not to pretend I can control them.
3. Do you plan before you start writing?
I have tried, but it never works. For me, starting a story or a novel is like finding a thread and pulling it. If I'm lucky, something unravels. That's an odd image for a story. Knitting would make more sense. You move the needles and something grows, stitch by stitch, but never mind: for me it's about unraveling, pulling gently enough that I don't break the thread.
Maybe the reason planning a novel out beforehand doesn't work for me is because I don't know my characters until I write them. They grow with the story. Any choices I make for them in advance would be arbitrary and false.
I do sometimes know, either at the beginning or when I'm partway through, where a book's headed. Or I think I know, but I don't always turn out to be right, and even when I am, by the time I get there the place I land isn't quite what I imagined.
Another way to explain how I write is to say that my stories take on depth as they go. In the novel I'm working on now, I find myself going backward a lot, deepening the events and interactions. At the moment, I seem to be going backward more than I go forward.
The closest I ever came to plotting out a book was a half-page summary for the novel that became Open Line. I imagined it was about a radio talk-show host who wanted to quit her job and claimed, on the air one night, that the Vietnam War never happened, it was all some massive government coverup of she had no idea what and didn't much care.
Yes, I had a job I wanted to quit. Maybe that's what allowed me to write the summary, and it was helpful to have it. I referred back to it a few times when I got stuck, but what eventually happened in the book wasn't what I'd outlined. Among other things, she never had wanted to quit her job–she loved it. She was only bored.
4. Does anything about publishing a book still surprise you?
People's responses, always. I'm not talking about reviewers, professional or amateur. They're important but they're not what I'm talking about. You send a book out into the world, it lands in people's hands, and you know nothing about what happens between them and the words you've written unless, very rarely, one of them writes and lets you know you've touched their life. That hasn't happened to me often, but when it does it means a lot.
5. If you could read only one book for the rest of your life, what would it be?
ONE BOOK? That's a horrible thought.
6. What question have you not been asked that you wish you had, and what's the answer?
Interesting question, and I wish I could come up with an equally interesting answer, but the best I can do is tell you about a question I've been worried someone would ask about A Decent World but that they haven't: What's my personal connection to the political constellation that formed around that estranged mother and daughter I started with?
Why am I bringing it up myself? Because I don't have a better answer to your question and because, what the hell, let's get this issue out of the way.
I grew up in the US during the 1950s red scare. I'm the daughter of Communists. The world of the novel is a world I know well, and it's a world I avoided writing about for years. I couldn't imagine anyone would either accept it or understand it. I couldn't imagine anyone would publish the novel, but it was clear to me that if I didn't write it, I wouldn't write anything else.
Moving from the US to Britain–I've been here for 17 years now–means living in a different political atmosphere. You can say the word socialist and people don't pass out. They don't check to see if you have horns. You can even say communist. In the US too, these are different times. Not necessarily easier ones, but at least different. Still, I'm marked by the fears I grew up with. As a child, I learned not to talk about these things. Even now, I take a deep breath before launching into them.
There's a belief among at least some writers that we do our best work when we tackle our deepest fears. If that's true, this book should come wrapped in gold foil and have stars on it. It scares the hell out of me. It's also very close to my heart. I love some of the characters. I can't imagine having only one book to read for the rest of my life, but if I had to write and rewrite one book for the rest of my life, this would be the one.
About the book
Summer Dawidowitz has spent the past year caring for her grandmother, Josie ― a lifelong Communist, a dedicated teacher, and the founder of an organization that tutors schoolchildren. When Josie dies, everything that seemed solid in Summer's life comes into question. What sort of relationship will she have with the mother who abandoned her? Will she meet with the brother Josie exiled from the family? Does she really want to go back to the non-monogamous household she was part of before she moved in to take care of Josie?
Finally, does she still believe a small, committed group of citizens can change the world, and if so - how?
You can buy a copy of the book here.
(This is an affiliate link. You can also purchase A Decent World from your local independent bookshop.)
No comments:
Post a Comment