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"The Broken Estate" and "When the Kissing Had to Stop"
Literary criticism remains alive and well (the novel is another story) in the work of two masters of the form.
By Euny Hong Koral
[07/01/99]

Kafka of the Great White North
Franz's niece takes the Yukon.
By Anne Beatts
[06/30/99]

Reviews
"The Wonders of the Invisible World"
These brooding, crushingly accurate stories are as forgiving as they come.
By Austin Bunn
[06/30/99]

Ivory Tower
Do what you want and the identity crisis will follow
A graduate student finds that there are tougher dreams to pursue than scaling the walls of the ivory tower.
By Christine Kenneally
[06/30/99]

The free market or your soul
Two conservative pundits play a game of moral Twister trying to reconcile consumerism and traditional values.
By Gavin McNett
[06/29/99]

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If a murder happens, the first question is, is she arrested or not?. If she wasn't, what's the point? It negates the act. I've always been concerned with what happens to children in our society when there's nobody left to take care of them. I've always been aware of that, and of course she would end up in foster care -- and start moving from house to house and really seeing the various components of our society. We don't have a unitary society anymore, you know; it's very fragmented. I look up and down my block in Silverlake and there is a different universe in every house. Fifty completely different worlds and who would see that better than somebody in foster care?

This is the first novel you've written?

This is the first novel that's seen the light of day.

Tell me a little bit about your writing life up until this point.

Oh, the long sad story. No -- it's a story of courage and struggle. I started writing when I was 21. I was going to become an historian. And then I realized there was more to the world than just the past. I didn't want to spend my life in the library. I wanted to be Anaïs Nin, I wanted to have adventures and look glamorous. What a mistaken idea of what a writer's life is like!

Then what?

I wrote short stories. I went to film school for a while. I wrote screenplays, which were terrible. And I realized that if I was never going to make any money at writing, never going to sell anything as long as I lived, I might as well do what I want to do. Because then, no matter what, I would have spent my life doing what I want to do. So, I went back to writing fiction and just kept writing and learning. I had to learn to write. The desire preceded the ability. Let's see, I started writing fiction in '78 or '79, and I went to film school for a semester -- not even a semester. It was a debacle.

Why was it a debacle?

Because I'm really a writer. To make films you have to have boundless energy, you have to work and play with others really, really well and I'm really a more contemplative kind of person. I like to sit at home and think, a lot. And have time to read and think and walk the dog. To live in my car and eat at Burger King three times a day and be constantly trying to persuade people to do things … I just couldn't do it. In film, you reenact things in physical reality. And physical reality is recalcitrant. I can write a line like, "She picks him up and drags him onto the bed," but if she can't pick him up and you're struggling, then it's two hours later, and people are starting to walk, and say, "Hey, I got to go." It was just wrong, but at least I found out. It was terrible. I was crying every morning when I woke up and had to do it again. My husband said, just forget it, forget it.

So, I went back to writing fiction. I became a newspaper editor in Colorado. I was the editor/reporter/photographer, I set the type, I laid out the pages. I did that for two years, which is a very demanding job. And then when I quit in '87, I wrote 18 short stories that first year and I've been writing ever since. It's been 20 years since I started writing. It was 12 years after I first started writing before I published my first short story. My "overnight success" is the result of 20 years of learning to write. A lot of it is determination and trying to find the teacher who has what you lack.

Where did you study writing?

Well, I had taken a couple of UCLA extension classes, but I didn't find any of my writing classes particularly helpful. I got to a point where I could tell a story, but I would get rejections like, "Interesting story, but what's unique about your sentences?" Oh, it drove me crazy! What do you mean, "What's unique?" What do you want me to do, put the verb at the front? I tossed and turned for years over that one.

Were these notes from editors?

From editors. Up to that point the fiction classes I had taken were on the lax side. I found myself teaching more than learning. But there was a writer I adored, who wrote very lyrical prose. What a beautiful writer, Kate Braverman. I signed up for her UCLA workshop and then she invited me to work with her private workshop.

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