 |
This page has been moved to a new location. The new URL is:
Please update your links and bookmarks accordingly. You will automatically be taken to the new URL in ten seconds.
February 18, 2000
Stacey D'Erasmo
By Gerry Belsha
Stacey D'Erasmo's debut novel Tea (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill) is one of those wonderful novels which welcomes you in with open arms, almost sucking you in like a black hole, giving you hope when there appears to be no hope at all. D'Erasmo's strength is her ability to dive deeply into complex, intimate truths and emotions but with a style that is stark and simple. It's a lifesaving, soulful style that always leaves you with the feeling of self-determination and power. And that is something always needed in this time when everything soulful seems to get steam rolled by fascists everywhere.
Tea is a story about Isabel Gold, a girl who at age eight, watches her mother suffer through depression, alcoholism and eventually suicide. D'Erasmo then, in triptych fashion, takes a look at Gold in her mid-teen years and then later 20s. Tea is powerful because its format fits the way life is really lived - a rhythm of day-to-day, sometimes banal events that all pull together to make Gold who she is.
D'Erasmo, born in New York City, raised in Washington D.C., only recently turned to fiction writing. She previously had worked as a feature writer and reviewer for many newspapers and magazines, including Newsday, The New York Times Book Review, Out and Harper's Review. She was a senior editor at the Voice Literary Supplement and was the first editor of Art Forum's Book Forum. Check This Out! recently spoke with D'Erasmo about Tea, the 70s and her "final" novel.
Check This Out!: Have you been getting good feedback on the book?
Stacey D'Erasmo: Yeah, everything has been going amazingly well. We went back to press on it last week, which is very good.
CTO: You actually wrote fiction before you began your journalist career and your work with the the Village Voice. Why did you stop writing fiction at that point and what brought you back to fiction?
SD: I had always written stories and poetry when I was a kid, teenager and into my 20s. I was in graduate school and I had published one short story and then I just stopped. I think that I really needed to stop actually. My writing at that time tended to be kind of dense. I think I really needed to be in the world and not in graduate school. I was a little direction less - at the end of one phrase of writing. When I went to work at the Voice, it was incredibly, explosively interesting. Working on a newspaper and especially one that is a writer's paper, which is what the Voice was and is, was unbelievably exciting. All of a sudden there is an entire world to write about and not one that I made up. It was wonderfully liberating for me as a writer, as a thinker. I really understood in a way that I hadn't before, how creative and powerful non-fiction could be. It was a tremendous education
But then I got involved with a poet. She would be working on her poems and sending them out and I started to feel a little jealous. I missed it and I wanted to go back. I wanted to start writing fiction again. But it had been a few years by then and my innocence in a certain way was gone. I really understood that most likely nothing would happen. Most likely I wouldn't get anywhere. But it just grew, my fiction writing and what I could do with. The opportunities that came my way slowly increased over time. I started about eight years ago. That is a long time. In many ways, although I had always written, I really began to learn for the first time, by going back, picking up fiction again as a grown up. I think in many ways I really began to learn for the first time and to be a beginner in a way.
CTO: Do you ever go back and read stuff that you wrote in your early 20s?
SD: Not recently, maybe in another 10 years. I think definitely that journalism taught me a lot about vernacular and about sentences. There is so much that goes on from sentence to sentence. It cleared away a lot of clutter. It is about vitality and engaging the reading. Before I worked in journalism I could never write dialogue and had no idea how to make people talk.
CTO: I, like you, grew up in the 70s. Tea really gives a good feel for what it was like to be growing up during that decade. How did we get from the looseness and freedom of that decade to the uptight and restricted 90s?
SD: I think that people got really frightened. I think the Reagan years were very horrifying. Even now it is a much more conservative time. The value system is down in the basement. The 70s were not really a time about money and being successful as much as it is now.
CTO: Where did you get your inspiration for Tea?
SD: It sort of came to me in a flash. I knew very clearly that I wanted to write in three parts about the same proto-lesbian heroine and that I wanted her to have a loss that she would have to return to in her life. There wasn't any one particular incident. In many ways there was a rhythm that came to me that I really wanted to look for and a feeling. I have always been a big fan of the coming of age novel. When done well it is a tremendously idiosyncratic and rich form. It allows you to explore a character's consciousness. I really wanted to write one and make it a triptych structure, look at her life and see what has changed.
CTO: How long did the whole writing process take?
SD: I started it in the summer of 1994, about four years.
CTO: Have you read it recently?
SD: I haven't sat down and read the whole thing straight through in awhile. Once it sort of goes through publication it becomes a commodity. It is something different.
CTO: In retrospect is there anything you would want to change about the book?
SD: Oh sure, lots of things. It's my first book. All the time, especially as I do readings now. I see an error or a place where I think something could have been done better. Whatever book you write is a record of what you were able to do up to that moment. But also, it also has a certain feel of a time. But even if I had the opportunity that I could reach in and change it, it's really gone and done now. It had its own shape and its own body and I couldn't go back in and tinker. Once in awhile I will discover a continuity error. There are a couple continuity errors.
CTO: Do you ever get frustrated when you read reviews of Tea and see a lot references made toward Isabel being gay, focusing in on a gay character, even though her sexual preference is not really a central crisis to the story? After all, when someone writes a novel about heterosexuals, critics don't point out that the characters are straight
SD: It (Isabel's sexual preference) is central to her, but not like a problem. No, I don't get frustrated. But I haven't been doing this for too long. So you will have to ask me later. I feel like it's not a crisis or trauma in the book but it is central to her character. I want people to see it. I want readers, gay and lesbian readers, to be able to find it. I want it to be an Out book and in a kind of natural way, which is the way we live our lives. It is a natural and integral part of my existence. It doesn't bother me at all because her queerness is definitely a large and vital part of her existence. And also, I haven't felt marginalised, like, "oh this is a gay book we don't have to pay attention to it." I feel actually like I have been real fortunate in the way it has been received.
CTO: You said in one of your recent interviews that very often the most powerful illusions are tied up in the most ordinary, most domestic things. Can you elaborate on that?
SD: I said that in reference to the title of the book. The first cup of tea in the novel is, not tea at all. It's what Isabel's mother calls her afternoon drink, but Isabel doesn't understand that. She thinks it's actually tea. Even as her mother slides into depression and alcoholism and suicide. Tea is something off in the corner of the picture, but that is really very important. You don't really walk around the planet like in a movie suddenly having this big abstract realization and this huge dramatic confrontational scene in regard to your illusions. These things express themselves in some of the most banal, tedious ways. Tea is not really tea. It capsulized the entire history of her illusion. Its not gratuitous. It's about what we pick up and hold and wear and touch every single day.
CTO: That is one of the wonderful things about Tea. You really don't put events and people up on a pedestal. Your writing and characters seem to make things seem obtainable and events are not extraordinary. In a way it inspires people to think that they have power in their lives to take control.SD: I'm glad that you say that because I definitely have strived for and worked very hard for a kind of naturalness and naturalness to who she is. She is special and interesting, but also, she is - you know her, you know what i mean? We all know that person.
CTO: How much writing do you do on a average day?
SD: About four or five hours. I don't know why there is this magic number of four hours, because so many writers say that. Somehow I can stay in the zone for four, maybe five hours, then after that I need to leave and do something else.
CTO: Any regular time or routine?
SD: Yeah in the morning. I try not to answer the phone, which is like satin.
CTO: What events in the last year have been inspiring to you, and what events have turned your stomach.
SD: Inspiring? This is like, will seem like, the stereotypic dykey answer, but I have to say the U.S. women's soccer team. They really blew my mind and I am not an athlete. I am not a jock at all. I was never on any team. I was riveted and I felt truly inspired by watching them I thought that it was amazing, seeing all of these woman really pushing themselves to the limit.
CTO: What is really amazing is that the large percentage of the crowd seemed to be teenage girls. That has to be inspiring to - have role models.
SD: Oh it's fantastic. I completely wish that I had that, even to watch, as a teenager, Just because you are watching women not be afraid to fall down, to sweat, to go the limit and that is fantastic.
CTO: And turned your stomach?
SD: Recently the battle over this little Cuban boy. The horrifying thing is now the kid might have to go into foster care. So now they've succeeded in fucking him up and fucking it all up so severely. It's not enough that he watched his mother and all those people drown and he lost his homeland and he is the insane center of all these political battles, but now they are going to shove him into foster care? I find it disturbing that the whole world is watching this child and no one is taking care of him. I find that deeply disturbing. It's like you want the mom of the world to step in and say ok, enough is enough, we are not going to do this anymore.
CTO: One of the stock questions always asked is "how did you get in the business?" I want to know how are you going to get out? What do you think your last book will be like?
SD: Last book of my life? That is an interesting question. I have never thought of that. My last book? Well I tell you what comes to mind, and definitely don't hold me to it.
CTO: Well, that would be hard wouldn't it? We won't be sure it is your last book until you actually die.
SD: True that is quite morbid (laughs). When I think of the next book that I want to do, and I have a few running around in my mind, they are not at all like Tea, not focused on one person. It's not that I would want to write another coming of age novel but I think I could see my last book being a study of one character, not necessarily a woman, a lesbian, but someone. That is what I imagine. There is something about that singularness. I guess that I hope that many, many, many years from now, that I would have learned so much more about writing characters, that it could be a very very rich exploration.
CTO: Well, we will see if you are correct.
Home| Features & Interviews |Lusty Lady |Candles |Lollipops | Music Reviews |Book Reviews | News | Contact Us | Copyright 2000 Check This Out!
