_Beowulf_Sheenan_Not_Final_lo_res.jpeg) |
|
| Photo: Beowulf Sheehan | |
Matthew Thomas was born in the Bronx and grew up in Queens. A graduate of the University of Chicago, he has an MA from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and an MFA from the University of California, Irvine, where he received the Graduate Essay Award. He lives with his wife and twin children in New Jersey. We Are Not Ourselves is his first novel.
The story of writing We Are Not Ourselves is a special one--tell us about it.
I submitted part of the novel to my last workshop at UC-Irvine after spending two years handing in short stories that never quite jelled--in part because in many of them I was working through material that would eventually find its way into the novel in radically reduced form, a sentence or two of a 20-page effort. I entered post-graduation life without anything close to a finished manuscript; in fact, I was just beginning. I found work as an adjunct instructor at a handful of colleges all around the Los Angeles area while fighting for time to write. I moved to New York and cobbled together adjunct work, but it wasn't enough; I had no health insurance, so I took a full-time sabbatical replacement job at my old high school, and that led to a job the following year at Xavier High School, which became my home for the next seven years.
I worked on the book during the school year when time allowed and heavily during vacation weeks and in the summers. At my job, I found an unused room on a floor set aside for storage and disappeared there occasionally during free periods to write.
A stroke of luck brought me an affordable apartment and made it easier to stay in the city. Later I got married. We saved our money, lived frugally, and I kept working, but the end wasn't in sight. My wife took the extraordinary step of telling me to take a year off to finish my book, which was an act of heroism, as she had just delivered twins. I think we were both afraid of what it would be like if I never finished my book, how it would affect the psychology of our family. It was a major gamble, but what's worth doing in life that isn't? I signed with my agent in March 2013 and he sold the book a month later.
One of the novel's great achievements is its detailed portrayal of believable characters--Eileen, of course, and Ed, Big Mike and so many others. How hard was it to get these characters just right?
Getting the characters right involved a mixture of intention and openness to suggestion. The interactions between characters often suggested the need for a scene I hadn't anticipated, and then the new scene in turn revealed things about the characters I didn't know. I don't mean to suggest, in some anti-Nabokovian way, that I believe characters control everything, because I admire the autocratic insistence with which Nabokov commands his "creatures." I tried to practice it myself--to decide in advance the facts of their lives, the dates and places of their births, their hair color, where they went to school, what they did with their time, what they wore, how they spoke, and I either researched these things or dreamed them up. I wrote them down, not for use in the book necessarily but more in the way an actor prepares to perform a role by entering the reality of the life from the inside. But there is the need to shape a plot, and I found I had to let the characters guide me in that. The next moment in the scene, even the next big movement in the work as a whole, often presented itself when I stopped trying to engineer specific outcomes and just let characters be.
Everything in this novel is deeply felt. Is there a strong autobiographical element in the novel?
Some of the basic facts of the biographies of the characters--their professions, birthplaces, rough ages--overlap with some of the facts of the lives of the people in my family. But the novel began to improve when I allowed the characters to be characters and sloughed off the need to memorialize people--my father in particular--that had led me to attempt the impossible reproduction on the page of the fathomless humanity of any individual person.
I also faced the dilemma of possible readerly conflation of character with author. This gave me pause when I allowed Connell to make choices I wouldn't have made. I decided to go at that problem head-on by putting him through the wringer, being a little hard on him. I remembered something Jim Shepard said to us once in class: be tough on your characters and your readers will be easier on them. They will say, Hold on a second, this isn't as bad a guy as you're saying.
The novel confronts Alzheimer's and how it affects one family. And it does so in a serious, compassionate way. Was it hard to avoid sentimentality or mawkishness in dealing with such a difficult topic?
If a scene seemed headed in a mawkish direction, I would search for the specific details that would ground its emotions in something plausible and real. A moment that might have been full of genuine sentiment can dissolve into kitsch if a writer reaches for shortcuts or gets carried away "feeling" something the characters aren't feeling authentically themselves. And when books like The Road exist, whose every ounce of affect is utterly earned, it's a lot harder to justify weaving any sentimentality into one's own book.
Did someone in your family have the disease? Did you do a lot of research about it for the novel?
My father died of Alzheimer's in 2002. I began writing the novel a year later. I did a good deal of research into the state of medical insurance practices and Medicaid and Medicare law in the last couple of decades, and the history of the development of Alzheimer's drugs, intake procedures for nursing homes, the effects of Alzheimer's on the bodies of sufferers, the rates of deterioration and so forth. But I never wanted to write a case study. I sought to write a novel first, and a novel that had to do with Alzheimer's second.
This is a big "family" novel, in the sense that it's long, detailed and grand--like Look Homeward, Angel or The Corrections. Did you always envision this novel as "big"?
I love big, all-encompassing books. The two you mentioned are favorites of mine. I also love short books. The Lover. Flaubert's Parrot. Olesha's Envy. Tinkers. So Long, See You Tomorrow. I tried to make this book as short as I could and still tell the story I needed to tell. Once I realized that to tell it in a way that would make the effect of Alzheimer's on a family resonate, I had to go back and write the arc of this woman's whole life, so that the reader would understand why it was significant that so much was lost. I knew I would be in for a long project, and I sighed and bellied up to the table and settled in.
Eileen's husband, Ed, is a dedicated community college teacher who passes on opportunities to move up at his school. You're a high school teacher. What is it about teaching that makes you want to do it and write about it?
Writing about teaching is compelling because teaching is a job in which something critical--the molding of the minds of the young--is always at stake in the routine performance of the task. In its purest form, teaching is a vocation, and as is true with the performance of any vocation, you get back from it more than you put into it, even when you put a lot into it and even when it's not always "fun." It's a privilege to teach. It's a privilege to discuss books with developing minds. Teaching high school English is not for the faint of heart, nor for those who require a lot of sleep. The great irony of the job is that nobody (except for perhaps book editors) reads less for personal pleasure than an English teacher does. There's no time.
Were that any specific books or writers you were thinking of as you wrote your novel?
One Hundred Years of Solitude was a touchstone, in terms of how big a canvas Márquez worked on and how brilliantly he dramatized the inheritance of traits and the unconscious playing out of storylines from one generation to the next in a family--the Nietzschean "eternal return of the same" idea that Kundera also explores so captivatingly in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. After I had decided on short chapters as my form, Mrs. Bridge provided a model for how much could be accomplished using them (as well as for how to tackle the sweep of a whole life in a novel). I learned from Stephen Dixon's Interstate that it's possible to move time radically forward with a single sentence. Dixon is a master manipulator of time who can describe an individual moment with pointillist clarity for two pages and then stun you with "A year passed." From David Markson I took the idea that a concatenation of apparently disconnected bursts of storytelling can accrete meaning in ways that are no less powerful than the movements larger chapters make. Last Orders--another work that expertly manages short chapters--is an exquisitely sensitive book that never slips into sentimentality, and it provided a model for the scrupulous rendering of the emotional life of a family and a group of friends. And Kenzaburo Oe's unsparing, raw and sometimes uncomfortable A Personal Matter showed how to write from the inside about calamitous accidents of biology and their effects on a family.
Now that it's over are you ready to take on another big novel?
I'm working on a novel rooted in characters. At heart it's a family drama, though it's about a different kind of family than the one in my first book. Thank god. I spent enough time with them. --Tom Lavoie