Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe (47 page)

1¼ cups dried black-eyed peas

4 cups water

1 onion, chopped

1 piece salt pork or
8
pieces bacon

A little red pepper

1 quart fresh beans

Salt and pepper to taste

1 piece salt pork or 6 pieces bacon

⅓ cup butter

⅔ cup brown sugar, packed

6 medium-sized sweet potatoes, cooked, peeled, and sliced

½ teaspoon salt

⅓ cup water

2 pinches cinnamon

1 medium green tomato (per person)

Salt

Pepper

White cornmeal

Bacon drippings

3 tablespoons bacon fat

4 firm green tomatoes, sliced ½ inch thick

Beaten eggs

Dry bread crumbs

Flour

Milk

Salt

Pepper

Q: You began writing, I gather, for TV and later became an actress in TV, theater, and films. What took you back behind the camera to write novels?

FF: I started working in the theater at age thirteen, writing skits for cast parties, etc. Then I went to New York and sold some material to be used in a revue at Upstairs at the Downstairs and appeared in that nightclub. The next week I got a job on
Candid Camera
writing, but several months later began acting on that show as well. I started out wanting to be a writer, but got sidetracked for many years as an actor. It took me many years to realize that acting and performing did not make me as happy as it did other performers. I always felt that something was missing from my life. Much later, I realized that although I was doing quite well, I was in the wrong profession. It was not until 1980 that I had enough courage to quit acting and go back to my first love, and I have never regretted that decision.

Q: You won a Scripters Award for your screenplay, won stardorn for your acting, earned good reviews and bestseller sales for your novels. Which gives you the greatest pleasure? How do they differ? Do you miss intimate contact with your audience in fiction?

FF: I have received the greatest pleasure from writing. The difference is that in acting you are simply performing another person’s words and your performance is always, in effect, conditioned by the director, other actors, etc. Writing novels is like painting or composing music. You have complete control of your work. It is yours and yours alone. I find that I have a much more intimate relationship with my audience in fiction, both from letters and personal contact at speeches and book signings than I ever did in acting. I feel that people know me so much more from my novels than from my acting. My novels are basically who I am and what I think.

Q: Actresses are always saying that there are too few roles for mature women. You provided two in one novel and movie—the Kathy Bates part in
Tomatoes
, a middle-aged woman, and an older woman, Mrs. Threadgoode, done by Jessica Tandy, and both women are attractive. Was this at all a conscious effort or the lucky happenstance of art? In any event, you seem to have an affinity for characters who are well beyond the ingenue age. Why haven’t you developed the usual prejudice against anyone with gray, white, or thinning hair?

FF: First of all, as a writer, I want my characters to be interesting to me and, ideally, to others. In order to be interesting they must be fully formed and have had experiences that cause them to have a certain outlook on life or to have formed strong opinions of their own. I have met relatively few interesting young characters. It takes years to become wise or bitter or whatever it is we are to become. These are the people that fascinate me. I tend to rail against the current fashion in American culture of glamorizing only very young, pretty girls and completely ignoring the most wonderful and sexiest of women, those who are adult. I find there is nothing more attractive than a genuinely adult man or woman. And yes, as a woman who used to be an actress, I have first-hand knowledge of how they still cast seventy-five-year-old men with twenty-four-year-old leading ladies while fabulous actresses over thirty are considered over the hill. I have always liked older people, people who could teach me something about life.

Q: Who were your literary models, or heroines and heroes?

FF: My first love was of Southern writers: Tennessee Williams, Eudora Welty, etc., but I find that I love any writers with passion for place and character and a certain time.… Dickens, Steinbeck, William Kennedy, Wallace Stegner, M.F.K. Fisher, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Raymond Chandler, and more.

Q: You seem to write easily, naturally, like a good ol’ gal Southern storyteller. And humor is a large part of your appeal. Could there be that there is also a serious, literary person working below the surface?

FF: A serious literary person below the surface? Oh yes. I suffer from what most humorists do, a deep need to be taken seriously. And I have to grab her by the neck and shake her and say “Oh, shut up,” just tell the story and stop preaching. But writing humor is very serious and hard. Still, I find a novel without humor is not interesting to me. Life is, after all, very funny. If I did not really believe that I would jump off a building tomorrow.

Q: It seems to me that a book group or a writers conference figured in your decision to write novels. What happened?

FF: In 1976 I went to The Santa Barbara Writers Conference and won first prize for a short story about childhood that eventually became my first novel. One of my idols, Eudora Welty, was a judge and encouraged me.

Q: Your affinity for most of your characters is striking. Your love for them almost leaks out. Your down home qualities, or theirs, are the reason for much amusement yet you’re never laughing at them. It’s more like laughing with them. Your Southern characters are colorful but never merely quaint. Why is that? You left the South. You’re a woman of some sophistication
.

FF: I may live in California, but I have never, as they say, left the South, nor has it left me. I go home to Alabama for several months each year and most of my friends are still there. I still find the richest and most endearing characters are composites of people I know or have met.

Q: Rumor has it that in your new novel,
Welcome to the World, Baby Girl!
you’ve left the South—or some of your characters have. True? Why?

FF: Yes, I have moved to the midwest. But note: Southern Missouri … and some of it is set in Selma, Alabama. Why the move to the midwest? I basically write about middle class people and the midwest is full of wonderful little towns that reflect the values of what I think this country is all about. I think these are the people, no matter where they live, that usually get ignored in movies, plays, novels, etc. I like them. I am one of them.

Q: Your darker characters, the few who are genuinely evil, don’t produce the same generous spirit in you. Are you a good hater?

FF: My darker characters are used to try to show the effects of some persons’ cruelty to their fellow human beings. I am not a good hater of people. I always seem to want to give people a break. I usually can understand how a person has become what they are and I believe that if people knew better they would do better. But I am a good hater of the results of what meanness and ignorance do to other people. Mostly it makes me profoundly sad.

Q: Whether your characters are light or dark, I have a hunch that friendships count for a great deal with you.
Tomatoes
has some wonderful pairings, of friends likely and unlikely. Do I detect a deep feeling for the arts of friendship?

FF: Yes. Being an only child and losing both my parents at an early age, I have found that the friends I have and have made over the years are the people who help me get through life, good times and bad.

Q: Another writer, Jill McCorkle, says: “There is a wonderful Southern tradition of oral storytelling, and an inability to tell a tale without stopping at every turn to fill in the history of a place, the family, and everything that has gone before.” And also, “I cannot deny my strong Southern heritage and the open invitation to indulge in all those
skeletons that are usually kept locked in the closet.” Does this describe you, too?

FF: To some extent. I do believe that history of a family or a place is extremely important to understand what is happening today. I also think that most Southern writers love stories about people and situations, especially about their own families.

Q: Why is it that when writers from the South get going, they make people from everywhere else seem taciturn?

FF: I think the one thing people forget is that the South has an entirely different culture than most of the country. Southerners are as different in the way they use the language as Italians are from Germans and Swedes. What tends to confuse people is that we are all speaking the
same
language, but we use it in a different way. Put a woman from the South and a woman from Maine in the same room and they would have a hard time, not because of the language but because of the usage. A Southerner may take an hour to answer a question, whereas the lady from Maine might just answer yes or no.

Q: I suppose it’s inevitable that I ask you how you write—when and where, with what instruments, by day or by night. Are you disciplined, doing so many words a day? Or are you nicely messy, and write when you simply can’t not write, when it won’t let you go? Virginia Woolf famously wrote of
A Room of One’s Own.
Do you have one?

FF: Oh dear. I am dyslexic and have A.D.D.; therefore I am extremely limited. I write on a typewriter. I am hopelessly disorganized. My room looks like an invasion has taken place. I write in the morning and usually for at least four or five hours a day, if not more … never less. If one day I find that I cannot write, I get up and go out and roam antique stores, drive, walk, etc. I have one room away from the rest of the house so I can’t hear phones, faxes, mailmen, Fed Ex deliveries. I turn on a fan to help drown out any noise.

Q: Have you ever been accused of writing about a specific person, one who exists in “real life?” Anyone ever say “That’s my Aunt Evelyn,” or something like that? And what is real life?

FF: No, not really. Usually my characters are based on a combination of four or five different people I have met or observed or heard about. Idgie Threadgoode was based somewhat on my great Aunt Bess Fortenberry who owned a cafe by the railroad tracks but the events were fiction.

     What is real life? I have come to believe that real life is what we want it to be. How we choose to look at life and interpret it. For me I choose to see it as I want it to be. Not that I do not see the terrible things; I do. But I find that if I hear on the news that ten people have been murdered and maybe twenty-five people hit in the head and robbed, I try to remember that on the same day there were millions of people who did not murder or rob anyone. I look for the best in people and I see it all the time. My heroes are the people, teachers, nurses, etc. who get up and go to work everyday when they would rather not. These are the ones who never complain and get the least attention.

Q: Which character in Fried
Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe
came to you first? Where did the novel begin for you?

FF: Strangely enough, the first character in
Fried Green Tomatoes
was the cafe, and the town. I think a place can be as much a character in a novel as the people.

     The novel began for me when I was handed a shoebox full of little things like a menu, a picture, a lock of hair, an old Easter card, etc. This was all that was left of the sixty-nine years of my Aunt Bess, who had been such a vital and loving, giving person while she had been alive. I wanted to recreate a life from that shoebox.