Golden State: A Novel (32 page)

Random House Reader’s Circle:
Why did you decide to set the novel against the backdrop of a vote for secession?

Michelle Richmond:
I am fascinated by the fact that so often things that seem impossible are actually very much within the realm of possibility. Every day in the news, there’s something else that completely explodes our expectations. Tom’s radio show,
Anything Is Possible
, is a tribute to that notion, and I hope this novel is a tribute to that notion as well. Personally, to be clear, I
don’t
think that California should or will go anywhere, but there’s been so much secession talk on the fringes for years, from states as diverse as New York, Texas, Colorado, and California, that it seemed worth exploring what would happen if the concept of secession moved from the outermost fringes to the mainstream.

I also am interested in the way characters live out their lives against the backdrop of the larger world, which is what every one of us does, every day. Only days after moving to California, I experienced my first tremor. I’d been in hurricanes and tornadoes, but this was the first time I’d felt the ground move beneath my feet. It sent
a powerful message: that stability is an illusion, and that we have no way of knowing when everything is going to change.

Fifteen years have passed since I felt that first tremor, and I’ve felt hundreds of them since then. I am accustomed to them, but I don’t imagine I’ll ever be immune: every time the house moves—whether it’s a quick jolt or a slow roll—I’m reminded that we live on a fault line. To me, this seems like an apt metaphor for marriage in particular and for life in general.

RHRC:
In
Golden State
, as in
The Year of Fog
, the couple is suffering from the loss of a child. Can you talk a bit about this theme and why you are drawn to it?

MR:
The worst thing I could imagine as a child was being separated from my parents. Now that I am an adult, I see this fear of separation from the other side. As a child, you fear the loss of protection, but as an adult, you fear the inability to protect a child who is in your care.

In my mind, Julie is deeply in love with Tom, and always will be. But there is something about the love for a child that is very different and more fierce than romantic love—I believe it must have something to do with the need to care for those who are incapable of caring for themselves.

RHRC:
You have said in the past that you never outline, and that you don’t know where a book is going when you begin. How much did you know about this story when you began writing it?

MR:
Well, I knew from the start that it would be the story of a marriage. I am always intrigued by what holds a couple together, and by what it takes to sever the bonds that, at some point, were strong enough to justify a vow of lifelong commitment. For Julie and Tom, there is this deep love and passion and mutual respect that have kept them together for so long, but things happen, things largely beyond their control, to threaten that love. Will the center hold?
That was the question I began with, and I had no idea when I started writing what the answer would be. But it was important to me that Julie and Tom both be characters as decent as they were flawed.

I also knew, when I began writing the novel, that three relationships would be central to the novel: the marriage, Julie’s relationship with her sister, and the couple’s relationship to the lost child. It was only much later—years into the writing of the book—that Dennis became a strong force. He sort of took me by surprise and added a new element to the novel. This is where the author-editor relationship comes into play; in this case, my editor noticed a character that had been lurking fairly quietly on the sidelines and basically said, “What’s the deal with this guy?” It was a good question, one that forced me to look at the story from an entirely different angle.

When I began exploring Dennis’s role in Julie’s life, I thought about all of the relationships we enter into sort of blindly over the course of our adult lives. And I thought about how much of ourselves we make known to people, and how easily we sometimes trust others with our deepest secrets and fears. What interested me about Dennis were the long-term repercussions of that trust.

RHRC:
There’s a lot of music in your book. Do you listen to music when you write?

MR:
I’ll sometimes listen to instrumentals, but I never listen to music with lyrics while I’m writing. It gets in my head. When I’m not sitting down writing, though, there’s always music in our house. My husband used to DJ at UCLA when he was in college, and he’s always on the lookout for new acts, or new albums by people you haven’t heard of in twenty years. In our house, I buy the books and he buys the albums, and then we share.

RHRC:
How did you research this book?

MR:
Well, I spent a lot of time driving, walking, and taking the bus up and down California Street! Most people in San Francisco never
use the cable cars, and when I started writing this novel, I’d been living in San Francisco for years but hadn’t ridden a cable car since I was there on a family vacation when I was thirteen.

Sometimes, some of the research happens before the idea of the book ever takes hold, and that was the case with this novel. At the time I began writing it, my little boy attended the preschool on the campus of the Veterans Administration Hospital in San Francisco. It’s this amazingly beautiful place, and I felt so fortunate to drop him off there every day. But I was also aware that the hospital served a population of veterans who had seen the very worst of war. This was also at a time when the patient population was beginning to change, and when many veterans were coming home with terrible wounds that would not have been survivable in previous wars.

A general internist at the hospital generously allowed me to shadow him and his residents. I took copious notes, but it goes without saying that much of what I witnessed on rounds and in the lectures went over my layperson’s head. When it comes to the actual medical terminology of the book, I should emphasize that any failures in logic or procedure are, of course, entirely my own!

I also read a lot of first-person accounts by veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and talked with friends in the military. We expect so much from our service members, and when they come home, I think we civilians sometimes feel awkward around them. There is this sense of not knowing quite what to say, of being curious but afraid to ask questions that would be intrusive or would force them to recount what they’ve been through. I tried to capture that in the relationship between Julie and her sister: Julie knows that Heather has been through a great deal, but she also knows that it’s something she will never entirely be able to understand.

RHRC:
If you hadn’t become an author, what career would you have pursued?

MR:
Well, I am endlessly fascinated by outer space. I spend a lot of time reading about newly discovered planets and the Martian atmosphere.
I do weird things like attend the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) conference and stay in the hotel with all the Artificial Intelligence people just to soak up the conversation. I ask my son at least once a month, “Honey, do you think you might like to be an astronaut?” I’ve made my husband sit through the planetarium show at the California Academy of Sciences more times than I care to admit, and it has never once failed to move me to tears. So, I would love to say that I would have become a physicist had I not become a writer, but that simply would not have been possible. We are not always given the brains that we would choose. I am very, very happy to be a writer, and I am keenly aware that my gray matter supports the writing life quite well but would not be particularly well suited for a life observing the unknown universe. I must stick, then, with the known universe, and spend a lot of time staring at the stars.

Golden State
began with the idea for a single scene: a husband and wife at the end of their marriage, spending their final night together in a San Francisco radio station, where the husband works as a late-night deejay. As the story developed, the one thing that remained constant in my mind was the sound of the music from the radio station. Early drafts of the novel contained a number of songs that didn’t make it into the final draft. Here are the songs that, for me, capture the spirit of the novel and of the place that has become my home:

Admiral Radley, “I Heart California
” California has inspired many great songs over the years, and, like “California Dreaming,” this one is a personal favorite. The product of a one-off local California indie super-group combination, comprising members of Grandaddy and Earlimart, this song is an unapologetic celebration of the true spirit of California.

Josh Rouse, “Sweetie
” This one comes from Rouse’s 2007 record,
Country Mouse City House
. For me, the best love songs contain just a pinch of melancholy. When I picture Julie and Tom working
through their complicated relationship, I always hear this song and think of Rouse’s great line “crooked couple standing side by side / Is that you? Is that me?”

Tom Petty, “California
” Like Julie, Tom Petty is a transplant to California from the South. For years, his identity was intertwined with his birthplace in Gainesville, Florida, and his stories seemed to emanate from there. Listening to his albums over the years, I’ve always been interested to hear how his southern identity has slowly evolved and reconciled itself with his adopted home. With the short, direct, and brilliant “California,” from 1996, the evolution seems complete. This song is highly personal for me. Like Petty, my roots are deeply southern, but I have made my home and my adult life on the West Coast.

Norman Greenbaum, “Spirit in the Sky
” Another California transplant, Greenbaum moved to California at the age of twenty-three. He wrote and recorded this classic four years later in San Francisco. A Jewish kid from Massachusetts, Greenbaum reportedly penned his fun, funky, celebratory “friend in Jesus” song in less than fifteen minutes. By some accounts, he was never really sure what the song meant. I can never figure out what it means either. I don’t know what it would’ve been like to live in San Francisco during the Summer of Love, but I imagine that the vibe was very similar to what is captured in this song.

Scorpions, “Wind of Change
” Written by Klaus Meine during a trip to Russia in 1989, this song celebrated the imminent fall of the USSR. Since then, of course, it has become an anthem for large-scale movements that topple unjust regimes. At the heart of
Golden State
, for me, is the idea that huge, unexpected political and social shifts often seem inconceivable and impossible until the moment they happen. More important, though, this song rocks. I dare you to listen to it without feeling inspired. Long live the Scorpions.

The Mendoza Line, “Aspect of an Old Maid
” As the radio plays throughout
Golden State
, I wanted to establish the melancholy soundtrack of mature breakup songs. No one does a bittersweet, super-complicated breakup song like the Mendoza Line. If we lived in a world where all things were fair, the Mendoza Line’s classic album
Lost in Revelry
would have sold as many copies as Michael Jackson’s
Thriller
. This is one of their later songs, and it comes from their last disc,
30 Year Low
.

Kirsty MacColl and Evan Dando, “Perfect Day
” Though the Lou Reed original of this song is a classic, I’m always drawn to this version by MacColl and former Lemonhead Dando. You can find it on MacColl’s disc
From Croydon to Cuba
.

Steve Forbert, “Goin’ Down to Laurel
” I can’t imagine anyone other than Steve Forbert being able to write a great song about Laurel, Mississippi. I first saw Forbert at Mercury Lounge in New York City, then at Maxwell’s in Hoboken (which now, sadly, is closed). Years later, I saw him play at a little church in San Francisco’s Noe Valley. Forbert has a gift for writing heartbreaking songs and delivering them with his unforgettable voice. He’s another musician with one foot in the South (he’s from Meridian, Mississippi) and one foot in the wider, urban world.

Aidan Moffat and Bill Wells, “The Copper Top
” For me, this is one of the saddest songs ever written. Everything is getting older.

Dire Straits, “Telegraph Road
” Lasting more than fourteen minutes, the storytelling in this song covers a span of well over a hundred years and tells the tale of a single Detroit, Michigan, road from beginning to end. When I first started writing
Golden State
(which was originally titled
California Street
), this song was on a mix disc in my car. At the time, my son, in the back seat, always wanted the volume louder, and whether we had arrived at our destination or not, we always had to sit there until the song was over. Someday I will clean
out the car, and when I do, I hope to find this disc among the Tootsie Roll wrappers and lost tubes of lipstick—and in working order.

Badly Drawn Boy, “The Way Things Used to Be
” Quick, obvious songs of infatuation (think early Beatles) have never done it for me. I’m always drawn to songs about long, messy, complicated relationships (isn’t that the only kind of relationship worth having?). In that category, this Badly Drawn Boy number is one of the best.

Elbow, “August and September
” What can I say? I love cover songs, and this is one of my favorites. It’s a cover of the nearly-as-good original by The The, and I found it seven years ago on a
Q
magazine 1986 tribute disc. It’s another sad breakup song, and although it didn’t make the final edit of
Golden State
, it always seemed to fit in well with the sound the novel made in my head.