The Time of Her Life (31 page)

When did you start writing your first novel
, Dale Loves Sophie to Death?
How long did that novel take you to write?

Oh, I think that I was growing increasingly frustrated with my inability to write good short stories. I was getting some of
them published, but I knew they weren’t right. I was so furious at myself at one point—for finishing a story and knowing that
while some of the writing was good the story didn’t work—that I picked up my typewriter and put it in the middle of the driveway
so that when my husband came home that evening in the dark he would run over it! Of course, about a half hour later I rushed
out and saved it—I couldn’t have afforded another and it had occurred to me, too, that it might ruin our car. Also, of course,
how on earth could I have explained it to my husband? But I think my idea was that if my typewriter got run over by a car
then it would hardly be
my
fault if I didn’t write.

During my twenties and early thirties I struggled with short stories, and they were published in some wonderful journals,
and those editors were extremely encouraging. I began the first chapter of
Dale Loves Sophie to Death
as a story. And I was pretty pleased with the ending for once, but I didn’t send it out right away, and I began another story
which in the back of my head I knew was not a story; it was a second chapter. But I was too terrified to admit it. By the
time I had four chapters I admitted to myself that I was writing a novel.

Was writing your second book easier than writing the first?

It was easy to sit down and write the book. I was still new to the process and didn’t second-guess myself so much that I froze,
which is something I have to fight now. The second book had been taking shape in my head the whole time I was writing
Dale Loves Sophie to Death
. It’s a book that’s the other side of the coin of
Dale Loves Sophie
. But I hope never in my
life to have to feel as… agonized, or despairing… well, heartbroken. I was heartbroken by
The Time of Her Life
. And yet I think it may be my favorite of the books I’ve written.

How did you decide to write about such a different family in
The Time of Her Life?

Well, as I said, it’s the other side of the coin. The family in
Dale Loves Sophie to Death
is a safe family despite everything, but the Parks family in
The Time of Her Life
is not one bit safe. As I was writing
Dale Loves Sophie
I had a sort of constant hum beneath the ideas that I was investigating in that book. I had the continual thought that, “Yes,
this is right, but it isn’t the whole story. There are other families with different realities entirely.”

The Parkses are not good for each other, but they do all love each other. The emotional well-being of every member of that
family is endangered since it rests on the stability of the other two. Of course, it’s hardest on Jane, because she has no
power; she is certainly the most vulnerable. Claudia and Avery, though, are not terrible people; they are both adults who
never matured, and they haven’t any idea of how to be responsible for their daughter. It doesn’t occur to them that they are
supposed to be taking care of her. They can’t even take care of themselves.

The children in your books are so wonderfully and accurately drawn. Do you put yourself in a child’s frame of mind in order
to write about your young characters or do you paint them from observation?

I don’t know that I ever really think about there being any difference in writing about children as opposed to writing about
adults. I remember my own childhood quite vividly—the mysteries and terrors and joy, too. And I have children. They’re adults
now, but anyone with empathy who has children understands childhood a second time over, and from
another angle. I’ve always thought one of the best current writers about children is John Irving. I don’t know him, but the
generosity of his literal consideration of children is wonderful.

I suppose writers are always afraid to write about children because they are terrified of being accused of sentimentality.
I’ve never thought there was anything particularly sentimental about children or childhood, but I think too many writers make
the mistake of endowing the children they create with a cynicism impossible for a child to have. Cynicism requires being old
enough to have become jaded, and the most fascinating aspect of inhabiting a child’s vision is revisiting an issue about which
one has become jaded as an adult, but which has to be unwound again—like a ball of yarn—and reexamined.

Where do you find inspiration for your books? Is it all imagination or do you use stories and characters from real life as
a starting point?

Oh, I don’t think “inspiration” is a term that really describes how my books take shape. I think writers are generally people
whose antennae are always up; they take in everything whether they want to or not. It isn’t always pleasant. But my own friends
and family—or an utter stranger, say, standing in line at the grocery store—does or says something that makes me become alert.
Some other person or event often triggers a reevaluation of a deep belief I wasn’t even aware I had. If I sense a challenge
to something about which I’m passionate, about which I hold very strong ideas, then slowly a story or a character begins to
take shape through which I’ll reconsider the issue. I’m beginning to sound very pompous or high-handed! That’s one of the
reasons I dislike talking about writing. I suppose what I’m trying to say is that I think the story starts to take shape the
moment that imagination and reality converge.
And once I’m entirely absorbed in writing, then every single thing that happens in real life seems astonishingly coincidental,
since it inevitably resonates somehow with the tale I believe I’m inventing.

What are your favorite books, books that have influenced you, or books you enjoy recommending to readers?

Well, the usual suspects, I suppose. Austen, James, Virginia Woolf. And I’ve discovered that when I read many books when I
was young I knew they were wonderful but I missed so much of what was brilliant about them. I’m rereading Eudora Welty right
now.
Delta Wedding
. She’s so good that I didn’t realize just how brilliant she was until this reading. How it could have escaped me is mysterious
to me. She has such tact and is so careful, but this book is like a pointillist painting. There are so many ways to understand
her characters.

I was enormously affected by Fitzgerald, who’s so visual a writer, and by Peter Taylor, who has exquisite phrasing. I worked
very hard for a long time trying to achieve his sense of ease—the sense that the story already exists and is just being unraveled
for you. But the hook that made me want to write—and which I came upon, oddly enough, in the Baton Rouge bus station when
I was taking a bus to visit my cousins in Natchez—was
The Man Who Loved Children
by Christina Stead. When I got back to Baton Rouge it turned out that my mother had just read it as well. It’s an astonishing
book. It’s a masterpiece, and it always seems to me the opposite, in a way, of
War and Peace
, which I also love for all sorts of reasons but especially for the wonderful story. Each of those books gives you an entirely
believable world, but Stead’s starts wide and becomes so amazingly intense that finally it’s like a laser of compressed emotion.
Tolstoy explodes into a universe and gets wider and wider.

What are you working on now? You mentioned a trilogy…

The Evidence Against Her
is the first in a series of three novels, each of which will stand on its own. The second book is tentatively titled
Greenside Lane
, and the third book, also tentatively titled, is
Two Girls Wearing Perfume in the Summer
. The series is a tale of a particular American family from its inception, beginning with the gradual confluence through marriage
of four midwestern families in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and that family’s evolution through the
1900s and into the early years of the twenty-first century.

I’m interested in the careless, random, ironic, or merely accidental circumstances from which communal and familial myths
and expectations are first derived, and of course, I intend to unravel the intricate—sometimes tragic—consequences of those
myths.

I have always been interested primarily in an investigation of character, and that still absorbs me, but I also want to give
readers a whole world, so that when they have finished any one of these books they will be able to revisit its landscape in
their imaginations. I want any reader to believe that he or she grasps more about the essential lives of the characters than
those characters understand about themselves. I want to make it clear that the accuracy of those legends and myths by which
we all define ourselves is irrelevant in the long run. We inherit or grow into expectations based on who we are assumed to
be because of family, class, gender, race, etc. And much of the struggle of discovering a way to be happy is choosing which
myths and legends we embrace and fulfill, and at what point it’s necessary to discard the expectations of anyone else altogether.

1. The novel opens with a description of the weather in the town of Lunsbury, Missouri. Is this significant? What does the weather
   seem to indicate? Are there other scenes in the novel in which weather seems to play a large role?
   
2. Claudia Parks is a somewhat enigmatic figure. Do you think she is really as “nihilistic” as Avery implies? Are there in fact
   things that she cares about? Why do you think she is like this? And why do you think her life revolves so much around Avery?
   
3. Avery Parks, for all that he tries to distance himself from Claudia, resembles his wife in many ways. What do the house, the
   book he is writing, his drinking, and his departures tell us about him as a person? Why is he unable either to commit to Claudia
   completely or to leave her once and for all?
   
4. Are Avery and Claudia harder or less hard on each other than you think they should be? The word that a psychologist today
   might use to describe their relationship is
   codependent
   . Do you think Avery and Claudia should stay together and try to work things out, or would it be better for them to part ways
   for good?
   
5. Jane is a very precocious eleven-year-old, and she is an extraordinary and dedicated violin player. How does this factor into
   her relationship with her parents? How has Avery and Claudia’s “regard” for their daughter affected her?
   
6. Do you think Jane feels anything amiss in her family or is it just normal to her? How does her admiration for Maggie Tunbridge
   and her friendship with Diana Tunbridge influence Jane’s relationships at home, if at all?
   
7. What do you make of the novel’s title? Do you think it might refer to more than one “time of her life”?
   
8. Even after the shocking and violent episode with the violin, Claudia and Avery don’t seem to register the meaning of what
   they’ve done. What does the ending of the book signify to you? What do you think will happen in the next few months and years?
   
9. Does the Parks family remind you of any other fictional families? How is their situation better, or worse? How do the novel’s
   specific settings and time periods affect both the life of the Parks family and your assessment of them?
   

Robb Forman Dew received the National Book Award in 1982 for her first novel,
Dale Loves Sophie to Death
. She is also the author of a memoir,
The Family Heart
, and of the novels
The Time of Her Life, Fortunate Lives
, and, most recently,
The Evidence Against Her.

T
HERE ARE any number of villages, small towns, and even cities of some size to which no one ever goes except on purpose. There
are only travelers on business of one sort or another, personal or professional, who arrive without any inclination to dally,
or to dawdle, or to daydream. And yet, almost always in these obscure precincts there is a fine grassy park, a statue, perhaps,
and benches placed under tall old spreading trees and planted around with unexceptional seasonal flowers, petunias or geraniums
or chrysanthemums in all likelihood, or possibly no more than a tidy patch of English ivy. A good many visitors have sat on
such benches for a moment or two, under no burden to take account of their surroundings, under no obligation to enjoy themselves.
A stranger to such a place may settle for longer than intended, losing track of the time altogether—slouching a bit against
the wooden slats, stretching an arm along the back of the bench, and enjoying the sun on a nice day, comfortably oblivious
to passersby and unselfconsciously relaxed—without assuming the covertly alert, defensive, nearly apologetic posture of a
tourist.

By and large these towns are middling to small, and are never on either coast or even any famous body of water, such as a
good-sized lake or major river. These are communities that lie geographically and culturally in unremarkable locales: no towering
mountains, no breathtaking sweep of deep valleys, no overwhelming or catastrophic history particular only to that place. In
fact, with only a few exceptions, these unrenowned
districts are all villages, towns, or small cities exactly like Washburn, Ohio, about which people are incurious, requiring
only the information that it is approximately forty-five miles east of Columbus.

As it happens, Monument Square in the town of Washburn is not four sided but hexagonal and was a gift to the city from the
Washburn Ladies Monument Society, ceded to the town simultaneously at the unveiling and dedication of the Civil War monument
on July 4, 1877. The monument itself is a life-size statue of a Union soldier at parade rest, gazing southward from his perch
atop a thirty foot fluted granite column, the pediment of which is over twelve feet high. Altogether the monument stands nearly
fifty feet, and on its west face is the inscription: