The Way Life Should Be (31 page)

What do you think makes this book relevant today?

I think that people are particularly interested, at the moment, in family stories. We yearn to know about cultural traditions and variations—why and how our customs and rituals have developed and evolved. And it’s impossible to look at family traditions without talking about food: why we eat what we do, at home as well as on the street and in restaurants. What does the food we eat say about who we are?

I also think that many of us yearn for a simpler life, to feel that our lives are purposeful and meaningful. We want to have time to be reflective and contemplative.
The Way Life Should Be
is about the desire in all of us to slow down, to find a way to get the most out of life. It’s about finding a place that truly feels like home. What is “the way life should be”? What is the key to happiness? How do you identify, and pursue, what you really want in life? Would you know it when you see it?

Who is your reading audience?

One of the best things about publishing a book today is that, because of the Internet, a novelist can get immediate feedback from readers. I receive many e-mails every week through my website; I get alerted to blogs where people are discussing my novels, as well as customer reviews on sites like amazon.com. Based on the mail I receive, many—though by no means all—of my readers are women. They span a wide spectrum of ages, backgrounds, and geographic locations. A fair number of readers identify themselves as “foodies,” and others mention their Italian or Italian-American backgrounds. I get asked to appear, either in person or by speakerphone, at many book clubs. I think the reason that this novel isn’t limited to a particular region of the country is that it isn’t about Maine, exclusively; it’s about finding an oasis, a place that feels like home.

Do you prefer writing novels, writing nonfiction, or editing? What do you love most about writing?

I have always thought that if I hadn’t been a novelist, I would have become a book editor. I truly enjoy editing other people’s writing; it is immensely satisfying to help another person find a way through a problematic draft. That is why I edit anthologies and work as a freelance book editor—and even, to a certain extent, why I teach creative writing and literature.

Novel-writing, on the other hand, is hard work—lonely, exhausting, and constantly frustrating. It is so difficult to say exactly what you mean, in the way that you intend. In
Madame Bovary,
Flaubert wrote (beautifully, of course), “Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we strum out tunes to make a bear dance, when we would move the stars to pity.” But there is nothing else like it. To write a draft and revise it again and again until you have made manifest the vision in your head, to finally
get it right—it’s a tremendous feeling. Writing novels is my passion. I feel very lucky to be able to do it.

Does your work as an editor and teacher help your writing?

In some ways my work as an editor and teacher makes the process easier. I see the first drafts of writers at all levels—some just starting out, and some who are professionals. It’s immensely reassuring to realize that everyone goes through a version of the same experience—from self-doubt to elation, from occasional writer’s block to flashes of inspiration. I’ve also learned that most people give up at some point—they don’t finish a draft, or they aren’t willing to do the hard work to revise. Writing well is damn difficult!

What would you like readers to know about the writing life?

I think it might be useful for readers to know that not all novelists write every day. I can’t. I have three boys and a demanding job; I have to carve out time to write. While working on
The Way Life Should Be
, I wrote whenever I had a free moment, in Maine, in Montclair, on the train to New York. I spent a week at a friend’s summer home on Long Island and another at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Writing a book takes so much time and focus. Moments of quiet immersion are rare in my life; I have to consciously seek them out to finish a novel.

Angela found her passion. What is yours? What would you do if you were not a writer?

Words are both my vocation and my avocation—reading, writing, editing, teaching, listening to dialogue in movies and on TV. I could happily read books for the rest of my life. My happiest times are with my three boys; I especially love being with them in Maine, and we all love to travel.

If I weren’t a writer, I would probably be an editor. But I really enjoy cooking, too. I have worked professionally as a cook several times in my life: at a retreat on the coast of Maine, as a private cook to a writer and his wife on Martha’s Vineyard, and as a caterer in Virginia.

What are you working on now?

I am finishing a novel set in and around New York,
Four-Way Stop
, which will be published by William Morrow in May of 2009. And I have also started another novel that—like
The Way Life Should Be
—takes place, in part, on the coast of Maine

Reading Group Guide

1. What is the “way life should be”? How does Kline develop and expand upon this question as the story progresses? Nonna tells Angela that her father “can’t see any other way. To him, this is how life is. And the way it should be” (p. 59). Later, spotting the Maine state slogan on a billboard, Angela wonders if it’s simply “a marketer’s vision of a land of lobsters and blueberries that never has, and never will, exist” (p. 259). How does Angela’s own vision of what her life should be change over time?

2. How does Angela’s identification with her grandmother, and apparent resistance to her mother’s influence, shape the choices she makes? How does her thinking about these two women change as the story progresses?

3. What does Maine represent to Angela before and after her arrival there?

4. One of the major threads running through this book is the journey of generations of immigrants in America. Nonna clings
to old customs; her son mainly wants to assimilate; her granddaughter wants to learn about her cultural traditions. How “Italian” is Angela? How has she been shaped by both the Italian and Irish sides of her heritage?

5. Nonna describes
“il regalo”
as the gift of instinctively knowing how to cook. How can this phrase be seen as a larger metaphor for Angela’s experience in the novel?

6. The idea of “home” is very important in this book. What is Nonna’s idea of home? What is Angela’s? How does this novel explore the roots we retain as we move away from our families of origin?

7. What does
“la famiglia”
mean to Angela at the beginning of the book? At the end?

8. Angela goes to Maine in search of love, but things don’t turn out as she’d planned. Do you see it as a desperate move or a brave leap of faith? Does her decision to stick it out make sense to you?

9. What role does food play in Angela’s life and in the book?

10. By the end of the book, do you believe that Nonna feels she has led a fulfilling life, or is she, as she laments, filled with regret about the choices she made?

11. Each person in the cooking class reveals a secret—some mundane, some serious. Nonna reveals a secret, too. How do these revelations add resonance to Angela’s own story?

12. Which character do you find most sympathetic? Most interesting? Most exasperating?

13. For much of the book, Angela’s relationship with her brother is fractious and distant. How would you characterize their relationship at the end?

14. “Chick lit” is a label often applied to novels and memoirs about single urban women on a quest for love and adventure. Does that label fit this book or not? Why or why not?

15. How does the character of Lindsay function in the story?

16. What is the metaphorical significance of the rabbit-fur coat that Nonna gives to Angela when she returns to Maine (p. 258)?

17. As the novel ends, Angela is crossing back into Maine in the middle of winter. What do you think will happen to her? Will she ever open her own restaurant?

Excerpt from
Orphan Train

Spruce Harbor, Maine, 2011

Through her bedroom wall Molly can hear her foster parents talking about
her in the living room, just beyond her door. “This is not what we signed up for,” Dina is saying. “If I’d known she had this many problems, I never would’ve agreed to it.”

“I know, I know.” Ralph’s voice is weary. He’s the one, Molly knows, who wanted to be a foster parent. Long ago, in his youth, when he’d been a “troubled teen,” as he told her without elaboration, a social worker at his school had signed him up for the Big Brother program, and he’d always felt that his big brother—his mentor, he calls him—kept him on track. But Dina was suspicious of Molly from the start. It didn’t help that before Molly they’d had a boy who tried to set the elementary school on fire.

“I have enough stress at work,” Dina says, her voice rising. “I don’t need to come home to this shit.”

Dina works as a dispatcher at the Spruce Harbor police station, and as far as Molly can see there isn’t much to stress over—a few drunk drivers, the occasional black eye, petty thefts, accidents. If you’re going to be a dispatcher anywhere in the world, Spruce Harbor is probably the least stressful place imaginable. But Dina is high-strung by nature. The smallest things get to her. It’s as if she assumes everything will go right, and when it doesn’t—which, of course, is pretty often—she is surprised and affronted.

Molly is the opposite. So many things have gone wrong for her in her seventeen years that she’s come to expect it. When something does go right, she hardly knows what to think.

Which was just what had happened with Jack. When Molly transferred to Mount Desert Island High School last year, in tenth grade, most of the kids seemed to go out of their way to avoid her. They had their friends, their cliques, and she didn’t fit into any of them. It was true that she hadn’t made it easy; she knows from experience that tough and weird is preferable to pathetic and vulnerable, and she wears her Goth persona like armor. Jack was the only one who’d tried to break through.

It was mid-October, in social studies class. When it came time to team up for a project, Molly was, as usual, the odd one out. Jack asked her to join him and his partner, Jody, who was clearly less than thrilled. For the entire fifty-minute class, Molly was a cat with its back up. Why was he being so nice? What did he want from her? Was he one of those guys who got a kick out of messing with the weird girl? Whatever his motive, she wasn’t about to give an inch. She stood back with her arms crossed, shoulders hunched, dark stiff hair in her eyes. She shrugged and grunted when Jack asked her questions, though she followed along well enough and did her share of the work. “That girl is freakin’ strange,” Molly heard Jody mutter as they were leaving class after the bell rang. “She creeps me out.” When Molly turned and caught Jack’s eye, he surprised her with a smile. “I think she’s kind of awesome,” he said, holding Molly’s gaze. For the first time since she’d come to this school, she couldn’t help herself; she smiled back.

Over the next few months, Molly got bits and pieces of Jack’s story. His father was a Dominican migrant worker who met his mother picking blueberries in Cherryfield, got her pregnant, moved back to the D.R. to shack up with a local girl, and never looked back. His mother, who never married, works for a rich old lady in a shorefront mansion. By all rights Jack should be on the social fringes too, but he isn’t. He has some major things going for him: flashy moves on the soccer field, a dazzling smile, great big cow eyes, and ridiculous lashes. And even though he refuses to take himself seriously, Molly can tell he’s way smarter than he admits, probably even smarter than he knows.

Molly couldn’t care less about Jack’s prowess on the soccer field, but smart she respects. (The cow eyes are a bonus.) Her own curiosity is the one thing that has kept her from going off the rails. Being Goth wipes away any expectation of conventionality, so Molly finds she’s free to be weird in lots of ways at once. She reads all the time—in the halls, in the cafeteria—mostly novels with angsty protagonists:
The Virgin Suicides, Catcher in the Rye, The Bell Jar
. She copies vocabulary words down in a notebook because she likes the way they sound:
Harridan. Pusillanimous. Talisman. Dowager. Enervating. Sycophantic
. . .

As a newcomer Molly had liked the distance her persona created, the wariness and mistrust she saw in the eyes of her peers. But though she’s loath to admit it, lately that persona has begun to feel restrictive. It takes ages to get the look right every morning, and rituals once freighted with meaning—dyeing her hair jet-black accented with purple or white streaks, rimming her eyes with kohl, applying foundation several shades lighter than her skin tone, adjusting and fastening various pieces of uncomfortable clothing—now make her impatient. She feels like a circus clown who wakes up one morning and no longer wants to glue on the red rubber nose. Most people don’t have to exert so much effort to stay in character. Why should she? She fantasizes that the next place she goes—because there’s always a next place, another foster home, a new school—she’ll start over with a new, easier-to-maintain look. Grunge? Sex kitten?

The probability that this will be sooner rather than later grows more likely with every passing minute. Dina has wanted to get rid of Molly for a while, and now she’s got a valid excuse. Ralph staked his credibility on Molly’s behavior; he worked hard to persuade Dina that a sweet kid was hiding under that fierce hair and makeup. Well, Ralph’s credibility is out the window now.