What You Have Left (24 page)

I'm also indebted to the magazine editors who originally published portions of this book: Rebecca Burns, Brock Clarke, Michael Ray, R. T. Smith, Hannah Tinti, Nancy Zafris, Linda Swanson-Davies, and Susan Burmeister-Brown. For their financial support, I'm grateful to the Arts Council of Indianapolis, the Indiana Arts Commission, and the Ohio Arts Council.

To the participants and staff of the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, I offer my heartfelt thanks for your unfailing friendship, generosity, and encouragement. I have never been so happy or so proud to be affiliated with a group of people.

Most of all, thank you, Deborah—for your brilliant, fierce editing; for your faith and support; for Hazel; for your love.

ABOUT THIS GUIDE

The following reading group guide and author interview are intended to help you find interesting and rewarding approaches to your reading of
What You Have Left
. We hope these enhance your enjoyment and appreciation of the book.

READING GROUP GUIDE

1. This book doesn't start at the beginning of the story. Why do you think the author sometimes showed you the results of a character's actions before revealing his or her personal history? How might it have changed your ideas about Wylie if we read his side of the story first? How were your feelings about Cal affected by this structure?

2. The only two chapters in the novel that are narrated in the first person are
chapter 3
(Lyle 1991) and
chapter 8
(Holly 2007). Did it feel different to hear the characters speak for themselves in those chapters, rather than hearing their stories from a third-person narrator? How reliable are Holly and Lyle as narrators? Were there any specific passages that stood out to you in these chapters as particularly unreliable?

3. Discuss the relationship between Wylie and Lyle. Why did Lyle initially lie about having met Wylie (
p. 67
)? Do you think he had Holly's best interests in mind, or his own? What about his decision to switch car keys with Holly at the end of
chapter 3
(
p. 77
) and take the blame when the police arrive? Was this an act of chivalry, or of self-interest?

4. In
chapter 2
(Wylie 1971), we learn about the tragedy that befell Gladys and Lester's new baby, Nat. How do Gladys and Lester act as foils for Maddy and Wylie? Could what happened to baby Nat ever have happened to baby Holly? What evidence can you find that Wylie and Lester are different kinds of fathers? What suggests they are similar?

5. Did you view Wylie's decision to leave Holly with Cal as a selfish, or selfless, act? Is he fit for single parenthood? How do you think Holly's life would have been different if Wylie had raised her? How would
she
be different?

6. Lyle works in construction, and there are long, detailed passages about the projects he undertakes. How do these descriptions act as metaphors for his relationships in the book? As he is renovating Cal's home (
p. 8
), how is this reflected in his relationship with Holly? What about in his relationship with Cal? When he is reinforcing the foundation of the statehouse (
p. 112
), does the foundation of his relationship with Holly undergo any simultaneous renovation?

7. The walls of Cal's bedroom are made of pecky cypress, a desirable kind of wood that was once considered trash. “What makes pecky hard to find… is that you can't tell if a cypress is infected until you chop down the tree and cut it open (
p. 6
).” How is the pecky cypress like the Alzheimer's that runs in Cal's family? Why is it meaningful that Cal got the pecky cypress from the scrap pile at his father's sawmill?

8. Is it significant for you that Wylie and Maddy's relationship began while each of them was dating somebody else? How did learning about Dale and Sheila affect how you felt about Wylie and Maddy? Do you think they were really committed to one another?

9. Many of the characters in the novel battle addictions. What are some of the addictions the characters struggle with? Did any characters succeed in overcoming their addictions? How did the addictive personalities of the characters affect their relationships?

10. An interest in car racing seems to be almost genetic in the novel. How do the characters use their mutual interest in racing to remain close to one another? How does it pull them apart? What did you see as Maddy's primary obstacles? Did she really have to stop racing when she had Holly? How did the sexism she endured affect her relationship to the sport? Do you think racing will play a role in Claire's future, and, if so, will she have to face the same issues her grandmother faced?

11. When Holly and Wylie are finally reunited in
chapter 8
(Holly 2007), Wylie's short-term memory has been jeopardized as the result of a seizure caused by a lifetime of drinking. He is convinced that he tried to contact Holly in recent years but got no response. Holly realizes that without the benefit of short-term memory, he is simply believing what he would like to be true. In this circumstance, is it the thought that counts? Do you believe that Wylie does in fact wish he had contacted Holly sooner?

12. How does car racing act as a metaphor for the relationships in the story? Which ones are going around in endless circles? Who is leading the race in different chapters? Who is trailing behind? Which relationships are more like Wylie's figure-8 races, characters just dodging a head-on collision?

13. Why did Holly steal Wylie's videotapes of his visit with her and Claire (
p. 208
)? Was this a final act of vengeance against the father that left her? Or did she want the tapes for herself and Claire? Will Wylie even remember?

14. At the end of
What You Have Left,
what do the characters have left? Is Wylie's memory loss a curse, or a blessing in disguise? Do Lyle and Holly have each other? Does Claire have everything she needs? Are you hopeful for the future of this family?

A CONVERSATION WITH WILL ALLISON
by Claudia Labin

Did you know right away that it was Holly's story you wanted to tell?

Actually, her dad, Wylie, was the focal character of the first chapter I wrote, which appears in the book as
chapter 7
. It wasn't until I wrote a couple more chapters that Holly emerged as the protagonist. I didn't really have a plan. All I knew was that Wylie and Holly eventually would meet again.

How hard was it to give birth to this novel?

Harder than I expected. Back in college, I imagined I'd publish my first book in my twenties. Now, at thirty-nine, I'm just grateful this one made it out into the world.

Which of your characters was the most difficult to write?

Holly's grandfather, Cal, was tough. I'd already tried and failed once with a similar character in a short story. Like Cal, my grandfather had Alzheimer's, owned a dairy farm in South Carolina, etc. But the book required that Cal be an altogether different person than my grandfather. It took me a while to differentiate the two.

In the book you take chances and make bold shifts in viewpoint and time. Could you explain what led you to switch between first- third-person point of view?

The book ended up with three chapters in first person and five in third person. The decisions were intuitive; I was just looking for the viewpoint that worked best for any given chapter. At some point or another, I think I tried all of them in both first and third.

Often, when I'm having trouble writing, switching viewpoint is what unlocks the story for me. It has to do with voice, obviously, but also with narrative distance, and tone, and how information is released.

How did your method of working on the short story differ from your method of working on the novel?

In the case of
What You Have Left,
not much, since the chapters are self-contained. But now that I'm working on a novel with a more conventional structure, I find myself planning more. The book is in the first person and proceeds chronologically, which means, in terms of structure, I have fewer ways of getting out of a jam; I can't switch to another character's viewpoint or jump around in time. So I feel a stronger need to have a sense of where the story is headed. I end up making a lot of notes about what's going to happen later in the book, or at least what might happen.

Did you show the manuscript to others during the drafting stages, before you showed it to an editor?

My wife, Deborah Way, is an editor at a magazine in New York. We met in the MFA program at Ohio State, and since then she's spent countless hours editing my fiction. As an
editor, she's very thorough, has very high expectations, and takes my work very seriously, which is exactly what I think every writer needs. I do, at least.

My agent, Julie Barer, also made several helpful suggestions before we sent the manuscript out.

In your acknowledgements at the end of the book, you thank your dad “who graciously allowed his stories to be hijacked.” Are any of the characters based on real people? Was your dad a NASCAR aficionado?

None of the characters are based on real people, but a lot of the things that happen in the book happened to people I know. For instance, parts of Maddy's childhood are loosely based on stories my dad told me about his childhood. He's also the reason auto racing is in the book. He'd been friends with Cale Yarborough in high school and volunteered as a track steward at Columbia Speedway in the 1960s. When my brother and I were kids, he used to take us to the races.

Who would you say influenced you as a writer?

A great deal of what I know about writing—and reading, for that matter—I learned from Lee K. Abbott, whose workshops and literature courses I took as an undergraduate at Case Western and, later, as an MFA student at Ohio State. Mary Grimm and Michelle Herman were wonderful, generous teachers, too. I'm also indebted to the authors I worked with at
Story
. Reading and editing their work was an education in and of itself.

How has the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley impacted your writing?

I've had the good fortune of being a staff member at Squaw
Valley off and on since 1999, when I was still at
Story
. At first I thought it was corny that they called it a “community” instead of a conference, but I quickly came to regard it as the most important community in my writing life.

I think writers have a built-in need to get together. Most writers I know are very social people, yet we spend a big chunk of our lives alone at a desk, shut off from the rest of the world. It's good to come out of the cave and meet each other now and then. And of course it's helpful, professionally, to spend time with such an accomplished group of writers, editors, agents, etc. But the big thing about Squaw is the friendships I've made. Also, the valley itself is stunningly beautiful, and I like staying in a house with a bidet.

You were executive editor of
Story
. What did you look for when you got that stack of stories in the mail each day? And how, in the end, did the job impact your own writing?

I looked for stories that I couldn't put down, that were written with authority, and that in some way (voice, language, subject matter) stood out from others in the slush pile. Intelligent stories with a lot of heart. It didn't hurt if they were funny, or sad, or funny
and
sad. It especially didn't hurt if the author was unpublished, because we took a lot of pride in discovering new writers. Most of all, though, I just wanted to be moved.

Working at
Story
was very humbling. We got almost 20,000 submissions a year, and every day I was reading stories I liked better than mine—and rejecting most of them. The job gave me a fuller sense of the range and quality of fiction being written today, and it made me demand a lot more from myself as a writer.

Where do you write?

I have a nice little office at home that Deborah dreams of turning into a bathroom. There's an old wooden desk, a metal chair on wheels. Usually the cat's in my lap, at least until my leg falls asleep.

John Updike apparently has three desks. Do you use different physical places to create, write, and edit?

Mostly I write on the computer at my desk, but I do find it useful to revise on a hard copy, somewhere other than in my office. Reading the words on an actual page helps me see problems I missed on the computer screen. Somehow the change of scenery helps too.

Also, I spend about 90 minutes a day driving my daughter to and from school. I do a lot of brainstorming in the car, talking into a handheld digital recorder.

How would you define yourself as a writer?

I'm just trying to tell a good story and write a book that readers will enjoy. If I manage to do that, I feel like I'm doing my job.

Reprinted with the kind permission of
The South Carolina Review
.