When We Were Friends (49 page)

Elizabeth Joy Arnold:
I’ve loved books my entire life, was one of those kids who huddled with a flashlight under the covers so I could read just one more chapter, and brought books to the dining table to read during every meal. When I was seven I had a friend whose mom worked in a publishing house, and to me that seemed like the world’s greatest job; I pictured rows of people with their legs folded up on soft chairs, books open on their laps, turning pages.

Being “a reader” was my top career choice, and creating my own books was a close second. From the age of five I wrote stories: first the type of books kids make on paper that’s three-hole-punched and bound with yarn, inevitably about either monsters or puppies, and then in fifth grade a friend and I alternated chapters in what would become my first novel. (This was actually the inspiration for the reminiscences Lainey and Sydney have about jointly writing a book and sending it off to Houghton Mifflin.) I kept writing throughout junior high and high school, and it turned into a real physical addiction. Now if I go without writing for any period of time my fingers start itching.

But, of course, writing isn’t a practical career choice. My parents continuously reminded me that writing was a hobby, and not something a person could ever actually make money at. Quite sage advice actually, since in those years I was practicing and getting gradually better at writing, I needed a “real job” to support the addiction. And since I like money, or at least dislike not having it, I decided to do the sensible thing, and go into chemistry instead.

Why chemistry? I understood science, was good at it—at least in school. My dad was a physicist and he always encouraged me, buying me kits to “Make your own radio!” and “Create rainbows with diffraction gratings!” When you’re that age, science is pure fun. I had a huge chemistry set, and that was how I pictured chemistry for long after I should’ve known better; as this opportunity to mix things in flasks and make smoke that smells like rotten eggs.

And then I left grad school during a recession, and I couldn’t find a job. I was working as an administrative assistant for a number of months, and I was absolutely miserable. So to make myself feel like I was at least accomplishing something that fulfilled me, I went back to my childhood dream of writing. I gave in to my addiction, and once I started, I couldn’t stop. Eventually I found a job as a chemist, but I kept writing nights and weekends. It was a year after I went back to writing that I started the book that became
Pieces of My Sister’s Life
.

As far as similarities between chemistry and writing? It seems to me like the type of creativity they require is completely different. But the one skill that my science background might have given me was analytical ability. It’s helped me look at the different threads in a story, subplots and the arcs of all the main characters, hold them all in my mind and figure out how they need to intertwine throughout the narrative and come together at the end. I work it like a puzzle almost. That’s very similar to research, trying to tie together bits of information to make something coherent. But of course the main difference is that in writing you make your own truths (or at least draw from universal truths to paint a
unique story), whereas in science you’re trying to discover truths that already exist. So in that sense fitting the threads together is much easier in fiction, because you can wing it. With enough tweaking you can pretty much always make it work.

RHRC:
Do you have a particular writing process? What is a typical day of writing like for you?

EJA:
I usually wake up quite early, read for inspiration while I’m caffeinating my brain, and then I’ll start writing and keep going until I feel like I’ve been wiped clean. I’m really good at procrastinating, and if I didn’t start first thing my writing day would be doomed. The internet’s a killer, for example. I’ll get online meaning to just answer reader emails or check my Twitter feed, and then I’ll look up and it’ll be noon. So I’ve made it a rule that I don’t turn on the computer till at least 2:00, later if I’m having a good day.

I almost always write using a pen, because the words seem to flow more organically from my brain through my arm. I’ll end most days by typing what I’ve written into my laptop and printing out the pages for a sense of completion. And the next morning I’ll read through those pages and revise them, which is a nice warm-up and gives me a good jumping-off point for that day’s writing.

I’m constantly revising, trying to polish as I go. I have to be reasonably happy with what I’ve written before I move on to something new, or I get discouraged and want to just throw in the towel. By the time I type the last period, I’ve probably rewritten the “first draft” a hundred times. And then I’ll put the manuscript aside and work on something else so I can get a fresh perspective on the story. The initial rewrites are more stylistic changes, but I need that fresh look so that I can read the story more analytically, figuring out whether plot elements work the way I meant them to, and finding the most compelling parts of the story so I can decide where I want to put more focus. And then comes another round of writing and rewriting. Even after all that, I’m never really happy;
there are always things I know I could improve on if I just had unlimited time. But I know I’m going to have to let the manuscript go and send it off to my editor before I’m completely happy, because chances are she’ll find much more important things to rework, and she’ll inevitably end up cutting the sections I would’ve spent more time on.

RHRC:
Where did the inspiration for
When We Were Friends
come from?

EJA:
I love the idea of a Cinderella story—a woman who’s been beaten up by life circumstances finally coming into herself, realizing she’s worthy and eventually living happily ever after. As I started thinking about the story, trying to understand who Lainey was and what she lacked, and what might help her feel better about herself, I realized pretty early on that giving her a baby, specifically the baby of her former best friend, Sydney, who’d destroyed her self-esteem, would allow her to examine her relationship with both Sydney and with her own mother; to work through what had happened in her past, and to discover her own strengths. There’s nothing like parenthood, I think, to really give you a sense of self-worth.

Once I had that main plot element, the rest more or less fell into place. More important, I was able to put my heart into the story, live it with Lainey, because I knew exactly where she was coming from.

My husband and I had always known we wanted to adopt, but the whole process turned out to be much harder than we ever anticipated. We signed up to adopt from Vietnam, but after we’d been waiting two years, Vietnam closed to U.S. adoptions. And it was during this process, bruised and battered, that I wrote
When We Were Friends
. I’d watched most of my friends and family have kids; everywhere I looked there were babies and pregnant women. And here we were, I knew we’d make amazing parents, but this one thing I wished for more than anything else in my life
was becoming impossible. So that’s a theme that resonates throughout the novel: here’s Sydney, a woman who seems to treat her child with complete indifference and, it turns out, ends up completely using her. Why was this woman blessed with a child when Lainey knew she never would be? I guess, in a way, while writing this novel I was living vicariously, raising the baby I was increasingly sure I’d never get a chance to have myself.

A question I always seem to get from book club readers and interviewers is whether my books are semi-autobiographical. And really they’re never even remotely autobiographical. Lainey and I are two very different people and … I have never kidnapped a baby. But this story, more than my other books, had corollaries with my own life. The corollaries made writing this book more heart-rending for me than my previous two books, which dealt with subject matter that was more acutely tragic. But in the end it was also ultimately really healing to write.

(The addendum to our saga is that soon after I finished the last draft of
When We Were Friends
, my husband and I were chosen by a birth mother domestically. We’re now raising an amazing baby girl, Anna Lily, and the experience has been a hundred times better than we even dared to dream. That’s
our
Cinderella story.)

RHRC:
One of the most compelling aspects of the story is the intensity of the friendship between Lainey and Sydney as young girls, and the psychological effects of the breakup of their friendship. I think every woman can relate to having had a similar experience at some point. You also explored a variation on that theme in your novel
Pieces of My Sister’s Life
, in which the childhood closeness—and ultimate estrangement—of the twin sisters at the center of the story still has repercussions for their lives twelve years later. What intrigues you about relationships like that?

EJA:
I find close relationships between women fascinating. There’s something about the intensity of the bonds, both positive
and negative, that you don’t usually find between men. We rely on the women in our lives for comfort and validation, and when something goes wrong in those relationships it cuts deeply. Makes us doubt ourselves. And in both novels the relationships became richest, and then soured, when the girls were teenagers. Most of us can remember the sort of “love affairs” we had with our best friends in high school and college—in some ways much more powerful than the friendships we make later in life. That’s when we’re discovering who we are, and our friends really become part of us, help us find other sides to ourselves. Losing those kinds of friends is like a divorce or a death, or like losing your home; it’s heart-wrenching. There’s so much potential in those conflicts for story making and character building.

So I wanted to explore both sides of these relationships, the bad but also the good (like Lainey’s relationship with Pamela and the beginnings of her relationship with Sydney), friendships that can heal the broken parts of you and make up for the things life has taken from you. I also wanted to look at the unhealthy aspects of extreme closeness, the exclusiveness of Lainey and Sydney’s early friendship and also the obsessive sort of bond Star feels with Lainey. It’s only by letting go that both of them can grow.

RHRC:
The dramatic tension in the novel is particularly gripping. Did you plot the story out ahead of time, or did it develop naturally as you wrote?

EJA:
I’m not one of those writers who’s good at plotting out my novels before I start writing. Before I was first published I’d just start each book with characters who intrigued me, in a situation I wanted to explore, and I’d let them lead me through the story. It was more fun for me, the way reading a book is more enjoyable when you don’t already know the ending. But even more than that, it made me feel like the characters and stories actually existed somewhere outside of me, a fully formed piece of pottery
just waiting for me to uncover it piece by piece through the writing. I do outline now, even though it doesn’t feel as natural to me, because I’m less likely to veer off course, digging up the pieces to a completely different pot and trying to fit them where they don’t belong.

But the story I imagine at the point I’m writing the outline is still really vague. For
When We Were Friends
, the general mechanics were in place, I could see the big picture. But there were definitely times characters did things I didn’t expect, and the book turned in ways I didn’t initially plan for. I only figured out the details and the twists, and the myriad ways I’d put Lainey and Molly in danger, as I went along.

RHRC:
Who are your favorite authors? Has anyone in particular inspired you as a writer?

EJA:
Oh my gosh, I have so many favorites that I hate naming names, because I’m going to leave out others I love just as much. But if I have to pick, the name that comes to mind first is Anne Tyler. I remember reading
Celestial Navigation
years ago, and her talent at developing characters just blew me away. She’s probably the first author who pushed me to be a better writer, gave me something to strive towards. I’ve read every one of her books at least twice.

The last book that actually stunned me was probably
Middlesex
. I’m proud to say I discovered it well before it made the bestseller lists, when a chapter of a draft Eugenides had written was published in a book filled with “up-and-coming” young writers, and I wrote down his name so I’d remember it when his novel came out. (Is it ridiculous that I’m so proud of this? I feel like his editor must have when he signed him on.) I devoured the book, I was in total heaven, and then I reread it immediately feeling this intense despair, knowing I could never write even a tenth as well.

Other favorites (the authors who I’ll stalk online to figure out when their books are coming out and then run to the store to buy
the hardcover) are Michael Chabon (who I have a major crush on), Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, Elizabeth Strout and, when I need something completely different, for his brilliant imagination and utter uniqueness, Neil Gaiman. And now I feel guilty. It’s like trying to pick your favorite friends or relatives; it should never be done.

RHRC:
What are you working on now?

EJA:
It’s really hard for me to describe novels I’m in the middle of writing because when I’m deeply inside of them, I have so many different pieces swimming in my head that I could talk for hours about what’s happening and what’s going to happen, without ever giving a remotely cohesive picture.

But actually, I’m really excited about this next book. It’s about a woman, Chloe, whose husband, Nate, disappears. And in the process of trying to find him, Chloe discovers a journal he’d written in code, hidden inside a copy of
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
. As she gradually figures out how to decipher it, using books the two of them read together as children, Chloe starts learning secrets about him and their shared past that upend everything she’d once believed.