Camanchaca has one of the strongest novel openings I’ve read in years, a knockout vignette that disarms the reader with a few beats of unnecessarily specific detail, and then seamlessly shifts into fast and steady motion while glancing across a violent mystery all in just a quarter of a page:
My father’s first car was a 1971 Ford Fairlane, which my grandfather gave him when he turned fifteen.
His second was a 1985 Honda Accord, lead gray.
His third was a 1990 bmw 850i, navy blue, which he killed my Uncle Neno with.
His fourth is a Ford Ranger, smoke colored, which we are driving across the Atacama Desert.
Diego Zúñiga’sbookis constructed of crisp snapshots — 110 of them — that take place in locations in Buenos Aires and Santiago and small towns across Chile. Our narrator is an aspiring journalist, trying to understand and process the traumas of his fragmented family.
Though the narrator in Camanchaca is 20 years old, his social and emotional growth is stunted and he’s badly overweight. He’s dependent on one parent who’s unable to provide for him, and another who’s unwilling. They’re tragic monsters: his dad is a suave deadbeat who left when the narrator was four. His mom is lonely, obese, and desperate for human touch. While he seeks to uncover what happened to his Uncle Neno, our narrator captures his family in clipped recollections.
“We’d sit in the living room: two glasses of water, an ashtray, her cigarettes and lighter, the recorder, the microphone, and a radio,” the narrator says of a series of nights with his mom in their home in Santiago. She liked talking about her childhood, and is haunted by the memory of her mother packing a suitcase and leaving forever when she was just a girl. When telling stories, she often wanders off track or disappears into silence. The narrator nudges her back. He asks about the accident with Neno. “She looked at me and told me that someday she’d tell me the truth, but that for now, I wouldn’t be able to understand.”
Left throughout her life, the narrator’s mom has a crushing fear that he’ll leave her, too. When the narrator and his mom moved away from the father, they ended up in a private and oppressively co-dependent world. “When we came to Santiago we decided we would sleep together,” the narrator remembers. “Although, really, it was my mother who made the decision. She told me there was no money for gas, we couldn’t have a heater, and it would be best for us to sleep in the same bed, like when I was a kid and we still lived in Iquique.”
The narrator rememberspoints of high-uncertainty and pain in his life — at the age of four, ten, fourteen, etc. — but the most chronologically recent thread of the story takes place with the young man’s trip across the desert with his father’s new family. The trip is hazy and surreal, with vast stretches of nothing but sand and orange horizon. Then the narrator wakes up to streetlights he doesn’t recognize. “When I left Iquique, Alto Hospicio didn’t yet exist,” the narrator thinks. “There were five house in the middle of the desert, along with a couple of illegal garbage dumps. Now it’s a city, I think to myself, a city with lit streets.” Despite the narrator’s attempt to understand his world, it slowly but powerfully shifts beneath him.
Though the chronological jumps are frequent and the scenes are compact, Zúñiga deftly threads the storylines with evocative anchoring sensations. The dark deterioration of the son’s relationship with his mother, for example, is paired with the visceral decline of the family dog. One night the narrator and his mom hear her whining outside. The narrator says, “We went to the yard and there she was, thin, her cocker spaniel ears covered in dirt. She was lying in her house and crying. “I don’t know what to do,” said my mom.”
The narrator says, “Me either.”
Camanchaca is a fog that forms across the Atacama Desert along the Chilean coast. Though the actual weather-event doesn’t descend upon our characters until the final page of this novel, the sensation of the sprawling unknown hangs across each page, and Zúñiga lures the reader through with lucid, short-range glimpses of the surrounding world.
I’ve read this short, poetic book several times and I still don’t entirely understand what happened to Uncle Neno — there’s a series of infidelities with the mother and father. There’s a bad accident out on a desert stretch of road — but maybe it’s better that way; maybe it’s more representative of the fragmented way a person might inherit trauma.
Between each short burst of lyric storytelling, there are huge empty spaces. “At first my mother answered the way she always did, leaving loose ends, silences, the kind of things that seem so much a part of her life.” The narrator tells her she can’t do that — stop without explaining things fully. “She said she didn’t know how to do it any other way.”
I never listen to music when I write, even purely instrumental music unleashes too many voices in my head.
But I had music in mind while I was writing my most recent novel, perhaps because it’s a novel that relies on atmosphere more than plot. A Separation is about the disappearance of a man and the end of a marriage, but I tend to think of it as a love story. So here are a few love songs that were playing in my head as I was writing the book.
1. I Only Have Eyes For You — The Flamingos
Something about this song — maybe the tempo, leisurely to the point of narcotic — has a touch of darkness to it, an undercurrent of cynicism. Its thick swoon almost feels pointed in its proximity to stupor.
2. Smoke Gets in Your Eyes — The Platters
When I sat down to choose these songs, I thought about focusing on love songs about betrayal. But so many of the best love songs are already about bad faith and disillusionment. Here, the pastel-colored romance of the early verses gives way to stinging humiliation in a perfect lyrical turn.
3. Perfidia — Phyllis Dillon
I love the relentlessly upbeat tone of this song, which is so at odds with the actual lyrics. Dillon adds an inflection of heartbreak into every note she sings, even the ones in a major key. There’s also a version by Xavier Cugat, which Wong Kar-Wai used in Days of Being Wild — as well as In the Mood for Love and 2046.
4. I’m a victim of this song (Wicked Game) — Pipilotti Rist
Artist Pipilotti Rist’s cover of Chris Issak’s Wicked Game is total deranged perfection. She scream-sings her way through the lyrics in a way that has more or less obliterated the original from my memory; it might do the same for you.
5. Midnight, the Stars and You — Al Bowlly and Ray Noble
My novel is set in a hotel in Greece during the off season. This song was used at the end of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining — the ultimate story set in a hotel during the off season, and also, inter alia, a movie about writing.
I’ve often found that I only really figure out what I’m writing about when I’m done writing. In the case of this particular book, it turned out that I was writing a book that was as much about grief as it was about marriage. In fact, most of the music that is actually referenced in the book is in one way or another about loss. Here are a few:
6. Prologue, Billy Budd — Benjamin Britten
By chance, I went to see a production of Billy Budd at the Brooklyn Academy of Music just as I was starting to write my novel. The opera’s themes of loss and ethical indeterminacy were central to the book I wanted to write, and a direct inspiration. In this unsettling prologue, the character of Captain Vere is wracked with guilt as he recalls his role in the death of Billy Budd.
7. Mirologi-Epirotiko Makedoniko — Elias Karathimos
Professional mourners — women who are paid to issue laments at funerals — feature heavily in my book. Why The Mountains Are Black is a compilation of Greek village music assembled by record collector and curator Christopher King. It provides the musical context for the phenomenon of the professional mourner. This particular track is a Macedonian mirologi, an instrumental version of one of these ancient laments.
8. Defixiones, Will and Testament — Diamanda Galás
Galas draws from this tradition of laments, as well as many others, to create her own tornado of grief — as in Defixiones, Will and Testament, a memorial to the victims of the Armenian genocide. The effect is majestic, unsettling, the work of a musical shaman and a virtuoso.
Katie Kitamura is the author of the new novel, A Separation (Riverhead, 2017). Her previous novels areGone to the Forest and The Longshot, both of which were finalists for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award. Kitamura has written for The New York Times, The Guardian, Granta, BOMB, Triple Canopy, and is a regular contributor to Frieze.
Benedict Cumberbatch is no stranger to literary adaptations, and now the star of Sherlock and Parade’s End is set to play the lead in Melrose, a five-part TV miniseries based on the Patrick Melrose novels by Edward St. Aubyn.
According to Deadline, the series, a Showtime-Sky Atlantic co-production, will be written by David Nicholls, the British novelist who has adapted books such as Far From the Madding Crowd and Great Expectations for the screen. Each episode will correspond to one of St. Aubyn’s five Melrose novels: Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, Mother’s Milk, and At Last .
St. Aubyn’s semi-autobiographical novels chronicle the tragic, dizzying life of Patrick Melrose, a boy raised in a blueblooded family that’s as emotionally bankrupt as it is historically affluent. Patrick’s story certainly has the potential to make for compelling television: a monstrously abusive father, infidelity, a life of heroin addiction and hotel rooms, all set in locales from the 60’s South of France to New York City in the 80’s. And Cumberbatch, perhaps more than any actor working, seems well-equipped to capture the Melrose world of decadence, high culture, wit and emotional torment. It’s apparently a role he’s been after for quite some time. In a 2013 Reddit Q&A, Cumberbatch said that if he could play any literary character, it would be Patrick Melrose. Filming is set to begin this summer, which should put the premiere on target for 2018. In the meantime, the literary Internet will patiently await…wait, huh? This is Cumberbatch! Bring out the memes…
The former president and former first lady signed a joint deal with Penguin Random House
Last night, Penguin Random House announced that after a heated auction they had secured the rights to forthcoming books from both Barack and Michelle Obama. For the former President, this will be his fourth book following best selling memoirs Dreams of My Father and The Audacity of Hope, and a children’s book Of Thee I Sing. The former first lady published American Grown in 2012, which told the story of the White House Garden.
While the details of the deal have not been released, The New York Times reported “the opening offers for Mr. Obama’s book alone were in the $18 million to $20 million range.” The total is rumored to be about $60 million. If true, the sum significantly outpaces Bill Clinton’s and George W. Bush’s $10 million post-presidential memoir advances and Hilary Clinton’s $8 million sum for her 2003 memoir Living History.
The Obama’s plan to donate a portion of their advances to charities, including the Obama Foundation. Additionally, Penguin Random House will donate one million books in the Obama’s name to First Book, a literacy focused non-profit, and Open eBook, a partner of the White House Digital Education Initiative.
There has yet to be a definitive announcement about what subjects the books will cover — or what imprints they will appear on — however many hope Barack Obama’s text will draw from the journal he kept in office. The New York Times speculated, “his memoir could include behind-the-scenes moments that were captured as major events unfolded.” Considering the announcement came on the night of Donald Trump’s first address to congress, hopefully it will also include some less-than-subtle thoughts on the current administration.
SL You were talking about the label of the comic writer. I’ve always felt like all the writers I like could be called comic writers, and it just means that life is funny and tragic. GS Serious writers are often just the ones suppressing the funny shit.
I really love books that are kind of thin, but sort of heavy. Thin but incredibly intense. Books that seem like they took 10 years to write, but are almost like the notes for a book that is actually impossible.
When those first precious basil leaves sprouted, my first novel — which I had written in a prolonged state of panic, knowing I had absolutely no idea what I was doing — was in the process of being rejected by every agent and editor in New York whose contact information I could wrangle from the internet. I received literally hundreds of rejections. Mostly, they were form letters that I still read carefully for clues, as if upon the 35th reading I would discover some new information beyond what they plainly stated. None of the notes shape-shifted.
Cultural critique is in a tricky spot. Living as we do under an extremist government, it is hard to know what to do with criticism, or how to consume art that does not carry a big rubber stamp declaring it “political.” It’s hard to defend doing anything except being in the streets.
Tell me what you can’t forget, and I’ll tell you who you are. I switch off my apartment light and she comes with the dark. The train’s eye widens in the tunnel and there she is on the tracks, blond hair swinging. One of our old songs starts playing and I lose myself right in the middle of the cereal aisle. Sometimes, late at night, when I’m fumbling with the key outside my apartment door, my eyes meet my reflection in the hallway mirror and I see her, waiting.
Marlena and I are in Ryder’s van. That morning, while he was still asleep, she stole the keys from the pocket of his jeans. The spring’s burst gloriously, stupidly into summer, and we’re wearing drugstore flip-flops, hair tacky with salt at the temples, breath all cigarettes and cherry lip gloss and yesterday’s wine. I kick my sandals off and unfold my legs on the dash, press my toes against the windshield the way I do when it’s just Marlena and me. Ryder says I’ve ruined his car, that the spots won’t rub off, but I don’t care. Marlena painted my nails, propping my foot on her thigh. High-alert orange — her color.
Our windows are rolled all the way down. The breeze loosens the hair from my ponytail, sends it in tangles across my face so that everything I see is broken. We’re on our way to the beach, for a normal day. For holding our breath underwater until our lungs beg. For the breath-stealing slap of a wave against our stomachs and sour, fizzy mouthfuls of beer stolen from unattended coolers. We’ll track the sun’s movement with the angles of our towels and pass the same two magazines back and forth until the light sinks into the water. When we leave, unburying our feet from cold sand, we’ll have sunburns, then fevers.
We’re pretending to be girls with minor secrets, listening to Joni Mitchell with the volume turned up. Every line is a message written just for us. I sing so loud Marlena can’t hear herself, tells me shh, tells me I’m making her brain hurt. But in this memory, I only sing louder.
Marlena puts pressure on the gas and the car climbs the big hill on the dead-end road that leads to the lake. The speedometer leaps — we pass fifty-five, the limit on country roads, and hit seventy within a minute. The car fills with wind, so pushy and loud my hair whips against my neck and I can’t hear the music anymore. My voice hitches and I swing my feet to the floor. I try to roll my window up but Marlena locks it from her side. When she looks at me, grinning, I feel the car edge over to the shoulder, tires spitting gravel. She swerves back into the lane and the speedometer quivers before it jumps past eighty-five. Marlena’s ponytail has fallen almost out, and I wonder whether she can see, if maybe she doesn’t realize that we’re up to ninety now, and that underneath the wind there’s a new smell, bitter and hot, the van’s organs burning. We go faster and faster. I giggle a little and tell her to slow down, and a few seconds later to slow the fuck down, and when she doesn’t answer I shout that she’s crazy and scaring me and I want to get out of the goddamn car and that we’re going to die, please, she’s going to fucking kill us. We hit a hundred miles per hour, zipping up another hill, the car thrumming. When we reach the top the tires lift off the pavement, and when we land I slam against the glove compartment, catching myself with my forearms. She doesn’t brake and I wrestle my seatbelt on. Lake Michigan, Caribbean blue and winking light, rears up in our faces. We’re half a mile or less from the drop-off, the parking lot, the path to the beach.
She’s not going to stop, and for a second I feel something foreign, a rage that’s equal parts hunger and fear. Do it, I think, do it, and my stomach’s in my throat but I’m so tired of being the one to say no, be careful, stop. “What if I just keep going?” she shouts. Later I realize she was probably very high, because that would have been around the time of the pharmaceutical bottle of Oxy, forties, pills that loom in my memory of her like an extra feature; her eyes, the scraggly tips of her unwashed hair.
Now the lake is bigger than the sky. After we go under, how long will it take me to kick out the passenger-side window, my flip-flops floating to the roof of the car, my body shrieking for air? Marlena is a bad swimmer.
But then, no more than a dozen car lengths from the drop-off, we start to slow. The van weaves back and forth across the dotted line, careening onto the outer edges of its wheels. We stop with a shudder and a squeal. I jolt forward, the seat belt knifing into the space between my breasts. The headlights nose the slatted fence that marks the place where the land plummets a steep quarter mile to a crescent of stony beach. The car sighs, its engine ticking with relief. I am almost crying, my pulse a gallop, and I hate her for knowing it.
“Oh, come on,” Marlena says, but she’s out of breath and it takes her too long. “Do you really think I’d let anything bad happen to you?” Hives, the kind she gets when she’s anxious or excited, spread in a fine red lace from her collarbone up along the jumpy tendons of her neck, ending at her jaw. She scrapes a set of fingernails against my kneecap, a small circle that opens outward, shivering through me.
I want to spit right in her face. I want to walk away from everything she’s made me do and all the ways I’ve changed so bad that for an instant it’s possible, I almost do. I tuck my hands under my thighs so she won’t see them shaking, and stare at the pinetree deodorizer. It flutters like we’re still moving. “Cat,” she says.
It’s not a question. I love this wildness. I crave it. So why, when something in me asks if it’s worth ruining my life over, do I hear No?
I blink hard, until the tears are gone. When I laugh, shaking my head, she laughs too, and the horrible thing between us disappears, except for one indestructible sliver, mine forever. We grab the plastic bags of snacks from the backseat and trip down the path to the beach. Already I’m forgetting the feeling that seared me minutes before. Do it, just do it already, you bitch. She’s singing again, “California,” the part about kissing a sunset pig, the part about coming home. I chase her voice with mine.
Joni Mitchell songs fit Marlena. She was comfortable in higher registers, landing fast on each note, and she could perfectly mirror Joni’s trembling strength, the way she turned syllables into hard bells, ringing. That’s the last time I can remember hearing Marlena sing “California,” though it couldn’t have been. It was one of her favorites, and this was four months, at least, before she died. She drowned, technically. Though not in the way I’d feared that day, Ryder’s van, shooting through a guardrail. There was no great splash. No screams from the beach, no rushing lifeguard. She would have liked that better.
Marlena suffocated in less than six inches of ice-splintered river, in the woods on the outskirts of downtown Kewaunee, a place she had no reason to be at twilight in November. She was wearing one of my old coats and a pair of chewed-up Keds that the police would make much of. The tote bag she carried was full of loose change that must have rattled, as she walked, against that prescription bottle, her pay-as-you-go flip phone. She struck her head neatly, brutally, on a river boulder, and, it is assumed, her body slid just so, unconscious, until mouth and nostrils were submerged in water.
Some of the details are facts, but very few — where she was found, what she wore and carried. She was last seen alive at 5:12 p.m., according to Jimmy, my older brother. His memory of those three numbers blinking on the car clock is distinct. Though, he told me later, frustrated, drunk, he could be remembering what the clock read in the minutes just after she got in the car. It’s possible, he said, that 5:12 p.m. was the time he left the house, before he even picked her up. I understand why it bothered him so much, not knowing the time line for sure. Neither of us really believes that what happened to her was pure accident.
At a little past one in the afternoon, almost twenty years after that day in the car, I received a phone call from a ghost. I was walking through a corridor of faceless skyscrapers on Fifth Avenue, congested with men in long wool coats who collectively bristled when I slowed and pulled my phone from my pocket. I had a hangover, a dull knot between my eyes, a flutter in my pulse. When I saw the area code, 231, I hit Ignore. I leaned against a deli window, my chest tightening. I had no business with anyone in northern Michigan anymore; Mom lived in Ann Arbor with Roger, who even after a decade I still thought of as her new husband; Jimmy was in the UP, working for a construction company that built overpriced vacation houses.
The caller left a voicemail.
Hi, the voice said, a man, a nasal tilt to his vowels that reminded me of home. I’m sorry, he said, and then said it again. This is weird. Is this the phone for the Cat, the Catherine, from Silver Lake? This is Sal.
I saw Sal the boy, the landline’s cord corkscrewing around his fingers, speaking, as if by magic, with a grown man’s voice. It almost made me laugh. Sal Joyner. I’m in New York. He stopped for a second and then said, drawing out the words, The Big Apple, as if to prove to whoever was listening that he meant it, that it was both incredible and real. You probably don’t even remember me, he said, and then I did laugh, something like a laugh at least, a sharp intake of breath that curved up at the end, a not-unhappy sound. I hope it’s okay that I called. I’m wondering if you might have some — an hour or whatever, to meet. To talk to me about my sister.
And it all came back, of course, the edges sharper, clearer, than the city around me, the city that had seemed to blur and then fall away as soon as Sal said his name. Though it was there already, wasn’t it? A period of my life so brief it was over almost as soon as it started, and still there’s something I want to know, a question ticking in the deep, a live mine.
Popular Australian children’s author, Mem Fox, was recently detained by the United States border control as a result of Trump’s travel ban (or “not a ban” or “bad people” ban or whatever he is calling it now).
Everybody is arguing whether or not it is a BAN. Call it what you want, it is about keeping bad people (with bad intentions) out of country!
After nearly two-hours of exhausting interrogation, border control agents finally determined that Fox, a 70 year old woman who has traveled to the United States 116 times, was in fact not a bad person. However, it appears that irreparable damage has been done as far as the author is concerned. In a statement obtained by the Guardian, Fox says, “I felt like I had been physically assaulted which is why, when I got to my hotel room, I completely collapsed and sobbed like a baby.” She was taken aback by the “so many insults and…so much gratuitous impoliteness” she received, that at this point she “couldn’t imagine” returning to the United States again.
The writer of over 30 books, including the classic, Possum Magic, filed formal complaints with the Australian and US embassies. While Fox’s ordeal is a downright embarrassment for the United States, let us not forget that this is a frightening reality for millions of our local community members who have far less agency. If border control is treating a darling, 70 year old, visa-carrying author this way, we should be worried.
In her debut novel Everything Belongs To Us, Yoojin Grace Wuertz transports readers back to 1978, to Seoul National University in South Korea. Four students — Jisun, Namin, Sunam, and Juno — struggle to succeed financially and socially during the final years of a repressive regime that also incited an economic transformation in the country. Jisun, a tycoon’s daughter, shuns her privilege to become an underground labor activist. Namin, her childhood best friend, lifts her family out of poverty by soaring to the top of the class. Juno will stop at nothing to get it all, including top rank in the university’s prestigious social club, “the Circle.” And Sunam, lover and villain, drives a wedge between the women, changing their lives forever.
Born in Seoul, Wuertz immigrated to the US when she was six. I met her at Tin House Writer’s Workshop in 2012, where I first witnessed the compassion she transmits from her heart to the page. She is brilliant, poised and determined, and while her prose is keen and tidy, the intimate relationships she creates in her stories are messy enough to be true. She currently lives with her husband and son in New Jersey, which is where she was when I phoned her to discuss writing historical fiction, listening to our elders, enduring an authoritarian leader, and Everything Belongs To Us.
Andrea Arnold: South Korean history hasn’t been widely covered by American novelists. Why did you choose to set Everything Belongs To Us in 1978?
Yoojin Grace Wuertz: My parents were college students in Seoul in the 1970s and I became fascinated with the stories my dad would tell me about that period. It was a very dynamic, volatile time because the economy was growing at an unprecedented rate under a repressive and authoritarian government. Park Chung Hee was President, and I chose to set the novel in 1978 because many factions in the country — student and labor activists particularly — were rising up in dissent during that time. [The President] was assassinated in 1979, three months before I was born. As an immigrant kid, I noticed cultural differences between Korea and the U.S., of course, but I didn’t understand the political differences. It started as an intellectual interest but ended up being personally meaningful because it helped put my own history and identity into larger context.
AA: Financial success is everything to everyone in the novel except for Jisun. After we leave these students, an economic transformation occurs in South Korea. What was life like for South Koreans before and after the economic transformation?
YGW: My parents were born in 1953, 1954 at the end of the Korean War. For that generation, the post-war generation, they witnessed several generations’ worth of economic progress compressed into thirty years. In 1953, Korea was among the most impoverished countries in the world with something like $50 GDP per capita, which is really hard to imagine now, in 2017, because South Korea is a major world economy and companies like Samsung and Hyundai are household names. But that shift happened during my parents’ lifetime and during the lifetime of the characters in this novel. And it happened because of the Park administration, which blatantly pursued development at the cost of democracy and human rights. For that reason, Park Chung Hee is a very controversial figure: revered by the older, more conservative generation and criticized by progressives. His daughter, Park Geun-hye, who was impeached from the Presidency last December, has had a similarly problematic legacy.
AA: Jisun is an underground labor activist, although she is also a privileged college student whose father is very wealthy. She is full of contradictions. Who is Jisun?
YGW: I wanted her to have a passion that was counter to her birth and to her grooming. I modeled her father after the authoritarian figures in Korean history. Very successful and nation-minded but brutal. He had a plan for his daughter, and she rebelled against it because she had different ideas for herself and what she considered noble and what she wanted for her future. Jisun has that financial success that was so highly desired by many people in the country, but what she wanted was freedom, democracy and personal agency, which is what she didn’t have in her life.
AA: She falls for a Methodist missionary named Peter. I don’t want to give spoiler alerts, but can you tell me about missionaries and why they were allowed to be in Korea spreading gospel during Park’s regime?
YGW: Christian missionaries have a centuries-long history in Korea, but especially after the war they were instrumental because they brought aid in addition to religion. American missionaries set up universities and supported other educational and social efforts. The government did not oppose American missionaries in the ’50s and ’60s. But in the ’70s when the missionaries became supportive of labor protest and antigovernment and pro-democracy movements with the rise of Minjung theology, which is a Korean social justice theology comparable to Latin American liberation theology, then the government started to feel antagonistic toward US missionaries and US groups. There was a tense balance, because the United States is one of South Korea’s most important allies. The administration had to be very careful not to offend America by kicking out or jailing missionaries, which I reference in the early part of the novel. Peter was protected by his US citizenship.
AA: In many ways the character Namin reminds me of you. She’s brilliant and hard working. Success is her only option. Did you model her character after anyone?
YGW: Thank you, I actually modeled her after my mom! My mom grew up the youngest child in a single parent home because her father passed away when she was an infant. My grandmother, who was an amazing woman, had to raise three kids in an incredibly challenging financial climate. Pretty much everybody was poor, but if your family did not have the primary breadwinner, which would have been the father, you struggled even more. My mom has always been an academic person. She’s always loved reading and studying and learning. The scenes of Namin testing into the most elite middle school in the country, when she was the first one from her working class town to get accepted, that happened to my mom. The town threw her a party! She tested into the top high school and women’s college, Ewha Womans University. She was able to overcome financial and social challenges via education. My father’s stories about the political and cultural climate sparked my interest in researching this time period, but my mom’s personal story became the heart of the book.
AA: Motherhood is another recurring theme in the novel. I’m thinking of the references to ajummas, which is so great because then everyone has a mother even if she’s just the woman next to you on the bus! Can you talk about the changing role of women in 1978 Korea and why motherhood became a focal point of the story?
YGW: Ajumma is a Korean concept I find difficult to translate. I’ve seen it translated as auntie, but that isn’t quite right. Basically, ajumma can refer to any middle-aged or married woman. Sometimes it’s a pejorative word and sometimes it’s an affectionate word, depending on the context. But I guess the translation “auntie” refers to Korea’s communal culture, the idea of communal motherhood and family. When I was growing up all adults were my parents because all adults could tell you what to do. In the novel, I think I chose to create an absence of traditional mothers. Jisun’s mother is dead. Namin’s mother is not supportive of her sister during times of crisis. Her sister, who becomes a mother, has a very conflicted idea of motherhood. Portraying female characters was something that I thought a lot about while writing this novel. I wanted to create women who were anti-convention, who didn’t fall into the expected roles, and so maybe that’s why I created an absence of motherhood. Not because I don’t value motherhood — I’m a new mother myself — but because there is no lack of Korean women being portrayed as mothers and daughters and caregivers. I wanted something else.
There is no lack of Korean women being portrayed as mothers and daughters and caregivers. I wanted something else.
AA: What is Juno’s notion of a “little pond” and where did it come from?
YGW: Korea is a small country geographically. South Korea is the size of Indiana. To the west is China, a huge landmass, culturally influential. On the east side is Japan, maybe not huge in land but historically powerful. Koreans have always thought of themselves as wedged in between giants, which creates a bit of an inferiority complex. In the national mindset is this intense desire to succeed despite its underdog status. Juno, being somebody who is desperate to succeed and project himself as large as possible, says Korea is “a little pond,” and in a little pond you want to learn how to be a big fish, a shark. That way you might get a shot in the ocean.
AA: Games play a big role in your characters’ lives. The university boys play baduk. The Circle hazing involves a sex game. Jisun plays sadistic games with Sunam. Are games important in Korean culture or why are all these games played in the novel?
YGW: Yes. I think games are important in Korean culture. I grew up watching my male relatives play baduk, the Chinese game “Go.” It’s a strategic, cerebral game. Historically only aristocrats were allowed to become educated in Korea. They were called the yangban class, and playing these games of strategy was considered very erudite and marked you as a person of intelligence.
AA: Did your own childhood memories make their way into the novel, and in addition to chatting with your parents what kind of research did you do?
YGW: I read everything I could about the time period, particularly focusing on the protest movements for labor rights and democracy. Contemporary studies with first person accounts were particularly helpful to give me a sense of what people were experiencing at the time. For the Peter character, I read first person accounts of American missionaries who had gone to Korea in the ’60s and ’70s. I did a lot of cultural research talking to my family members about what films they were watching, what music was popular at the time, what they would do for fun, where they would go for dates, and what was normal in terms of friendships and dating and clothing. In terms of my own memories, the novel is set in 1978, two years before I was born, so I would do this thought experiment where I would take my memories of living in Seoul as a child in the early- to mid-’80s and try to slightly rewind in time. If the economy is growing at 7 or 8% as it was during that time, every year makes a difference in terms of standard of living, what people could afford, and also how social norms would track with those economic changes. I would take what I remembered and try to reverse-engineer what that memory might have been a few years earlier.
AA: When you were going through your rewrite you told me about a character you cut from the novel. Now that I read the book I’m curious about the role that other character had. Can you discuss your journey from draft to publication?
YGW: In very early drafts, this novel was about Sunam’s family, his kids. It would’ve been set in the ’90s and ’00s in the United States. What I found while I was writing it was that nobody cared about that story [Laughs]. They were more interested in the flashbacks to Sunam’s youth when he was a college student. So I decided to set the novel in that time period, which actually scared me a lot because I had not set out to write a historical fiction novel. Writing historical fiction scared me because it seemed like a lot of research. [Laughs] And it seemed like I’d have to be an authority on a time period I hadn’t lived through. I wanted to do right by the material because of the people who had lived through it, because I so admired them and the work they had done. Once I started getting into the research and once I started talking to my family members I stopped thinking of it as historical fiction and started thinking of it as how can I tell this story? What would it be like if I was going through this? Also, because my parents and I are culturally very different, they having grown up in Korea during this repressive time and me having grown up in America in a much freer time, we had a pretty tense relationship for many years. Writing this novel actually created so much healing in that relationship, because I was researching this material as a writer who wanted to understand the time period and these characters — not as a daughter who was often quite resentful of the culture. Developing empathy for these characters, who are essentially contemporaries of my parents, helped me to understand where they were coming from in a radical way that I hadn’t been willing to consider before.
AA: Did you start writing Sunam’s story while earning your MFA at NYU?
YGW: Yes. During my first semester at NYU I was still straddling that contemporary family arc. After that first semester I started the draft that became the novel. By the time I graduated, I had half the manuscript. It took me a year after that to finish the manuscript, and I connected with my agent shortly after that.
AA: What was your experience like at NYU? Were there teachers that shaped you or that you emulated?
YGW: I was very intimidated to even apply. My idea of myself as a writer was so fragile because I had already written a failed novel and I wasn’t sure I was supposed to keep going. I would go to MFA open houses, come home and say nope, not this year. It took me seven years to work up the courage to finally send in an application. Thank god I was accepted because I was so afraid I wouldn’t be able to survive the rejection. When I started the program I jumped in with both feet and I loved it! I felt so fortunate to be able to learn from these amazing writers every week.
The professor who helped my writing the most was Aleksandar Hemon, who I had as a second year. He taught a class on editing. I thought editing was just making prettier sentences, and what I learned is that editing is a process where you find what your story is. You find the most interesting way to tell the story, in the most active way possible. Not just tinkering with adjectives, which is something I’d been doing for a long time, trying to hold onto sentences that weren’t helping my story because I’d worked hard on them. I learned it’s okay to write shitty drafts and throw out most of it if it teaches you where the story is for the next draft. He’d say “it’s all shit until it’s not.” If you’ve read him, you know how un-shitty his writing is, and it is very empowering to hear him say “it’s all shitty” before it becomes that remarkably unshitty thing we get to read.
Another professor I learned a lot from was David Lipsky. I was so lucky because I was in both David’s and Sasha’s classes at similar times and they were teaching opposite craft skills that turned out to be complementary. From Sasha, I was learning about structure and plot and organizing story, and what I learned from David was micro word-level editing. He is an obsessive reader. He will ask you to choose that one word in a sentence that makes it great rather than good. Every week he’d come in with a short story that was the best version of itself and say why does this work?Why does this give you a lift? It was a new way of reading and noticing.
AA: What are you working on next?
YGW: You mentioned that you saw the theme of financial success being major in Everything Belongs To Us. I’m writing another book with a theme of class strife. This time it’s set in contemporary America, and it’s a story of a marriage where the two partners are of very different classes, cultures and race. I like working with social differences in intimate relationships.
From a nearby bunk a girl loudly whispered in the dark, “Say goodnight, Gracie.”
A chorus of other recruits, at least four, answered, “Goodnight, Gracie!” in the high-pitched nasal tone of an old-school Hollywood dumb blonde.
I was fairly certain that the instigator of this almost nightly routine was a blonde girl from the division’s flag team who I more or less regarded as a bully. She seemed to think she was cute. She seemed to fancy herself a leader of some kind. I didn’t care for her during the day, but at night when she initiated the George Burns and Gracie Allen routine, first with a handful of girls, and by the end of the sixth week of training, fifteen or twenty girls, I really hated her.
And you know what? I remembered seeing a documentary about Burns and Allen, the married comedy team whose Burns and Allen Show ran in the 1930s and 40s, that said the whole “goodnight Gracie” thing wasn’t actually part of their routine. And why in the world would these girls want to do this non-routine in Navy basic training anyway? It bothered me to no end. No one stopped them. No recruit drill commander ever overheard what they were doing and told them it was un-Navylike. Part of me wanted to call out to the instigator and ask what her deal was, but she was always busy whispering with other girls and I just didn’t have it in me to get in the mix. Other than having befriended the only other older, college-educated recruit, I wasn’t doing great socially. But, I was in freaking boot camp, so why should I have to worry about my social life?
I was in freaking boot camp, so why should I have to worry about my social life?
Now, what the instigator’s routine certainly did do for me every night was pull John Denver to the forefront of my mind, via his movie with George Burns, Oh, God from 1977. I had the almost nightly habit of scrolling through a John album for entertainment and comfort as I was trying to fall asleep. Sleep was not generally elusive since we were lucky to get five or six hours a night, and we moved almost constantly the other nineteen hours of the day, but comfort was hard to come by.
Bereft of amusement, I closed my eyes tight and imagined scenes from Oh, God. John’s acting always made me uncomfortable, but I applauded his chutzpah in going after movie roles — he didn’t mind putting himself in uncomfortable situations. In that movie, John played a family man who worked at a grocery. His life wasn’t great and he had his doubts about the state the world was in. Suddenly God, played by Burns, began appearing to him with the message that he could and should make a positive difference. Though I wasn’t really looking for one, the parallel between the story’s set-up and my current situation didn’t completely escape me. Or maybe attempting to create a parallel was just another comfort-fix.
In 1975, the year I was born in Hobart, Indiana, my mother took me on long walks and sang Top 40 songs from the radio. That year was an outstanding one for John — probably the peak of his career. He had a string of number one songs and albums, he won an Emmy, was named country music’s performer of the year, and hosted the Tonight Show numerous times. I always wondered why his work resonated with me after it no longer resonated with our culture as a whole. He was most popular at the tail-end of Vietnam — perhaps the country needed someone who seemed honest and goodhearted as part of a healing process — but why did I need him?
Though I wasn’t really looking for one, the parallel between the story’s set-up and my current situation didn’t completely escape me. Or maybe attempting to create a parallel was just another comfort-fix.
So who knows how many times I’d heard his best known songs before the day when I was about six when “Country Roads” grabbed me by the collar. My family was in our white- canvas-topped orange Skylark when it came on the radio. I remember leaning forward to get closer to the speakers and asking, “Who is this?”
My parents and most of the rest of the world had gotten over John by 1981. So, in the car they looked at each other like I’d asked about buying bellbottoms, but eventually one of them answered my question.
Nineteen years after his death, people persist in thinking of John as a peace-nik. And I wondered if he would have disapproved of my having enlisted. He died in Monterey, near the Defense Language Institute, a year and a half before I moved there and began my Arabic course, and it wasn’t like I could have asked his advice even if he’d lived. But I still wondered what he would think. His own father had been a record-breaking Air Force pilot and John grew up moving from one base to the next; he knew more about military life than most people, which gave weight to any opposition to war he voiced.
In any case, John knew more about war and the military than I did. Growing up in Kansas City hadn’t given me any feel for military communities. Leavenworth was only half an hour away, but to see straight-backed men with short hair sporting the occasional uniform, one had to actually go to Leavenworth; they didn’t leak out into the city or suburbs. I never got the sense that anyone in my community cared about wars or the plight of the soldier or anything. I was raised during the Cold War when not much was happening in an obvious way. In fact, the feeling that I had was that I grew up entirely in peacetime. That’s how little I’d paid attention.
I was raised during the Cold War when not much was happening in an obvious way. In fact, the feeling that I had was that I grew up entirely in peacetime. That’s how little I’d paid attention.
And looking back, my reaction to the first Gulf War was pretty stupid.
My best friend Janet and I were at the mall when Congress declared war. I was still fifteen but she had been sixteen since November and her parents allowed us to take their minivan. A TV hung from the ceiling in the corridor and we stopped to watch the announcement.
What I knew of war came from L.M. Montgomery books — you know, the Anne of Green Gables series. By the time Anne was a teenager, Canada was involved in WWI. Her brothers and boyfriend had to go to war and wear a lot of khaki; the women back home fortified themselves with chicory-thinned coffee and cut down on sugar consumption… for The Cause.
So, I’m embarrassed to admit that I had sort of always hoped for a war. At the time of the outbreak of the first Gulf War, I’d been reading the books for at least five years and couldn’t get enough of heroes having to leave their girls behind, and the lonely dog who refused to eat and always sensed when his special boy was unexpectedly approaching by rail or when said boy was blown to pieces in a distant land. I never once thought I would like to be the figure who packed up and flew off to combat, but I certainly wanted to be the girl who got to skimp on meals, collect scrap metal, sew, and write letters to someone. Lots and lots of letters.
At the time of the outbreak of the first Gulf War, I’d been reading the books for at least five years and couldn’t get enough of heroes having to leave their girls behind, and the lonely dog who refused to eat.
Therefore, when we saw the declaration of war on the mall TV, I told Janet we needed to abort our shopping trip stat; I couldn’t believe my good luck and I wanted to begin pacing the floor and beating my breast, my family at my side. Maybe I’d learn to ululate if the situation grew desperate enough.
After Janet dropped me off, I burst through the front door and ran up the steps of our split-level ranch shouting, “Have you heard? We’re at war! Can you believe it?”
My parents and sister were sitting on my parents’ bed watching the smoky, green, loud, live coverage. I didn’t want to look away from — I think it was Gary Shepherd — ducking from tracer fire, trying to hold his earpiece in place. He seemed really scared.
I asked my father if there’d be a draft. He said if it went on long enough maybe there’d have to be. I crossed my fingers.
When the war ended only five weeks later, I was super disappointed. Nothing had even happened. It hadn’t changed our lives at all. I wondered when we’d have another chance at one of these things — to do it up right.
Thanks to my focus on Montgomery, I mainly knew about Canadian and British involvement in the First World War, and nothing else about any other war at all. I had some vague understanding of Vietnam because I’d seen movies and a replica of the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial Wall. Janet’s dad was a photographer in Vietnam but never spoke about it. I didn’t exactly ask him questions, but as I understood it he didn’t want to discuss his experience anyway. And, of course, I knew WWII was when the unpleasantness with Hitler had occurred. That about wrapped up my knowledge of war.
I knew WWII was when the unpleasantness with Hitler had occurred. That about wrapped up my knowledge of war.
Talk about a Lost Generation. I’m fairly comfortable saying that I wasn’t the only Gen Xer who was so ignorant.
We weren’t beatniks. We weren’t hippies. But we would have enjoyed being either. Particularly in college. We hadn’t earned one designation or the other, but were gladly standing on the shoulders of disheveled giants with our soft, clean feet.
We sat in our dark dorm rooms, candlelit, drinking Guinness, reading aloud to each other from our Great Books. We contemplated, we mused, we debated and cogitated. We learned to swing dance. But the beats we were imitating… didn’t they do the same out of their sense of world-weariness? Out of their severe feeling of having been beaten down by the wars and the economy and a sense of needing to make change happen? Shit, read two pages of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and you feel the real deal. Even the first few lines of the poem are so charged that any kid in a dim dorm room drinking foreign beer should be ashamed of himself:
“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn
looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly
connection to the starry dynamo in the machin-
ery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat
up smoking in the supernatural darkness of
cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities
contemplating jazz…”
Then there was the hippie part, which was equally appealing. At St. John’s College we lay in the sun on the grassy knoll. We made daisy chains, braided them into each other’s hair. We didn’t wear shoes. We spoke of peace, we derided the idea that any type of fighting would bring about any type of peace. But what were we talking about? Vietnam? That ended before most of us were born. And the average unthinking person laments what happened in Vietnam. What did we have in our minds when we stitched peace symbols onto our jeans? Free love? Maybe that’s the part we liked.
And I don’t want to think that wars are the only things that can define a generation, but they do offer scaffolding. We were pretty unscaffolded.
When I was a college senior I had one friend, Steve, a divorcé in his 30s, who was an Air Force veteran. He stood out because he was an actual adult. He was balding. He tucked in his shirts and continued to seek regular haircuts all of first semester. By second semester he let his hair grow and adopted a slouchier dress code. We still sensed he was different from us, but he assimilated because he wanted to be part of the community. We liked him. Of course, he hadn’t seen “action” any more than we had, but he had worn a uniform. He had endured military relocations. He had taken orders, which many of us thought was the worst thing anyone could have to endure. Orders. You can’t tell me what to do. No one puts Baby in a corner.
I don’t want to think that wars are the only things that can define a generation, but they do offer scaffolding.
As time in training wore on, more and more I felt that I was in chains, à la Jean Jacques Rousseau’s The Social Contract and Discourse on the Origin of Inequality — “Man was born free, and everywhere he is in chains. Many a one believes himself the master of others, and yet he is a greater slave than they” — and less and less was I able to override the bullshit idea that I’d chosen to be at basic, and that I was being paid, and it was temporary, and that I’d be off to another life soon. Was any of that really true? I wasn’t so sure what was up to me and what wasn’t any more.
I remembered from John’s autobiography that he said of singing “I Wish I Knew How it Would Feel to be Free” (Billy Taylor and Dick Dallas), that “it surprised people” when he’d sing it — “this young white kid, with granny glasses, who didn’t seem like anyone who would worry about that.” He wrote that he found songs within himself about freedom, and though I’d listened to his songs all my life, it was only as I aged that I also was able to find those sentiments within myself. I, too, was young, white, middle class, no apparent disadvantages… But the reason John was a megastar was that he’d exploited those universals: everyone everywhere, at one time or another, thinks “I wish I knew how/it would feel/to be free/I wish I could break all these chains holding me.”
In a way I’d been worrying about freedom, or lack thereof, ever since I finished my bachelor’s. Mortimer Adler, one of the founding fathers of the St. John’s program, had said in a lecture I attended, that when we graduated our job was to look up from the books. We had the contents of the Great Books — the canon of Western culture — in our heads. The “great” books were defined, as I thought John’s songs were, by their authors’ ability to speak to human universals — and once we left school we absolutely had to look up from what we’d been studying and out at the world to attempt to make sense of life. In so many ways my enlisting felt like an unlikely move after completion of such a liberal degree. But in other ways I wondered if it made perfect sense. Living well takes a huge amount of discipline. Wasn’t there something about education in the classical sense, that required physical discipline, which we had none of at St. John’s — not even in sports — and required service to one’s country or community? By enlisting, I was completing the puzzle of my schooling, wasn’t I?
The “great” books were defined, as I thought John’s songs were, by their authors’ ability to speak to human universals.
And shouldn’t I feel thankful that I was in a situation that was really giving me reason to think about Rousseau’s ideas? “Let us agree then,” he wrote, “that might does not make right, and that we are bound to obey none but lawful authorities.” Were my drill commanders lawful authorities? Did I have just cause to oppose the authority they wielded over me? Did I even want to oppose them? Was I not an authority of some kind also? I wondered if I would ever have needed to think about these particular questions if I hadn’t subjected myself to the structure/strictures of basic training, though I now knew said training involved girls who imitated Hollywood blondes in the night, and longed for good humor and communion and leniency from those who were stricter-minded than they.
The dystopian classic will be shown in theaters across the nation
For some, watching (or reading) about life in a fictional dystopia is the best way to come to grips with our own budding calamity. In that vein, the United States of Cinema has announced plans to screen Michael Radford’s adaptation of George Orwell’s 1984 for audiences at 89 theaters nationwide (plus one in Toronto — thanks for the solidarity, Canada!). According to the Guardian, the event will be held on April 4th, an homage to the date Orwell’s protagonist, Winston Smith, wrote the first entry in his illegal diary.
In a press release, the organizers said: “Orwell’s portrait of a government that manufactures their own facts, demands total obedience and demonizes foreign enemies has never been timelier.” A portion of the proceeds from ticket sales will be directed to local charities surrounding participating theaters.
1984 has lately become a rallying point for those who oppose the new administration. Earlier this month, we reported on the spike in sales for dystopian novels like 1984, It Can’t Happen Here, and Brave New World.
If you’re interested in attending a screening, check out the event’s website.
United States of Cinema also expressed its strong support for the National Endowment for the Arts, a program currently under threat, and says it hopes the screenings will “encourage[] theaters to take a stand for our most basic values: freedom of speech, respect for our fellow human beings, and the simple truth that there are no such things as ‘alternative facts.’”
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