Heidi Julavits

Heidi Julavits is a writer, editor, teacher, and life artist who divides her time between the bustle of New York City and the calm of Maine. Her fourth and most recent book, The Vanishers, was published in March 2012 and is written in what the New York Times calls “Julavits’s signature style: sharp-eyed, sardonic, hilarious.” Her previous books are The Mineral Palace, The Effect of Living Backwards, and The Uses of Enchantment. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Harper’s, Esquire, McSweeney’s Quarterly, the New York Times, and the Best American Short Stories, among other places.

In 2002, Julavits co-founded The Believer magazine, which quickly became a coveted must-read for anyone with serious literary proclivities. She has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and was a finalist for the Young Lions Literary Award. She earned a BA from Dartmouth College and a MFA from the writing program at Columbia University, where she is currently an Assistant Professor.

Julavits is easygoing and amiable, happy to share everything from serious advice to embarrassing stories. During a long and laughter-saturated lunch, there was time for a whole lot of both.

What were you like as a kid?

I was really, really, pathologically shy. And yet, obviously, I like to talk a lot. So these were competing forces when I was a kid. Writing enabled me to be verbose, since I never actually said anything! I never talked to anyone.

You’re not like that anymore.

Not at all. It was a very conscious, self-improvement program that I put myself on.

Wow. When?

I would say, probably my early thirties. I mean, I became socially more comfortable with people. But I was still terrified, terrified, terrified of public speaking. As a writer, ironically, you end up having to do a lot of public appearances. When I started to read aloud, this issue really came to a head for me. So I started teaching. I figured that was the way to deal with it. Teaching is public speaking but it is also leadership. You really have to take charge, the responsibility for the energy in the room is entirely yours.
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Ed Park

Ed Park is an embodiment of the devilishly resourceful modern American writer; the kind who not only writes beautiful books but also teaches, edits, blogs, and tweets fervently. He is a founding editor of The Believer and the former editor of the Voice Literary Supplement, having also served as an editor at the Poetry Foundation. From 2007 to 2011 he wrote a science fiction column for the Los Angeles Times, entitled Astral Weeks. He also created the PDF periodical the New-York Ghost, which, like many of Park’s literary endeavors, was what one might call quick-to-cult.

Park’s debut novel, Personal Days (2008), was named one of Time’s Top Ten Fiction Books of the year and one of The Atlantic’s top ten pop culture moments of the decade. It was a finalist for the PEN Hemingway Award, the John Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize, and the Asian American Literary Award. His short stories and nonfiction work have also appeared in a range of anthologies and journals, including Burn This Book (edited by Toni Morrison) and Trampoline (edited by Kelly Link).

He earned a B.A. from Yale and an M.F.A. from Columbia, where he currently teaches in the graduate writing program. He recently left The Believer and became a fiction editor at Amazon Publishing.

Park lives in Manhattan with his family. We met on an afternoon in May to chat over sweet red bean buns at a deserted Korean joint on 32nd Street while various 80’s and 90’s heartthrobs crooned in the background.

You grew up in Buffalo, New York, in the suburbs. Were you always a kid who wrote stories?

I was. In fifth or sixth grade, there was an assignment to write about single-celled creatures. I did two or three, about a Conan-the-Barbarian-type hero warrior who would fight very large versions of an amoeba or paramecium. That swords-and-sorcery type thing was an influence. There was a Saturday morning cartoon called Blackstar, so my character was Blue Moon. [Laughs.] I changed it just enough to avoid copyright problems.

Around the same time, I did my own version of the Encyclopedia Brown stories: short mysteries you would read to figure out a solution. My character was called Dictionary Black, also to avoid potential lawsuits. I would take the plots of Encyclopedia Brown stories, which take place in a nameless American town, and make them more geographically Buffalonian. I adapted them to my setting.

It sounds like you put a lot of energy into them.

They were imitative, which is I think natural at that age, but I have a distinct memory of lying in bed imagining the different series that I would write. At that point I had read some C.S. Lewis, some Tolkien, and I was thinking, “Well, the Blue Moon series will obviously run to five books, where in each one he will defeat different single-celled organisms, and Dictionary Black will be its own series…”

Was the idea of being the writer important, or was it about the books themselves? Did you think, “I want to be like C.S. Lewis,” the person behind the story?

The idea of being the writer was important, but at that age it was less an ego thing and more just the excitement of having produced these mini-masterpieces.

Did you show them to family and friends?

I don’t know. The stuff for school, the teacher would see. It’s possible that I showed friends or my folks, but just having produced them was satisfying. It was art for art’s sake.

[Laughs.] Of course. You were a purist.

I was.
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Olav Westphalen

Westphalen in his studio, Stockholm, 2012

Olav Westphalen is a German artist educated in America and currently living in Sweden whose work has been exhibited around the world. His most recent solo shows include A Junkie in the Forest: Doing things the Hard Way at Galerie Georges-Phillipe and Nathalie Vallois in Paris, France; and Flip-Flop Factory at the Minsheng Art Museum in Shanghai, China. Previous shows include 1 D-Mark at the Polytechnic University as part of The Drachma Project in Athens, Greece; Prow: The Prequel with Peter Rostovsky at the Sara Meltzer Gallery in New York, N.Y., U.S.A; and Desert Dreams, a performance at Studion, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden.

He earned a MA from the Fachhochschule fur Gestaltung in Hamburg, Germany, and an MFA from the University of California at San Diego, in San Diego, U.S.A. He currently teaches at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm.

Westphalen’s work is often funny and irreverent – much like the man himself. We met in his Stockholm studio and laughed over coffee and cardamom buns.

You were born in Hamburg, Germany in the 60’s. Not so long ago, but an entirely different world.

It’s funny, because to me it always felt normal to be born under those circumstances. Now you realize, “Man! It’s a long time ago.” Both my parents were academics but it was totally understood that my mother would stop working when we came. It was actually only because my father got sick at the time that she basically went back into professional life – which was very, very good for her.

My parents were economists. My father was from a pretty rich family, my mother was from a normal, educated middle class family— high school principals and priests and so on, the protestant mélange. But they both lost everything in the war. So it felt like there was this very pragmatic, thrifty, practical, do-it-yourself attitude because you had to somehow build it all up again, but at the same time this wistful longing…

But it was really normal. Middle of the middle class, suburban. The one exception was that when I was quite young— in the mid to late 60s— we lived in Latin America for two years. My parents were doing development work and so we trekked around and lived in five or six different countries over two or three years.

Do you remember that time?

Yes, what you remember as a four or five year-old. I remember the nanny, the garden, the apricot tree, how the neighbor’s daughter got bitten by a snake in Chile and they had to draw lines on her foot to see the infection moving up…

But it was more that it pulled us out of the whole German context. Coming back was a bit of a cultural shock for everybody, maybe most for my parents. They’d had a pretty entrepreneurial student life and they got these jobs that let them out into the world, and somehow coming out of it they thought it had to be this way: that you have to come home, settle, buy the house, raise the family, have reliable jobs… In the case of my father, he became a bank director and I think he just hated it his entire life. But that was just what you did. Those markers were very much still intact. You marry and then you have children and when you have children you move out to the suburbs so you can have a big house…all these things were just unquestioned.

They had been in a student acting troupe, my father was a violinist…all those things just kind of fell off. So I think in a way I had a very sheltered and comfortable childhood but it was also kind of heavy because you felt like, “No one’s really having fun here.”

Olav Westphalen, Amateurs, 2006, Styrofoam, resin, paint

In light of all the expectations and conventions we are talking about, I imagine your parents may not have been too enthusiastic about the fact that you wanted to become an artist.

It’s funny, because both my parents and their parents and families on both sides, were real bildungsbürger – they loved art, they would go to the shows, they would even collect a little bit. But in a way their appreciation for art went along with a complete lack of respect for people who were making art. Art was something to understand, to enjoy, to discuss, to own, to go look at on weekends, but it wasn’t something you made. It was almost like going to a restaurant vs. being the kitchen staff. There was really this very, very solid bourgeois self-satisfaction with the side of the industry they were on.

Of course their reaction when I started getting interested in art was always, “Oh but do something practical.”
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Ann Packer

Ann Packer is the author of two best-selling novels, Song Without Words and The Dive from Clausen’s Pier which was selected for Good Morning America’s “Read This!” book club, won an American Library Association Award, a Great Lakes Book Award, and the Kate Chopin Literary Award. She has also published two collections of short stories, Mendocino and Other Stories and, most recently, Swim Back to Me. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Washington Post, Vogue, and Real Simple. Packer is a graduate of Yale University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She has received a James Michener Award and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Her writing reverberates with both simplicity and complexity. Just like Packer herself, who surprises by first appearing reserved only to bubble over with humor and warmth.

Let’s start at the very beginning, with childhood. Your parents were professors at Stanford. Was your mom heading the writing program at that point?

Not heading it, but she was enrolled as a student, as a Stegner Fellow to study writing. She and my father had married in ’58. She was living in Alabama and she moved out [to Californa with him]. She needed something to do, structure – so she enrolled in the Stegner program and studied with Wallace Stegner. Then, gradually, over the years, she moved from that to a lectureship, to Assistant Professor, and she just stayed on for thirty years or so.

A lot of people I speak to have had to struggle to make their families understand exactly what it was they wanted to do, but you grew up in a household where writing was valued.

It was highly valued and so it was really the opposite – I had to make my way to the thing my family valued. Which is not to say that I wasn’t a reader. I was always a reader, but I never imagined that my life would ever have anything to do with literature or writing fiction…

Why do you think that was?

My little brother, who is a journalist, was more the one who was into all of that. He had avid interests in books and sports, in the presidents, in all kinds of things, and I was more the kid who was sort of observing – which is of course the ideal terrain for a fiction writer; that’s really the way we all start out. But for whatever reason, whether it was rebellion or insecurity or some combination of those things, writing just wasn’t something that I was at all interested in doing.

Had your brother sort of claimed it?

You know, he did claim it. He wrote poems, he wrote stories… Every summer my mother would abridge a Shakespeare play for him and his friends to perform on the patio.

You were not involved in that?

No, I was involved as a member of the audience. It wasn’t until I went to college. I was an English major, of course, because I wanted to keep reading, and I actually didn’t have something else that I wanted to do. But, when I was just starting my senior year, a friend of mine talked me into applying for a writing class. I was very resistant at first but I took this class. We started out doing little fiction writing exercises in dialogue or setting, and I just fell in love with it. I couldn’t believe how much fun it was. I couldn’t believe it counted as work! [Laughs.]

I started writing short stories, and it came very naturally to me. There was something about my orientation toward life that made making up stories –actually it’s even more than that, putting together sentences – a good fit for me.
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Lynn Shelton

Lynn Shelton went from acting on Off-Off-Broadway stages to directing some of indie film’s brightest stars. Her directing credits include We Go Way Back, My Effortless Brilliance, Humpday, and most recently, Your Sister’s Sister, which stars Emily Blunt, Mark Duplass, and Rosemarie DeWitt. Her work has screened at pretty much every major film festival in the world, including SXSW, Sundance, Cannes, and Toronto. In 2009, she won a Grand Jury Prize from Sundance and a special “Someone To Watch” award from the Independent Spirits.

Bloggers have referred to Shelton as the “female Apatow“, but up to this point she hasn’t really used his budget. Rather, she gravitates toward the scaled down model of filmmaking – small casts, miniscule budgets, and lots of collaboration with her cast and crew.

Did you make movies as a kid?

I’d only had one experience with making movies in school. It was this Super 8 camera project. I’m talking elementary school, that was really it, I don’t think we really had access to video cameras otherwise. But I was really into photography; my stepdad had given me a camera – a K1000 – when I was 14. I spent a lot of time in the dark room when I was in high school.

Where did you grow up?

I grew up and was raised in Seattle, where I live now. I ended up at the University of Washington and got a BA in acting, and then I moved to New York to do theatre. And then I don’t know exactly what it was – maybe a combination of getting into a couple unfortunate shows, maybe knowing I would never make a living at it, or knowing I would never pay the rent. I don’t know what it was. I just had a falling out with the theatre. It became less satisfying to me. I ended up producing my own theatre, which was helpful, but generally…it wasn’t doing it for me anymore.

What kinds of jobs were you working while you were acting?

For about 5 years, I was a temp. Oh god, it was horrible. I remember my goal for my 30th birthday was not to work in offices anymore. It was a blessed relief to finally stop that.
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Lauren Slater

Lauren Slater is a prolific nonfictionist and a licensed psychologist, best known for applying her lyrical cadence to some of the most controversial questions of our time. Slater is the author of seven books, several of which have stirred critics at once to kiss and to slap her hand. In Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir (2001) she sweeps readers into a hypnotically truth-bending tale of her bout with epilepsy. In Opening Skinner’s Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century (2004), Slater unlocks ten famous studies, including Stanley Milgram’s notorious shock treatment experiment on obedience, and then tests them herself. For one of the resulting essays, “On Being Sane in Insane Places,” Slater walks into a psychiatric emergency room and claims to have a false symptom—an auditory hallucination of the word “thud”—thereby risking confinement. Members of the international academic community railed against Slater’s methods, but she went on to win the 2005 Bild Der Wissenschaft Award in Germany for most groundbreaking science book of the year. Her books, essays, and articles, often taught in college classrooms, collapse the wall between scientific jargon and literary narrative.

Her five other books include Prozac Diary (1998); Welcome to My Country: A Therapist’s Memoir of Madness (1995); Love Works Like This (2002); Blue Beyond Blue: Extraordinary Tales for Ordinary Dilemmas (2005), her first book of fiction; and The $60,000 Dog: My Life with Animals, forthcoming from Beacon Press. A contributing editor at Elle, Slater has published work in Harper’s Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, Vogue, The Best American Science Writing, The Best American Magazine Writing, and more.

She holds two degrees in psychology: a Masters from Harvard University and a Ph.D. from Boston University. A former Knight Science Journalism Fellow at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Slater won a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 2004. She served as the guest editor for The Best American Essays in 2006 and has been nominated for numerous National Magazine Awards.

This Days of Yore interviewer rode in buses, trains, and cabs to locate the writer in the tiny town of Harvard, Massachusetts, where she had just moved. We talked in her office, a cozy room furnished with her seventeen-year-old desk and a daybed.

In Prozac Diary, you say that you have always seen yourself as a writer. Were you born into this work?

I don’t think I was born into it, although it’s possible that I was. In Kindergarten, when we were learning to read, our teacher wrote C-A-T on the board. I remember looking at that and struggling and struggling to know what it meant. Suddenly it dawned on me: cat. Those severed letters all came together into one meaningful word. That, I think of, as the beginning of my fascination with language.

Do you remember the first narrative you ever wrote?

In first grade, I set out to write a novel called “Tommy and the Toy Ships.” I wanted it to be one hundred pages. I think it was one hundred pages, many of them with pictures.

[Laughs.]

I felt quite sure that it would get published. Then my mother gave me a typewriter—a cursive typewriter—and I found the mechanics of writing absolutely fascinating.

Were you serious about writing from the moment you owned the cursive typewriter?

When I was fourteen, I started writing in earnest. I read Carson McCullers’ Member of the Wedding, and I was really taken with that, so I started reading short stories in the style of Carson McCullers’.

All through college I wrote seriously, especially my junior and senior year. When I graduated, I really buckled down and started to try, in earnest, to learn the art and the craft of writing. I had a long apprenticeship—on my own. I was apprenticed to the books I was reading.
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Julie Otsuka

Photo by Robert Bessoir

Julie Otsuka is a writer whose debut book, When the Emperor was Divine, is rapidly becoming a modern American classic. The novel, which tells the story of one Japanese American family’s internment during World War II, is based on Otsuka’s own family’s experience. The Emperor was Divine was a New York Times Notable Book and a San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year. It has been translated into six languages, assigned to all incoming first-years at over thirty-five colleges and universities, and is a regular “Community Reads” selection across the United States.

Her much anticipated second novel, The Buddha in the Attic, about Japanese “picture brides” coming to the United States nearly a century ago, won the 2012 PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction, was a New York Times Notable Book, was picked as a Best Book of the Year by The Boston Globe and Vogue, and was a finalist for the 2011 National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She is the recipient of the Asian American Literary Award, the American Library Association Alex Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Otsuka lives in New York City and is a devoted customer of the Hungarian Pastry Shop, where she has been coming to write every afternoon for nearly two decades. This conversation took place in the back of the café on an unseasonably chilly afternoon in May.

You came to writing a little bit later in life. You started out as a painter.

Yes. But I didn’t even do very much drawing until I got to Yale. It was this undiscovered talent that I had, actually. My first year at Yale I took a drawing class and I got an A+, and I’d never taken a drawing class before. So I ended up taking a lot of art classes and fell in love, at first, with figurative sculpture. And then I took a painting class and I loved doing that.

Was writing in the back of your mind, or was that an unexpected discovery as well?

No, no, I never thought that I would be a writer. Maybe I wrote stories when I was very young, but I wasn’t writing fiction when I was a teenager. I mean, what did I have to say? Even during my twenties, it took me a long time before I felt like I had a story to tell. It took me a long time to come to my material.

What was the next step for you after graduating from Yale?

I really wanted to go to graduate school for painting. So, I was waitressing, working on a portfolio. Then I started a graduate program in painting in Bloomington, Indiana.

But I think it was a little too early for me to be going to graduate school. The pressure of having to produce was too much for me. So I dropped out after about three and a half months. It was very intense. Up until then, I had always been pretty prolific with my painting and very unselfconscious. But then, for the first time, I froze up.

The workshop critique form, is that what did it?

Yes. I had my first crit coming up and I just choked, I just couldn’t paint. I literally could not paint anything.

That must have been pretty scary.

It was awful. It was terrible. It was the first time that I ever really failed at anything. And I failed spectacularly. I couldn’t even make a mark on the canvas without swiping it away. So, I dropped out.
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Trey Ellis

Trey Ellis is an American writer and screenwriter who, as a recent graduate of Stanford University, published the seminal essay “The New Black Aesthetic”, which has been reprinted dozens of times, is cited in over sixty scholarly publications, and is considered a key text in the study of black popular culture. Ellis has also published the novels Platitudes; Home Repairs; and Right Here, Right Now, which won the American Book Award and was named one of the notable books of the year by The Washington Post. His most recent book is a work of nonfiction entitled Bedtime Stories: Adventures in the Land of Single-Fatherhood. He has also published humor and political commentary in The New York Times, Newsweek, GQ, Playboy, Vanity Fair, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Salon, The Huffington Post, and NPR’s All Things Considered.

Ellis, who is also a distinguished screenwriter, is an alumnus of the Sundance Institute, a Sundance international mentor, and an Associate Professor of Screenwriting in the Graduate School of Film at Columbia University. He wrote the HBO film The Tuskegee Airmen, starring Lawrence Fishburne and Cuba Godding, Jr, which garnered him an Emmy Award nomination. His screenplay for the Showtime film Good Fences, produced by Spike Lee and starring Whoopi Goldberg and Danny Glover, was shortlisted by PEN Center West for teleplay of the year. His first play, Fly, was performed at The Lincoln Center Institute, The Vineyard Playhouse, and the Crossroads Theater. In the fall of 2012, it will be produced at the historic Ford’s Theater in Washington, D.C.

Ellis is a confident fast-talker with a treasure trove of stories to share.

Growing up, were you a kid who read a lot? Were there a lot of books around?

When I was a kid, my mother was going to law school but was also a playwright. The house was full of books. I’ve wanted to be a writer since the fifth grade: I had this idea of a writer living on a boat off of Nantucket with a typewriter on the deck and a beautiful bikini’d wife serving whiskey.

[Laughs.] A super realistic view of a writer’s life. But why fifth grade? Did you read something at that time that gave you that image of a writer on a boat?

I don’t remember. I’d just moved: my dad was at the University of Michigan and moved to Yale. Before that, in Michigan, I was into sports and thought I’d be a professional running back. In the fifth grade I decided, “No, that’s unrealistic. I’ll become a novelist.” A friend and I wrote a screenplay together, and I was writing from that moment on.

I read a lot, but I didn’t want to read Hardy boys or YA fiction. Being perceived as a smart kid was important to me. The biggest book we had in the house was an 800-page biography of Hirohito, so I tried to plod through that in maybe the sixth grade. I didn’t understand ninety percent of it, but I thought that’s what I should be reading.

So screenwriting was a goal from very early on?

That was the first one, but I didn’t think about them again for a while. By high school I was writing short stories, and at boarding school—at Andover—I studied with Alexander Theroux, who is a fantastic novelist. He was very supportive. When I went to college at Stanford, I started my first book, Platitudes, in a creative writing class with Gilbert Sorrentino, who was a great novelist as well. I finished college early and went to Florence, Italy, where I’d studied overseas, and I finished the novel there. I was working at a gym and teaching English, all these little odd jobs under the table, and writing this book four hours a day every day. That was because the Paris Review interviews said that a writer should write for four hours every day.
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Simon Doonan

Photo by Albert Sanchez

Simon Doonan is a pint-sized writer, fashion commentator, and the creative ambassador at-large for Barneys after serving as the store’s creative director for 27 years. He is the author of Confessions of a Window Dresser, Wacky Chicks,Nasty (later re-released as Beautiful People), Eccentric Glamour, and most recently Gay Men Don’t Get Fat. He is currently at work on a book of personal essays called Fashion Asylum (Blue Rider).

But it was a long road from his scabby-kneed Dickensian childhood in post-war England to the fizzy life of letters and glamour he has cultivated. And his writing success, which commenced at age 46, came as quite a surprise to him, after the childhood trauma of failing a high-stakes school placement exam at the age of eleven.

I sat down with Doonan and his Norwich terrier, Liberace, in his epilepsy-inducing Greenwich Village apartment, which he described to The New Yorker as “palatial gay fantasia.” A papier-mâché Prince head laid beleaguered in the corner, and upon my noticing it, he suggested that we pose with it for a photo. He is warm, irreverent, and inappropriate. He is just as funny speaking of the cuff as he is in his books. And yes, he does shop in the boys’ department occasionally.

From window dressing to a highfalutin writing career of books and columns. How did that happen?

I think my career is a series of serendipitous occurrences. I never had any kind of plan, and I don’t think people believe me when I say that, but I didn’t. When I graduated college I got a job at a factory in my town.

What kind of factory?

I worked in a series of factories, but the one that stands out is the cork factory, where my mother worked making the inside of bottle tops. That didn’t pay too much. I would go every day to the Manpower agency when I was 21, 22, where they would give me a job. I did a whole bunch of things after college, and I had literally no idea what I was going to do. I got a job demolishing public toilets.

Wait, with, like, a sledgehammer?!

Yes, that was horrible. And I did that for a few weeks because construction jobs paid more, but I decided that was not me. They were so foul I’m surprised I didn’t get some horrible flesh eating bacterium. There was a local department store where my gay best friend, James “Biddie” Biddlecomb, worked in the soft furnishings department, and it was much less money, like instead of 18 pounds a week you’d get 11 pounds a week, but I thought at least it’s bearable. The local department store was very Are You Being Served? I got a job in clocks and watches, and since there was a recession going on we weren’t exactly inundated with customers. Eventually, Biddie and I saved up money and got a squalid apartment in London.

I got a job in a fashion store near Saville Row, and then I applied for a display job at Aquascutum. I didn’t want to work in a factory because it was too dirty, so I thought, “Ok, I can work in a store,” but it was boring just flicking a feather duster around, so I got a job in display, because even in my hometown I could see the display people had more fun. I started doing freelance window display jobs, and then I got a job as display manager at Turnville and Asser and they had lots of little windows in a rococo style. I had a lot of great freelance jobs. I got a job for Tommy Nutter, he was the trendy tailor on Saville Row. They wanted outrageous, fun windows. One day I was doing the windows and putting in stuffed rats with little bow ties on and a guy, Tommy Perse, came in and said, “You are really twisted! This window is great! You should come work for me in LA.” And I went home and said to my drag queen roommate, “This guy wants me to go work in LA, where’s that?!”
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Susan Cheever

Susan Cheever is the author of five novels, four memoirs, and four additional works of nonfiction, including her most recent, Louisa May Alcott: A Personal Biography, which puts the iconic girls’ novel Little Women into vivid context. Cheever’s loving account of her famous father, Home Before Dark: A Biographical Memoir of John Cheever by His Daughter, was published in 1984.

Cheever is the author of countless book reviews, essays, and articles for The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The Daily Beast, among many other publications. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and an Associated Press award, and she was nominated for a National Book Critic’s Circle Award. She teaches writing in the MFA programs at Bennington College and The New School.

Cheever insists she came to journalism and creative writing by accident. She’s fond of saying she learned to write by marrying three writers. For this interview, we spoke by phone as she is on tight deadline to finish a biography of E. E. Cummings, a friend of her father’s whom she says saved her life. She is chatty, upbeat, and at times blunt. She sounds a lot like the way she writes, which made for a lively conversation.

You began your life in New York City with a soon-to-be-famous writer for a father. Do you remember realizing that he was a writer?

I remember realizing he was a writer, but he wasn’t famous for most of my childhood. He didn’t really get famous in any sense of the word until the mid-’60s, which is when I was in college. Some of my playmates’ parents felt that his writing was shocking and dirty, and they would say, “Ugh, the things he writes are so dreadful,” meaning that they had sex in them—even though, of course, they didn’t; in those days you couldn’t write about sex at all.

I thought of him as special and talented but somehow beyond the pale. That was fairly confusing for a small child.

I guess what I’m getting at is that it would have been a different lifestyle than, say, your schoolmates’ fathers who went off to be dentists or ad executives or whatever they were doing.

Well, it was different because he didn’t go to work. And there’s that famous story, which other people take credit for but which is mine, about him putting on his good suit and hat and going down the elevator to the lobby in the morning at 400 East 59th Street. And then while the other fathers went to their offices, my father went down to the basement where he worked in our storage cubicle, taking off his suit and hat and working in his boxers, and then putting his suit and hat back on in the afternoon and coming upstairs with the other fathers.

So there was a lot of longing on his part and, I think, on all of our parts for something more normal and stable than what we had.
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