Sisterland (57 page)

My father had put my name on the front of the envelope, spindly letters in blue ballpoint, and I felt a little ache seeing his handwriting. The envelope wasn’t sealed, and inside were three photographs, all taken by my father on the evening of his birthday the previous September: one of Rosie, blurrily running across the grass; one of Vi sitting in a not particularly ladylike way in our recliner, Owen on her lap; and one of just Jeremy and me, standing side by side. It had been a while—longer than Rosie had been alive, I was pretty sure—since I’d seen a picture of Jeremy and me together and no one else. Usually, one of us was the photographer.

As I held the edges of the picture, I had an intimation—perhaps I mean a sense—of our children looking at it years in the future, when they themselves were adults: Rosie at thirty, say, and Owen at twenty-eight and Gabe at twenty-seven. Who would Jeremy and I be by then? Would we still be married, would we even still both be alive? I hoped so, I hoped it desperately, but the future (this is true for all of us) is opaque.

Our children, our grown-up children, who might or might not know the secrets of their parents but who’d surely possess secrets of their own—would they regard us with affection or resentment? The answer, presumably, is both, but still, it is hard not to wonder in what proportions, hard not to yearn, as I did at my father’s burial, for those proportions to be favorable. As little girls, Vi and I studied an image of our parents at the Arch, our mother in her belted orange wool jacket and matching beret, our father with his dark sideburns. And surely the clothes Jeremy and I wore in this picture, the haircuts we had, would seem as amusingly outdated to our children as the Arch photo had seemed to Vi and me, the year 2009 as faraway to them as 1974 had been to us.

And then one of my adult children speaks; I imagine it being Rosie. She and her brothers are clustered around the picture of Jeremy and me, examining it with the combination of disdain and curiosity we all feel when confronted with evidence of a world that dared to exist before our consciousness of it. “I can’t believe how young they were,” Rosie says.

Jennifer Hershey, I am endlessly grateful for your calmness, sharp intelligence, and good humor. At Random House, I also have benefited from the wide-ranging talents of Gina Centrello, Theresa Zoro, Maria Braeckel (my best and most constant e–pen pal!), Sally Marvin, Susan Kamil, Tom Perry, Sanyu Dillon, Avideh Bashirrad, Erika Greber, Joey McGarvey, Janet Wygal, Bonnie Thompson, Kelle Ruden, Virginia Norey, Robbin Schiff, Beck Stvan, and Paolo Pepe.

Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, you are my fierce advocate, and your wit and wisdom sparkle. I’m lucky to have the support of many other people at William Morris Endeavor, including Suzanne Gluck, Alicia Gordon, Cathryn Summerhayes, Claudia Ballard, Tracy Fisher, Raffaella DeAngelis, Margaret Riley, Michelle Feehan, Kathleen Nishimoto, and Caitlin Moore.

At Transworld, I get to work with, among others, Marianne Velmans (who is not only smart and charming but an identical twin to boot), Suzanne Bridson, and Patsy Irwin.

Jynne Martin, you have forever earned your own category.

My wise early readers and fellow writers, thank you for saving me from myself: Shauna Seliy, Emily Miller, Susanna Daniel, Lewis Robinson, Anton DiSclafani, and Katie Brandi.

Several friends and friendly strangers were very generous in helping me answer particular questions about a variety of topics: Michael Wysession, Edward J. Moret, Aimee Moore, Kelly Judge, Mariah North, Rebecca Hollander-Blumoff, Susan Appleton, Rhoda Brooks, Andrea Denny, and Patrick Randolph.

I also want to recognize the public radio show
St. Louis on the Air
, hosted by Don Marsh, a particular episode of which influenced my understanding of the New Madrid Seismic Zone. That show aired in February 2011 and featured as guests Michael Wysession and Seth Stein. Among my other sources of information about the aftermath of earthquakes were
New York Times
articles by Deborah Sontag. Any mistakes that appear in
Sisterland
are, of course, my own.

To my sisters (who read an early draft) and to my parents and brother (whom I wouldn’t allow to), thank you for still putting up with me after four novels.

And to Matt and our little St. Louisans, there’s no one I’d rather miss deadlines with than the three of you.

Amy Gentry:
A lot of your female, first-person characters have an investment in conformity and flying under the radar. Why are you interested in those characters particularly? Because, especially in
Sisterland
, you had a choice. You could have written from Vi’s point of view instead.

Curtis Sittenfeld:
I find people who, at first glance, appear to be typical or average, whatever that means, and then turn out to have hidden qualities, to be very interesting—much more interesting than someone whose eccentricities announce themselves immediately and can turn out to be superficial. So I think that that’s part of it. When I was younger—when I, myself, was a teenager—I gave people the benefit of the doubt, thinking, so many people that appear very calm and even boring must have all these wild emotions and crazy ideas. As I’ve gotten older I’ve unfortunately come to the conclusion that a lot of people who seem normal and boring
are
normal and boring. But in a novel, I have the privilege of making people more layered.

AG:
You include a lot of finely rendered psychological detail. I wonder how that developed for you? Were you conscious of going after that psychological realism?

CS:
I wouldn’t ever, while writing, think to myself, “I need a little more psychological realism.” I write what’s interesting to me, and so if I’m reading I like to have a very thorough idea of a character in a book that’s by someone else. I like it when characters are some combination of appealing and flawed or self-interested. I think in terms of scenes, and what I want a scene to achieve, and the psychological realism arises from that. It just kind of works its way up. I have my first-person narrators make a lot of observations, I have lots of dialogue, and so it bubbles up out of that.

AG:
A lot of the psychological details tend to be these very fine observations that the character is making about the social interactions happening around her. Do you have a special interest in social dynamics?

CS:
To some extent, I do. Tonight I’ll go with my family to a neighbor’s house for a little cookout, and it’s not as if I’ll be mentally taking notes. I would not be above borrowing something juicy if it happened, but I interact fairly normally in social situations. I think that a lot of people can be having these interactions, and then afterwards you make some observations that you weren’t even conscious of making in the moment.

AG:
Did you ever wish that you were a twin?

CS:
Yeah, I would have liked to have been a twin. I have a sister who’s two years older, a sister who’s five years younger, and a brother who’s nine years younger, so there was lots of
sibling
in my life already. But I will say that sometimes my sisters and I get mistaken for twins, and I always take it as a compliment. My sisters and I were having dinner at a Mexican restaurant in Washington, D.C., and we got mistaken for triplets, and we were extra-complimented. At least I was. Maybe they weren’t, but I was.

AG:
Why is that, do you think?

CS:
I guess because twins have this mystique, and triplets—the normal sibling connection potentially can be very powerful, and there’s this idea that it’s even more powerful with twins. It really is not just someone
like
me, but another version of me.

AG:
Did you talk to identical twins when you wrote the book?

CS:
Yes. I’m friends with these twins who, they’re about to turn forty, and they don’t know if they’re identical or not. I guess they’ve never had the test, and
I
think they are, but I guess it’s not clear. By total coincidence, my British editor is an identical twin. So my friend Emily the twin—she’s a novelist, too, Emily Jeanne Miller—and my British editor read early drafts, and I specifically asked them to pay attention to anything that smelled wrong, twin-wise, and actually, neither of them had any twin concerns. Then the funny thing was, a magazine editor read an early copy, and I didn’t even know this woman was an identical twin. She said, “You nailed it.” But there’s a part where it’s New Year’s Eve and the twins are at a party and one of them kisses the other on the lips, and she said, “That was totally disgusting, but otherwise everything rang true.”

AG:
Yet you kept it in.

CS:
I did keep it in. I think by the time she read it, it was too late to change it. Being disgusting wouldn’t have deterred me anyway.

AG:
Were you ever tempted to write from multiple points of view? From Violet’s point of view?

CS:
No, I wasn’t. I understand why that question would come up. It’s funny, because readers like Vi. Some readers don’t, but a lot of readers think she’s refreshing and funny. But if she were the one telling the story, I think they would not like her. People would find her kind of obnoxious.

AG:
Yeah, she’s a great character, but I can see where she’s better from the outside.

CS:
Less is more.

AG:
Part of what makes her great is how monstrous she is.

CS:
Unapologetically monstrous—and the fact that she’s unapologetically monstrous, but she’s not a hundred percent monstrous. I think that she has very endearing qualities.

AG:
Like what?

CS:
She’s very blunt. She’s very entertaining. She’s unapologetic. She has an ability to enjoy herself.

AG:
And yet you feel like if you were with her she might be enjoying herself more than you.

CS:
Yeah, at your expense.

AG:
Getting to the psychic connection the twins have, their powers—we never find out if there’s an entity behind their psychic abilities, and if it’s a force for good or evil. How did you make that decision, not to explain?

CS:
The twins believe that they are psychic, and so essentially the book accepts that they are psychic, and neither the book nor the characters are trying to prove to the reader that they are. They just believe they are, which I think is much more natural. It’s almost like in life we’re most hell-bent on proving things that we’re not really sure are true. I didn’t want to present it in a defensive way, I wanted to present it in a matter-of-fact way.

AG:
Is
Sisterland
your first exploration of nonrealist themes?

CS:
It’s funny when someone says that, because now I know whether you believe in psychic ability.

AG:
Well, do you believe in psychic abilities?

CS:
I’m open to them. So you know, in the book, there’s the character Hank? He basically says there are a lot of things in the world that are weirder than psychic abilities, that we accept as true. There’s a lot that’s not explained about the universe. And so, psychicness is not stranger than that. And I’m in agreement with Hank. It’s not like I consider myself to have psychic abilities. I guess I consider myself at times to have intuition. But I also don’t feel the book is supposed to be an exposé about how psychics are frauds.

AG:
I certainly didn’t read it that way. But at the same time it was interesting trying to suss out where the book was going to fall on that issue. I never thought that the book was debunking their psychic abilities, but there were times when intuitions proved to be slippery things.

CS:
The book is obviously told in first person from the point of view of Kate, who believes that she has psychic abilities and believes that her sister has psychic abilities. And so the book allows for the possibility, no matter what I personally believe. But there came a point where I realized I do have to come down on one side or the other in terms of how much credibility I’m going to give both the sisters.