ANNE TAYLOR FLEMING TALKS TO:
JUDITH FREEMAN is the author of four novels, a
collection of short stories, and one work of nonfiction. Her
novels include THE CHINCHILLA FARM, SET FOR LIFE
(winner of the Western Heritage Award), A DESERT OF
PURE FEELING, and RED WATER, named one of the 100
best books of 2002 by the Los Angeles Times. Her
nonfiction book, THE LONG EMBRACE: RAYMOND
CHANDLER AND THE WOMAN HE LOVED, was chosen as
one of the best books of 2007 by Newsweek, The Village
Voice, Slate.com, and National Public Radio. Freeman,
who teaches in The Masters of Professional Writing
Program at the University of Southern California, is
working on a memoir.
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Have you read something recently that knocked you out?
Yes, Rachel Kushner’s novel THE FLAMETHROWERS. It’s about so many different things,
including the art scene in NYC in the 1970s, radical Italian politics, racing on the Salt
Flats in Utah, the exploitation of rubber workers in Brazil, WWI, and that’s just for
starters. There’s a poetic density to Kushner’s writing, a rhythm to her storytelling I find
so beautiful – she’s constantly shifting gears in her prose. It’s a wickedly brilliant literary
novel.
How different is the process of writing fiction and nonfiction?
It depends. If I’m sitting alone in a room, imagining a story, writing a novel based mostly
on memory and imagination (as I did in THE CHINCHILLA FARM and A DESERT OF PURE
FEELING), that’s one thing. But if I have to do a lot of research as I did for my historical
novel RED WATER set in 19th Century Utah, then that’s a different kind of novel writing,
and it bears more resemblance to the process of writing nonfiction, which also requires a
lot of research, and then folding that research into a new story one is creating. Both
involve pure storytelling. I tend to bring a novelist’s sensibility to everything I write,
including the biography I wrote of Raymond Chandler, which wasn’t at all a traditional
biography, but a very personal book, the way a novel is so personal. Truthfully, I don’t
find the process so different. Both require a room, a maniacal obsession, an unflagging
ability to stay the course.
You are now writing a memoir? How is that going? Are there memoirs – new or old
– that you’ve loved?
The memoir is going. That’s perhaps the most I can say. I’m steeped in the process of
excavating my past and am fascinated to find that many of the memories I’ve drawn on
for my novels now have to be retrieved from their fictionalized state and somehow
deracinated, the fictional elements removed and the purity of a memory restored.
I am passionately in love with Vladimir Nabokov’s autobiography, SPEAK, MEMORY,
which I’m reading for the fourth time. Nabokov is so brilliant, such a naughty, sparkling
writer when it comes to language, always infusing his sentences with the brightest bits of
playfulness. He also had a wonderfully rich childhood on the family’s estate in prerevolutionary Russia, where he acquired his lifelong passion for butterfly hunting. On my
bedside table, I have American novelist Paula Fox's haunting memoir BORROWED
FINERY. She had a harsh, bohemian childhood, shuttled between parents, grandmother
and a kindly minister named Uncle Ellwood.
Do you read for pure “escape,” whatever that means? If so, what would you reach
for?
Do I read for “escape?” Either I always do, or I never do: I’m a bit flummoxed by this
question because the truth is I always hope to “escape” into the world created by an
author when I pick up a book. I want these worlds, however, to be lushly modulated by
language and character and ideas in ways that so-called “escapist literature” usually isn’t.
I think I’m a snob when it comes to reading. I’m looking for literary works that inspire
me, as a writer and a human being.
Is there an author you would like people to know about – someone they might have
missed?
Halldor Laxness was an Icelandic novelist, author of INDEPENDENT PEOPLE and
PARADISE RECLAIMED, the story of an Icelandic farmer who journeys to Mormon Utah –
and back – in search of paradise. He won the Nobel Prize in 1955 and yet many people
seem to never have heard of this comically enchanting writer.
You were captivated by Raymond Chandler. Why did he get it so right? Which
book(s) of his would you recommend?
Chandler is a perfect example of an author who wrote in an “escapist” genre – the
mystery novel – except that he transformed what had been thought of as a rather lowly
genre into high literature (he and Dashiell Hammett, from whom he learned so much).
Chandler “got it right” because he was a great original stylist (Those similes! Those
lyrical descriptions of 1930s LA! The deadly witty dialogue and brilliant range of
characters!). He wrote in the language of the common man, but with uncommon
intelligence. He also captured the exquisite corruption, violence, and class stratification
of 1930s LA in his novels, making him as much of a social historian as a mystery
novelist. FAREWELL, MY LOVELY may be his best novel. I’d also recommend his
collected letters, which are alternately hysterically funny and so poignantly sad.
Is there a book you reread?
The book I read early and come back to, ALONE, is a nonfiction book about the months
Admiral Byrd spent alone living in a shack buried in the ice at the South Pole, making
meteorological readings. I first read it when I was 13 and it had a profound effect on me.
It showed me what was possible for human beings to endure.
When you are in the middle of writing a book, do you still read a lot or do you not
have enough brain room, as it were?
I read perhaps even more voraciously when I’m working on a book because I’m always
looking for inspiration and guidance: I want to be goaded and plumped and prodded
intellectually and creatively, unnerved and attracted by the ideas and poetry in the
language and stories of others. What I read is another issue: I have to be sure that I’m
following my deepest intuitive feelings about what I’m drawn to, and if I get it right, it’s
almost as if I’m enhanced by what feels like a collaboration – many authors working with
me to help me get a new book right.
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This month, Anne Taylor Fleming recommends:
THE BOOK OF MY LIVES by ALEKSANDAR HEMON, who will be with us this summer. It
is a magical memoir in essay form, a passionate paean to two cities: Sarajevo, Hemon's
original home, and Chicago, where he now lives after essentially getting stuck there when
war broke out in his homeland.