Lisa Glatt’s first novel, A Girl Becomes a Comma Like That, was recently published by Simon & Schuster. Her poetry collections include Shelter and Monsters & Other Lovers. Lisa's work has appeared in such magazines as Mississippi Review, Other Voices, Columbia, Indiana Review, Pearl, and The Sun. In 2003 she received the Mississippi Review Prize for fiction. She currently teaches at California State University, Long Beach and private workshops. Glatt is married to poet and visual artist David Hernandez.

Felicia C. Sullivan: After reading the recent NYT book review of your debut novel-in-stories, I have to (in a sense) defend the evolution of this form that has become increasingly in fashion. Where one can perceive the novel-in-stories to be an easy “out” from the arduous task of novel writing, others can point to many authors such as Michael Chabon, who notes that the art of the short story is a difficult one whereas novels have a bit more “wiggle room”.

One can look at such recent groundbreaking (in form) offerings from Elissa Schappel, Stephen Elliott, Kate Walbert, Edwidge Danticat & Susan Minot—just to name a few—that the fine line between the novel and the short story can mesh for the sake of what the author wishes to convey – a focus on a specific cast of characters and the important events (or stories) in varying points of time.

How did you come to choose the novel-in-stories form for A Girl Becomes a Comma Like That?

Lisa Glatt: I’m thrilled that you’re defending the form and am obviously personally interested in the debate: are these books novels or collections of stories? Are they proliferating naturally, because the writer’s characters appear in one story and then reappear in subsequent stories, linking on their own, or are they coming about because of pressure from the publishing world? Whatever the inspiration is, I’m a fan of the form itself and the many writers who’ve published these books: Elissa Schappel’s Use Me, Emily Carter’s Glory Goes and Gets Some, Dennis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son in some ways, and even Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, which felt like wonderfully linked novellas. Each of them blur the line in different ways and their books are labeled one thing or another by their publishers, but I, as a reader, don’t really care what they’re called. I loved reading the books—that’s it, I’m waiting for whatever it is these writers publish next…

Although A Girl Becomes a Comma Like That began as a short story and was published, like other chapters in the book, as such, I didn’t really choose the novel-in-stories form, but did want there to be a break or a pause between the main narrative, Rachel’s story, and the other women who intersect her life in varying degrees. I didn’t want to write a straight first person chronological narrative and thought that if I broke that narrative up with other characters’ episodes (or stories) it would complicate things. Many people make the assumption that the writer works best with one genre and that she shouldn’t venture too far away from what she’s good at—a story writer shouldn’t write poems or novels and a poet shouldn’t write stories, etc. If those people read a novel where some of the chapters are self contained or the connection between chapters isn’t immediately clear, they feel (or so I’ve been told) a bit cheated, that what’s in their hand isn’t a novel at all, but a book of stories pasted together. They may be the same people who hate prose poems—another form that I love.

FS: Although the novel focuses a great deal on the intricate and delicate relationships between the body, sex and death, I thought there was a deeper theme of leaving that threaded itself throughout the stories. What is your take on leaving as a theme and how do you think it’s managed by the different characters?

LG: I’m interested in the idea of abandonment, both in how we do it daily when we say goodbye with every intention of seeing some people again—those closest to us that very evening after work or whatever—and also the way that death separates us finally and fully, and how we function together despite this.

In Comma, Rachel prefers men who are traveling (leaving) and is horrified that her mother, on her way to death, is leaving her, which probably indicates that her biggest fear is abandonment. She knows she can’t be abandoned emotionally (by men, at least) if she never really gives herself up. In Ella there’s the whole question of whether or not she’ll leave her husband, and in the chapter “Geography of the Mall”, Georgia’s shoe salesman leaves her, but only after she’s served him that meager yogurt cone and he understands that she’s left him already. My first painful memories are of being three or four years old, at the window screaming and sobbing when my divorced mother left the house—going off to work or on a date—and not only fearing that she’d never return but being angry and hurt about the time she’d spend away from me, the amount of time I’d be forced to spend without her. There’s a poem in my book Shelter called “Desertion” about my mother stepping out for dates and about her finally dying and how all of it is leaving and painful.

FS: Both of your previous works are books of poetry. Several poets I’ve known have remarked that the move from poetry to fiction was like an explosion of each line, stanza, into a million pieces with each piece opening up to form another line, another thread—a story. Poetry is compact, economic in nature where much emphasis is placed on the artful selection of each word. Nabokov spent twelve years translating Pushkin, obsessing over meaning rather than meter while he found prose translations slightly more easeful.

Perhaps fiction presents air, more of this “wiggle room”. Was the transition to fiction a natural one for you? Will you return to poetry?

LG: I’d always written both, so it wasn’t really a transition. It might look that way because my first two finished books are poetry—very narrative and not at all well known in the poetry world, which is fine really. I’ve always been interested in the story in a poem and the poetry in a story—preferring narrative poems (out of fashion, I’m told) and prose that’s poetic on some level. For the last several years I’ve been working on fiction and haven’t felt that same pull towards writing poems that I once did, so I can’t really say that I’ll return to poetry—but who knows.

FS: From all your characters—Elizabeth, Rachel, Angela, Emma, and Georgia, which in particular are dearest to you and why? Although men play a secondary role in the novel, do any of them strike you more than others?

LG: Elizabeth is dearest to me, above and beyond the rest, because in her I tried to capture a bit of my own mother, who died of breast cancer in 1998, and who was, like Elizabeth, cheerful and strange and optimistic and opinionated through it all. Rachel comes in second because she shares my experience with a dying mother that she can’t imagine going on in the world without, but somehow, with the limited number of choices we’re given, does just that. And Gilbert comes in a close third because he’s based on a man my mother mentioned after a visit to her oncologist, a man she flirted with in the waiting room and wanted to get to know better, but didn’t, unfortunately, see again.

FS: In the Art of The Novel, Milan Kundera warns that writers must divorce themselves from their character’s actions—judgment must always be suspended. Granted, this is a difficult thing to do as you are the one pulling the proverbial strings. Many of the characters don’t always make the kindest or safest choices with respective to their bodies—did you find yourself judging any of the women in A Girl Becomes a Comma Like That? Even in the slightest?

LG: No, I didn’t. I’m with Kundera here, although I do know that the choices my characters make in the book aren’t always safe or wise, but they’re the choices that many women I know have made, smart women, complicated women, grieving or sad women that behave recklessly. Sexual behavior is complex and people act and react for all sorts of reasons, often without even knowing or understanding their own motives. I just read an amazing essay by Cheryl Strayed in The Best American Essays 2003 called “The Love of My Life”. It’s about Strayed’s experience with her own mother’s death and how it changed her sexual relationship with her husband and led to a period of wild infidelity on her part. It would surprise me if someone was to read that essay and judge her, yet I know that some readers would do just that, as Strayed’s own friends did. She was married and slept around—the behavior is “wrong” or “bad”, but to me, for me, what’s propelling that behavior, the connection between grief and need, sadness and hunger, is what’s important and worth thinking about and exploring.

I remember reading Fear of Flying when I was thirteen and even then I wasn’t judging Jong’s main character’s behavior (if I remember correctly the first chapter is called “The Zipless Fuck” and is about a woman hooking up with a man she doesn’t know on a plane, in one of those ridiculously small bathrooms). In the late 70s my mom and stepfather had a brief stint with nudism, joining a camp in Topanga Canyon, and inviting all sorts of colorful nudists into our life and home. There was an ordinary gay couple, there was a couple involved in an “open marriage”, there was a happily married sex surrogate—a woman whose job it was to coax impotent men into erections, supposedly “healing” them, there was a woman whose t-shirt said FUCK on the front and YOU on the back. It was, let’s say, a permissive household and one that didn’t foster a lot of judgment. What’s the saying…a slut is someone who’s slept with one more guy than you’ve slept with?

FS: Hemingway was known to write in bursts to stop only at the point of climax and then quickly move away from the work so he would have momentum for when the pen was picked up again. How do you come to your stories? How do you pick them up from points of pause? How do you know you’ve ended them?

LG: As someone who’s written poetry in the past, those points of pause scared me in the beginning, and I wanted to get as much work on the page as possible in one sitting because I feared that I wouldn’t be able to pick it up again, that I’d lose some of the intensity or momentum. That’s impossible with longer fiction, obviously, and I had to learn some lessons about sustaining a narrative and letting go of some of my own personal demands. While writing the novel I often felt frustrated and unhappy with myself and my progress, but came to realize that so much of that doubt and ambivalence is part of the process, at least for me.

FS: Who are you currently reading?

LG: I’m reading Dan Chaon’s You Remind Me Of Me and loving it and I’m also rereading Meghan Daum’s essay collection My Misspent Youth because I’ll be teaching a Creative Nonfiction Writing Workshop this fall and plan on teaching it. I read Meghan’s essays several years ago and am once again smiling and laughing while I read. I just finished Matthew Sharpe’s The Sleeping Father and he blew me away, strange and beautiful and all his own. I’ve told everyone I know to read it—it’s so damn good. And just picked up Diane Ackerman’s new book An Alchemy of Mind.

FS: An author friend of mine recently chided herself because she was influenced early on by the Sweet Valley High series, The Babysitter’s Club—and I laughed, said that was completely natural, that we weren’t all born reading Proust (although many writers still haven’t picked up his work). What were the books you read early on in your teen years?

LG: As I mentioned earlier, Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying, a French novel called Nobody’s Boy, everything by Judy Blume.

FS: Until fairly recent, New York was the center of the literary community. With the wonderful strides made by magazines such as Swink with bicoastal events and an attempt at uniting writers from both coasts – have you felt the climate change in California, notably, Southern California? Do you feel a community blooming more so than in the past?

LG: There have always been wonderful writers here in Southern California that I admire, too many to name, but I have noticed, mostly through Swink events, a new bigger community coming into its own. Pearl has been an important part of Long Beach for decades and now they’re joined by several other publications coming out of Los Angeles, which is great. There’s a new chatter, an excitement about what’s happening, unlike what I’ve personally experienced before.

FS: I’ve been in the thick of Hannah Tinti’s wonderful debut, Animal Crackers. Curious – if you could be any animal – which would you be and why?

LG: A really pampered house cat. I’d be clean and have a soft cushion in the corner of the living room where I could sprawl out. I’d have a window ledge where I could sprawl out too and get some sun. I’d do a lot of sprawling out and lounging.

FS: Imagine your ideal salon of artists, living or dead. Who would inhabit your home on a weekly basis to chat all things art?

LG: Weekly? Once a month would probably be enough for me! That’s a funny question because I think that some of the dead writers I admire might not be the best company. My ideal salon would probably be a bunch of fun and talented people that I already know: my husband David Hernandez, who’s an incredible poet and wonderful company. Leelila Strogov, editor and writer extraordinaire. Meghan Daum, who’s smart and witty and talented. Marilyn Johnson, who edits Pearl and whom I adore. Marysue Rucci, Andrew Blauner, Gina Frangello, Denise Duhamel, and David Ulin…I could go on and on.

FS: And yes, the inevitable—what’s on the horizon?

LG: My short story collection is forthcoming from Simon & Schuster in April ’05. I’m finishing that book up now and I’ve recently started my second novel. There might be a nudist camp family in that one.

--------------------------------------------

small.spiral.notebook reviews A Girl Becomes a Comma Like That
Visit the Author's Website.