Natasha Radojcic has published two novels Homecoming, which won one of the highest literary awards in Italy, and You Don't Have to Live Here, both published by Random House. Her novels are in the process of being translated into eight languages. She has also published both short stories and nonfiction in The New York Times, Tin House, Boston Review, Rolling Stone (Italy), Daily Telegraph (Serbia), and several other magazines and newspapers worldwide. Natasha lives in NYC, but runs away to Vermont for sanity and snowboarding every weekend. Her writing philosophy is in tune with Dorothy Parker’s: Writing is the art form of sitting your behind in the chair. Do it.

I met Natasha Radojcic at my apartment on a Tuesday afternoon in August. She’d just come from teaching a class at Fordham University. My Shitzu mutt took an immediate liking to her, and bounced buoyantly on her hind legs for attention, probably smelling Pepper, Natasha’s eighteen-year- old Shitzu, who she’d rescued from a pimp years ago, and who’d recently won the oldest pet prize at Saint John the Divine. We sat down on my sofa. I offered her a drink. She asked for water with lots of ice, and then said – do you have anything to feed me? I brought out Manchego cheese and rice crackers. You have to feed a Serbian when they come into your home, she said. Next time, I’ll know, I said. Natasha is tall with long, swarming brown hair, prominent brown eyes, and the body of an athlete, which is not a coincidence. She was once an Olympic skier. Shall we start? I suggested. I’m ready, she said.

AW: Was your first novel Homecoming your way of dealing with the Bosnian War?

NR: Yes, and the Nato Bombing. I remember somebody that was very import ant to me, perhaps the most important person to me in many ways, who is from my country, who was from my country, and who is no longer with us. He died two months after the bombing. The night of the bombing we sat at our favorite bar, and got drunk, and I asked him if it was really going to happen, and he said no. I thought so too, and then it happened the next day. When there was war in Sarejvo we knew who the bad guys were, and then when they were [sigh] well, I thought okay they’re trying to stop the Serbian power military from annihilating more innocent civilians in Sarajevo, but then this whole this whole thing with Serbia and Kosovo came and they were bombing my hometown. Nato was bombing my hometown, and I couldn’t figure out who the good guys were. I was like: please, what’s going on? What’s going on?

The experience of the Bosnian war, the experience of my family, made me think - a personal story. I used my mom’s village, her house, actually our last name, although Halid is obviously a fictional character for the book.

AW: Was the book badly received over there?

NR: No.

AW: Didn’t it stir up a bit of a scandal?

NR: Well, [sigh] Bosnian journalists were really negative, and they wanted to portray me as somebody who didn’t speak the language, who didn’t know anything about the area, who wasn’t even Bosnian. I think people sometimes when they go through tremendous trauma feel like it belongs to them, so there was a split with the book. On one side people were totally against it, and on the other side they were totally enthusiastic, which is complicated here.

AW: And wasn’t there a rumor circulating that you’d been paid 1 million dollars from Random House and married a Wall Street tycoon?

NR: Well, yes, but it wasn’t just a rumor. It was actually published in the their Daily with the highest circulation, and thank god I have a brother who is 6 foot five because at one point my aunt was like - where are you going to be able to go outside w/o a body guard?’ A million dollars here is equivalent to a billion dollars there, and an average monthly income is $250.00 - $300.00. A billion dollars over there is an unimaginable amount of money.

AW: So what did eventually happen when you went home? How did you deal with it?

NR: I didn’t go anywhere alone, and when I gave a press conference my brother and all my male cousins came.

AW: So you’re a real celebrity over there.

NR: Well, it’s complicated. I’m in the papers all the time. And even though most people have not read the books, which is how it usually happens, most people have heard of the book, heard of a lot of writers but never actually read the books. I caught a few of my colleagues say something about the book that I had also read in The New Yorker or Time or something, and then I realized they read the review, they didn’t actually read the book, and that’s a professional person in the business. I can’t imagine what it’s like over there where the economy is still totally destabilizing, and I understand they don’t have time to consider the value of my fiction.

AW: I was most intrigued by the character of Mladen, the stupid Giant. He clearly embodied all the innocence that remained in that village ravaged by war, and I was wondering where he came from? What part of you?

NR: I like awkward things. You know? I adopted a dog that nobody wanted. I’m friends with people nobody wants to be friends with. I marry guys nobody should have. In a way we reject that which doesn’t immediately fall into social norms, and he doesn’t because there is something wrong with him, and he is deformed looking, and they force him to live in a cage, and I thought, well, I’d want him.

AW: In your second novel, You Don’t Have to Live Here the protagonist, Sasha, resembles you a great deal. Is she you?

NR: Well, I’m about 25 years older than Sasha, so if it was me it certainly isn’t me today. I really go to bed early these days. You know there is a movie by Sergio Leoni called "Once upon a Time in America" and it’s about a man who owned a big club, and ran a speak easy during the prohibition, and he comes back after many years, and they ask him what he’s been doing all this time, and he says “I’ve been going to bed early,” and that is the big difference between Sasha and me.

AW: Right, but the book itself was a loosely disguised memoir –no?

NR: You know I really don’t like doing what is fashionable and trendy, and because all these memoirs have been sort of in the spotlight right now, I didn’t want to do it that way. A) I think that if there is a trend to read something you read it for sort of a peep show almost, especially because Sasha’s life was a little bit out of control at some points. I think it takes away from the language, and what the language should try to convey, an image and an emotion in the least amount of words possible. And if you say this really happened they’re going to be like - was she really a stripper? Or - was she really strung out? And that doesn’t matter, it’s irrelevant.

AW: See, I guess I have always felt the opposite. I’ve always believed that labeling a story as fiction when it really happened is somehow a cop-out, or somehow diminishes the significance of the life. I definitely toyed with the idea of labeling my memoir a novel but in the end I felt that it would be cowardly.

NR: I don’t think what we are saying contradicts one another. I don’t think it excludes one another. It’s just for me it was always about the sentence, and the emotional state that I was in so that’s the story that came out. I never had a particular compulsion to sit down and record real life.

AW: See, that’s where we differ because I do have that. I’ve always had that. I think that even fiction records real life.

NR: I don’t think we are saying different things. It’s two genres but they work together.

AW: What made you write that book?

NR: What do you mean?

AW: I mean why didn’t you just create something entirely fictional. What made you get so close to your reality? I mean essentially you did record real life, so at some level there was a compulsion to do that.

NR: I wasn’t doing very well then. I had a terrible loss. The man I told you meant so much to me died, and that’s a really confusing thing to go through. He was only 34. My friends were going through such different experiences. Everything I thought was going to happen wasn’t going to anymore, and I lost my drive, and a friend of mine said “let’s go to Puerto Rico for a few days,’ and we went to Puerto Rico, and we stayed with some artist friends at their apartment on this beautiful beach, and there was something so cruel about the fact that I was sitting in this beautiful apartment on this beautiful beach, and that I was fine. I mean I was heartbroken, but my cells were multiplying at the normal pace. I was going to be fine for sometime, and he wasn’t, and his death was an accident, a car accident. I didn’t know how to survive. There’s a process in accepting horrible things about life, a process of maturation I think, and it goes parallel with acceptance, and I had to accept this loss. It’s not the first loss; I lost a country, I lost a language, I lost a mother, I lost human justice. A lot of things that were sort of promised to me as a young person, but you know I’m certainly not the only one, and the only way for me to understand that that was life and I had to live with it was to look back, and revisit what I remember as my young life, though it might just be my own memory which is probably infested with anger towards my parents and all this stuff. I needed to revisit the past and understand it so I could be a mature person, and accept that life can be beautiful, and we should go on even after the horrible things. I had to do this so that I didn’t just shut down. I started it in a real nonfictional way “I was born in 1956.” It had a real quality of the essay, and then I went back to the 60 pages, and changed everything, and now it starts “What remains of the early days begins with an image of my foot.” It was because I had always felt uncomfortable in my body. My feet seemed swollen, and I always felt dirty, and that was the essence of my childhood. That’s why it had to be fiction for me because it spoke better. I mean I’m not sorry that it is fiction, even though maybe it could have been a memoir.

AW: I was just curious what the motivation was for you because most writers would use the memoir-as-novel guise to hide behind, and I didn’t think that’s what you were doing.

NR: No.

AW: Was "You Don’t Have to Live Here" published as a memoir in Europe?

NR: No, but they just assumed because they’re obvious similarities: the name, the first person point of view, the travel: Cuba, Greece, New York. And you know my family, the members that were not so happy with having the curse of a writer in the family were outraged, and I haven’t spoken to some of them since the book came out.

AW: And haven’t some family members claimed that you’re dead to them?

NR: My cousins and my uncles said that I am dead to them, and that my name is not to be mentioned. To them I am dead.

AW: Do you want to tell me a little about the novel you working on now, Dreaming. Or is it now called Dreaming, Mississippi?

NR: Yes, I wanted it to be Dreaming, New Mexico but then Bob Dylan or Neil Young wrote Dreaming, Albuquerque. And I was so upset. So mine is in Mississippi.

AW: This is your happy book, right?

NR: [laughs] This is the book about love, and everybody finds what they need.

AW: That’s very ambitious.

NR: Marquez does it in Love and the Time in Cholera. My dream is to be half as good as he is, well, I don’t like to lie, and I’m lying here. My dream is to be just as good as he is, but it’s a tall order. I read him, and I’m in awe of his faculty, very seldom do craft and passion and soul and emotion come together. You can have over exaggerated craft like Nabokov, or you can have extreme emotion and drama like Dostoyevsky, or you can have an astonishing intellect like Virginia Woolf, or you can have an amazing rebellion within craft like Joyce, and then you can be like Faulkner who writes better than anybody, but I have no ambition to be like Faulkner because I want to be happy. So option b is Marquez who too reveres Faulkner, and the way he writes about Faulkner is amazing but he also loves people.

AW: So, do you think if you’re writing about pain, about loss and loneliness, it reflects in how you live, in your level of happiness? Can’t it just be an outlet for it? A place to deposit it?

NR: For me – yes. People get to the process in as many ways as there are people. You know what I mean? But for me Homecoming came from this depths of confusion and depression in terms of what was happening to my people, and You Don’t Have to Live Here came from a personal tragedy, and Dreaming came from having I’m not sure I’ve figured it out. What’s important: passion, love, restraint, in a positive way, not flying off the handle. I think I got to the point where I decided there had to be a place, or a story that’s purely about people doing good things to each other, and for each other. If you take Homecoming upside down you’ll get Dreaming.

AW: But is a place where nothing but kindness and morality and love exist realistic?

NR: That’s not, see it gets confusing because that not what happens there. Dreaming becomes real. Something bad happens.

AW: So would you categorize this book as magical realism?

NR: I think so. Well, this is the thing, when Marquez writes he believes that people fly on carpets and do crazy things. So magical realism is that it’s told in a matter of fact way, but the whole concept of Dreaming for me is like a new Jerusalem. It’s like a revelation. It comes out of the chapter of revelations in New Jerusalem, out of the last part of the bible, but not because there is violence, and Jesus is not that nice, and they call him the lamb the entire revelations, and he just keeps slaughtering everybody. Anyway, it’s that kind of fairytale-ish contemplation. I’m aware that it’s not realistic, that it doesn’t exist. I don’t think this is how it is. It’s almost like - I thought as a genre I’d call it a Prescriptive fairytale for a fledgling human.

AW: That’s very nice.

NR: Yeah.

AW: Well, it was great talking to you about your work, and I look forward to reading Dreaming. Thanks!

NR: Thank you.