A: Oh gosh, I think we go back to when I was 23 years old. This is not a thinly disguised memoir. She's a fictional character. But she happens to be the age that I am at every stage in her life. She was a young woman, a young wife, mother. Unable to hold onto her marriage. Single parent during all the years that I was going through those things. And now she's 70 and so am I.
So I know her world, and I know the times in which she lived. And I guess I would say my understanding of her has been greatly amplified and informed by the hundreds and hundreds of women who write to me, or who I've come to know over the course of 30 years teaching memoir workshops to women. At the core, her themes and obsessions are mind, and I'd never pretend otherwise.
She is a person who is driven to make a happy family, whatever that may be. So was I. And like me, she didn't come from one. I used to say I'd make a happy family if it killed us – and it practically did [she laughs].
Q: In the new book, she struggles with how to be a mother to her adult children, and usually ends up feeling she's failed someone somehow.
A: Over the decades that the two books span, she's wrestling with questions that are always at the center of my world, too. What is a good parent? What is a good mother? There's actually a chapter that I think is called ‘The definition of a good mother' that I performed on Facebook in honor of Mother's Day. And the bottom line is there is no such thing.
Or who can say? No mother is good enough. Whatever we do, there's so much we didn't do. It's sort of this failure built into the job.
Q: When you started the first book, what made you want to use so many of the kinds of experiences you'd lived?
A: In a way, it's a story I've been telling again and again at different stages in my life, and it was transformed each time. Marriage, parenthood, family, love, relationships between parents and children, men and women. That's always been in my books. So what's changed is not so much my themes but me.
I actually published a book in the '90s, I guess 30 years ago, called ‘Where Love Goes.' That was about a woman who was divorced and a single parent in a small New Hampshire town. Many of the same issues, but that was me when I was 40. I saw things very differently, I think. I wrote the book that I wished I could have read when I was 35 or 40.
Q: What has changed for you in recent years that influenced the Eleanor books?
A: After my marriage ended, I made a really good marriage in my late '50s. To a man who had also been divorced, who raised three children. And we had been married just one year when he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. We struggled mightily to save him but it was impossible. He died not quite eight years ago.
It was really after Jim's death, I think, after I'd been through the big conflagration, that I could look back at the kinds of things that used to seem like trouble. And used to seem unsurvivable or just unbearable. And I saw them so differently.
I didn't start right away. It's not like Jim died and I started writing ‘Count The Ways.' Jim died and I actually started writing my memoir, ‘The Best of Us,' which was about finding and losing my very good partner. But that really was the genesis of my revisiting – you could say an old story, but I would say just a classic story of love and loss and surviving lives at a very different stage of life. With forgiveness.
Q: How soon after ‘Count the Ways' did you begin ‘How the Light Gets In'?
A: I actually spent a whole year just thinking what should happen next in her life. I didn't want the answer to be that some wonderful man, some perfect guy comes galloping along on his stallion and rescues her. She needed to make her own way forward. I knew I wanted to give her a really great love affair, but I didn't want the love affair to be the be-all and end-all.
Q: You bring the book right up to 2024, with a lot of real-life events referenced in it.
A: I didn't know we'd be having the Donald Trump trial but there were some things I could guess.
Q: Tell me about incorporating current events into your work, because going back to ‘The Die For' and as recently as your novella ‘The Influencer,' you've done that.
A: I think I could take it back even further, 50-some years to the very first article that I published in the New York Times about my growing up. I was always fascinated by the intersection of our private personal lives, our individual stories, set against the backdrop of what's going on in our world and especially in the United States of America.
That piece became my book ‘Looking Back,' you know. I'm looking at the Beatles coming on the Ed Sullivan Show, a night I remember. The Kennedy assassination, of course. The Vietnam War. Every now and then, somebody will make a criticism of my work and say, ‘I love her work, but why does she have to be political?'
Our lives are political. How could I possibly have had Eleanor living her life in the fall of 2016 and not address the election? Whatever her views? It was an event that shaped our lives. Or COVID or the January 6 insurrection.
Q: I was struck by the empathy you show Ursula's husband Jake, who goes down a conspiracy rabbit hole and shows up at the Capitol on January 6.
A: I think it's crucial, not just for Jake, but for every character. That's sort of my sacred responsibility. My job is to locate compassion for every single character. The function of memoir and of fiction is in part to help us understand more of the world.
I've been thinking a lot about Alice Munro (the Nobel Prize-winning author who died in May) the last few days. Those stories expanded our understanding of what it was to be a human being. So yeah, I didn't want to make a cardboard cutout of a Trumpster. It would have been very easy to do that. But I wanted to imagine what brought him to that place, and I think when you read the book, you will know what it is.
Q: I wanted to ask you about the importance of music in your books. I have a CD soundtrack to ‘Where Love Goes,' which 30 years ago was the first book I can remember that had a playlist printed it inside and a CD soundtrack with Townes Van Zandt, Steve Earle, Aimee Mann, people like that. I still have it.
A: I love hearing that! It was an idea whose time had not yet come. When I write, I have a practice of playing music that will get me in the mood of the book, and I even make a sort of playlist for each of my characters. I don't play music when I write; I couldn't possibly. I play it before. So in the case of ‘Where Love Goes,' it's this heartbreaking novel, so I played these heartbreak sort of Americana kind of songs. I lost my shirt on that project but I had a good time.
In this book, it has a lot of John Prine, who I loved. Musicians that I love, they become characters in my life, too. They're in my house, too, and so when John Prine died, which was April of 2020 when COVID took off, it was very real to me. And of course, I made my reaction Eleanor's reaction. She'd lost a friend.
Q: You also mention the deaths of Sinead O'Connor and Leonard Cohen in the author's note on music.
A: If I had my choice, I probably would have been a singer-songwriter. But as it is, I tried to make my books sort of my songs.
Q: You get to use more words than a song.
A: I use more words, but I want to make you cry [she laughs].
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This story was originally published June 28, 2024, 4:00 AM.