“I was unloading the dishwasher, or loading it — something with that dishwasher. And I saw this woman standing by a picnic table.”
Have you thought about a more permissive, contemporary structure regarding staying and leaving? Not yet. Where do you get your character names? Oh, the names. They are so fun — and very, very important. If they are not the right names, the story won’t work. I realized that way back with Amy and Isabelle. Many of the names are from my family. I had a great aunt Olive, and the name Burgess is a family name [The Burgess Boys was her fourth novel]. A Kitteridge was married to a family member. So there are lots of names to mix and match. Otherwise, the names just come to me: “That’s right, that’s what she is. Let’s call her Patty. That’s perfect.” Do you consider yourself a visual person? And is being visual necessary to being a good fiction writer? I can only speak for myself, but I do see a lot. It is important for me. And it’s important to hear. How do these novels come to you? You’ve said that Olive Kitteridge came to you. Yeah, she just showed up.
Can you describe that? I was unloading the dishwasher, or loading it — something with that dishwasher. And I saw this woman standing by a picnic table. And we’ve never had a picnic table in our family. But there she was, standing by the picnic table. And I could hear her, inside her head, thinking, “It’s high time everybody left.” And I thought, “Oh, I better get that down right away.” And I did. And that was Olive. What’s the process by which you were led to unpack all the threads of Olive for the book? Olive shows up, and I realize right away that this will be a book of stories about Olive. I understood what the form was going to be, and that’s important. Then I begin to understand right away that Olive will be too much to take on every page. The reader will need a break. I’ll need a break. I’m so interested in different points of view, and that’s fun to do in a small town. I just love how, in a small town, we think we know someone, but we only know them this way, and someone else knows them that way. That was interesting to me, initially, as a way to give readers a break. But then as I made these characters I realized that they are living people who happen to know Olive in their own way.
Coming out of the unlikely mouth of Vicky, Lucy’s sister, in this book is the sarcastic reference to the “truthful sentence.” Lucy Barton talks about that also. It seems that you are on an inexorable quest for the truthful sentence. It is essential, and I’ve always understood it to be essential. For years I kept thinking, “What is a truthful sentence?” I was trying to write as truthfully as possible but it was not sounding truthful. It took years — and years and years — of practice and rewriting to know that this is a truthful sentence and that is a truthful sentence — to understand it intuitively. Is a truthful sentence saying exactly what you mean? Or does it mean saying exactly what the character means to say? The whole thing. It’s hard to describe what a truthful sentence is; it’s a very awkward thing to discuss. But it has to have all those things in it, and it has to be as direct…as…possible.
Fall 2017
41