Jennifer Crusie's Blog: Argh Ink

Jen Weiner was sweet enough to take some time out of her Cupcakes Across America Tour to answer my questions about her new book, Fly Away Home, which is out today! Today, run out and get it! And if Jen’s in the bookstore, she’ll give you a cupcake!

Jenny:
Well, thanks to you, I got no sleep last night. I started to read a few pages of Fly Away Home before I went to bed and then just kept going because I had to find out what happened to Sylvie, Diana, and Lizzie, but I forgive you because it was such a wonderful read. So let’s start with the great opening premise: Sylvie Woodruff, a very smart woman who has devoted herself to her husband’s political career, finds herself in the Clinton/ McGreavey/Craig/Spitzer/Sanford club: Her husband had an affair and the media breaks the story while she’s at a highway rest stop. Was that series of scandals what started you on this story, or did they play into the character of Sylvie, a woman starting over at midlife, that you already wanted to write?

Jen:
There are books you write because the characters who show up in your head are familiar. They sound like you, they feel like you, they react to events the way you would react, eating the same comfort foods and cracking the same jokes.

Then there are characters who compel you because you don’t understand them at all.

Sylvie Woodruff falls squarely into the second camp – I knew I wanted to write about a politician’s wife, the kind of woman who’d stand stoically by her man while he gave a press conference confessing to some manner of bad behavior, because she knew that her place – her job – was to be at his side.

I knew I wanted to write about Sylvie, and I started imagining her specifics – where she’d gone to school, what her family was like – but it took me a while for me to get her voice, and her motivations, because she’s very different than I am. But I was fascinated by the questions her character raised: what kind of woman would choose to be the power behind the throne, instead of a power in her own right, with all the risks that implies? Are there women who choose to be good wives instead of good mothers, and what are the consequences of that choice? What do you do when your personal life and your work are so entangled that when one piece falls apart, the whole tower crumbles? And what do you do in the wake of that kind of disaster?

Jenny:
There’s a great short scene toward the middle of Fly Away Home where a lone reporter stops Sylvie and asks her why she did what she did (being deliberately vague here because I don’t want to commit spoilers). Sylvie’s answer is beautifully brief, but it encapsulates the conundrum that all of those political wives were faced with, the choice between personal pride and family. I thought Sylvie’s choice was interesting (and a good one for the start of her arc) but I was also with the reporter. Are you divided on that choice as I am? Since that choice of personal vs family pretty much fuels all three POV characters’ journeys, is that the central thing you wanted to explore in this book?

Jen:
Public versus private, family life versus public life were absolutely big themes, and, for Sylvie, the question that young woman poses is unanswerable in that there’s no right thing she can say, no answer that will satisfy. That was a tough scene to write because my heart was with both characters – the poor reporter, who feels that she’s owed not just an answer but a certain kind of behavior from a woman who’s had Sylvie’s advantages, and Sylvie, who knows that there’s nothing she can say that will satisfy.

Jenny:
Sylvie’s older daughter, Diana makes some, uh, interesting choices in Fly Away Home. She’s probably the least sympathetic character with her condemnation of addiction in others while she’s being dragged under by her own obsession, but she’s completely understandable; you never think, “Why did she do that?” and most of the time, I was thinking I might be making the same choices, too. Was it difficult to make her somebody that readers could relate to, given her prickliness and her very high standards (among other things)?

Jen:
Oh, I do like writing about a good villain, or a good unsympathetic character who’s undone by her own choices and toppled from her pedestal!

I think that Diana, harsh as she is to her husband, and the world around her, is harshest on herself – she holds herself to impossibly high standards, gives herself crazy lists and deadlines and then, suddenly, after she’s sworn off the world of sex and passion, finds herself undone by her own appetites.

Because FLY AWAY HOME is a story about women remaking themselves in the wake of a disaster, I wanted to have Diana fall, and fall hard, to lose everything that she believed made her who she was – her job, her home, her tight grip on herself. Once all that is gone, she’s able to be a little gentler with herself – a better person, a better friend to Gary, a better Mom. I hope readers will be able to relate to her, detestable though she may be. I mean, “step away from the blog and go for a jog?” Who says stuff like that?

Jenny:
Sylvie’s younger daughter, Lizzie, is much easier to like because she’s so much more easy-going and loving, but she has her own demons, too. Why did you choose an addiction/recovery story for her?

Jen:
I’d been reading a lot of memoirs about addiction – for some reason, the Times is, ahem, addicted to them, and feels it necessary to review every book about drugs and recovery written by a white man of a certain age.

One of the books I read was called THE ADDICT. It wasn’t written by an addict, but by a doctor who treated them, but one of his patients really stuck with me. She was a young woman, attractive, intelligent, upper-middle-class background, stable, married parents, but she’d just never felt like she fit into the world, and she started swiping painkillers to cope with those feelings.

Jenny:
I loved Selma. (Well, who wouldn’t?) With her in the mix and on the scene, you have three generations of mothers in this book, all of whom are making their own mistakes and then trying to make up for them. How important are mothers to your work (I know, I know they’re important, but I want to hear you talk about it)? You wrote your first book before your babies were born; how has your writing about mothers changed since you became a mom?

Jen:
I think I’m always going to be interested in the choices women have – whether, and when to marry and have children; how to balance work and children, how our choices are shaped by our own mothers and our experiences being mothered. GOOD IN BED, one of my pre-baby books, was very much a story about Cannie and her mother, and IN HER SHOES was about two girls struggling toward adulthood in the wake of a mother’s absence. Now that I’m a mom myself, I think maybe I’m a little more…flexible? Forgiving? Something like that…about the choices that women and mothers make. I think that even though there are blogs and books and first-person essays about the everyday exhaustion and dreariness and frustration of motherhood, the prevailing cultural view is still that motherhood comes with this rose-tinged blissful glow. In fact, I think, it’s much more complicated than that, a much more fraught and ambivalent undertaking that entails saying goodbye to many of the things that made up your single-girl life. So yes, the moment of becoming a mother (and understanding and forgiving your own mother) is something I’m very interested in continuing to explore.

Jenny:
Milo was an interesting choice: In a book about women, you made the only child not just male, but detached and repressed. In that, he’s an interesting bookend to Selma, his great-grandmother, whose family thinks she could use some detachment and repression. Did you see that as symbolic of how the family was gradually repressing itself to conform, the evolution from Selma to Milo, an evolution they needed to break, or was that just the way Selma and Milo showed up on the page?

Jen:
I think Milo is the end product of a series of reactions: Sylvie reacts to Selma by trying to be the perfect (and perfectly invisible) wife; Diana reacts to Sylvie by trying to be the perfect career woman, and Milo reacts to his mother and father by being his own prickly self. I think at one point one of my early readers asked whether it wouldn’t make more sense to have Milo be a little girl, because this is very much a story about women and women’s choices, but I thought it would be one of the first instances of motherhood thwarting and undoing and remaking Diana to have her get the opposite of what she’s wished for. She wants an adorable, bookish little girl; she gets Milo, who is, even she admits, kind of weird.

Jenny:
I thought the way you worked with food in Fly Away Home was fascinating. Not just the obvious Sylvie-can’t-have-cookies stuff, but the way Diana tries to protect her son with draconian food rules, and the way Lizzie sees food as a way to take care of her father, and the way Sylvie rediscovers herself through the recipes she finds in the house. Talk to me about food and storytelling, Jen, because you do it so well.

Jen:
I think food plays such an important role in womens’ lives – the kitchen can be a battleground, a place to nurture or score points or prove your own superiority or restraint. I love to cook, and I love good food, and I live writing about food!

With Diana, it was fun, because I got to satirize every nutty food rule that every mom I know has, in an effort to keep her own kid from developing his or her own food issues (or, god forbid, getting an eating disorder. Or getting fat). Showing Lizzie learning to cook was a way of externalizing the changes she’s going through as she belatedly makes the trip from childhood to young womanhood. And I loved Sylvie’s cooking scenes, as she learns how to take care of her daughters and herself (one of my first readers said it was gastro-porn. I do not disagree).

Jenny:
I also loved the clothes in Fly Away Home. Not just that waistband cutting into Sylvie’s stomach, but the way you returned to that when she tried to use her former work clothes as a Halloween costume. Lizzie’s using Sylvie’s old hippie-chick-freedom clothes to redefine herself. Milo’s hats. The way the clothes the men chose and the way they wore those clothes appeared to the women. How important are clothes to your storytelling (and to you)?

Jen:
It’s funny, because in my real life I am the least fashion-conscious person you’d ever want to meet. Maybe that’s not quite true – I love dressing up my daughters – but in my own life, I think about clothes as something that stand between me and public nakedness and shaming.

But when I’m writing, I have to think about clothes a lot. With Sylvie, image is important, and she’s remade herself, both surgically and sartorially, to fit the mold. Diana treats clothing like a uniform, until she falls in love, and Lizzie’s trying to establish connections by the way she dresses and build an identity – a common thing for a woman in her twenties.

I think my best fashion moments in FLY AWAY HOME are when Sylvie learns about her husband’s betrayal and feels three separate waistbands digging into her flesh and starts feeling like her own clothes are trying to kill her.

Jenny:
The book begins and ends at a highway rest stop. What’s with that?

Jen:
Hey, someone noticed! Rest stops (and public restrooms) often play major parts in my books. The big thematic answer is that rest stops, and airports, and train stations and places like them, are sort of places that float in space, untethered…they don’t really exist anywhere, in a way. Nobody lives there, and everyone passing through is on his or her way to somewhere else. I liked that idea of impermanence, of unreal places where anything can happen.

Also, my mother told me that my father was leaving at the Vince Lombardi Service Area on the New Jersey Turnpike. So there’s that, too.

Jenny:
What did you set out to do in Fly Away Home, besides tell a great story? Are you happy with the novel?

Jen:
I wanted to write about a woman I didn’t understand, and get to the point where I, and, eventually, readers, understood her – so in that respect, yes, I’m happy with FLY AWAY HOME. I always want to bring my characters to a better place than where they started the book, and I think that FLY AWAY HOME achieves that, too. I want to make my readers think, but also keep them entertained, and tell a great story with characters who feel real.

Jenny:
What’s up next? Voracious Weiner fans want to know.

Jen:
Weiner fans. Heh. Well, I’m starting to put the pieces together for my next book, gearing up for a two-week cross-country tour (cupcakes! There will be cupcakes!), and enjoying hanging out at the beach with my kids. And reading MAYBE THIS TIME, and loving it!

Jenny:
You have such good taste. All that and a terrific new book, too. Everybody should read Fly Away Home!