Sapp, Rebecca
Alice Sebold
Issue #33
The author talks about covering new ground in her latest novel, The Almost Moon, learning to live with our own bodies, and how she got over being an ‘absolute loser’ in New York
By Ling Ma
Published: September 1st, 2007 | 12:00am
Alice Sebold isn’t really into small talk, but she’s game for just about anything else. “I just was at a dinner party last night,” she mentions, “and people were talking about, you know, food and wine — and I was just bored out of my mind.” The writer says she’s likely to be the first person at the party to talk with you about your mother. “Or your fear of failure, or whatever,” Sebold says, “than I am the person who’s going to talk about the restaurant I just went to.”
You wouldn’t expect anything less coming from the author of the best-selling The Lovely Bones
Sebold’s latest novel again takes on weighty material. Five years in the making, The Almost Moon
On a Sunday afternoon in July during a bicoastal phone conversation (I’m in Brooklyn, Sebold is in Long Beach, California), we got right down to it.
How did the specific story of The Almost Moon come to you?
I never think in terms of plot; I just think in terms of people. I think I’m intrigued by the mythology of what a parent is and what that level of intimacy can mean, not only in a positive sense — which is the one I feel we hear so much about — but also in a negative sense, particularly in the mother-daughter connection. There’s so much mythologizing of that relationship, and I think the mythologizing stems from the need to deny some difficult parts about it. I wanted to see what it was like when somebody was really pushed to face some negatives. The results of having served the parent for a very long time sometimes can be very negative on the person who’s serving.
I remember you were quoted in an interview as saying, “My mother was kind of owned by her mother until my grandmother died at 96.”
It’s just basically that she lived in a state of duty to her husband and her mother her whole adult life. Her mother died when [my mother] was in her early 70s. Her mother was very demanding and judgmental. It was difficult to watch my mother — who after all is not a peer of mine but is my mother — suffer under that tyranny into her older age.
There’s so much attention paid to female physicality in this novel. There are a lot of passages just devoted to Helen’s observations of her mother’s body, of her own body, and the fact that Helen makes her living as an artist’s model. What role do you think this notion of female physicality plays into the murder?
I think encountering and accepting the body and understanding it and owning it as your own is huge. I feel like we’re backtracking in a big way right now. Women are becoming more and more concerned with appearing not as they truly are. And so, just in the same way that you would become intimate with your lover — through a physical way, truly understanding who they are — I think Helen, when she’s bathing her mother after she kills her, really sees a map of her mother’s life and some of the costs of it on her mother as she does encountering her own physical self on a routine basis as an artist’s model.
The connection to the body is huge, and in my mind not really talked a lot about in what I would call intellectual fiction. It is in Europe — much more in literature in translation you’ll find that. But here, it’s as if we’re a bunch of floating heads. That doesn’t seem right to me.
I was wondering if the process of writing this novel made you feel differently about your own body? Did it change you personally in the way you reflect on your own body?
I don’t look to my work to transform me. I feel like I’ve already come to certain understandings, and then my characters and I explore how that understanding affects their experience or their lives. I might come to an understanding via [the character] of something that doesn’t have to do with me but is an offshoot.
Kind of hard to explain, but I think all women particularly by the age of 40 have come to various levels of horror [laughs] and acceptance of the physical self. And you really do have to find a way, not just to love your own body, but love the bodies of all women.
One of the nice privileges of getting older is that the idea that you’re competing in any way with other women really begins to lift. And so you find yourself in restaurants just staring at some young, beautiful woman across the room. You know she hates herself; you know she thinks she’s not attractive. But you’re so blown away by this kind of quivering vitality of youth and strength and insecurity and everything that’s all rolled up together in one. At a certain age, you’re able to look at other women as if they’re these amazing pieces of art. You wish you could tell them how amazing they are, but you know even if you did, they wouldn’t hear you, so. But I do think that’s something that happens as you get older.
What was the writing process like for this novel? What times did you wake up?
I’m an early riser when I’m working, so my best work takes place in the dark [laughs]. I’ll get up around 4 o’ clock and get to work very quickly. I burn out by noon when I’m keeping those hours. It makes me a very dull social person because I’ve got to go to bed much earlier than most people.
You’ve mentioned that when you were living in New York, you wrote a novel that never got published. What was it about?
I wrote a couple of novels that never got published [laughs]. One of them was set on the Lower East Side and it’s kind of like a, I don’t know, a love triangle or something from what I can remember. And the other one was about a family that left for Tennessee, and of course an act of violence occurs when they’re in this small Tennessee town.
So those were two novels I had representation for, but they were never able to sell them. And then I wrote incomplete novels. I think a lot of people have those in their drawers.
How do you find yourself changing as a writer at this point? What’s the best advice you’d give all those twentysomething writers currently living in the East Village right now?
The thing that I would say to the aspiring 20-year-old writers is, don’t judge your process so harshly. I know that for a very long time, I was stymied by what I felt I should be as opposed to who I actually was in terms of what I was driven to write about, but also in the way I was driven to write.
You know, we’re all products of our times in various ways, and one of the ways is that there are certain writers who get a lot of attention when we’re coming of age and so we feel that we should write like them. They may not be at all who we are as writers. I spent years trying to write like writers that I actually don’t write like. So a huge breakthrough for me was when I stopped judging my own process and just did it.
Was it a realization that came to you gradually or was it like an overnight switch?
I think it came to me gradually. I do think it helped, frankly, leaving New York [laughs]. By the time I left New York, I knew that it wasn’t New York, it was me in New York. Moving to New York is like doing a chemistry experiment. You’re either going to be that element that works really well with the culture of New York, or you can be an element that works OK with it, or it could be really negative.
And for me, I worked well with it as long as my writing didn’t have anything to do with it. I was so on top of consciously living as a New Yorker that my subconscious really got lost, and that’s where my work comes from. So it ended up being a freeing thing for me to leave New York.
But when I left New York, I left it an absolute loser, an absolute failure and really harshly judged myself.
How old were you at the time?
I was 33. I was three years over the 30-year mark [laughs], and nothing had happened. And friends of mine in New York were saying things to me as I was leaving, like “I don’t know why, some people make it, and some people don’t.” Like, you know, I was dead.
Oh no ... [laughs]
But that’s the way New York is. It could be really harsh. I never regret that I had my time there, but there’s a whole life after being a failure in New York [laughs]. It’s hard to keep that in mind when you’re living there.
What’s something you’ve always wanted to write about, but you’re afraid to write about?
[pause] I don’t know, and it will probably be the subject of my next book. I tend to write about things that are — you know, intense subjects have been a preoccupation for me. I don’t know what’s next, but that will probably be the next book.
Comments
Please login to be able to comment on this article.
more