Elissa is also an admirable literary citizen. She is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, where she the author of the “Hot-Type” column. She has been a Senior Editor at the Paris Review and is a founding editor of the literary magazine, Tin House. Elissa has also been the co-editor of the anthologies, The Friend Who Got Away and Money Changes Everything. She lives in Brooklyn, New York with her family and too many hats to count.

***

The Rumpus: Blueprints for Building Better Girls chronicles, in many ways, the perils of growing up female. Can you discuss taking on this litany of female “problems,” like anorexia, rape, miscarriage, “sluttiness”?

Elissa Schappell: The truth is, I didn’t start out with a plan to take on anything, save for the voices in my head, and all these ideas I was formulating about what it means to be a girl or woman in America today. It wasn’t until I’d written a few stories that I noticed what I was doing was creating these archetypal female characters—the slut, the good girl, the bad mother, the party girl, all these women we think we know—and making them complicated human beings. Subverting the reader’s expectations of who they were. Who the culture says they are, or should be.

In this way the book really is a handbook. These “perils” are the sort that etiquette books exist to address, as in: What is proper decorum for a well-bred young lady whose been raped? Dos and don’ts for making new friends with fellow mommies. Do: Take wine to the playground in a thermos. Don’t: Threaten to smack your child’s face off. You know, what the culture dictates what women should do versus what they actually do. Good girls don’t do body shots.

The “taking on” part came in the revising, once I knew what the story was.

Rumpus: Instead of archetype, we could use the word label. Your book takes place—and in this way it is novelistic in its scope—from the seventies until the present. Do you think these labels have changed over the past forty years?

Schappell: Obviously there’s been some change, right? I don’t think the labels have changed so much as the behaviors associated with them, which is a thread that runs throughout the book. What it means to be a good wife now, versus thirty years ago is pretty different given the realities of modern marriage. Save for stuff like, Don’t have sex with the gardener, and Mrs. Dale Carnegie’s, “Laugh when your husband’s boss makes a joke, but not too much!”

However, the label “slut” hasn’t changed much, or how you get it. “Slut” has always been the sharpest chisel in the bullies’ toolbox of ways to dismantle a women. It has little relation to how much sex a girl is having. We all know that just as many “good girls” are screwing in the back of their boyfriends’ cars as “sluts” and fewer of them use protection. In the case of the heroine in Monsters of the Deep, she’s just a girl who got breasts before her peers, is comfortable with her body and her sexuality. She’s a mystery to them and her power is unsettling, thus they project all their sexual frustration and aggression on to her.

Rumpus: This book deals very much with being a parent, a mother. What do you think is unique about that character in fiction? Do you think mothers become invisible as characters? Does that reflect how they’re seen—or not seen—in the world?

Schappell: Actually only three of the eight stories are about being a parent—what all of the stories share, and I think this is what you’re picking up on, is that in every story you are aware of how the main character’s relationship with her mother has made her into the girl or woman she is. In this are the echoes of how the culture dictates what is acceptable and unacceptable behavior, in this case for an upper-middle class white woman in our modern time.

What is what is so unique about the mother in fiction is the power mothers possess. It’s scary. We have the power to give you life, and if we choose, buckle you into your car seat and drive the family station wagon off a dock. You know, fathers can leave, but mothers stay. What I wanted to show in the stories was that not all mothers are happily self-sacrificing, not all love their children as much or more than their husbands, and not all mothers are to blame for their children’s problems, in the case of one of the stories told from the point of view of the mother—not to blame for their daughters’ eating disorders.

In terms of the mother in literature what we see, historically—and I’m generalizing here—is a disconnect between the multi-faceted, complicated human beings mothers are, and the way they’re often portrayed. They’re Medea or Mildred Pierce, or a stereotype—the meddling Jewish mother like Sophie Portnoy, or the cold withholding WASP in any number of Cheever stories.

I don’t think mothers are invisible so much as their power is invisible. Like the term soccer mom. Who in the fuck is the soccer mom? She’s a sexless, jobless woman behind the wheel of an SUV, carting around a bunch of ten-year-olds. Or, perhaps she volunteers at a rape crisis shelter, is banging her contractor, and she’s using the kids as drug mules. We seem to assume—and I was as guilty of this as anyone—that men have richer lives simply because they leave the house, and punch a time card.

Rumpus: Do you think men read your books?

Schappell: Sure. However, with Use Me, the majority of men who approached me about the book told me, “Oh! I just bought your book for my wife.” “Or, my girlfriend loves your writing.” The first few times I just smiled politely, then I started saying, “Don’t worry. You can read it. There aren’t that many big words in it. Read it with a dictionary.”

It seems like men are reading this book. Or, every man who has read it has decided write me. Which is lovely. Perhaps it’s because reviewers—and these are good reviews, some written by women—keep writing about how “provocative” and “darkly funny” they are (which perhaps can be construed as naughty and mean?) as well as “full of unsympathetic female characters,” who are inevitably cited as being unstable, depressed, dangerous… In my experience men are mad for female characters who are liable to pop off without warning.

Perhaps it’s the title? Maybe they assume the book contains actual plans for how to build your own horny nubile robot? No, it’s because it’s been proven that women seeing a man reading my book immediately assume, He must be incredibly smart and great in bed.

Seriously, though, this is all about conflating gender with genre. It’s bullshit. I’ve examined books by Hemingway and Austen with a high powered microscope and failed to find evidence of any genitalia, male or female on either.

Rumpus: Something you said to me years ago has stayed with me. You said, writing like a man would be the biggest compliment. Do you still think that? Why?

Schappell: I’ve always wanted to be taken as seriously as my male counterparts. I didn’t mean I wanted to be a male writer. (Although I could do with an art wife.) I suppose what I was saying was I felt that the only time gender doesn’t figure into evaluating the worth of a piece of art, is when the artist is a man. That’s the baseline for comparison. As good as, worse than, better than, comparison to men. So I would prefer to have my gender be invisible. Although given that we’re talking you and me—years ago…was I on top of a table, shaking my fist? I might have been in the bag. Regardless, that sentiment is pretty funny when you consider the feminist slant of this book.

Rumpus: The stories of these characters lives are passed on, often to surprising people. What is it about re-ordering our stories, re-telling it for our children or friends, that changes it?

Schappell: We need to tell our stories. It’s a form of currency, catharsis, it’s how we frame our experiences. It allows us to create and take control of our identity, right? Because the stories are told from different points of view, and the way characters sometimes overlap we see how these women reframe experiences, reimagine themselves—as the hero, villain, innocent bystander.

Rumpus: This makes me think of audience, how as readers we are either being told a story or eavesdropping on a story. Your characters do both—they talk to the reader directly, and they let the reader spy women talking to each other, to their partners, children.

Schappell: I wanted the reader to see characters from several different perspectives. I wanted Bender, the party girl, to have an opportunity to talk directly to the reader, to have her say, because no one listens to her. In the case of Charlotte, the young woman whose been raped, I wanted to keep the reader at distance. To protect her. You don’t get to be in her head. There’s only one person she feels she can tell that story to.

Rumpus: Can we talk about humor? Because, you are a funny lady, on and off the page. How are you using humor to come at these difficult subjects?

Schappell: You have to make them laugh, or I do, because as Oscar Wilde said, “If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they’ll kill you.” I simply can’t run that fast.

Rumpus: As a writer, you are using it as a cloak too, right?

Schappell: My characters use humor to protect themselves, make people like them, to diffuse awkward situations. Like everyone they are whistling past the graveyard, difference is as they’re whistling they’re checking out the inscriptions on the graves, (Mother She Made Home Pleasant) and wondering if it’s possible for fake flowers to ever make a grave look cheerier, and not sadder.

The fact is if you make people laugh, they are less likely to shut you inside a locker. They will invite you to lunch. When you open your mouth, they will stop talking and, expecting to be entertained, quiet. Listen. Let their guard down. You disarm them with a few bad puns. Then, once you’ve got them laughing, they trust you, you can slip your knife into their side, they don’t even notice until they start to feel the ache.

Rumpus: Humor is very subjective. There’s nothing more particular than humor, is there?

Schappell: You’re right. Some people get the humor in the stories, others don’t. There will always be those who say, “You shouldn’t be making jokes about cancer or miscarriage or abortion. It’s not funny. You’ve crossed the line.” If that’s not enough, they’ll add, “Not only that, you seem angry.” Well, I am angry, and as to these rules the culture imposes on women, on me, I wasn’t there when we voted. So, if you’ll pardon me sir, madam, you can stick it.

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The Rumpus: So let’s talk about The Surrendered.  It’s timeless, and yet, it’s set in two distinct time periods and places.  (Korea in the 50’s, NY and NJ in the 80’s) What was it about the Korean War that drew you to this story?

Chang-rae Lee: I’d always wanted to write something about the Korean War because of my heritage. My father lost his brother during the war, and I fictionalized that episode, which was told to me very briefly without much detail. I always thought at some point I’d write about it, and when I began I found I was even more interested than I’d anticipated.  I felt a strange and unexpected passion for it. I knew I had a familial connection, but there was something about writing about those people, particularly Korean orphans. And in a strange way American GI’s, many of whom I’d had accidental conversations with over the years.  I had a visceral connection to the period.  By visceral I suppose I mean emotional.  But every fiction requires so much that is not that so I did a lot of other research and a lot of thinking, a lot of struggling there.

Rumpus: What did you do and read to put your characters in a space and time set so different from our own?

Chang-rae Lee: I don’t consider this a historical fiction, and yet the feel of it has to be convincing and authentic.  So I did a lot of reading of first person accounts from

Koreans and combatants and aid workers.  And I spoke to relatives.  A lot of wonderful photographs were made available to me from that period—1950-1956—and those were given to me by a Korean newspaper in Seoul. Ruined villages, refugees streaming through a river valley, GI’s and orphans and orphanages, those tiny details that you can only see in a picture.  It’s not that I wrote those details, but photos can give you the confidence that you have a real feel for the landscape. Then you can invent with a solid kind of faith, and recreate a feel and flavor of the time, and, one hopes, a tonality, a sense of that time having been lived by those characters.

Rumpus: When you say you don’t see yourself as writing historical fiction, I think I know what you mean, but can you talk about that a bit?

Lee: I don’t think this is a book about the Korean War. It observes what went on in the war, but it’s much more interested in the private, singular expression and consequences of war in general.  My friend C.K. Williams thought this was a cosmic war novel, about any and all war.  How the cost and anguish and suffering is expressed by modest figures.  I wanted to present a sweep and scope of larger events, and a grander backdrop, but most important was to set against that a very singular, real and modest people struggling with every day and human struggles.

Rumpus: In all your work there is this interesting play between the present and the past.  Everyone in this novel—as well as in Native Speaker and A Gesture Life–is haunted by terrible tragedy. The past sits with them, as it does for all of us, at all times.  The very structure of your novels seems to emerge from this.  Can you talk about how the present and the past inform each other and how you work might reflect this technically?

Lee: The past, as you suggest, is absolutely present at all times and the present is born from the past. I wouldn’t want to suggest that the past determines the present.  I think a lot of this book is a presentation of a kind of destiny and then a secondary presentation of what someone would do with that destiny, that they are in some measure in control, and have volition.  All of my books really do look at that to degrees of difference.  Technically, I do enjoy the flashback!  But not just for informational material.  I want the flashbacks to feel that once you’re there they have their own unity, their own kind of atmospheric sensibility; I want the reader to be transported.  The novel is a big, complicated, unknowable thing before it’s written. By definition it uses and plays and delights in time. It delights in the interlacing of chronologies and the consequences of that interlacing.  And those have personal and psychological expressions in a character.  Aside from other issues of writing, psychological characterization is what narrative can do best.

Rumpus: And it’s also how memory works… In many ways your characters were powerless in the past and the agency of their current lives is in the choice of how they navigate the present.  They construct their lives in the wake of their losses.  How does this inform the narrative voice?

Lee: I like that question because I think their pasts are treated with a voice that sees their role as those of innocents.  That’s reflected in the past time sequences.  They’re less “written.” When I’m describing wartime activities or violence I don’t want to be too ornate, to prettify the picture.  Once we trace them to the present, the prose becomes denser.  I’m more interested in the psychic intricacies that they build up and try to run away from, and how they self-construct. A lot of my work is about self-construction.  Here, it’s those folks who are deeply wounded and bewildered.  They’re not just victims of trauma; they’ve been shaken so forcefully that they don’t quite know how or where to stand.

Rumpus: Having just taught your first book, Native Speaker, last semester, and reading this book directly afterward was interesting.  You use spying to examine the immigrant experience here in the States. Issues of secrets and betrayals are also at the very heart of this story.  What compels you about this theme?  You’re not examining race and ethnicity at all in The Surrendered.

Lee: Not at all.

Rumpus: I’m wondering if that was a conscious choice or if this story just didn’t lend itself to that.

Lee: I could easily have gotten into those issues.  But I really had no interest.  As you say, it’s mostly because of what the story required. It wasn’t hurtling toward those kinds of questions toward identity.  There is secrecy and betrayal but that’s more part and parcel of the kind of anguish that the people go through.  And maybe that’s modes of survival, rather than modes of consciousness, which was what I was looking at with Native Speaker and Gesture Life, even Aloft.  A certain kind of character influenced by society or culture.  Here it’s a mode of physical survival.  Not just life or death; these people are very bodily.

Rumpus: I wanted to ask you about that in regards to sexual identity.  You write about sex a lot in this book.

Lee: No one ever mentions that though!

Rumpus: Really?  It’s so weird how sex gets talked about or doesn’t get talked about it.

Lee: Not one mention!  And there’s a lot of sex.

Rumpus: There’s a lot of sex!  And there’s a lot about smells and bodily functions, and I’m wondering what you were playing with there, and why this is so important to the story.

Lee: It’s so important to the story.

Rumpus: Do you think people are scared to ask you, in particular, about the sexuality?

Lee: I think because of these big issues of life and death that maybe sex feels like a crass question.  But for Christ sake, this is a book that is so interested in an elemental human condition.   And one of the ideas about surrender is an erotic surrender, too.  These folks are surrendered by destiny; they surrender to each other in certain moments, but there is a lot of erotic surrender.  I’m fascinated in this book by how people get through the day.  The aches and pains and wellings that they have.  Not just erotic, but of illness. I spent a lot of time on June and her body and how she struggles with this flesh of hers that doesn’t recognize her will to live.  Hector struggles with his beauty and his imperviousness.  He’s immortal and yet he desperately wants to die, to erase himself.  And Sylvie has her problem with drugs.  I think they all wanted to forget they were trapped in their bodies.  What is Eros but the life force?  That’s what these folks are trying to tap into. It’s a mode of survival and enduring.  And being present.

Rumpus: Can we talk briefly about this theme of the absence or loss of children?  You’re a father—I wonder what it must be like to write about that, and what draws you to that story.  And of course these orphans have lost their parents.

Lee: Obviously loss of family is huge and critical, but I think really it’s more about losing a sense of family.  The horror of that kind of incompleteness. Writing this book, I tried not to think about my father, which does no one any good fictionally.  I did try to imagine not just the horror of that moment, but the horror of having witnessed it, and the lifelong void.  And I think that’s what’s so frightening.  That’s what haunts me.  Not just what happened to my father, but what happened to me, and what I see happen to so many families. My first cousin just died; he was only 33. I could see the void in his parents’ faces.  It’s not just the loss of that person, but the idea of this dead space in the family which for me is quite startling.

Rumpus: It’s interesting how the domestic and the historical echo each other—that really spoke to me.

Lee: Well, your books are about family bonds that are forged and influenced by larger historical forces…Look at June with her son.  I wanted to suggest something about how she might bring ruination on her own family life.  Even, and especially after, what had happened to her. I was afraid of making her monstrous, a hard instrument of this world.  Which was captivating too, to think of how deeply she could wound herself by neglecting her son.

Rumpus: We have a lot of empathy for her.  There are really interesting characters in this novel.  I’d like to go back to what you were saying about historical novels teaching the reader about a space and time.  But there can be a lack of intimacy with characters.

Lee: Right!  Historical novels are about costumery.  I think that’s the magic and mystery of fiction. I don’t want to write historical fiction but I do want the story to have the feel of history. There’s a difference.

Rumpus: And are you working on anything now?

Lee: I’ve been sketching out for the last six months.  A different kind of immigrant novel.  With a China angle.  Because China is so ascendant.  And I’m fascinated by that as it has to do with American dominance, or the wane of American dominance.  But I haven’t quite found the language of it yet, or my way into it, the perspective.  I’m just thinking about the whole picture.  I always try to write a book while publishing one, but it just turns out I need a year off.  This book almost killed me.

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