Jessica Anya Blau’s debut novel, The Summer of Naked Swim Parties—which does in fact involve much poolside nudity—was picked as a “Best Summer Read” by The Today Show, The New York Post, and New York magazine, hailed as a “Best Book of 2008” by no less an authority than The San Francisco Chronicle, and lauded by the novelist Jonathan Selwood as “really, really fucking funny.”
In the wake of the release of her scintillating sophomore effort, Drinking Closer to Home, Blau sat down with Greg Olear (they sat down at their respective computers, but still) to answer some intoxicating questions about fiction versus memoir, drunkenness versus sobriety, and glossy breasts versus matte ones.
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The Rumpus: Your debut novel, The Summer of Naked Swim Parties, is drawn from experiences in your own life; Drinking Closer to Home, your new one, is also semi- autobiographical. I want to talk to you about the distinction between fction and memoir. Why fctionalize your experiences? Why not write a memoir with creative liberties, à la Augusten Burroughs?
Jessica Blau: I guess I don’t want to have to be faithful to the truth.The great thing about fiction is you control the world—everything in it, everything people say and do, what they eat, and even how they smell! There would probably be much less joy in the act of writing, for me, if I had to adhere to an absolute truth.
Rumpus: The absolute truth, of course, is fuzzy, like George W. Bush’s math. I fnd it’s a paradox: to arrive at a universal, capital-T Truth, you have to sacrifce the journalistic, event- and character-driven truth. Put another way, fction is the brown paper bag over the malt liquor of reality that allows us to tell the truth without violating the liquor law (or pissing off our friends and family).
Blau: Exactly! Packaging is everything.That malt liquor is much more interesting and mysterious when it’s wrapped in the paper bag. And, often, if we don’t adhere to the real truth but adhere to the truth of the story we’ll end up revealing a bigger truth, anyway.
Rumpus: Harper Perennial, your publisher, features a “P.S.” section, which includes more background information about the author. Yours includes a section with members of your family commenting on the characters of whom they are the basis. I found this an interesting choice, given how you invite readers to guess at how much of the book is real and how much is invention. How did the interview come about?
Blau: Mostly it came about because I was at a loss as to what I should put in that P.S. section. I wanted it to be entertaining, and light—a quick and easy read.And I know that some people read that section frst, or read it in the bookstore before deciding if they should buy the book or not—so it needed to be well done, but not too serious. In doing an interview, I sort of took the onus off myself and put it on my family.They’re all more fascinating than I, so they seemed like a perfect solution of the problem of what to put in there.
Rumpus: More fascinating than you? Come now.
Blau: Well, to me they are! I get sick of myself when I’m the center of attention too long. I can only take so much of my own voice. Remember that scene in Terms of Endearment when Jack Nicholson is dumping Shirley Maclaine and she says,“Blah blah blah blah.”? Meaning, enough of your palaver, shut the fuck up.That’s what I want to say to myself when I hear my own voice long enough.
Rumpus: The Summer of Naked Swim Parties is first-person, single point-of-view. Drinking Closer to Home is more ambitious in both scope and narration—it’s third person, with the point-of-view shifting even within individual chapters; what I believe is called, in MFA circles, “headhopping.” Tell us about the challenges of writing this way.
Blau: Originally I wrote Drinking in frst-person present tense. Then, at some point, I switched it to first-person past tense. My agent wisely suggested that I change it to third-person past. And it was my editor’s idea that I do it in third-person, filtered through each of the grown children. Both of these women, my agent and editor, are rather brilliant, so I tend to trust their suggestions.
Rumpus: There’s nothing like a good editor. Good editors are vastly underrated.
Blau: Yes, I’m incredibly lucky and grateful! It was interesting for me to go into heads of the characters who aren’t based on me. And it was really interesting writing things like sex scenes through the eyes of the people having sex. It wasn’t hard to imagine my sister having sex—we hung out a lot during college and post-college, we’d experienced some crazy stuff together. But it was a bit more challenging to imagine my brother, or the character based on my brother, having sex. Even though it’s a character, I saw my brother in my head as I was writing. So to get down to his penis and where he puts it was a little weird at frst.
Rumpus: I know I would be grossed out thinking about my brother’s penis. Heck, I’m grossed out thinking about my own penis.
Blau: I didn’t know you had a brother! I’m sure he’ll be happy to see that you mentioned both him and his penis in an interview!
Rumpus: I’m sure he’ll be fattered.You write candidly and unabashedly about sex. Drinking includes, among other things, gay sex, straight sex, married sex, adulterous sex, lots of nudity, and a crash course in cunnilingus—but your sex scenes are distinguished by a certain playful ebullience that is contagious. What’s your attitude toward writing about sex?
Blau: I never realized that I wrote about sex so much until other people pointed it out. Sex does seem to be everywhere and on our brains a lot, no? I certainly think about it a lot. If not wanting it, just wondering about it.You know, you’re sitting in the two-hour line up at the DMV checking out people and wondering what their sex life is like, what they do when they’re naked with another person.
Rumpus: There are better places to do that than the DMV.
Blau: But places like the DMV are great because everyone has to go there—so there’s every version of a human waiting in line—and just about every version of a human has sex eventually. I guess that curiosity about other people’s sex lives comes out in my writing. I should point out that originally there were no sex scenes for the character based on my brother, and my editor asked for them specifcally. Her request went something like this:“We need two more Emery chapters. One where he loses his straight virginity and one where he loses his gay virginity.” I’m glad I added them. Many people have said that the Emery chapters are their favorites.
Rumpus: There are too many great chapters to choose, but the Emery ones are certainly highlights.Was his the hardest mind to inhabit?
Blau: Not really. Because the characters were based on my family, and because they are people I think about and talk to often, all their voices are in my head and they were all easy for me. As I said before, it was a little weird thinking about my brother having sex— but once I distanced myself from it a little it was fine.The hot tub orgy he experiences turned out to be sort of fun to write. For some reason, I had a scene from Zoolander playing in my head as I wrote—the one with the guys in the open-top Jeep hosing each other down with gas straight from the pumps while some Wham! song plays in the background.
Rumpus: The scene that ends with all of them bursting into fames and dying; yes, I’m familiar with it.
Blau: Do they die? I forgot that they died! I just loved that joyous LaCoste-shirt sort of playfulness in that scene!
Rumpus: The novelist Sean Beaudoin calls the new book a “funny and forthright look at an unusual family dynamic (actually far more usual than the family itself imagines).” I think he makes an important point, that the Stein family, odd though they may be, are not Running With Scissors-odd—which is, I think, part of their charm. There is a certain ineffable quality to their eccentricity—words like oddball or weirdo or eccentric don’t really do justice to these rich characters. How would you describe the Stein family? (The Steins, not the Blaus!)
Blau: I’ve always seen them as wacky but loveable, interesting and fucked up, but not total fuck-ups. And I see the love that is behind everything they do, and how much Louise loves her kids even when she quits being a housewife and no longer cares for those kids. Some of the reviews, and particularly the raving-great reviews, have shocked me as they call Louise abusive and describe the three children as “survivors.” Two reviewers compared the book to The Glass Castle.
Rumpus: There are worse books to be compared to, but I don’t see it.
Blau: Oh, I LOVE The Glass Castle, I was thrilled by the comparison. But I looked at her life and thought, “Those kids are abused!” And I never looked at my own life, or the Steins’ lives, and thought that. Maybe I have Stockholm Syndrome, but what the Steins go through, and what my brother and sister went through, doesn’t seem like straight-forward harmful “abuse” to me. It seems more like a bunch of eccentrics doing some crazy-ass shit and cracking up about it more than anything. I mean, even when one of the characters is suicidal, they’re all laughing at her in the background. (As I typed that I realized it sounded sort of sick, right?)
Rumpus: Only if you haven’t read the book. In your interview with Gina Frangello, you proposed a theory of two types of beauty: still and active. Care to expound on that theory, and give some examples?
Blau: I’ve always been interested in people and in faces. And at a very young age, I noticed that sometimes the prettiest people, the ones you see in a photo and think are stunning, aren’t the most beautiful when you see them in person. And then there are these people, who if you saw a photo of them you wouldn’t necessarily say they’re beautiful, but who are utterly compelling. The ones who exude beauty that doesn’t necessarily show up in a still photo have what I call active beauty. The ones like Brooke Shields (look at any picture of her from before she started having plastic surgery) have what I call still beauty—there is nothing about her physically that isn’t perfect. But does anyone want to have sex with her?
Rumpus: Ouch!
Blau: French women exude active beauty. They sometimes have these jagged noses, or scraggly hair, or small mouths, but they can be the absolute most beautiful women on earth. In high school I would stare at the girls in class and think about their beauty and how it worked and how I might respond to it if I were a guy. And I noticed that the physically perfect girls were often not the ones the guys went crazy for. Most boys fell for active beauty over still beauty every time.
Rumpus: You live in Baltimore, which, in addition to being the setting of the greatest show in the history of television, is also, quietly, home to something of a literary scene. Did this infuence your decision to move there? What do you think of Baltimore?
Blau: I came here to go to graduate school at Johns Hopkins. I had been living in Toronto before I came here and probably, until the day I moved, wouldn’t have been able to fnd Baltimore on a map. It is a strange, odd town—with neighborhoods that are too scary to drive through and neighborhoods that look like the setting for Knot’s Landing. Oh, and then there are neighborhoods where the 16-year old white girls push their babies in strollers while smoking cigarettes. All of it is interesting to me. The writing community here is immense and wonderful. People support each other, they show up at each other’s readings, they hang out together.
Rumpus: There are more writers living there than I would have thought.
Blau: Among the writers living in Baltimore are Madison Smartt Bell, Stephen Dixon, Anne Tyler, Laura Lippman, Marion Winik, James Magruder, Michael Kimball, Larry Doyle, and on and on. Alice McDermott and Matthew Klam both live outside of Baltimore but teach at Hopkins and so are a part of Baltimore. Beverly Lowry happens to be in town this semester, and I had dinner with her (along with six other people) last night.That’s what it’s like to live in Baltimore. If you lived in New York and Beverly Lowry came to town would there be any way you’d have dinner with her? Poe lived here and so did F. Scott Fitzgerald whenever Zelda was on the fritz. She’d check into the mental hospital that isn’t far from where I live.
Rumpus: Fitzgerald makes me think of drinking, which brings us to the next topic. Ironic, isn’t it, that you wrote a book called Drinking Closer to Home, in which many people drink, and yet you personally don’t drink at all.
Blau: I love how much you know about me!
Rumpus: I did my homework.Which, in this case, involved reading a blog called The Drinking Diaries.
Blau: I stopped drinking when I was 21. But I do love to be around people who are drunk.There’s that great song,“Like a G6,” that has the wonderful line, sober girls around me, they be acting like they drunk, acting like they drunk . . . . Yup, that’s me.Actually, I’m sort of kidding, but I do feel a little giddy when I’m with a bunch of trashed people.
Rumpus: Okay, enough questions about sex, booze, and writing. Tell us about the famous breast cream. No. 7, is it?
Blau: Ah, No. 7. It’s great stuff! Now, here’s the bad part about living in Baltimore. Because I appear to be the only person in Baltimore buying BOOTS No. 7 Breast Cream, Target (the only store that sells the BOOTS products) no longer carries it here! I even talked to the manager about it. She told me they didn’t sell enough to stock it. If I lived in Chicago, or New York, or France even, there would be loads o’ people buying No. 7, and I’d be able to pick it up when I went out for milk and dog food! I just ran out of my last tube and am going to get on the internet today to see if I can find it. Anyone who wants glossy, smooth breasts really should give it a try.
Rumpus: Does anyone not want glossy, smooth breasts?
Blau: Many people don’t even notice or care about the glossiness of their breasts. I am certain they are much better off, psychologically, than I.
