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Be Willing to Break Your Own Heart

An Interview With Elizabeth McCracken

Brendan Dowling

Public Libraries: I’m interested in what drew you to library school. By the time you began your MLS work, you had already sold your first book of short stories and earned an MFA from the Iowa Writer’s Conference at the University of Iowa. What made you decide to become a librarian at that point?

Elizabeth McCracken: I’d already decided some years before that. On my 15th birthday, I walked into the Newton (Mass.) Free Library and got a job shelving fiction A–SM (it was a wonderfully strange old building, and fiction SM–Z was in another room). I stayed there for seven years, eventually working behind the circulation desk, and I loved every minute of it—a lot of that had to do with my boss, Cathy Garoian, who was one of the great circulation librarians of all-time. (Circulation is still my favorite department.) I left to go to grad school, but I always knew I’d come back to library work one way or the other.

An MFA is not a professional degree. I really wasn’t fit for employment once I had one, especially because I didn’t want to teach five sections of composition a semester, which was the kind of job I would’ve gotten had I been very lucky. Some writers have no trouble working jobs they hate and then coming home to write. Not me. I wanted my “money” job to be something as gratifying as writing. I didn’t want to have to scramble for work. And, besides that, I really loved being a civil servant.

I miss library work. I miss having colleagues and regular patrons.

PL: A lot of your work focuses on marginalized members of society, and you have been praised for your ability in showing the ordinary aspects of extraordinary people (the suburban mother who used to be a circus freak in “What We Know About the Lost Aztec Children,” James in The Giant’s House). What draws you to these characters?

EM: The general population is much more eccentric than much pop culture would have you believe. That’s what I think. People are idiosyncratic; the “average” American is much less interesting than any individual “real” American. I think that I’m drawn to people who are physically anomalous because I believe they really are as ordinary as anyone, and because I’m interested in how who we are physically both defines us and doesn’t define us.

PL: You’ve talked in past interviews about borrowing events from your mother’s life to put in stories, and your family has made cameos in your work (your Aunt Blanche in A Giant’s House). How else has your family affected your writing?

EM: Oh, in every way. First of all, I come from a family of writers (my parents and my brother are also professional writers, though not of fiction); both my parents came from families filled with professional and amateur artists. Nobody ever thought that becoming a writer was an odd thing to do. Nobody suggested that I should go to law school. (There are also a lot of librarians in my mother’s family.)

Now, I don’t know whether my family really is more eccentric than other people’s, or whether they’re just less inhibited about their eccentricities. I grew up hearing stories about family members on both sides, and some of those characters—my great-great-aunt Mary George, my great-great-Uncle Mose, my great-aunt Edna—had died long before I was born and were nevertheless as vivid to me as if they’d been living. Maybe vivider. There’s a kind of resonance that happens when you hear story after story about relatives you don’t know, and that resonance is what turns a collection of anecdotes into a novel. It matters that Aunt Mary George’s first husband was a butcher who killed himself; if you’ve heard enough Aunt Mary George stories, you think: of course he was a butcher! of course he killed himself!

I also have a great resource in my father, whose memory is—and I don’t use this word lightly in a library publication—encyclopedic. This week, I’ve had to call him up with questions about train service in the Midwest in the 1930s. Just being a train buff does not explain his ability to immediately tell me how someone would get from Des Moines, Iowa, to Los Angeles, California, in December of 1939, and what the dining car would look like, and whether the train was all-Pullman or not. He knows everything. I think my tendency to want to cram as much information into a novel or short story as I can—for me, revision is often a matter of weeding extraneous information out—comes from listening to my father talk about his various passions, a sort of did-you-know-the-following-fascinating-fact approach to writing.

PL: You have a very unique writing style. Daphne Merkin likened you to a lot of Southern authors, but your editor, Susan Kamil, talks about how you subvert the Southern Gothic style with an almost New England-like pragmatism. Would you agree with these assessments? What writers, past and present, do you look up to?

EM: I do love Southern Gothic writers, especially Carson McCullers. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is one of my favorite books of all time. I’ve recently been rereading the work of another Gothic writer, Nathanael West, though he’s sort of hardboiled Californian Gothic. Like most novelists I know, I worship Lolita. I love Dickens and Browning and Ralph Ellison and Tennessee Williams. Among living writers: Rose Tremain, Grace Paley, Calvin Trillin, Studs Terkel, Jonathan Ames, Barbara Gowdy, Edwige Danticat, Frank Bidart—I’m limiting my choices to people I don’t know personally, because I know too many writers whose work I love and I don’t want to leave anyone out.

The older I get, the more direct inspiration I get from poetry. Some of that might have to do with knowing more poets.

PL: Talk a little bit about the library programs that you and Ann Patchett have presented. What has it been like returning to libraries in a different role?

EM: As writers, we have similar world views but entirely different approaches. We love and deeply respect each other’s work—there’s nobody I can imagine trusting with my work the way I trust Ann. I can send her something in a very tender stage, and she’s somehow able to see what it will eventually become. So we talk about our friendship and our work relationship, and we talk about how different we are as writers. We both love fielding questions, and I love hearing her answer. Once we appeared at a private girls’ school together. Ann talked nostalgically about her own school days, and how she loved her uniform (she went to Catholic school; the girls at this academy wore kilts). I said, “I never had to wear a uniform,” and the woman who was showing around said, “We know. We can tell by your writing.” I don’t think that explains the difference in our work, but it certainly explains the difference in our personalities, and maybe the difference in our work habits. Ann is much more disciplined. She once said that she would kill herself if she wrote as inefficiently as me—I write pages and pages and pages that never see the light of day. Her work is gorgeous and complicated and terrifically moving; at the same time, there’s a real rigor when it comes to the plot and the goings-on of the physical world in her work that I could strive for and continually miss. I think maybe it all boils down to her having worn a kilt for twelve years of her childhood.

This is all to say: when we speak together, audiences get two pretty different kinds of writers, who nonetheless believe in each other’s work.

I’ve given readings at libraries and talks at a few regional library conferences (in Texas, New Hampshire, New Jersey, and Massachusetts), and I always have a great time. Librarians and library users—they’re my people. At a Texas Library Association meeting last year, I read a section from The Giant’s House about library buildings (largely inspired by the Newton Free Library building) that talks about how all librarians, deep down, hate their buildings, and it was a little like preaching in church—librarians in the audience began to voice their agreement. If I had said, “Can I get an Amen?” I would have gotten several.

Whenever I read in a library, I want to ask if I can man the circulation desk for half an hour. I’ve never done it, though.

PL: What are you currently reading?

EM: I am reading, in manuscript, a collection of wonderful essays called Famous Builder by Paul Lisicky (whose first novel, Lawnboy, won an ALA Gay and Lesbian Roundtable Award—I think I got the name of that right). Patchett’s next novel, Bel Canto, will be published by HarperCollins next year and is absolutely extraordinary. Just recently, I read The Dream Songs by John Berryman, and have been dipping into Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry.

PL: What are you currently working on?

EM: I’m just finishing a novel called Niagara Falls All Over Again. It’s about a comedy team, two guys who work in Vaudeville and eventually hit it big in movies. It just might kill me. Right now I’m typing the whole thing over, which is something I’ve never done before. I think it’s a useful experience, but it’s also pretty tedious.

PL: What advice would you give to young writers?

EM: The usual: read a lot, write a lot. One of my favorite pieces of writing wisdom is that in order to write well, you need to be willing to write badly. Some days I’m appalled by how true that is for me, though usually I find it inspiring: if there’s a day that I hate everything I write, I can believe that I’m on my way to something better.

You need to be unafraid of making tremendous blunders. Tremendous, giant, ugly, heart-rending blunders—not just because good fiction takes risks, but because mistakes are the heart of good fiction. Anyone can take a class or read a book and follow a list of rules designed to keep students from making mistakes; you can teach yourself to write quite an unobjectionable story that way. And what, I ask you, is worse than an unobjectionable story?

When you’re writing, save all your ambition for the page. Being too career-ambitious will make you more fearful in your work.

Be willing to break your own heart.

Brendan Dowling is the Communications Assistant at the Public Library Association. He interviewed Elizabeth McCracken via e-mail in September 2000.