WATER FOR ELEPHANT [139]
Once they collected your quarter, they did their act and then they got out. You were leaving by the front end of the tent, and they were hauling the benches out by the back end—they’re done, they’re finished, they want to get on the train.
DW: You mentioned the photo that gave you the idea for a novel about the circus, but how did you decide to incorporate Jacob’s story from the Bible?
SG: I can’t remember the exact moment of genesis, but this is one of the things I’ve always liked about literature: the layers. Margaret Laurence’s The Stone Angel, for instance, has that whole layer in it. It’s a long tradition in English literature. It won’t detract from the story if you don’t know it’s there, but I thought it would be a fun thing to play up for people who recognized it.
DW: The writing wasn’t without its challenges. To finish the book, you shut yourself in a closet.
SG: I had a couple of very long interruptions with this book. The first one lasted eighteen weeks. After that, I crashed out the first half of the book. Then someone from my tech-writing days called me and said, “We have a short, three- or four-week contract. Do you want to do it?” Sure. Easy money, right?
That turned into four months of ten- and eleven-hour days, writing about SQL server databases and XML data files, really serious stuff. I was burned out, and I was having a lot of trouble getting my head back into the characters. I’d left the book at a point where I had something like sixteen plot threads up in the air. I was shopping on eBay and checking my e-mail obsessively, finding a million reasons not to write. That was why the closet. It takes me about an hour and a half to get from the real world into the fictional world.
DW: Back in those tech-writing days, before you wrote Riding Lessons, did you aspire to write fiction?
SG: Totally. I studied English literature because I wanted to write. I had been writing since I was about seven. My first novel filled three exercise books; an imaginary horse shows up in the backyard, and a girl finds him and rides off and jumps fences. It’s always been what I wanted to do.
I graduated, and I had an English degree. What are you going to do with an English degree? I went into tech writing. I liked it—it was fine—but my husband and I had always talked about me retiring early to try writing fiction, to see if it worked.
I was writing for a statistical software company, and I got laid off. I was putting my résumé together, and my husband said, “Do you want to try it now?” I said, “Can we?” So he said, “Let’s give it two years or two books, and if it doesn’t work, go back to tech writing.”
DW: So did it take two years or two books?
SG: Two books, it took. Before Riding Lessons, I wrote what I call “my drawer book.”
DW: Which no one is ever going to see.
SG: My husband threatens that if I die he’s going to try to sell it. If I don’t, no one’s ever going to see it.
DW: That’s reason to live, right there.
SG: Yes. Also, it’s been cannibalized to the point where I don’t think it’s publishable.
DW: I’ve been asking people lately: If you were going to set up your own personal hall of fame for writers from each decade of life, who’d get in there? Who’s been important?
SG: I’m probably the outlier here because I was a fan of Victorian novels as a teenager.
DW: That’s fine. It’s the Sara Gruen hall of fame.
SG: Okay, so it was the Victorians. Then D. H. Lawrence in my twenties and a bunch of Canadian authors. Doris Lessing’s The Black Madonna. That one I really liked. Margaret Atwood is certainly in my hall of fame. And Yann Martel.
I recently reread The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and I’m rediscovering Hemingway. It’s all cyclical, probably the same people every decade, but new ones get added all along.
DW: The frame of Jacob as a ninety-something-year-old man grounds some of the crazier stuff going on in his past. Reviews of all your books praise the way you handle older characters.
SG: I like to write flawed characters. I take a warts-and-all approach to everyone.