I've been promoting a new book of short stories: I've been giving public readings and interviews. It's a great and privileged thing to be able to do and of course it bucks one's ego immensely. It's not something one may ever complain about. How then to explain the strange grumpiness writers experience in trying to explain or justify stories that are entirely made up and that one doesn't really want to explain?
I know I'm not the only one. Writers are always complaining about the best thing that ever happens to them – the moment when the media take an interest. We are always saying that the questions are somehow the wrong ones, that we don't want to talk about ourselves because of course the characters in our fiction are sort of us but not exactly us either, and we don't want to talk about social or political issues because if we wanted to do that we would have written an essay, and a made-up story is just that, it's not an argument to be defended and dismantled. And we sometimes honestly don't know why we are obsessed with whales or weather or witchcraft.
But then what on earth do we want? To not talk at all? In the past, a famous writer could choose that option: J.D. Salinger did; Thomas Pynchon did. In those days a novel could rise to fame on its own: People read them more. A novel without an author attached to it would today sink instantly into oblivion. And since opportunities to talk about art in the mainstream media – particularly in the broadcast media – have diminished dramatically in the past 20 years, the promise of making the general public aware of a piece of fiction is a rare and golden opportunity.
The question is, how does one – how can one – talk about a story one has written in a kind of trance, to people who haven't yet read that story? One only really wakes up to what one has written after having written it. We have no idea what we are doing when we are writing! I've been on both sides of a radio-show table. I know how difficult it is to bring an imaginary world to an audience that hasn't experienced it. You can have a critic on to explain a novel or a film (by far the best option, to my mind), but then you don't satisfy your network's demands for celebrities and for personal stories. Producers are afraid this will seem a little bit dry. You can ask the author to summarize her book, and it will still leave you with five more minutes of air time to fill. You can ask her about her process: Does she write in the morning, does she use a computer? This stuff may be of interest to aspiring writers who think their own work will be improved by following successful behavioural patterns (it won't), but for the rest of the world it's dull.
I gave a reading from my book in Vancouver recently and answered one of these "process" questions petulantly. It doesn't matter, I said, how an author writes; everybody does it differently and who cares? The moderator then generously asked what I would prefer to be asked about. I was tongue-tied. It wasn't that I didn't know the answer – the answer is that I love to talk about technical things, about point of view and authorial intervention and the use of adverbs – but I was afraid to say it; I was afraid to sound elitist or condescending and I was afraid of boring my audience.
As authors we are eager to play the game, so we come up with a theme or issue that the book is supposed to revolve around. This is a boon to interviewers and panel moderators. Finally something to argue about! Instead of discussing a work of fiction in which unique characters obsess over the small details of their wholly unreal lives – something that has no real bearing on public policy – you can argue about the state of the health-care system (if your book is about a dying parent) or the treatment of trans people (if your book has a trans character).
After I put together my book of stories, written in varying moods over about 15 years, I tried to find a theme in them. I chose to say that they were all about people with secrets. This is a pretty easy theme to find in any fiction, as most people, fictitious or real, have secrets. So I had a posthoc hook.
Now I find myself doing interview after interview about whether people should have secrets, particularly from their spouses, and whether widespread secrecy is evidence of the failure of marriage and whether there should be marriage at all. I have done no studies on any of these things, but suddenly I am an expert on them. My fiction is not propaganda, I hope, for one thing or another. I just thought they were dramatic scenarios. But how do you stretch this political discussion, the one that everyone wants, back to adverbs?
I was on the CBC's Q a week ago, interviewed by the warm and sensitive and genuinely curious Shad. I was delighted and grateful to be there. And perhaps overeager to play the media game. I said a bunch of provocative things: I said that only unattractive people are monogamous; I said prostitution and pornography exist only because of marriage. These are rather sweeping statements, of the kind that make for excellent argument (and, oh yes, publicity, too). Indignation predictably ensued. Everyone was pleased: There was a controversial guest and I got the name of my book mentioned.
As I say, we authors choose to play the game: We set up its terms ourselves. If we don't, our interviews don't get retweeted. I honestly cannot come up with any better suggestions for interviewers for handling this weird art form. But the truth is I am not an expert in anything except perhaps narrative point of view and the use of adverbs.