Caroline Leavitt
Interviewed by Teresa Burns Gunther
Photo by Jeff Tamarkin

Caroline Leavitt is the author of Meeting Rozzy Halfway, Lifelines, Jealousies, Family, Into Thin Air, Living Other Lives, Coming Back to Me, and Girls in Trouble. She writes a book column "A Reading Life" for the Boston Globe. She is the recipient of a New York Foundation of The Arts Award in Fiction. Caroline Leavitt is also a National Magazine Award Nominee, and a Nickelodeon Screenwriting Fellowship finalist. She teaches writing at UCLA online, as well as mentoring private clients. Her essays and stories have appeared in Salon, Parenting, Redbook and various anthologies. She lives in Hoboken, New Jersey with her husband writer Jeff Tamarkin and their son Max. Ms. Leavitt can be reached at http://www.carolineleavitt.com.

TBG: Your novels have been praised for their readability. In some reviews your novels are described as gripping and as page-turners. Does this kind of praise get confused with a description of work that is less literary?

CL: It's interesting you ask that because the last review of my book by The Washington Post talked about this. It was this amazingly terrific review that supported the view that a page turner of a novel could also be literature of the highest kind. It was really wonderful to read that. The reviewer said that when a book is a hybrid, readable as well as literary, that shouldn't matter. I have a friend who writes books that are categorized as romantic and actually they are very literary and she has a very hard time getting reviewed because people don't know where to pigeon hole her work. I don't really like these distinctions that people make with books.

TBG: What is your process for starting a novel? Do your story ideas center on a character or plot?

CL: I usually start with a character because that's what I'm most interested in, rather than plot. I try to put the character in some sort of a question, some sort of a situation. For example, what would happen if you gave up your baby and all of a sudden you realized that it was a mistake, then that sort of leads to more things happening. And usually what happens if I have that basic "What if?" question is that the book usually goes through four or five drafts, which are a mess, because I never really know what's going to happen. I have a lot of false starts and false endings. It usually takes me up until the fourth draft before I can take a look at the whole book and see what the story is supposed to be. As long as I hook onto one specific character, and one specific "what if" that swirls around that character, then I'm able to hold onto the book.

TBG: Your eighth novel, Girls In Trouble, has been very well received. One review calls it a "wrenching exploration of parent-child relations,"

CL: Yes, it's been amazing. It went into third printing three weeks after publication. As a writer you never know when you're going to reach an audience, or why, but clearly this went to the heart for some people.

TBG: Jo Ann Beard, the author of Boys Of My Youth, says that she writes one sentence at a time and doesn't continue to the next until its perfect.

CL: I can't write in that way. There was a wonderful book published years and years ago, called Ross and Tom, about two writers who had instant fame and they both commit suicide shortly after. And one of them wrote the way I do which is just pages and pages and pages that you throw out until you circle around and find the story. And the other guy, I think he was actually the guy who wrote Mr. Roberts, he wrote the other way. He would sit at his desk and write one sentence and wouldn't move forward until that one sentence was absolutely perfect and he never wrote more than one draft, even though it still took him two or three years. But I can't write like that.

TBG: You said you write five drafts of a novel. How do you know when you're done?

CL: That's a really good question. Usually I just sort of feel it. All of a sudden it's like a light switch coming on and the characters start coming alive and I just sort of know it intrinsically that okay, this is what the story's about. This feels sort of satisfying. I mean, I never finish and feel "Oh! I wrote a good book." I just sort of finish and feel, okay, this is the best that I can do with this and now I'm going to quickly move on to something else so I don't think about whether this book I just finished is any good or not.

TBG: You write both short and long fiction. Do you have a preference?

CL: Yes. I prefer the novel, because you can get messier. I find writing short stories very difficult because every sentence has to matter. With a novel you can sort of be more unwieldy and messy and I like that.

TBG: Baharati Mukherjee writes with four TV's, all tuned to news channels. What do you need to work?

CL: Well, you're going to love this. One thing that drives my husband crazy, because he's in the music business and he writes about music and he writes music books, is that I have to have music on but I have to keep the same CD on playing over and over and over. I do that all day, and you know, he makes me shut my door because it drives him crazy. But I have to have something with enough of a beat so I feel energized, and it can't be so interesting that I have to listen to the lyrics.

TBG: Do you have a favorite you're listening to now?

CL: Right now I'm listening to Crowed House, which I'm not ashamed of. But there have been times when I've been listening to the Carpenters. . There have been other times when I've been listening to really stupid music, but just because it propels me and makes me feel energized.

TBG: Have you ever feared that you'll run out of ideas or just wanted to abandon a novel in progress?

CL: I never worry about running out of ideas because I've done so many books now that I know my process. Which is that I have one idea that I really like and then I write a first draft and I can't stand it. And then I write a second draft and I think it's horrible but I'm too far into it to give it up. And usually by the third draft I show it to somebody and they rip it apart and by the fourth draft the story starts to come together. So I know that the first year or year and a half is going to be horrible. But I've gotten used to it.

TBG: You've been praised for your skill in creating compelling characters. One reviewer said of Girls in Trouble: "Leavitt once again proves how adept she is at creating fully fleshed characters." In your novels you choose the omniscient POV, moving seamlessly in and out of your characters. Is that the pleasure for you in writing?

CL: Absolutely. It is absolutely the pleasure for me. I'm always concerned that my characters, even if they are doing horrible things, that they are sympathetic. And I think that the way for me to feel sympathetic towards them is to understand why they are doing what they're doing and why it is they want what they want. Also feeling their feelings in a moment. It's like getting to know a person. It's how I fall in love with my characters. And that's my process.

TBG: In Girls In Trouble you offer a very compassionate portrayal of the "bad boy," a character so often reduced to a stereotype. I wondered if that was intentional.

CL: Absolutely intentional. I really wanted to turn a few stereotypes on their heads. I was really annoyed that there are the bad boys that everybody dismisses and everyone says, puppy love, oh, it will never last. In fact, when I showed that first draft of my novel to some people, one of the things they objected to was the idea that any teenaged girl would still love her first love through her life. They said, "That's ridiculous. You know, those boys are throw away boys, they're bad boys." And I kept feeling that's not true. That's not really true. That's a first important love. Just because a boy is bad, so called bad, and acting out as a teenager doesn't really mean that he is a bad person. Often it's a matter of circumstance. And I wanted to show that here was someone that Sara was right to have loved when she was seventeen. And if they had been allowed to be together who knows, maybe they would have had a long and happy life together.

TBG: One review said Girls in Trouble is "Ripe for movie adaptation." Haven't most of your novels been optioned for film?

CL: Yes, most of them were. My first book was optioned and then there was a writers/directors strike. So that was dropped. Into Thin Air was supposed to be a movie and got all the way, almost up to principal photography, and then the studio decided they didn't like the director and everything fell apart. Coming Back To Me was optioned by Spelling and they had a script written by Tina How who won a Tony for Coastal Disturbances and I was sure that was going to make it and then that fell apart. And with Girls in Trouble, there's always movie interest floating around but you never know. I always take the tack that I'm going to hope for the best and not cross my fingers because I know enough about the movie business to know that it's so hard to get anything made.

TBG: Girls in Trouble seems so timely.

CL: I'd love for it to be a movie. I'd be interested to see what it becomes on screen. And of course, when a novel becomes a film, the author gets more readers.

TBG: Your characters watch videos and go to double features. I understand that you love movies. What do you watch and how does movie viewing inform your writing?

CL: Before my husband and I had our son we used to go to the movies every single day. Now we rely on Netflix. So I haven't really seen a whole lot recently. I like the movies that are really serious dramas. We just saw 21 Grams, which I liked a lot. And Monster, which I thought was great. We see lots of foreign movies, interesting movies from Iran and a lot of movies from China. I also love really trashy horror movies. I love to be genuinely scared. I guess it just informs my work in terms of character development. I like my characters to go to the movies. I like them to read books and go out to eat. Watching films does inform my work. I've also written scripts before so I'll look at a film in terms of pacing and things that they've done that I think are interesting and I'll wonder how that might translate into print. And, I just love movies.

TBG: You had a very difficult time* after the birth of your son, Max. Coming Back to Me captures that experience. In Girls in Trouble was the theme of babies being taken away also inspired by that experience?

CL: Absolutely. It was such a terrifying experience. I still worry about Max all the time. I have to make sure he's around. I think part of my problem was because I was so sick and they gave me these memory blockers. The memory blockers are used because the procedures are so terrible, they protect your from remembering the pain the next time. But they don't allow you to process the trauma. You cannot process something you don't remember, so I just have a lot of uneasy feelings all the time about what I have and when is it going to be taken away from me and what can I do to prevent that. My whole modus operandi is to try and live as happy a life I can. But I'm always sort of waiting for the other shoe to drop.

* After the birth of her, Ms. Leavitt developed a rare blood disease, Factor VIII inhibitor caused by the pregnancy. With this disease, any movement can cause instantaneous, fatal hemorrhage. After seven weeks, five operations and two near deaths, Ms. Leavitt was finally able to go home to her family.

TBG: Your essays parallel your fiction. Does family, specifically your roles of wife, mother, daughter, friend, most inform your work?

CL: Absolutely. Sometimes I write about things to make sense of them. To turn the things that have happened to me into art. And a lot of times it just happens to be the things that I'm thinking about. My life is very much invested in my family and my child and it just sort of sneaks out into the work.

TBG: Your essays also share a great deal of personal information about your life, such as your ex-husband Tom in your essay, The Husband From Hell.

CL: Right.

TBG: Have you ever regretted this openness? Has it ever caused conflict between you and your family or friends?

CL: Well, you know I always feel that you want to write what you'd want to read. The most interesting writing to me is where there is, what I call, Blood On The Page. You write from your gut and you write about the things that concern you. What I've also found is that the people that I've written about either know that I'm going to write about them or they don't recognize themselves. I've never really regretted it. And in fact, the interesting thing is, the one time where I had totally made up people for my first novel I actually ended up getting a lawsuit from these people who insisted I had written about them. I had to hire a lawyer. It was really ridiculous. They happened to have the same names as the characters in my novel.

TBG: Where these unusual names?

CL: No, just very similar. They were Rozzy, Bea, and Bess. I think just those three. My characters last name was Nelson. I deliberately wanted an all American name and their name happened to be something very similar to that. We had lawyers going back and forth. My contention of course was, gosh, if I'm going to write about real people would I be so naive as to use their real names? In the end it was sort of settled out of court. They made me change two of the names in the paperback edition, which I wasn't happy about but people were just worried that they were going to stop the book from coming out. I find it's more often the case that people that I haven't written about are sure I'm writing about them instead of the other way around.

TBG: How does your column for the Boston Globe contribute to your own writing?

CL: The column is a personal one. I take two books and write about a common theme and my response to it. I might write about books that were written by people whom you wouldn't expect to write books-like a waitress, a hobo and a belly dancer. Or, I'll write about books about obsession. Looking at someone else's work and figuring out what works and why, makes it so much easier to do that sort of critique for myself. It's a dream job-I just love it. And I get to read for a living, what's more wonderful than that?

TBG: Is there one book from your childhood that turned you on to reading and made you know you wanted to be a writer?

CL: Oh, absolutely. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. When Francie wanted to become a writer, I just felt, oh my god. I always, always, read as a kid and I loved that book.

TBG: Who would you say is your favorite writer or the writer you feel has most influenced your work?

CL: Oh, there've been a lot of them. I love Anne Tyler, love Elizabeth Strout, love Alice Hoffman. I love reading women who write about families and relationships. I also adore early Larry McMurtry when he was writing about women. Moving On about a young woman in Texas is one book I used to read every year. The characters are so alive that you feel the characters are going to show up at your door and ask for a glass of water.

TBG: What are you reading now?

CL: Dan Chaon. I just finished You Remind Me Of Me. An extraordinary novel from a superb writer about the interwoven lives of several people--an adopted boy who grows into a haunted manhood, a drug dealer with a young son, a woman who's also haunted by the baby she gave up when she was a teenager. He's able to create whole worlds in just a few sentences. It's the kind of book I read both as an astonished writer, trying to figure out how he did it, and as an amazed and very grateful reader.

TBG: Do you read different types of literature or avoid reading at different stages of a novel's development?

CL: Hmmm, good question. Nowadays I read for a living--for my Globe column, which is a different sort of reading, and I read a lot of nonfiction. I always have to be reading. There are certain books and writers I don't read while I am writing for fear of being influenced--particularly when it comes to subject matter. For example, I couldn't have read Dan Chaon's novel about adoption while I was writing mine--it would have paralyzed me. Sometimes when I'm having a problem, for example I can't figure out how to do a particular scene, I might remember an author who did a great job at it, and go back and study how he or she did it. A lot of my preparatory work has to do with nonfiction. I read a lot of adoption books--how to books--for Girls In Trouble.

TBG: In Girls In Trouble, the character of Mr. Moto tells Sarah that she cannot write. Was there a Mr. Moto in your life?

CL: Oh, there were a few of them. There was actually one high school teacher whom I did approach once and said, "You know, I really want to be a writer." And he did indeed say to me, "I'm sorry, you don't write that well". And there was another Mr. Moto when I was in college at Brandeis. It was a writing class and he held up my manuscript by the corners and said, "Now we're going to discuss this garbage." And he tore it apart. He tore it apart. And I cried in class but I kept coming to class. And five years later when I published my first novel I tracked him down and I sent it to him and I said, "You know, you said I would never be a writer, that I wrote garbage. Well I proved you wrong." He ended up writing me back this letter that said, "I knew you would. I was trying to make you mad because I thought that would get you to work harder," which was probably not true but it gave me a lot of satisfaction to track him down and say look, you were wrong, I was able to do this.

TBG: Another theme in your last two novels is the mother's fear of being usurped by another woman. In your novel, Coming Back to Me, Nurse Gerta takes over. Was this character born of your experience?

CL: When I came home from the hospital I was still very, very sick and I wasn't allowed to get out of bed. We had a lot of baby nurses and I don't really remember them taking over so much, it was more my fears that they would and also I was very worried that I wasn't being a good mother. For the first three or four months of Max's life I wasn't allowed to pick him up. I really wasn't allowed to do anything with him and we didn't bond at first. And it got to the point where I would approach him and he would start crying, he would want his father. And it was really, really hard for me and it took us a long time to bond. The way I processed that in my writing was to create an outside character that would take over my role and I could work those issues out that way.

TBG: The sister relationship in your long and short fiction is often a polarized relationship. What does this represent for you?

CL: I'm really interested in sisters. When I was growing up with my sister, she's a few years older than I, and like many sisters, like the sisters in my books, the older sister is the beautiful, talented, the amazing one. She was also my best friend and we were very, very close, to the point of having a symbiotic relationship up until she was twenty and she got married and she changed. She became a responsible adult while I was still being a wild teenager and that was a really hard thing for me to process. You know, we're very, very close now. I just like writing about sisters.

TBG: Other than the fathers of young children, the older men in your stories seem to have a difficult time expressing emotion. For example, George, as well as Sara's father, in Girls in Trouble, and Lee's father in Into Thin Air. Is this intentional or simply the way these characters developed?

CL: It's both intentional and subconscious. Here's the intentional part: I think men have had a rough time of it. Older men--much like my own father--were encouraged not to show emotion, to be the "man", to keep that stiff upper lip, and it's interesting to explore what happens when life pushes them to show emotion. Sometimes--here's the subconscious part--I think I'm just trying to rewrite my father's script for him and give him the voice he didn't have when he was alive. It was painful for me to grow up with a rather silent father.

TBG: In an earlier interview you said you've had lots of interesting jobs, but it didn't mention waitress. Yet, you write about restaurant work quite convincingly.

CL: I've never been a waitress, because I know I'd be a terrible waitress. . But I like to write about it because I live in the New York City area where a lot of my friends are waitresses. But I have had terrible jobs and I've been awful at all of them. No seriously, I was hired to walk this woman's dog and I was terrible at it. I worked at an answering service and I was fired for giving the wrong messages to the wrong people.

TBG: This message mix up is in one of your novels.

CL: Yes. And I worked for a public TV station and I was fired from that job. The only jobs I've had where I've been successful were as a fashion copywriter, which is hilarious because all I really wear is jeans and T-shirts. I was very good at that. I've been a professional namer and I was very good at that.

TBG: It was hard to find really negative reviews of your work.

CL: Oh, I can show you some.

TBG: How did these negative reviews affect you?

CL: I've had terrible, terrible reviews. I still remember the lines. I had one review that said, "This is more psychopathology masquerading as fiction from the eminently tiresome Leavitt." I remember that one. . And it's funny, I remember the reviews but I don't remember what book they were for. There was another one that said, "Leavitt has no one but herself to blame for this horrifically bad novel." Let's see. There are always horrible ones. In the beginning I would just cry and feel humiliated and just feel completely terrible and one thing that helped was my husband who's a reviewer, who he just tells me, "It's one person's opinion, but don't worry about it. People don't remember the reviews as much as they remember the name. And since I started writing a book column for the Boston Globe, all of a sudden it dawned on me how much of one person's opinion it is. There have been books I've written about that I just loved and I'll see later that they are getting horrific reviews from places. Also, a few years ago, in the space of two hours I got the absolute worst review I have ever received in my life from a major newspaper and two hours later I got the absolute best review I've ever received from a major newspaper. And the good review loved what the other one loathed. What I usually do when I get a bad review, which is something I got from Carolyn See from one of her books, is to write a letter to the newspaper and it's a really nice letter thanking them for feeling that my book was important enough for reviewing and saying that although you didn't like this book I hope you will like the next one. I'm very polite and nice and what it does is make me feel like less of a victim. I feel empowered. I feel, well, it's good Karma.

TBG: You've been compared to Anne Tyler, Jane Hamilton, Sue Miller and Elizabeth Berg and more. How do you feel about these comparisons? Do you see the parallels?

CL: I wish I were as brilliant as those writers. It's a great compliment but I never see the parallels. I just sort of see it as a review tool. People use that so you get recognition. They're saying "If you like Anne Tyler you'll like so and so. It's really complimentary. But one of my very first reviews compared me to Ernest Hemmingway, whom I write absolutely nothing like.

TBG: There's a lot of debate about MFA programs, a main criticism being that they turn out cookie cutter writers. Do you have an opinion on this?

CL: I never went to get an MFA, mostly because I don't do well in a class environment. I think a lot of people say that the writing coming out of MFA programs is cookie cutter, because either they're not in an MFA program or they're a little leery of people in there getting ahead more. I think anything that gets people writing is fabulous and I think MFA programs are great.

TBG: Is there any particular advice you would offer young writers? Any books you feel must be read?

CL: I would tell them to read absolutely everything. And to not to be afraid to form their own opinions about what works and what doesn't work and why a book's good and why it isn't good. In terms of helpful books, there are all sorts of books on writing but the ones I've found are helpful are, Carolyn See's great book, Living the Literary Life. I like Annie Lamott's book a whole lot too, Bird by Bird, because I think it's really down to earth. And my advise would be to keep writing, don't listen to anyone who tells you no and just keep writing. I think anybody who keeps writing will succeed. If you want it enough and work hard enough you'll succeed.

TBG: And finally, what are you working on now?

CL: I'm very superstitious so I can't talk about it, but it's a rough first draft of a new novel.

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