Lit Hub Asks: 5 Authors, 7 Questions, No Wrong Answers

The Lit Hub Author Questionnaire is a monthly interview featuring seven questions for five authors with new books. This month we talk to:

Charles Bock (I Will Do Better: A Father’s Memoir of Heartbreak, Parenting, and Love)

Kay Chronister (The Bog Wife)

Mike Fu (Masquerade)

Kate Greathead (The Book of George; full disclosure, my wife)

Sarah LaBrie (No One Gets to Fall Apart)

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Without summarizing it in any way, what would you say your book is about?

Kay Chronister: That early memory you have of playing in the woods with your siblings, which you always think is a perfectly happy memory, which you associate with a time before anything went wrong for your family—except, when you think about it, you remember that someone got hurt or you got in trouble for the mud on your clothes or you were reluctant to go back to the house for reasons you couldn’t name, that already an undercurrent of tension and unease had seeped into the life of your family and you can’t remember it ever not being there.

Mike Fu: The weird, tingly threshold between real and imagined worlds. Moody late nights in New York. The preposterousness of history. The unfathomability of the people you hold close.

Sarah LaBrie: Hope, ambition, failure, hope again.

Kate Greathead: The intersection of delusions of grandeur and self-loathing that strikes a certain kind of privileged white male millennial.

Charles Bock: Love. Parenting. Manhood. Grief. Mortal failings. Personal growth. The fullness of responsibility. What adulthood means. Joy and its many forms. Ambition & Capital letter Art.  Creed of the enfant terrible verses truths of family.  Musical theater as it relates to love. Selflessness. Generosity. The passing of time & the importance of how we spend what dwindling amounts one might have.

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Without explaining why and without naming other authors or books, can you discuss the various influences on your book?

Kate Greathead: Ex-boyfriends. Unmet ambitions. Small-scale humiliations. Neurotic narcissism.

Kay Chronister: Pitcher plants, the Tudor-Stuarts, inheritance plots, sympathetic magic, literary hoaxes, antique stores in Appalachia.

Charles Bock: Fairy tales and great love stories and that took their characters on odd but epic journeys, these were guiding principles.  I also wanted a book that hit with the intensity of the emotions I feel when I look at pictures of my daughter when she was young. I wanted it to be a book with rich sentences, but also no extra words, a read where the writing and pacing would be consumed like potato chips.

Mike Fu: I’ve long had a thing for metafiction and nested structures, I guess. I like a book that pokes at both the protagonist and the reader. Film has also been a big influence on me, particularly in terms of the non-visual texture of a world. I’m a fan of twisty narratives that leap off into unexpected places.

Sarah LaBrie: Trying to help my mom after she was diagnosed with schizophrenia, even though we weren’t speaking and I lived several states away. Also frustration with and curiosity about then-contemporary mainstream conversations about “what it means to be Black” and  a desire to understand that discourse in both its larger historical context and in its relationship to my own life experiences, which I knew were not uncommon, but didn’t see reflected anywhere.

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Without using complete sentences, can you describe what was going on in your life as you wrote this book?

Charles Bock: Resurrection. Homework support. Forays up five flights of stairs, often with laundry bags or groceries. Editing workshop manuscripts. En masse antibacterial soaps and gels. Multiple moves of residence. Bedtime stories. Lullabies. Ukrainian prison sit-ups. Explanations about why we can’t order take out tonight and acknowledgments that I am a shitty cook and we eat the same staples repeatedly, that is what a staple is. Grieving a parent. Selling off large amounts of my sneaker collection. Giving notes and feedback on auditions for arts high school. Hair loss.

Kay Chronister: Writing a dissertation on Gothic novels and historical mythmaking in eighteenth-century Britain.

Sarah LaBrie: Figuring out too late that a time travel novel I’d spent the last several years of my life writing and revising wasn’t going to work, trying to crawl out of that heartbreak before it killed me, starting this memoir about my mother’s psychotic break to see if I could avoid my own, and understanding, for the first time, that writing a book could be, not easy, exactly, but effortful in a way that didn’t feel like walking on knives.

Kate Greathead: Toddlers, pandemic.

Mike Fu: Pandemic stasis. But also, a dramatic repositioning of myself, physically and mentally. Library, grocery store, jogging. Another foray into academia. Cats.

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What are some words you despise that have been used to describe your writing by readers and/or reviewers?

Mike Fu: Not to be too precious about it, but I feel immense gratitude for anyone who takes the time to read my work, even if it doesn’t land the way I want it for them. To speak about book reviews more generally, I think terms like “tour de force” strike me as bland and ultimately rather meaningless.

Charles Bock: Descriptive detail to the point of suffocation; too much exposition; slight characters; deep interiority; convoluted plot; wild winding sentences that go on for too long; overhyped; overpunctuates; sensational and explicit and sexual in ways that made me uncomfortable with my personal hang-ups;  lotsa squeeze, little juice; lotsa nutrition, no candy; why did it take him so long to write that book; did he have to thank so many people in his acknowledgements?

Kate Greathead: Satirical, quirky.

Kay Chronister: “Horror.” “Not really horror.” I know it has to go somewhere in the bookstore, though.

Sarah LaBrie: I installed a plug-in that makes it impossible for me to look at bad Goodreads reviews. If people are saying despicable stuff on there, more power to them. I’ll never see it. I guess I’ll also say this, though: the book is not “sad.” Or like, fine, it is, but it’s also funny and that matters too.

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If you could choose a career besides writing (irrespective of schooling requirements and/or talent) what would it be?

Sarah LaBrie: Mayor of Los Angeles. I would like access to the budget, please. Barring that, deep sea whale photographer.

Kay Chronister: An animal behavior researcher, specifically the kind that looks into the social and emotional lives of cows or sheep.

Mike Fu: I think about this a lot, actually, and have reached wildly different conclusions about alternate life paths. For one, I feel like I’d derive immense satisfaction from agricultural work. Or perhaps a parallel universe would have me engaging with storytelling from a completely different position—as a therapist.

Charles Bock: NBA point guard.  Mattress tester.  Some kind of doctor who does crazy research or surgeries that like saves lives or fixes children’s faces or something truly helpful like that.

Kate Greathead: A gatherer, as in hunter/gatherer.

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What craft elements do you think are your strong suit, and what would you like to be better at?

Mike Fu: I tend to get fixated on the credibility of the physical world I’m describing. I have to establish, in my mind’s eye, the layout of a room, the placement of windows, furniture and other accoutrements. Or consider how a character moves through a city, the noticeable features of a particular season, that kind of thing. I’d like to believe that my attentiveness to this aspect helps me establish setting with ease. Conversely, I’ve struggled with knowing where (or sometimes how) to start and conclude a story. The framing is so important!

Kate Greathead: Characters. Plot.

Kay Chronister: I have a good handle on the rhythms of sentences. I still don’t really know what I’m doing with pacing.

Sarah LaBrie: I’m good at outlining, structure and plot. I beat myself up a lot when I’m between projects and I don’t know what’s next. I wish I didn’t do that because it doesn’t help.

Charles Bock: Whenever I read an author, no matter who it is, I end up wanting to do the things that author does well. I mostly am humbled by other writers. The craft element that is my strongest suit is I can sit at a desk and give it a whirl.

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How do you contend with the hubris of thinking anyone has or should have any interest in what you have to say about anything?

Charles Bock: Any person who has published a book already has had the hubris of their expectations blasted out of them, so this one is no worry. But my hope, when I sit down to write, is to follow my own curiosity.  Is this interesting and entertaining and compelling to me, is the first and biggest obstacle.  If I am interested, I try and follow why it’s interesting.   I also can stay engaged by the constant attempt to match my abilities up against the craft and art of writing (so as to try and make sentences that matter, etc…)  Worrying about what I am trying to communicate, and how to say it, how to convey an image, focusing on the word choice, the clause, et al… that is enough.  If I can stay in that loop, then, again, I don’t have to deal with the hubris and audience aspect of your quite valid inquiry.

Kay Chronister: I have no idea how to tell what will interest other people, unfortunately. I write what interests me and then let publishers worry about the anyone being interested part.

Sarah LaBrie: I needed to read a book about what happens when your estranged, 53-year-old mother, has a psychotic break at a time when you yourself are suicidally depressed. I knew, to hold my attention, the story would need to be not-boring, not laden with tragedy for the sake of tragedy, and easy to finish once I started it. That book didn’t exist, as far as I could tell, so I wrote it. But I wrote it because I needed to. If I’d started out with other people’s interest in mind, it wouldn’t have worked.

Mike Fu: It’s true that we live in a uniquely self-absorbed era, and writing a novel is about as navel-gazey as you can get. But I also hold onto the hope that we can find something like empathy, or recognize a glimmer of our own experiences, among all the different kinds of stories that are continuously layered over or woven into our lives.

Kate Greathead: I write from a place of shame and self-loathing.