WRITERS TELL ALL
Matthew Turbeville: If it means anything, when typing up my questions I tried to change my front to New York Times Bestselling Author instead of Times New Roman. Amy, how does it feel to be the most coveted new author in all of crime fiction—someone compared to Megan Abbott, Laura Lippman, Tana French—the greats. What do you feel is the biggest leap and struggle between switching from groundbreaking debut to blockbuster follow-up? (Plus a book about Tori Amos in between!)
Amy Gentry:If anyone considers me in the company of any of those three authors, I’m insanely honored! They’re three of my favorites, and in many ways, my role models. Moving from the first to the second book is always a challenge. You spend years crafting your debut, because it has to be absolutely perfect before you can sell it. And since you don’t know whether anyone will ever read it, it’s written one hundred percent for you. My second novel LAST WOMAN STANDING was written under contract, which means I had to figure it out a lot faster--none of the long detours and rambling pre-writing sessions and trying out three different settings that I did for Good as Gone. I was also pregnant when I wrote LAST WOMAN STANDING, desperate to finish before the baby. I had a timeline all written out, but in my panic I wound writing a completely bizarre alternate ending, and still not finishing it. I remember sitting in the hospital with the pitocin drip going, emailing my agent on my phone. It was all very bizarre. I had finished the ending with a newborn crying in the next room. Obviously there was an extension involved. . .! My editors at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt were extremely patient and helpful through it all. But it certainly wasn’t the leisurely part-time writing experience of Good as Gone. The Tori Amos book, which had been under contract since before I had a literary agent, was a further wrinkle. Anyone working on two books at once will tell you that no matter how hard you try, both rounds of edits always end up hitting your in-box the same day. MT: When you first published Good As Gone, people were obsessed. We met because I was obsessed and wouldn’t stop tagging you on Facebook (I still don’t but we don’t want the authorities to know that!)—what inspired this novel? You were famous, if I remember correctly, from being the brilliant debut author who didn’t meanto write crime fiction. Can you explain to us how that happened to? AG: I didn’t read a whole lot of crime fiction--or at least, I didn’t think of myself as reading it, although I had read Lippman, Megan Abbott, Ruth Rendell, Barbara Vine, Chandler, Hammett, and the great Patricia Highsmith. But somehow, even though I had read many of them in grad school, I didn’t think of myself as knowing a lot about them. I always wanted to write like Henry James--not in his style, obviously, but stories of incredibly twisted people messing with each other’s heads, and trying to be good people and failing miserably. That’s what I thought I was writing with Good as Gone--a twisted family melodrama wherein the mother suspects her daughter is an impostor, and we have to figure out which one of these two women is seriously screwed up. (I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say: both of them!) Anyway, there was a kidnapped girl sitting right in the middle of the book. I felt like kind of a dummy when I realized it was obviously a thriller. Once I began thinking of it that way, the whole thing fell into place. And I looked at my bookshelf and suddenly it made sense that I owned twenty-three books by Patricia Highsmith. Almost all the stories I want to tell involve psychological suspense, even if they don’t have dead bodies in them. And lots of them have dead bodies! MT: Attica Locke semi-recently said that all fiction is crime fiction. Do you agree with that? What do you feel is the single greatest crime committed inGood As Gone? That may be a really loaded question/answer so feel free to elaborate on that. But also the concept of the kidnapped girl and returned woman—sure, I’m sure it’s been done before, but you made it feel so new. How did you decide to approach the issue and how did you come about your completely unique approach? AG: I agree completely that all fiction is crime fiction. Henry James is crime fiction, but instead of murdering each other quickly, they murder each other slowly, over hundreds and hundreds of pages. In Good as Gone, everyone (except possibly Jane, the little sister) has committed crimes of desperation by the end of the novel. The kidnapping is the biggest crime depicted in the novel, but the book is far more concerned with the longer-lasting violence of retraumatization, the way our harmful ways of thinking about sexual violence victimize the same vulnerable people over and over again. That’s why the structure of the book includes a backward chronology, diving into the past of the woman who calls herself Julie. Trauma rearranges time, it rearranges identity. The whole family has reordered themselves around it, and that, too, is a kind of violence. MT: Before you stumbled upon crime fiction, who were your favorite authors? Now that you have found what I hope you feel is your true calling (I love your books so much I couldn’t live without them!) who are your favorite crime writers? AG: Before my life of crime, I went through phases with James, Highsmith, Dostoevsky, Shirley Jackson, James Baldwin, Muriel Spark, Kate Atkinson, Kelly Link, Tessa Hadley, Jennifer Egan, and various others. In terms of crime novelists, the three writers you listed above--Abbott, Lippman, French!--are a holy trinity for me. Every new French book that comes out, I have to take several days off to celebrate. I’m also a huge fan of Sara Gran, whom I discovered relatively recently. I love short books that leave you completely gobsmacked and hers are so short but they feel like universes unto themselves. MT: Megan Abbott loves your new book, and so do a whole lot of other people. Last Girl Standing is part Strangers on a Train, part Single White Female, part Steph Cha (I love her so much). My first question is an obvious one: why in this time period, with Trump, a wall, anti-Semitism, do you make your protagonist half Hispanic, half Jewish? I’m sure there are multiple layers of why the protagonist is who she is, and I’d love to hear about them. AG: Yeah that’s a big question. One big thing is that I got called out on the Alex Mercado character from my first book, the P.I. character, not having a bigger role. Someone I quite respect said that he was one of the best, most likable characters in the book (agreed!) and wished he could have had a bigger role, suggested that it was disappointing that this Latino character didn’t turn out to be central to the story. I have often thought about using Mercado in future books, but I knew I would be writing female protagonists for the foreseeable future, and that question of whether they always had to be white, even though I live in Texas and my books were set in Texas where whiteness is far from the norm, nagged at me. Once I realized it was a book about a stand-up comic from Amarillo, I just felt that her character made sense as a non-Spanish-speaking Latina with a mixed ethnic identity, who struggles with feeling that she doesn’t fit in with either the mainstream comedy scene (read: white dudes) or the Latinx comedy scene in Austin--because she does’t speak Spanish and she’s not a dude. Dana is always stuck between two places (Austin/L.A.), two ways of seeing the world, two ways of coping with trauma. It’s a very binaristic book in that way. And it made sense that she would be biracial. Moreover, to talk about how women are marginalized in comedy in 2018 without some look, however compromised by my own subject position as a white woman, at the marginalization of non-white women in those fields--that just didn’t make sense to me. As for how our current political climate factors into that--it’s hard for me to put into words, so I’ll quote Tori Amos: “Girl, you have to know these days which side you’re on.” It’s very much a book about choosing sides, even when that’s impossible. MT: What book or books, and what movies, what TV shows inspired this book? One movie that comes to me is Heathers, except Christian Slater is a beautiful woman. AG: Ha! That’s a point of reference I wouldn’t have thought of at the time but it’s very good. Of course LAST WOMAN STANDING is a straight-up, unabashed Patricia Highsmith rip-off--ahem I mean homage, with the doppelganger character from Strangers on a Trainappearing out of nowhere to represent and express all the repressed fury of the protagonist. But we saw what happened when I tried to do a Henry James homage, so no doubt my Highsmith homage turned out similarly warped. MT: I’m assuming this novel was written at least a year of two ago—while when hatred was high, it wasn’t nearly as public and unashamed as it is now. Hatred is everywhere, and it seems you pick this racial and sexual hatred and bring it to the forefront. So, I’m wondering if you think of writers (including yourself) as sort of foreseers, people who can predict social climates, how things will be by the time they finish and publish their novels. It really feels like you’re a blind woman warning everyone about an upcoming war—which reminds me, Madeline Miller needs to write more too. AG: The hatred you’re talking about--I think it’s very pragmatic. If you stay in your place, they will love you. When you don’t accept your position, the love turns to hatred instantly. A lot of women are writing about rage right now because we have all collectively decided not to accept this version of reality. But rage doesn’t feel good. Rage is a beautiful, terrible, righteous infection. It’s a last-resort response to an undeniable truth. The question is, how can we harness it without getting eaten alive by it? In this book I am trying like hell to answer that question, and I can’t. I just can’t. The answer for me, and I think for a lot of writers, was to channel the rage into writing a book. Not very helpful, but if what you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. So I don’t think we’re seers--I think we just have the ability to get things into words that everyone else is thinking and, more importantly, feeling. Activists are out there yelling at people in restaurants. That’s probably more useful work than novel-writing. MT: You are an English PhD, you review books, etc, so it seems obvious you would become a novelist eventually. Would you mind explaining your own adventure into writing novels, and would you ever write a story collection, crime or no (I would buy it!). AG: I have written novels since I was a little kid, though I never finished one until senior year of college. After that, I thought I would become a novelist right away. I almost finished one, but I abandoned it at the critical two-thirds point. (That last act is still the hardest to write!) I was broke and I had to move back home. My mistake was in thinking that because I couldn’t figure out how to write a novel immediately while waiting tables in a strange new city, I needed to abandon it entirely for ten years. I went to grad school and started reviewing books because I did not know that being an author was actually a real profession where you could make money, and these other things seemed like more practical avenues for my talents. (They weren’t!) It was only when I had failed miserably at everything else, and was contemplating every passing whim for a possible profession--cake-decorating was on the list--that I started writing Good as Gone. I read all these corny self-help creativity books like The Artist’s Wayand The War of Art. And my husband, who was making payments on my student loans at the time, kind of talked me into it. I owe him a huge debt of gratitude for many things, but chief among them, he hooked me up with the woman who started my writing group. And that writing group is how the novel got written. I have written only a handful of short stories in my life, and none of them are very good. I’d like to develop the skill someday, but I have a lot of novels to get through first. MT: So, there are only so many things about Texas I love: you, Larry McMurtry, Jeff Abbott, this one vegan eatery called Bok Choy located in the hellmouth aka San Antonio, my wonderful and very favorite friend Melissa (please meet her during your tour in Houston!), Beyoncce and Solange and Tina, and there are a few more but I’m mostly forgetting. It’s one reason why I wonder why Dana, the protagonist of Last Woman Standing, would return home. The comedy scene is smaller, it seems, so maybe she has a chance. And maybe she gets a chance. I’m trying to be spoiler free but would you mind filling us in on just as much as you’d like readers to know on your delicious all-you-can-eat-butffet follow-up novel Last Woman Stnading? AG: I love Texas, although it has been somewhat trying to live here as an adult woman who wants to have reproductive freedom. Growing up in Houston, I always thought I would get as far as I could, and I lived in Portland and Chicago and each time wound up coming back here. Austin, as Dana says in my book, is the Velvet Coffin. So incredibly comfortable. But there’s something about Texas, too, that’s very friendly and very open. It’s not just Austin that’s weird; Texas, too, is a very weird place. But I digress. The reason Dana comes back to Austin is the same reason I came back to Austin twice: she feels she’s failed. Something happened to her in L.A., and it scared and shamed her, and she came home with her tail between her legs. Austin was home base. I’ve known so many performers who did stints in New York, L.A., and Chicago, and then came back home when the money ran out or the winter got too cold. Performing is such an intense career. You actually use your body to make your art. And you start feeling used up. Dana likes Austin a lot less than I do--she’s in a very challenging corner of it, in the stand-up world. But even the stand-up scene here is friendlier than in a lot of places. In a small pond, there’s a lot more collaboration. People don’t feel as threatened by eachother. And one of the things that’s happened in LAST WOMAN STANDING is that Dana left Austin right when the scene blew up, so it actually got bigger and more threatening while she was in L.A. She comes back, and it’s too competitive to feel comfortable, but still not a place where you can find creative jobs that pay. That’s a story I know all too well from performer friends. MT: In college, my best friend Melanie said once that when she gets rich or marries rich she would like to form a vigilante squad of people who kill rapists. In a way, in the novel’s beginning, Last Woman Standingis somewhat about revenge against men, things that start small but escalate quickly. I don’t want to make you angry (I get angry when I think about this subject) so I won’t ask you what you think men who abuse women in any way should have to suffer through, but I will ask is if you agree with anything Dana and her new friend do? AG: It’s one hundred percent wish fulfillment. I have revenge fantasies all the time. How can you not? If you’re sure--and, based on personal experience as well as volunteer work with survivors, I am sure--that nothing will happen to these people, that there will be no consequences for their crimes, how can you not want to get revenge? In writing the book I wasn’t interested in what the men deserved so much as what the women deserved. I felt that Dana and Amanda deserved their rage, their horror at what had happened to them. They deserved to have it acknowledged, that what happened to them was wrong. They deserved for there to be consequences. MT: So as you know, and as I will tell our readers, I was blind from a botched surgery two months under a year since I had it and received my copy of Last Girl Standing. It performs miracles, people. I can see now! But other than that, it’s an amazing novel. Beyond amazing. What were your fears when writing a sophomore novel? And—I would like to stress this—this is not Good As Gone 2. This novel is something completely new and innovative, the voice as noir as Patricia Cornwell and as compelling as Megan Abbott. The dynamics of the relationships are reminders of Laura Lippman and the surprises and twists are as well executed as Alison Gaylin. But really, it’s all Amy Gentry. So how did you make such a unique sophomore novel? AG: I cannot take credit for making a blind man see, but I’m so glad it helped in any way! In terms of writing a unique sophomore novel--time pressure had a lot to do with it. That sounds blasé, but actually it’s kind of a blessing to be forced to pick your first good idea and run with it. To work on this faster time-scale--and remember I was writing a nonfiction book at the same time, and by the way I actually I drafted a completely different novel, too, that I wanted to get out of my head but that wasn’t suitable for this contract--I had to summon everything I had learned in Good as Goneand boil it down to its essence. I scrapped fancy structures and alternative POVs and just concentrated on telling the story that scared me most--the story of a woman who lets go and becomes pure rage. The one thing that helped me, structurally, was to develop the theme of doubles and doppelgangers throughout the book--not just Dana/Amanda, but also Dana and Betty, her stage alter-ego. There are a bunch more doubles throughout the book, but I would get into spoiler territory very quickly if I went there. That theme of mirroring made me want to use a 4-act structure, which is basically the same as a 3-act structure but it has a really strong central hinge that divides the book neatly in two. Once I figured that out, the book got easier to shape. It’s very much about passing through the looking-glass, seeing what life is like on the other side, once you’ve accepted that you live in a much darker world than you wanted to admit. MT: I have to say, I’m so relieved that you, one of my favorite authors, did not succumb to the sophomore slump. Still, it’s hard to compare your two novels—they’re so different in every way possible. An interesting question that I’ve been juggling about in my mind (I’m not a good juggler) is how Megan Abbott, and many others, have become the leading writers and readers of crime fiction. What does it mean that women are now in control of the most violent, most destructive, but also most nuanced and interesting genre in literature? AG: I think (and I bet Sarah Weinman would back me up on this) that they always have been. Big props to Gillian Flynn for reminding the world, with Gone Girl, that the domestic has always been the pulsing heart of noir. Go back and watch The Reckless Moment, directed by Max Ophuls in 1949. Watch Joan Bennett hide that body so that she can preserve the fiction of happy domesticity in a post-WWII world that just doesn’t make sense. God it’s so good! We’re in a world that doesn’t make sense right now, and we’re being told to pretend everything is normal and it just fucking isn’t. I think women have never had the luxury of ignoring the ugly truths that connect the personal to the political, and in this moment, our insights and our rage are very useful. MT: There’s this idea of repressed memory, of forgiveness but by the end of the novel you’re not sure who you’re forgiving. It’s like the perpetrator—of many crimes against many different women—is wearing a mask. In the same way, Dana wears a mask when she takes on a role completely outside of herself while wearing a wig, a sexy blonde psychopath. Can you talk about the wig, the character she portrays, and without too many spoilers what this means? AG: Many early readers have told me that Betty, the “sexy blonde psychopath” that Dana turns into when she puts this very trashy wig on, is their favorite character. (All I have to say is, you’re all very twisted.) Masks are very paradoxical, because they hide your face of course, but they also uncover or free forbidden parts of you. Think of all the trolling and abuse that came to the surface when people got to use avatars online. It’s not always evil, of course--theater people know that putting on a mustache or a costume of any kind can suddenly put you into a role in a way you could never quite be otherwise. Betty comes along at a time when Dana’s comedy feels very stale and rote to her, and unleashes this whole different side of herself she’s been repressing. Amanda starts that action going, of course, but it’s the Betty wig that tips the scales. True story: the idea for using a wig came from one of my fellow waitresses at a long-ago restaurant job. She was very into vintage, which is already kind of a costume. One day she came to work with a haircut she didn’t like. To cover it, she wore a wig for about six weeks while it grew out. During those six weeks she developed a whole alternate personality named “Denise.” Denise was a nasty, bitchy waitress, and I enjoyed her thoroughly. But eventually my friend was really grateful to retire Denise. She thought she might have a hard time coming back to herself if she kept Denise in the picture much longer. Denise was just too much fun, and she was taking over. How could a novelist not file that away for later? MT: What’s the best book you have read in a long time? On a similar note, and piggybacking on the Toni Morrison quote, do you feel you have written the book you’ve always wanted to read but have never been able to find? If not, can you give us a glimpse into what book that might be and when, if you decide to, you might be writing it? AG: The Witch Elm by Tana French and Claire deWitt and the Bohemian Highwayby Sara Gran are two books that made me gasp--and cry--and feel really jealous. When I read both of them, I thought, “No fair! I didn’t know you could do that!” And although I talk about Highsmith all the time, I really wanted the tone of LAST WOMAN STANDING to be more like a Muriel Spark book--witty and nasty and weird. I don’t think I have succeeded, but I’ll keep trying. An excellent book is often a distortion of the author’s intentions rather than its perfect fulfillment. I hold onto that. MT: Amy, I am so lucky to know you and have you as a friend. I know our readers are so glad to hear from you and get to peek directly inside your mind. You’re a genius. You know that. Feel free to leave any thoughts or anything below, and know how very much we love you and your work, and you’re welcome at Writers Tell All anytime. Thank you again, and I look forward to being haunted and thrilled by your next novel. AG: I certainly do notknow that I’m a genius! But I feel lucky to have you telling me that I am. You’re so wonderfully supportive to the community, Matthew, and we’re all lucky to have you. Thanks for everything you do.
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