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Interview with Alison Clement
Interview with Alison Clement
Twenty Questions
Alison Clement
A Conversation with Alison Clement
Q: What first sparked the idea for Twenty Questions?
One day, years ago, I turned down a ride from a man who later murdered someone. He offered a young woman a ride home from the restaurant where she worked, and he killed her. Just as June does, I opened the newspaper one day and saw his photograph. And just as she does, I wondered if the other woman had been murdered in my place.
A couple years ago, I was thinking about that murder and I thought, was that really the same man? Was the man who offered me the ride and the man in the photograph really the same man, or was I just being overly dramatic and letting myself imagine it was him? And I thought, what if you knew that the same man you’d turned down a ride with had been arrested for killing someone? What if you could be sure he’d gone straight from you to the victim? And what if this happened to someone who is even more obsessive than I am, and what if that person had access to the personal life of the victim? What if the character had access to the victim’s child? I thought the situation presented interesting possibilities.
Q. In what ways did the process and experience of writing this book differ from that of your debut novel, Pretty Is as Pretty Does?
While Twenty Questions began with a situation, Pretty Is as Pretty Does started with a character and a place. When I started Pretty, I intended to write about an uncle of mine who had died—I was interested in the difference between the way we think about people and the way they experience their own lives. Lucy Fooshee, the main character in Pretty Is as Pretty Does, was a minor character at first. When it was obvious that she wasn’t going to settle for such a small role, I tried to give the story to her and her sister, Evaline. I began to write it from two points of view. So now I had the good sister and the bad one, but the good sister, poor Evaline just wasn’t as interesting as Lucy, so hers was eventually reduced to a minor role, and Lucy took the story. At one point I tried writing the story in past tense. As a reader, I don’t generally like present tense, but despite that, I found, maybe because the character herself lived in the moment, this story worked best in the present.
The only element of Pretty that didn’t change as I wrote it was the place, which I call Palmyra. It was modeled after a small town where I lived for a few years as a teenager. Once I began to develop the character, Lucy, I became interested in the relationship between her and the setting. She was clearly someone who didn’t belong in the place where she lived.
Writing Twenty Questions was much more direct. I began with June believing that another woman had been murdered in her place and built it from there. I made a list of everything that needed to happen, so I could keep those things in mind as I went along, and then I began to write.
Q: What is it about June that you think readers will most identify with?
I think some readers will identify with her anxiety and the helplessness she feels. I think they might also identify with the way in which June fools herself. She wants to believe in her husband, and she refuses to see anything that might threaten her marriage. Until she’s forced to do otherwise, June believes what she wants to believe. Who hasn’t been guilty of that?
Q: On your website you say that at the elementary school where you work as a librarian, “the kids think a lot about war these days.” How does war imagery, particularly in relation to children, resonate in the novel?
At our school, we try to teach the kids to use their words to solve problems, to take responsibility, to empathize, not to blame the other guy, to help each other, to guard against bullying, to be kind. But what does the bigger world tell them? It says the bully wins. Align yourself with him, and he’ll protect you. It says, we’re first. We don’t need anyone else. We’re the best. It’s not our fault. It says the suicide of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay is not an act of desperation, but rather “an act of asymmetric warfare waged against us.” How do we counter that? How do we teach our kids kindness and humanity in a society that refuses to be accountable for its mistakes, that glorifies violence and rationalizes war?
I wanted to imply a relationship between the violence of war and violence that is not sanctioned.
Q: Lucy Fooshee, the main character in Pretty Is as Pretty Does, shares a last name with some members of your family. Did you work any personal facts like this into the plotline of Twenty Questions? If so, will you reveal what they are?
I like to use friend’s names when I write. I think they get a kick out of it. Stabenow, McMurray, Papadopoulos, Leeann, Lural—those are all names of friends.
I find that when I’m working on a scene, ideas or solutions will present themselves as I go about my day—I’ll see things or overhear a conversation that fits into the story. For instance, I have a close friend who’s Greek Orthodox and one day he was explaining icons to me and then, what do you know, June’s friend is Greek Orthodox, and there are icons.
In the book, Mona talks about the pyramids in Lake Mills, Wisconsin. When I wrote about that, I was remembering a trip I made to those pyramids on a summer night with my boyfriend.
I like it when memories or pieces of conversation or other bits of real life find their way into my stories. I almost never plan to put them there. I don’t think, well, I guess I’ll toss in a bit about Lake Mills; the story opens up and there’s a place for them and in they go. It’s like dreaming, only hopefully a little more organized.
Q: You once worked as a waitress, as did June in Twenty Questions. What anecdotes about your restaurant days can you share with readers?
Don’t get me started on waitress stories! Restaurants, as June says, are passionate places, full of unpredictability and eccentricity. And they are full of stories. I’ll just tell you one….
One night when I was working I had a customer who was eating alone, a handsome fellow, and, as he ate his meal—a good meal: grilled salmon and wine—he was writing on a pad of paper. I always wanted to know what my customers were up to, and pretty soon I could see that, among other things, he’d written the name of a friend of mine. I had to admit to him that I was a nosey waitress, and I asked why he’d written my friend’s name. The customer was Kevin Krajick, a writer, and he’d come here to the Oregon coast from New York to work on an article about the forest. He was looking for a man named Chuck Willer, because he hoped to interview him. Chuck was an environmentalist. “Oh,” I told him, “I can get you an interview with Chuck. He’s my husband.”
Sometimes I miss waiting tables, although by the end I had begun to resent it. I wanted to be the one sitting at the table, eating and drinking. I wanted to be the one on vacation.
Q: Throughout the story June makes references to movie scenes and characters, and in one instance Mona even tells her she has seen too many movies. What are some of your favorite movies?
I have so many favorites. The Color of Paradise, The Official Story, A Room With a View, The Sea Within, Amores Perros, Y Tu Mama Tambien, Fargo, Dirty Pretty Things, 21 Grams, Munich. My husband says that I just like dark movies, but it’s not true. I also love Roddy Doyle’s work, especially The Snapper and The Commitments. And I loved Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Adaptation, and O Brother, Where Art Thou?, and those aren’t very dark.
Q: How important are details in this story—Vernay’s red shoes, June’s bracelet, how June traces the writing on Harlan’s shirt? In what ways are the small details that make up a story as integral as the overall plot?
Fiction is the accumulation of details. It’s about the senses, about the body, about things we see, hear, taste, smell, and feel.
For a long time I’ve wanted to write about poverty and its effect on children, but it was very hard to do this. Kids suffer when their parents are poor. Everyone knows that already. This novel ended up being a natural and, I hope, effective way for me to write about it because I could use the specific, physical details of the kids’ lives. I could use a discussion between two young children, as they try to grapple with the meaning of foster care, for example.
We’re physical beings first. We’re not moved by ideas, as much as we are by physical details. Flannery O’Connor talks about this. Using Madame Bovary as an example, she quotes a line in which Flaubert writes about Emma playing piano and, on the other end of the village, the bailiff’s clerk “bareheaded and in list slippers, stopped to listen, his sheet of paper in his hand.” O’Connor goes on to say that, before anything else, before anything grandiose, a writer is about “putting list slippers on clerks.”
Q: What would you like readers to know about Twenty Questions?
People ask where I got the title, “Twenty Questions.” Many parents know it as a game they play, usually on long car trips, with their children. In the game, one person thinks of a physical object, and the other players try to guess what it is. They can ask up to twenty yes/no questions. Is it alive? Is it bigger than a loaf of bread? And on and on.
Young children often begin guessing right away. Is it a horse? Is it a doll? As if they can just stumble onto the answer. At the beginning of the book, June is like this. She won’t ask the right questions. She doesn’t want to know the answer.
Alison Clement
A Conversation with Alison Clement
Q: What first sparked the idea for Twenty Questions?
One day, years ago, I turned down a ride from a man who later murdered someone. He offered a young woman a ride home from the restaurant where she worked, and he killed her. Just as June does, I opened the newspaper one day and saw his photograph. And just as she does, I wondered if the other woman had been murdered in my place.
A couple years ago, I was thinking about that murder and I thought, was that really the same man? Was the man who offered me the ride and the man in the photograph really the same man, or was I just being overly dramatic and letting myself imagine it was him? And I thought, what if you knew that the same man you’d turned down a ride with had been arrested for killing someone? What if you could be sure he’d gone straight from you to the victim? And what if this happened to someone who is even more obsessive than I am, and what if that person had access to the personal life of the victim? What if the character had access to the victim’s child? I thought the situation presented interesting possibilities.
Q. In what ways did the process and experience of writing this book differ from that of your debut novel, Pretty Is as Pretty Does?
While Twenty Questions began with a situation, Pretty Is as Pretty Does started with a character and a place. When I started Pretty, I intended to write about an uncle of mine who had died—I was interested in the difference between the way we think about people and the way they experience their own lives. Lucy Fooshee, the main character in Pretty Is as Pretty Does, was a minor character at first. When it was obvious that she wasn’t going to settle for such a small role, I tried to give the story to her and her sister, Evaline. I began to write it from two points of view. So now I had the good sister and the bad one, but the good sister, poor Evaline just wasn’t as interesting as Lucy, so hers was eventually reduced to a minor role, and Lucy took the story. At one point I tried writing the story in past tense. As a reader, I don’t generally like present tense, but despite that, I found, maybe because the character herself lived in the moment, this story worked best in the present.
The only element of Pretty that didn’t change as I wrote it was the place, which I call Palmyra. It was modeled after a small town where I lived for a few years as a teenager. Once I began to develop the character, Lucy, I became interested in the relationship between her and the setting. She was clearly someone who didn’t belong in the place where she lived.
Writing Twenty Questions was much more direct. I began with June believing that another woman had been murdered in her place and built it from there. I made a list of everything that needed to happen, so I could keep those things in mind as I went along, and then I began to write.
Q: What is it about June that you think readers will most identify with?
I think some readers will identify with her anxiety and the helplessness she feels. I think they might also identify with the way in which June fools herself. She wants to believe in her husband, and she refuses to see anything that might threaten her marriage. Until she’s forced to do otherwise, June believes what she wants to believe. Who hasn’t been guilty of that?
Q: On your website you say that at the elementary school where you work as a librarian, “the kids think a lot about war these days.” How does war imagery, particularly in relation to children, resonate in the novel?
At our school, we try to teach the kids to use their words to solve problems, to take responsibility, to empathize, not to blame the other guy, to help each other, to guard against bullying, to be kind. But what does the bigger world tell them? It says the bully wins. Align yourself with him, and he’ll protect you. It says, we’re first. We don’t need anyone else. We’re the best. It’s not our fault. It says the suicide of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay is not an act of desperation, but rather “an act of asymmetric warfare waged against us.” How do we counter that? How do we teach our kids kindness and humanity in a society that refuses to be accountable for its mistakes, that glorifies violence and rationalizes war?
I wanted to imply a relationship between the violence of war and violence that is not sanctioned.
Q: Lucy Fooshee, the main character in Pretty Is as Pretty Does, shares a last name with some members of your family. Did you work any personal facts like this into the plotline of Twenty Questions? If so, will you reveal what they are?
I like to use friend’s names when I write. I think they get a kick out of it. Stabenow, McMurray, Papadopoulos, Leeann, Lural—those are all names of friends.
I find that when I’m working on a scene, ideas or solutions will present themselves as I go about my day—I’ll see things or overhear a conversation that fits into the story. For instance, I have a close friend who’s Greek Orthodox and one day he was explaining icons to me and then, what do you know, June’s friend is Greek Orthodox, and there are icons.
In the book, Mona talks about the pyramids in Lake Mills, Wisconsin. When I wrote about that, I was remembering a trip I made to those pyramids on a summer night with my boyfriend.
I like it when memories or pieces of conversation or other bits of real life find their way into my stories. I almost never plan to put them there. I don’t think, well, I guess I’ll toss in a bit about Lake Mills; the story opens up and there’s a place for them and in they go. It’s like dreaming, only hopefully a little more organized.
Q: You once worked as a waitress, as did June in Twenty Questions. What anecdotes about your restaurant days can you share with readers?
Don’t get me started on waitress stories! Restaurants, as June says, are passionate places, full of unpredictability and eccentricity. And they are full of stories. I’ll just tell you one….
One night when I was working I had a customer who was eating alone, a handsome fellow, and, as he ate his meal—a good meal: grilled salmon and wine—he was writing on a pad of paper. I always wanted to know what my customers were up to, and pretty soon I could see that, among other things, he’d written the name of a friend of mine. I had to admit to him that I was a nosey waitress, and I asked why he’d written my friend’s name. The customer was Kevin Krajick, a writer, and he’d come here to the Oregon coast from New York to work on an article about the forest. He was looking for a man named Chuck Willer, because he hoped to interview him. Chuck was an environmentalist. “Oh,” I told him, “I can get you an interview with Chuck. He’s my husband.”
Sometimes I miss waiting tables, although by the end I had begun to resent it. I wanted to be the one sitting at the table, eating and drinking. I wanted to be the one on vacation.
Q: Throughout the story June makes references to movie scenes and characters, and in one instance Mona even tells her she has seen too many movies. What are some of your favorite movies?
I have so many favorites. The Color of Paradise, The Official Story, A Room With a View, The Sea Within, Amores Perros, Y Tu Mama Tambien, Fargo, Dirty Pretty Things, 21 Grams, Munich. My husband says that I just like dark movies, but it’s not true. I also love Roddy Doyle’s work, especially The Snapper and The Commitments. And I loved Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Adaptation, and O Brother, Where Art Thou?, and those aren’t very dark.
Q: How important are details in this story—Vernay’s red shoes, June’s bracelet, how June traces the writing on Harlan’s shirt? In what ways are the small details that make up a story as integral as the overall plot?
Fiction is the accumulation of details. It’s about the senses, about the body, about things we see, hear, taste, smell, and feel.
For a long time I’ve wanted to write about poverty and its effect on children, but it was very hard to do this. Kids suffer when their parents are poor. Everyone knows that already. This novel ended up being a natural and, I hope, effective way for me to write about it because I could use the specific, physical details of the kids’ lives. I could use a discussion between two young children, as they try to grapple with the meaning of foster care, for example.
We’re physical beings first. We’re not moved by ideas, as much as we are by physical details. Flannery O’Connor talks about this. Using Madame Bovary as an example, she quotes a line in which Flaubert writes about Emma playing piano and, on the other end of the village, the bailiff’s clerk “bareheaded and in list slippers, stopped to listen, his sheet of paper in his hand.” O’Connor goes on to say that, before anything else, before anything grandiose, a writer is about “putting list slippers on clerks.”
Q: What would you like readers to know about Twenty Questions?
People ask where I got the title, “Twenty Questions.” Many parents know it as a game they play, usually on long car trips, with their children. In the game, one person thinks of a physical object, and the other players try to guess what it is. They can ask up to twenty yes/no questions. Is it alive? Is it bigger than a loaf of bread? And on and on.
Young children often begin guessing right away. Is it a horse? Is it a doll? As if they can just stumble onto the answer. At the beginning of the book, June is like this. She won’t ask the right questions. She doesn’t want to know the answer.
