How Perfect Is That
Sarah Bird
A Conversation with Sarah Bird
Q: Why did you write How Perfect Is That?
A: To cheer myself up. To make myself laugh. I wrote most of this book in 2003 when I was in despair over what was happening in our country. I needed a way to think about the war; about the stolen election; about toxic, Gilded Age levels of opulence and obliviousness. And I needed to do it without wanting to drink Drano. As always, humor, seemed to be the way out.
During a conversation with a friend who couldn’t afford to get a Pap smear, my need to understand collided with a need to laugh. She was the fifth highly-educated friend I’d spoken with in as many weeks who had either just lost a job or had a job with such crappy insurance that basic health care was out of the question. Tired of simply wringing my hands, I suggested that she should move back into the co-op boarding house where we both had lived when we were students at the University of Texas. Why, with the money she saved she’d have enough for that elusive Pap smear in no time!
The absurdity of that prospect—moving back into your old college boarding house—tickled us both and, suddenly, laughing seemed like a lot more fun than hand-wringing and railing and wailing. So, rather than futilely obsess about the fate of America, I created a character who was every bit as oblivious, greedy, and short-sighted as those who had delivered us to our current fate. In an attempt to keep hope alive, I also made this scoundrel redeemable. We’ll see if the same holds true for America.
Q: How do you respond to readers who take the novel simply as a comic romp?
A: Hallelujah! First and foremost, the book has to work as a novel and, hopefully, one with elements of humor. The political agenda is entirely my own and one need not share it to enjoy the book.
Q: How did you decide on the title?
A: Well, actually, I originally called the novel Weightless. I meant it ironically since my protagonist, Blythe Young, is excessively weighted down with social aspirations, regret, guilt, schemes, lies, sins of both omission and commission. She is desperate to be a woman who lives to gain material possessions and lose body weight.
As fitting as that title was thematically, it didn’t convey that this is basically a comic novel. I was moaning to my friend, the art/pop culture critic, Dave Hickey, that I needed to come up with a title that was less weighty than Weightless, and he suggested How Perfect Is That. Since Dave is a certified genius with the MacArthur grant to prove it, how could I refuse?
Q: What aspects of How Perfect Is That are close to your own life?
A: The low society stuff is much more autobiographical for me than the high. I did actually live in a UT co-op boarding house called Seneca House while I was getting my master’s at the University of Texas. But in that day and age, it housed female graduate students. It has since morphed into a co-ed, mostly undergraduate, sometimes feminist, mostly vegan, generally activist house which the current residents were kind enough to allow me to visit several times.
Beyond that, there’s probably less autobiographical overlap in this novel than almost any of my others. Fortunately, many kind-hearted souls in high places helped me with the high society research by sharing their worlds with me, allowing me to glimpse lives that are a round of charity galas, private jets, and Dom Perignon by the crate.
Q: Your protagonist, Blythe Young—while good-hearted—is not always a likeable character. (Cut to our heroine drugging guests at a party she is hired to cater). What was your inspiration for her?
A: Good-hearted? That remains to be seen. Blythe is a scoundrel! A reprobate! A user and an abuser! The whole question in the book is: Can she be saved? Is she redeemable?
This likeability question intrigues me. It comes up far more often in novels with female protagonists than it does when the hero is a male. The conventional wisdom is that female readers don’t like books in which the heroine is not “likeable,” “relatable.”
I may be a complete freak in this, but I loves me a bad girl, a woman with some deep and real characters flaws, as opposed to a protagonist whose major flaw is giving too much or something totally cooked up like that. Blythe was fun to write and, I hope, she’s fun to read.
Q: To name a few of the socialites that appear in the book: Kippie Lee Teeter. Missy Quisinberry. Noodle Tiner. Lulie Bingle. You can’t just make these names up. Do these ladies (or their likenesses) actually exist in Texas?
A: An early reader in New York told me that the names were just too over the top, too unbelievable. Not that truth is any defense when writing fiction, but I did have to laugh since all those names came from lists of Texas Junior League board members.
In fact, I wish I’d read today’s newspaper in time to include a couple of names I saw there: Naelynn and Gary Beth. Although Texas likes to think of itself as Western, it manifests a lot of southerness, and, in particular, a lot of rural southerness, in girls’ names.
Q: While How Perfect Is That can be read as a light read, it also has a serious political undertone. Do you think the political attitude has changed in Texas over the past few years?
A: Night and day. At least in the world where the novel is set.
Austin had always been this happy, liberal blue island in a hostile sea of red. Well, after the 2000 election, that sea threatened to swamp our little island paradise. This period, when to criticize the president was to be a traitor, already feels like history, like the McCarthy Era, something that happened a longtime ago. Or maybe didn’t happen at all. A time of madness when politics wasn’t the thing you didn’t talk about because it bored everyone so much, but because friendships would be ended and concealed handguns drawn.
The whole country went through this calamitous convulsion, but it was particularly rancorous here in Austin since there is a large and influential group that, beginning during the years when Bush was governor, gained tremendous social cachet through personal friendships with the Bushes.
In these circles, politics suddenly became an even more fraught topic than it did in the rest of the country. I was fascinated by the peculiarly personal dimension this discussion took in Austin where, suddenly, friendships that dated back to college hippie days were subjected to political litmus tests, and judgments could be rendered on who did or did not accept invitations to the White House. Seating charts became color-coded with the unreconstructed Blues moved far down the table or out altogether.
I knew that the tide had turned when, during the summer of 2006, I walked in on a conversation and heard one of the Austin inner circle of Bushies say, “We never really liked George. Laura was always the one who was our friend.” And now, interestingly, many members of that inner circle are supporting Obama.
Q: What would you say to people who want to categorize this book as just a book for Texans?
A: This goes back to the long, ongoing controversy about “regional” literature and the extremely condescending assumption it is based on: that the story set in New York—preferably Manhattan—is universal, anywhere else and it’s regional.
Blythe Young is a social climber for the ages. She has an interesting manifestation in Austin, but could have cropped up anywhere in the country. She is a classic American hustler amped up on the steroidal greed of both the dot com era and flavored with the virulent strain of Southern Belle-ism that afflicts a certain type of Texas woman.
Q: Your loyal readers are likely to notice that How Perfect Is That, while funny, has a darker brand of humor than some of your previous books. How would you compare this novel to your others?
A: As my husband asked during the 2000 election when I was marching, writing letters to the editor and ranting nonstop, “What happened to that carefree girl who didn’t used to know who the governor was?” I guess that carefree girl wrote the earlier books.
Q: How long have you been writing?
A: I have been supporting myself entirely with writing since 1980.
Q: Looking back, did you choose the writing profession or did the profession choose you?
A: I believe it chose me in this way: Growing up, I was pathologically shy, deeply introverted, and driven to make things. I loved creating little worlds. When my Air Force family was stationed in Japan, I made a tiny Japanese village with cotton for snow on the thatched roofs of the little huts that I made out of broom straw. I found that recreating my favorite books by, say, painting horrible little watercolors of Heidi’s grandfather’s home in the Alps, allowed me to extend the experience of being transported by those books. I once recruited my five brothers and sisters to re-enact Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Sadly, my older brother got perhaps too carried away being Simon Legree; there was whipping involved. In any case, introversion and a drive to escape into worlds I created predisposed me to the writing life.
Q: When did you “know” you were a writer?
A: Since I grew up in an Air Force family, frequently stationed on overseas bases, I had even less exposure to writers than most children. All the career options I was exposed to growing up involved uniforms and missile silos.
The idea of being a writer never crossed my mind until I discovered a form so, hmmm, “approachable,” that it occurred to me that human beings might be producing it rather than the gods who wrote the books I loved. This form was the photoromance. I discovered the photo-romance when I was an au pair in France. Ostensibly, I was in France learning French. Actually, I was fleeing a very bad love affair. In any case, I was a twentyyear-old nitwit and the only person whose French was worse than mine was the three-month-old bebe I was taking care. So I started buying photo-romances in a shy person’s way of learning to speak a language.
When I returned home, I sought out a comparable market in the United States and discovered true confession magazines. Pulp fiction: True Love, True Confession, Modern Love. I believe they have disappeared from the face of the earth. There could be no more ignominious way to begin, yet this was mine, and it fit my timid temperament in a way that no MFA program could have. These publications allowed me to learn how to tell a story in a voice that was not my own, to sink deeply into a character and her world, but, most importantly, since these “confessions” were all anonymous, they allowed me to simply learn how to fill up pages with no thought whatsoever that they would ever be associated with me.
Q: What inspires you?
A: I am inspired by books I love and by worlds that I want to capture and put into books such as the sub-cultures surrounding off-beat rodeos; the hothouse community of flamenco dance and guitar in New Mexico; the nomadic world of the military brat growing up in the Far East.
Q: Every writer has a method to their writing. On a typical writing day, how do you spend your time?
A: Get up. Drink way too much tea. Spend far too much time on our mediocre local newspaper. Work too many crossword puzzles. Walk my dogs. Answer email. When I seriously stop and think about my day, I can never quite pinpoint the moments when I actually write. I always seem to be taking the trash out or driving to my son’s school to bring him the homework he forgot or trying to decide what color to paint the trim. Just now, tallying up all the books I have published, I had a moment of wondering if I’d made the whole thing up.
Q: How long does it take for you to complete a book?
A: The shortest amount of time it’s ever taken me to write a book was four months. The longest was fifteen years.
Q: Do you write straight through, or do you revise as you go along?
A: I try to get as much down as I can without censoring myself too much, then I go back and revise. Sometimes a lot. I wrote essentially five completely different versions of my previous novel, The Flamenco Academy. It took me that many attempts to get the form, the tone, and the setting right. Excruciating.
Q: When you sit down to write is any thought given to the genre or type of readers?
A: I find it very inhibiting to think of an actual human reading what I write. While writing The Flamenco, Academy I had to put readers farther out of my mind than usual since this was my first book that contained no humor whatsoever and I knew that some readers would be disappointed. And they were.
As far as genre, mostly I write semiliterary novels. Fortunately, almost the only convention in this genre is that the work has to clearly not be genre. But I am familiar with genre conventions. The vast majority of writers support themselves by teaching. I always knew that I was not capable of sustaining the level of extroversion that teaching requires. Instead, I supported myself during the early years of my career by writing romance novels. Like pulp fiction, they were wonderful for learning the mechanics of writing. Since this wasn’t the form I aspired to, they served as a sort of out of town tryout where I could fill up pages without torturing myself about every word.
Q: When it comes to plotting, do you write freely or plan everything in advance?
A: I didn’t really understand plotting until I spent nine years working as a screenwriter. Writing in film is a group enterprise. Probably too much so. But it requires outlines and presentations, so I was forced to know every tick of a story before I told it. This flattens the work to a degree. With luck, talented actors then go in and reinflate it. Still I prefer to allow novels to unfold as they will, to take the shape they are meant to take without my intervention.
The characters guide me through the story. Once I know who they are, they tell me very decisively what they would and would not do. Generally, it helps me not to know how a book will end as that keeps me from tipping my hand.
Q: Many of your novels portray very exotic worlds and eras, Civil War Spain in The Flamenco Academy, Occupation Japan in The Yokota Officers Club. You’ve also set books in the worlds of romance novels and offbeat rodeos. What was it like, essentially, setting a book in your own backyard?
A: Although the novel is set in Austin, where I live, there was still a fair amount of research involved since How Perfect Is That is set in social arenas that I don’t belong to. Both Austin’s high society and low had their own anthropology and getting the anthropology right is one of my chief joys in writing.
Q: What kind of research do you do before and during a new book?
A: I consider research the great reward of the writing life. It is a rabbit hole I tend to go too far down and spend too much time in. The kind of research varies for each book. The book I set in the world of off-beat rodeos began as the thesis I did for a degree in journalism. Photography is a magic way to research. With a camera in front of my face, I could disappear into whatever world I was exploring. Plus the photos were fabulous visual notes and sending prints to subjects I wanted to interview further was a great way to make friends.
The Flamenco Academy was the most fascinating to research. Flamenco in New Mexico has a mesmerizing history that combines the Gypsies thousand-year exile from India; the Moorish Conquest of Spain; the conquistadors in the New World; and lots of substance abuse.
How Perfect Is That involved a different sort of research. In part I found it hilarious imagining what it would be like to have Barbara Bush as your mother-in-law. What a weekend with that whole crew might be like.
Q: Do you visit the places you write about?
A: In many cases, I choose to write about places that I can only visit by writing about them. Such as the Golden Age of Flamenco in the cafes cantantes in turn-of-the-last-century Sevilla and the post-Occupation Japan of my childhood.
Q: Where do your characters come from? How much of yourself and the people you know manifest into your characters?
A: My characters are, generally, composites of dozens of people I know all filtered through me.
Q: Do you ever suffer from writer’s block? If yes, what measures do you take to get past it?
A: Early on in my career, I saw that I was the type of person who might latch onto “obstacles” if I allowed that to happen. That I could easily obsess about not having the exact right sort of paper or validation from the outside world. So, I committed to writing no matter what the circumstances, to not believing in writer’s block. If I didn’t have a desk, I wrote in bed on a legal pad. If I didn’t have time, I lived ultra-cheap so I could exist on a half-time job. This was great training as it now enables me to completely ignore my incredibly messy house and just about anything else that would interfere with writing when I need to.
Q: What kind of books do you like to read?
A: I adore great novels with comedic elements and seek them out constantly. Some of the early favorites that formed me as a writer are Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole, Lady Oracle by Margaret Atwood, Ladies Man by Richard Price, all the novels of Charles Portiss (Dog of the South, Norwood, True Grit, Masters of Atlantis, Gringos), and most of Thomas Berger’s, particularly Little Big Man. I love every book that Nick Hornby and Tom Perrotta have ever written.
Q: When you’re not writing what do you do for fun?
A: Drift through big box stores with a tankard of Diet Coke in my shopping cart. I find Costco to be particularly soothing.
Q: If you weren’t a writer what would you be?
A: Psychotic. I say that only half in jest. Temperamentally, I’m really only suited to be sitting alone in a room for ten hours a day making up lies.
Q: What is your favorite word?
A: Is there a more perfect word than “onomatopoeia”? I’m sure I’m not alone in cherishing onomatopoeia as my first “big” word. I remember experiencing this tiny blip of power when I learned, when I “owned,” this word. It made me avaricious for other words that were both euphonious and impressive. I was quite the little nerd.
Q: What’s next for you?
A: I’m currently writing a film adaptation of my last novel, The FlamencoAcademy.
Interview with Sarah Bird
