I first got to know Gina Frangello when I wrote her a fan letter because A_Life_in_MenI loved Slut Lullabies so much. I don’t usually write these, but was so inspired by her work and so taken with the risks this woman writer took, I went ahead and did it anyway, and then met Gina at an AWP after that. I’m very pleased to be able to print below an in-depth interview with Gina regarding her equally-excellent new book, A Life in Men.

Gina Frangello is the author of three books of fiction: A Life in Men (Algonquin 2014), now in its third printing, which was included in the Target Emerging Authors series and has been a book club selection for NYLON magazine, The Rumpus and The Nervous Breakdown; Slut Lullabies (Emergency Press 2010), which was a Foreword Magazine Best Book of the Year finalist, and My Sister’s Continent (Chiasmus 2006).  She is the Sunday editor for The Rumpus and the fiction editor for The Nervous Breakdown, and is on faculty at UCR-Palm Desert’s low residency MFA program in Creative Writing.  The longtime Executive Editor of Other Voices magazine and Other Voices Books, she now runs Other Voices Queretaro, an international writing program in the Central Highlands of Mexico. She can be found at www.ginafrangello.com

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Bonnie ZoBell:  So glad to get to talk to you about your beautiful new book, A Life in Men: A Novel, which I could hardly put down. “Pretend I’m not already dead” is a pretty great first line. What did you hope to achieve by starting with that? Was it easy to come up with, or did you go through a lot of different first lines?

Gina FrangelloGina Frangello: I had that opening line for a long time, before I even began writing a first draft of the novel. I always knew it would open that way, yes…what I didn’t realize, however, was who was actually speaking. I thought it was Mary, for a long time, until the first draft revealed to me that it wasn’t. Then I had to revise the beginning a bit to accommodate the fact that Mary isn’t actually the narrator of the book, Nix is. I think with a first line, writers are always of course aiming, on a very basic level, for something that makes the reader want to read the next line. In this case, I was also hoping to establish extremely early on how the omniscient point of view of A Life in Men functions, because it’s not precisely traditional, in that usually an editorial omniscient point of view is a third person, the way Kundera uses it, or Jess Walter in Beautiful Ruins, whereas in this case it’s a first-person omniscient, so to speak…

BZ:   I felt so close to Mary, your main character, while reading the book that she seemed like an especially good friend or even me myself. It’s true that she has cystic fibrosis and that people naturally feel for her about that, but I’m talking about more of a deep confidante type of intimacy. Any thoughts about how you managed to achieve that?

GF:  This is great to hear because I think emotional and psychological intimacy with my characters is perhaps my single greatest goal as a writer. While I’ve enjoyed stories and novels that are written with more of a formal distance, it’s not a kind of writing I find myself drawn to in my own practice. I try to always to write from the inside out, rather than the outside in. I don’t find clinical or general descriptions of character’s emotions to be very revealing, i.e. “she was happy” or “she was excited” or “she was heartbroken,” and I always try to excavate the layers underneath what such a stock emotion actually feels like. Stephen Elliott recently said about my work, in an introduction he gave me at the KGB Bar, that it feels like my characters are so naked they don’t have any skin, and it was, while a delightfully weird thing to say, also one of the nicest compliments I’ve received, because yes, I want the reader inside my characters, at least the focal ones, not observing from the outside. I want them under the skin.

BZ:   I read that you had a friend long ago in your past who had cystic fibrosis and that you also researched the disease quite a bit. But Mary seemed to really and truly have the disease. What did you do to get such a close take on it? Did you read any biographies of people who’d had it? Case histories from doctors?

GF:  Yes, I read all of those things. One biography but mostly blogs and open chat forums by people with CF, and yes, quite a few studies in medical journals, reference and self-help manuals written by doctors for people with CF and their families, all of those things. I read a lot, for at least a year before I actually began writing.

BZ:  There are those who would say that a woman marking her life by the men who were in it might need to define herself a little more independently. What would you say to them?

GF: Well, clearly I would agree with that!  I mean, in part the title is an ironic one because Mary is marked at least as much by Nix as by any man in her life, and she’s also deeply marked by the absence of her birth mother, and her reactions to—and in some ways against—the fear her (adoptive) mother displays about her illness. The fact that the main women in Mary’s life mark her primarily through absence is very different from the fact that the men in her life are extremely present and engaged and very much associated with her own agency and adventures. It’s also true, of course, that while Mary does have a teaching career for part of her life, certain other means of self-identification, such as dedication to work or having children, are less available to her than to most other women because of the demands of her illness. For Mary, to define herself through travel or relationships is in part a triumph of not self-identifying primarily through her illness. But the title of the novel is certainly not a prescriptive one for women in general, or even for Mary herself, nor is it entirely literal in terms of Mary’s self-definition. It’s also in part a play on the title of one of Leo’s paintings, too.

BZ:  Arthog House, where Mary lives when she first moves to London, is so fascinating. I also read somewhere that you lived in a house very much like it when you were younger and in London yourself. Was it fun or depressing? Was it a drug house or just a place where hip young kids could afford to live?

GF: I didn’t live in a house “very much like it,” I lived in that exact house, ha! It was called Arthog House, and it was in that exact location and I worked at the Latchmere Pub just like Mary does at that time. The house was extremely fun, though it wouldn’t be inaccurate to say there were depressing aspects to it, of course. Some of us were young and broke and traveling, but a couple members of the household were quite a bit older, as Yank is in the novel, and had been drifting for so long that the wear and tear was visible and not a fleeting thing as it was for some of us who would go on to have different kinds of lives. It was I suppose “a drug house” in the sense that…uh…the people who lived there did quite a few drugs and some were small time dealers. It was not a drug house in the way such a place is often depicted in popular culture, of people being incapacitated and just lying around high nonstop in a stupor—almost everyone in the house had a job, though usually under the table without English work permits, and everyone was active and traveled a lot and several were involved in artistic pursuits. It was a complex place. It wasn’t an either/or in terms of what you’re asking. It was both of those things, and also other things. I was incredibly nurtured there, at a time I desperately needed it. At one point, Sandor describes Arthog House by saying something to the effect of “we all knew each other quite well there, except we lied all the time,” adding, “it was very intimate.” Which pretty much describes the reality of the thing

BZ:  There was only one time, I confess, where I stopped liking Mary for a short period. I don’t want to give the story away, but it was at a point where she’d been with a boyfriend for quite a while and, feeling needy, convinces him against what his beliefs have been thus far that he’ll marry her and they’ll have a baby. This is quite a cathartic moment for the young man when he realizes how much he loves Mary. Immediately after that, she flees to another city and doesn’t even say goodbye to him. I know cystic fibrosis means her life will be shorter, and I’m glad she’s not angelic or she wouldn’t be human, but how COULD she?

GF:  Joshua never agrees to have a baby. He agrees to marry, even though he doesn’t believe in marriage, but he doesn’t consent to start a family with Mary…he says that her desire to bring a baby into such a damaged world, with the added difficulty of her own early death looming, and the loss that would inflict on the child, is “obscene.”  When they become engaged, it is implicit in Mary’s understanding that there will never be children. That’s a large part of why she leaves Joshua, though there is no rational explanation for how she leaves him. She is simply, I think, afraid that if she had to say it to his face, she would not actually go, and she feels that she needs to go, because she will never have a life of her own in Kenya, and will be forever defined by Joshua’s pursuits, and unable to have her own work or motherhood or a community of friends of her own. The act of trying to find these things when she believes, at that time, that she may only have a handful of years to live, if that, is, I think, quite courageous, but the way she leaves Joshua is deeply cowardly, and this contradiction exists in Mary in many ways, until near the end of her life.

BZ:  I know that traveling means a lot to you personally as it does to your character, Mary. I like to travel a little, but I love staying home, too. Could you share a little bit about Mary’s  wanderlust  and what it means to her? I assume in getting that answer, we might also learn how you feel about it in your own life.

GF: Mary’s hunger to travel is informed by mine but is of course of a more urgent and voracious pitch because she is racing a clock much more literally than most of us feel ourselves to be. She has a disease that, for people in the year she is born, 1968, has an average life expectancy of twenty-three. For her, travel begins as a way to try to decipher the mysteries of what happened between her and Nix—Mary has no idea, when she begins to travel, what it will mean to her; she is simply trying to, in a sense, live the life Nix craved, and try to figure out that loss. But very quickly travel becomes much more, and a way for her to write her brief life on a larger canvas. For Mary, “staying home” becomes very synonymous with “playing it safe” and going quietly into her impending decrepitude, waiting for the days when she needs an oxygen tank to take a shower. As such, home doesn’t have the positive connotations it has for most of us. I travel a great deal, and I have since I was in my late teens, and it’s been profoundly shaping and transformative for me and is also something I crave and enjoy, but unlike Mary I also have three children and have lived in the same home for fifteen years, with my parents living downstairs from us, and most of my life revolves around the domesticity of the daily ins and outs of family. These things give me enormous pleasure, but they aren’t options that were available to Mary in the same way, nor does the day to day mean the same thing to her. We are all “on the clock,” of course, and running out of time, but most of us don’t feel acutely aware of it on a daily basis the way Mary does, or that people with concrete life-shortening conditions are likely to.

BZ:  I found it fascinating that Mary’s travel companion, Nix, parts ways with Mary early in the book, and yet she stays on until the end through Mary’s thoughts and flashbacks. By the end, she’s just as important if not more important to Mary than she was at the beginning. Mary’s perceptions about Nix continually change as the book progresses, and therefore, so do the reader’s. This really works nicely because it shows how much Mary’s matured by the end. Did you plan this, or is it one of those happy things that just developed? Do you think Mary’s matured at the end or that she never really can because of her disease?

GF:  I did plan it that way, though of course there are always surprises. Mary is 20 at the onset of the novel and 33 by its end. I think and hope she matures a great deal, as anyone should over such a period of time, though there may arguably be ways in which her illness, which she feels “demands narcissism” of a certain self-focused kind, blocks her from maturing at the same rate or in some traditional ways. The thing is that I believe people are always in progress. I don’t think there is such a thing as having “matured” to some optimal state, but that we are always changing and potentially growing and that there is no such thing as having “arrived,” or having mastered what it is to be alive. So Mary is in the process, yes, of gaining greater maturity, but of course she is still very young, and there’s no doubt that were she able to lead a longer life, there would have been many more stages ahead of her. Kathleen says early in the novel that we’re a lot of people over the course of a lifetime, and I agree with that completely. Mary is not, at 33, the same person she is at 20, but she is also not the same person she would have been at 50…which is an unknowable thing.

BZ:  Do you want to tell us about anything you’ve written recently, since the book came out?

GF:  I hope to finish a draft of my next novel, Every Kind of Wanting, this summer. But mainly I’ve been writing a lot of essays, mainly personal in nature, since A Life in Men came out in February, which has been surprising, and exciting, and in some ways scary—nonfiction is a quicker form for me than fiction, but it also terrifies me writing about myself and about…um…facts.

BZ:  Thanks so much for talking today, Gina. Can’t wait to read Every Kind of Wanting!