Dale Loves Sophie to Death
by Robb Forman Dew
List Price: $13.95
Pages: 256
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0316890669
Publisher: Back Bay Books
Robb Forman Dew is the author of the novels Dale Loves Sophie to Death, The Time of Her Life, and Fortunate Lives, as well as a memoir, The Family Heart. Dew lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts, with her husband, who is an author and a professor of history at Williams College.
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How did you begin to write novels? Did you always want to be a writer?
I've been thinking about that a lot lately–why I became a writer, that is. I used to think it was because I had something urgent to say. But I actually started writing before I could even write. I don't know how old I was–four or five–and I would fill pages with wavy lines as though I were writing words. So maybe it's a genetic imperative of some sort. I don't think I've ever asked anyone why he or she became a painter, because I assumed it was simply a deep pleasure because that person was talented. But, of course, I'm sure painting is filled with the same euphoria and misery as writing.
I grew up in a family where everyone seemed to write, or seemed to want to write. I remember being truly startled when a friend of mine avoided a class in college because she would have to write essays, and instead she took a science course. It was the first time I really understood that loving to read–my friend was a great reader–really didn't have that much to do with wanting to write. And I've come to a few conclusions about why people do write. I think that writers really have to write or they become unhappy–even depressed and disoriented. And I think that they're lucky if they also have talent, but whether talented or not, anyone who writes is–for the time the actual writing is going on–imagining that he or she is imposing on some imagined reader a worldview. It's an unconscious attempt at seduction, I think.
When did you start writing Dale Loves Sophie to Death? How long did the novel take you to write?
Oh, I think that I was growing increasingly frustrated with my inability to write good short stories. I was getting some of them published, but I knew they weren't right. I was so furious at myself at one point–for finishing a story and knowing that while some of the writing was good the story didn't work–that I picked up my typewriter and put it in the middle of the driveway so that when my husband came home that evening in the dark he would run over it! Of course, about a half hour later I rushed out and saved it–I couldn't have afforded another, and it had occurred to me, too, that it might ruin our car. Also, of course, how on earth could I have explained it to my husband? But I think my idea was that if my typewriter got run over by a car, then it would hardly be my fault if I didn't write.
During my twenties and early thirties I struggled with short stories, and they were published in some wonderful journals, and those editors were extremely encouraging. I began the first chapter of Dale Loves Sophie to Death as a story. And I was pretty pleased with the ending for once, but I didn't send it out right away, and I began another story which in the back of my head I knew was not a story; it was a second chapter. But I was too terrified to admit it. By the time I had four chapters I admitted to myself that I was writing a novel.
How did the response to Dale Loves Sophie to Death–and, in particular, winning the National Book Award–affect your writing, your career, your life?
I was thirty–five when Dale was published and thirty–six when I won the Book Award, and for about five days I was simply elated. It was like being the homecoming princess at Westdale Junior High School. I felt just as Sally Field must have felt when she received her second Academy Award and said, "You like me! You really like me!" And then–since I had won it–it began to seem to me not all that special. And the following year when I was asked to be one of many judges for the award, I realized that my book was probably a choice that was a compromise for most of the judges. It really didn't change my career as far as I know, although it probably made it easier to get publishers to read my manuscripts. But it didn't alter the way I write or cause me to worry about succeeding with my next book.
In your third novel, Fortunate Lives, you chose to write again about the family at the center of Dale Loves Sophie to Death. Did you always know that you'd return to the Howells family?
You know, I really can't remember. I know they stayed in my mind, but my second book, The Time of Her Life, was the obverse of Dale. It was about a less healthy family, and I certainly wasn't thinking of the Howellses then. The Howellses were moving right along with me through my life, though. They were learning the most terrible things you can learn–which were passions and ter–rors that I only knew through them–and yet in the grand scheme of things they were incredibly lucky. I believe it was the irony of their being safe and comfortable–enviable to so many people on the earth–while suffering a loss that is as bad as anything that can happen to anyone that intrigued me about the Howellses. Well, I guess I was bound to return to them. And I think that in the trilogy I'm at work on now all the families from my books will end up knowing one another or possibly being related. I know there's some sort of connection.
The setting of Dale Love Sophie to Death–Enfield, Ohio–is almost like a character in the book. Can you talk about the importance of place in your novels?
It's something I don't think about much except for the actual town or neighborhood–the immediate surroundings, the weather.
When I first started writing, the South was the setting for all my stories–I grew up in Louisiana. But it was like struggling to grow while being suffocated by kudzu. I grew up during the civil rights movement–my high school didn't integrate until I was a junior, in 1963. I cared passionately about social justice and race relations, and when I realized that I could not write about the South without tackling those issues on some level, I switched locales. I wanted my stories to happen in a place that didn't need to be explained, because although I'm politically active, politics is unbearably distracting to me when I write fiction.
What are your favorite books, books that have influenced you, or books you enjoy recommending to readers?
Well, the usual suspects, I suppose. Austen, James, Virginia Woolf. And I've discovered that when I read many books when I was young I knew they were wonderful but I missed so much of what was brilliant about them. I'm rereading Eudora Welty right now. Delta Wedding. She's so good that I didn't realize just how brilliant she was until this reading. How it could have escaped me is mysterious to me. She has such tact and is so careful, but this book is like a pointillist painting. There are so many ways to understand her characters.
I was enormously affected by Fitzgerald, who's so visual a writer, and by Peter Taylor, who has exquisite phrasing. I worked very hard for a long time trying to achieve his sense of ease–the sense that the story already exists and is just being unraveled for you. But the book that made me want to write–and which I came upon, oddly enough, in the Baton Rouge bus station when I was taking a bus to visit my cousins in Natchez–was The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead. When I got back to Baton Rouge it turned out that my mother had just read it as well. It's an astonishing book. It's a masterpiece, and it always seems to me the opposite, in a way, of War and Peace, which I also love for all sorts of reasons but especially for the wonderful story. Each of those books gives you an entirely believable world, but Stead's starts wide and becomes so amazingly intense that finally it's like a laser of compressed emotion. Tolstoy explodes into a universe and gets wider and wider.
Has it gotten easier, or more difficult, for you to write as you get older?
Oh, no. And that's what's so wonderful about being fifty–four. At last I thought to myself that whether or not anyone would acknowledge my right to assume authority, I was ready to take it anyway. And I was able to think . . . wider, bigger, with more reach. I was weary of concentrating on a relatively narrow range.
What are you working on now? You mentioned a trilogy . . .
The Evidence Against Her is the first in a series of three novels, each of which will stand on its own. The second book is tentatively titled Greenside Lane, and the third book, also tentatively titled, is Two Girls Wearing Perfume in the Summer. The series is a tale of a particular American family from its inception, beginning with the gradual confluence through marriage of four midwestern families in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries–and that family's evolution through the 1900s and into the early years of the twenty–first century.
I'm interested in the careless, random, ironic, or merely accidental circumstances from which communal and familial myths and expectations are first derived, and of course, I intend to unravel the intricate–sometimes tragic–consequences of those myths.
I have always been interested primarily in an investigation of character, and that still absorbs me, but I also want to give readers a whole world, so that when they have finished any one of these books they will be able to revisit its landscape in their imaginations.
I want any reader to believe that he or she grasps more about the essential lives of the characters than those characters understand about themselves. I want to make it clear that the accuracy of those legends and myths by which we all define ourselves is irrelevant in the long run. We inherit or grow into expectations based on who we are assumed to be because of family, class, gender, race, etc. And much of the struggle of discovering a way to be happy is choosing which myths and legends we embrace and fulfill, and at what point it's necessary to discard the expectations of anyone else altogether.
Excerpted from Dale Loves Sophie to Death © Copyright 2012 by Robb Forman Dew. Reprinted with permission by Back Bay Books. All rights reserved.
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