The Season of Lillian Dawes
by Katherine Mosby
List Price: $12.95
Pages: 271
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0060936959
Publisher: Perennial
Katherine Mosby lives in New York and is an adjunct professor at NYU. She is the author of a collection of poetry, The Book of Uncommon Prayer, and a novel, Private Altars, which won the Book-of-the-Month Club's First Fiction Award.
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Q. In your second novel you explore the young adult life of a character from your previous novel, Private Altars. Had you always planned to pursue the story of the Daniels family?
A: Actually, I started the first novel with the idea of writing about Willa Daniels as a young woman in New York but as I came to know her and her circumstances, I realized that her story was so deeply informed by her mother, Vienna's story that that story needed to be told first.
Q: Many of your readers have read Private Altars, but many will be meeting Lillian for the first time. What kinds of challenges did you encounter writing this novel for both audiences?
A: One of the ideas I was exploring was the notion that we are, as personalities, in a state of flux, permutating and evolving as time and circumstance shape us. I was reminded of the famous quotation from Heraclitus, "You could not step twice into the same river; for other waters are ever flowing on to you." I wanted to examine the difficulties that creates in "knowing" someone. Are we the same person now as in high school, college, etc.? Are we different people with and to different people and are they all equally true?
I think that readers encountering a character at a different point in life, in a different place, under wildly different circumstance can assume that they will be seeing new aspects of that character and will need to get to know the character anew, just as in life, when we reconnect with someone as an adult whom we have not seen since childhood. What we know of the past helps add resonance and complexity to our understanding of who they are now and how they got there, but knowing is a verb, and implies an ongoing process. I think that is what is both so rewarding and so frustrating about relationships.
Q: The novel is told in the first person, from Gabriel's point of view. Was it difficult finding that voice? What were the challenges?
A: Yes, finding the right voice to tell the story was the most difficult part of writing the novel. I vacillated between third person and first person, uncomfortable with the limitations of first person but wanting the intimacy and immediacy it can offer. Once I determined that I needed to write in first person, I tried various point-of-view characters trying to find the right voice. I wrote several chapters with Hadley as the narrator. I briefly tried Spencer and then took several stabs at Gabriel as narrator until I finally felt like I had gotten hold of the narrative voice that seemed right. Another problem was that the story is being told in retrospect so Gabriel must be able to convincingly recreate what it was like to be seventeen while also occasionally interjecting the hindsight or perspective that the intervening years have afforded him. It was very challenging trying to straddle the two stances and I relied to some extent on the technique that we all use in telling anecdotes about ourselves that took place when we were children: much of the reflection or detail benefits from our current maturity, but the dialogue we place in the mouths of our childish selves.
Q: Melancholy is another predominant mood in this novel which, combined with the shabby gentility of the Gibbs sons, Lillian's tragic past, and the flamboyant, unprincipled lifestyle of Clayton Prather and his crowd, carries echoes of Faulkner and Fitzgerald. Which writers -- or works of fiction -- have been most influential to your work?
A: This is a question that writers are often asked, and one that I have generally found surprisingly difficult to answer. I suppose this is partly because as a devoted reader, there are so many different writers to whom one feels indebted and because comparisons are inevitable and odious when invoking the names of the literary idols that have shaped us. I think part of me shrinks from the invitation to link my work with the work of those I revere, while of course, part of me longs to be worthy of such association.
I have enormous admiration for both Faulkner and Fitzgerald, for the beauty of their use of language as well as for the resonance of their themes. But I also admire Colette and Lampedusa, and Proust, Truman Capote, Jane Austen, Fred Exley and Isak Dinesen, Edith Wharton just to name a few who come readily to mind. And there's the problem: no sooner do you start your list of names before you are overwhelmed by the numbers of others that should or must be mentioned. Before you know it, you sound like you are making an interminable "Oscars Night Acceptance Speech" drowning the listener in a tsunami of names. If I had to characterize the writings I have been consistently drawn to, they tend to be works that prize the lyrical possibilities of expression as well as those that explore the ambiguities and complexities of relationships, and examine the human condition with an unflinching honesty.
Q: One of the novel's main characters, Spencer Gibbs, has veered away from his family's traditional calling -- law and politics -- for the life of a writer, a "fall from grace" that has alienated him from one aunt and endeared him to another. In your own experience, was your decision to become a writer met with any such disapproval, or disappointment, from your family? Do you think writers are born, or are they made by experience?
A: My family never disapproved per se of my life as a writer although concerns were voiced from time to time about the difficulty of trying to make a living while I supported my writing habit. I had acclimated my family early on in my childhood to the notion of my becoming a writer. It had always been what I wanted to be when I grew up: not only did I like to make up stories and write poems, collect words and read books, but it was the only job I could think of where you got to work in your pajamas if you wanted. And that part of it still seems pretty good when compared to all the other forms of work I do that require me to wear panty hose and spend half an hour brushing the cat hair from my clothing to make myself presentable on someone else's time table.
Q: In addition to writing fiction, you are also a poet. How are the demands and rewards of poetry different from that of fiction? How, in your own work, does one art form influence the other?
A: One of the biggest differences between working on the two forms is that with poetry, even though you can tinker and tweak a poem forever, you usually have a first draft in a matter of days, or at most weeks, whereas with a novel, it can take months just to get a character through a door, and it might be years before you have a first draft complete. This is a huge difference because not only is there a much longer delay of the gratification of completion but also it means that in fiction, you are working in the dark (as far as the overall shape of the work) for long, frustrating periods of time. It requires a different kind of psychic stamina, as well as a huge leap of faith that a) you will eventually achieve completion, and b) it will have been worth the effort. But there is also more latitude in prose, because a poem, precisely because of its more modest size, demands a precision that cannot accommodate even an extra or imperfect word.
Excerpted from The Season of Lillian Dawes © Copyright 2008 by Katherine Mosby. Reprinted with permission by Perennial. All rights reserved.
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