The Sweetheart Season
by Karen Joy Fowler

List Price: $12.95
Pages: 384
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0345416422
Publisher: Ballantine Books

Karen Joy Fowler, A PEN/Faulkner and Dublin IMPAC nominee, is the author of Sarah Canary, The Sweetheart Season, Black Glass: Short Fictions, and Sister Noon.

Fowler, born on February 7, 1950, lived in Bloomington, Indiana--where her father was a professor of psychology--until she was eleven years old. "Bloomington lives in my mind as a sort of Oz-like place where I caught fireflies and watched lightning and ran around. None of the yards were fenced, so we could play games that covered massive amounts of territory." She then moved to Palo Alto, California, and was outraged to find that all the yards were fenced. "As part of growing up, I suppose, the things I was expected to do got smaller and smaller anyway, in the same way that the territory I was allowed to occupy got smaller and smaller because of the differences between California and Indiana."

She majored in political science at the University of California at Berkeley, and had her first baby at twenty-three during the last year of her master's program at the University of California at Davis. After completing her master's degree, she entered what she refers to as her "child-rearing years." Though she loves her two children with an intensity that still amazes her, Fowler--then thirty years old--began to feel restless. She decided to take a dance class to reclaim some territory of her own. "And it was only after I realized that I wasn't going to make it as a dancer that I took a creative writing class in Davis."

Fowler began to publish science fiction stories. She soon made a name for herself in the sci-fi community with the publication of Artificial Things, a collection of short stories. She then wrote her first novel, Sarah Canary, a critically acclaimed book that she hoped would bridge the gap between mainstream and science fiction. Fowler considers her second novel, The Sweetheart Season, to be "a romantic comedy with historical and fantastical elements."

In 1991, Fowler, along with science fiction writer Pat Murphy, created the James Tiptree Jr. Memorial Award which, in Fowler's words, "is presented annually to a short story or novel that explores or expands our understanding of gender...both to honor Alice Sheldon [the science fiction author who used the pen name James Tiptree] and to remind the field of its own importance in the continual struggle to re-imagine more livable sexual roles for ourselves." Karen Joy Fowler, who lives in Davis and now writes full time.

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Q: Henry James used to talk about the "seed" of his stories--The source that served as the basis for his plot. Sometimes he created a story out of a bit of gossip he overheard or from an account reported in the newspapers. Where did you get the seed for The Sweetheart Season?

Karen Joy Fowler: Probably the initial trigger was the stories I grew up with about my mother's experiences during World War II. I didn't use the actual stories--my mother was in La Jolla, California, during the war, and her stories all involved spear fishing to supplement the rations, watching the ocean for submarines, and everyone pooling their gas to drive to Mexico for a steak dinner. But I had my mother very much in mind when I was trying to picture Irini. My mother died while I was writing the book and I spent as much time with her as possible in her last years. I comforted myself with memories and surrounded myself with pictures of her as a young, vibrant woman. I wrote the book, at least partly, to deal with my grief and to try to be close to my mother by meditating on the differences between World War II and my mother's generation, and the Vietnam War and my own generation.

Q: Why do you suppose that Americans who grew up in the forties and experienced the Holocaust, race riots, lynchings, and other hideous acts of inhumanity and suffering still managed to, as a reviewer for The New York Times Book Review so aptly put it, "retain the kind of hopeful, heads-up innocence that seems to elude us"?

KJF: Well, that's really the central question of the book. The whole book can be organized around that single issue and best understood as me fumbling to answer that very question. In the end I really can't answer it. It just makes no sense to me. My generation's tendency toward despair, pessimism, and whining seems a more sensible reaction to the facts as they have been presented to us. But I very much admire the other response. I think perhaps one factor was the earlier conviction that they themselves were good people, and I think that their conviction stemmed partly from believing that their role in World War II was an admirable one. I can understand that such assurance would put everyone in a sunnier mood.

Q: If optimism and a naive innocence was the mind-set of your mother's generation, what characterizes the mind-set of your generation and the narrator of The Sweetheart Season's generation?

KJF: I never said they were naive or innocent. I don't think they were. I just think they all liked their war better than we liked ours. Vietnam really stamped my generation irretrievably. When I was a teenager, the Civil Rights movement was underway. It was something I watched on the evening news--Martin Luther King Jr. and the sit-ins, the marches, voter registration--a nightly demonstration of passion, courage. I was very caught up in the drama of it. And it was absolutely clear who the good guys and who the bad guys were. Although I was white, I never for a moment felt implicated. If anyone on the screen represented me, it was my government, the federal government. To the extent that I understood its role, I was proud of it. The Supreme Court was absolutely unified on school desegregation, no dissenting opinion, and that made me very proud. So I could see that horrible things were happening, that innocent people were being hurt and even killed. But my government and me, we were trying to stop that. We were moving in the direction of justice and equality and brotherhood. So imagine my surprise when this same government lied about our reasons and our role in Vietnam. Just a few years later, and I was seeing pictures of napalmed children and knew my government had used the napalm. And suddenly I could see that I had no power or voice, never did have. The pride I'd felt was replaced with a vision of my country, my government, and ultimately myself, since it was my government, as vindictive, petty, small-minded, mercenary, dishonest, and uncaring. As well, it pointed out to me that my own politics were those of a despised minority. This country will never resolve Vietnam and the culture will never pardon those of us who protested and dissented.

Q: Is Martha Stewart the modern day Maggie Collins? How are they different?

KJF: I did not once think of Martha Stewart when I was writing the book. But, yes, I can see the lineage. I think that maybe Maggie Collins would argue that her expertise extends to a wider range of areas. She has aspects of Miss Manners and Dr. Joyce Brothers--she'll advise you on your marriage and your menus and your morality, too. Martha Stewart is more about presentation than about substance. She's more appropriate to this time period. But I think Martha Stewart is an interesting icon. She emphasizes domesticity, but it doesn't feel antifeminist. She does her homemaking and her entertaining with such elan and precision and energy that it becomes a kind of revenge feminism. Try to shut a woman like her up in the home and she'll decoupage your socks and then you'll be sorry!

Q: What does the narrator mean when she says at the end of the book, "We all get the goddesses we deserve"?

KJF: The World War II generation was hearty and sensible and hard-working so they get a hearty, sensible, hard-working goddess. But if my own generation chooses instead to emphasize victimization and entitlement and self-pity, then we can expect to see a different aspect. We'll find our goddess checked into the Betty Ford clinic.

Q: Did you start writing The Sweetheart Season before the movie A League of Their Own came out? If so, how did it affect you and the book?

KJF: Actually my original plan for the book involved the professional women's league. I had already done a lot of research when I began to hear about the movie, and it was very distressing. First I thought, Maybe it will be just a really tiny movie and nobody will notice it. But when I heard that Madonna had signed on, I knew I had to change my plans because Hollywood was not cooperating. Initially I had thought I would write a book about female athletes, the issues involved in being physically gifted and female, and the ways in which women are sometimes discouraged from being good at something when competence is almost always admired in men. I thought I would be writing about the league and about women who played baseball very, very well, but when A League of Their Own came out I thought, All right, I'll write about women who don't play baseball so well after all, and so the whole issue of being athletic and being female was largely lost in this revisioning. Not gone entirely, but very peripheral.

Q: Did you like the movie A League of Their Own?

KJF: No, not much. There's so much to be said about the professional women's league: where it came from, what happened to it, what it meant in the context of the war, what it meant for the women in it, what kinds of women were in it. The movie didn't touch these issues. I thought it was a very safe movie and, therefore, not a really interesting one. And there were a few, just a few, things in it that struck me as mean-spirited. For example, I intensely disliked the portrait of the team chaperone. Very stereotypical, very tedious. I wanted my own team chaperone, Fanny May, to play against type.

Q: Why do so many of your characters distrust science? Are you saying that we rely on or trust science too readily?

KJF: I wish we relied on science more. Actually, I think as a species we seem to have a predilection for magical thinking instead. That makes fools of us. But so does science. Early results look promising. Snake-oil salesmen pass as Ph.D.'s; Ph.D.'s pass as dispassionate, rigorous practitioners. I mean, both my novels have dealt with historical periods and one can't help but notice that last year's science is often this year's nonsense; it's not real science, but whatever is passing as science. So let's say that I distrust scientists, not science. But often it's hard to know where one stops and the other begins. I especially object when the language of science is adopted in the social sciences to feign precision and reproducibility. The very words "studies have shown," or worse, "studies have proved," arouse my instant ire.

Q: What do you want people to get out of reading The Sweetheart Season?

KJF: The Sweetheart Season is intended to be a comic novel. I am most pleased when people tell me it made them laugh. And I wouldn't mind at all if people thought just a bit about Gandhi again.

Q: How much research went into writing The Sweetheart Season, and how did you go about doing the research? Did it require reading old cookbooks and advice columns, traveling to the Midwest, investigating the life of a cereal magnate?

KJF: Yeah, all of the above. I read a lot of old magazines, which was great fun. I talked to my aunts about whatever they remembered. They provided me with a lovely list of euphemisms they swear women used whenever it was necessary to talk about menstruation, "Falling off the roof" being my favorite. I mean, what was the derivation of that? I had baseball experts to advise me. I read old housekeeping books and actually tested out some of the housecleaning tips--I tried cleaning my toilets with Coca-Cola and wiping my walls with fresh bread. I made many unauthorized uses of vinegar. My home was lovely to look at, but a bit sticky to the touch.

Q: Was this, your second book, easier to write than your first?

KJF: No. Harder.

Q: What's the subject matter of your third novel?

KJF: It's a sort of secret history of San Francisco. I really can't say much more. I'm making it up as I go. Anything could happen.


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Excerpted from The Sweetheart Season © Copyright 2009 by Karen Joy Fowler. Reprinted with permission by Ballantine Books. All rights reserved.

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