Swimming Naked
by Stacy Sims
List Price: $24.95
Pages: 256
Format: Hardcover
ISBN: 0670032905
Publisher: Viking Press
Stacy Sims has worked in advertising, public relations, and graphic design, and writes a monthly column for Cincinnati Magazine. This is her first novel
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Q: The Greene family has a unique trajectory. Where did the idea for the novel originate?
SS: When my friend's mother became ill, she told me a story about her favorite memory of her mother. It happened during family vacation when she went out to the beach with her mother, leaving the rest of the family behind. Her mother, completely glamorous in a black bathing suit with upswept hair and red shiny fingernails, smoked a cigarette. To my friend, this was such a vivid memory. To be alone with her mother was part of the excitement, but to share a secret with her mother, to help hide the fact that she smoked, that created a different sort of relationship between mother and daughter. I wanted to explore that idea in a scene and juxtapose that against the daughter sitting with her dying mother, years later. I didn't set out to write a novel. I just wanted to get those ideas across. But I liked the characters so much I wanted to find out what happened to them in between the beginning and the end of their relationship. The next scene I wrote featured a college-age Lucy coming to see Anna in the suburbs of Cincinnati. And I kept writing. After about three months and 100 or so pages, I realized I was creating a novel. A few months later I quit my job to finish writing Swimming Naked. I was turning forty and it seemed the right thing to do.
Q: What happens to Frank is such a specific, unusual event. Did you have a previous interest in lightning? If not, how did that occurrence come into play?
SS: As I was writing about the family, I realized that this was a story about women. Lucy, Anna, and Faye were so much to deal with that the father, Frank, was like a piece of furniture on a set. I knew that something had to happen to get these women (including me!) to pay attention to him. I knew something was going to happen in the storm. I even thought for a moment or two he might die. But then I read about Lichtenberg figures, the marks that some lightning victims bear, and it all made sense to me. It made sense that Frank would be physically marked and psychologically altered. The rest of the family was marked and altered as well. They just didn't bear a physical mark. They wore their pain through their oddball actions. Lucy actually tried to relieve herself of some of her emotional scars by marking herself with her tattoo. Just imagine what we would look like if we bore physical marks from every painful experience. That is what I liked about Frank's lightning "tattoo." The other thing that intrigued me was what happens to a person whose irrational fears become obscenely justified? Anna was terrified of storms. Lots of kids are. But her worst nightmare turned out to be worse than she could have even imagined.
Q: Whenever a novel is narrated in the first person, it is hard to avoid the question of what similarities the author shares with the narrating character. Can you elaborate on that?
SS: The territory is emotionally autobiographical. I understand what it is like to be a mercurial mother. I understand what it is like to be an alcoholic woman. I understand what it is like to keep the world at bay with humor and bravado. But this is Lucy's story, not mine. I walked with her out to the station wagon, wearing pajamas and about to head off on family vacation: we did that when we were kids, my brother and I. But Lucy took over from there. The details of her life are hers. Her family photo album is not mine.
Q: The novel avoids high drama and sentimentality. Was this a deliberate decision or simply an organic part of the storytelling process?
SS: Lucy's unsentimental view of the strange circumstances of her life was an organic part of the process. That is just who Lucy turned out to be. But the decision to keep the story itself from becoming too sentimental was very deliberate. I know from experience that lives get changed in tiny, barely measurable steps. I did not want Lucy and Anna to be miraculously healed and happy and skip off into the sunset. They lived messy lives. I think they are on their way toward some sort of recovery. But I'll bet that will be messy, too.
Q: We live in a society that is well versed in psychological diagnoses. Why did you choose not to label your characters with any particular mental illness?
SS: Mainly because I didn't see them as having any particular mental illness. I think there is a terrific amount of good old-fashioned human suffering out there, and some of us do an impeccable job of hiding it, at least for a while. And a lot of us end up pretty miserable without any signature event to cause it or explain it. Anna was a fearful girl who was coddled. She did have an unmistakable tragedy, but she grew into your garden-variety alcoholic, suburban housewife. Lucy suffers from panic attacks, drinks too much, and is promiscuous. I hate to say it, but I know a lot of women with these same problems.
Q: Where do you see Lucy and Anna ten years into the future?
SS: I think Lucy will have had to deal with her own addiction issues and Anna, unfortunately, will have had one or two more relapses. I think Lucy has a better chance of finding a life of some real happiness because she is able to access her true feelings far better than Anna. Anna has lived in fantasy for so long that it is hard for her to deal with reality. I don't imagine that Lucy and Kyle stay together. But I think Anna and George do. The teenage girls: I fear they are a total mess. It sounds terrible, but life is hard, especially once you start abusing substances. It becomes a very slippery slope. But what makes me feel hopeful is the power of faith and grace. I have known people who I thought didn't have a chance in hell of putting together a happy life and they have done it, completely transformed themselves. And sometimes the further the fall, the greater the ascension. So maybe there is hope for Anna!
Q: When Anna misinterprets her own memories, how much do you feel that modern therapy is responsible for that? And how much of it is simply part of Anna's troubled psyche?
SS: I think a lot of Anna's distortion comes from the shock of being sober. She has been able to steer clear of reality for a long while with the help of alcohol and painkillers. And everything she has been telling herself in order to justify her addictions has turned out to be a pack of lies, her own lies. So she is doubtful about what is the truth of anything. But I also believe that we have become culturally tuned into the idea that sexual abuse is the epitome of the painful childhood memory. Clearly, whether or not the memory is repressed or recovered, this would be a horrific experience to have had. But this is not Anna's problem. In fact, it is easier for her to try to latch on to these mistaken memories than to deal with her own real ones.
Q: Now that you have published your first novel, do you have another one in the works?
SS: I am working on a novel entitled "As White as O." It is about Jack Hawley, the son of Sam Hawley, who was an infamous outsider artist who drowned in the Ohio River. The story begins fifteen years after Sam's death, when Jack is called to New York to attend an art exhibit in which his father's work is featured and to be a part of a meeting with HBO to discuss a movie about his life with his eccentric father. After Jack's five-day trip to New York, during which time he also reconnects with Eva, whom he has been in love with since he was a teenager, and meets his mother, whom he had been told died giving birth to him, he sits down to pen his own story of his life as he is angry at having his life story told by others; first by Clara, his father's former lover and art curator, and now, possibly, by HBO. All of this is further complicated by the fact that Jack is seen as an unreliable witness to his own life as he has a peculiar condition called synesthesia, which denotes the rare capacity to hear colors, taste shapes, or experience other equally startling sensory blendings.
The title comes from a curious and wonderful detail of the synesthetic experience. Many synesthetes see letters in color and while the palette is unique for each (the letter a may appear red for one and blue for another), nearly all see the letter o as white.
I like thinking about perception and memory and considering who owns the truth of any given situation. And I like thinking about Jack, who with all his strange and rich family history and his synesthesia is motivated principally by reconnecting with the girl he fell in love with when he first laid eyes on her fifteen years ago, when he was fifteen years old, two weeks to the day after his father drowned.
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Excerpted from Swimming Naked © Copyright 2012 by Stacy Sims. Reprinted with permission by Viking Press. All rights reserved.
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