Interview

Q: Be Mine opens with the powerful image of a dead rabbit in the Seymour’s driveway, a casualty of a van delivering Valentine’s Day roses. How did this striking image come to you?

A: The idea for the novel occurred to me with these images—a speeding florist’s truck on Valentine’s Day, a rabbit in the road, and snow. There is blood in the snow and a woman is standing on the porch of her renovated farmhouse, awaiting her roses. I saw her one day; maybe I was her.

It came to me then that, in the lives of many women who have lived their lives as daughters, wives, and mothers in mid-America, the great adventures and dangers of our lives—what might be the equivalent of a man’s solitary excursions or military service—have been those of romance and entanglement. We go on psychological odysseys, sexual odysseys, and professional odysseys, too. But how many of us, trained early to be fearful and for real reasons, reach the age of forty-five or fifty without ever having taken a walk down a road alone after dark? Yet, the excursions of the heart we’ve had are no less dangerous!

But what is the psychological and social price paid for making all of one’s excursions either with another (usually a man) or making them into oneself? It occurred to me that this character, a woman in her forties in a midlife crisis, would long for excursions, internal or external, and that the home—behind her as she faced the road, the rabbit, and the florist’s truck—would be the thing she would risk, willingly or not, for this excursion. I thought of a quote from [Charlotte Bronte’s] Jane Eyre that says “You shall yourself pluck out your right eye; yourself cut off your right hand.” And I thought that by writing this novel I would like to find both the lethal potential and the possibilities for grace in a story of ownership and restoration.

Like Sherry, I live in the country, in an area of rapid development. The natural world and the increasing traffic are in a state of constant collision. Roadkill in winter—and the violent implications of blood on snow—is a common sight. But I think the image was really generated by my foreknowledge of what would happen to Sherry, and to her life, because of the ramifications of romance and passion in the course of the novel. The guilt she feels seeing the destruction that the delivery of her Valentine’s Day roses brought with them resonates throughout the book.

Q: As the title suggests, possession, or the notion that people belong to one another, is a central theme in the book. Jon, Chad, and Bram all lay claim to Sherry as their wife, mother, or lover. Does Sherry define her identity through these relationships?

A: Certainly. But she also sees these people as hers. They are her family, her friends, her lovers, even her colleagues. Sherry feels she knows them, and she knows herself in relation to them; but the events of the novel reveal how unreliable this knowledge can be. In fact, Sherry learns that those she thought were hers are completely capable of slipping through the bonds that she believed held them to her.

Be Mine started as a meditation on possession and possessiveness in passionate relationships—those between spouses, parents, and children; between friends; and between lovers. I also wanted to explore what love—and its unpredictable sibling, romantic passion—requires of us, offers us, in a consumer culture, in a troubled time and place.

As I continued to follow my protagonist into her story, what began to interest me most was thinking about how little we know about ourselves and others. I thought of both men and women I'd known who'd ventured into illicit relationships, and how, in some cases, a terrible lesson was learned about how quickly the social persona can be yanked away, leaving us exposed. In the background as I wrote, of course, there was always the war, and the ways in which war and its politics divide a small community like the one at the center of this story, like the one I live in. Because the protagonist’s son has left for Berkeley and his closest high school friend has joined the marines, these two concerns—the home in crisis and a country at war—began to seem wedded to me—the invented domestic conflict and the collision of the private self, the individual citizen, with the outside world.

Q: Jon and Sherry have been married for twenty years but Sherry’s affair reveals the flaws in their “happy” life. Would the cracks in their relationship have been exposed if the affair hadn’t occurred?

A: If not for the affair, the cracks would have been suppressed—but as we all know, the price paid for that kind of denial may have been just as high.

Q: After she realizes what has happened to Garrett, Sherry says “It surprised me, then, to find myself knowing exactly what to do.” How did Sherry learn to handle something like this?

A: Actually, my idea here was to show that the skills it would take to cover up a potential crime scene are precisely the skills she’d been developing throughout her life as a mother. Protecting Chad completely and under any circumstances—especially being the kind of mother Sherry is—is what her whole life as a woman had taught her.

Q: Be Mine—as well as The Life Before Her Eyes and your other novels—is set in a Midwestern community. As a native and current resident of Michigan, what is it about the landscape of this part of the country that appeals to you as a writer?

A: For better or worse, this is my place. I was born to it, I’m still here, and I know it intimately. The struggle, as I continue to write, is to find new ways to use the landscape and the culture of this place. But the struggle is the inspiration, too. In writing this novel, I was looking to find a new way to explore and describe a life in the Midwest—the Midwest of dying farms, patriotic fervor, academic skepticism, aging tract houses, sprawling affluent subdivisions, and industrial ruins. This is a place where the Puritan work ethic is in conflict with a decadence brought on by easy access to drugs and consumer goods, and that is in contrast to an earnest devotion to family and a longing for the spiritual. There is also a feeling among some members of Generation X that the Baby Boomers, their parents, are degraded and weak. These children feel as if they have been neglected by those charged with their care. I began to think about the way some of the jaded tastes and desires of my own generation have spilled over on the landscape, and what this means for those who come after us.

I wanted to make characters of, and put into motion, the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the Midwest’s early farmers as they changed the landscape, the land, in ways that would have been unimaginable only seventy years ago. And I wanted to find a means of writing about this changing of the landscape, both actual and psychological, in a novel that takes place in the present and moves from the close study of an individual to that of her community. I wanted to evoke the Midwest: its images, its ignored omens, the resonant music of gravel trucks, and how the winter sun rises over the freeway and illuminates the living and the chrome.

Q: Be Mine is your fourth novel for adults. You also have written six collections of poetry, a young adult novel, and have taught creative writing. Can you share with us any nuggets of wisdom you have discovered through being an author or through teaching budding writers?

A: Writing is its own reward, and those who discover this are the luckiest writers and people. The endless engagement one can have with the world, an engagement that comes from trying to put words to it, pluck images from it, discover new meanings, unearth its secrets—there is no better way, in my opinion, to use the little bit of time we have here.