HO: There's this resilience that kids have....They can stay innocent and keep reinventing themselves despite a lot of appalling stuff. I find the juxtaposition of the innocence of children and the cruelty of the urban world really inspiring. Even when they are in the most horrible of circumstances, their world view is still magical and is informed by talking crocodiles, super heroes and agoraphobic monsters who live in their closets. Kids are all philosophers, processing the world. It also allowed me to describe adults in a different way. The qualities in adults that attract, impress, and disgust children are different than those that their peers notice. So a child's voice allowed me to create portraits of demimonde characters from a different perspective while shedding of a lot of societal preconceptions.
AC: Is it helpful in writing this voice that you have a daughter of your own?
HO: Not really. It's a voice that comes from the past and that sort of has nothing to do with the world I'm in now. It comes from being a kid rather than observing kids. I'm so good to my daughter and give her all this attention and Royal Tenenbaumesque experiences that I didn't have as a kid. In a way, I feel like I'm having a wonderful, artistic childhood through her. But when my sisters and I tell stories about our childhood, she gets all upset and says, "I wish I lived back then. Your parents were never around, you did what you wanted, terrible things happened, it sounds great! Tell me more stories about this magical time, the eighties!"
AC: You sound like a great mom. (I love that your daughter asks about the magical eighties.) How have you managed being both a good mother and a good writer?
HO: I write during the day when my daughter's at school and when she gets home, I put whatever I'm working on aside and spend time with her. It actually focuses me. It allows me to not worry about being a writer for good chunks of the day. Being a struggling writer can drive you completely mad with anxiety, especially while writing a novel. You spend years working on something that might end up unpublished and that's in the back of your mind, laughing and taunting you ruthlessly. It can turn you into a really unpleasant person if you forget about real life, which is easy to do as an author.
I had my daughter very young -- I was only twenty when she was born -- so she was probably around one too many struggling artists growing up. She'd be woken up in the middle of the night by someone in the kitchen wailing that they should be opening for Tom Waits. But she has this really unique and funny grasp on humanity now.
AC: How long did you work on "Lullabies," and what was the hardest thing about writing it?
HO: It's always hard to say how long exactly you worked on your first novel because you kind of have to write a few drafts and then throw them away. So I spent a few years writing stuff that ended up in the trash and then maybe three years writing the book. I get embarrassed to tell people how long I was actually trying to write a novel for. I'd like to say that I wrote it in eleven months in my last year at Harvard, but it wasn't the case. I have a really scattered brain. I write sentence by sentence and I have two pieces of paper out, writing scenes from two different chapters at the same time. It's hell putting my notes together into coherent chapters, and I imagine other writers have a more linear writing style.
AC: With regard to writing in a nonlinear fashion, were your agent and editor helpful in pointing out plot discrepancies that can arise from writing in this style?
HO: My editor, Courtney Hodell, was absolutely brilliant. Her contributions were always to expand, to flesh out the story and to elaborate on the feelings the characters were experiencing. There were also times in the story where I was nervous about taking the drama where it had to go and she was always yelling at me to be fearless and take the leap. There were some continuity challenges for the copy editor. Mostly the seasons were kind of screwy. I'd have someone leaving their house in winter in a tank top and he was like, Dude, it's January!!!
AC: In the past have you written prose pieces with less linear constructions? Do you have any interest in that now?
HO: Well, even though I write in a nonlinear way, I always have an idea of the whole of the piece in my head as I'm writing. I revise it all pretty carefully to make sure that the piece is narratively cohesive. I don't have any interest in book length projects that don't have linear constructions, to be honest. It's like digging for dinosaur bones. Each part of the narrative is a bone that I am uncovering. But in the end I find it indispensable to wire all the pieces together to form a proper skeleton. Otherwise, presenting a pile of bones is too confusing and those viewing the dinosaur will miss the whole glorious function of a shoulder blade if it isn't where it's supposed to be.
I do, however, do some odd things on the radio and in magazines. It's easier to be sort of radical in shorter works when you don't have to hold the audience's attention for more than a few minutes.
