Amy Bloom: 'We did not have people who identified as transgender lauded in the mainstream press'
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Version 0 of 1. Your new novel, Lucky Us, tells the story of two spirited half-sisters in 1940s America and takes in everything from prewar Hollywood same-sex orgies to postwar German reconstruction and tarot card readings in a Brooklyn beauty parlour. Yet it's only 256 pages. Was the hardest thing deciding what to leave out?I do find it challenging to leave stuff out. Two of my models for novel-writing are The Great Gatsby and As I Lay Dying, both very short books. I've never wanted to write a 600-page novel, not that I think there's anything wrong with them. For me, there's something exciting about being able to tell the whole story without anything extraneous. I tend to think: "Let's tell the story, let's get to it. Let's serve the characters." I don't have a wish to express myself on issues such as silk versus nylon or the origins of rice. There is some cutting. I mean, I don't send it over to my editor at 500 pages, I tend to do it on my own. Rewriting certainly takes as long as the actual writing. You are also a noted short-story writer. Do you think the discipline of that form helps you keep your novel prose tight?I think it's been helpful. To be able to do the compression of movement of a short story with the breadth and connective tissue of a novel is the aim. And if you throw some poetry in there, that's all to the good. Your father fought in the second world war and you lost many of your relatives in the Holocaust. How did your family history inform Lucky Us?My family was so close mouthed about their history, I had no idea. My mother's mother had one photo of her standing with six people who all looked like her and were fairly close in age and when she arrived in this country [America] she had three siblings. If you asked where the other siblings were, she would have shrugged. We did not come from an Oprah-style sharing family. They didn't like to talk about it, so I have no idea what happened. Apart from my grandfather who left a short journal, written in Yiddish, and the first sentence reads: "It is not fun to be the youngest son of the poorest man in the village." That sounds like one of your opening sentences.I think the impulse to get to the heart of the story and to tell it well is in my genes. You wrote your first children's book, Little Sweet Potato, two years ago. How did that experience compare with writing for adults?It's certainly more fun to write a children's book. The idea of creating incident is very different for a children's book in that all I had to create was a thunderstorm and some mean carrots [laughs]. That particular story I'd told to my own children night after night for a year. I don't see myself pursuing a career in children's books although my family and I sometimes joke about it and come up with possible titles for a follow-up. "Little Sweet Potato in Outer Space" or "Little Sweet Potato in the Middle East". In 2002, you wrote a non-fiction work, Normal: Transsexual CEOs, Crossdressing Cops and Hermaphrodites With Attitude, which examined our attitudes to sex and gender. Do you think we've reached a tipping point in our acceptance of transgender issues because of people in the public eye such as Orange is the New Black actor Laverne Cox, who was recently featured on the cover of Time magazine?I do think it's getting better. I don't think we've reached a point where people stop asking: a) where are you from? Or b) are you a man or a woman? There are a lot of people to whom it does not occur that the question is a) rude and b) none of your business. There's always going to be people like that. And there's obviously a group of people who, in fact, intend to harm. But I think overall, certainly when I wrote that book, we did not have people who identified as transgender lauded in the mainstream press. Do you watch Orange is the New Black?I do. There are a lot of things I like about it and there are things that make me laugh. The prison guards who constantly walk around with their weapons in easy reach strike me as extremely unlikely figures. But the characters and some of the women – the acting is just off the charts. You have said in the past you knew you were bisexual from the age of 13 and have had relationships with both men and women. You are often asked about this in interviews. Do you think we view sexuality too rigidly?I don't know about rigid. I think there's an understandable human impulse to want to identify something as "that". Personally, I think it's worth studying the names of plants and shrubs. It's worth understanding the difference between oaks and elms and to understand that an oak will never become an elm tree no matter how long they stand next to each other. There are people for whom the prospect of sex with the opposite sex or the same sex is horrific. Then there's a big middle [section] of people who go: "Yeah, probably not, but maybe at a pinch." Then there's a small group who are: "Yahoo! Lobster and steak!" There's a concern that somehow people are trying to fool us by changing their mind, but if I went out for dinner and ordered the chocolate lava cake and then thought: "No, on second thoughts, I'll have the creme brulee", we would not turn to them and say: "You lying, sneaky person". So which do you prefer: chocolate lava cake or creme brulee?[Laughs] I'm not a big dessert person. Although I have to say, being married, that chocolate lava cake is really nice. You mention your cousin, the celebrated literary critic Harold Bloom, in the acknowledgments for Lucky Us. I have to say, the cousinhood is entirely artificial and volitional. We met a few years ago and adopted each other. We have made ourselves cousins. It is, for me, a great pleasure and it actually feels like an honour when Harold gets going and is reciting a poem and then talking about it. It's like walking through the library at Alexandria. You also share your surname with James Joyce's heroine, Molly Bloom in Ulysses. Have you read it?I have read it bit by bit. I didn't find it a quick read. You were a psychotherapist for several years before becoming an author. Did you ever have a really annoying client?Sure. The number of people who are really, really annoying who find themselves seeking out therapy is not tiny. What's moving is the other side of being really, really annoying is being really, really alone. If you're smart, you might reach out for some help with that. Is it true you don't read contemporary fiction when you're writing?Yes. It's too disheartening for me as a writer. I look at this book that's out there and between covers and for sale and I think: "Oh gosh, it's finished. Look at me scribbling away. I will never finish. I am doomed." It's that. But I do read during those windows of finishing one book and before starting another. What have you enjoyed recently?Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. She's the most enormously talented person. What are you writing at the moment?I am working on another novel set in the 1930s, which has as one of the centrepieces the relationship between Eleanor Roosevelt and the woman she was in love with for many years. There's also a corrupt diplomat, South America… I like, in my novels, to have things happen because in my short stories, nothing ever happens. What do you make of Hillary Clinton as a hypothetical future president?Hmm. There are a lot of things about her I admire and it is impossible to watch her in action and not see how smart she is. I have a friend in politics who said the closer you got to Hillary, the more you saw her warmth and the closer you got to Bill, the more you saw his coolness, which I thought was fascinating. I have to say, though, I'm overall a big fan of President Obama. Lucky Us is published by Granta (£12.99) on 28 August |