Kathleen Finneran is reading at Women & Children First Books Sept. 27.
I don't often have the advantage that I had when I recently interviewed writer Kathleen Finneran. We met in 1990 as participants in the Bennington Writing Workshop at Bennington College in Vermont. We remained friends over the course of the next ten years and when her memoir The Tender Land: A Family Love Story was published during the summer of 2000, I was especially excited for her. The book, which details her younger brother Sean's suicide when he was a teenager, is beautifully written and is as compelling as the most intimate fiction. However, since it is a work of nonfiction, it is even more gut-wrenching. Carolyn Alessio, of the Chicago Tribune, called it "a memoir of a Midwestern tragedy and a baffling, virulent sadness." Amidst the sorrow, however, there is also a gradual healing, and the tenderness of the writing is one of Finneran's greatest gifts.
Gregg Shapiro: When we met at the Bennington Workshop, you had just won a prize for your writing in St. Louis, is that correct?
Kathleen Finneran: Yeah, The Missouri Arts Council Writers Biennial. It was a grant of $5,000.
GS: The piece that won, was that a part of the book, The Tender Land?
KF: No, it was a piece called "Learning to Read." It was a little personal essay about when I learned to read.
GS: Can you please say something about the genesis of the book?
KF: I started writing the first chapter, "The Evidence of Angels," when we were at Bennington. When I finished that, I sent it to an editor who was then at Poseidon Press, a subsidiary of Simon & Schuster. She offered me a book contract, based on those 25 pages, in June of '91. At some point during the summer of '93, Simon & Schuster shut down Poseidon Press and all of the contracts where redistributed to other editors at Simon & Schuster. My editor from Poseidon Press stayed out of the business for about a year. Then she went to work at Crown, which is a division of Random House. When she did that, I left Simon & Schuster and went to Crown with her. A few years after that, Crown changed its emphasis and wasn't as much interested in literary memoirs. She thought she wasn't getting her due there so she left Crown in '95 or '96. I was at Crown with just another editor for awhile and when my editor decided to go work for Houghton Mifflin, I broke my contract at Crown and went to Houghton Mifflin.
GS: Did it ever feel to you like, this is never going to happen?
KF: Yeah, all the time. The combination of always changing publishers and taking so long to finish writing it myself. It wasn't just the changes in the publishing field; it was feeling like I will never get done with it on my own.
GS: Did you ever consider writing this story in the form of a novel or a fictional voice?
KF: No, never. I don't have a good fictional voice for, one thing. I don't seem to have the talent for fiction. I always felt that it was inherently part of the story that it should be as personal as possible.
GS: The dialogue flows in this extremely natural, conversational tone. How did you go about creating conversations from the past?
KF: I always remembered one certain thing that somebody said to me and wrote the conversation around the one thing that was most important. So I'm not sure that those were exactly people's words as those conversations happened, except for what might have been the central thing they said to me that I had recollection of.
GS: Was there a section in your book that was more difficult to write than another? Was there a section that took on more weight, more importance, more difficulty or were they all equal?
KF: No, they weren't equal at all. The piece about my father, the long piece called, "As My Father Retires," was very easy to write. I'm not sure why. Then after I had written it, I wanted to do a piece that was equal in significance for my mother and that was very difficult to write, because my mother is a very simplistic, religious person. There was a real balance to not make her seem like some kind of fanatic who was so childlike that she seemed like a simpleton. So for that reason, the section called "Acts of Faith and Other Manners," was a hard part to write. I wanted to match what my mother was and I in some ways didn't have the talent to do that right off the bat. I had to really write and write and write a lot until I was able to master that and I think I achieved it in the end. The other part that was really difficult to write was the first chapter, which I rewrote 17 times in tremendously different ways. I think maybe one of the reasons it was so difficult to write was because I wrote it after the rest of the book was done and I had to make it introduce what was already there.
GS: I'm glad that you brought up your family. The book is sub-titled "A Family Love Story," and it is, first and foremost, about family. What has the reaction to the book from your family been like?
KF: They read parts of it all along over the nine years that it took to write it. I never gave them the complete thing until I was finished with it last summer. When I had the manuscript as it was going to be in the end, I gave them each a copy. My brother and my sisters were all very supportive of it and really liked it a lot. My parents had many reservations, more about what I revealed about myself in the book than what I revealed about any of them. They were very guarded about the sexuality in it. My mother was very upset that the world would know that I had shoplifted when I was a teenager. That kind of thing. Things that would have conflicted with tenets of their faith, of Catholicism. It was really difficult last summer to go through that, but since the book has come out, they've come around and embraced it for what it is.
GS: Aside from the fact that you do write about your sexuality in the book, had they had a problem with that prior to that?
KF: It was more that it was in print.
GS: But they were OK with it as family.
KF: Well to the extent that it was ever very visible within our family, which it never has been, because I never really had that many serious relationships in my life, so it was sort of a nonentity.
GS: You recently did a reading from the book in St. Louis, which is where your family is. Can you tell me about what that experience was like?
KF: It was really the most remarkable night of my entire life. There were about 250 there. Many of them were people who were friends of my younger brother Sean's in grade school. These friends of his are all 33-year-old men now. It was sort of like a moment of being able to see what he might have been like as a man. It was very moving. There were there that I hadn't seen in 20 years and people that my parents hadn't seen in 50 years. It was really a wonderful experience for all of us, I think.
GS: I understand that after having lived in New York for ten years that you are planning on moving back to St. Louis.
KF: By the end of the year.
GS: What will you miss the most?
KF: The people that live here that I won't be near any longer. And having an office ( laughs ) . I will probably miss the degree to which you can get theater and art here. Not that you can't experience those things in St. Louis, but it's certainly a different level of immersion. ... The reason I'm moving back there is that I'm hoping to be able to write full-time without having a job for a while, which I'd never be able to afford to do in New York. And having a larger place to live in.
GS: What's your next book project?
KF: It's a book about being an aunt. It's based on my relationship with my nieces and nephews and my aunts and great-aunts.
