Beth Gutcheon

BIO

Beth Gutcheon is the critically acclaimed author of MORE THAN YOU KNOW, FIVE FORTUNES, SAYING GRACE, DOMESTIC PLEASURES, STILL MISSING, and THE NEW GIRLS, as well as several film scripts, including the Academy Award nominee The Children of Theatre Street. She lives in New York City.

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PAST INTERVIEW

April 7, 2000

Beth Gutcheon is the acclaimed author of six novels, including her latest creation MORE THAN YOU KNOW. A woman of many interests, in addition to weaving the stories of generations and ghosts in her most recent book, Gutcheon has also written several books on quilting. Her lifeline, however, lies in the art of writing. Recently via e-mail TBR Senior Writer Jana Siciliano interviewed Gutcheon who was in sunny Barcelona. Hear about supernatural experiences that she and friends have witnessed, in addition to learning about her new book, past screenplays, and what it takes to be a writer.

BRC: Your sixth novel, MORE THAN YOU KNOW, combines a gripping ghost story with a poignant tale of young love. What inspired you to write this story?

BG: MORE THAN YOU KNOW came from a number of different sources. My then husband and I had an experience in the seventies in New York that made it clear to both of us that we are all sharing the ozone with spirits without bodies. Later, when I began work on a story about a conflicted relationship between a mother and a teenaged daughter; it occurred to me that being an adolescent, especially one who is not well seen or respected, is a lot like being haunted. You're yanked around by enormously powerful forces and feelings that are real, but invisible to others, and impossible to explain; and the adults seem to believe you're doing all those infuriating things to your hair and going around with those bad people just to be annoying. So it seemed a good premise to create such a relationship and put a real ghost in the middle, frightening, strong and dangerous, which the daughter sees and the parents think is a manifestation of her determination to be infuriating.

BRC: In addition to critics highly applauding this book for being expertly written, some have specifically touted you for writing a "literary" ghost story. Do you think critics are more wary of spiritual tales than realistic ones?

BG: I don't know that critics are leary of spiritual stories, and indeed I think of this one as a study of real phenomena --- of what kind of screwed up spirit hangs around the living complaining instead of going off to what ever comes next for a normal soul. I assume the point about "literary" ghost stories is in distinction from folk or anecdotal stories. The difference between THE TURN OF THE SCREW and the ghost who poured a glass of water on my friend Meaghan, in full view of a roomful of witnesses, is that one is made up for literary purposes while the other is simply reported with astonishment as something that really happened in our universe, however difficult it is to explain.

BRC: What makes some people suspicious of ghost stories while others are drawn to them?

BG: My friend Ben lately said to me that on a trip to Ireland he and his wife were given a bedroom inhabited by the dead grandmother of the house. He said "Miriam saw her and believes in her the way other people believe in tables and chairs." I asked if, then, only Miriam saw the grandmother. Ben said "Oh no, I saw her too, I just don't believe it." I don't know what else to say except that probably what we believe or don't is affected by both reason and volition. And of course experience.

BRC: What do you think makes a good ghost story? What are your favorite supernaturally inspired stories?

BG: I think good ghost stories fit what we already know or believe about psychology. A friend of mine lately said that she had been raised Catholic, and while she was on the fence about whether ghosts exist or not; she had no trouble believing that the concept of Purgatory can be translated to mean that some souls leave this life with unfinished business with the living, and that they have to strive to find ways to effect what was left undone before they can rest. She had an experience in a dream of her dead mother communicating something they both had needed to resolve, but she didn't necessarily believe that that meant she had a ghost experience, though I would say she had.

BRC: You work in Maine and live in New York City. Why do you choose Maine as the backdrop in MORE THAN YOU KNOW? How does working in Maine differ from working in the city?

BG: I was living in Maine the year I finished MORE THAN YOU KNOW, which I had begun some fifteen years earlier and abandoned. In a practical sense I can say that what is most different about writing in Maine is that it's so far north and east that in December the sun sets at 3:50 or so. Much less daylight means you have to get out and about and get your exercise and do your errands at hours I would otherwise be nailed to my desk, and it was a revelation to discover I could rearrange my routines as required by light and weather and function perfectly well. Of course, for writing this book it was also important to have the local speech in my ears all day, and access to research materials that would have been very hard to come by elsewhere. By "research materials" I in many cases mean that I could go to the local library and ask Fern McTighe what books rented for in the Depression and have her able to answer from her own experience. (She turned 80 the year we were there.)

BRC: In addition to writing novels you also write film scripts, including the Academy Award nominee CHILDREN OF THEATER STREET. How does writing a novel differ from writing a film script?

BG: Writing a script differs from a novel in that as a novelist you're responsible for everything: setting, plot, costumes, dialogue, pace, meaning. In a script you are responsible for solving narrative problems (how do we render the passage of all Three Punic Wars in under a minute without showing sand running through an hourglass?), who is in the scene, and what do they say. Almost everything else is somebody else's call, no matter what you call for in the script. This is either very good or very bad, depending on whom you are working with. I mostly thought it was good --- it's fun to be part of a team under pressure, when you spend the rest of your life alone in a room staring into space trying to make something out of nothing.

BRC: What novel of yours would you most like to see as a film? Have you written screenplays of any of your novels?

BG: I wrote the screenplay of my novel STILL MISSING, which became the film Without a Trace. Of course I think MORE THAN YOU KNOW would make a wonderful movie, because the ghost could be done so well on film and because the setting itself is so beautiful. And because it is told in a spare way, the right size for that kind of treatment. (That is a coincidence, from the fact that ghost stories and movies are both essentially short forms, compared to the kind of sprawl and weight a novel can sustain if it has to.)

BRC: Do you find it more or less difficult to adapt your own work into screenplays as opposed to other people's work?

BG: Adapting my own work is not hard, because I know how the machine was put together; there is always the possibility, and we see it on the screen all the time, that an adapter will either miss the essential mechanism of the story or lose it along the way, once he gets fatootsed by what the actors want and what the producer will pay for and so on. But it's hard in that I've already worked on the story so long that I want to leave it alone. I like adapting other peoples' work equally, depending on the book.

BRC: How did writing MORE THAN YOU KNOW differ from the experience of writing your first novel? Do you find writing ever gets easier? Or is that an urban legend...

BG: Hard to say if writing gets easier. I think everyone hates the first draft because, until you get to the end, you don't know if you can get to the end. But the more craft you feel sure of, the easier it is to be confident of all that comes after the first draft.

BRC: You've created quite a following with your other novels including the popular STILL MISSING and THE NEW GIRLS. Was STILL MISSING -- the story about a mother who has to deal with the trauma and loss of her missing son -- a way for you to deal with the insecurities and fears of motherhood?

BG: STILL MISSING was certainly a way for me to deal with my feelings about motherhood, in that I am the mother of one son, having grown up in the middle of a big family and feeling then and now that my brothers and sisters are a great source of security and identity and fun in my life (and my son's). And of course, if you do motherhood right, you lose your children in the end, at least as children.

BRC: Did you attend a prep school similar to the one in THE NEW GIRLS? Was your reality changed by the civil unrest and social protest of the sixties? If so, how?

BG: I did attend a prep school that was at the time embarrassingly like the one in THE NEW GIRLS. We were brought up to be wives of prosperous businessmen circa 1938, and then I for one went off to the Harvard of the mid-sixties (which my hometown thought of as The Kremlin on the Charles). It was, um, disorienting. There didn't seem to me to be anything for it but to get into every kind of trouble possible. We were furious about the war, cared deeply about The Civil Rights movement and passionate about social injustice, which was presenting us an awfully broad target. It was formative in more ways than I can describe.

BRC: When did you decide to become a writer?

BG: I don't know that I decided to become a writer; I loved to read, from the time I was six and used to spend days on the top shelf of my sister's closet with a stack of Oz books, so no one could find me and order me to get my nose out of a book. It was hard to figure out how to read for a living, but I realized that writing makes voracious reading your job.

BRC: What is your writing day like? Do you give yourself writing vacations?

BG: My writing day is very disciplined. In the early stages of a novel I read until I have enough of what I need of the book to start writing. When the writing phase begins I work from about ten to six, with an hour for exercise somewhere in there depending on weather (always go out and walk if I can). I don't talk on the phone or go out for lunch or pay bills or any of that until I have done either seven hours or seven pages. Although, the older I get, the more I find I can be less rigid about the program and still get the work done. My writing vacations are reading.

BRC: As a woman writer, do you find it is easier or harder to "have it all" in terms of your relationships, home, family, and satisfying work?

BG: I don't know what to say about 'having it all." Being a writer when you're happily married gives you a lot more control over your time than people who work for others have; but working for yourself is always a slightly nutso business, since you are employee and employer. Being a writer when you're single, let alone a single mother, is miserable. Writers are alone too much as it is. I think that learning to manage the emotional consequences of being alone too much is by far the hardest part of the job, woman or man, single or married.

BRC: Writers such as Anne Rivers Siddons and Penelope Fitzgerald write glowingly about your work. What writers are you most likely to wax rhapsodic over?

BG: If the question is, what writers have I read all of more than once and mostly more than twice, the list is Austen, Dickens, Cather, Waugh, Nancy Mitford, Scott Fitzgerald. Of writers working now I think Shirley Hazzard is amazing, the living treasure; I admire much of AS Byatt's work, and much of Jane Smiley's, and much of Susan Minot's and what I've read of Andrea Barrett's. I read a great deal of biography as well, and social history.

BRC: Can you tell us a little about your next project, or is it too soon to ask?

BG: It's not too soon to ask about the next project, but as it happens it's too soon to answer. I hope I'm on a reading sabbatical, but if so, it's almost over.

BRC: You're touring now for MORE THAN YOU KNOW. What is your favorite part of the book tour --- what is your least favorite part?

BG: My favorite part of the book tour is the chance to see old friends, and answering questions after readings. The least favorite is being away from my husband and my dog, horrible hound though she is.

BRC: What advice would you give to aspiring writers?

BG: My advice to aspiring writers is, of course, read. But more important, and maybe less obvious (though I've already said it once) is, if you aren't constitutionally suited to being alone for really long stretches, and can't handle the fairly tricky part of the job description which reads paychecks and reality checks may only arrive every three years, it may not be for you. How does any writer know if she's good or merely deranged? It's not a small problem.

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ARTICLE

MORE THAN YOU KNOW, the new novel from Beth Gutcheon, concerns a ghost who haunts a young woman on a small island off the coast of Maine. The novelist herself has no problem admitting, however, that the work is based on real life experiences --- she does believe in ghosts.

The death of a young friend of her family brought her a visceral experience with the beyond --- when the girl was declared brain dead, but her body was still alive, "We were in great grief...[but] odd things happened. Things left in one room were found in another, and on at least two occasions the phone was answered by the answering machine, although we had turned it off. Then came an entirely different kind of visitation, a wordless but completely inarticulate communication that it was over; she was going, that she was at peace entirely..."

Gutcheon is the acclaimed author of five other novels. Her first was THE NEW GIRLS (1979, Putnam), about a girls' boarding school in the 1960s. Her second novel, STILL MISSING (1981, Putnam), about a mother whose child vanishes on the way to school, was translated into 14 languages and made into a film called Without A Trace, for which she wrote the screenplay. After working on other screenplay projects, she wrote DOMESTIC PLEASURES (1991, Villard), a love story about two New Yorkers trying to raise teens while dealing with their own lives. The fourth book, SAYING GRACE (1995, HarperCollins), is set in the world of a private day school in California; and the fifth, FIVE FORTUNES (1998, HarperCollins), is about a year in the lives of five different women who unexpectedly find how much they have in common when they meet at a fancy spa.

Gutcheon also wrote the narration for the documentary feature film The Children of Theater Street, about young ballet students in Russia, which was nominated for an Oscar in 1974. On top of her screen and book writing, Gutcheon also has a reputation for being a great quilter. Her books on patchwork quilts, PERFECT PATCHWORK PRIMER and THE QUILT DESIGN WORKBOOK have sold thousands of copies. She once made a TV series called "A Show of Hands" for WGBH-TV in Boston. Having graduated with honors from Harvard, she moved to Soho in New York City with her husband and children, quilting up a storm until her writing career took off.

--- Jana Siciliano

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