Kathy Hepinstall

BIO

Kathy Hepinstall was born in Odessa, Texas, and spent a large part of her childhood two hours from the Louisiana border, where most of her relatives reside. She lives in Austin, Texas. THE HOUSE OF GENTLE MEN was her first novel.

INTERVIEW

September 21, 2001

Kathy Hepinstall's first novel THE HOUSE OF GENTLE MEN was a lyrical exploration of redemption and the human spirit. Now with THE ABSENCE OF NECTAR, she brings us the character of 11 year-old Alice and her struggles growing up poor in rural Texas. Bookreporter.com writer par excellence Joe Hartlaub talked with Hepinstall about family relationships, the gap between women and men and the poetry of Leonard Cohen.

TBR: Your first novel, THE HOUSE OF GENTLE MEN, was part fantasy, part allegory, yet firmly rooted in the exploration of universal, real-world issues. Your new novel, THE ABSENCE OF NECTAR, could have been based, literally, on this morning's newspaper, or any file picked at random from a Children's Services caseworkers desk. Was there some specific event, past or present, that provided the spark of the idea for AN ABSENCE OF NECTAR?

KH: The first spark, as I remember, came from a bit of a cynical place. At the time I wrote the first draft of THE ABSENCE OF NECTAR, I hadn't yet sold a book. And I was thinking, okay, here's the wild and crazy southern book that perhaps the book world might want. Also I had read a bit of a book called Ellen Foster (or is that the name of the author? I get consistently confused for some reason) and I wanted to do something similar. I'm starting to realize, too, that I like to tell coming-of-age stories, particularly coming-of-age suspense. I read a book about famous women criminals, and there was a story about a woman who, if I remember correctly, had killed her family. She was confined to a mental institution but escaped so often that the newspapers began reporting her escapes. That true story influenced my creation of the character Persely Snow.

TBR: THE ABSENCE OF NECTAR is, in part, a dark coming-of-age novel, told through the eyes of Alice, an eleven-year-old girl growing up in what appears to be a simpler time and place, and  dealing with issues --- awakening adolescence, divorced parents, stepparents, and abuse --- as intense as any which a child growing up in contemporary America might have to deal with. Yet the relationship between Alice and Boone, her brother, provided a balance. It conveyed a sense that no matter how badly the adults made a mess of things, the children, standing together would directly or indirectly make things well again. Was this an element that developed over the course of your writing of THE ABSENCE OF NECTAR or something that you had outlined in advance?

KH: The first allies or enemies that you make are your own siblings. In many of my writings, there is a loyal brother figure (Milo in House of Gentle Men, for example) that acts as a kind of shepherd --- a berserk shepherd, in Milo's case. My own brother is two years older than me and I tend to insert him in my narratives. Even when growing up in "normal" families, children have their own heroic sense of camaraderie and faithfulness. I'm not sure it was a conscious decision to have the bond so strong between brother and sister as it was a natural outgrowth of my own real-life relationship with my brother. Another thought I just had: I think that's why I love THE PRINCE OF TIDES so much. The love between siblings is so intense and exists without boundary or apology.

TBR: Your work is as quietly intense as anything I have read in recent memory. While you certainly, and obviously, have the ability to present matters from the feminine viewpoint, your presentation of the behavioral strengths and shortcomings of both genders is unabashedly honest. You don't hesitate to present those behavioral contradictions, good and bad, which cause the triumphs and disappointments in the relationships between men and women. Is this the function of astute observation, coupled with literary talent, or have their been any particular philosophers whom you have studied that have led you to these presentations?

KH: This is probably a bad paraphrase but I remember some lines from Leonard Cohen:

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in

I feel the way about people that I feel about literature. I can tolerate enormous faults if there is some shining overall quality. Loyalty, generosity, love. Have you ever read a book that was technically faultless but left you inspired? I've met people like that and I prefer the flawed and beautiful ones.

TBR: Do you have any plans, no matter how general to revisit Alice, perhaps in adulthood, in a future novel?

KH: You know, I really liked Alice, and I've been told that the character is close to "the real me." What I liked about her is that she had much more control of the narrative than, say, Charlotte in THE HOUSE OF GENTLE MEN. You know how they always say, it's not what happens to you but how you react to it? She had an appreciation for the absurd that would have made her interior life colorful and dramatic even in a "normal" household. I would love to see her again and maybe even write a sequel.

TBR: Over the past year you moved from Texas to San Francisco. San Francisco has inspired a number of great authors across many genres --- from Fritz Leiber and Frank Herbert and Dashiell Hammett, to Jack London and Robert Louis Stevenson, to Armistead Maupin and Amy Tan, to a dozen others I could easily name. Do you notice that the change of residence has generated any difference in your writing?

KH: You know, I never thought of it before, but I wrote the rough draft of a novel called THE MIGRATION OF MAD WOMEN there --- and that narrative was much less centered on a southern location. But I've been wanting to get away from distinctly southern narratives for a while. But I think I find my inspiration further south than San Francisco.  It felt too foreign to me to really attach to it as a writer.

TBR: You are in what appears to be an enviable position, though it might be a two edged sword, in that as THE ABSENCE OF NECTAR is being released there is already some industry buzz about your third novel. Can you tell us anything about your next novel?

KH: I'm not sure which novel will be my third --- Putnam bought it sight unseen --- but I do have a novel in their consideration about a fourteen-year-old girl who tends graves for tips.  She is burgeoning sexually but subverts that in an obsession with the dead.  Her sister is the town slut, and disappears mysteriously one night. The grave tender must find not only her sister but her own misplaced sexuality. I haven't heard from my editor yet.  Now that I think about this story, I realize that she might be hiding behind her desk.

TBR: In my review of THE ABSENCE OF NECTAR, I speculate just a bit about aspects of your educational background. While we don't necessarily need to know if you were an active participant in math class, our readers would be curious to know what your educational background is, in terms of what schools you attended and what you majored in. Could you tell us a bit about that?

KH: I majored in radio-TV-film at The University of Texas. It can be a very useful degree or you can plan it carefully, like I did, to insure that after four years you know practically nothing. I think I had some vague idea of being a Hollywood producer, without knowing exactly what that meant. In my last years at the university, I took some advertising courses, and that is what my day job ended up being. I'm very influenced by advertising people. They have an incredible, almost Southern in fact, appreciation for the absurd. Later I tried to enter the creative writing program at the University of Houston, but wasn't allowed in. Instead I had to take the literary studies track, and got my master's in literature. I think that being forced to read books in this time period probably helped my writing enormously. So did advertising writing. It forces you to work on a deadline and also to think conceptually. Also, good advertising writing goes beyond the product and finds some deeper emotional resonance with the audience. That probably helped too, if one might think of the narrative as a product and the characters and themes as the emotional benefit.

TBR: What authors do you feel have most influenced you?

KH: I've mentioned Pat Conroy. He fascinates me because he's not a perfect writer nor perfectly controlled in his writing but his humanity is absolute genius. I love what Michael Ondaatje does with words in THE ENGLISH PATIENT. I used to be more into the Latin American writers, but as time goes by my writing has become less surreal.

TBR: What sort of work regimen did you practice while you were completing THE ABSENCE OF NECTAR?

KH: I usually write a great amount in a relatively small period of time in which I do little else. Those writers who get up at five in the morning for ten years while holding down a full-time job are amazing. I don't think I could do that.

TBR: Are you working on anything now?

KH: I'm writing a novel for a company that does young adult fiction. We're trying to develop a young adult novel with a supernatural bent.

TBR: What books have you read in the past six months that you would recommend to your readers?

KH: There was a book I really enjoyed called "E."  It's set in a London ad agency and parts of it are wickedly funny. Also a book called "Speak." --- a young adult novel about a high school girl with a secret whose outlook on life is so cynical and funny in the midst of this tragedy. It's one of those books I can't even really say I read. I was so interested I raced though it, skipping big parts of it to get to the end.

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PAST INTERVIEW

February 9, 2001

It's a beautiful phenomenon when a seemingly small book busts out of the publishing gates and quickly rallies a huge fan following. This is what happened with Kathy Hepinstall's riveting suspense novel, THE HOUSE OF GENTLE MEN, now available in paperback. Senior Writer Joe Hartlaub read the book in hardcover and fell in love with Hepinstall's vivid prose and superior story. In honor of the paperback, he returned to the author and asked her a series of questions about THE HOUSE OF GENTLE MEN, her reaction to the overwhelmingly positive male and female response, who she would love to star in the possible film version, a sneak preview of her next project, and much more.

BRC: THE HOUSE OF GENTLE MEN was marketed, at least initially, as a novel for women. It certainly is that; it is also, however, a novel that dances across several genres --- mystery, gothic, fantasy, romance, to name a few --- yet ultimately defies classification. Did you begin writing a romantic novel, or did it take on a life of its own as it unfolded?

KH: That's a good question. I never intended the novel to be romantic in the classical sense of the word. In the back of my mind, perhaps, was the kind of epic, tragic love that THE ENGLISH PATIENT so beautifully explored. And I wanted this story to have a very gothic, atmospheric mood. I was interested in exploring love, but also guilt, loneliness, war, grief, violence and redemption.

BRC: THE HOUSE OF GENTLE MEN is by turns poetic, allegorical, beautiful, and violent. I was struck by some of the classical elements and vehicles you used to write it and how these were melded into a very modern setting to create a novel that, rather than being a reinvention of someone else's work, is very uniquely your own. Were you in fact influenced by any particular author in writing THE HOUSE OF GENTLE MEN?

KH: Toni Morrison's BELOVED was a big influence on me. I loved the fact that the house in her novel was the center of the narrative --- the center of each converging story --- and held so much tension. And I liked the way SNOW FALLING ON CEDARS used World War II as a backdrop to the story. Someone said once that if you use a great event in a novel, it will make the novel "bigger." For example, the way Toni Morrison wove in the subject of slavery in BELOVED gave that book so much more depth and resonance.

BRC: While again, it was marketed as a novel for women, THE HOUSE OF GENTLE MEN is, I believe, of particular interest to men. As your novel comes perilously close to spilling the beans, so to speak, as to what women want, an unanswerable, unfathomable issue as far as most men are concerned. You, of course, can go into as much or as little detail as you want, but what was the impetus behind the writing of THE HOUSE OF GENTLE MEN?

KH: Initially I thought of this novel as a "literary chick book," and I was surprised at the passionate response of the male readers. Their reaction meant a lot to me. I think that the book is actually very sympathetic to men. In the past few years I've become very interested in the fact that men love a very different way than women love. A friend of mine and I were discussing soap operas --- the reason soap operas are so popular, she said, is that they show men loving the same way women do --- a sensitive, romantic, all-consuming kind of love. Not that men can't be that way. It's just that women tend to affix their own fantasies onto men. All told, I don't think this is fair to men. Another person told me: "Women marry men expecting them to change. Men marry women expecting them never to change." This strikes me as particularly true. The overriding question, then, is how can men and women overcome these wildly different approaches to love? THE HOUSE OF GENTLE MEN is kind of wishful thinking --- a place where men act the way women, in their imaginations, hope they will. But even women are conflicted on the subject of "gentle men." Women do appreciate and long for them. But we're also attracted to "bad boys," like Benjamin, waiting like a wolf in his sweet potato barn.

BRC: I was initially attracted to THE HOUSE OF GENTLE MEN after visiting the website for the book (www.houseofgentlemen.com). How did the idea for the website come about? And how much involvement did you have in its creation? I really like the website, too!

KH: A friend of mine is a web designer, and he came up with the idea of a house as a main page that is entered through the windows. We wanted to give visitors an idea of what the house might look and feel like, and draw them into the story. Another friend of mine shot the house one very cold morning. The house on the website is actually in a neighborhood in Austin, Texas, but it had the right look and feel of THE HOUSE OF GENTLE MEN. Originally the website told men to stay away, that this was a house for women. The advertiser in me thought this was a provocative way to introduce the website. But a couple of men complained, and they were right; the opening statement was in direct contrast to the spirit of the novel. So now the website welcomes all gentle men.

BRC: The paperback edition of THE HOUSE OF GENTLE MEN has just been released, and in a few months your second novel, THE ABSENCE OF NECTAR, will be published in hardcover. What can you tell us about THE ABSENCE OF NECTAR?

KH: THE ABSENCE OF NECTAR is a very different book than THE HOUSE OF GENTLE MEN. In this latest one, I wanted to combine a southern coming-of-age story with a suspenseful narrative. THE ABSENCE OF NECTAR is set in rural East Texas, which has more of a southern ambiance than a stereotypically "Texas" one. This novel is about two children who find themselves with a mysterious new stepfather who claims that his own family drowned in a nearby lake. The children don't believe his story. Their mother tells them they have wild imaginations. Until the night she comes into their room and, instead of her usual endearments, whispers a single word: Run.

I had a great time writing this novel. Puberty, poison, faith, secrets, lies, obsession, one very stupid dog, and one obligatory reference to The Alamo. It's coming out early in the fall.

BRC: Are there any plans for a film adaptation of THE HOUSE OF GENTLE MEN?

KH: A producer/director named Arne Glimcher (The Mambo Kings, Gorillas in the Mist) optioned it and is trying to raise the money to have the film made. I personally would love to see Joaquin Phoenix in the role of Justin. He's got that haunted quality.

BRC: You are also preparing to take a short trip to Mexico in the process of completing your third novel. Which leads to my next question: is there any "real world" setting for the characters and/or the setting of THE HOUSE OF GENTLE MEN?

KH: Some of the character traits are borrowed from my family. There's a little bit of one of my cousins and also my brother in the character of Milo, for instance. And I think there's a little bit of me in the character of Leon Olen. He believes privacy means everything, and thinks he can change the course of fate if he just gets the words right. And, like Louise, my mother really did defeat two girls in a school house fight by grabbing one by the hair and using her to pummel the other one into submission. As for the setting, I used the area of Beauregard Parish in Louisiana. I know the region well. Some of my relatives still live there. It's a mystical, beautiful, somewhat haunted kind of place. Snakes too.

BRC: Could you tell us about your academic background?

KH: I got my undergraduate degree in Radio-TV-Film from the University of Texas at Austin. Then I tried to enter the creative writing program at The University of Houston. Donald Barthelme declared me "marginal" and then died. I like to remember these as his last words. Because I couldn't get in the creative writing program, I got a master's degree in English Literature.

BRC: You recently moved from Austin, Texas to the San Francisco area while in the midst of writing your third novel. San Francisco is one of those cities that seems to be a wellspring of creativity, with the Beat Generation, Jack London, Robert Louis Stevenson, Fritz Leiber, Frank Herbert, Amy Tan, and many other authors finding inspiration there. Did you find the change of setting inspirational in any way?

KH: To be honest, I found writing in Austin, Texas to be more inspirational, as it was only three hours from the Louisiana border. I miss the woods, and I miss the sweet, sad way old women mourn the death of their bromeliads in a sudden freeze.

BRC: Could you tell us about your writing work schedule?

KH: I tend to work obsessively over a short period of time until I've finished a draft. In the past few years, I would freelance as an advertising writer until I had enough money to take a few months off and write novels. Now I take off a couple of days a week on a more regular schedule, which seems to be working all right.

BRC: Have you read any books in the past six months that you would recommend to our readers?

KH: I've read most of THE HOURS by Michael Cunningham and found it quite beautiful. And I read an amazing book last summer called RAVELING by Peter Moore Smith, who is actually related to actress Julianne Moore. Just a total page turner, good writing, brilliant story. That book made me feel good about the publishing business, believe or not!

BRC: Will you be doing a book tour in support of THE ABSENCE OF NECTAR?

KH: Yes, I hope to. I really like doing readings, and figuring out how to draw an audience into the story. Thank you for the interview, Joe. I enjoyed these questions.

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