August 4, 2023
Something Borrowed Parts 1&2
SOMETHING BORROWED is a new feature I’m going to be sharing in the (six!) weeks left before the launch of my new novel, ASKING FOR A FRIEND (coming September 5 from @doubledayca).
Though STOLEN GOODS could also be a not entirely unsuitable name…but art is more charitable than that, I think, and influence is everywhere.
In ASKING FOR A FRIEND, I’ve BORROWED from Laurie Colwin, one of my literary lodestars, the notion of a somewhat preposterous cultural institute. In Colwin’s HAPPY ALL THE TIME. it’s the Magna Charta Foundation, the Morris family trust where Guido works. Similar institutes pop up in her other stories, convenient ways to occupy her quirky characters but not to have them so occupied that they need to be confined to a desk all day.
In ASKING FOR A FRIEND, Jess was originally a teacher. Not having had a proper job myself since 2009 (and even that one was more like a Laurie Colwin job than a real one—I was hired as a researcher for a project that never happened), I am not GREAT at writing work, but in order to have them seem like realized human beings, you’ve got to give your fictional people something to occupy their time with. And then, for a variety of reasons, Jess being a teacher wasn’t working out, and I was rereading HAPPY ALL THE TIME at that point, and decided to take a few Colwinesque liberties. I invented the Charlotte Nordstrom Institute for Folk and Fairy Tales, very loosely based on the Osborne Collection of Early Children’s Books housed at the Lillian H. Smith Library (and I swear its petty office grievances are PURELY fictional. So is its carpet.)
Funnest Fact: My book is launching at the Lillian H. Smith Library on Wednesday September 6! Stay tuned for more details…
Giving Jess work at the Nordstrom Institute was a lot of fun, allowing me to weave in my experience working in libraries, as well as the novel’s recurring fairy tale themes and motifs, all the while playing with workplace/office politics and dynamics, just the way that Colwin does.
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I’m excited to share with you the second instalment of my SOMETHING BORROWED series, in which I share the things I’ve borrowed/STOLEN for my new novel, ASKING FOR A FRIEND.
Most obviously, I’ve stolen the setting for Jess and Clara’s apartment from the real apartment I shared with my friends many years ago, although I’ve cut a couple of rooms out, and changed the raccoon that got into the upstairs bedroom into a family of squirrels (with much more destruction—raccoons are pretty laidback as home invaders go). I’ve borrowed the way the golden light shone through the south facing kitchen window, and the incredible sense of home these friends created which I was so lucky to be a part of.
Weirdly, our apartment, for a period, was turned into a museum, though not until many years after we’d moved out, but it hadn’t changed much in the interim, and my novel too is a kind of museum preserving this curious and essential moment in place and time.
Something else I’ve borrowed is a line from the book which was something my very wise friend, Dr. Rebecca Dolgoy, said to me a few years ago, which was, “The children you have make any other world impossible.” She gave me her permission to use that line, for which she’s credited in my acknowledgements.
“The children you have make any other world impossible.” I think maybe the very same thing can be said about good friends.
PS Rebecca is now a Curator at an ACTUAL museum (Ingenium, in Ottawa!), whose collections include the world’s most ancient sample of flowing water. Sadly, they do not store it in a Gabe Kaplan goblet.
