Rheta Grimsley Johnson Discusses Change: From Print Journalism to the New Media

by Shana Thornton-Morris, Managing Editor

Working as a columnist and reporter since the 1970s, Rheta Grimsley Johnson has witnessed the reshaping of the newspaper industry. From issues of nepotism, the inclusion of women in the newsroom, to the ultimate dwindling of print journalism in the face of new media giants, Johnson covers many sides of the newsprint in her most recent memoir, Enchanted Evening Barbie and the Second Coming: a memoir (New South Books, 2010). And, in spite of the new virtual media, she remains loyal to the tangible—to the ink on her fingers created by print journalism.

“I’m finished with memoirs,” Johnson says, while laughing. Enchanted Evening Barbie and the Second Coming is an unlikely title for a journalist who lives in the self-titled Fishtrap Hollow, but Johnson isn’t interested in presenting you with a glossy magazine image of Barbie and her world of Dream Houses. Johnson has a soft voice but is straightforward, like her writing style. She gazes into your eyes, a direct look.

As she writes in her memoir, “We weren’t ever going to dress, look, or live like Barbie. Our Dream House would come with utility bills…. Ken might take the Dream Car and run off with Midge…. A Country Picnic always had rain and ants. An Enchanted Evening could end in an unwanted pregnancy. (…) There should be a Barbie outfit for that. Disenchanted Evening.”

Given her tongue-in-cheek style, Johnson’s next revelation about promoting her memoir is surprising. Johnson says, “This has all been bizarre… surreal. Women have shown up to readings and signings dressed as Barbie. They’ve obviously not read the book. They think it’s about Barbie dolls. I don’t know what’s going on,” she says bewildered. She goes on to say that she’ll write about it later, and I suspect that she isn’t quite finished with writing memoirs.

Johnson and I have met in a hotel restaurant and are seated at a small round table. She is a guest speaker at the Clarksville Writer’s Conference in Tennessee. I place a small mp3 player in the center of the table and Johnson gives it a sideways stare. I press record, explaining that I’m uncertain of how this one works—it’s new, another type of technology. For back-up, I have a notebook and pen that I also place on the table and we begin discussing what it has been like for Johnson to watch the newspaper industry change rapidly over the course of three decades. She started her writing career on a manual typewriter and says that she was “damn proud” of being labeled a feminist, first while writing for her college newspaper, The Auburn Plainsman, and later as a columnist. To be a liberal feminist in the South could be a case of double profanity, depending on the town. Johnson is also a humorist, a third obstacle, and one that she slightly altered and even delineated from. She admits that the rural South was behind the progressive cities and towns of the US, and that’s why her work as a journalist, for many newspapers throughout the South but especially for Memphis’ The Commercial Appeal and Atlanta’s Atlanta Journal-Constitution two of the South’s oldest daily newspapers, is even more intriguing.

In the memoir, she is at once proud of the feminist label and questioning of it, and that duality shows her remarkable honesty. At the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Johnson took over a famous column written by Lewis Grizzard, who died in 1994. He was a beloved humorist in Georgia, and Johnson received “hate mail” for her liberal slant. Of course, she toned herself down considerably and was eventually restricted to only news within Georgia.

So, she reached out to Americans living below the poverty line, dusted off their “whatnot” shelves, and became a voice for people who wouldn’t have otherwise told their stories. She’s known for her objectivity and compassion, and was one of three finalists for the 1991 Pulitzer Prize in commentary. Her curiosity embodies not only the momentum of chasing previously unheard stories, but also the challenge of working hard for ideals that often fail to live up to our expectations.

Johnson searched for journalistic gems before she had even finished college at Auburn. Rheta and her first husband Jimmy Johnson pursued the idyllic dream of starting a weekly newspaper on St. Simons Island. There, she used “antique type-setting equipment, cantankerous machines called Justowriters.” After their relentless pursuit of journalistic ownership fell flat, Rheta and Jimmy settled into full time jobs at The Monroe Journal in Monroeville, AL, where they overlooked the nepotism policy at the time—that spouses could not work together, and often the woman in the pair was asked to resign. Eventually, the couple did face the problem at another newspaper; fortunately, Jimmy created the cartoon strip Arlo and Janis, while Rheta traveled as a reporter and columnist throughout the South and often abroad.

Aside from her journalism career, Rheta’s story has many unexpected turns for the reader—a bewildering divorce, the unexpected tragedy of her friend and lover Barry’s suicide in her driveway, and finally discovering love and companionship with her second husband Don Grierson, a retired journalism professor. She had intended to write a funny book, one that chronicled her Christmas celebrations. However, she had only written three chapters when Grierson died, and the book changed. It continues to carry the initial humor, but took on an unexpectedly serious tone. Finishing the memoir helped Johnson to process some of her grief.

“I was in some kind of zone, I’ll tell you,” she says about writing the memoir. “I was grieving, and it is honest. I had done thirty years of columns and always held back a little, and all of a sudden it seemed like it didn’t matter about being diplomatic or pretending to be something that I wasn’t.”

She is disappointed to see the dwindling of print journalism and calls herself, “an old newspaper hack” and says, “That’s okay. I’ve had a nice run. I’m just not interested in recreating myself for the new media. I know it’s legit. I know it could be done…. I’ll write for newspapers as long as they exist, and then I won’t write.”

“Everyone has to find their place, what they’re good at whether that’s longer novels or short stories,” Johnson says. “I’ve been at it long enough that I know my niche and do it well, and that’s what I’m going to do.”

Indeed, not only has the medium of journalism shifted into the virtual realm, but in the memoir, Johnson also reminds us that the subject matter of “news” has altered into an obsession with celebrity culture, in print media as well. She tells a story of having lunch with several new reporters in Atlanta, fresh on the presses graduates, who are discussing celebrities that they’re covering and one particular celebrity becomes the focus of the conversation. At some point during the lunch, Johnson realizes that she’s the only reporter who doesn’t personally know the celebrity.

“On anything that’s been written about me, the bottom line is that I am a newspaper person,” Johnson says. “That’s what I’ve done everyday of my life for 35-years. These books have gotten a lot of attention, but I guess they’re not as defining to me as what I’ve done. Anna Quindlen had that great title, Thinking Out Loud, and that’s important to me. And, people discount that. They think if something’s not between hard covers, then it’s not writing. Well, I beg to differ. If you give it your all and roll out of bed everyday to write… that’s been my life’s work. I enjoy being able to be more expansive, but the 750-word essays that I would do four times a week in Memphis and later in Atlanta, that has defined me and kept me going. It’s still what I do, not four times a week anymore,” she laughs. Before we leave the restaurant, Johnson reminds me to press stop on the mp3 recording of our interview and to save it. I suspect that she’s more technologically curious and adept than she desires.

Johnson has won numerous awards in journalism, from the Ernie Pyle Memorial Award in human interest reporting to an induction into the Scripps Howard Newspapers Editorial Hall of Fame. Johnson has written three other nonfiction books. Her first memoir is Poor Man’s Provence: Finding Myself in Cajun Louisiana (New South Books, 2008). America’s Faces (St. Luke’s Press, 1987) contains a collection of human-interest stories and articles. Johnson also wrote the authorized biography of Charles Schulz, Good Grief: The Story of Charles M. Schulz (Pharos Books, 1989).

Currently, Johnson is a syndicated columnist for King Features of New York and her columns appear in newspapers across the US.

Enchanted Evening Barbie and the Second Coming: a memoir, published by New South Books, is available now.

Buy the book Amazon

Shana Thornton-Morris serves as Managing Editor for Her Circle Ezine’s Books and Literature section. In addition, she writes interviews, features and fiction. She also teaches composition and literature courses, chases her husband and daughter, and runs trails with her dog Mojo.

Purge by Sofi Oksanen

Review by Sharon Samuel

Harper Paperbacks, 2010

With gripping suspense and graphic honesty, Sofi Oksanen breathes life into “a world of brittle paper [and] moldy old albums emptied of pictures,” to create a tapestry where past meets present, and the shadow of war stands starkly against the prospect of peace. In her debut novel Purge, Oksanen explores various forms of loss—loss of innocence, of freedom, of national pride, and of love—in a manner that demonstrates the depth of human resilience.

Purge centers on the elderly Aliide Truu and her charge Zara, who turns up at Aliide’s unassuming home in Estonia, bloodied and desperately seeking refuge from her former life as a sex slave. Though their paths appear to intersect coincidentally, Oksanen slowly reveals the disturbing connection between the two women through a series of flashbacks.

The novel begins in the year 1992, when Aliide and Zara engage in their cryptic dialogue and the older woman struggles to open herself up to the younger. Oksanen then abruptly introduces the Estonia of the Soviet era, during which Aliide learns to live quietly and simply under the heavy hand of the government. The reader is also transported to Zara’s past. Succumbing to the allure of earning money in Western Europe, Zara leaves her home and lands in her captors’ snare.

The suffering that both women endure may cause readers to redefine, and certainly to broaden, their perception of rape—that is, what it means to be robbed of physical and psychological purity, and to be humiliated to the point where security can only be found in distrust. Oksanen’s vivid language exposes the atrocities committed under the USSR through the lens of a feminine world altogether intimate, nurturing and tragic.

At the same time, Purge is a story about storytelling; Oksanen’s choppy format creates apprehension in the reader, as it becomes increasingly clear that there is more to Aliide and Zara than they are willing to divulge initially. By deliberately holding back key pieces of information and moving the reader in and out of layers of time, Purge is truly an adventure in itself.

Ultimately, what Oksanen has achieved is a multilayered drama about the vitality of the Estonian spirit. Certain characters seem to personify disappointment in the Allied response to their plight; and yet, despite the imminence of physical and spiritual death in post-World War II Europe, such darkness is eclipsed by the magnificence of survival.

Based Upon Availability by Alix Strauss

Review by Mayra David

Harper Paperbacks, 2010

A hotel is the perfect setting for Strauss’ characters; eight women passing through the lobby and rooms of an impressive and impersonal hotel. Like hotel rooms, bodies may come with standard fixtures, and one can never tell who is living inside. The characters in this book feel free in their own heads, as they do in their hotel rooms, to wallow in their neuroses, fetishes, and poisonous feelings just as long as the outside world doesn’t notice. A hotel room can always be wiped clean of a person’s presence, their mess; nobody cares about their pain.

Strauss’ doesn’t flinch at all when taking first one, then another woman under a magnifying glass. While I think it is brave to tackle such psyches head on, I quickly felt disinterested in her main character, Morgan, the hotel’s manager, who gets the first few chapters of the book. Morgan, bereft by her sister’s death nearly 25 years ago, is a dispirited, destructive person – monotonously so. She regularly enters occupied hotel rooms and tries on guests’ clothes, takes their beauty products and prescription medication. It’s not a simple case of sticky fingers. Rather, it seems she is trying to penetrate their privacy, getting to know them in the way she wishes somebody would do with her, force a connection with her, and bring her back to life.

The succeeding chapters each deal with one of the other seven women and we don’t get back to Morgan till the very end. Here, Strauss hits her stride. The other characters are just as richly developed, if not more so. They have more interesting quirks and stories. Anne, for example, a borderline (she confirmed online) obsessive-compulsive concierge, was both frightening and entertaining all at the same time. Not entertaining in her OCD ways, but entertaining in that she goes beyond the walls of the hotel: into the city, on a date arranged online. And Trish: The back of the book will tell you she is consumed with envy for her newly skinny, newly engaged best friend. But that hardly begins to describe the bundle of pain and aspiration this woman seems to be.

With a plot, this could have been a great novel. The elements are there: great characterization, crisp writing. But instead the book is really a collection of short stories that uses Morgan as a thread to function as a novel. Generally this works very well, though at times it feels forced. The strongest thread through these stories is really the uniformity in their voices. Though heard from different points of view, it’s the same voice whether it’s being told from the first person or a close third person. Even the unusual second person perspective is an ill-conceived notion in this case.

The other women are well-developed in varying degrees. Strauss is a skilled writer, that much is clear. She knows how to create a person on a page. If only she had given them room to breathe, perhaps asked Morgan to move over a little and make some room for the other lovely, lonely, damaged women.

Butterfly Tears, Stories by Zoe S. Roy

Review by Rose Gold

Inanna Publications, 2009

Butterfly Tears is a collection of fifteen short stories which oscillate between China and North America. Through memories, dreams, dialogue and the sparing use of symbol, these short stories speak of the almost unendurable hardship suffered in the “Cultural Revolution” of Mao’s China as well as the shock and bewilderment experienced by Chinese immigrants in North America as they struggle to come to terms with the new world they have found themselves in and the loss of the old world they have left behind.

The stories are simply told and move effectively and seamlessly through time and place. Throughout the pieces, we are given sometimes glimpses and sometimes enduring images of a lost world, of a new world as seen through the immigrants’ eyes, and of the relationships caught between both worlds. It is intriguing to learn about the Cultural Revolution in China and to see how ruinous and stultifying those years were. At times it is almost hard to believe the extent to which individual freedoms were suppressed. In several stories, public denunciations occur. In “Ten Yuan”, for instance, a man is denounced for telling a joke, and in Twin Rivers, a woman denounces her own husband. The paralyzing fear of the regime is an ever-present undercurrent in these stories, and some scenes seem almost prototypical of Orwell’s 1984.

There is a distinct feminine and feminist perspective in the stories. Many of them deal with women who cast off traditional values – Confucian or Maoist – to begin a new life in North America where they must confront unexpected challenges and troubles in family relationships. In “Butterfly Tears”, for instance, childhood memories of a crazed old man abandoned by his wife, entwine with an old Chinese myth of thwarted love and with disturbing dreams to torment a woman who is about to separate from her husband.

While later stories deal with the conflicts and fortunes in the relationships of Chinese women who struggle to adapt to North American society, many of the early stories take place in Mao’s China. One of these, “Yearning”, is an effective and gripping tale of escape from Communist China, and in “Frog Fishing” a very realistic and sickening denunciation is portrayed. “Twin Rivers”, straddling both worlds, is an effective story of jealousy, revenge and shame, which echoes and reflects an earlier tragedy.

This collection offers the reader many captivating cameos of the Chinese/North American experience as seen through women’s eyes. The stories are believable and direct and do not fail to engage the reader with their weave of dream, memory and often surprising turns of fate. Especially intriguing are the stories and scenes set in Mao’s China, which give us a rare glimpse in to the dark and frightening world of the Cultural Revolution, the totalitarian nightmare which in some way or another haunts every one of these stories.

Zoe S. Roy was born in China and was an eyewitness to the Red Trror under Mao’s regime. Her short fiction has appeared in several Canadian magazines. She currently lives in Toronto where she works as an adult educator and writer.

Apparition Wren by Maureen Aslop

Review by Metta Sáma

Main Street Rag, 2007

We’re often trained to think of titles as the entryway to the poem; after all, it’s the first thing the eyes (are supposed to) land on when first encountering a poem. Some of us (renegades that we are) choose to save the poem for last or to meet it somewhere in the middle of our reading, a sly glance upwards that says “hmmmmm. . . now what is this poem doing?” Sometimes the title is a place-holder, sometime it’s a key to the workings of the poet’s mind. In Maureen Alsop’s debut book, Apparition Wren, the title of the collection works as the latter.

Alsop’s poems are wicked, irreverent, often tender with a sly edge; yes, sometimes they’re abundant in their play, and she goes after this decadent language with intense vigor. They very often perform as the title of the collection performs, as a little mystery with logic built in: what is an apparition wren? Is it similar to an apparition of wrens? Is it the apparition of a wren? Is it the voice of someone startled who accidentally left “of” out of the equation? Is it a child speaker? A dialect? I’m still not sure, but I certainly enjoy the topsy-turvy smashed up world the title (and the poems themselves) toss me into.

In “Autobiography of Fresh Oil” Alsop takes on the voice and attitude of oil that has seemingly lain itself on a road and is interrupted by a farmer, who drives his tractor over the oil. Of course, this angers the oil, after all, it’d lain itself out to be sunned!

Where the oiled road tapered into a bend
past shaded oak, I flat
lay myself on it. I burn
under the gravel sun. Until

a tractor come: he, farmer
of cornfield, say Fuck; yes (1-6)

The poem takes many a surreal turn and the voice of oil becomes muddled, less slick, abbreviated, and damaged: “I want/to enter him into me in repulsive way”, “But//blank my speak”, “A breeze//punish me”, “Later, I squeal//to the good doctor” (17-18, 21-22, 25-26, 31-32). Eventually, the oil “come[s] to know/nothing/of [it] self” (43-45). This is Alsop’s Apparition Wren at its core: ever-turning, ever-searching, ever-leaping.

In the oft-quoted poem “Daguerreotype Portrait of Woman and Bird” (itself a mine-field of style and tone, attitude and experiment (beginning with a six-line stanza on one page, moving to a 3-stanza 11-line poem on the next page, a 4-stanza 16-line poem on the next page, and followed by two pages of stanzas that alternate from solid structures to shifty foundations)), Alsop throws in 8 lines (3 stanzas) of backward slash marks to indicate “thinned ink” that had been “cramped” on paper:

// //////// //// //
//// // /// ////// /////

///////// /// //// / ///// ///// /////// ////////
//// /// //////// / /// ///// //////

/// /////////,
//////////////////////////
/////////////////////////
//////////////////////// (42-49).

I had the great pleasure of meeting Maureen Alsop recently. We took a walk together and laughed at the funny names of plants and agreed that poetry, often, is the intense desire to laugh with and play with language, to interrogate it, to twist it and sharpen our tongues on it. Apparition Wren, with its multiple voices, its attention to detail, and its hybridity of contemporary languages and archaic diction certainly masters the art of poetry that makes one want to work hard to get to the heart of every word.

Grace from Friction: An Interview with Margaret Dilloway

by Hannah Eason

Hawaii-based author Margaret Dilloway’s debut novel, How to Be an American Housewife (Putnam Books 2010), takes on a subject near, dear and a little dreadful to most of us: the mother-daughter relationship. In the simplest of circumstances, it’s a relationship marked by friction: between wills, between intentions, between interpretations of what the other means at any given moment.

In addition to everyday growing pains, Shoko and Sue (mother and daughter in Dilloway’s novel) must work through conflicts of culture. Shoko is a Japanese-born housewife trained in proper etiquette and home management. Sue is her American-born daughter who makes it her task to place Shoko’s behavior – which has always seemed odd from an all-American vantage point – in a context where it makes perfect sense.

From a relationship historically fraught with one uphill battle after another, Dilloway harvests the rewards we mothers and daughters always hope to achieve: understanding, respect, a unique brand of friendship, and grace.

Hannah Eason: The title of your novel comes from a fictional guidebook purchased for the mother in the story, Shoko, by her husband Charlie with the intention of helping her transition from Japanese to American culture. You’ve mentioned that you had a real-life inspiration for this guidebook. Tell us some about The American Way of Housekeeping and what role it played in the formation of your novel.

Margaret Dilloway: My mother had a copy of The American Way of Housekeeping. It’s a book of housekeeping tips, written by a military officers’ wives club, for Japanese housekeepers. The book shows Japanese writing on one side of the page and the English translation on the other. My dad thought it might help my mother out, maybe even help her learn English, but I don’t think she did anything more than glance at it.

I was a bit astounded at how, frankly, backwards the American women seemed to consider their Japanese housekeepers to be. True, there are American recipes and explanations on how to use Western-style appliances, but there are also sections warning the housekeepers to do things like keep children away from wells. I wouldn’t think any culture would let children play by a well.
The book made me realize that perhaps how I viewed my mother was different than how the American occupation would have viewed her in the 1950s. I’d always thought my mother was, if anything, more careful than my friends’ mothers, so it was shocking.

H.E.: Obedience seems to be an important theme in the book, with Shoko claiming her own disobedience and her daughter, Sue, stating up front that she has always been obedient. How would you say their differing dispositions in that regard affect how they understand one another?

M.D.: Shoko knows she’s always been disobedient, and she tries to change her nature, but cannot. She is afraid that her daughter is the same as she is, and it will lead to her daughter’s downfall. Sue has always been obedient, but being so accommodating didn’t turn out well for her, either. She sees her mother as controlling and judgmental, and doesn’t fully comprehend Shoko’s background.

They both know what societal norms are and try to fit in. Shoko’s an outsider with Americans. Sue is an outsider with her mother’s peer group. Neither truly fits in anywhere, and maybe what the book is suggesting is that this is all right. You don’t have to fit in anywhere, you have to be yourself and if your loved ones understand and support you, that’s a bonus.

H.E.: Through what seems to be a delicate, evolving communication barrier between mother and daughter, Sue often interprets Shoko’s words as carrying heavy disapproval when Shoko does not view them this way at all. How much of their struggle derives from having grown up in different cultures, and how much of it is the simple age-old struggle of parent and child?

M.D.: I think much of what Shoko says would be interpreted as harsh in Western culture, but to Shoko it’s simply honesty. Communication is also a fairly universal struggle among mothers and daughters. Some mothers who have read this book have told me they think every mother and daughter should read it. There are always meta-messages behind what mothers and daughters say to each other. Deborah Tannen wrote a great book about how mothers and daughters communicate, called You’re Wearing That explaining the competition, love, and anxiety that goes into mother-daughter communication. Mothers tend to project a lot of their own stuff, both good and bad, onto their daughters.

H.E.: At one point in the novel, Shoko’s husband and Sue’s father, Charlie, is unemployed. Having done everything she can to stretch the family’s resources and encourage her husband, Shoko states, “I wished more than anything that I could go out into the world and conquer it for my family.” How does Shoko deal with the limitations imposed on her by culture, especially when her disposition is to defy limits, to be disobedient?

M.D.: Shoko is first limited by her culture and historical circumstance– post World War II Japan. Then her health becomes an issue, so even if she wanted to could go get a job, she would have had problems with her heart worsening through the years. She deals with it by pretty much pinning all her hopes on her daughter, living through her daughter, though it’s largely unintentional. Shoko also has a lot of internalized conflict.

H.E.: Shoko’s daughter, Sue, is a single mother working long hours for the sake of supporting her family. What is Shoko’s view on her daughter for whom work outside the home is simultaneously a necessity and an option that was never, in America at least, on the table for Shoko herself?

M.D.: Shoko realizes it’s a necessity. But Shoko gets a new expectation that Sue ought to be an executive, since she works full-time and has a college degree. I don’t think Shoko fully understands how corporate America works. And of course Sue feels she is disappointing her mother in this way, too.

H.E.: Shoko had a relationship with a man in Japan which would’ve been very difficult to pursue. She instead chooses Charlie, an American soldier, because a secure future in the United States is made possible through him. While this marriage is founded in the practical rather than emotional, we see ample instances of kindness, even adoration, unfold between them. What can you tell us about the sort of love that Shoko has for Charlie? Also, is this type of love satisfactory to her?

M.D.: It began as a marriage of necessity for Shoko. In many cultures and in historical times, marriage took place not because there was romantic love, but because of necessity. Shoko knows that Charlie is dependable, though imperfect, and he’ll never desert her. In a time when it was not uncommon for Japanese brides of Americans to be deserted, that counted for a lot with Shoko. So I think it’s a satisfactory love in that way. She’s got a pretty nice home in San Diego and, while there are still some hardships, it’s a lot better than what she had as a child and young adult.

H.E.: How do Shoko’s decisions regarding men influence the way that she looks upon her daughter Sue’s love life?

M.D.: There’s no clear answer. Shoko thought her life with Ronin would be too difficult, so she picked what she thought would be an easier life. That life wasn’t so easy, either. Shoko realizes either path has its own pitfalls. Yet romantic young love didn’t seem to work for Sue, so Shoko’s now probably hoping for a steady provider who will allow Sue to work less hard.

H.E.: It’s easy to imagine, from the vigorous approach she brings to her household obligations, that Shoko might have been a powerful CEO in a different life. Could Sue have ever been happy in the capacity of a housewife? What impressions of homemaking did she take away from watching her mother?

M.D.: Sue has both traditionalist and bohemian streaks in her. Of course, she tried not to address her own needs because she was putting the needs of her child first, which necessitated a steady job. Yet I think she could have been happy as a housewife, because she enjoyed the mothering part so well. It would also depend on how supportive her partner was.

Sue saw her mother treating her homemaking as her profession, which is why she did not want other people like Sue helping her. Sue saw that keeping house alone did not fulfill Shoko, nor did it lead to a strong relationship with her children. So I think if Sue was a housewife, she would be less focused on the house and more focused on child-rearing and making the actual atmosphere of the home more comfortable.

H.E.: What would you say is the relationship between these two strong female characters and the concept of feminism?

M.D.: The characters are deliberately at odds with the title. Neither woman fits into the traditional role of housewife. The word has a negative connotation; try telling someone you’re a housewife at a party and see how fast they run away. That’s why people call themselves “stay-at-home moms” now. The word “housewife” subjugates women.

These characters require the re-imagining of “housewife.” In reality, there is no “traditional housewife” role at all. Trying to fit into a pre-conceived role is what causes trouble. Instead, it’s what each woman makes it. I would like to reclaim the word housewife, because I don’t think there’s anything wrong with being a housewife. It’s honorable to want to make a home for your family and keep things running, whether you’re female or male, and no matter what you call it.

H.E.: What are the main characteristics, as mothers, that Shoko and Sue have in common?

M.D.: They both see their daughters as miraculous creatures who should own the world.

H.E.: We have the opportunity in the novel to meet Helena, Sue’s daughter and Shoko’s granddaughter. What traits is she gleaning from these two women as she grows up?

M.D.: Helena is learning to value her own independence and individuality more than either Sue or Shoko ever did. Shoko has a far more relaxed approach with her granddaughter. Helena has this benefit that Sue did not.

H.E.: Going back to Shoko’s childhood and adolescence in Japan, it seems that her father had a somewhat progressive stance in the extent to which he allowed her to assist in decision making. How would you say his actions contribute to Shoko being as willful and determined as she is?

M.D.: Shoko’s father was perhaps not as traditional as others. He did give up his worldly possessions for religion, and he did not always take the same views as others did. Shoko’s father valued her as a human, not just as a compliant daughter-figure. He recognized her true nature and also recognized he could not change what she was. And if he hadn’t appreciated this about Shoko, she wouldn’t have worked and helped the family be better off.

H.E.: The character of Mike, Shoko’s son, is an interesting one. He intermittently lives at home between bouts of employment well into middle age. He’s not overly communicative. But it is noted that he has this strength of character which makes itself known when the pressure is on. What part did his Japanese-style rearing within American culture play in how he has turned out?

M.D.: Mike’s parents, in wanting to make things easier for him than it was for them, perhaps made things too easy for him. I don’t know that this is simply Japanese style parenting. There are a lot of people like Mike who are Americans.

H.E.: You mention that How to Be an American Housewife is, in ways, an imagining of your own mother’s personal life. Did you relate strongly to certain aspects of Sue’s cultural struggles?

M.D.: Yes. Japan was culturally absent for me; I only knew about it through artifacts my parents had. We did not have Japanese friends or any strong cultural connection like that. We did not have family in the area, or go visit family, or have a friend network, so in some ways I grew up very isolated. It’s still odd for me to think that I have dozens of cousins around the country and in Japan I’ve never met.

There were definitely moments I called upon from my own life to integrate with Sue’s.

H.E.: Sue is called upon in the novel to make a trip to Japan on her mother’s behalf in hopes of reconciling with Shoko’s estranged brother. What are her main motivations in saying yes?

M.D.: She is beginning to understand her mother as an adult and imagine what it was like growing up in Japan. With her mother’s trip to see her at work and her mother’s worsening health, Sue finally has a visceral understanding of her mother’s mortality. She wants to make the trip for her mother. She also wants to see Japan for herself and find that missing part of her psyche, of knowing where she came from. On some level, Sue knows this will help her have a better relationship with her mother, even if her mother passes away.

H.E.: I’m curious about what your personal relationship with Japanese culture has been. Have you had an opportunity similar to Sue’s, to experience it first-hand? If so, did Sue’s reactions in some ways mirror your own?

M.D.: I have only been to Japan once, when I was three. I had a fantasy that I would get to go back to Japan and have an experience like Sue’s before I wrote this book, but it was financially impossible. So I sort of carried out my fantasy in the book. It’s like imagining a trip to Mars.

H.E.: Based on the duality of culture you experienced while growing up, were there any authors in particular who were telling stories you related to? Or was part of the inspiration to write that you weren’t necessarily seeing your story in print?

M.D.: I haven’t read many stories about bi-racial children. To me race is an afterthought; it’s more like being bi-cultural. You can have schisms in racially homogeneous societies, as we see in Japan in the novel.

Maybe that’s part of what I was trying to say by including the Japanese untouchables: every culture oppresses some other subset of its culture, whether that’s based on race or wealth or religion. But if you had two Japanese people emigrate to America, and one was from the Eta and one was from a samurai lineage, they’d be treated the same.

H.E.: In future writing, do you think you’ll continue to explore the Japanese-American cultural chasm?

M.D.: I wouldn’t rule it out, but there are many more subjects I’m interested in.

H.E.: How do you incorporate your writing work into your own, probably quite demanding, schedule as an American Housewife?

M.D: It’s gotten a lot easier lately. My youngest child started kindergarten just this week, so I work while the kids are at school.

However, the more I write, the more I forget to do real-world tasks.

So I have to set an alarm if I have to go do errands.

H.E.: Is there anything else you would like to tell readers about your experience in writing How to Be an American Housewife?

M.D: I only hope everyone has at least a few moments of enjoyment out of it, even if they only think the cover will look great on their bookshelf.

H.E.: Thank you, Miss Dilloway.

The cover of the book, by the way, is very eye-catching and would look attractive on anyone’s bookshelf.

How to Be an American Housewife, published by Putnam books, is available now. You can visit the author’s website, Margaret Dilloway, American Housewife, at www.margaretdilloway.com for a reader’s guide and Ms. Dilloway’s blog on the writing life.

Buy the book Amazon

In addition to writing UpClose interviews and book reviews for Her Circle Ezine, Hannah Eason writes fiction under the name Jane Eisenhart. Links to her short stories and additional writing can be found on her website: http://hometowngrotesque.squarespace.com/.

Emma Donoghue long listed for Man Booker Prize

Irish born author Emma Donoghue has been long listed for the UK’s most prestigious literary award, the Man Booker Prize. The largest of its kind in the UK, the award acknowledges the year’s best novel written by a member of the Commonwealth or Republic of Ireland, and boasts a £50,000 grand prize.

Room, Donoghue’s seventh novel, tells the story of five year old Jack, who has lived in a 12 foot square room with his “Ma” since birth. Donoghue’s other works include Stirfry (1994), Hood (1995), Kissing the Witch (1997), Slammerkin (2000), The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits (2002), Life Mask (2004), Touchy Subjects (2006), Landing (2007), and The Sealed Letter (2008).

The shortlist will be announced on September 7th, followed by the winning announcement on October 12th. We wish Emma Donoghue well with Room, and with her nomination.

- Laura Cude

The Lost Summer of Louisa May Alcott by Kelly O’Connor McNees

Review by Rhianon Huot

Amy Einhorn Books
Published by G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2010

Kelly O’Connor McNee’s The Lost Summer of Louisa May Alcott poses the question, “She taught us how to love … But who taught her?” This novel, based on Little Women, Louisa’s journals, letters, and biographies of Louisa’s life, is an imagining of an unfulfilled romance. The author chose a summer of Louisa’s life which has few historical facts attached to it.

The year is 1855 in Walpole, New Hampshire. Louisa meets a Joseph Singer, who she falls for deeply, but doesn’t wish to surrender her life and self for.

The dialogue is moved forward skillfully with lines from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, the first edition of which came out the very year of the Alcotts’ vacation to Walpole. Whitman’s poetry brings your mind into a magical and romantic state as it moves the protagonist further into love’s arms. It’s quite likely Louisa herself was familiar with Whitman, as her father was good friends with Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was a staunch supporter of his.

The Lost Summer draws on many of Little Women’s themes to assemble sketches of Louisa and her family’s life, so it may appeal to lovers of Little Women. In Little Women, Jo did not truly love her beau, Laurie, in The Lost Summer, Louisa loves Joseph deeply but chooses not to be with him.

McNees tries to show us Louisa’s mind, and we’re given many reasons as to why the affair cannot be fully realized. However, it remains difficult to understand the reasoning behind Louisa’s choice of solitude. She is constantly referring to housework, specifically the laundry, that would have to be done in a domestic partnership.

Her views on marriage seem black and white, and not quite feminist in particular. For where has her sense of choice disappeared to? Can she not live in a happy marriage of compromise, as the character of Joseph promises her?

With light having been shed on the many internal dialogues and struggles that Louisa’s character has, it’s easy to imagine these very conflicts may have plagued Alcott during her real life. In the end we see her looking back on her life, perhaps a bit regretfully, but proud of the work she has accomplished.

The Flat On Malabar Hill by Chitra Kallay

Review by Mayra David

iUniverse, 2009

One family, one story; seven voices, seven lives. In this beautifully written novel, Chitra Kallay explores that great tension between being the individual versus being a part of a whole. It may seem like a single, straightforward idea, but this idea is so well-explored in the the novel that it reveals within it culture clashes, generation gaps, societal inequities, and family – in particular marital – dynamics. It contains the notion that not only are we individuals, but we are always part of a greater entity; our individual actions are always part of a bigger picture. In a word: karma.

The Flat on Malabar Hill is a portrait of a prominent Mumbai family, centered around and headed by Vinod and Shanti. They have two sons, Kishore and Dev, as different from each other as two men can be: one succeeding in all aspects of life, where the other fails. One equally comfortable in India and the United States, the other not even comfortable in his own skin.

The novel switches perspectives between the seven family members, starting with Shanti as she visits Kishore’s home after the birth of her first grandson. Kishore and his wife Anjali have just moved back from the United States to rear their child in India, where his parents are eager to help. To him, this is not only the custom, it is the ideal. So the story begins with the gulf between Shanti and her daughter-in-law Anjali; though they are both Indian, they are two mothers from different times and backgrounds. This, Shanti’s first visit with her grandson, sets the tone for the rest of the novel: expectation, disappointment, unintended cruelty, private humiliation, and strong hope are the constant currents that run throughout the various relationships of this family. And just like the unstable electrical current that powers their houses in Mumbai, their interactions lead to inevitable blow outs.

Though the themes and situations here will certainly resonate with people from any ethnic background, the characters live and breathe their Indian culture. The heat and humidity, the sticky crowds and hot food, the luxurious lifestyles enabled by those in poverty all color as well as drive this novel. Kallay bravely leads the reader into the world of this family, unapologetic for its jarring character and yet ever mindful to explain its customs and scenery. This doesn’t make anything less exotic, but more exciting. The more we know of Mumbai the more intrigued we are by her; however much we get to know the family members, they still surprise us in their thoughts and actions. This continues all the way to the powerful end of the novel which we acutely sense to be neither the beginning nor the end of this family’s story, merely part of their karma.

Fragile Beasts by Tawni O’Dell

Review by Mary Harwood

Crown, 2010

A rich, eccentric old woman who keeps a vicious bull in her pasture. Two teen-aged boys who have lost their father in an horrific car accident fueled by alcohol and abandoned by their mother. When these two worlds collide, long-kept secrets break open old scars.

The story starts with Candace Jack as a young woman begging for the life of the bull that has just fatally gored her lover, the great matador El Soltero. Death becomes a theme that runs through each character’s plot line. Candace has never stopped mourning El Soltero and keeps her home as a shrine to him. She decorates with bullfighting posters and has a Spanish cook/houseman, Luis, who serves almost exclusively Spanish cuisine. In her pasture, she keeps a giant, perfect specimen of a bull, the offspring of Calladito, the bull who killed Soltero yet she saved from the ignoble death outside of the ring. As we learn from El Soltero, there are only two ways for a bullfighter to die: “in the ring and out of the ring.” Candace believes the same is true for great bulls. She breeds new bulls from Calladito’s sperm, cultivating the one offspring that most matches his fire. But otherwise, she remains remote in her home, purposefully cut off from the world.

Kyle and Klint, the two teenagers, are dealing with the death of their father in very different ways. Kyle wants to be an artist. His brother is a gifted baseball player. Two sons of a beer-guzzling janitor – the favorite son is easy to predict. However, Klint speaks little throughout the book yet looms over his brother’s story as well as Candace Jack’s. Shelby, Candace’s neice, has a crush on Klint and Kyle has a crush on her. Shelby comes up with a plan to keep the boys from moving to Arizona to live with their mother, who really doesn’t want them. She convinces her aunt to take them in. Candace is reluctant at first, but when challenged by the boys’ mother, she handles it by literally paying for them and becoming their legal guardian.

In some ways, the plot is predictable. Lonely, eccentric rich woman takes in two orphaned boys from the wrong side of the tracks and opens up, takes them as her own children she never had. However, it goes beyond the hackneyed to incorporate unexpected twists of painful secrets and unexpected loves. Interwoven with rich scenes of the world of the bullring (in part through letters from El Soltero’s grandnephew, now a famous bullfighter), Kyle’s blossoming as an artist and Klint’s retreat into himself are the stories of the two men who have loved, and kept, in their way, Candace for almost 60 years – Luis, the houseman and cook and Bert, her lawyer who sends yellow roses like clockwork.

This is a wonderfully crafted novel that also teaches us lessons in how to live and how to die. In the end, the fragile beasts are not bulls – they are us.

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