An Interview with Leigh Stein

Rob MacDonald: Your first novel, The Fallback Plan, is doing very well, and I’m curious to hear how it feels to have your work in the hands of a wide audience. When you put out a chapbook of poems with a small press, you know that a lot of your readers are likely to come from within that poetry subculture, but when you put out a novel with Melville House that gets reviewed in Elle, the audience must cover the whole spectrum. Is that exciting or terrifying?

Leigh Stein: It’s true; they’re two totally different beasts. When I’ve had chapbooks of poetry published, I know who my audience is going to be: my friends in the poetry community, and their friends, who eventually become my friends, too, once we meet at AWP. Not even my family really reads my poetry (my mom and sister have read a little bit), so that’s how small the audience is.

Getting a novel published is bigger; it’s more like being on stage, which I used to love. There’s a distance between you and the reader (I’m not handselling my novel, like I’ve done with my tiny poetry chapbooks), and the reach is, of course, broader.

The hardest part of the experience for me so far has been the public reaction. All the major press I’ve gotten has been positive, but I initially made the mistake of reading all my amateur reviews on Goodreads and Amazon. These can be soul-crushing, personal, and vicious. I didn’t expect my book to elicit such a powerful response: I thought some people would like it, and some people would be meh. But instead, some people love it, and some people despise it (and me). There’s a lot of confusion over who Esther is: is she me? Am I a slacker readers can love to hate? ‘Cause I’m not.

RM: I made the mistake of reading some of those same reviews, and I was surprised to see how often people were getting hung up on the politics of moving back home after college. That aspect of the book felt secondary to me, and I didn’t get the feeling that you were trying to make a big statement about either entitlement or slackerdom — it was just another way of showing how life can fall short of our expectations, how reality doesn’t always live up to fantasy.

LS: The moving back home part felt secondary to me, too, while I was writing it. But publishing is a business, and my book is being marketed as having a lot to do with a particular moment in our economy / culture, so as to sell more units, and make my bed of money even fluffier.

But seriously, you hit on a good point: fantasies and expectations. Esther is an actress; she’s used to playing different roles and imagining fantasy scenarios, and that just carries over into her normal life. There are some fantasies, like winning the lottery, which are totally culturally acceptable. But the darker fantasies . . . that’s what’s controversial. I had a friend who once told me she wished something really bad would happen to her, like her mother dying, so people would feel sorry for her and leave her the hell alone. Successful, ambitious, hard-working people are under a tremendous amount of pressure (I’m including myself here) and sometimes our fantasies are about giving in and giving up. That’s Esther. Her invalid fantasy comes from pressure on the outside (“Get a job!”) and depression on the inside.

RM: Fantasy seems to play a significant role not just for Esther, but for all of your characters, regardless of age — Amy has her art, Jack and Pickle have their video games, and there’s that great scene at the end with May and the cicadas. As I was reading the book, I found myself thinking of fantasy as the element that survives even after we let go of our childhood — sort of a persistent echo of childhood itself.

LS: That’s true! Especially with Amy’s fantasies (or, sadly, memories) made manifest in her art, but also with May’s collection (and even the video games). Fantasy follows us, and I think is also what brings us back to literature (and there’s a lot of Esther going back to childhood books in the novel). Maybe we can’t dress up in capes and crowns the way we used to as children, but we can still read books that transport us.

Laura Miller wrote a book called The Magician’s Book: A Skeptic’s Adventure in Narnia, which opens with a poignant, shimmering childhood memory: she’s standing outside in the California suburb where she grew up, wishing Narnia really existed and wishing she could go there. “I want this so much I’m pretty sure the misery of not getting it will kill me,” she says. “For the rest of my life, I will never want anything quite so much again.” Bam! That’s the opening paragraph! I loved this book. I read it when I was almost done writing mine (in other words, when I was already deep into my own Narnia fantasy), but it has so much to say about childhood and yearning and magic.

RM: That quote speaks to the danger that comes along with imagination — even though we can use books (and music and art) to hold onto (or reconnect to) childhood, maybe we’re just prolonging the agony. I know that Esther eventually decides to let go of her childhood, but did you find that writing the novel helped you to let go, too, or are you still hanging on?

LS: Am I still hanging on to childhood? Not like I used to. In my early twenties, I was so nostalgic. Is that weird? To be young and nostalgic? I think it’s something I just outgrew, novel or not. The novel I’m working on now isn’t so nostalgic: it’s about girls in their mid-twenties and problems with girlfriends and boyfriends. Maybe it’s immature, or obvious, to write about life as I see it happening (there’s Gchat in my next novel, for example), without more reflective distance, but that’s what I’m interested in.

RM: It’s really interesting that The Fallback Plan is trying to make sense of the present through the lens of the past, but a lot of your poems are looking back at the present from the future’s perspective. 

LS: It’s hard to exist in the “now,” without reaching forwards or backwards, and I guess my writing is a reflection of my personal struggle to stay in the present. Thich Nhat Hanh says, “The past is gone, the future is not yet here, and if we do not go back to ourselves in the present moment, we cannot be in touch with life.” This is good advice for living (smell the roses!), but my creative practice is fed, and inspired by, yearning for what is gone and what will come.

How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive Is An Essential Manual for the Romanticist In Everyone

Remember that old red pickup truck you had when you were in high school? The one with the bench seat that was so narrow the middle seater had to straddle the stick shift while you awkwardly rested your arm on their leg when shifting gears? You loved that car, even kept it filled with gas and fresh washing fluid sometimes. Then one afternoon when you were rolling over the last speedbump in the afterschool exodus line the engine fell out, splintered on the cement. You sat for a few moments behind the wheel while the impatient honked behind you, remembering the time you sat in the drive-in theater and kissed that girl until the movie’s soundtrack turned to static. You haven’t seen it in years, but now here it is and damn did you love that automobile.

Christopher Boucher knows how you feel; he’s been there with his ’71 Volkswagen too, broken down in the middle of 91 just outside Northampton, Massachusetts. His bleeding manual How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive instructs on more than how to find the beating engineheart of your VW: it also teaches about the anger, regret, and love that motivate us after the death of a parent.

Written with brilliant wit and a sensitive touch, How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alivemimics the style of John Muir’s 1969 manual of nearly the same name, slipping in and out of surrealist car maintenance passages while telling the story of Boucher’s son, his ’71 VW, as they both process the death of Boucher’s father at the hands of the Heart Attack Tree.

I know it sounds like a bizarre premise (it is) and it can be confusing when Boucher guts the definition of words, but the story, and new words, are injected with a glowing, wistful emotion that turn piñatas into evenings filled with small moments of time and girlfriends into women made of stained glass that shatter if they get too cold and are impossible to resist.

Simply, How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive is an essential manual for the romanticist in everyone.

Read and Repeat: Fairy Tales for Grown-ups

Recently, the literary air has buzzed with chatter about “readability”: is a book that is easier to read somehow worth less than one that is more difficult? Should we automatically reward more challenging books over less trying ones?

No, I say! Definitely not, decidedly not!

Let’s look at the fairy tale. This is, incontrovertibly, a stripped-down genre: good versus bad, action and reaction. But we tell and retell these basic stories because of their simplicity and the basic vibrations they stir within us. Gianni Rodari, an Italian writer and journalist, has been most celebrated for his children’s books, but a few of his tales simply sing to us adults who long to be children again.

Lamberto, Lamberto, Lamberto is a simple and, yes, very readable story about a wealthy Italian baron and his search for immortality. Straying somewhat from the fairy tale model, no one in the story is particularly good (though several are particularly evil). Character depth concerns Rodari far less than character quirks, and the author’s creative capabilities construct an unforgettably charming tale. As any good fabulist knows, the story is in the details.

The charm of numbers, for example, weaves its way throughout the narrative—so deceptively simple but used just right. The Baron Lamberto suffers from twenty-four maladies, a list of which his butler frequently consults.

“The baron gets his numbers mixed up sometimes.’
‘Anselmo, I am really suffering from twenty-three today.’
‘Your tonsils?’
‘No, my pancreas.’”

Further on, twenty-four bandits named Lamberto — the 24-L — invade the baron’s island. They demand twenty-four million dollars — one million from each of the Baron’s twenty-four banks. To help with this ransom, Lord Lamberto summons the twenty-four bank directors and their twenty-four assistants.

But the bulk of the story’s wonder lies in its love of words. Through repetition of his name by a very well-paid group of six strangers, the Baron realizes his dream of vitality and is reborn — the power of a single word. Rodari, delightfully exercising the craft of comedy, illustrates our own daily neglect in our lazy pronunciations. Signora Zanzi is “very careful not to draw out the second syllable [of Lamberto], to keep from bleating like a sheep.” In general, when the staff pronounces Lamberto’s name, one cannot hear the capital L, a problem that the Baron desperately tries to resolve. Just try not to smile about that.

The story itself is, perhaps, not so unbelievable. It’s not quite science fiction or even fantasy. It’s strange enough and, yet, just slightly not-strange enough that we can begin to believe in it. The quirks, the wordplay, those are for the grown-ups. The temptation to believe in what we know is not true, that’s for the child. And is that not exactly what we want the best fiction to accomplish? Simple it may be, a quick read, certainly, but Lamberto, Lamberto, Lamberto delighted me in its playfulness. Rodari amended our world into one where even funerals have happy endings.

If you are looking for a book that transports you, that contains details you will return to for years to come, and that you may, someday, give to your children, it’s this one. Simple does not equal simplistic or, worse, deficient.

I am thrilled to have discovered this book and Rodari’s writing as an adult; they will both remain on my shelves, alongside the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen, as a story and a storyteller that never grow old (much like the Baron himself). Readers: are there fairy tales to which you continually return? Moral tales, fables, creation stories? Do they remind you of childhood hopes, invigorate forgotten possibilities? I hope so.