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Pif Magazine
ISSN: 1094-2726
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Pif, LLC
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Interview : Page 1, 2
HE: I want to show that southern women are strong and, like myself, sometimes to a fault.
A good example is Sarina Summers [one of ETCC’s three main characters]. She tries to control anything and everything – her physical appearance, her friends, her romantic life, her social stature. Problem is the people who are part of her master plan have minds of their own. Thus, trouble ensues. Bitty Jack Carlson [the character "happy just to be loved by the fat kid"] is, of course, my every-girl champion. With her, I wanted to show a girl can succeed without a knight in fresh-pressed corduroy, and, above all, she can rescue herself.
Southern women aren’t meek and mild. They drive the plot. They are what the story’s all about. Whether you agree with them or not, you have to respect their passions and what they will do to French kiss their destinies.
I’ve been watching Designing Women reruns on Lifetime. Linda Bloodworth-Thomason portrayed those four women in truthful, painful, funny, accurate ways. Delta Burke was such a star in that – I never get tired of watching. If we want to go the Southern literary route, you can’t beat Lewis Nordan, Michael Lee West, Billie Letts, and Elizabeth Dewberry Vaughn when it comes to portraying complex Southern women. Still, there’s a viciousness some of my characters have that I haven’t seen in another story.
CR: Machiavelli wrote, "It’s far safer to be feared than loved." How does fear play into the viciousness you mentioned?
HE: Sarina really structures her life according to her fears. She trusts fear more than love because with fear comes predictability – at least that’s what she thinks. She’s afraid of not finding a husband, security, a spot on the cheerleading squad and imagines worst case scenarios and then battles the scenarios before they happen. For example, she has to beat out two hundred Central High hopefuls for one of the ten Junior Varsity cheerleading slots. She fears being beaten. She’s not the most flexible pipe cleaner in the box. So... what does she do? Mama gets her a personal trainer. Another example is how Sarina bullies boys into dating and mating. She handles live bass to lure a boat salesman. She eats blackened catfish to make herself seem health conscious and mature. Simply put, she’s frightened of losing control of her life and destroys anyone who might one day get in her way.
CR: Your publishing house is pitching ETCC as a cross between Fried Green Tomatoes and Stephen King’s Carrie. This seems right on to me because you’ve claimed to have put the things you most fear into your novel. Were you referring to being stalked, or having someone else break your fingers, or what?
HE: I needed to be scared in almost every scene of the novel. Whether that fear was from obvious threats – desperate girls with butcher knives or matches or cutting remarks – or more realistic things like the impending loss of a loved one, the loss of family security, or the loss of simple sanity.
One of my biggest fears (other than whales) is the loss of control. That’s why I became a novelist, after all. In my book, I have total control over every single thing. In real life I’ve been lied to, cheated on, betrayed and pushed around. Like Sarina, I find myself too easily suspicious. I often expect the worst – I’ll lose my job, my friend will die, the sky will fall, there’s no such thing as premenstrual syndrome and this is my REAL personality.
Most of this novel sprang out of worst case scenarios. Often I find myself thinking things can’t get any worse. My answer always is, Of course they can!! That’s where so many plot twists came from—the of-course-they-cans.
Another fear is of the straight and narrow. So many of us are raised with the plan to get married, have kids, live happily ever after, but so often that doesn’t work out. I worked at a detective agency (secretary) – I’ve seen the percentages. I have a real fear of putting all my trust in one other person--i.e. hubby.
All of these scream of danger, and in the book I scared myself silly.
CR: Your characters take things to the extreme. Do you?
HE: There’s the simple pride in a job well done. Then there’s that attitude of: you want me to dig a hole? Well, I can’t dig one without planting grass, and flowers, and a bird feeder around a picket fence around the hole.
In the area of writing I cross every "t," dot every "i" – for example, I took different kitchen knives and hacked up chicken legs to see which item would hack off a finger most successfully. The butcher knife won (see first chapter of Part Two).
In real life, this mindset gets me into trouble. I become incredibly anxious over how things appear: What will the Joneses think? But, fortunately, this helps my fiction. I wind up with intricate, tight, twisted plots and characters you’d think were your new best friends.
But at the same time, my characters suffer and bust out of their trappings in ways that I can’t. That’s why it was important for one of the girls to walk out of the book alone and confident in herself, her future, even though she wasn’t having her hand held. I want to soothe at least a few of my fears.
Tell us what you think. Email
talkback@pifmagazine.com
Camille Renshaw is the Senior Editor of Pif Magazine.