Interview with Molly Giles about Her Memoir, Life Span

Molly Giles is the award-winning author of five collections of short stories, including Rough Translations, winner of the Flannery O’Connor Prize for Short Fiction. Her first novel, Iron Shoes, was released in 2000, and twenty-three years later, she published the sequel, The Home for Unwed Husbands. This interview is about her engaging and moving memoir, Life Span.

Molly Giles, photo by Ralph Brott

Zack Rogow: As someone with a long and celebrated career as a fiction writer, what motivated you to switch to nonfiction for your memoir Life Span?

Molly Giles: I had jotted down a few childhood memories with the intention of developing them into short stories, but then I got lazy; I thought, why go to all the bother of inventing things? Why not just say what actually happened? So much easier!

 

Q. The structure of this book is not like any other memoir I’ve ever read. How would you describe it?

 

A. Life Span is a memoir composed of flash fictions stitched together year by year, starting in 1945 and ending in 2023. Each short episode happens on, near, or under the Golden Gate Bridge or alludes to the bridge through a memory, allusion, or image of some sort.

 

Q. At what point in your writing process did you decide on that structure?

 

A. Early on. It just seemed right. Assembling the pieces into an actual book did not occur to me for a long time, though—that was a suggestion put forth by a writer friend I trust.

Q. What inspired you to mention the Golden Gate Bridge in each segment of the memoir? Were you at all influenced by Hokusai’s “Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji” or Wallace Stevens’ “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”? 

A. Sadly, no—I love Hokusai’s prints. Although I admire Wallace Stevens hugely, I can’t honestly say I understand him. And I’m not sure I was “inspired” by the Golden Gate Bridge. It was always just there. I was born in San Francisco and have lived in the Bay Area all my life. (Although I taught in Fayetteville, Arkansas for fourteen years, I returned to my home in West Marin every summer and Christmas holiday during those years.) The bridge has been my steady beacon, companion, and friend throughout my life; I simply love it.

Q. The sense of humor in this book is winning, but at the same time, it has a dark tinge. Often, terrible things end up being funny. For example, when the author’s second child Rachel is born, the older daughter Gretchen is jealous and absolutely refuses to say her baby sister’s name when her mother prompts her:  

“Can you say Rachel?”

Gretchen plugs her thumb into her mouth and closes her eyes. No. She cannot say Rachel. Will not. Should not be asked to.

Why do you think some of the episodes about the most difficult interactions end up being humorous?

 

A. I’ll probably misquote him, but Bukowski once pointed out that nothing is funnier than the truth.

 

Q. Many of the stories or entries in this book are only a page and a half, but they are extremely moving, such as the one about the wife having a dream where she tells a stranger to kill her husband. How does a writer create deep emotion with few words?

 

A. By cutting. You have to pare and pare to get to the heart. Then you have to be careful not to stab the heart. You have to know when to stop. One of the most frustrating things about trying to teach creative writing, as I did try for 35 years, is that some things, like this, cannot be taught. They have to be learned.

 

Q. There’s a lot of tragedy and betrayal in this book, and yet the tone is mostly light rather than grim. How did you manage that?

 

A. Being a memoir, the book is about me, and my life. And though I don’t take myself too seriously, I do love my life.

 

Q. In the end, what were the gains and losses for you in using such a particular and unusual structure? Did the shortness of each vignette challenge you, or restrict you, or both?

 

A. Neither. I never felt challenged or restricted by the brevity of the pieces—I felt freed. It helped me zero in on what I wanted to say. I like to overwrite and then cut back. I was constricted by my decision to only include incidents relating to the Golden Gate Bridge, however—I had to leave out the entire East Bay!

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Zack’s new memoir, Hugging My Father’s Ghost

Other posts of interest:

How to Get Published

Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout

Putting Together a Book Manuscript

Working with a Writing Mentor

How to Deliver Your Message

Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?

Why Write Poetry?

Poetic Forms: Introduction, the Sonnet, the Sestina, the Ghazal, the Tanka, the Villanelle

Praise and Lament

How to Be an American Writer

Writers and Collaboration

Types of Closure in Poetry

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout, Part 7: Community

I strongly believe that the single most important thing you can do to sustain your career as a writer is to participate actively in a community of writers and/or fans of literature. If there is a group of writers, however small, who are eager to read or hear the next thing you write, that creates an enormous amount of support for starting new work, and for finishing ongoing projects. This community could also be friends, a partner, or family who are fans of your writing.

The most obvious form of writing community is a writer’s group. A writer’s group is a great way to share your work, gather information about publishing opportunities, celebrate small and large triumphs, and commiserate about disappointments.

I’ve been in a poetry group in the San Francisco Bay Area since 1987, when I first moved there. It’s called Thirteen Ways, named partly for Wallace Stevens’s poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” and partly for the diversity of styles and aesthetics in the group. The membership has changed over two and half decades. We’ve stopped meeting for years at a time, but there is a core of three of us who’ve been getting together for most of the last twenty-five years.

We meet once a month on a Sunday afternoon. We start off with a potluck, along with lots of juicy literary gossip and informal exchange of information about where we’re sending our work these days. We share our best quinoa recipes or the goodies we’ve bought. It’s social; it’s fun; the food is delicious. That’s important in sustaining a group.

The work part of the group is a three-hour round robin, where each member gets to read recent work. We all jump in and critique, starting with positive comments. Then the sharks arrive. I don’t mind feeding the sharks, as long as they don’t go for the jugular, since I am there to improve my writing. If I get some strokes, I like the shark bites.

When we first started the group, only one member had had a full-length manuscript published. By now, that’s true of every member of the group. The list of awards the members have garnered is quite impressive: the Lambda Literary Award in Poetry, the APR/Honickman First Book Prize, the Poets Out Loud contest, the May Swenson first book prize, and a gift certificate to a local yarn store. The last one was my award. I’m sure we would have gotten those honors without the group (especially the yarn certificate), but the writers group has certainly helped all of us grow as authors; polish our work; and most importantly, stay in the game. We’ve also given numerous readings together where we’ve shared our audiences. We trade information about where to send work, which editors like what sort of work, reading opportunities, favorite TV shows, etc.

It may not be convenient or comfortable for many writers to be in a group like that. Novelists and prose writers in general need to give other readers longer extracts in order to get meaningful feedback, which creates some logistical problems in a writers group. But I do recommend writers groups, provided that the company and the literary styles are compatible. That’s a big “if.” I‘ve been in groups that didn’t click, because one or two personalities dominated—often not the best writers in the group, by the way. Like any partnership, it’s vital to have the right chemistry.

Community is important to writers for their careers but it’s also one of the most fun things about being a writer. Many of the most interesting people I’ve met in my life are writers. That is one great pleasure of being part of this cadre of inspired misfits.

If the idea or the reality of a writer’s group doesn’t work for you, there are other ways to be involved in a community of writers. You can correspond with individual writers, connect via Facebook or other social networks, or just mail or email manuscripts back and forth. Your community can be a virtual one.

Speaking of virtual communities, I think writers who create fictions—novels, stories, dramas—have a different type of community that helps sustain them. In an odd way, I think your characters become a sort of community. They move into your head, where they take the liberty of carrying on their conversations and their fights with you as the witness—not paying a dime of rent, by the way. They become a presence in your world. When you finish a work, you miss their company. Novelists and playwrights can survive with less community for this reason, I think. Maybe that’s part of why people write novels and plays, to create that community in their imagination.


Other recent posts about writing topics:How Not to Become a Literary Dropout, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10

How to Get Published

Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop

Putting Together a Book Manuscript

Working with a Writing Mentor

How to Deliver Your Message

Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?

Why Write Poetry? 

Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka

Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout, Part 5

In Buddhism there is a term “right livelihood,” which refers to making a living in a way that is in harmony with your spiritual principles. As a writer, you also need a “right livelihood,” one that is in harmony with the demands of being a writer. Or, you can marry someone rich with a cute English accent, not a bad alternative. That works, provided you remain in touch with something you are passionate about.

Barring that, pick a career and a lifestyle that allows you time for your writing. Writing is a time-consuming activity. Even if you’re writing haiku—especially if you’re writing haiku—you need mental time to process your writing. I think of our creative thought processes as working like laundromat dryers, where you watch the clothes going round and round, in endless combinations.

You need your thoughts to circulate like that, for the shirts to get tangled up in the sheets and the pants in the shirts, in order for the right creative combination to occur. Make time to go walking or jogging or skiing or swimming, where all you do is think and compose in your head. Allow new thoughts and word combinations to mix in with your brain waves.

The English Romantic poets William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge used to compose their poems while hiking. 

                                                           William Wordsworth

                                                        Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Wordsworth and Coleridge did this first on England’s southern coast, and later in the Lake District. They took so many walks along the coast that faced France, and their writings were so radical, that the English government suspected they were plotting to find a landing site for the troops of the French Revolution to invade England. So the government assigned a spy to follow Wordsworth and Coleridge on their hikes, just in case. All the spy got to witness was a few sonnets in the making, but I wonder what that spy was thinking when he followed the poets on their romps through the rainy countryside of England. “Kubla Khan—hmm. That must be some kind of code.” “What do the daffodils stand for: maybe Robespierre?”

One thing you can do to sustain your career as a writer is to choose a type of work that allows you time to think about writing, and to write. That doesn’t mean you need a job where you can sit and type sestinas all day at your computer, though few of us would complain about being paid for writing poetry. But there are some careers that feed your writing, and others that starve it. A career that feeds your writing is not necessarily teaching writing or literature. Wallace Stevens was a lawyer on the payroll of an insurance company, which in those days, was a relatively low-pressure job, I imagine. Gary Snyder worked as a watchman on a fire tower for the Park Service and wrote many terrific poems while he did that. Th poet May Swenson had jobs as a stenographer and secretary for decades while she wrote most of her best poems. For years the poet Li-Young Lee worked as a clerk in a book warehouse, but the job allowed him the privacy and mental space he needed to develop as a writer. I’m not suggesting you get a dead-end job—you should have a career that fulfills you professionally.

But some careers do make it almost impossible to write. I doubt you can be in charge of a major business or nonprofit organization or a major part of a business or organization, where you have to supervise many employees, and still write actively. I don’t think you can be in a corporate law firm where there’s pressure to make partner. It’s the mental time as well as the actual writing time that suffers in that sort of job. I’ve never known a writer who had a job like that. For one thing, they’d never hire us, and rightly so. But I’d be happy to be proved wrong about this, if someone knows a counter-example.

If you don’t know if a job will allow you the mental and physical time to write, try it out. You’ll find out soon enough.

Use your time wisely, as our seventh grade teachers used to tell us. People who get hooked on watching multiple old TV series all the time may have fun with that hobby, but they rarely finish writing books.

Another important method for saving time for your literary work is to think through an idea before you start writing it, the way a chess master looks many moves ahead before pushing even a pawn one space forward. Play out the possible combinations, to see if you have any place to go with that idea. If you see that the moves you plan will lead to an insurmountable problem, try a different idea later. That will save you time.

Other recent posts about writing topics:

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10

How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka

Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer