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.
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| Molly Giles, photo by Ralph Brott |
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.
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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