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Overview
Hailed as “beautifully observed” (The New York Times) and “a brilliant feat of storytelling” (The Boston Globe), Carol Anshaw’s New York Times bestselling novel is one of the most acclaimed books of the year.
“When you add us up, you always have to carry the one.”
Following a devastating moment in the hours after Carmen’s wedding, three siblings and their friends move through the next twenty-five years under its long shadow. Through friendships and love affairs; marriage and divorce; parenthood, holidays, and the modest calamities and triumphs of ordinary days, Carry the One shows how one life affects another, and how those who thrive and those who self-destruct are closer to each other than we’d expect. Whether they take refuge in art, drugs, social justice, or love, Carol Anshaw’s characters are sympathetic, funny, and uncannily familiar as they reflect back to us our deepest pain and longings, our joys, and our transcendent moments of understanding.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781594135927 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Gale Group |
| Publication date: | 11/06/2012 |
| Edition description: | Large Print |
| Pages: | 451 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 1.00(d) |
About the Author
Actor and voice-over artist Renee Raudman has performed on film, television, radio, and stage. A multiple Audie Award nominee, she has garnered several AudioFile Earphones Awards, a Publishers Weekly Listen-Up Award, and numerous starred reviews.
Read an Excerpt
Carry the One
hat dance
So Carmen was married, just. She sat under a huge butter moon, on a windless night in the summer of 1983, at a table, in front of the remains of some chicken cordon bleu. She looked toward the improvised dance floor where her very new husband was doing the Mexican hat dance with several other large men, three of them his brothers, other Sloans. Matt was a plodding hat-dancer; his kicks threw the others off the beat. In spite of this lack of aptitude, he was waving her over, beckoning her to join in. She waved back as though she thought he was just saying hi. She was hoping to sit out this early phase of her marriage, the mortifying dances segment.
“Don’t be discouraged. Everything will get better from here.”
This was Jean Arbuthnot, who sat next to Carmen, tapping the ash off her cigarette, onto her rice pilaf. Jean and Alice, Carmen’s sister, were among the artists who had taken over this old farm in the middle of Wisconsin. Jean played and recorded traditional folk music in a workshop on the edge of the property. Alice painted in a studio that occupied half the barn.
“Bad dancer doesn’t mean anything else, does it?” Carmen said. Matt was now doing a white-guy boogie to a bad cover of “Let’s Get Physical,” shooting his hands out in an incoherent semaphore. “Like being bad at parallel parking means you’re bad in bed?” She pushed back her chair. “I’ve got to pee. This is apparently a big part of being pregnant. I didn’t know that before.”
“Just use the outhouse.”
“I did that. Once.”
“You looked in. You can’t look in,” Jean said.
“I am going up to the house, where looking in is not a problem.”
Jean took Carmen’s hand for a moment, then let go. They were old friends, which made this brief touch a little slip of regular in the middle of these unfamiliar, celebratory events. Seated on Jean’s other side was Tom Ferris, a minor Chicago folksinger. At the moment he was banging his forehead softly on the table, to indicate he couldn’t abide the terrible cover band. Even though it was now definitely night, he was still wearing his signature accessory—Wayfarer shades. Today he sang while Carmen and Matt exchanged rings. Some Scottish ballad about a pirate and a bonny bride, a ship on stormy seas. Jean backed him up on a dulcimer. The two of them were fiercely committed to preserving traditional music. Superficially, that was their whole connection. Their covert connection was being tragic lovers, the tragedy being that Tom was married, with small kids. Carmen thought Tom was a total waste of Jean’s time, but of course didn’t express this opinion to Jean.
“I wonder where our backup bride has gone off to?” Carmen looked around as she stood up. Her brother, Nick, had shown up for the occasion in a thrift-shop wedding dress. His new girlfriend, Olivia, was wearing a Vegas-y, powder-blue tux. Some nose-thumbing at gender roles, or one of Nick’s elaborate, obscure jokes. Neither of them was in evidence among the crowd.
“Or your bridesmaids for that matter?” Jean observed, meaning Carmen’s sister Alice, Matt’s sister Maude. “Many lost siblings tonight.”
Carmen entered the farmhouse by the back door into the kitchen, which at the moment was vacant of humans, going about a life of its own. An ancient refrigerator emitted a low, steady buzz. The pump spigot dripped into a sink whose original porcelain was, in a circle around the drain, worn down to the iron beneath. A fat fly idled around the open window amid dangling pieces of stained glass. The room sighed out its own smell—a blend of burnt wood and wet clay. Trace elements of blackstrap molasses, tahini, apples, and dirty socks were also in the mix.
She passed through the living room with its brick-and-board bookshelves, walls filled with paintings by Alice and the other painters who lived here. In the corner, a giant wood stove hulked (the house had no central heating). The only undisguised piece of furniture was a ruby red velvet sofa from the 1930s, left by some distant, previous tenants. Everything else had been brought up from city apartments—cheap, rickety furniture draped with feed-sack quilts. A coffee table littered with seeds and rolling papers and a stagnant bong.
She headed up the stairs.
• • •
Alice was going to have to pull herself together, get herself outside, get her feet back on solid ground, she knew that. Instead she was lingering in surprising circumstances, having been dragged out of the ordinary progress of life into a hurtling, and (of course) sexual, detour. Which accounted for her not properly participating in her sister’s wedding reception. Not living up to her duties as maid of honor. Particularly, currently, not doing the Mexican hat dance, whose ridiculously peppy melody drifted up from the dance floor, through the screen of her bedroom window, audible in spite of the giant box fan wobbling on the floor. Rather she found herself naked, face down on her bed, pinned beneath the groom’s sister.
So far, this was the best moment of her life.
Draped over the edge of the bed, she looked down at their abandoned clothes. The parachute pants and slinky silk tops she and Maude bought together a couple of weeks ago—the day they met as bridesmaids—lay in a shimmery clutter on the plank floor. They hadn’t seen each other again until this afternoon when they walked together down the petal path, then stood side by side witnessing the ceremony. When Maude’s bare arm brushed against Alice’s for the third time, Alice decided not to take it as an accident.
And now, with a few intermediate steps, they had arrived exactly here. The evening was nearly as hot as the day it had come out of. The box fan had been running on high and was angled toward the bed, but still both of them were slick with sweat, also a little surprised to find themselves in their current situation. Still neither blamed it on the stunning weed they smoked just before the ceremony. Something had happened, they just weren’t sure what.
“We should probably get back out there.” Maude said this, but in an unconvincing voice, and without making a move to go anywhere.
“I don’t know what to say about this,” Alice said.
Maude was cupping Alice’s buttocks and had worked her fingertips lightly between Alice’s legs, teasing. “It could just be a one-wedding stand.”
While the fingers slid in, then out, Alice asked, “Could you stay over tonight?”
“I have a shoot tomorrow afternoon in the city.” Maude was in nursing school, but was also a model, for Field’s. Carmen had shown Alice a brochure. In it Maude’s hair was puffed and sprayed into a housewife helmet. The problem, according to Carmen, was that Maude was too gorgeous for a department store. They had to suppress her wild looks, tamp her down to pleasant and purchase-inducing. Then they could prop her next to coffee makers and bathroom vanities, in small-print dresses, quilted robes.
In this particular moment, Alice didn’t think she could ever get enough of her. She lay very still, listening for rejection in Maude’s excuse, but all she could hear were the soundless fingers. Then Maude said, “Maybe you could come back to the city with me? Stay overnight?” And Alice flooded with a goofy euphoria.
As they passed a cigarette back and forth while they shimmied back into their wedding gear, Alice was a slightly different person than she had been an hour earlier, more alive. Medical tests, she was sure, would show her pulse elevated, her blood thicker with platelets.
“We could maybe get a ride with my brother and his girlfriend,” Alice said. “I mean I don’t particularly want to spend the next three hours in your parents’ backseat with the Blessed Virgin statue. When they came up the drive, I thought she was some elderly relative.”
“They didn’t like the outdoor wedding concept. They wanted it to seem more like a church. What can I say? They’re religious maniacs.”
• • •
Above Alice and Maude, in the attic of the farmhouse, far enough up and away that the music and crowd noise outside was filtered through several parts rural nighttime, Alice and Carmen’s brother, Nick, stretched luxuriantly, aroused for a moment by the slippery sensation of satin between his legs. He felt sexy in his gown. Sexy and majestic. His arms, in the low light from a single bulb hanging within a Japanese paper shade, looked black. He had been working construction all summer; everything about him was either tanned or bleached white.
“I’m glad you found your way up here, into our small parallel universe,” he said. “To pay respect to the shadow bride.”
“And his groom,” Olivia said, tugging her lavender cummerbund down.
Their audience—temporary acquaintances, teenage cousins from the groom’s side—nodded. They were beached against huge floor cushions patterned with Warhol’s Mao and Marilyn Monroe. Neither kid had done mushrooms before. Nick had brought these back from a trip to Holland last year for an astrophysics conference in The Hague. He gave a paper on dark energy. He loved mushrooms.
One of the cousins had discovered that the shag carpet in the attic was tonal. “Listen,” he tried to make the rest of them understand, “if you press it here. Then here.”
Nick smiled and gave the kid a thumbs-up. Nothing he enjoyed more than turning people on. He’d skipped about half the grades along his academic way and so, although only nineteen, he was now a graduate student at the University of Chicago, studying astronomy. On his off nights he explored—through doors opened by hallucinogens and opiates—an inner universe. On drugs, he experienced no anxiety in the company of other humans, and did great with women. Olivia was new. At the moment, she was curled against him like a cat. They had only been seeing each other a few weeks. He had met her at a party. She was a mail lady. It was a job she said she could do better if she was high. Until Nick met her, he hadn’t thought of mail carriers going around stoned, but now he wondered if they all did. He could imagine them sorting so carefully, this letter here, that bill exactly there. Then walking their routes with deliberation, attuned to everything—the subtly changing colors of the leaves, the light rustle of the wind.
Olivia grew up in Wisconsin. “I know this stretch of road like the back of my hand,” she told him on the way up. So she drove while he just stared out at the wide fields edging the road, high with corn, low with soybeans. The sun-bleached sky, the tape deck whining out Willie Nelson, a hash pipe passing back and forth between them, angel flying too close to the ground. Could life get any better?
Now Nick looked down at her satin shirt spilling from the front of her tux jacket like Reddi-wip. He dipped a finger into the folds to test whether it was cloth or cream. He suspected Olivia would be new to him for a little while, then gone. Okay by him. He wasn’t looking for anything long term. He enjoyed moving through experiences, traveling without having to go anywhere. Other people and their lives were countries he visited. So far, Olivia’s main attraction, her local color, was the way she was always subtly touching him. The other excellent thing about her, of course, was her easy access to drugs.
• • •
The upstairs was a maze of narrow hallways. The only sounds were the heavy whir of a fan in one of the bedrooms, and a thumping bass coming down through the ceiling. Carmen found the bathroom, and used the toilet, which was painted to make it appear melted in a Daliesque way. She washed her hands in a paint-splattered sink with a large, misshapen bar of soap the color of glue. She inspected her makeup in the mirror, decided against using any of the extremely funky hairbrushes in a basketful on the windowsill, and made do with running wet fingers through her hair. She closed the toilet lid and sat sideways so she could press her forehead to the chilled porcelain of the sink. She suddenly found herself wobbly in the middle of all this tradition rigged up around something she wasn’t all that sure about. Child brides in India came to mind, kidnapped brides in tribal cultures, and mail-order brides for pioneer farmers. The vulnerable nature of bridehood in general. Still, there was nothing to be done about it now. Forward was the only available direction.
• • •
“We cut with the knife upside-down, then we feed a piece to each other.” Matt told Carmen this as if she was a foreign exchange student just off the plane. His mother had given him this information. She was the boss of this wedding, the commandant. The only thing Carmen got was the location—behind the farmhouse in the dreamy flower garden, a relic from some earlier incarnation of the farm. Wood and wire fences submerged beneath waves of climbing roses, Boston ivy, clematis. Stone paths mossed over, the surface of the small pond at the back burnished ochre with algae, paved with water lilies. Throughout the wedding, in the late hours of this afternoon, the scent rolled off the flowers in sheets that nearly rippled the air. A small threat of rain was held to a smudge at the horizon. Just this once, Carmen got perfection. Now though, things seemed to be slipping off that peak.
“Maybe we could just skip the cake-feeding thing?” she said to Matt, trying to gauge how drunk he was. A little, maybe.
“Oh, my aunts really want it,” he said. “I couldn’t say no to them.” Carmen could see these women gathering, clutching their Instamatics, tears already pooling in the corners of their eyes, tourists on an emotional safari, eager to bag a bride.
It suddenly occurred to her that Matt was a stranger. This was not some nervous, paranoid overreaction. The truth was she had known him only a few months, as yet had only his general outlines. He was a volunteer on the suicide hotline she ran. She trained him through nights drinking burnt coffee while talking down or bringing in or referring out kids on bad drug trips, guys who’d gambled away the family savings, women despairing in abusive marriages, gay guys and lesbians running the gauntlet of coming out—all of these callers sitting in motel rooms with some stash of pills they hoped would do the job, or looking out a high window they planned to use as a door.
Like Carmen, Matt believed in the social contract, in reaching out to those in need. He wanted to do his part; he was a good guy. Also she was pregnant, which was an accident, but they were both going with it. She was optimistic about heading into the future with him, but still, he was basically a stranger.
Now his aunts were clamoring—waving stragglers left and right—to gather a lineup of the bride and groom and his parents. Carmen’s parents were hipsters and atheists, way too cool for weddings. They were not present today.
• • •
Fatigue hit Carmen like a medicine ball; she was a bride, but also a woman in the middle months of pregnancy, and even ordinary days tired her out. Everyone had had their fun, and now she just wanted them all to go home. She wanted to be teleported to the squeaky bed in the room at a Bates sort of motel Alice had found for them nearby; it was slim pickings for tourist lodgings this far from a main highway. It was okay that it wasn’t a romantic setting. This was more of a symbolic wedding night. They’d been living together since February, sleeping together since about three weeks after they met. Tomorrow they were going fishing. Matt loved to fish and had brought rods and a metal box of lures. Carmen tried to imagine herself fishing. It was a whole new world she was walking into. Everything important was just beginning. Her earlier fears gave way to little slips of the giddiness that comes with potential.
• • •
Setting everyone off in the right direction, getting cars out of the yard by the barn, washing casserole dishes and ladles, and making sure they went off with their proper owners was a huge project, like getting the Conestogas out of Maryland, setting the wagon train off toward Missouri. Although it was nearly three a.m., the moonlight in the cloudless summer sky set up a weak, alternate version of day. Olivia’s cavernous old Dodge had room for a few stragglers, refugees from already-departed carloads. Tom Ferris stowed his guitar in the trunk—filled, Carmen noticed, with a high tide of what appeared to be undelivered mail—and got into the backseat along with Maude and—a little surprise—Alice, who Carmen wouldn’t have thought needed a ride anywhere, as she was already home. Carmen tried to make eye contact with her sister, but Alice ducked. She and Maude looked softened by sleepiness and lust; they were holding hands as they tumbled into the car one after the other, like bear cubs. Carmen was clearly way out of the loop on this.
She thanked Tom for singing at the ceremony. He stretched himself a little ways out the car window to bless Carmen with a sign of the cross. “I only perform at weddings of people I think were made for each other. My blessing on you both.” Almost everything Tom said came off as pompous.
She walked around to see how her brother was doing—still pie-eyed on something. He had twisted himself so the back of his head rested on the frame of the open passenger window. The sky was alive with stars and he was lost in them, like when he was a kid. Carmen pinched his ear, but he didn’t so much as blink. She couldn’t get a read on Olivia, who was starting up the engine, which faltered a couple of times before kicking in and required a bit of accelerator-tapping to keep it going.
“You okay?” Carmen asked her, peering past her brother so she could get a better look.
“Oh yes,” Olivia said brightly, maybe a little too brightly, but then Carmen didn’t know her well enough to know how she usually was at three in the morning. “Everything’s copacetic.” She flipped Carmen a little salute of confidence, and shifted into drive.
Carmen watched them weave down the long dirt road that led to the highway. They were the last of the guests to go. Billy Joel was on the car’s tape deck, “Uptown Girl” getting smaller and tinnier as the car drifted away, Nick’s head still poking out the open window. Carmen could see only the vague yellow of the car’s fog lamps ahead of it. “Hey!” she shouted. “Your lights!”
When the car disappeared from view, Matt said, “She’ll figure it out eventually.” And then he picked Carmen up.
“To the cave, woman!” he said, carrying her to his car, where he set her gently on the hood. He kissed her and said, “Don’t get me wrong. This whole thing was great. But I am so glad it’s over.”
“Oh, me too,” Carmen said. “All I want is a good-looking husband and a bed and about fifty hours’ sleep.” Some of the time when she talked to Matt, she felt as if she was in a movie scripted by lazy screenwriters. The two of them were still generic characters in each other’s stories. Girlfriend/boyfriend. Bride/groom. Wife/husband. But maybe that’s all marriage was—you fell into a groove already worn for you. You had a place now. The music had stopped and you’d gotten a chair.
• • •
By the time the car reached the end of the dirt road, everyone had grown quiet. Alice looked around at her fellow passengers. Maude was sleepy against her, within the circle of her arm. Nick was zoned out in the front, watching a mosquito flit up and down his forearm. Tom Ferris, on the other side of Maude, was staring out the side window, tapping down, pulling up, tapping down the door lock. Olivia turned left onto the two-lane—Route 14—and let it rip. Alice stuck her head a little ways out the window thinking there was nothing like traveling a country road at night. The sky was so clear, the moon so high and luscious.
A few miles on, the road dipped a little, then cut through a stand of trees. The leaves shimmered in the high moonlight, and now Billy Joel was singing “You’re Always a Woman to Me.” The first Alice saw of the girl was not her standing on the side of the road, or even running across it, but already thudding onto the hood of the car. A jumble of knees and elbows, and then her face, frozen in surprise, eyes wide open, huge on the other side of the windshield.
What People are Saying About This
"Anshaw has a deft touch with the events of ordinary life, giving them heft and meaning without being ponderous." —-Publishers Weekly Starred Review
Reading Group Guide
This reading group guide for Carry the One includes an introduction, discussion questions, ideas for enhancing your book club, and a Q&A with author Carol Anshaw. The suggested questions are intended to help your reading group find new and interesting angles and topics for your discussion. We hope that these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book.
Introduction
Carry the One begins in the hours following Carmen’s wedding reception, when a car filled with stoned, drunk, and sleepy guests accidently hits and kills a girl on a dark, country road. In that moment, the future lives of those involved, including Carmen and her brother and sister, are transformed. They are bound and burdened by this shared tragedy—in the arithmetic of their lives, when they add themselves up, they always have to carry the one. Over the next twenty-five years—through friendships and love affairs; marriage and divorce; parenthood, holidays, and the modest tragedies and joys of ordinary days—each passenger moves forward against the press of guilt and reacts to this shared and catastrophic moment in different and unexpected ways.
Topics & Questions for Discussion
1. At her wedding reception, Carmen, in a moment of doubt about marriage, thinks: “Still, there was nothing to be done about it now. Forward was the only available direction.” How much of life is lived on this principle—taking the step that seems to come next? How often does this turn out to be following one bad decision with another based on the first? How does this apply to the characters in this book?
2. How do Carmen, Alice, and Nick change over the course of the novel? Which of them changes the most, which the least?
3. Even before the accident, the lives of everyone involved were entwined (by marriage, sex, family, friendship). Discuss how the nature of these relationships is affected by the accident. Does the accident strengthen any bonds? Does it weaken others? How does each character’s perceptions of the others change throughout the course of the novel?
4. As the driver of the car, Olivia is the only one who serves prison time for Casey’s death, and as Nick enviously reflects, “prison was forcing her to atone.” Do you think the others try to atone in their own ways? Do you think Nick’s envy of Olivia’s punishment is justified? Do you agree that, in a way, Olivia is the one who suffers the easiest punishment, because even though prison is brutal, it’s a physical, finite sentence for what they collectively did?
5. Nick’s is the only life that eventually falls completely apart. Do you think his drug use is related to his guilt, knowing he could’ve prevented Casey’s death? Why or why not?
6. Mourning and loss are themes of the book. How do the characters grieve differently? How does this grief affect their choices? In what ways can mourning be a selfish experience? What do the characters mourn besides the loss of Casey’s life?
7. Discuss the way parenthood and parent/child relationships are portrayed in the novel. Think about Gabe and Carmen; Rob and Heather; Nick, Carmen, and Alice’s relationships with Horace and Loretta; and even Terry and Shanna Redman.
8. Romantic relationships seem to be tough for all of the characters. Alice spends her time yearning for Maude (who cannot seem to decide what she wants) and sleeping with other women to fill the void, but once they are finally together, they fall out of love. Carmen’s first marriage fails, and she looks at her second as a “small mistake.” After Olivia leaves, Nick turns to prostitutes and never has a meaningful relationship again. Even Tom finds that his affair with Jean was the thing keeping his marriage together. Discuss these relationships and the dynamics within the couples.
9. Alice is deeply affected by her visit to the Anne Frank house, but when she tries to talk about it with Anneke, the curator politely changes the subject. “Anne Frank is complicated,” she says. What is it about the house that you feel touches Alice so deeply? Is this exchange applicable to Alice’s feelings about the accident?
10. When Kees Verwey sees Alice’s paintings of Casey, he says to her: “…You are honoring her with these, giving her a kind of life. What if these are the best paintings you will ever make?” Alice replies, “Then maybe not showing them is the terms of my atonement.” Do you agree with Verwey or with Alice? Do you think she should have shown them? Or do you think it would have been wrong to profit from Casey’s death, the way Tom profited from the song he writes about the accident?
11. When Nick visits Shanna Redmond, she says to him about Casey: “She was such a careless kid…Never looked both ways like I told her. You can tell them that. The others. Not that it was her fault. But it wasn’t all theirs either.” Do you think Nick ever passes this message along? Do you think it would have helped the others to hear it? Or at that point, was it meaningless, given all they had been through?
12. Alice feels Casey is dictating the paintings of her unlived life. Do you think she is? As with the ending of the book, do you feel information sometimes passes between the world of the living and that of the dead?
13. How much of our present is shadowed by our past? How long do we carry regrets forward?
Enhance Your Book Club
1. Visit the author’s website, www.carolanshaw.com, to learn more about Carol Anshaw’s writing and to see her own paintings.
2. Discuss which character each member related to most. Then have each member select their ideal cast for the movie version of Carry the One.
3. Read one of Carol Anshaw’s previous books (Aquamarine, Lucky in the Corner, Seven Moves), or another novel that explores the complexities of choices, family relationships, love and loss, such as Jean Thompson’s The Year We Left Home. How are they similar? How are they different?
A Conversation with Carol Anshaw
Can you tell us about yourself?
I grew up in a deeply conventional suburb of Detroit. Reading novels made me aware of a world beyond those regulation lawns. From the time I could read, my father drove me to the library every Saturday and I took out the maximum number of books allowed. My parents were not educated and had no way to guide me in my reading. When we moved into our new house, they filled the family room shelves with books from a place that sold them by the pound. I read all those books.
My fantasy was being kidnapped by a motorcycle gang, then dropped off in a city where I would live in a boarding house with colorful characters. [I’d scoped out both the gang and the boarding house in movies.] Unfortunately, none of this happened, but after college, I was able to get as far as Chicago. I found a newspaper job, then a few years later, quit to start writing fiction seriously.
To support myself I did a ton of freelance journalism, mostly movie reviews. Later I began writing essays on books for the Village Voice. I published a regrettable first novel, then went 14 years before Aquamarine was published. I was in the tunnel that whole time, teaching myself to write.
I was married for several years. Then, in my thirties, when evidence started mounting that my sexual orientation was shifting [this time it wasn’t movies that provided the clues], I got out of my marriage and started life again from scratch. I got a cheap apartment. The first morning I woke up with a roach crawling across my mouth. The people above me fought through the night, throwing furniture out the windows, threatening to burn down the building. None of this really mattered; I knew I was moving in the general direction of authenticity, and this was thrilling.
Now single, I needed more money to live, and started writing paperback novels for young adults. I think I wrote over 20 of these, all under pseudonyms. I could write one in 5-6 weeks. I was using everything I made to buy myself time to write. At one point my savings totaled $72. I had a dinner for four I could make for $10. I wrote Aquamarine by maxing out a credit card.
Belatedly, I went back to school for an MFA as a teaching credential, but the experience turned out to be much bigger than that. For the first time I had a community of fellow fiction writers. I also found a great teacher and mentor, Sharon Stark, who still works with me. Finally I found my way to SAIC. Fifteen years later, I am still there, still happy to be part of its sparky, clangy, pinball energy. One of my great rewards there has been helping my students with their novels, seeing those books through to being born.
Where did the idea or inspiration to write Carry the One come from?
I wanted to make a story that has sweep but feels concentrated. I wanted to make a book that is recognizably a novel, but also something a little new. Someone once said that in terms of narrative, what follows violence is always interesting. Setting up the violence in the book as a death, an accident, but one that could probably have been avoided was a layer I applied to the story, to give it moral shading. The characters feel greater and lesser degrees of responsibility, and have very different responses to what happened, but none of them can outrun its shadow. I also wanted to write a story that covers a significant span of years, to examine the part time plays in love and obsession, in relationships among siblings, in political convictions, and the struggles of an artist. And in the case of one character, the way addiction can trump everything else. I see a lot in literature about addiction, but very little about what it’s like for the family of an addict, how one member can create a centrifuge, pulling the others into the spin, how much energy is spent trying to retrieve the person hurtling downward.
As you mention above, much of Carry the One focuses on addiction. Have you or has someone in your life struggled with addiction? Is it something you’ve experienced firsthand?
My brother was an addict, which was hard to live through with him, also hard to write about.
Many authors find that their characters are extensions of themselves, in one way or another. Is there a character in Carry the One with whom you identify the most? Are any of the characters based on people you know?
Alice is the character most like me, but she is not me. Nick’s addictions are those of my brother, but the character is not my brother. Carmen is an amalgam of a lot of women I’ve admired over the years. The way I write is like cutting up real life into tiny pieces of confetti, then taping them back together in a wholly different pattern.
Like Alice, you’re a painter. How does your painting influence your writing?
All my life, but more intensely for the past 10 years or so, I’ve been painting as well as writing. My partner says it’s like I’m having an affair, slipping up to the studio at 11pm and painting into the night. I think it helps me with my writing by providing a counterbalance to working with words. With painting I’m making narratives in a different language that’s all about color and light.
The siblings are named after characters from famous operas: Carmen, Lucia, and Nabucco. Why did you choose those particular names for them? When you begin crafting a character, what tends to come first for you—name? Personality? Physical attributes?
The names Carmen, Alice and Nick came to me. Later I made these nicknames from pretentious names their pretentious father gave them. The personality comes to me first with every character. From there I have to give them names and figure out what they look like.
Although the novel alternates viewpoints and follows each character, we don’t really get to see their lives from Tom’s or Maude’s perspectives, even though they were in the car. Was this simply because you felt that Carmen, Nick, and Alice were the main characters of the story? What made you decide to use Olivia as the character who brings the novel to a close?
Yes, the siblings are the main characters. I had more of Tom, also of Jean, in earlier drafts, but in compressing the book much of them got squeezed out. The novel has to end with Olivia; that’s all I can say about that.
Does the story end for you where it does for us as readers? Or have you imagined their futures in your mind, beyond the pages of the book?
This is always a question I love getting from readers, what happens afterward. I think it implies I’ve brought the characters to life. If the characters live beyond the last page, they do so in the reader’s imagination.
Early readers keep asking about the ending. Is there anything else you can tell us?
All I can say to the reader is: read the last page a little slower than you ordinarily might.
Who are your writing influences? Any books you are currently reading that you would recommend to your readers?
I’d say my biggest influences are Shirley Hazzard, Alice Munro, and Don DeLillo. I’m reading half a dozen books at the moment. When you’re a writer and teach writing, you are always reading the books of your friends and students and former students, books you might use in a class, books to fill one or another gaping hole in your reading history. Then, once in a while, you get to pick up a book and read it purely for pleasure. Just now that book is Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84.
What are you up to these days?
I’m working on a sequence of paintings of the British writer, Vita Sackville-West. I read all the time. I’m still catching up on all the books I should have been reading instead of those books that came by the pound. I’ve been in the same relationship for 15 years now. This has been just a really lucky break, finding this extraordinary person and being able to hold her interest for so long. We live most of the time in Chicago, some of the time in Amsterdam. We have a dog, Tom, who has doubled in size since the day we got him at the shelter and were told he was full grown. He is by now the size of a pony. When he wants something on the kitchen counter, he just stands up and takes it. I take French lessons. I am trying to master crow position in yoga. I like to have friends over, and I can now afford to serve dinners that cost more than $10. I can even put flowers on the table.
Are you working on a new novel?
I’m working on a novel about the trickiness of modern urban life. It’s called The Map of Allowed Wandering.