Interview with Laura Zigman

A brief conversation with the author of Small World and Separation Anxiety

Housekeeping:

This past Friday, the Atlantic published my essay on literary mentorship inspired by Darryl Pinckney’s terrific memoir Come Back in September. When I pitched the piece, I saw myself as completely objective (Me? I’ve never had a formal mentorship.), but as I read the book and wrote this piece, I realized that all the informal conversations I’ve enjoyed with former professors, editors, publicists, agents, writers, fellow readers constitutes a version of mentorship. Let this essay help you see all the ways you act as a mentor (unbeknownst to you) and enjoy mentorship. Formal titles aren’t essential.

But speaking of titles, over the holidays, I was elected by my peers to join the board of the National Book Critics Circle. I’ve been a member for years and have enjoyed the community of other critics, but now I can do more to help amplify the voices of marginalized writers and expand book coverage. Perhaps this is shooting for the moon, but why not dream? I’m tremendously honored.

Interview with Laura Zigman:

Within the last couple of years, it’s become harder and harder to place author interviews despite the fact that these are the pieces that prompt the greatest responses from readers. Truly, outlets may not see the metrics they hope for, but people really do like craft interviews. It’s not just me. In that spirit, I’ll be including conversations or correspondences with writers in my newsletter. This could become a monthly element of this newsletter. Let me know what you think (and if there’s anyone you’d like me to spotlight).

As today is her publication day, I wanted to speak with Laura Zigman. We met in 2019 at a media luncheon and over a busy table, we clicked immediately. Thanks to the cooperation of my two daughters and husband, I read her 2020 novel Separation Anxiety over the course of one flight from New York to Dallas and onward to Santa Fe. I laughed and cried and simply knew that I had to interview her. This was the heartfelt, sincere book that people actually want me to recommend to them when they tell me that they need something to read. I came home and interviewed her for the Observer. We met one last time at her Books Are Magic reading in March 2020 (my last time in the store).

When I traveled to Washington D.C. this fall, after years and years of never traveling alone, I followed up my audiobook of Laurie Colwin’s Family Happiness with Laura’s new novel Small World. It was only fitting to read Colwin and Zigman back to back because they are both big-hearted writers who recognize the need for levity. Here, in their books, I find the middle-aged women whose wisdom I want most. In Small World, two sisters find themselves under the same roof after decades upon decades apart. Joyce and Lydia are now divorced and testing out a temporary solution; sharing apartment rent and expenses in Cambridge, Massachusetts while they get back on their feet. 

As the months go by, it becomes clear that the patter upstairs isn’t normal. No, despite it being a residential building, their upstairs neighbors are running a yoga studio over their heads! These frustrations and others mount; their long-contained lives crack open and tough conversations surface. It becomes impossible to avoid the absence of their missing sister. Eleanor died at age ten after a lifetime of disabilities and medical challenges. Living together forces the sisters to reckon with the responsibilities we owe one another and the ways we can find a path forward without ignoring the past. A literal hurricane swept outside my window as I returned to North Carolina, but I couldn’t stop reading. Again, Laura left me in tears and laughing out loud. You can pick up the book today. If, like me, you wondered how this complicated subject found its way into a novel, please read on. Here’s our exchange: 

Lauren LeBlanc: Not every good story should be a book. However, sometimes, what would be a great novel is a terrible memoir and vice versa. How can you tell that you've got a great story that would benefit if you switched gears? You've successfully recognized when a project should change its shape or form. Your 2020 novel Separation Anxiety began as a screenplay. Could you talk about how you began to work on your new novel Small World?

Laura Zigman: That's exactly right. Sometimes what you have, what you start working on, isn't working the way you're doing it, and instead of getting discouraged and giving up completely (my normal modus operandi), you can figure out a way to repurpose what you have and use it in a different way. I always try to remind myself (in the pit of discouragement) that nothing is ever wasted. That you will use what you've done eventually. I learned this when I started working on Separation Anxiety. I hadn't written a novel in almost a decade, but I had written other things—at home, mostly—a little series of online videos called Annoying Conversations; a spec script that my agents really loved but couldn't sell. I was, during those years, either almost completely blocked or deeply discouraged by the fact that what little I was able to write, I couldn't monetize or get traction on. Nothing seemed to be leading anywhere.

And then: I decided I wanted to try to write another novel. Sitting in a chair, thinking of what to write about almost killed me, but then I thought: I have that script. What if I used that as a starting point for the novel? It was a couple and their young son, a kind of road-trip story, though I knew that a road-trip story was not what would work in a novel. So I just started with a scene I liked and thought: I can use this. Then another one. And another. There were a million drafts of the novel; the plot changed; the characters deepened; but I'd seeded it with what I had. I'm convinced that if I'd never written that script-that-didn't-sell, I never would have written Separation Anxiety. It would have seemed too daunting, too impossible, to start from absolute scratch.

A similar thing happened with this novel, Small World. I'd gone away to Yaddo back in 2017 and spent the month working on what I thought would be a memoir: I'd always wanted to write about my childhood, about growing up in a family that had lost a child, and I got about 50 or 60 pages done there. They were really a narrative, but vignettes, which I loved, but they really went nowhere. My sister had died when I was very young, I hadn't known her, and almost everything of consequence—the action of that story—had happened off-stage. By which I mean: It had happened to my parents, not directly to me. What I was trying to capture was very internal, and that didn't seem sustainable in full-length memoir.

When I started Small World during COVID, I started as I often do with a comic real-life situation in mind: this time it was the annoying neighbors who had lived above us in Cambridge for several years, the ones who had opened an actual yoga studio in their living room which was right above ours. It's only funny in retrospect, I have to say! But I knew even then that the extreme and prolonged aggravation we experienced would make its way into something someday. That I would use it. I assumed I would write about a couple living below the noise, with a kid and a dog, as we had, but then I thought: I've just written about a couple in Separation Anxiety and I don't want to do that again so soon. That's when I thought about having it be two newly divorced sisters living together for the first time, as adults. I knew there would be so much great sibling-material to mine!

What began as a comic premise—What if my sister Linda and I were both divorced and she moved back from LA (after almost forty years) and in with me in Harvard Square?—eventually became an opportunity to tell our real-life story. Or a version of it. The one that I'd tried to write about in that memoir, but different. I knew I would have to change so much of our true story: that instead of having so much take place off-stage, Eleanor, who dies in the novel at ten years old only a year after being institutionalized with physical and developmental disabilities, would have been very present in the childhoods of these two sisters in way that our sister Sheryl had not been to us. I had to create a situation where what we had felt growing up—unseen by our parents who were grieving and doing their best after a terrible loss—was dramatized. And miraculously, I used almost everything I'd written at Yaddo in the novel—as background and flashbacks and as the basis of many invented scenes.

LL: What surprised you as you transposed stories from real life into fiction? 

LZ: I was amazed by how they fit so perfectly into a story I didn't even know how I was going to tell. I remember going back to the pages I'd written five years ago, all these separate vignettes and scenes, taken straight from memory, and thinking: this is the foundation of the Mellishman family, This is where the sisters, Joyce and Lydia. This is their origin story. I knew that I would change important aspects of it for the sake of making it a more interesting and dramatic story—I wanted their sister Eleanor to be part of the story, not just a child who had died off stage and a vague memory for them, but what I'd managed to get down during that month at Yaddo was not wasted.

LL: Would you say that the flexibility of fiction gives you a more creative way to work out the knotted elements of the past that prompted you to begin writing a memoir? How so? 

LZ: Absolutely! I loved the idea that I could craft this story the way I wanted to. I'd told my own personal story so many times—it was so short, so limited, so constrained given the fact that I never really knew my sister Sheryl—so this gave me the freedom to imagine what it would have been like to know her. To have known her had she lived with us, had she been a living part of our family, even for the short time (7 years) that she lived. Opening that up as a possibility forced me to think of scenes at home. I would need to show what it would have been like to care for a special needs child at home, what it would have been like for Joyce and Lydia to come home from school and see aides there in the afternoon—graduate students from the local colleges getting experience for their degrees; the parent activist meetings in their living room all the time; how excluded they would have felt from it all, being so young and being, what they would now be called, the "well" children. It gave me the chance to imagine answers to all the questions I've always had but never asked in time before my parents died, about what it was like when Sheryl was moved out of the house and into Fernald; what that day would have felt like; what the day of her funeral would have been like—for my parents and for Linda and me. We didn't go, of course, being 3 and 5. So what did we do that day? Who stayed with us? What did we eat for dinner when they got home? Fiction is a remarkable way to conjure up a world you didn't know. There's a comfort in facing those questions; in imagining those answers. Simply going there put to rest so much unrest in me. I really do feel like something very deep in my psyche has been solved.