Interview: Amanda Boyden

By Marcus Gilmer in Arts & Entertainment on Aug 29, 2008 7:20PM

Amanda Boyden knows a thing or two about gritty. Her first novel, the excellent Pretty Little Dirty, explores two midwestern girls' delving into the punk scene of the early 1980's. After a childhood that saw her raised in Minnesota, and the Chicago and St. Louis areas, Amanda settled in the swampy revelry of New Orleans where she attended the Creative Writing program at the University of New Orleans and has been there ever since. [Full disclosure: Amanda and her husband, Torontoist-approved writer Joseph Boyden, were colleagues of mine at the University of New Orleans.]

This August saw the release of her second novel, the beautiful, engrossing Babylon Rolling. The book centers around a year in the lives of several characters on the fictional Orchid Street in New Orleans’ Riverbend neighborhood:

• Ariel & Ed – a middle-aged white couple who have moved from Minnesota with their children, Miles and Ella
• Cerise – an older black woman, in her 70s, a “lifer” living with her husband, Roy
• Fearius – a 15 year old gang member who is struggling to move up in his brother’s gang
• Prancie – a white woman in her mid-50s, a prim, proper, and peculiar woman caring for her cancer-stricken husband, Joe

Smoothly segueing between characters, Boyden's prose enraptures the reader in the mannerisms and lives of her characters and makes them come alive, more vivid than many characters from the three-dimensional world. Ed's internal struggle between Zen enlightenment and his deep-rooted, knee-jerk racism; Cerise's love for her family at odds with her desire for independence following an accident; Fearius' climbing the ladder of his gang's hierarchy. The characters on Orchid Street find their lives intertwining and drawing them closer and closer together as they try to push on with their own lives, all against the backdrop of the carnival atmosphere of New Orleans.

We caught up with Amanda on the eve of the third anniversary of Hurricane Katrina as she embarks on a national tour (including Chicago) and as she and Joseph cast a weary eye towards Gustav.

Chicagoist: The novel revolves around five characters: Ariel, Ed, Cerise, Fearius, and Prancie. The idea of using the voices of different characters is a difficult undertaking (Richard Banks’ The Sweet Hereafter comes to mind). What inspired you to approach the story in this way?

Amanda Boyden: Well, I don’t think that New Orleans has a singular face nor has it ever and I think that it takes a number of individuals to give a bigger perspective on our city as a whole. I would argue that the city itself is a character in the novel, too. We’re a diverse group and I knew that I needed more than just one or two narrators to help present a larger perspective of the city. It’s a communal story. I had reread Peyton Place a number of years back and that also is told from a number of vantage points and I liked the notion of telling a community story through a group of really diverse characters. I think I had that idea of the ensemble cast relatively early on.

C: What was the most difficult part of writing from multiple perspectives?

AB: I actually found it really invigorating. I don’t know if I’m schizophrenic [laughs] in that I hear voices in my head, I hear these characters’ voices very distinctly so it was a real pleasure. If I grew really exhausted of drawing one character, I really enjoyed the switch into another character’s head. So while I had a number of plot lines that were moving through the book, it was really enjoyable and not all that difficult to switch characters.

C: Whose perspective was it most difficult for you to write?

AB: Oddly enough, I would say probably Ariel although I think my friends would argue that she’s the closest to me. But I think what she chooses to do in the narrative was tough for me to write. Most people would think it’s Fearius: he’s so different than me, so far away from who I am. But his was one of the clearer voices I always had in my head. Maybe I inhabited that character so fully I became, but it was definitely Ariel that was harder to write.

C: My favorite characters were Cerise, a black woman in her 70s, and Fearius, a 15 year-old black gang member. What was your approach to getting the reader to trust a young white woman to speak authentically from these characters’ perspectives?

AB: I think if anyone has read Pretty Little Dirty, they’ll figure out pretty fast that I’m not chicken where my writing is concerned. I’ve always felt the need to be brave and take some chances. I did that with Fearius and went head-first into it, with the thought that the issues of appropriation or authenticity would come up but I knew I needed to approach him and his character with [pauses] with some guts, you know, with some strength and belief in my ability to sway reluctant readers. I didn’t worry about it too much. Maybe I’m head-strong. I knew it was an issue that was going to arise. Would I change a single word of Fearius’? No.

It’s not much of a secret that Fearius feels pretty damn doomed early on. I think the reader senses, “Uh oh, this is not going to end well for this poor kid.” Of course, hopefully he’s not all that sympathetic to begin with but I hope he’s able to gain the reader’s sympathy as the novel progresses.

C: Sometimes writers have a tendency to write themselves into a corner. You don’t show you’re your hand and you resolve the conflicts in the novel in a very organic way. Everything is very grounded in reality, seems plausible, and makes sense. Going into the writing process, did you have these resolutions mapped out or did they come about as you were writing?

AB: You know, what’s so funny about that is that I knew what would happen at the end, I just didn’t know how. Without giving the ending away, I knew who would be involved in the climactic scenes but I didn’t know how it was all going to go down. I know it’s a cliché for a writer to say, “Well, my characters just took me where they wanted to go,” but I really did rely on my characters at that point to lead the way and let me know how it was all going to work out. And miraculously they did. For example, Miles’ [Ariel & Ed’s young son] reaction to the climactic scene, he did all on his own. I had no idea I would include a scene with Miles at that stage in the book; it’s an example of a character just doing what he or she needed to do [laughs].

C: Who was your favorite character to write?

AB: I really loved writing Fearius, but I also really loved writing Cerise. [Laughs] I suppose everyone for different reasons. Ed was enormously fun to write and I got poke and push him and prod him. He gets to enter his own personal struggle with racism very, very reluctantly so it was really kind of fun. I know that sounds a bit sadistic but it was really fun to put him through the wringer and jump him through some hoops he really didn’t want to go through.

Fearius was good just because of the freedom of his personal language and the freedom that afforded me in just his expressions and his take on the world.

Cerise…I just love her [laughs]. I have this abiding love for this elderly woman, the real-life equivalent of which I have none. She makes me so happy that she is so full of love and continues to stay in love with her husband. She touches my own personal heart.

And Prancie because she’s such a fucking nutball. [laughs] I think we’ve all seen Prancies, well, prancing around this city of ours. I kept thinking how much fun it would be to take the most innocuous character, on the surface, a skinny little 50-something lady, and make her one of the most dangerous of the bunch. Some readers have told me how much she creeped them out, like something out of a Cormac McCarthy novel.

C: What’s funny is that Fearius seems to be the one character who most operates within his own moral code, even though he’s a gang member and that initially elicits a certain reaction from the reader. It’s akin to some of the characters on The Wire. He’s torn between his responsibilities towards his family and towards his “job.”

AB: Yeah, I’m glad you noticed that. I had to find a way to make him - if not exactly admirable for "average" White Middle America - accessible inside or within an honorable code, of sorts. I also entertained, relished, the notion that the people who are most innocuous on the surface, i.e. Prancie, have the darkest cores.

C: You said earlier that the city of New Orleans is a character itself in the novel and with the timeline of the story taking place over a year, you see different yearly rituals: hurricane season, the New Years bonfires, Mardi Gras. Were you worried at all about those who are unfamiliar with New Orleans missing out on some of the details of the city and the story

AB: Well that was part of why I knew I needed an “outsider” coming in, so to speak. We have Ariel & Ed who are recent transplants. They’re my outsiders and they bring with them their outsider perspective. For example, Mardi Gras is presented through the perspective of long time characters and also brand new so I was able to hold the hands of readers who have never been to New Orleans by using Ariel & Ed to help explain some of our stranger New Orleans customs and ways that don’t make sense to outsiders.

But I also flip it and present it from another perspective so a reader might get a better idea of what it’s like to live here and experience everything.

C: Orchid Street, where the characters live, is fictional. Is it based on an existing neighborhood?

AB: Yes, the neighborhood I had in mind is the Riverbend area where Carollton Ave and St. Charles Ave. intersect at the Mississippi River, near Oak Street. That area had the little divey bar and little shacks and shotgun houses and then it had a number of bigger, nicer houses across the street so it really was a jumble and, without a doubt, a mix of different people.

C: Speaking of neighborhoods, you spent some of your childhood in Evanston, River Forest, and Oak Park, so you’re familiar with the Chicago area. Many think the two are sister cities of sorts, especially with their rich musical heritage. Would you agree?

AB: Yeah. They're both cities of true neighborhoods, still, you know? And the people in both love them their food, too. And both are relatively diverse and are happy to play hard.

C: The timeline of the book spans late summer 2004 to late summer 2005, starting right before Hurricane Ivan and concluding just before Hurricane Katrina. Had you started writing the book before Katrina hit?

AB: I hadn’t started writing it before Katrina although I had my notebook with character sketches. I knew who was going to be living on my fictional Orchid Street. I knew I wanted to make them a real diverse group and that I was going to end up with an ensemble cast, multiple narrators. But I hadn’t written a word of it until Joseph and I were evacuated to Toronto and after watching everything fall apart on television, I honestly didn’t know if there was going to be much, if any, city for us to return to at all. I think I set out to write a swan song of sorts or at least a tribute, a memory- I wanted to capture something of what was New Orleans, knowing it would never be the same again.

C: How did your evacuation, your own experience after Katrina, and Katrina itself influence your writing? Did it affect it at all?

AB: It absolutely did in terms of spirit or tone. We are a flawed city filled with flawed people but for all the challenges we continue- we choose this city. But despite all of our flaws, we have an enormous heart, a communal heart. And seeing how everyone helped others, post-Katrina, I knew I needed my characters to help each other, especially at the end. I really did want to show my readers that we help each other. Clearly, the government, at all levels, failed us, so it takes neighbors to help each other.

C: The novel ends just days before Katrina hits; one of the characters even notes the storm, still somewhat innocuous, out in the gulf and this kind of casts a pall over the end. Is that why you added the epilogue or did you know you’d be doing that anyway?

AB: I knew I wanted to return to that Greek chorus style that opens the novel, the plural first person. I did need to turn that plot trajectory up at the end, add a little upward turn because the world knows how dark and horrible Katrina was so I needed to make sure the reader had that…I guess gift. And I had done such horrible things to some of my characters, I needed that gift myself. I needed to imagine if they made it out okay. In part, that’s why it’s set up town, the “sliver by the river’ [the narrow stretch of the Uptown neighborhood that runs along the Mississippi River and has some of the highest ground in the city; it did not flood during Katrina]. I needed to know who makes it out okay.

C: I’ve been gone for almost two years but you and Joseph have stayed. What’s your perception on how things are now in New Orleans?

AB: I sit next to people on airplanes all the time and they say one of two things: “Oh, I’m so sorry, New Orleans is ruined,” or “Why isn’t it all better yet? It’s all fixed now, right?” And it’s neither one of those, it’s something in between. We still need more help and we still need more visitors. Our number one industry is tourism and we’re never going to fully recover if we can’t get people to come back to the city.

Will the Lower Ninth Ward [one of the neighborhoods hardest hit by flooding] ever come back? No. It’s like that book that just came out not too long ago about what would happen if humans just disappeared from the earth. If you go down to parts of it now, it looks like nature’s coming back with a vengeance with weeds and vines just swallowing up abandoned houses.

Will New Orleans ever be what it was? No.

Is it rebuilding, on its way to becoming something else? Yes.

Do I hope that there’s enough of what was here before remaining? [Laughs] I don’t want to see this become a boutique city. I don’t think anyone here really does.

Is our crime rampant again? Yes.

Do we need help? Yes.

Post Script – In an email exchange since the interview, Amanda had the chance to address Gustav: “[If it hits] Gustav could well be the death of New Orleans as we know it...It's hard not to be freaking about it right now.”

Amanda Boyden, Wednesday September 10, 6 p.m., 57th Street Books, 1301 E. 57th Street

Photo of the author taken by LJ Goldstein