Featuring questions from George Plimpton*
GP: Are these hours during the actual process of writing pleasurable?
MM: It depends. Once I can actually talk myself into opening my laptop and writing something, it’s not that bad. I find it difficult to write continuously for more than say, 30 minutes, though. I’ll go get a snack or put my clothes in the dryer or brush my hair–anything else, really. I guess what I’m saying is that no, writing in and of itself is not all that pleasurable. The pleasure comes when you write something you think is really good, even if it’s not that good or needs to be cut. You get to think, “My oh my, I’m brilliant” for a few seconds before going back to the usual way of thinking, which is the exact opposite of that.
TW: That list makes me think of This Boy I Loved A Rock, for the brushing of the hair, if nothing else. It’s one of those stories that feels so much larger and more complex than one could expect from a few hundred words. In fact, many of the stories in Less Shiny left me with that impression. Do you have to come at the stories in Less Shiny differently than the longer stories in your collection Big World?
MM: Thanks! Sadly, I’m not writing much flash anymore. Once I started writing a lot of short stories, I somehow lost the ability to compress a fully-rendered world into such a small space. When I try to write flash now, I can’t get where I need to go quickly enough and they inevitably turn into longer pieces. If the flashes in Less Shiny are larger and more complex than their length, I think it’s because they are larger and more complex in my mind. It’s like, I could tell you so much more than what’s actually on the page about those characters, and their lives.
GP: When you are writing, do you ever find yourself influenced by what you’re reading at the time?
MM: This is an interesting question. There are some writers that have such strong voices and styles that I try to avoid them when I’m writing–James Frey is an example. I generally don’t have a problem with this, though, because I read so many books at once that it dilutes whatever effect reading one thing at a time might have.
GP: Who are you’re literary forebears – those you have learned the most from?
MM: Mary Gaitskill’s Bad Behavior made me want to be a writer. I didn’t know I could write about women and their feelings, their obsessions. I didn’t think anyone would want to read stuff like that. I’m also a huge fan of Beth Nugent, who is vastly under-read and under-appreciated. I don’t know that my writing style is similar to either of these women, but I feel like they gave me permission to write. There’s still some shock accompanied with putting certain words down on a page. It’s like, you can do it all day long and you can tell your friends about it, but God forbid you write it down.
TW: There’s a confessional tone in Less Shiny that is very appealing, almost like listening to gossip. Stories like Los Angeles, Boyfriend, and South Dakota seem to stand out in this regard. What are your thoughts on gossip in fiction? Or writing confessions and sharing secrets?
MM: Gossip in fiction? I like it. Gossip, in general, I find very entertaining, though people tend not to tell me things. I think secrets are kind of stupid, really–if you want something kept private, keep the damn thing private. If you want everyone to know, tell one person, or better yet, tell two, that way it’s sure to get out. I don’t think I’ve ever told someone something and then said, “But shh, don’t tell, it’s a secret.” And then other times the whole secret thing is supposed to be “understood” so the other person doesn’t feel bad at all about not keeping it. And then everyone gets mad.
TW: Was the “water spot, up there on the ceiling” in This Boy I Loved… making a cameo from your story Leak in Big World?
MM: Embarrassingly enough, this is actually my third reference to leaky ceilings (the other is “Aesthete,” which originally appeared in Wigleaf and will be reprinted in Dzanc’s Best of the Web 2010). “This Boy” and “Aesthete” were written at about the same time. “Leak” was written maybe a year later. I don’t remember how I came upon the initial leaky ceiling, but it’s doubtful that it was metaphorical, so there must have been one somewhere. The “Leak” leaky ceiling was actually at my parents’ house, and my father and I had a conversation that was pretty close to the one in the story, only I was in my late twenties and my mother was there.
GP: Do you think the intellectual stimulus of the company of other writers is of any value to an author?
MM: Definitely. I love talking to writers about books and point-of-view and other things that most people don’t care anything about. So far, however, my strike out rate with female writers is high, much higher than with females in the general population, though that is fairly high as well. I wrote a bunch of stuff, analyzing the situation, but then deleted it because I don’t really want to think about that right now. I’m working on it, though. I really want to be the kind of girl who likes other girls a whole lot, like Drew Barrymore. I read these interviews in magazines and the interviewer always says something like, “And then I asked her about her love life because I forgot we weren’t Best Friends!” I’d like to be a girl like that.
*Questions from The Art of Fiction No. 21 in The Paris Review, Spring 1958.
Amen.