If you haven't read Matrimony yet, I must warn you there are spoilers contained in this interview. But I also want to encourage you to read the interview because you will WANT to read the book. So I leave it up to you...
I can't remember reading a novel about marriage written from a man's point of view. What inspired you to start?
It’s funny—I never know what a novel or story is going to be about when I start writing it. I’m lucky if I know what it’s about once I’ve finished it! I think it’s important for a writer not to plan out too much in advance, because if you do, you end up straitjacketing your characters in a preordained plot; you get what a friend of mine calls Lipton-Cup-a-Story. For me, character is at the heart of fiction, and so I want to make sure that I leave room for my characters to breathe; they need to surprise me. When I started MATRIMONY, I thought the book would be about a love relationship and that it would take place at a college reunion. Well, it is (in part) about a love relationship, and there is a college reunion in MATRIMONY, but that reunion doesn’t take place until around page 260 and the scene lasts for all of seven or eight pages. So I discovered pretty early on that the book wasn’t going in the direction that I anticipated. Only over time did I discover that marriage (Julian’s and Mia’s marriage, most centrally, but other marriages, too) would lie at the heart of the book.
In certain communities, it is common for people to marry young. That's another discussion altogether. But again, in contemporary fiction it seems rare. How did that develop?
That’s a really good point you make, Melanie. Graymont, where Julian and Mia go to school, is based loosely on Hampshire College, and the town of Northington, where Graymont is located, is based on Northampton. People like Julian and Mia who go to a school like Hampshire in the late 1980s/early 1990s don’t get married at twenty-two. Maybe their parents and grandparents did, but for them, it’s truly out of the ordinary. Julian and Mia get married when they do because Mia’s mother is dying and they want her to be there for the wedding. To my mind, Mia’s mother’s death, and Julian and Mia’s resulting marriage, is the central incident in MATRIMONY. Had Mia’s mother not gotten sick, not only do I believe Julian and Mia wouldn’t have gotten married when they did, I suspect they might never have gotten married at all. They probably would have stayed together for another year or two and then drifted apart and broken up, as most people of their age and background do. I don’t doubt for a moment that they love each other. But a lot of people who are in love at twenty-two don’t end up marrying the person they love. So much in life is about timing and circumstance. In this case, the circumstance that intervenes is Mia’s mother’s illness, and everything follows from that.
Julian and Mia have a shotgun wedding and Mia, who’s in mourning, doesn’t even want to open the gifts. She and Julian stay in Northington for another year because she’s in too much grief to even think about making plans. Then, when Mia and Julian move to Ann Arbor, where Mia starts graduate school, they feel like freaks for being married (for a long time, Mia doesn’t even admit to her new friends that she’s married). There’s nothing like a college town, where people often act as if they’re younger than they are, to make you feel old for having gotten married. So Julian and Mia’s marriage starts off on somewhat rocky terrain.
No marriage exists in a vacuum, there are other relationships that influence and sometimes interfere. And I thought all those relationships were integrated very naturally into the story. Which of these storylines was the most challenging to write?
They’re all challenging. Really. MATRIMONY took me ten years to write and I threw out more than three thousand pages. I kid you not. There wasn’t a day that wasn’t challenging. That said, one of the greatest challenges was Carter’s role in the novel. Not the writing of the Carter sections per se, but the broader question of how central he would be to the book and, more specifically, how to allow him to recede while I maintained his important role in the novel. In real life, it’s sometimes the case that you’re extremely close to a person in college, and then you never see them again after you graduate. That’s just life. But fiction is different from life. You can’t make a character (Carter) be really important for 100 pages and then just drop him.
In earlier drafts, I had Carter be really important at the beginning, and then, once college is over, we don’t hear from him again until the reunion fifteen years later. But that rang false to me, a case of my trying to achieve a cosmetic (and therefore superficial) symmetry. I realized that if I wanted Carter to be important at the end I couldn’t just pull him out of my sleeve as it suited me. I needed to make him important all along, even as he also disappears (he can’t be an every-day figure, after all; he’s moved across the country; he lives far away from Julian and Mia). When I figured out the middle of the book—the Ann Arbor section and the Iowa City section and especially, with respect to Carter, the Berkeley section—that’s when the whole novel started to come together for me, and figuring out Carter’s role was at the heart of it.
Can you share how readers have been responding to the betrayals in the book? Did you expect people to become so passionate?
I assume you’re referring principally to the fact that Mia sleeps with Carter and that when Julian finds out, nine years later, he leaves her. What’s been truly incredible is how differently the people I’ve met in book clubs have responded to this chain of events from how the critics have responded. MATRIMONY was reviewed in a whole lot of places, and pretty much no one batted an eye; barely a critic made mention of these facts, except to say in their plot summaries that they happened. But at book clubs there has been huge controversy. People feel very strongly about Julian’s leaving Mia over an incident that happened nine years ago, when they weren’t even married yet—though, as some readers have noted, they were engaged, and Mia slept with Julian’s best friend.
Some readers side very strongly with Julian, and others side equally strongly with Mia. At a couple of book clubs, actual shouting matches have broken out—though I, I assure you, wasn’t among the shouters. At times the divisions have been along gender lines (in those few book clubs I visited that were coed), at other times the divisions have been along age lines (the younger readers tend to side with Julian, the older ones with Mia), and at still other times there has been no easily discernible pattern. People just feel so strongly about what happens, and everyone brings their own perspective and life experience to the matter. I’ve found the controversy very interesting, and I think it’s good for the book. A novelist wants to be writing about difficult, not-easily-agreed-upon subject matter. If it was clear that either Julian and Mia were right, the novel would be less complex.
As for me, I don’t take sides in the debate. I think it’s really important for an author not to judge his characters, and not to favor one character over another. If I find myself rooting for a particular character, I’ll compensate in the other direction. A writer needs to give every character a fair shake if he wants them to come fully to life. The only thing I’d say in response to those who question Julian’s leaving is that his departure shouldn’t be looked at in a vacuum. This is a marriage, as I suggested earlier, that got off to a difficult start, and I think Julian and Mia got married too young. They met when they were freshmen in college; they’ve never had the chance to grow up on their own.
Once we see them in Ann Arbor, it’s clear that there’s ambivalence on both sides. Mia neglects to tell her friends that she’s married. She’s also uncomfortable being married to someone who’s rich, and so she insists that they live in a cheap apartment. She doesn’t express much faith in Julian as a writer and wants him to go to law school. Julian, for his part, has a flirtation with his student Trilby. Mia, who is determined not to repeat what she considers to be her mother’s mistakes (giving up her career and following Mia’s father to Montreal), instead reverses things on Julian and makes him follow her. The dinner party scene, when Julian feels like an outsider looking in, captures what a lot of people experience in college towns when they’re the member of the couple not affiliated with the university. Resentment can build up. When Julian comes back from Berkeley, having learned what happened with Carter, Mia says to him, “It happened nine years ago. My mother was dying. Doesn’t that count for anything?” Although Julian doesn’t say this, what he’s thinking is, Doesn’t anything but that count for anything? He has come to see Mia’s mother’s death as Mia’s trump card. It’s why he and Mia got married; it’s why they stayed in Northington for another year. And now he’s followed Mia to Ann Arbor. He’s beginning to feel, Enough already.
In the end, I think Julian and Mia need time apart. It’s only after being apart for almost two years that they’re able to get back together. They’ve tried to forget each other, to move on, and they haven’t succeeded. That’s when they realize that they belong with each other.
What is your favorite part (piece, passage) of the book? (As a writer, or a reader or both?)
I don’t have favorites. It’s like choosing among my children.
As a mother, I found the part where Julian talks to his mom about not having siblings to ring so true. The ways that as children we were on a need to know basis, and as parents we hold back so much from our kids. Was this meant to be a pivotal moment? (Clearly, it was for me...)
It was certainly a moment that I struggled with. In earlier drafts of MATRIMONY, I thought Julian’s parents were coming off as caricatures. It was too clear that I was siding with Julian against them. It was as if Julian himself had written their characters and was saying to the reader, “You see what I had to deal with?” I didn’t like that about the book. It was important to me to make the parents more fully fleshed out and complex. That was where the scene with the mother comes in (the scene you’re talking about) as well as the subsequent scene, when Julian goes to his father’s office to visit him. Because MATRIMONY takes place over twenty years (it starts when Julian and Mia are freshmen in college and ends when they’re approaching forty), the novel is in large part about maturing. And part of the maturation process is being able to see your parents as actual people and not merely as your parents who provided for (or, as the case may be, didn’t provide for) your needs. This is what happens with Julian. He discovers that there was all this stuff going on with his parents that he never knew about—in large part because he didn’t bother to look.
Along these same lines, in your experience with book clubs are there any insights people had that took you by surprise?
Certainly. At every book club there are surprises, and I’ve participated in close to sixty book club discussions of MATRIMONY now, in person, by phone, and on-line. My readers definitely keep me on my toes. Still, I’d say the response to the betrayals that I discussed above (the vehemence of the response, that is) has been the biggest surprise—though it’s happened so frequently that at this point I’m no longer surprised by it.
I found the passages where Mia takes care of her ailing mother to be the most poignant and lovely. How were you able to capture that in such an honoring way?
Thank you, Melanie. I think the novelist’s job is to try to capture everything in an honoring way, which is probably why it takes so long to write a novel. I didn’t do anything different in those passages from what I do in the rest of the book. You try really hard to inhabit your characters as completely as possible. You make a lot of mistakes along the way. You rewrite, rewrite, rewrite, revise, revise, revise. Although everyone has a different favorite character in the novel, for a lot of people it’s Mia, and so the inevitable question is, How are you able to write from a female point of view? People assume I come from a family of sisters, but the fact is I’m one of three brothers. My answer to the question is that writers are always writing from the perspective of someone different from themselves. A gregarious person has to imagine what it’s like to be shy; a young person has to imagine what it’s like to be old. I don’t see gender as being any different. You asked before what struck me about the response at book groups, and one other thing that has come up many times is a very small, seemingly insignificant detail in a scene relatively late in the book. Mia has gone to see the gynecologist, and she folds up and covers her underwear before the doctor comes in because she doesn’t want the doctor to see her underwear. Quite a number of people have asked me: How did you know that? Did you do research? Did you go undercover to the gynecologist? The answer is no, and in general, I did only limited research for MATRIMONY. The only times I’ve ever been to the gynecologist were when I accompanied my wife when she was pregnant, and that was after I wrote the scene in question. I just inhabited Mia as best I could; I imagined what she would do under the circumstances. People wonder how you can imagine things, but that’s the job of the novelist.
Are you reading anything right now?
I’m always reading. My semester began recently, so I’ve been reading a lot of graduate student work, much of which is quite strong. I recently read Curtis Sittenfeld’s American Wife, which I liked a lot. Tessa Hadley’s The Master Bedroom is really good too, as is Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland. I’m on my paperback book tour right now, and I’ve been giving readings at a lot of independent bookstores, and since I think it’s important to support independent bookstores, I make sure to buy a book wherever I read. I picked up a copy of Stewart O’Nan’s Last Night at the Lobster, which I’ve been wanting to read for some time now, as well as Anna Winger’s This Must Be The Place, a first novel I’d never heard of until I read a review of it in the New York Times Book Review a few weeks back and thought it would be a book I’d like.
Could you please share some of your favorite books with us?
This, too, is like choosing among your children, but I can give you some I’ve really loved over the years, including some that influenced me when I was writing MATRIMONY. In that group, I’d include Wallace Stegner’s Crossing to Safety, Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, Richard Russo’s Empire Falls, and Ian McEwan’s Atonement. I love John Cheever and Richard Yates; Yates’s Revolutionary Road had such a big impact on me. And William Trevor. Just about anything he writes speaks to me. Lorrie Moore’s short stories are wonderful. Alice Munro is a master. Her stories are like peeling an onion—you keep discovering more layers. There are other novels I’ve admired over the years, some of which have been forgotten or didn’t get as much attention as they deserved. Robert Boswell’s Mystery Ride, Robert Cohen’s Inspired Sleep, David Gates’s Preston Falls, and a little-known novel by Max Phillips called Snakebite Sonnet—those books have all really stuck with me.
Do you have any questions for the reader?
I’m sure I must, but it would depend on the particular reader. In most cases, the reader knows so much more about me than I know about them. That’s why I’m the one who gets asked the questions.
Many thanks to Josh for his time and thoughtful answers.
The End.
Undiscovered Country: A Novel - due out in July. That's some gene pool.
