Anonymity (27 page)

You've set novels all over the South. Why did you pick Austin for
Anonymity?

Austin has a young, hip vibe. It's an educated city with an interesting mix of people. Austin touts itself as the live music capital of the world with good reason. Every night is a party. On weekends, a couple of main avenues are turned into pedestrian malls lined with bars, comedy clubs and music venues. The thousands who wander the streets are a people-watching smorgasbord for a writer. The funny, the intriguing, the strange—I've seen it all on Sixth and Congress. It's a predictably unpredictable place.

Austin is big on business too—Whole Foods and Dell computers and dozens of other high-profile national and international companies are headquartered there (including my brother's company, Gel Pro). The University of Texas has one of the largest student populations in the country. Austin is also the seat of government for Texas, yet the city is super-liberal, making it rather out of place in the larger culture of the state.

I often visit my brother and his family in Austin. I love the vintage clothing stores and the odd shops. In
Anonymity
, I paid homage to some of my favorite parts of Austin, like heavenly beef brisket, Barton Springs and the city's most well-known resident, a cross-dressing homeless man who habitually ran for mayor and usually took a serious percentage of the vote.

There is always risk for a writer who sets a story in a real place and time. I tried to be as accurate in my descriptions of Austin and her people as I could while still serving the fictional aspect of my story. Most readers love this approach and enjoy mentions of familiar landmarks and personalities while fully accepting the slight inconsistencies that come with fiction.

What compelled you to write about the homeless?

I was intrigued by the scruffy teenagers hanging around an area people call The Drag. It's a commercial strip abutting UT's campus, made famous by that horrible clock tower shooting. These kids were queued up along an alley. When I asked why, I learned it was a food bank for homeless youth.

I had never given any thought to homeless young people. I grew up in a small town where nobody was homeless. If you were down on your luck you just moved in with a relative or you moved a trailer in your parents’ backyard.

Then I moved to South Carolina where the most visible homeless population is primarily African-American men. That became my mental profile of the homeless, so when I saw the volume of young homeless in Austin, I was astounded.

There was one girl, who could not have been seventeen, whose face was a mask of tattoos, a decision that would impact her for life. I carried that girl's image in my mind for fifteen years before this story finally spun out. Sometimes a situation like that will make an impression on a writer, and we'll mull it over for years before coming up with a story to do it justice.

So you decided to write about that street urchin with the tattooed face?

Who was she before she became that girl? How did she come to be one of the ragged, hungry children in an Austin alley? She made me consider numerous story lines about how young people end up without anywhere to call home.

Before I did research for this book, I always thought of the young homeless population as runaways. There was a wave of runaway literature and movies back in the 70s that contributed to a widely held, yet wildly ill-informed view of why children are homeless. Like a lot of people, I thought teens ran away from home because they didn't like the rules mom and dad set. Or perhaps they did come from an abusive situation, but they decided a romantic version of life on the road would be better than staying with a relative and trying to finish high school.

What I found was that somewhere around half of all street youth come from the foster care system (the kids call it foster scare) or a group home. Some come from a psychiatric hospital or juvenile detention. When a child turns eighteen our society opens the door and pushes them into the streets. We don't care that these kids have no safety net. They have little education, no job skills, no medical care, no food and no place to live. Foster care children tend to be the outcasts of the outcasts. In gutter punk society, fostered kids were often avoided by others.

There are the kids from families simply unable to care for them anymore. With the economy collapsing, even middle class Americans are losing their homes. Often, older children strike out on their own allowing more resources for younger siblings.

Then there are “throwaway youth.” It's a sad term, but accurate. This describes kids who are kicked out of their homes because of drug habits or personality issues or because their parents can't deal with their sexual orientation. Sometimes kids run away and adults won't let them return. The bottom line is that most of the homeless youth are honestly homeless.

Most larger cities conduct a census of their homeless population in January of every year. Of course, it is hard to be accurate with a population that is always on the move, but the number that comes up most frequently for youth (anybody under 23) is around 1.5 million on any given day in the United States. The youth under 18 are even harder to count since they tend to be particularly evasive.

You write about families a lot. The street punks form an unusual definition of a family.

Street kids do form an unconventional family of sorts, but there can be a lot of conflict between them. They fight over resources and squatting rights and the best spots for panhandling. But there is also a sense of community, a sort of “us against the world” mentality. They understand each other.

Then there is the Bryce family. They are conventional in so many regards.

The parents are money-oriented, they've got bills to pay, a lifestyle to maintain. Their daughter turns up her nose at their consumerism way of life and chooses a minimalist existence. But like a lot of adult children today, she still relies on her parents for certain things even while she criticizes them.

Then there are the Kimballs. Even though LDS are very family-oriented, these parents can't seem to overcome the inconvenience of having a child with Lorelei's problems. They methodically try various ways of solving the problem, but once they'd gone through all the obvious options they pretty much gave up. They're only interested in fixing the problem, not learning to live an altered life. Some families end up letting go of children like Lorelei in order to preserve the rest of the family.

Emily is against her parents’ consumerism, yet she takes gifts from them that she needs but cannot afford, like car tires.

It intrigued me to look at the social issue of young people without direction in life. I have plenty of friends who paid for their children to attend college. Some dropped out, some are indecisive and drag the experience out for years, some graduate and then move right back in with their parents.

Psychologists are now calling the period between eighteen and twenty-five, “emerging adulthood.” Many parents are dismayed and frustrated by their grown children's delayed transition from childhood to self-reliant adult. Parents don't know when to cut their children off financially, when helping is no longer truly beneficial. Then there are the kids who suffer overly involved parents who refuse to let go.

There are so many choices now, particularly for kids from supportive, well-off families. Young adults seem overwhelmed by possibilities, thwarted by the competition and resentful of all the expectations. This is probably the first group of children who don't expect to do as well as their parents did financially, so many of them are rejecting the pressure to go out and achieve. The economy is making it harder for them to succeed, and so they are turning away from the consumerism and ambition of their parents’ generation.

Barbara is an interesting, complicated person.

Lots of readers love Barbara and her demons. She was fun to write because she allowed me to express opinions and views that are generally not my own. As a writer, one is constantly in the study of human motives. Barbara is based on people I love and respect, but don't necessarily agree with when it comes to politics, economics and society's responsibilities. Perhaps it is my journalism background that compels me to tell both sides of a story.

On the other hand, I'm not exactly like Emily either. She's not driven to accomplish anything, the polar opposite of me. I'm constantly looking for life's next big challenge. Emily is one of those content people who just wants everybody else to chill. These folks don't bother to consider long-term goals or what the future will bring. They're happy to just exist. That was something different for me to explore as a writer, how to make an interesting character out of somebody with very little drive. In the end, we find Emily is complicated and talented.

You seem to like to write about different professions.

I have an artist friend who says she never asks anybody what they do when she meets them. I found this odd, so I decided to try it myself. It was hard for me not having a concrete way to define someone. I had to just take people as human beings and not look at them in a larger social and economic context. It was an interesting exercise, but not one I could adhere to for long. It's too ingrained in me to ask, “So, what do you do?”

I like to give my characters careers and jobs. I have written about bartending, taxidermy, landscape architecture, public relations, social work, philanthropy, drug trafficking, working for a mulch company, sewing underwear in a factory, being a sculptor, a housewife and a security guard. My next book is about a chef and a botanist. Jobs are an easy way to develop a character because as Emily observed, professions are how we define ourselves in society.

What type of research did you do for this novel? How did you get the details of homeless life?

The youth street outreach program in Austin is called LifeWorks. The fellow in charge of direct contact with the kids was very generous with his time. He took me to locations important to the homeless youth in Austin. He was very open and answered question after question, guiding me in the right direction. He shared studies about the homeless youth population done on both national and local levels. My work is filled with details—locations, language, music, services and attitudes. I try to be as accurate as I can, as long as it benefits the story.

I found a number of lengthy Internet chats about being young and homeless. One conversation, posted by a girl in Australia, continued for a number of years. Her candid explanations of her day-to-day struggles inspired many of Lorelei's thoughts and situations. I came to admire the ingenuity homeless kids possess. Homeless youth are often viewed as only deficient or deviant, but I found them to be resourceful and clever. They possess a lot of coping skills, a lot of street smarts.

Road Dogg is a real person. I met this young man in a studio while I was interviewing a tattoo artist. He had his street name inked across the tops of his fingers. He regaled me with firsthand accounts of the life of a traveler—train hopping, community houses, how to find work on the road. I had to name a character after him.

He helped a lot with my understanding of what it took to cover your body in tattoos. He described how bored homeless kids pierce and tattoo each other for recreation. Some of the kids even do body modifications, like sewing the upper cartilage of their ears together to make elf ears. My teenage daughter thought this was totally cool, while I found it unnerving.

Tattoos are a large part of the plot of your novel. Did you do research into tattoos?

I talked to dozens of people and visited studios to interview tattoo artists. I read a lot and researched the history of the art form. Tattooing is such a rich historical means of human expression. Other cultures admire the art, but in America, excluding the military, tattooing is associated with criminality or being lower class. People with tattoos are thought to be showing open distain for traditional social mores.

Once, a girlfriend and I took our daughters to the beach. We were in a touristy spot where a shop sold transfer tattoos. My daughter was about five and she begged for a butterfly. While I watched our girls get tiny animal designs I thought,
why not?
I had nowhere to go and nothing to do for a couple of weeks. I got a pretty henna scroll on my neck as a social experiment, just to see if the world would treat me any differently. I was amazed by the change in how I was treated. Granted we were in the conservative South, but still, the transformation of my caste in life was immediate and across the board. I suddenly went from an upper middle class mommy to trash. It was shocking.

Perception is the key word when thinking about tattoos. Some cultures see this form of art as a right of passage. Some view tattoos as a way of beautifying the body and still other cultures use it as a means of showing rank. American culture views it as a statement that says, “I don't play by anybody's rules.” This frightens the mainstream; but things are changing. People under thirty don't view tattoos the same way their parents do. It is becoming more accepted and I think tattoos will soon be as ubiquitous as coloring one's hair.

Music plays a part in this book. What music did you listen to while you wrote?

I listened to a lot of amazing music while writing
Anonymity.
I love alternative music, so I enjoyed learning what appeals to kids today. The music is rich and filled with emotion, but the lyrics are dark. These kids aren't listening to silly love songs. Music now expresses a lot of genuine angst. Their songs are about real life struggles.

Four artists that stood out as street culture favorites are Green Day, Beck, Radiohead and Everclear. These artists write expressive, narrative-based songs.
Father of Mine
, by Everclear, is a song very representative of the problems many of the street kids face. These lines from the song are most telling:

Daddy gave me his name
,