The Almost Archer Sisters (30 page)

A
UTHOR
Q
UESTIONS

Q: Your “day job” in Canada is as a TV writer, director, and producer. Which do you find more difficult—making television or writing novels? Do you prefer one type of work over the other?

A: I love working in TV, but the challenges are entirely different than writing novels. In TV, you must be able to collaborate at all levels, with all sorts of personalities; the best TV is a product of many minds coming together. Writing requires the ability to work (and be) alone for long periods of time. You collaborate with an editor to hone the vision, but it’s a different kind of joint effort. So as an introvert—who likes people—I think I have the perfect work balance.

Q: Your first novel,
Tempting Faith DiNapoli
, also had a female first-person narrator; however, that novel followed the coming-of-age of a young girl, as opposed to Peachy’s perspective as a twenty-eight-year-old wife and mother. Do you prefer writing first-person narratives? Which perspective was more challenging for you to write convincingly?

A: I really, really want to write in the third person; in fact, there was a draft of this novel written in the third person. It just didn’t feel right for the story. Plus, I love writing in the first person. It’s like acting, something I’ve always secretly wanted to do but have never had the guts to pursue. I also love reading the first-person voice. When it’s real, it stays with you and fills you up. Peachy is not autobiographical: I’m not married, I don’t live on a farm, and I don’t have children. But when I “found” Peachy’s voice, I knew the book was hers. Funny, the first draft of this book was written from Beth’s first-person
perspective, but I wasn’t that interested in “being” Beth as I was in “being” Peachy.

Q: In
Tempting Faith DiNapoli
, the narrator struggles with her Catholic upbringing and her own Catholic faith; religion plays a major role in the novel. In
The Almost Archer Sisters
, by contrast, religion’s presence is far more tangential—a brief prayer said by Peachy in the abortion clinic’s parking lot, for example. Did you make a conscious decision to move away from religious themes in your second novel? How does your own Catholic upbringing influence your writing about religion, or about acts such as Beth’s abortion?

A: It wasn’t a conscious decision; religion is just not a big part of the Archers’ lives. But Lou’s a member of A.A., which offers a certain kind of spirituality; God’s a part of his life. Peachy, however, prays out of superstition, or reflex, rather than some true connection to a God of her own understanding. As for Beth, she’s pretty godless all around, which is why her abortion didn’t cause any real moral dilemma (and why I love her). She lives life on her terms, solely by her own will and Peachy’s good graces. As for my Catholicism, it feels like something that’s stuck to the bottom of my shoe for the rest of my life. I struggle with it—always will. But right now I wouldn’t say I’m a practicing Catholic even though I pray and meditate daily.

Q: Do you have a favorite scene in the novel? A favorite character?

A: I love the scene where Peachy is furiously leaving Beth instructions on how to care for her boys and husband before abandoning them for New York. There’s this tedious roster of tasks every mother has to complete on a daily basis, tasks they
rarely say out loud, let alone consider: shortcuts for chores, a mental storehouse of information on which kid eats what and why. Juxtaposing the banal with the furious was a lot of fun to write. As for a favorite character, I love Beau—hapless, flawed, simple, and heartbroken. I really felt for him, and I tried to make this idiotically unfaithful guy as sympathetic as possible. I also love Nadia; she’s a compendium of three east European women I know, all of whom have some of her traits: fierce loyalty, morbid pragmatism, and a true sense of their own beauty (which I envy, the way Peachy envies Nadia’s). And the accent. It’s an exaggeration of a friend’s lovely Polish accent.

Q: Peachy and Beth have an extremely complicated sibling relationship, full of love, jealousy, and hurt. Can you talk about the process of your creation of these two vibrant characters? Which one of them came to you first? With which character do you relate most?

A: Beth came to me first. I wanted to write about a successful woman who lived in New York, who just had her heart broken. She wasn’t living the
Sex and the City
life so much as one that’s growing increasingly erratic. It’s easier to characterize junkies and hookers, but professional women slowly becoming unhinged by problems with booze, drugs, and boys tend to still retain a certain glamour. I wanted to strip Beth of that, to show some of the consequences of checking out of your own life, especially when the outside seems so perfect. Peachy is really the only person with whom Beth is mostly honest. But when their lives began to intersect in the early drafts, that’s when Peachy began to fascinate me more than Beth. That’s when I jumped ship and rewrote the book from Peachy’s perspective. I knew what it’s like to be the screw-up, frantically dialing my sister for some validation in the middle
of a self-created drama. But I began to imagine myself on the receiving end of those calls. And while the plot in this book is not autobiographical, the relationship between the sisters somewhat mirrors the one between my sister and me. We are complete opposites and have taken entirely different paths in life. She got married young and had two kids. (She’s since separated from her husband, who, unlike Beth, I did not covet in the least!) She’s lived in the same city and worked at the same job for almost two decades. (Very not me.) She didn’t finish university, hasn’t traveled much, so you’d think we would find little common ground for our near-daily conversations. Yet I consider Sue to be one of my best friends. We don’t have those dark tones underpinning some sister relationships: no hidden resentment or jealousy, unlike Peachy and Beth, who I would say have a more typical sister relationship. My mother can take credit for that. She raised us to be girls’ girls, so much so I really only hang out with girls’ girls.

Q: Nana Beecher, Nell’s mother and Peachy and Beth’s grandmother, makes quite a splash in her relatively brief appearance in the novel. Did you take her inspiration from real life?

A: No, I have the best nanas. My mom’s mum spoiled us rotten, and my Italian grandma, who’s still alive, in her nineties, is incredibly loving. No, Nana (June) Beecher is not based on anyone I know, but I am aware of those emotionally brittle women who are perpetually disappointed in life. Depressed from birth to death. Every barrier in life has the potential to shatter them. I feel for them, frankly. I hope I never carry bitterness or regret into my old age.

Q: Your portrayal of Peachy as a mother is by turns laugh-out-loud hilarious, incredibly poignant, and matter-of-fact. The
litany of Peachy’s tasks as she gives them to Beth is particularly astonishing. With no children of your own, how did you write about motherhood? What was the most difficult aspect of it for you to imagine fully?

A: Again, my sister has always been frank and funny as hell about the joys
and
the tedium of motherhood. Though she loves her children to death and couldn’t imagine life any other way, she’s always been honest about what I’m ostensibly missing out on — which, according to her, is not much. We both know women who treat the institution like it’s some kind of ultimate female nirvana; motherhood has come to define them. And they believe that the only real love is that between a mother and child. I wanted to write about a mother for whom the role becomes a seamless part of her life, a natural extension of her and not some uber-special accomplishment. Peachy is completely unprecious about motherhood, and yet she’s smashingly in love with her boys. It’s like religion; I find the fanatics off-putting. I relate to the ones who are quiet about their devotion. My sister helped me with mom facts: what would be appropriate for a kid to do or know at what age. And though there’s not much of an age difference between the boys, I didn’t want them to blend in together like some kind of kid blob. There are not-so-subtle differences between Sam and Jake. The hardest aspect for me to imagine was missing them. I don’t miss my nieces and nephews the way a mom misses her kids when she leaves them, even for a couple of days. My sister was key in reminding me of how often Peachy would call home and check in on them while she was in New York. (Often!) She scoured the draft for those holes. It’s funny—though I’m not a mom, I had one of those “mom” moments when a friend of mine named her youngest Jake, two years after I had named my “youngest” Jake. I remember thinking: hey, that was
my
baby’s name first!

Q: Peachy’s arrival in New York is flush with rich imagery of the city, combined with the manic chattering of Beth’s friend Kate. Peachy observes, “It was like watching a noisy musical playing inches from my face.” Depending on individual preference, your description of the city can be interpreted differently. Do you like New York? What aspects of the city did you feel were most important to Peachy’s journey of self-discovery? Could it have happened anywhere, or was New York a particular choice?

A: I love New York, and Peachy’s arrival was a scene that I tried to write from my own initial experience of the city—as a young woman from a small town pulling in for the first time. I remember the vertigo of it all, a city I only knew from movies, puzzles, and calendars. And I wanted Peachy to be surprised, like I was, that normal people actually live in New York, and shopped, and cried, and fought, and slept, and dreamt of other places, just like people in Belle River did. I wrote a scene where Peachy had to fight an urge to tiptoe up brownstone steps to peer into houses, an urge I, myself, didn’t fight when I lived there, even though it made me seem like a creepy hick. Peachy’s self-discovery could not have happened anywhere else, because New York’s the kind of place where people who’ve never been there feel like they’ve been there, so someone like Peachy, a small-town girl, could go alone for the first time and not feel utterly unhinged or afraid. New York has a way of feeling familiar to people. It’s like you’ve lived there in another life. At least that’s how it felt for me the first time.

Q: In the last pages of the novel, Peachy observes, “Happy endings are really the results of sad people trying to do the next right thing.” Was it important to you that the novel end “happily”?

A: The book ends happily for Lou, but I’m not sure it ends happily for everyone. Beth and Peachy’s reconciliation isn’t clean. The “fast forward” montage implies that Jake has some issues later in life, and I leave Beau and Peachy’s marriage question vague. But Peachy gathers some career momentum. Generally, I don’t like a happy ending so much as one where big things are resolved in some manner. People don’t have to skip off into the sunset. Also, I hope Lou’s happy ending is more akin to a nice twist, one you don’t necessarily see coming.

Q: Do you have any new writing projects planned at the moment? What are your next steps?

A: I am working on some fun TV projects for the next two years, and writing, always writing—the next book feels like it’s going to be about one woman’s search for home. It’s in the first person. So far.

R
EADING
G
ROUP
A
CTIVITIES

1. Using inspiration from Peachy’s date with Marcus, make the meeting an indulgent and slightly fancier affair than usual. Ask all of your guests to wear their favorite dresses (like Peachy’s Diane von Furstenberg wrap dress) to the meeting; serve posh hors d’oeuvres and white wine for refreshments. You can even dim the lights of your living room to create the “moody and intelligent” lighting that Peachy notices in the club with Marcus.
   

2. Before she became pregnant with Sam, Peachy dreamt of becoming a social worker. Your group can live a day in the missed life of Peachy by organizing a day of volunteering at a local charity, such as a soup kitchen or, like Peachy, with special-needs children.
   

L
ISA
G
ABRIELE
is also the author of
Tempting Faith DiNapoli
. Her writing has appeared in the
New York Times Magazine, Vice, Glamour
, and
Nerve
, as well as various anthologies, including
The Best American Nonrequired Reading
series. She lives in Toronto.

Copyright © 2008 Lisa Gabriele

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infringement of the copyright law.

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Library and Archives of Canada Cataloguing in Publication has been applied for

eISBN: 978-0-307-37491-2

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are
products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to
actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Published in Canada by Doubleday Canada,
a division of Random House of Canada Limited

Visit Random House of Canada Limited’s website:
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