Interview with Andre Dubus III, Author of 'The Garden of Last Days'

JMF: You've got the voice and ethos of some very different people in there. How'd you do that?
AD: Well, thank you. I guess the honest answer is I don't know. One of the things I love about writing, especially one of the things I love about the novel, is how much it can hold. It can really, as you know, it can be big and rambling and sprawling and can take on cities and wars and decades and all kinds of people. I personally love human beings. I really do; I really like people. I find them endlessly fascinating. In this book I tried to do the third person subjective point of view in every character. In my previous novel, House of Sand and Fog, the two main characters were first person, one was past tense, one was present. I read a lot of good third person subjective point of view writing and I wanted to really capture a voice with that instead of first. I still don't know how that's done, except that one of the things I love about writing this character driven kind of fiction that I try to write - It's a lot like acting. I did some acting in my twenties and what drew me to acting, especially stage acting, was this notion of becoming other people, of trying to find the energies and rhythms and ways of thinking and speaking and moving that are different from my own. It is very freeing, actually, to become other people. I worked really hard on the prose in this book, for the music of each character to be different from the others. So, I am gratified to hear that may have worked for you.

JMF: And AJ especially. I grew up in Southeastern North Carolina. I've known "AJ" all my life, and you really got him.
AD: Well, thank you. And you now what, he's one of those characters who completely surprised me that he even showed up. AJ is a young character who gets thrown out of the club early in the novel for inappropriately touching another dancer, and as the bouncer throws him out he breaks his wrist in the process of throwing him out. I kind of watched this happen from the point of view of one of the dancers where it might have been one of the bouncers, Lonnie Pike. As I'm writing, - You know Bill Morris had a great line, "The silence after Mozart's is Mozart's too." Isn't that beautiful? And the only reason I bring that up is that there are a lot of moments of silence in writing fiction for me. A lot of these moments where I just kind of sit and stare and wait for the next direction this thing has to go in. In one of those writing days, I could feel the character of AJ out in the parking lot. I could just feel him out there and I really believe that so much of this writing is sort of an intuitive dream state you put yourself in and you're supposed to follow these intuitions. So I went out into the parking lot and there he was in his truck with his broken wrist, drunk and brooding and I was glad to have found him.

JMF: You've said that you never feel like you have a story to tell. You write to find the story. Did you begin with a plot, or was it just that image you talked about earlier?
AD: I did just begin with an image, and I never do begin with a plot. Well, I have in the past tried to write fiction with some sense of foreknowledge or some sort of armature in place but I'll tell you that I am not the kind of writer who can do that. The novelist John Irving has said many times that he outlines his novels then fleshes them out. A lot of writers don't though, and I am in the camp that wouldn't even know how to do that. Again, I think this whole fiction writing thing is a plummet into your dream world, the dream world of the writer and the dream world of the reader. When you fall into that you find things you didn't know were possibly there so I began with an image and I've learned over the years that if you just go into that image. And, then, again the crap part is to find that language that pulls it out. One thing will lead to another and another and another. That's not to say that you are done because the revisions process is where you really get to work.

JMF: Sarah Shaber, a local mystery writer, with her last novel said that she knew who the murderer was and then she got 20 or 30 pages from the end and she was wrong!
AD: Ahhh, I love that!
JMF: It was somebody else, and I agreed. As one read it, it was clear that it was going somewhere and didn't. It went elsewhere but it was totally right.
AD: You know, John. I've been saying this the last few days because I realized there is something I've been saying in writing classes. I think there is a difference between making something up and imagining it. We could all sit around and have this parlor game and you can start a story and I'll add to it and Michael (Fain, who was driving Dubus around.) will add to it and it can be fun. Actually, a lot of screenplays get written that way in story conferences in Hollywood. But the reason that I think we forget a lot of those movies before we brush our teeth the night we saw them in the theatre is they are not grounded deeply in any real imaginable route. So then the challenge is not to make something up but to imagine it. So you are talking about this mystery writer. She was in the make up part of her mind, the thinking part of her mind. When she got deeper into the dream of the story she found there was no way it could have been this guy. Which is, again, this beautiful thing. I quote Grace Paley a lot who's got this great line. She says, "We write what we don't know we know." Isn't that beautiful?