by Fiona Maazel
Where does revision fit into your writing process?
Revision is my writing process. Revision is where the real work happens. A draft will always make certain promises, so when I revise, I start by looking at these promises to see (a) which ones I want to keep and (b) how to ax the ones I don’t. I try to ask the big and small questions. Is this interesting? Do I care? The assonance at work in this sentence—is it aurally pleasing or just annoying? I feel a little like one of those grooming monkeys when I revise: I look at the thing from all angles, I tinker, I cut, I savage. I also try to show my work to at least one other person whose aesthetic I value and trust. I will go over and over a story or novel or even a sentence and never actually feel satisfied. To paraphrase someone smarter than me: a work is never finished, just abandoned. Eventually, I have to let it go. And this would be fine if I never had to see it again. As is, I read from Last Last Chance at bookstores, and feel mildly horrified by sentences here and there and so I often revise as I’m reading. Maybe this explains why my events have yet to pack Giants Stadium.
Where does reading fit in?
When it comes to reading for pleasure, I am very behind. I can’t keep up with what my peers are doing, and I am ashamed. That said, I am also careful about what I read when I am working on a book because I am easily maneuvered into confidence or self-disgust, and neither is all that helpful when it comes time to write. Some writers are enabling in their brilliance—I read a great thing and then I want to do a great thing and I get very ambitious for its own sake and the work ends up being pretentious and awful. Other writers, for their brilliance, shut me down entirely. I read their work and think: Oh, forget this; I’m throwing in the towel. Oddly, I experience neither problem when I read old books—early twentieth century, nineteenth century, etc. As long as I’m milling around there, everything goes fine. The Mayor of Casterbridge, Crime and Punishment, Moby-Dick. I like a good yarn. But I also like a discursive novel so long as the mind behind it is exquisite and so is the prose. I like most anything that puts language first and plot second, though with the same caveat. I like to be wowed. I am not often wowed, but when it happens, there is nothing better.
Where did you get the idea of Last Last Chance (LLC)?
The book actually started as a short story. I’d seen a promotional video for a kosher-chicken plant in upstate New York that stars a rabbi who asks people if they know what kosher means. Of course, no one had any idea, myself included. Anyway, this guy and his lo-fi, handheld encomium for orthodox chicken, it made me laugh with a kind of horror. I figured I’d use it for something because if it’s funny and awful, these are good criteria for what’s likely to end up in my fiction. Ideally, anyway. Meantime, I was reading John Kelly’s book on bubonic plague and finding the whole thing really dark and harrowing. So I filed that away, too. Next thing, I started to write about a drug addict who’d been sent off to a chicken plant a few months after her father manufactures a deadly strain of plague that gets stolen from his lab—and off I went. This is generally how stories come to me—in parts that I stitch together.
What other kinds of art inspire you as a writer, and specifically, did any other kinds of art inspire LLC?
I live under a rock. I am woefully disconnected from what’s happening in the art world. I have not seen a new movie in months. I don’t have cable. I think I embarrass my friends. So it’s probably safe to say that art does not inspire me at all. I mean, I like it, I appreciate it and can be roused in all the ways art tends to rouse anyone, but it’s not a huge part of my writing life. Mostly I am inspired—though I don’t like this word, it seems silly—but mostly I am stirred to action by other people. Their stories. Their motives. People are so ugly and fascinating and pathetic and lovely, there’s just no shortage of what can be made of these qualities in congress with each other. So I listen a lot. I eavesdrop. I try to see what people are up to in their hearts and go from there.
Advice for writers?
Write.
What was the process of getting LLC published like?
Not so bad, really. I was very lucky because the book found its way into the hands of a great editor who really believed in it. Throughout our work together, I could feel his enthusiasm and it kept me going. It’s sort of a slow process—almost anticlimactic, really—but there were many highlights along the way. I kept having to remind myself to enjoy it. You only get one first novel. There were page proofs and galleys and the cover and advanced reading copies and flap copy and my first blurbs and my first reviews, and each of these felt like a milestone or minideath (depending), and each came at a bit of a price because I was scared and wanting, mostly, to (a) not get slaughtered by the press and (b) start work on something new. Happily, both came to pass, and it all went just fine.
Why, in a world like ours, does writing matter?
Oh, well, why does anything matter? Things aren’t going so well these days—our politics are appalling, the country’s a mess, and everyone is broke—so it’s possible all our artistic pursuits are vapid and pointless. But I don’t think so. The arts are how we communicate. How we reinvigorate our humanity when it seems lost to us forever. How we bring the perpetrators to task for what they have done. How we solace each other. Dismantle, ennoble, educate, and love. Writing is the record of note. The diary that matters. We might be regressing into the barbarism of our forebearers, but I’d like to think that literature—art—is and has always been the tide that turns us around.
One of the wonderful things about LLC is its ambition. You’ve braided together seemingly disparate narrative threads. Was it your intention all along to write such a “big” book, a novel that incorporated Vikings and addiction and plagues and reincarnation and, you know, everything else?
Not exactly, no. I knew I wanted to write about narcotics recovery and plague because I thought the solipsism of addiction might rub up nicely against a national crisis so that the stakes of one would always be dwarfing the other in a constant battle for which misery reigns supreme. As for the rest, the reincarnation stuff, it happened by accident. I got lucky that the substance or principle of reincarnation dovetails so nicely with many of the novel’s other obsessions. After all, the cornerstone of reincarnation is that you keep coming back—how excellent that this same mantra dictates behavior in narcotics recovery: Keep coming back to meetings, keep trying, and while you’re at it, tell your story, which is, of course, exactly what the reincarnated people do. Still, even without the luck, there was little chance I was going to write a small-scale novel. As it turns out, I have a lot of energy that will incline to absurdist and.somewhat questionable prose if not repressed or put to good use. For this novel, the oddness of the reincarnated people was a good outlet, and what allowed me to stay focused with the main narrative voice and not start making everyone a troll for no reason. If I can’t harness the energy, I’ll just start getting weird, or more weird, and no one wants that. So I have to marshal my energies but also find ways to let them rip—which means conjuring dead people and, possibly, bloviating on topics that interest no one but me. My mind wanders—I’m interested in so many things—so my task is to find a way to bring it all together.
What role did research play in the writing of LLC?
A huge role. I know very little about pretty much everything, so for the novel, I had to research plague and reincarnation and infectious disease and crack pipes. I didn’t even know what one looked like. I also had to read about fourteenth-century Europe and the Vikings and World War II just to make the dead people credible. The most harrowing material was about infectious disease. I learned much more than I wanted, and there were several weeks during the writing of this novel that I swore off meat and chicken and vegetables and food and air, it all seemed so deadly. Incidentally, there’s a bibliography on my Web site, which I debated long and hard about posting, because I didn’t want to seem pretentious. But in the end, I posted it anyway because, come on, this is interesting stuff! Vikings! Fatal disease! Well, my read
ing list is on there, if anyone’s interested.
LLC is dark and funny, the latter of which is very rare in books dealing with recovery from addiction. Did you set out to write a funny book or was it a product of Lucy’s perspective and experience?
Hard to say. I didn’t mean to be funny, but then the material is so unpalatable, I didn’t think I could get at how horrible addiction and egotism and terror really are without being funny about them. The risk is that the narrator, for her humor, seems unavailable or at least impenetrable, and so I worked hard to break her down as the book went along. Part of recovering from drug addiction is ego diminishment, the ego being a terrific defense and insulator. Much like humor, in a way. So I had to be careful about it.
Most readers will read the interview after having read the novel. What can you tell them about the title?
If you concede the possibility of a last last chance, then you essentially concede that your chances are infinite. And that’s pretty much what the book is about. This is your last last last last, etc. You just keep coming back—in body (as per recovery), in spirit (as per a reincarnated person), or in story (as per, well, all the stories that get told throughout the novel, including the protagonist’s). The book wants to dispatch the concept of apocalypse, even in the face of a slate-wiper like plague, and so that’s what the title is getting at.
How did you arrive at Lucy’s voice? Did you always imagine she’d be the window through which we see the book?
She came easiest of all—this angry, miserable girl who’s so shackled to her own egotism, she just can’t rise above herself. I had compassion for her from the start and figured she’d be a good way to tell this story because already in her plight would be the elements of a good story, just the homogenizing struggle we have with ourselves every day: to be better, stronger, more loving and courageous.
Also with Lucy—and Izzy, Hannah, and pretty much everyone in the book-how did you manage to make such stereotypically “unlikable” characters appealing and alluring?
I don’t think they are unlikable. I like them. I don’t even think they are all that weird. Okay, so they’ve chosen to manifest their problems in particularly destructive ways, but I hardly think these depart radically from how most of us conduct our lives, at least our inner lives, when we sit down alone with ourselves. Most people, when you look at them long and hard enough, are struggling and traumatized and confused and hurt. So what’s interesting in all this is not that people are good or likable, but that they try. And try really hard because there’s so much to overcome. I think there’s nobility and pathos and humor in all this, and so maybe that’s why some of the people in the book seem appealing. Because they are trying. Even Izzy tries. It’s just that not everyone succeeds.
The trauma (plague, etc.) is twofold in the novel, and it works on both a macro and micro level. That is, the national crises mirror, in many ways, the characterological crises. Was this your intent or did it evolve from draft to draft, revision to revision?
I certainly wanted the plague-as-meltdown to interact and foil the emotional crises that fell the main characters. But I also wanted to use it as the one thing a drug addict could play down by way of aggrandizing her own problems and, in this way, to illustrate the stupendous narcissism of addiction. Not even the plague is more harrowing or deadly than my problems and my life. The problem, though, with wanting to downplay the plague was that I almost lost it altogether and, from draft to draft, had to revive it. I also wanted to look at how a national crisis tends to mobilize things like fundamentalism, racism, and xenophobia, because these, too, are freakishly selfish in their trappings and stuffings.
The ending of the book is intentionally ambiguous (at least to my reading). Has that been a point of contention either with your editors or your readers?
Some people have asked me to clarify the ending, to tell them what happens. But what they really want to know is what happens next, which is a different question entirely. And one I can’t answer because I don’t know. In any case, I am suspicious of resolution and rarely find in its craft anything that satisfies me. I actually believe in ambiguity as an organizing principle, which is counterintuitive only in the way chaos theory is counterintuitive. Things don’t end neatly, if they end at all, and certainly not when there’s a plague still out there whose virulence and contagion are unknown. For me, the big thing was reincarnating Travis in the baby—that this guy who was just trying to do the right thing would end up in this child, who may or may not die of plague himself, and who may or may not take Lucy and Stanley down with him. Does it matter? No. Lucy has made progress. If she gets to act on what she’s learned is just not the point, only that she has learned at all.
What’s the best experience you’ve had relating to LLC since it’s been out in the world? The strangest experience?
Oh, I’m not sure I can answer these questions. It’s been very odd listening to people respond to the novel—discussing its characters and intentions—because they often credit me with more ambition or intent than I ever had. Sometimes a bone is just a bone. Sometimes it’s a metaphor for peace on earth, but with me, usually, it’s just a bone. So that has been weird. It’s also been a little embarrassing to grapple with people who’ve gotten intimate with my work because I am, in the main, pretty shy. Mostly, though, it’s been nice. I wrote a book and a few people read it, how amazing is that?
For those of us who know you, visiting your Web site feels like hanging out with you. One of the things that contributes to that is your movies. Can you talk a little about them? Do they in any way relate to your writing process?
It feels like hanging out with me? Is that a compliment? But yes, my movies. They are ridiculous. But also very fun to make. My first movie was about cheese. It ended with a picture of a woman wearing a cheese bra (the moral? Cheese is salvific). Probably my best showing to date is about tumbleweeds in Marfa, Texas. They fall in love. They argue, they part, they nap. As for the films on my Web site, they happened by accident. I spend a lot of time alone and I can’t write all the time. But I also have guilt when it comes to watching TV or brainlessly cruising the Internet. So if I’m not reading or working, I am probably making a movie. I suppose I enjoy making narrative in any way I can. Also, I figured since there were these weird reincarnated people in my novel, why not make a short film about each? So I started in on them. Turns out, I don’t know how to use my editing software at all, so the films are raw and lo-fi, and a lot of the time I end up treating my ineptitude like it’s part of the work, which seems like a decent way to pass the hours. I made a little movie for the New York Times’s Web site. When they posted it, I was almost as excited about that as I was to sell my novel. Right now I am making one about bears. The protagonists are my sneakers.
What are you working on now?
A new novel. It’s about loneliness and a kidnapping and how good people turn awful. It’s also about surveillance and our fractured politics and North Korea and a big love story gone very wrong. There might also be some salacious activity happening under Cincinnati. The other day someone explained to me what prog rock is. So now I think I might be writing a prog novel.
Bret Anthony Johnston is the author of Corpus Christi: Stories and the editor of Naming the World: And Other Exercises for the Creative Writer. He directs the creative writing program at Harvard University. For more information, please visit www.bretanthonyjohnston.com.
Discussion Questions
In Last Last Chance, Fiona Maazel paints a darkly comic portrait of the emotional and spiritual turmoil of Lucy, a thirty-year-old drug addict about to venture her seventh attempt at rehab. As daunting as this might be under normal circumstances, Lucy’s family is still reeling from the suicide of her father, formerly an esteemed government scientist now held in universal contempt after vials of an incurable “superplague” disappeared from his lab. People across the country start getting sick, panic ensues, and, as Lucy’s family falls into chaos, rehab suddenly seems like the safes
t place to be in this gritty novel about learning to have hope in a world full of anxiety. The complexities of Lucy’s story and the nuance of her wry yet vulnerable character provide many avenues for discussion.
1. Lucy struggles with self-loathing and a sense of worthlessness. Why do you think she feels this way? Nature or nurture? Do you blame her neglectful parents or something else?
2. On page 35, Lucy describes how she fell in love with Eric, but that this love wasn’t enough to stop or even curb her drug abuse. Why not? Why might the support and presence of someone you love not be enough to help a person like Lucy cope with her suffering?
3. Similarly, Lucy is convinced that rehab and therapy—basically all the services available to people with problems—will not work for her. Why does she think so? What do you think she has to surmount before she’s able to believe she can change or be helped?
