En av Fem
flators absoluta favoritförfattare, amerikanska Monica Nolan, har just släppt
ny bok och Skorpan har kontaktat henne för att få veta lite mer!
Intervjun
nedan är på engelska, men för den som tycker att utländska inte är deras
starkaste sida kan vi berätta att Maxie
Mainwaring, Lesbian Dilettante handlar om en av karaktärerna som vi
tidigare träffat i Monicas bok Loiz Lenz,
Lesbian Secretary.
Maxie är en
välbärgad flicka, som tvingas lära sig att försörja sig själv den dagen hennes
mamma kommer på henne med att kyssa en annan flicka och drar in hennes underhåll.
Roligt är också att det i boken finns skandinaviska maffiagäng som heter Swenson,
Larson och Olssen. Monica säger att hon var trött på att maffian alltid var
italiensk, så därför ville hon bryta mot stereotypen och istället ha
skandinaviska skurkar. Hon är nyfiken på hur det kommer att fungera för oss i
Europa och Skandinavien, så det får vi berätta för henne sedan!
Här kommer
Skorpans intervju med Monica!
-Congratulations on your new book, Monica!
Now tell us, who is this person, Maxie Mainwaring?
-Maxie Mainwaring appeared in my first book, Lois Lenz, Lesbian
Secretary, as a supporting character, and she gets her own story in this
book. She is the wild, reckless daughter of a high society family. Her mother doesn't
approve of her living in the Magdalena Arms boarding house and working as a
newspaper columnist's assistant, and has been trying to marry her off. The book
opens when her mother catches her kissing another girl and cuts off Maxie's
allowance. So Maxie has to learn how to support herself. Naturally there are
many, many complications, as Maxie lands and loses a whole series of jobs.
-What made you write this book? Have you met a lot of rich girls who never
had a job?
-I always knew I wanted to write another book about the girls at the
Magdalena Arms in general and Maxie in particular. While I had a few wealthy
girls in mind (the ones I knew worked and were much less frivolous), a lot of
the inspiration for this story was my own work experience. In a way it is a
wish-fulfillment fantasy about a person who has a lot of different jobs and
gets bored easily, and quits or is fired, and comes out on top. After two much
more hard-working protagonists, it was fun to write about one who has a
less-than-ideal work ethic. Let's face it, working for a living isn't fun, and
Maxie doesn't pretend it is. Maxie shares my preference for sleeping in and
having breakfast in bed rather than getting up for a nine-to-five job. Maxie's
love life, however, which mirrors her work life in its variety, is not in the
least autobiographical! That is pure pulp.
-There is always a mix of intriguing persons in your books! And they often
have a name that matches their personality. How do you come up with your
characters?
-It's hard to describe the process of inventing characters. They're made of
bits and pieces from all over--movies, people I know, strangers on the street,
stories I've heard, books--then they somehow come together in my subconscious.
And of course, they're often shaped by plot necessities! The names, on the
other hand, are more consciously chosen. I use different sources, for example,
my college alumnae newsletter. I'll look at the class notes from the 1950s and
1960s and make lists of names I like. Then I'll recombine or change them. Mrs.
DeWitt is a twist on the DeForests in Daphne Du Maurier's Rebecca,
because I had in mind a sort of fallen grandeur feeling. Mainwaring just
sounded rich and waspy (White Anglo Saxon Protestant, not the bug) to
me--there's a character in a Jane Austen novel named Mainwaring. Then in this
book it turns out that Maxie's ancestors are from Finland and her grandfather
anglicized their name which was originally Mänvaarik. Which brings me to the
Scandinavian connection...
-Yes, I heard that there would be some scandinavian references in this
book! Of what kind?
-A little background: I grew up in Chicago which at one time had a big
Swedish population, and still has a sort of Swedish neighborhood with a
Swedish-American museum and some Swedish restaurants, where I was taken as a
child. Since Bay City is set in the midwest, and based in part on Chicago, I
wanted to have that immigrant population as a presence in the books, which is
partly why I made up the Daughters of the American Pioneers in my last book, Bobby
Blanchard, Lesbian Gym Teacher.
The other reason is to poke fun at certain Americans' pride in having
ancestry that traces back to the pilgrims. The DAP (Daughters of the American
Pioneers) is a parody of the DAR (Daughters of the American Revolution) for
example. Really I'm poking fun at the whole artificial construction of high
society and aristocracy, etc. I'm proud of my ancestors who fled the potatoe
famine in Ireland (smart!), and also the ones who left Germany for reasons I
don't know, but I don't think I would join an organization to say that because
of them I am more special than other people whose ancestors got here a earlier
or later and came from a different place. We are all just immigrants in the
end, and the first ones here gave the indians smallpox, which is nothing to be
proud of.
Then I decided Bay City should be a place dominated by immigrants from
Scandinavia, so I made Bay City's criminal underworld Scandinavian. So now
Swedes and Finns and Norwegians (nobody from Iceland or Greenland, sorry) have
been substituted for both waspy DAR types and the Italian mafia, and Maxie has
to battle the Swenson, Larson and Olssen mobs. One of the reasons I did this is
because there are so many cliches about the mafia, and they have figured in so
many crime novels, and movies and television shows that they are old and tired
and I needed to do something different with my mobsters. I think American
readers will find it comic because of cultural expectations and stereotypes
about Italians vs. Scandinavians--I'll be curious to see how it works for
European and Scandinavian readers!
-Which is a favorite character in all of your books?
-Favorite character--Oh that's so hard to choose! I really love them all,
even the party-poopers and villains. Especially the villains! Right now I'd
have to say Maxie. I used to be very fond of Mrs. Pierson, the mean boss in Lois
Lenz (her treatment of Lois was inspired by the way my older sisters
treated me when I was a kid, so I'm sentimental about her). I like the girls
with criminal tendencies like the never-seen Ramona in Lois Lenz, who
reappears as Mona in Bobby Blanchard. I didn't manage to work her into Maxie,
but she comes back again in the book I'm currently working on. I'm also very
fond of Miss Craybill, the headmistress in Bobby Blanchard, because
writing about her reawakened my childhood interest in birdwatching, now a real
hobby of mine. I saw an owl in Golden Gate Park just last week, which was very
exciting.
-Thank you, Monica! We´ll let you get back to your writing then. What are
you working on?
- Now I must go work on book #4, Dolly Dingle, Lesbian Landlady,
which should be out in time for Christmas, 2014!
.
Inlägg
