Leslie DanielsRecent Interview:

Interview by Ron Hogan: Beatrice.com

Cleaning Nabokov’s House mixes uproarious humor with the poignant heartbreak of a mother fighting for her children. How did you handle this balance between laughter and tears?

I don’t think that laughter and tears are about balance. Life can break your heart and be hilarious at the same time. If you were a psychotherapist, you might say that humor is my defensive strategy. If you were a nice psychotherapist, you might say that it is part of my adaptive coping strength.  I was lucky to have an extremely funny father. We had a great time joking and bantering. After he was gone, I found myself writing toward the place from where he used to answer, a kind of calling out. It struck me then that humor is a kind of duty: If you can be funny you should, because life can be so deadly earnest. The opposite of humor is boredom, not sadness. Laughter and tears dance the tango.

Like your character Barb, you also live in Vladimir Nabokov’s house – though without finding a long-lost manuscript! What is it like to live in Nabokov’s house? How did the house inspire you?

Moving into the house, I thought a lot about what it meant to be there. I still do. What intrigued me was the fact of an absolute genius having lived in this same simple space same wide views and unfussy geometry juxtaposed with the fact that no trace of him existed. I looked for Nabokov in that house. I can find evidence of the architect, the original owner, but Nabokov exists only in the copies of his books on my shelves.

Since you’ve worked with writers as well as being a writer, how much of your industry savvy went into creating the character, Margie, who convinces Barb to become a writer? Do you give similar advice to Margie’s when you encourage fellow writers?

When I work with writers in any capacity, whether it is teacher or friend or agent (although I have stepped away from agenting) I am very unlike Margie who tells her client exactly what to do to succeed. I encourage writers to trust themselves, to find areas of  freedom and excitement, and to forge ahead.  Write the book that only you can write.

Darcy and Sam are such quirky and realistic kids! How did you create such authentic young voices?

My mother is a brilliant observer of children, I have learned a bit from her. Children haven’t yet figured out how to manipulate their image to blend in, so their actions are wonderfully overt, or “quirky.”  As for the authenticity, I have some background in acting, and accessing authentic emotion is part of the training. The feelings are real, the characters and situation are invented.

Barb realizes that she is “too rebellious a cook” to take a cooking class in Onkwedo, as she ponders ways to make friends in town. (p. 100) Are you also a rebellious cook? Why is cooking so important to your heroine?

My ideal cooking is with people I love, collaborating in the kitchen, making it up as we go along. That way it becomes a marriage of personalities and tastes and the results are always a feast. I also like to cook alone and feed people I care about, that’s another kind of communion. Cooking to me is a lot like writing: you take things that you like and believe in and put them together in a way that is enjoyable for other people. That act is a kind of offering. I flirted with the idea of writing a cookbook, but I find it absolutely boring to tell people what to do and how to do it. I think people should find their own way.

Psychology both real and invented is sprinkled throughout the novel, particularly as Barb realizes that her customers really want to be listened to and understood. You grew up in a family of psychologists and have a degree, too – did you draw upon your own family and research while you were writing?

I come from a family that had great respect for individuality and imagination. As I child I listened to my parents talk about their work and it fascinated me. That was our family culture. Psychology and narrative writing are very close together in that you are always dealing with how people behave, what motivates them, how others perceive them, and how they think about themselves. My sister works at a large mental hospital and her every work day is like the most extraordinary anthology of short fiction, by turns heartbreaking, fierce, hilarious, tender, bizarre. I listen to her talk about her day with awe and fascination and a feeling of great humility that human beings like her have the courage and imagination to reach out to others who are in such extreme places in their psyche and their lives. As a fiction writer, my orientation is toward character and interaction.

In the novel Barb muses, “It probably doesn’t matter where a writer writes, since his is living mostly inside his own head.” (p. 34) As a writer—and as someone who has worked with many other writers—do you think it matters where a writer writes?

I think there is often a restlessness in a writer that has to do with creating one landscape in your head while existing in another. And writers are just as superstitious as anyone else. If you think you need red walls and a fine tipped pen, sweat pants, and a latté to get going, by all means line that up. But don’t spend your life looking for the perfect red paint or lurking at the café. Those rules all seem untrue when think of the adaptation that human beings are capable of making. And interruptions abound. My own preference is to work in solitude.

An actual unfinished Nabokov manuscript, Laura, was published last year, after you wrote Cleaning Nabokov’s House. What do you think about The Original of Laura?

This was uncanny because I had finished a first or very early draft and had sent it to my agent two months before the real Nabokov manuscript was mentioned in the press. We were both flabbergasted. I’d even named the girl in it various things beginning with L. I felt the fear that dogs me as a writer: that people wouldn’t believe I had made it up, only that I was aping someone else. When I had a copy of The Original of Laura in my hand, I felt the humility we all feel before the forces of life and death. He didn’t finish the work, it is an artifact, not a novel.

Please tell us about your next project. Will you write another book about books?

I will answer that, but I have a question of my own first. Cleaning Nabokov’s House has a lot to do with intimacy: heartbreak, lust, romance, sex.  I was expecting a question about that! I will be deeply interested to see hear what discussions it provokes among its readers.

OK, now the second book question: I write in a very unruly way, like digging holes in the backyard, looking for dinosaur bones or gold. I am not the kind of writer who starts out with a big idea and makes a plan to accomplish it. I am much more like someone walking backwards through a foreign country, thinking to herself with each step, Look where I am, look where I’ve come from.