Dania Khandaker:
Welcome. I'm Dania Khandaker, assistant director of member services and chapter relations at Brandeis National Committee. It is my absolute pleasure to welcome you to our very first BNC virtual book club. And this is exclusive for all BNC members. We are kicking off our first book discussion on the book My Ex-Life written by Professor Stephen McCauley who's joining us today for the discussion.
Dania Khandaker:
Professor McCauley serves as the co-director of the Creative Writing Program and professor of the practice of English fiction here at Brandeis University. He's also the author of several novels, such as The Object of My Affection, The Easy Way Out, and My Ex-Life, which we are discussing today. Several of his books including My Ex-Life have been national bestsellers. His fiction reviews columns have appeared in Harpers, Vogue, New York Times, and New York Times Book Review, and many other publications. He was named a chevalier in the order of the arts and letters by the French Minister of Culture, and he occasionally plays the ukulele. We are honored and excited to have him here with us today.
Dania Khandaker:
Our host for today is none other than Merle Carrus. Merle is the BNC national vice president and a member of the Greater Boston Chapter. She's passionate about reading and loves sharing and discussing books that she has read. She's also our incoming national president of BNC. There couldn't be a better host for a virtual book club, and we're so excited to have Merle.
Dania Khandaker:
So for some housekeeping items, we have three fun poll questions for you during our session today. So please keep a look out and be sure to vote on your answers. We're also recording this event. So if you have friends in your chapter who missed today's event and wanted to join, they will be able to watch at a later time. You're also encouraged to send us questions that you think that we didn't cover at the end of the session. So please use the chat function at the bottom to send us your questions.
Dania Khandaker:
So without future ado, I want to hand it over to Merle and Professor McCauley.
Merle Carrus:
Thank you.
Stephen McCauley:
Thank you.
Merle Carrus:
Welcome, Stephen, to our first BNC book talk, and I'm so glad that you were able to join us today for this event.
Stephen McCauley:
As if I had anything else to do, right? Thank you so much. I really appreciate it.
Merle Carrus:
So I'd like to start us with a poll. So we'll do the first poll. If everybody could vote in...
Stephen McCauley:
Do I get to vote on this?
Dania Khandaker:
Yes, you can vote on it as well.
Stephen McCauley:
Okay. I'm going to do it.
Stephen McCauley:
While we're doing that, I just want to say thank you so much, Merle, for choosing my book and for inviting me. And I also want to say thank you in general to the Brandeis National Committee, which over the years has been an extremely generous and supportive toward me and my work and invited me to a number of these kinds of events, and also the University on Wheels. And I don't know if Beth Bernstein is here, but she has been a great support over the years as well. So I just want to acknowledge that and thank you very much. It means a great deal.
Merle Carrus:
And we appreciate your enthusiasm in assisting us and participating in the Brandeis National Committee. We love your support and it helps our organization also. All right.
Stephen McCauley:
When I first came to Brandeis, I was like in the early 1990s, and I've been teaching off and on, more on recently than previously. But since then, and it's been a really just wonderful place to teach. And the university has been great to me. So I'm very appreciative.
Merle Carrus:
All right. I can remove the poll.
Dania Khandaker:
All right. So the poll's done. Let's share the results.
Merle Carrus:
Can we see the results are the winning three was people were correct. So I'm happy to say that I discovered Stephen McCauley is the author through BNC, and I have enjoyed reading this book, My Ex-Life. And I look forward to going back now and reading some of your earlier work, and I hope some of the other people on the call also will. That you've written six. This is your seventh book, and six other books. And an answer to our first poll question, which people got right, that three of them have been made into movies. And so I think that's very impressive.
Merle Carrus:
So to start off us, could you tell us a little bit about how you came up with the premise for this book and the plot for this one?
Stephen McCauley:
Sure. The premise of the book, for those who haven't read it, is that previously married husband and wife who were married in their early-20s and then divorced shortly thereafter, reconnect 30 years later as friends to help each other out. They haven't seen each other in a long time and a lot has changed in their lives. David, the male lead, has come out and moved to San Francisco, and Julie has remarried, has a daughter by her second husband. And both of them are at a turning point in their lives where they each have a lot of problems that they have to deal with.
Stephen McCauley:
The initial contact is made because Julie has a 17 year old daughter who's applying to colleges, and David is a independent counselor, someone who helps students find out what schools they want to enroll in and write their essays and that kind of thing. And so she asks him for help with her daughter, and he comes to what is essentially Rockport, Massachusetts, although not called that in the book, to help her out. And they reconnect. Not as lovers, but as friends.
Stephen McCauley:
And I think that there are a number of things that played into this. One was just that there's something I find very charming about the idea of people, ex-spouses I suppose as a very sentimental side of me who are somehow right for each other even though their relationship may have some built-in problems that make it impossible, as in this case, or inadvisable. I don't know. But nonetheless that they're continued fondness for each other endures over time. So there was that aspect of it that I wanted to write about.
Stephen McCauley:
I also really like writing about friendships and about maybe it's best to say romantic friendships. I think that they're very important in people's lives, and I think that they don't perhaps get enough play in fiction.
Stephen McCauley:
And then in terms of a bigger theme, being of a certain age you might say. I had a standard joke that I like to say, which is I recently turned 50 and more recently than that I turned 65. So I think you begin to think about how you want to move forward in life, and I guess one of the things I wanted to explore is is it possible to look backward and resuscitate or reconfigure some relationship that you had in the past. That provides a basis for your life in some ways.
Stephen McCauley:
I've been surprised since this book has been... Not really surprised but since the book has come out, I've heard from a lot of people. And I think that there's just an enormous number of people who have written to tell me that they've reconnected with former boyfriends and ex-spouses and so on through Facebook especially, which is an easy way to peek into other people's lives. And a number of these little totally innocent endeavors have resulted in renewed relationships and so on.
Merle Carrus:
Right. So a couple of writing style questions just to start us off. When you started writing this, did you know the trajectory that you were taking? Did you start and know where it was going to end? Did you know all these characters that were going to be in it, or was it a surprise as you were going along what direction you were taking?
Stephen McCauley:
No. I mean, I literally knew... It was completely different. In fact, I wanted to get some of these. I wanted to show you because I think I said that in mid-March we had all of these writers that were going to bring to campus and Brandeis to do readings and so on and so forth and obviously weren't able to do that. So we did these Zoom meetings with them. And one of the things that we built-in as a value added because you're on Zoom was like showing people where the writers work. So I was going to show you some of my notebooks for this book because I do write long hand. But anyway, I didn't get it together. But maybe we can get to that in a minute.
Stephen McCauley:
No, I usually just begin with an idea on a couple of characters, and as I'm writing, I get to know them better. I realize that someone I thought was a potter is in fact a lawyer and very much as in life, you meet someone and then you say, "Oh, she's got an ex-husband." "Oh, and she's got a daughter by a previous relationship, and that daughter's got these friends and so on." For me, that's one of the exciting things about writing is just meeting all of these people and getting to know them and seeing how they interact.
Stephen McCauley:
And I had no idea how it would end, and the ending kept changing.
Merle Carrus:
Oh, that's interesting. So one of the members wrote in a question in advance, Margie Farber from Sarasota, BNC member asked... She really enjoyed the book, and she felt like the style of writing was informal, a style that seemed aligned with the messiness of the characters and their relationships. And she's wondering if this is your... Because I did admit at the beginning I haven't read any other books yet, and I will. Is this your-
Stephen McCauley:
They're all the same.
Merle Carrus:
Your writing style. Oh, okay. That was part of the question. Or does it just fit these... It just happens to fit these characters.
Stephen McCauley:
I love the term messy because I guess my writing is a little messy in the sense that... Well, I did not write this book sequentially. In other words, I had written about 100 pages of it. Portions of it were initially written in the first... I'll get to that in a minute. But anyway, my agent sent it out to publishers to try to sell it, and in fact, three people were interested in buying it. And I went, of course, with the one who offered the least amount of money because she was a wonderful editor. I thought I would enjoy working with her and she would have the best chance of getting the book into readers hands.
Stephen McCauley:
So at that point, I thought I'm just going to write scenes that I can imagine happening in the lives of these characters and in their relationship. And I did so, and it was completely out of sequence. I think I wrote an ending of the book very early on in the process. So in that sense, it's very messy. I guess to be honest, the somewhat conversational tone of the narration and that intimacy hopefully between the reader and the characters is something that takes a lot of time and a lot of revising for me to achieve. So I guess it's both things. It's a little bit messy and then it's more carefully revised and crafted.
Merle Carrus:
So I had mentioned to you before when we had spoken originally that I read the book the first time, just read through it as an enjoyable novel, and I thought it was... I started telling people it's a light, fun read. And then now I've gone back and I've studied it much closer, and I have to say that while it is still a very entertaining read and there's a lot of clever, fun dialogue and wonderful characterizations, which I'm going to point out a little later. I think it is a little bit more of a serious book, and there are some serious topics. Was that your goal to... Let's say it this way. How did you want people to view your book? How would you like people to come away from the book?
Stephen McCauley:
Many years ago I interviewed a writer for I think it was the Boston Phoenix. I was working for the Boston Phoenix at the time, and I interviewed a writer. And one of the first questions I asked him was why he had written this book, and he said in a sort of adamant way, "Well, I don't write to entertain." And I thought, "Really? I mean, maybe that's why you're having trouble getting published." So I definitely do think of myself as trying to entertain my readers, and it's very important to me.
Stephen McCauley:
On the other hand, there was a review for one of my novels. I'm pretending I don't know which one it was, but I do. In the New York Times, and they said, "Stephen McCauley wants nothing more than to entertain." And it was a very positive review, but I guess I thought about it. I thought I want a little bit more than to entertain or at least... I mean, there are many ways that you can entertain readers in other medium, and I hope that in addition to being entertaining, laughing and being amused by things, that it moves readers in some way. And that can be moved to laugh, maybe to move to get a lump in your throat at a certain point, moved to think a little bit about certain aspects of one's own life or about certain kinds of relationships. And I guess I think there are two different kinds of comedy in the book I think. I mean, I feel so pretentious saying this. So I apologize.
Merle Carrus:
I'm agreeing with everything you're saying.
Stephen McCauley:
Okay. But I think that there is a broad comic nature to some scenes and some chapters and some characters in the book. I'm thinking of the lady who comes to as an Airbnb consultant to the house, and that's sort of a broad comic set piece. It was for me writing it. I really loved writing it. At a certain point, my editor said, "Maybe you need to take this out of here. What does it have to do with anything else?" But I just had so much fun writing it I didn't want to.
Stephen McCauley:
And then there are other lines that I spend a lot more time going over and trying to get the wording right so that it's not only funnier but also it just has a little more resonance with some, if I may say so, deeper truth about people.
Merle Carrus:
We'll riff right off of the lady, the consultant coming to the house, and we'll go to our second poll question.
Merle Carrus:
Dania or Gil. Too easy.
Merle Carrus:
All right. We got it, Dania, you can pull it down.
Dania Khandaker:
I'm going to end the poll and share the results.
Merle Carrus:
Here's the results. So we got the results. Throw pillows are the key to the poll. And so if you could, I asked you to prepare this in advance. This is a great description... Oops, the poll keeps popping up in my face. You have this great description that really comes alive, and one of them is this description of Julie's house that she's trying to rent out as an Airbnb. And then she brings in this consultant will give her some advice to help her supposedly improve her business, and the advisor tells her that the living room is just too crowded. And she suggests throw pillows. So would you just read us that little passage?
Stephen McCauley:
Sure. And I should say beforehand that such people, I don't know such people like this exactly, but Airbnb consultants, of course, exist and they help people to try to decide how much to charge for their rooms and how they can advertise them better and how they should decorate them to appeal to guests more. And I should say in advance because this is a big deal in the classroom these days. If you're going to say something that might be upsetting, you have to give a trigger warning.
Merle Carrus:
Oh yes.
Stephen McCauley:
So I have to give a trigger warning here that hand sanitizers are discussed in this passage.
Merle Carrus:
I know. I thought it was so relevant.
Stephen McCauley:
I know.
Stephen McCauley:
Sandra's main point... Sandra being the Airbnb consultant. Sandra's main point was that the living room needed less of everything. Less furniture, fewer books, end tables and footstools, fewer scatter rugs that people could trip on, and fewer small items. "Some of them like to steal small things," she said. "You never accuse them. You sit and wait until you catch them in the act. Then you pounce." Predictably, the one thing Sandra advised more of was toss pillows.
Stephen McCauley:
"I'd like to see four or five times the number you currently have. It doesn't look as if you've been reading the blog closely, Julie. You can pick them up for pennies at bargain stores, thrift shops, even pharmacies."
Stephen McCauley:
"Won't that make the room look cluttered?" David asked.
Stephen McCauley:
Sandra sighed and shook her head in disapproval. "People associate toss pillows with well run, short term rentals. Nothing makes a room, a whole house more welcoming and relaxing. You literally cannot have too many. And if you have a sofa you don't want anyone to sit on-probably not a problem here-you even add more. You create a welcoming atmosphere but in practical terms, the sofa is impossible to use. I don't see any hand sanitizers here."
Stephen McCauley:
"In a living room?" David asked.
Stephen McCauley:
"People want germ-free environments, David. They don't want to stay in someone's house and think about all the DNA and fecal matter on every surface. You put out a bunch of hand sanitizers, and they plant a suggestion that everything is clean. End of story. I'm sorry, Julie. But I can only give this room a three. And to be honest, that's generous."
Stephen McCauley:
I rent Airbnb's to write in, and I go to places usually around New England, Upstate New York, and I find it more conducive to getting work done than being in my own house, even though I have a study with a big painting behind me.
Merle Carrus:
Right.
Stephen McCauley:
And I begin noticing that all of them just had an inordinate number of toss pillows everywhere, like on the bed. Because I'm one person and I prefer small spaces, I tend to rent small places. And so not only did you have a bed that was with throw pillows that covered half the bed, there was nowhere to put them. There were no closets or places to put them. So I just thought this is making the bed unusable. To my aesthetic unappealing. Anyway, I became obsessed with it. And I began taking pictures of these and sending them to friends and saying, "Look, I'm not making this up. This is a real thing."
Merle Carrus:
Right.
Stephen McCauley:
So that's why I put it in the book.
Merle Carrus:
It's just very well written. I mean, that really to me I think is the key is that they're just so cleverly written, all these little descriptive things about the house. And you can really picture them in your mind as you're reading the book.
Merle Carrus:
So I'd like to now look at I guess some of the different characters. Right at the beginning of the book, we have this quote, "The period of life he'd shared with his ex-wife and he was resigned to leave it at that. In the wake of Soring's departure, he'd come to realize it was racking up a number of ex-lives. So the book starts looking at David and his ex-life. Is he the person who's ex-life we are looking at when you say My Ex-Life in the title, or does that encompass other people?
Stephen McCauley:
Well, as I said originally I was writing the book in the first person from David's point of view. So when I thought of the title, I thought well it's him because his was the only point of view. And then I realized that I needed to open it up more. And so I included Julie's point of view. And then I gave it to a friend of mine who's a really good reader, and she said, "I think there's something interesting going on with this daughter, and I don't know what it is. But I think you should just kind of get to know her a little better. You should maybe write a chapter from her point of view." So that's what I did. And then I found the daughter Mandy so interesting and to me touching that I wrote more and more about her, and she became a third point of view in the book.
Stephen McCauley:
So I guess an answer to your question... Oh, and then I thought since the whole book... And, let me just say this, I finished a full draft of the manuscript and though it was done. Some of it was written in the first person, and some of it was in third person. I had previously asked the editor if she thought that was okay, and she said, "Yeah, I don't see a problem with it." I don't particularly like that in books, but it was what was happening. And then she said, "It's got to all be in third person. This is just too distracting."
Stephen McCauley:
So I thought that maybe I couldn't keep the title, but then I liked it. I guess it means both their ex-lives, both David's and Julie's. And I think there's maybe some point at which each refers to an ex-life or previous existence or something in the book.
Stephen McCauley:
And what I meant by ex-life was not just a brief random six months, but a period of your life that you thought was going to be your future. And I think we've all got a lot of those.
Merle Carrus:
So do you have a favorite character in the book?
Stephen McCauley:
I guess I have different favorite characters in the book. I mean, I really loved writing about the neighbor Amira who's outrageous and very appealing in lots of ways and totally over the top. And when you're writing about a character like that, it's really easy to figure out what she's going to say next because it's going to be outrageous and contrary and so on. But maybe Julie was maybe the character I liked the most. I just became very, very fond of her as someone who is deeply flawed, has made a lot of mistakes, continues to make a lot of mistakes, but is deep down a good person. I found her very sympathetic. As I wrote more and more of the book, I really wanted to give her some kind of happy ending. Maybe I did so implausibly by subtly having a big shift come their way at the end of the book.
Merle Carrus:
All right. So if we do the next poll question, that'll give us a hint as to my favorite character. And then we'll talk about it on the other side.
Stephen McCauley:
Ah.
Merle Carrus:
Too easy.
Stephen McCauley:
Too easy.
Stephen McCauley:
Let's see how many people get this.
Merle Carrus:
Couple other ones. All right. So we can take down that poll. We see who the winner is there. So easy, my questions.
Stephen McCauley:
Oh, 92%. Yay.
Merle Carrus:
We're all in a certain age category, we all know. So as you can see, the answer is my favorite character is Mandy, and the answer is Barry Manilow because Mandy tells Craig, her name is not a nickname for Amanda. And as she explains to him, "One of Barry Manilow's big hits songs was this incredibly lame ballad called Mandy, and my father loved it and wanted to name me after it. " So she's the person in the book I guess that I ended up caring about the most. I was rooting for her throughout the book.
Merle Carrus:
And as you said before about having a pit in your stomach that she was the one that when she started to go to work for Craig Crispo- is that how we say his name? And in my head, I kept seeing his name as Creepo. So I'm not sure if you came up with that name to get it close to something creepy because he was creepy. But I really did feel a pit in my stomach, and I was really getting concerned that something bad was going to happen to Mandy. And I really felt for her as I was reading the book. So I was very happy to see the ending wasn't as bad as things could've gotten for her so that I felt much better because somehow I did really attach myself to her.
Merle Carrus:
So I just have one question because I wasn't quite sure, and I could probably go back and read it a few more times. But there's a quote where Amira meets David, and she mentions Mandy. And she says something about not finding Mandy. She hopes he doesn't find Mandy crying on the library steps. And I wasn't quite sure-
Stephen McCauley:
What that meant.
Merle Carrus:
Why the library steps I guess was the...
Stephen McCauley:
I think every once in a while you walking down the street and you see someone crying or sitting somewhere in a crisis. I actually don't know the answer to that question why the library steps. I spend a lot of time in public. Not anymore. In public libraries. It's my best place to write. So I'm sort of bereft right now. But I'm sure I saw some teenager huddled in a corner or on the steps of a library at some point and it just-
Merle Carrus:
Right. I mean, I did picture that at that point, but then I guess she never seemed so connected to the library herself. That was my-
Stephen McCauley:
Yeah, that's a good point.
Merle Carrus:
That was my only... Okay. But because she was my favorite character and I felt really bad for her, and I do feel that her mother really loved her. But I think she just wasn't good at parenting, Julie. And that pot smoking problem, which I think was also very well described, didn't help with her. So I really did feel bad that she was missing all these connections with Mandy, and the fact that Mandy needed some boundaries and someone to talk to and she's having all this trouble growing up.
Merle Carrus:
So I loved this quote that Mandy says toward the end that, "The worst of all her inconsistent and contradictory feelings was that she tried to hide what she had been doing from David and now she resented him from not challenging her on it, for not realizing that she had been lying and for not rescuing her." And I think you got that so perfectly because I think that's what all children are always trying to do. They're testing you. They're hiding stuff, but they really do want boundaries. They really do want to be caught. They really do want to be rescued, and so I thought you just portrayed that whole relationship so beautifully.
Merle Carrus:
So tell us a little bit about how you ended up having Mandy go down that horrible rabbit hole.
Stephen McCauley:
Well, I had a sense that she was doing something. She was someone who was destined to get into trouble somewhere along the line because she was very smart but she's also very insecure. She had a somewhat tenuous relationship with both of her parents. She was caught in the middle of this divorce. Well, I had invited this writer whose name is Nancy... I'll think of it later... Nancy Jo Sales to campus to talk about a book called American Girls: Teenagers and Social Media. And it was a nonfiction book that she researched and wrote about. And I invited her to campus to talk about this book because I noticed when I was giving a guest lecture in a class, I asked a question about Twitter or something. And everybody got very excited and interested. And I realized, which any parent who's here knows anyway, just how important social media is to kids.
Stephen McCauley:
So the author of this book American Girls: Teenagers, et cetera talked a lot about the funny line that there is in social media between what teenagers may think of as appropriate behavior or even body positive behavior in showing themselves in a bikini or something of that nature. And what is bait for predators basically, and how that line is getting more and more blurred. So what Mandy does, which has become a cam girl I think it's called, something like that, or model. Is sort of appalling by most standards of exemplary behavior. But it is a fine line between how much people expose on social media these days as a totally accepted part of life and then stepping over this line. And I guess I just wanted to explore that a little bit.
Stephen McCauley:
I also wanted to have something sort of high stakes for this character. She was potentially at great risk. But I also didn't want to make it so creepy that the reader would want to look away from it because I sometimes find when I'm reading that there's something just so creepy I don't want to see it. So it was a balancing act in that way.
Merle Carrus:
Right. Right. And I think you did it really well. And also we were talking about some of the descriptions and characters, and I thought one of them that was very clever was all your Airbnb guests that came. I don't know if they're people that you've met when you go to Airbnb's, these types of people. But one of them short quote was, "Mrs. Grayson who stepped off the train arriving like a well-fed refugee. She was a short pillow of a woman wearing a flowered dress and despite the temperature, a cardigan draped over her shoulders." I mean, they're just so beautifully described that you can just picture this little woman in her dress.
Stephen McCauley:
Thank you. I do own a house in Rockport, Massachusetts, and I bought it because there's a little cabin in the back of the house that's on a pond. And I thought, "Oh, that'd be a great place to write." And it was for a while, and then I began renting it out mostly in the summertime but not entirely. There was one tenant who came back a few summers in a row who was a little bit reminiscent of that woman. Someone who was very sweet, very appealing, and there was something a little bit touching about her that she seemed a little bit lost.
Merle Carrus:
So the idea of ex-life, I think a number of people we said have an ex-life in this book, but everybody, all the main characters, and actually maybe Mrs. Grayson too, have a secret in their life. So David has a secret, a few secrets that he's kept. The first one that he married this woman and then turns out to be homosexual. Later in the book, he has the secret that he's keeping this bad news that he found out about the jewelry, and he's hiding that under his bed. So I love that quote also about the "value of the jewelry..." Okay. Let's start here. "David, hoping to delay the bad news about the small value of the jewelry, realizes he's delayed too long and has compounded the problem. He thought he'd learned his lesson about secrets long ago. As tempting as they were, they never remained secret forever, and they never made life easier in the long run."
Merle Carrus:
So he has a few secrets. Julie has her secret that she's been keeping from him. Pot smoking I guess she thinks is a secret, but everybody seemed to know about it.
Stephen McCauley:
It's like one of those secrets that everybody knows that we all have one of those too.
Merle Carrus:
Mandy thinks she has a secret life, but that turned out that having a secret life made you feel as if people you spent most of your time with didn't know you at all because they didn't know your secrets. Amira has a secret that comes out in the end, which I thought was a nice little twist at the end, her secret. Henry even has a health scare secret that he's been keeping, and the men in the basement all are leading a secret life. So that also I thought played a very big role in the book, this whole idea of secrets.
Stephen McCauley:
Yeah. I think ultimately as someone in my younger life, my ex-life I guess, I think I used to complicate things enormously for myself by keeping secrets from people and not living a double life but just, "Oh, I'm seeing this person but maybe there's somebody over here that I'm interested in," et cetera, et cetera. I even did that once... Oh, this is so bad, and I think this was the turning point for me. But I was seeing a shrink, not that I needed to, but I was. And I liked her and everything, but I felt like, "Ah, man. I'm not really... This isn't going anywhere."
Stephen McCauley:
So then I began secretly seeing another shrink at the same time. And of course I eventually had to tell shrink number one about shrink number two, and she was really angry at me. Entirely justifiably so. And I finally realized that it is much easier to just be honest, even if it's unattractive, even if... And I would even lie about if I had a tuna fish sandwich. I would say I had an egg salad sandwich for lunch. I don't know why. Anyway, I have some speculation about that.
Stephen McCauley:
The virtue of that in fiction is that it creates layers of truth. So there's always a little bit of peril about if some secret is going to come out, and as a reader, you anticipate that. And the other thing is that there's a little bit of a surprise for the reader sometimes when those things do come out.
Stephen McCauley:
The lies people tell themselves, tell other people because I think ultimately it's all about just wanting to tell yourself something about yourself. I think David wasn't lying because he was a bad person about his sexuality. He just wasn't ready to accept it in himself. And I think that's very true for a lot of people-
Merle Carrus:
Right.
Stephen McCauley:
... for lots of things.
Merle Carrus:
So you have mentioned, one of the questions Pamela Perlman, a BNC member from Cape Cod, had written in and guessed that she had grown up in Marblehead she said. So she thought that Beauport sounded like Rockport.
Merle Carrus:
You use San Francisco, the real city. Why did you decide to give a hidden name to Massachusetts? Are you protecting?
Stephen McCauley:
I'm protecting myself and my real estate investments in that town. No, I think the reason is because when you're writing about a small town, I wanted to just change things a little bit geographically. And if you're writing about San Francisco, there are these iconic neighborhoods, and you can imagine buildings within them and so on. The same thing for Boston or any number of places. But Rockport is such a small place that I had a very particular location for Julie's house in my mind, but no such house exists in such a place. I didn't want to have to be 100% accurate to the geography of the place and the way things really are. And so I changed it to Beauport, which happens to be the original name of Gloucester, Massachusetts. Was originally called Beauport.
Stephen McCauley:
And there's a really wonderful, I highly recommend this to everyone if it reopens this summer. I don't see any reason it couldn't actually. But in Gloucester, there's an historic house called Beauport, which was owned by a guy named... I forget his first name, but his last name was Sleeper. And it's this fantastic, madly eccentric mansion on the water. It's not the Hammond Castle. That's another one up in Gloucester. But this is a much smaller and more intimate place. But he was one of the country's first interior decorators, oddly enough, and every room in this house is designed in a different way. It's a real hodge-podge, but it's fascinating. And I highly recommend checking it out.
Merle Carrus:
Okay. Location to go to.
Merle Carrus:
So I think you did sort of wrap things up with a happy-ish ending for everybody in the book. Julie and David have a nice relationship at the end. And I'm wondering if you... You were talking about how people find each other years later. I think now their relationship works much better in the end because they've taken sex off the table. Do you think that's what now helps make this a happy friendship that can work for them?
Stephen McCauley:
I mean, sex gets taken off the table in a lot of relationships for different reasons. It's just like, ah. Yeah. There's less of that tension. There's less of that expectation. I hope that it's not naïve enough to think that neither one of them will ever have any sexual interests. In fact, it's clear that they do. But I think the other thing is, and maybe this is just totally cynical of me, but I really do think that... Well, I'll just say in my life I have done kind deeds and generous things. Oh sure, I'd love to help you repaint your living room in July when it's 100 degrees and you don't have air conditioning because I was attracted to someone and I was thinking that maybe there would be some benefit to it. So I wanted to take that mercenary aspect out of their relationship, and I really wanted their kindness to each other was rooted in some genuine affection without expectation of it necessarily going anywhere beyond that. And that was very appealing to me.
Stephen McCauley:
I think I wrote the first draft of this book largely in the spring and summer and fall of 2016 during the election. That election. And as the public discourse became more confrontational and vulgar and awful to my ears, I found myself wanting to write about people who were good to each other because they cared about each other. So I actually think that had an impact on-
Merle Carrus:
I think it...
Merle Carrus:
So I just have one last little question. The Queen Lucia, is that?
Stephen McCauley:
Yeah.
Merle Carrus:
Are those favorite books of yours? I realize those are actually a real series of books. Why did you pick those for them to read to-
Stephen McCauley:
Yeah. Well, there was a masterpiece. There was a BBC series based on these called Map and Lucia. They are a series of novels written by EF Benson in the early-1900s but some of them are later, but I think that's when they were initially published anyway, the first ones. And they're these characters that live in a little village that's not... It's in England, but it's not totally unlike Rockport, Massachusetts. And EF Benson himself, the author of these books, was gay, and it's clear that some of the characters in this book are gay but no one ever talks about it.
Stephen McCauley:
I had finished the book completely and I thought, "Okay. It's really done." It was going to the printer in a couple of weeks, and my editor, my dear editor again wrote to me and said, "There's something missing here for me. And what I think it is is that Julie and David who were led to believe are so close to each other, we don't really see them interacting that much. We don't see them doing anything together." I hated hearing this because I had very little time to fix it, but I knew that she was absolutely right. And I was deeply humiliated that I hadn't recognized this problem in the book.
Stephen McCauley:
So I went back and most of the scenes in the book of them reading together, of them taking walks and being physically intimate and so on in a nonsexual way were added very much at the last minute. And I think they strengthen the book enormously. And I was just so grateful. I think that's one of the things that a good editor can do is point something out to you that in your solipsistic, narcissistic way, you're not able to recognize as a writer.
Merle Carrus:
Right. Excellent. I think it does. It really pulls them, and then it connects them to Mandy when she gets the books and starts reading them and brings them back to him. So it is very good.
Merle Carrus:
So just quickly because we do want to let some people ask questions if they have them. I just want to ask are you working on something now that we're going to be able to read in the near future?
Stephen McCauley:
Yes. I am working on something now, and I'm supposed to finish it this summer. I'm hoping to do that. It's a novel called, at the moment, The Responsible Party, and it's about siblings, about a brother and a sister. One of whom is very responsible all the time, and the other is more of a free spirit. So the one responsible helps take care of the other one, et cetera. So that's kind of the dynamic that's explored in it.
Merle Carrus:
Interesting. Whole new dynamic going in a different direction.
Stephen McCauley:
A whole new dynamic but same tone. Maybe it's a little bit more serious. I find as I get older, life is a little less funny.
Merle Carrus:
That's why we have to read fun books.
Stephen McCauley:
That's why we have to read fun books, yup.
Merle Carrus:
So Dania, do we have some questions that you'd like to pose?
Dania Khandaker:
Yes, actually received a lot of questions. Actually Beth wanted you to know, Professor, that she's on the call, and that she's a big fan. We received quite a few questions from Paula Colin. She says that, "You described Julie and David as right for each other, but I wonder if people think they were only right for each other after their 30 years of life experience rather than at the time of their marriage?"
Stephen McCauley:
Yeah. I think they're right for each other with these adjusted expectations that we talked about, specifically that this is not going to be a sexual relationship. It's going to be an intimate, close friendship. And I think that in the lives of a lot of people I know, their closest relationships in some ways... I mean, I'm good friends with Anita Diamant, for example, and a reader, I'm sure writer many of you have read. And a lot of her books are about women's friendships, about this centrality of women's friendships in women's lives. I think that's true in other configurations as well. Male friendships are interestingly complicated, but yeah. That's my answer.
Dania Khandaker:
Did we mention which of the three books were made into movies?
Stephen McCauley:
So my first novel, which is called The Object of My Affection was made into a Jennifer Aniston, Paul Rudd movie. I think it came out in 1998. I occasionally hear people tell me that it was on HBO or something. I get no royalties from it. And then two others, my second one, which is called The Easy Way Out, and then my fourth novel, which is called True Enough were made... Those two were made into the movies in France, feature movies. In French. They changed the setting to France, et cetera. That was a very different experience from having a movie made in the US.
Dania Khandaker:
Absolutely. I actually plan to look it up and watch it after.
Stephen McCauley:
Good.
Dania Khandaker:
Ilene Feinstein asks, "How autobiographical is the story?"
Stephen McCauley:
It's not really autobiographical. I don't have an ex-life with whom I live in Rockport, but I think that all of my books are autobiographical in the sense that I put in a lot of my observations about people and relationships and life. A lot of the opinions, even though some of them are exaggerated for comic effect, of the characters, some of them are mine let's face it. So in that sense, it's autobiographical. It's impossible not to have things that you write be autobiographical. I know a lot of writers at this point in my life, and even when I meet someone who's writing a book set in the prehistoric times about dinosaurs or something, I will find myself thinking, "Oh my god, is that how she really feels about her husband?" Because you reveal stuff about yourself whether you want to or not.
Dania Khandaker:
Margie Farber asks, "A nontraditional living arrangements was intriguing and was validated. How did that enter into the book?"
Stephen McCauley:
Well, I mean, I think it was central from the beginning that this was going to be a nontraditional family of sorts. It's something I've written about in all of my books. I think as a gay man who grew up in the '60s and '70s when there was less obviously acceptance than there is now, but I think it's still true now as a gay person, I find that gay people have to invent their own rules or I felt like I did. And I think that that's true even though there's marriage now. Most gay couples I know who are married have marriages on their own terms. So I like the idea of talking about nontraditional living arrangements.
Stephen McCauley:
And the other thing that I've discovered, when you're a writer and you write a book like this or really like anything that people write to you and come up and tell you about their lives. And I think, "Why would you do that? Don't you know I'm going to use it?" But you find that most people's lives are not precisely as they appear on the surface, that there are layers to everyone's lives and domestic relationships that you really might not guess. That's what I've discovered.
Dania Khandaker:
Audrey Dyson asks, "On page 311, you characterize Boston as pointless. Do you really think this?"
Stephen McCauley:
I lived her most of my life, no. Not at all. That was an observation by a somewhat confrontational real estate agent from San Francisco, and that's her view of things. To me, it seemed absolutely what this particular character with her particular psychological makeup would think about Boston. So I don't.
Stephen McCauley:
Having said that, sometimes I feel like what is the character of Boston outside of the universities and the hospitals? But no, I love living here.
Dania Khandaker:
Louis Peterson asks, "Why did Julie react so strongly to Mandy jobs? It's not as if she was making porno movies."
Stephen McCauley:
Do you want to answer that, Merle?
Merle Carrus:
It was as close as you could get to making porno movies. I guess it was interesting that David was more accepting of it than Julie. I guess I would agree to that. But probably as a mother, right, it would take a little while to be able to I think forgive yourself. She probably was more angry, upset with herself that she had parented badly and hadn't seen this coming or prevented it maybe.
Stephen McCauley:
I also think that she suddenly sees her daughter in a very different light as someone who's acting out in certain ways. I think most parents would find it a little difficult to discover that their kid was exposing themself online for money.
Merle Carrus:
I thought she was going to give her money to help with the house.
Stephen McCauley:
Ah. I don't think she was making that much.
Dania Khandaker:
So Bobby Mince asks, "Your novel has a happy ending. Did you ever consider having the characters left hanging?"
Stephen McCauley:
Yes, I did because I wanted to make it plausibly happy, at least to me. Like implausibly happy would be suddenly, "Oh, let's remarry and adopt a child together and sleep in the same bed." That wasn't going to happen. So I hope that it's a happy ending. I also hope that there's a little bit of a sense of making do with what you have rather than finding perfection because it isn't that.
Dania Khandaker:
I think this is our last question from Michelle Able, "I'd like to know what books Professor McCauley has read recently, and if he could recommend what authors he particularly likes."
Merle Carrus:
Good question.
Stephen McCauley:
Early this winter, I began rereading, not rereading. I began reading some Dickens novels that I hadn't read before. I read Little Dorrit. I'm currently reading Our Mutual Friend. When I was much younger, I used to read Dickens. But I haven't since my 20s, and I thought, "I can't possibly read Dickens anymore because it does require a lot of concentration." But it's wonderful. It's so immersive and so entertaining and so deeply human and funny, a lot of it, even as it's very sad. So I've been reading a lot of Dickens.
Stephen McCauley:
I also just finished this novel that I loved. Hold on. Which is called Abigél by a Hungarian writer named Magda Szabó, S-Z-A-B-O. And it's set during the Second World War in Hungary, and it's about a girl who, for reasons I won't get into, is sent to a very, very strict and very confining girl's school. And it's a wonderful, wonderful novel. It was written in the 1970s, but it was just translated and re-released. The same author has written a really wonderful novel called The Door. But Abigél is so accessible and so readable, and I think it would be a great book club read, for example. It's really quite wonderful.
Merle Carrus:
Great. Adding that to my list.
Dania Khandaker:
Questions. I did want to mention we received quite a few comments and very positive feedback on the book. One of our members, Gayle Granada said that she really related to the characters because she had a serious relationship in college with a man who eventually came out after the death of his father. So these characters were very real to her. We've had other folks chat in saying that they are looking forward to reading your other books, and a lot of people wrote in that by the end, Mandy had an ex-life too. So they were adamant about mentioning that.
Stephen McCauley:
It all wraps up. Well, thank you so much for your questions, and really thank you again. Thank you so much, Merle, for preparing so much and for choosing the book. I really appreciate it, and I really thank the Brandeis National Committee for the work that you do as a member of the Brandeis community. I think it's just extremely important and it keeps the school alive in ways that is within the hearts and minds of people who are not necessarily in Waltham. So thank you so much.
Merle Carrus:
Thank you. Thank you so much for joining us with the Brandeis National Committee today.
Stephen McCauley:
Thank you.
Dania Khandaker:
Thank you. Thank you everyone. So with that, we end our first BNC virtual book club session. Again, big thank you to Merle and Professor McCauley. We hope you enjoyed the book discussion. Please keep a look out for our weekly BNC virtual programming emails for other programs and activities, and we hope to see you at our next session. Have a good day.