Richard Russo, MARRIAGE STORY

[0:38]Zibby Owens: Hi. This is Libby Owens, and you're listening to the award winning podcast, Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books. I'm also the host of Moms Don't Have Time to Lose Weight, and I'm the editor of the anthology, which you should run out and buy, called Moms Don't Have Time to A Quarantine Anthology. All proceeds of that book go to COVID nineteen Vaccine Research. And I'm the editor in chief of Moms Don't Have Time to Write, a new publication on Medium, and we're accepting submissions, so please send your personal essays there. And if all that isn't enough, you can follow me on Instagram at Zibby Owens, and my website is zibbyowens.com. Okay. Now back to this amazing podcast. Happy Monday. My book blast continues for Memoir Monday. This is part two of the memoirs I've been releasing as part of the book blast because I love memoirs And of course other books, but I really love memoirs. Anyway, enjoy this collection of diverse voices, thoughts, feelings, topics, and everything on this Memoir Monday. And you can go back a few days and listen to part one of the memoirs I'm releasing as the book blast. Enjoy, and I hope you connect and really enjoy them like I did. Richard Russo is the author of eight novels, including Everybody's Fool and That Old Cape Magic, two collections of short stories and a memoir elsewhere. His 2,001 novel, Empire Falls, won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. It was also adapted into an HBO miniseries starring Paul Newman, Ed Harris, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Helen Hunt. Rousseau's latest work is Chances Are, a humorous and riveting story about the complex power of friendship, and also a marriage story, which we're talking about today, which is a Scribed original, which you should definitely check out S C R I B D, Scribed. Rousseau earned a bachelor's degree, a master's in fine arts, and a PhD from the University of Arizona. In 2016, he was given the Indie Champion Award by the American Booksellers Association. And in 2017, he received France's okay, I'll try my French here, Grand Prix de l'ilrochio amelicaine. He has two daughters and lives with his wife in Portland, Maine. How was my French? I won't try it again. Hi, Rick. Thanks so much for coming on moms don't have time to read books. Oh, it's my pleasure to be here. I'm so It's my pleasure to be anywhere. Yeah. Well, that I mean, why not? Today is a gift. Yes. Indeed. So you're first of all, I'm honored to be talking to you after, you know, your Pulitzer Prize winning career, all these books and movies of books and screen I mean, your career is outstanding. But I recently finished Marriage Story, Your Scribed Original, which I absolutely loved, Marriage Story, An American Memoir, which tells all about your growing up and your mom and dad and their parents and your how you've really arrived here. Then a cultural commentary sort of at the end where you link it all back to where we are today. I was hoping you could start by just telling listeners a little more about why you wrote this piece to begin with and why now. I know you've already written a memoir, but why this piece? Why scribed originals? Why now? You know, thinking back on this piece right now, we're kind of coming out the other end of this pandemic. My wife and I are actually traveling right now for the first time since since lockdown

[3:52]Richard Russo: over a year ago. And thinking back on marriage story, which was completed, of course, you know, many months ago, it now feels to me very much like a pandemic document. I think that that those of us and I've spoken to another a number of other writers about this. Those of us who who all went into lockdown at the same time, we had different kinds of reactions to what was happening to us. And I think my reaction was that being told to go home and stay there wasn't an wasn't an entirely bad thing for me. It got tiresome, of course, and the worry and and everything else that was going on in all of our lives back then. But I know a lot of writers that kind of got stymied a little bit, and then some and and some used the time in some way more fruitfully. And and I fall into the to the latter camp, I think. I don't know why. I don't know what there would have been about my personality that would have welcomed certain aspects of what I couldn't what I couldn't change anyway. So, you know, I was told to go home and stay there, and I did, and it freed up an enormous amount of time. I was already working on a novel. I'm I'm I'm in the middle of third fool novel now. I have nobody's fool and everybody's fool, and I think somebody's fool or some some other fool is coming down the road. But my normal work schedule would have been to work on the novel in the morning and maybe read in in the afternoon or whatever other other obligations I might have as as a father or as a husband. But with all of this extra time, and the opportunity to think somewhat more deeply about things that I had thought about before, and all of us thinking it during this horrible period of time that we've been soldiering through, thinking about thinking about the shape of our lives and and and and the meaning of our lives. We're all faced with our own mortality. I I think we are all kind of meaning machines. I mean, we find a meaning in various different ways. We find meaning sometimes in religion. We find it in in family. We find it in work. Certainly find it in work. Those of us who are lucky enough to have work that gives us meaning. But, yeah, for for for me, I I just started thinking in slightly different ways than I had about people that were nearest and dearest to me throughout my life, which are my parents, my maternal grandparents, and thinking about the shape of of of this this life. You're talking earlier about my my my career. I've been doing this for a long time now, and it's been and it's been wonderful. Been absolutely rewarding. I can't think of anything else that I would rather have done during these last three decades than write these books. But the pandemic, I think, gave me the opportunity to to look at again through the lens of mortality some things that I thought maybe I was done with. You I did write a memoir once that had a lot and it had a lot to say about about my mom whose struggles in life were both heroic and sometimes tragic. And, I mean, I've always written more about my parents' America than my own. I've it's it's their generation, their generation, my father coming back from the second World War, my mother my mother's life in The States waiting for him to come back from the second World War. The America that they envisioned has always been front and center in my brain. And so I've been examining these things for a long time. And when I started writing this, I realized there was just a lot. Despite having written about it and having thought about it for much of my life, I suddenly had a slightly different lens. And I realized there was just stuff that I didn't know. I had never come to terms with. And that the only way the only way I was ever gonna get there was to was to sit down and and start thinking anew and in slightly different ways about stuff I've been thinking about. It's it's been important to me for a very long time. Did it work? Well, you tell me.

[7:46]Zibby Owens: I think so. I thought it was great. Well But did it did it help you feel like you made sense of those issues? That you came to some sort of closure that you're you know, that digging deep deeper into them at this point Yeah. Did it get you to the other side? I mean, you you tackled such things like, you know, even the difference between your parents' outlooks on America and their optimism pessimism. And you explained like sort of where that came from with your dad being in the D Day invasion and war and all the atrocities and all of that and your mother's, you know, holding on to this sense that there would be hope and, you know, holding you up as her model. And you had some funny line too about how pessimists you said something like optimists end up achieving more, but pessimists,

[8:29]Richard Russo: what happens? They're less disciplined. Yeah. Pessimists yeah. Pessimists have the comfort of of being right more often. Yes. But optimists tend to fare better in a way. Love that. That was amazing.

[8:40]Zibby Owens: Anyway, but did you achieve do you feel like you achieved what you set out to do personally?

[8:44]Richard Russo: Well, yes and no. Yes in the most in the most important way, I think, was that, yeah, I did I did I did arrive at some some new conclusions, both about my parents, but also about my maternal grandmother, which I'd love to talk with you about a little bit, and my maternal grandfather. So so, yes, I began to view their lives in a in a slightly different way. But since you bring up the word closure, I will preface the more specific comments with my take on closure, which is that in some pretty important way, that's something you should never seek. If you were to look at my career over the last three decades, I think you would find a rather narrow let's put it this way. My broadband is my bandwidth. Put it that my bandwidth is very narrow. I mean, you can look at you can look at a lot of writers and writers that I think of as as they keep coming back to the page because they have infinite curiosity about the world. A lot of different things interest them. And so when they finish one book, they immediately become curious about something else. And they start doing research and they start thinking more imaginatively. They make outlines. They make storyboards. And they achieve a career that I think is very different from mine because it's been motivated. What drives them is a curiosity about life, about the world, about the larger world itself. So they write a certain kind of book. My bandwidth is is really narrow in that there are only there are really only three or four things that I'm interested in. And and only and only one or two of those that I really know anything about. So what happens with each of the books that I write? They're all about the same thing. Tend to write a lot about class and I write a lot about family. And what happens with each of these books and what happened with Marriage Story as well is that I get to a certain point in whatever book it is that I'm writing, and I realized that because of the way I've structured the book or because of the choices that I've made in writing the book, I realized that I can't there's certain things that I can't get to because of the point of view that I've chosen, because of the the plot that I've worked in, the point of view character that I've chosen to see the story through. All of those things have been they've been doors or windows for me to get into something, but they also close something off. There are certain things that I can't get to because of the choices that I've made, which means that when I get to the end of the book, it will be a success in a certain way that I've done something that I wanted to do, but all the things that I wasn't able to do, all the things that I wasn't able to get at are still out there and unresolved. So there's never such a thing as closure. I just keep going back. I just keep going back into all those things that that I've managed to not get somehow, not get to the bottom of despite the fact that book after book after book, I'm trying to zero in on the things that that that mean the most to me. And it's I think of it as a certain things that certain writers keep returning to. And I in trying to justify my narrow bandwidth, I always think of a writer like Dickens who keeps coming back book after book after book to either having orphans in the story or having a certain character who seems orphaned in some way. Yes. No. Yes. He he's he's been abandoned in some way by someone that he loves or or she loves. And you know that that's, if you read enough Dickens novels, you know that that has something to do with the fact that even though he wasn't orphaned himself, he felt orphaned when his father went off to debtors prison and he was left on his own. He felt he felt orphaned. And so with Dickens, you on the one hand, you're always saying, what's with all the orphans? Come on, man. Surely, you ought to be able to surely, you know, 12 books into your into your career, you ought to you ought to be able to you ought to be able to surrender the orphans somewhere along the way, but he can't because that's that's central. His bandwidth is a lot wider than mine, but his but there's something about that experience of his life that will be central to everything that he writes. And that's the kind of writer that I am. I don't mean to not not in terms of, you know, that I I certainly haven't achieved what Dickens has achieved, but but I'm that kind of writer. So closure for me is just is is just something that doesn't happen. And that's the good news because if it ever did happen, if I ever did write in Marriage Story, or in any of my novels, any of my fool novels, or in any of my in any of my books, if I ever did get to the bottom of it, I'd be done. I'd be done as a writer because I'm really not that curious about anything else. So the lack of closure is is kind of a good thing. But to the earlier part of your question, the way that Marriage Story is a success to my way of thinking is that I was able to look at a human being. I was about to call her a character because she kind of becomes one in this. I was able to look at, for instance, my maternal grandmother's life in a way that was very different from the way I had seen her. I'm 71 years old now, and I I had seen her in a particular way. I mean, I loved her dearly when my mother and father split up. This is this marriage story is the story of their breakup, and then hopefully more by the end. But when when they broke up and my and I didn't see much of my father anymore, my mother was working full time had a full time job in General Electric in in Schenectady, New York, which meant that somebody had to take care of me. And and the person who made my mother's kind of semi independence possible that allowed her to be a working woman that she wanted to be was my grandmother. And when I came home from school, it was my grandmother that that met me at the door and and she whose company that I shared between 02:30 or 03:00 when I got home from school and when my grandfather came home from from his job. He was a glove cutter in Upstate New York. And you know how it is when you're a kid, whatever circumstance you're in just seems normal. You know? You don't you don't question it until you get until you get older. And I had heard throughout, you know, my growing up that that my my grandmother had had kind of what was referred to as kind of a rough patch. But I didn't know what that I didn't know what that meant, really. And it was only it was only later when I began to talk to my mother's sister, my my maternal aunt, that actually my grandmother, when she was younger, was subject to full blown panic attacks. And that there was a time after my mother had follow followed my father down to Georgia where they got married, but she was following him around to various camps that he was at before he shipped overseas. That during that time, my maternal grandmother was was pretty much incapacitated by by by fear, by just by just terror. She could she had a very difficult time leaving the house because if she did, she felt if she lost sight of the house that she lived in, she would never be able to find her way back, which left her in the care of her 12 year old daughter, my my mother's younger sister, who was at that time, like, 11 years old. And she was responsible for all the adult things. My grandfather was overseas. My mother was wasn't around. And so it was it was my grandmother who was nominally in charge, but it was really my aunt who who who did who did the heavy lifting. When my grandfather came back from the Second World War, they lived, as I say, a life that seemed perfectly normal to me at the time. I never questioned it. But it was a life in which my grandmother almost never left the house. She would go down to the corner grocery store where we got our remember those? Yes. Corner grocery stores? There was one right at the end of the street where where where we lived, and and she would walk around the corner to where my aunt lived because that was, you know, that was that was family, and they were so close, and they were my grandmother was very very anchored by my by my aunt's family still, although now we're we fast forwarded twenty years. And nothing ever I never questioned any of that. The fact that my grandmother did not have a single friend outside of the family. I never thought that that was was not normal. When the rest of the family went off to the lake on the weekend, you know, my grandfather and grandmother never went along. That didn't strike me as odd either. The fact that she never went anywhere except to my aunts and to church never struck me as unusual. But in writing marriage story, I began to see what I took for granted as a child, I began to see in a new light that when I came home from school, all the things that my grandmother did for me, meeting me at the door when I came home from school, walking me to school when I was too little to get there on my own despite the fact that was only three blocks. But still, as a kindergartner, she she used to walk me to school. And imagine now in in my in my sixties when my aunt began to tell me about some of the severe agoraphobia and panic attacks that she used to suffer when when my aunt was only 12 years old and and the kinds of things that my aunt had to do. It suddenly dawned on me, Zibby, that all those afternoons that my grandmother and I spent together when I thought that she was taking care of me, that I was also taking care of her. That just knocked me sideways. And marriage story, think is if it succeeds, it's that we all realize that there are things in our lives that even though we think we know them, we think we know them backwards and forwards, we probably don't.

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[21:02]Richard Russo: And if somebody tells you to go home and stay there and think about these things. The trajectory of my own life is a profound mystery to me. And part of it is a mystery because there's still so much I don't understand, things that I was confident of understanding, Now realizing that, no, I just hadn't questioned. I was a kid. I hadn't questioned. And even when I was older, even when I should have tumbled to some things, we sink into habits, don't we? We sink into habits of understanding. And so when I was 40 or 45, and should have been thinking a little bit more clearly, a little bit more deeply, I was used to the old thoughts. Was used to the old conclusions. Why interrupt them really when you think, We're we're so happy in our ignorance. Why why why mess that up with the truth, for heaven's sakes? So so if marriage story is if it if it succeeds in some way that when when readers read it, they they think, oh, you know what? I think that's that corresponds to something in my life. You know? There's a there's a lie that I've told myself or or there's something that I've assumed to be true, which turns out not to be, then if it's if a work of writing succeeds, it succeeds, I think, in helping us to feel a little bit less alone. That if we've if we've been foolish, if we've come to conclusions that turn out not to be true, that that's the nature of that's the nature of the game, and that we can, you know, make it our business to think a little bit more deeply and and and try to arrive at something a little bit closer to reality. The the shape of our lives makes a difference in the end. At least it does to my I'd like to die knowing a little bit about what this has all been about.

[22:53]Zibby Owens: Wow. Well, that was beautiful. I mean, it's hard enough to think of parents as people, but grandparents too. I mean, especially as a young child. Your book made me think about my grandmothers. And I was like, Did my grandmother leave the house? Was like, Maybe were they hiding? You you don't end up knowing the full story and you can't. And yet you're so close to people that you love. It's almost it's like this paradox, right? They're right there. And yet what do you not know? And then of course time runs out to get to the bottom of it. You said something so beautiful at the end of Marriage Story. Here, let me see if I can find it. You said, There are a few hard and fast rules about becoming a writer or any kind of artist for that matter. But one thing I can state with absolute certainty is that no matter how gifted you are or how hardworking, you're never going to be any good until you know who and what you love because until then, you won't know who you are. So I feel like this is your delving again into who you are based on who the people around you were.

[23:53]Richard Russo: Yeah. I'm trying I'm I'm thinking about actually a a recent David Brooks article in the times from I think it was probably late last week because he usually appears on Fridays. But he was talking about he was talking about Joe Biden, and he had actually had he'd had apparently an interview with with the president and asked him asked him if he had changed. And Biden's responses Biden's responses were interesting to Brooks and and and to me too because asked whether he had changed. A question of that's that's a question about who are you? Who were you then, and who are you now if you've if you've changed? And Biden responded by talking about his father, saying, one of the things my father told me. And it turned out that he couldn't get very far into any of the questions that David Brooks was asking him without turning back to the past and saying, is some something my grandfather taught me or my grandmother taught me or I learned this from my father. And the Brooks' conclusion from this, which I think is was spot on, was that writers are looking at the world, but they're not all looking at it from the same perspective. We're all that that phrase that we all use all the time, where I'm coming from, you say say to other people, you know where I'm coming from here? The literal manifestation of that is, I think, that that we are all coming from someplace. That's what makes us that's what makes us unique. And the answer that that the the idea for an artist, and not just for a writer, I think, but for any kind of artist, take a painter. A painter sits down to to paint maybe a landscape or a portrait or a still life. And and you think that the subject the subject of the work, of course, is the thing that the painter is painting. But so much of what you see depends on where you set yourself up, You know? Where you set your easel up, where where where you're standing with the brush in your hand has an awful lot to do with with what you ultimately paint. And for somebody like somebody like Joe Biden who's been living this life for a long time and has and has had a lot happen to him, Where he's where he's standing when he when he now looks at what America needs, I think he has the wisdom to understand that that that you can't see everything from everywhere. No no matter no matter how carefully you look, what you see has so much to do with where you're standing. And where you're standing is the past. Where you're standing has to do with who you love and what your experience of life has been seen through your own eyes, but seen through the eyes of people who the people who made you who you are. And so my books, this particular story, and my books in general are all about, I think, positioning. Where I choose to stand in this particular novel in order to look something that I've been looking at for a long time, but I'm I'm positioned somehow I'm positioned differently. The books when I look back at my early books now, like The Risk Pool, which was my first father son story, that story, I could not write that story now because I'm old. You know? But but I was positioned differently back when I wrote that book. If I were to try to rewrite that book now, I would just I would murder it. I know I would. I would kill it because when I read my books now, I I wanna rewrite every single sentence in in in all of them. And that just means I'm looking at things I'm looking at things from a different perspective now, and there's been more water under more bridges. And I'm not the same I'm not the same person I was back then. That's why it's okay to have that narrow bandwidth. Right? I hope so. It's that's my Zivvy, that's been my excuse for thirty years and I'm sticking with it.

[27:20]Zibby Owens: You know, it's so funny. In Marriage Story, you talked about how becoming a novelist was a gamble and how your mother even worried that it was showing signs of your dad that she that weren't on the top of her list, right, in his own problems with gambling. So you decide not to become a novelist right after getting a PhD, but then you decide to be a teacher for a while and then eventually pursue this dream. How do you feel now that this gamble the way that the that the dice have actually been thrown or whatever the analogy is?

[27:57]Richard Russo: Yeah. Well, I mean, I am so grateful that I found writing when I did for personal reasons that have that have absolutely nothing to do with success. If you were to take out yes. I was I was I was lucky one year and got a major literary prize, and it's made an enormous difference. A couple of wonderful movies have been made from my novels that have made a wonderful difference in my ability to continue doing what I love to do, you know, provided the money that allowed me to to teach less and to write more. But if you take success off the table completely, even if I were publishing, you know, mid list novels that never got much attention, even if I had published only, you know, three or four of those as opposed to the however many I've published now, if you take success off the table completely, I'm still, I think, just so incredibly lucky and grateful to have been able to do this work for as long as I have. Because to the extent that I'm saying, whatever extent that is, I owe it, I think, to to writing and to the writing process. What hap whatever it is that happens to me when I sit down in front of a blank piece of paper every day has benefited me in personal ways that have nothing to do with success. Absolutely nothing to do with success. And I I think I would explain that in very I mean, much of much of Mary's story is deeply intimate about, in some cases, my life, but also about the people who are most important to me, are most important to me. And and so I can't I I don't feel I don't wanna be confessional here in in the in the traditional sense of that of that word, but I've already talked a little bit about my grandmother's life, about my my mother's life, and and I I wrote about in my in my novel or in my memoir elsewhere. She really was heroically brave throughout throughout her life, and she had challenges, none of which were diagnosed and should have been, but we didn't know then what we know now. So her obsessive compulsive disorder went undiagnosed and therefore untreated. It made her life, especially towards the end, tragically narrow. And she got to the point that by the end, world, her world wasn't much larger than than your world that I'm looking at right now in that one room. That was that was pretty much her life by by the end of it. Despite, as I say, despite her heroic courage in in dealing with these these demons on her own without medical assistance. I mean, it really was I could hope to be half as brave as she was. But the same when when I say how lucky I was to discover writing, because it was, of course, the same obsessive compulsive disorder that led to profound panic attacks in my mother's mother, my in my grandmother, my maternal grandmother. Those things that allowed her not to get out of the house unless she could see it and and walk back to it. The the things that that challenged my mother so much because of her, again, profound anxiety disorders, things that I have passed on to my own daughters, by the way, too, but who doing, thankfully, just not only just fine, wonderfully well with their lives because they got the therapy is not that difficult. If you know what's wrong, the therapy works just about every time if you pay attention. But the same afflictions that my grandmother suffered and that I and that my that my mother suffered, I also was suffering from those as a younger man, and I didn't I didn't understand it I didn't understand it either. But I had certain rituals too that I needed. But for most people who suffer undiagnosed from obsessive compulsive disorder, the rituals that they have limit their lives. They make things tighter and tighter and tighter because they to wash their hands 100 times a day. That doesn't make your life richer, makes your life more miserable, more narrow. And every time you have to do something like you can't step on a crack, or every time you have to go through a certain ritual that makes you feel like you have some sort of control over your life, your life gets narrower. Whereas with me, when I found writing, what that allowed me to do was indulge a certain kind of ritual in a way that the very thing that made my grandmother's life and my mother's life so difficult for them turned out to be something that gave my life this structure that has been so important. Because if you want to be a good writer, one of the things you have to do is revise endlessly. Right? For a lot of writers, they understand the necessity of that, but they don't love it. It's not their favorite part of the process. For me, turning sentences around and getting them to work just the way that I want them to, that to me is, I won't say endlessly satisfying, because at certain point you have to realize that you're maybe you're going to make them worse now if you continue to tinker. But that whole process for me of revision, which can be the bane of a lot of artists' lives, is something that constantly opens up new possibilities to me. The revision process itself allows me to see certain sometimes they're minor, but sometimes they open other little windows. And so whatever the rituals, I don't know what my rituals would have been if it hadn't been for writing. Can't imagine I would have become a womanizer. I've been married to the same woman for forty nine years now. I can't imagine I would have been that, but I can imagine myself being a gambler. As a young man, I and it gives me no pride. I take no pride in this at all. I'm telling you, there was a point as a young man when I was in college, probably graduate school, that I gave blood in order to have in order to get into a poker game. That was how much how how that sense of that sense of must was so profound that I and I look back on that now with with absolute horror because for an obsessive compulsive, whatever it is that you're obsessive about can either make your life or much more likely destroy it. And and writing gave me an obsession that made me, I think it it it didn't it didn't allow me to it didn't make me surrender my sanity. It actually made me, well, as sane as I am. Whatever that is.

[34:19]Zibby Owens: Oh, wow. I wish we had more time. I feel like I could talk to you all day. You have you are so wise. And some of the things you said, I I mean, that whole notion of not even trying to achieve closure and how that's actually a gift. This is great. Anyway, thank you. Thank you so much for chatting with me today. Thank you for Which I truly loved. And, you know, I will not look at a road being paved the same way ever again after your description of that. So

[34:47]Richard Russo: thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it. Well, Zibby, thank you so much for talking to me. And you you've born you've born with me wonderfully here. You asked you asked a question and fifteen minutes later, I'm still answering it. So you've been incredibly generous with my rambling answers. So it's been a joy for me too. Thank you. You made my job easy.

[35:04]Zibby Owens: I just had to turn it on. Anyway, okay. Bye bye. Thanks. Have a great day. Bye bye. Have fun on your travels. Thanks for listening to part of my June Book Blast. I hope you enjoy it. Come back tomorrow for more. Thanks for listening to this episode of Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books. Don't forget to follow me on Instagram at Zibby Owens and at moms don't have time to read books. Also, sign up for my newsletter at zibbyowens.com and sign up for my virtual book club and meet lots of authors on Zoom every other week. Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan at Texture Sound for the sound editing, and thank you to Morning Moon Productions for providing this fantastic intro and outro music.