Spotlight on april guest author steve almond

Steve Almond - Debut Novelist
​by Sue Staats

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For a guy who’s written so many books that his website categorizes them by Fiction, Tales of Obsession, and Books that Piss People Off, it’s hard to believe that All The Secrets of the World is Steve Almond’s “debut” novel. I thought he was kidding. I was positive that somewhere, somehow, he’d already published a novel, maybe one he’d slipped in between the ten plus volumes of high-wire short stories and serious tirades cloaked in humor he’s published in the past twenty-plus years. But no. All The Secrets in the World, which is about two teenage girls whose unlikely friendship draws their families into a vortex of secrets and lies, violence and lust, is a social novel with the propulsive plot of a thriller, a mashup of Jane Eyre and The Wire.  And it is truly his “debut” novel. And as Steve tells it, it’s been a long road, filled with self-discovery. And matzoh balls…

Sue
You've written 10 full length books, many, many essays, short story collections, lots of commentary, and yet All The Secrets of the World is being called your “debut novel.” Please explain. 

Steve
Well, in the scoreboard that I keep in my head, most of my career has been spent as a failed novelist.  I really spent thirty years trying to figure out how to manage the intricacies of a novel. As a short story writer, the template is much simpler. I can bring a single character through a particular arc to a moment or two that is deeply consequential. The architecture of a novel is so much more complex, you're dealing with a cast of characters who have intersecting and interdependent trajectories, they're colliding against one another and changing the course of each character's life. That's a lot for me to manage. I'm not an organized person. I'm a hard-working person, but I'm not an organized person. 

For me the secret is to stuff it full of plot. That’s what I need, a big, complicated plot in order to keep going and successfully be able to sort of keep my forward momentum. My previous four or five novel attempts had a very meandering feeling, the prose would be okay, the characters would be interesting, but it did not have the thing that novels have to have—a chain of consequence. I just hadn't figured that out. 

This is really the first time I was able to successfully write a novel, and I do consider it a debut. 

Sue
It's amazing to hear a writer of your experience and success talk about still learning your craft, after having practiced it for so long. You just published an essay in Poets & Writers Magazine, where you talk about being a “failed novelist.” (Try, Try, Try Again)  And in it you mention something a friend said to you that helped you recognize what was getting in your way. He said, "Steve, you don’t want to write a novel. You want to be a novelist."  I wonder if you could expand on that.

Steve
Yeah, in writing this one I finally was more interested in the story than I was in my own ego. I was so invested for so many years in this idea, I’ve gotta write a novel, I’ve gotta write a novel, and I understand the reasons – my ambition, my parents loving novels, my own feelings that I’m pretty good but not really of the first rank as a writer, and all these anxieties are real, and they operate on me all the time. What I needed to find was a story in which I felt so much for the characters that they, and their struggles, were more interesting than me and mine.

Sue  
Lorena is the main protagonist, and things begin to get dangerous for her when the father of a wealthy friend of hers takes an interest in her. That section of the book, which occurs toward the beginning, is what’s being read for Stories on Stage. She’s just coming to know this man, Marcus Stallworth, and she’s attracted to him in ways she doesn’t understand, because she’s thirteen, but they feel very real and irresistible. You don’t hold back on making it clear that she's thrilled by his attention. He's not exactly interested in her in a fatherly way, either. Nothing actually happens, but these scenes are highly charged.  Did you get any pushback on these scenes from agents or publishers or early readers? Did anyone want you alter it so if would fit with today’s popular vision of the bad predator and the innocent victim?

Steve
It’s a great question. Yes, I was aware of what I was doing and what I wanted, but it took me a while to get the balance right. In earlier drafts, the attraction between Lorena and Mr. Stallworth, as she calls him, was driven too much by physical magnetism and sexual attraction. And that is happening – I think we’re foolish if we pretend that children and adolescents are not sexual beings. They are. That's a part of the human arrangement, and obviously there are adults in the world who are predatory. But what’s really happening on an elemental level, is that Marcus Stallworth, who also grew up in a disenfranchised, broken world, is recognizing that his own intelligence got him out of his own dangerous, vulnerable childhood, and he recognizes immediately, from the way that Lorena speaks, her tremendous intelligence, her scientific mind.

So in revisions of their relationship, it became extraordinarily important to make the reader understand that he was drawn to her, and that there are moments when he is acting on it, but he is primarily tortured by the awareness of this attraction and trying to hold back. And that Lorena wants to be seen, to be trusted and regarded. She’s seeking intellectual, emotional, psychological attention, to be seen by him, but she’s also a fatherless child, who has a huge absence in her life. And what I was trying to put forward was a more nuanced version of what is essentially a mutual attraction in which the adult  has illicit and very troubling feelings towards an underage girl.

It’s not to try to make him a sympathetic  figure. I think he’s a very troubling and troubled person, and a destructive one. But my job as a novelist is to try to understand, without judgment, what everybody is carrying—the burden of illicit thoughts, the destructive thoughts and behaviors. Rather than flattening people out as victims and villains, I want to show that everybody is some vexing combination of both of those things. 

I also was interested in what happens when the powerful collide with the powerless and that is something that operates on many levels, when Lorena walks into the Stallworth’s home. She doesn’t understand it at first, as we often don’t. We’re seduced by the idea of people who are living in a way that feels to us, that’s just magnetic and full of delight and pleasure and indulgence. 

Sue
There’s danger there, for sure. And another dangerous creature that shows up throughout the novel is the scorpion. 

Steve
I think of the scorpion a lot. They’re everywhere in the book. I know that’s sort of the leitmotif of the novel, because I think of human beings as kind of staggering around in the dark. We’re unaware of so much of our motives, unaware of the dangers that our behaviors and actions can bring into our lives. And Lorena herself, in ways she doesn’t fully understand until it’s too late, endangers her family. She doesn’t mean to do it. But in her behavior, she has a certain complicity as well. And that’s what I think I was trying to capture, that everybody is the hero of their own story, but also everybody makes mistakes. And when you don't have much power in the culture, like Lorena’s  mother tries to tell her,  you don't have a big margin for error. And sometimes you don't learn that until it's too late.

Sue
The idea of humans staggering around in the dark is such a good way to sum up these characters’ struggles. Also, there’s a phrase I marked, toward the end, where Lorena is older, and attending a lecture on astronomy. The astronomer says It's my belief that the central challenge we face as a species arises from dark matter within us, the regions of ourselves that we cannot see or confront. I recommend you look at the sky as much as you can. And I thought, okay, if anything wraps this book up, that phrase does it.

Steve
You got it. 

I’m using these two leitmotivs—well, actually three. One is the scorpion, and there’s also astrology and astronomy. You have to remember that before Galileo and Copernicus, and the modern scientific movement, astrology and  astronomy were intertwined. We looked at the celestial bodies and thought they had control and sway over us, the difference between faith and science that we are still struggling with within ourselves. And what the astronomer is saying is really what the author believes, which is that the human struggle is to identify the dark matter inside of us, our unconscious feelings and impulses and desires and fears. Because if we're blind to them, we're going to behave in ways that we don't understand are inimical to our fate. And that’s what Lorena comes to understand and forgive in herself, and I think that’s the reason she’s able to withstand the terrible traumatic events that befall her.

Sue
You’re set the novel in Sacramento, in the 1980s. Why?

Steve
Well, I’ve been to Sacramento, as you know, to teach your wonderful students (and appear at Stories on Stage) and fellow writers, so I know the city and I like it. And I lived this era, in Palo Alto, in the Bay Area. And in the 1970s and early 80s, Palo Alto was a different town. There were no computers. There was no Silicon Valley. I also have to say that as someone who grew up in a world where the big technological innovation with the calculator, it was very moving and very natural for me to write about an era where almost all the interaction was in person. If Lorena wants to solve a problem, if she wants to find Marcus Stallworth out in the desert, she cannot pull out a cell phone and enter a GPS program and boom, there he is. She has to figure it out. That adversity is part of how the plot functions, and how we see her tremendous intelligence and resourcefulness.
 
I didn’t want to set the book in Palo Alto because I was interested in scorpions, and in the desert, and the contrast between the capital, the political center of the state, and a world that was more a natural world, the world of the desert. And I think for me, just knowing and liking Sacramento, and thinking of Nancy Reagan and Ronald Reagan, and the assassination attempt, and the dawn of the Reagan Revolution, and the dream of the “mansion on the hill” and all the dewy propaganda of the Reagan Revolution—I was interested in telling the underside of that story, which is that part of the Reagan Revolution was about weaving a kind of dream in which the people who belonged in America, and belonged in the mansion on the hill, were white people with money, and it was the job of the state to protect those wealthy white people from brown people, from undocumented people, who were inherently morally depraved.

And it’s a sort of psychosis that has only become worse. Because, as I was finishing up the book, I was seeing images on the TV or computer of agents of the US government seizing small kids, sometimes younger than toddlers, from their parents. And literally, I’m writing about the underside of the Reagan Revolution and I’m seeing the extension of that playing out in the world I’m writing in, in 2018, 2019. And it made me feel that even though my novel is set in 1981, like any historical novel, it’s about the present time, too. 

So, in a way, I was trying to trace back. How did we get here? What is the mindset that animates this view? And it really has to do with something that Americans don't really want to think about, which is, we just consider ourselves more human than other people. 

During my first job out of college, I was living in El Paso, Texas, on the border. And when you live on the border, you see what the real story is, which is, if you're born north of a certain latitude in what they call the United States, you just have a right to a much more safe and prosperous life. And if you're not, and you want to get into America, you are going to be considered dangerous and an invader and a criminal. 

We don't think, what would it be like if I was in that circumstance, we think, Oh, well, if they’ve turned to crime, or if they can't find work, or if they, in one way or another, frighten us, it’s because there’s something morally defective about them. We don't think it's just because we were lucky enough to be born into a better story.  

Sue
You have the good fortune to be the first book published by a new publisher, Zando. Tell me about it, and how you connected with its very famous editor.

Steve
Zando was started by Molly Stern, who was at the top of the literary publishing world. She edited Michelle Obama's book, Gillian Flynn’s work, Sarah Jessica Parker. She's kind of a rock star in the publishing world. 

My book was sent out to a whole lot of different publishers,  and the thing that made me feel like yeah, Zando is the place, was just talking with Emily Bell, who was the only editor there at that time, and hearing  her and Molly speak about the book, and understand what its intentions were, being not just okay with the way that it shape shifts, the way that it moves from a kind of a dark YA feeling, to a police procedural, to a sort of desert walkabout book, and winds up in a Mormon sex cult, and then it returns  to examine everything  under the sun, right? Nancy Reagan, astrology, scorpion biology, the criminal justice system, the prison system, FBI interrogation tactics. It moves! And a lot of editors, I think might be put off by that, they’d say it’s too capacious, you're casting too wide a net.

Emily Bell and Molly totally got it. They’re like, you’re swinging big, it’s a social novel and also a thriller, and we get it, and we’ll publish it. We’ll publish the hell out of it.  And I was like, that’s all I need to hear, that you understand what I’m up to, and you dig it, and you’ll help me make it better. And in that sense, it was a very easy decision, to go with Zando.

Sue 
Also exciting is the news that it’s being adapted into a TV series. Tell me more about that. 

Steve
Now, you’ve read some of my other books. I’m interested in the inner life, and that’s hard to dramatize. But most everybody who read this thing said, ooh, I can see it. There’s a lot of plot, and characters, and different settings, and it’s a mystery, how’s it going to end. Lots of people were saying it’s like a movie in my head. So, we’re on our way with it.

Sue
Can’t wait to see it. Although, as everyone said, I’ve already seen it in my head!

And now I want to get into the wayback machine and go back to something you did in 2006, when you very publicly resigned your teaching position at Boston College to protest the choice of the then Secretary of State, Condoleeza Rice, as the commencement speaker. When I read that, it seemed so, so long ago, and so innocent, and the Bush Administration, which many thought then as so evil, seems positively benevolent by today’s political standards. But, for you, was this public protest a turning point?

Steve
Yeah. Well, lots of civilians and soldiers were killed, and the case for going to war was fraudulent. And the university I worked for was saying that the Secretary of State, who was one of the architects and justifiers of this war, is someone to be looked up to, who speaks with a certain moral authority, and we’re giving her an honorary degree. And I just thought it was bullshit. 

But I’m not sure it was a turning point. The connection from then, to now, is this: All the Secrets of the World in its form is rather unexpected, but in its moral concerns, it’s something I’ve been writing about in my journalism and in my fiction for thirty years. When I was in Miami as an investigative reporter, I wrote about the Bird Road Rapist, who was a Cuban American immigrant who was framed, essentially and put in prison for twenty-six years, until the Innocence Project proved that he was innocent with DNA evidence that they managed to uncover. It was a big, high-profile case and the police were under pressure to find somebody and make sure they were arrested and put behind bars, and the media did its thing. And that stays with you. When you’re an investigative reporter you see that these big systems of power, even though the individuals within them are acting in good faith, make mistakes. And there are pressures in these systems that create these terrible outcomes. And that’s partly what I was trying to capture.

That’s what the social novel does. It steps back and asks: What are the systems of power in which people are trapped and what are the incentives of those systems of power? And what happens if you’re somebody with power, like Nancy Reagan, who is a traumatized wife who wants to keep her husband safe but is also someone who behaves in a way that is going to be very destructive and ultimately kind of lethal, versus someone like Lorena Saenz or her brother Tony, who are completely powerless, and who get caught up in a web of circumstance and state power that winds up snuffing out their lives. 

Sue
It's clear that this is a social novel disguised as a thriller. I’m seeing more and more of that, aren’t you? More crime novels with a social awareness subtext.

Steve
For me, the genre of crime fiction is this weird double-edged sword. Because the problem is, we’re interested in the gory particulars of a crime, but we’re much less interested in how our society contends with the inequalities and the systemic problems that lead people into crime and lead them into desperate situations. It’s much easier to write about murder if you don’t have to think about morality, or you can just make out the police to be the good guy and the murderer to be the bad guy. All The Secrets In The World sort of turns that upside down and says, actually, no one’s a good guy or a bad guy.

Sue.
This is making me think about Sacramento’s recent horrific mass shooting, which is very, very complicated both in the crime, and whatever made it arise. 

Steve
Yeah. When I heard about it, the first thing I thought about was the speech Reagan gave in Sacramento, which is a scene in the book. He spoke about crime, and the crackdown on crime, and law and order. Reagan had convened a commission to study the problem. And their first solution was to recommend sensible gun control laws—and this was back in 1981—to have sensible gun laws so that an automatic weapon would not wind up in the middle of Sacramento in 2022.

And Reagan looked right past that recommendation. He went straight to how we needed to keep certain people—rich white people—safe from certain other people—poor brown people. I immediately flashed to “we’re still not getting the lesson.” You cannot have a culture awash in deadly weapons and not expect that they’re not going to get used on innocents.

Sue
Well, Steve, we’ve delved deeply and seriously. And now we’re going to get into the light and fluffy. On your Twitter page you identify yourself as Writer, Human, and Matzoh Ball. What does this mean?

Steve
I don’t know. I love matzoh ball soup and I make it often. My house is mostly vegetarian but my youngest has become addicted to rotisserie chicken, and the only way I can justify buying a rotisserie chicken is by using every single bit of it, so whenever we get a rotisserie chicken I always make chicken soup and when I make chicken soup I always make matzoh balls, and I love them and I’m the only person in the house who eats them,  so I am probably about fifty percent matzoh ball. Which I can live with.

And one more thing. There’s one thing I’ve really missed. I was coming to Sacramento once a year, at least, connecting with writers and being able to teach and read people’s work. And Stories on Stage did the greatest performance of one of my short stories that I’ve ever seen. I was just absolutely astonished at how good it was. And I’m guardedly hopeful that we’re coming out of this plague and that people will be able to go out and have literature and storytelling, which is a human activity that brings people together.

I’m super excited for the TV series, that will be awesome to see what they do with it, but there’s something precious that Stories on Stage captures, which is being in a space with a whole bunch of other human beings where each of us is making the movie in our head. We’re collaborating with the writer and the actor and making the movie in our head. There’s nothing like it.

Right you are, Steve! 
​
Steve’s website 
Zando Publishing
Steve's Twitter 
​Steve's Facebook
 
Edited for length and clarity

Sue Staats is a Sacramento writer. She directed Stories on Stage Sacramento for six years, from 2013 to 2019, and now contributes interviews and blog posts to the website, and cookies to the events (when they aren't virtual).  She’s currently looking for a home for her short story collection and getting her feet wet in a couple of other projects,  with the hope that eventually one of them will draw her into deeper waters.

Sue's fiction and poetry have been published in The Los Angeles Review, Graze Magazine, Tulip Tree Review, Farallon Review, Tule Review, Late ​Peaches: Poems by Sacramento Poets, Sacramento Voices, and others. She earned an MFA from Pacific University, and was a finalist for the Gulf Coast Prize in Fiction and the Nisqually Prize in Fiction. Her stories have been performed at Stories on Stage Sacramento and Stories on Stage Davis, and at the SF Bay-area reading series “Why There Are Words.”