This week’s story, “Floating,” opens when a woman and a man meet and there’s a seemingly instant connection between them. Do you think that kind of immediate attraction is common or rare?
The narrator dumps a lot on someone she doesn’t know. “Mom and Dad divorced. My sister died. Pills.” That’s something you tell someone ten dates in. What surprises her is he stayed there, and listened. Someone who can hold all that is someone worth finding out about.
The woman is the narrator of the story, and throughout the story we see her trying to figure out this man. Could he be a love interest? Is he even single? How many clues did he give her?
When people like you they don’t leave you to figure them out.
The narrator is fifty years old and divorced. After her marriage ended, she imagined there’d be plenty of opportunities to date and have fun, but she finds that on dates all the men say they want to have children or get married. She contrasts this with her twenties, when any mention of children would drive someone away fast. Is she amused or angered or saddened by this?
I think she feels grief.
It is not true that there aren’t opportunities for her to date or have fun now that she’s fifty and divorced. They don’t like her so they tell her they want children. If you tell someone you’re fifty and divorced, and they like you, they say, “That’s hot,” because it is.
She learns both that the man has gone travelling and that he lives with his girlfriend. Any new piece of information gives her the opportunity to speculate further. Does he retain a kind of power because he remains unknown and unknowable? Or does his power diminish the more she learns about him?
The way the story is put together is interesting. It’s entirely built out of conversations she hasn’t been in or had, bits and pieces of gossip that trickle out to her. I could have written the story from the point of view of the girlfriend, or the man’s point of view, or her friend, or the man’s friends or co-workers. But there is something so wonderful about being fifty and having your own job and having been through so many disappointments that a situation like this is filtered through different experiences and people—the narrator’s discernment has an incredible clarity.
How hard is it to write a love story? Does it involve a suspension of belief?
“Love at first sight” is a difficult line to build a story around because you have to get a reader to believe it. It’s so corny and such a cliché. How do you not laugh out loud? It will be hard to deliver this line with a straight face when I go and record this at the sound studio.
It’s hard to write a love story the way I do it, because in the end you know you don’t get anyone but yourself. And I insist that is a love worth having.
You published your first novel last fall, “Pick a Color,” which is about a woman named Ning who runs a nail salon. She spends her day observing the salon’s customers and the women who work there. What would she make of your narrator?
Ning would say to her co-worker, “Floating. Huh. Love at first sight. They all say that. This one doesn’t even know when a man doesn’t like her,” and we, the reader, would be in on that conversation because it’s a book that asks us to pretend that the English language right in front of us is not there. ♦