The five stories in The Beauty of Their Youth are told in different voices, settings, and times. Each is unique and handled with great subtly and originality. I was curious to ask Joyce about her fine collection.
VP: I know that writing is an organic process and our creations can bubble up from many sources, but I wonder how the territory of these stories came to you? And, perhaps more importantly, how you choose the angle from which to tell them?
JH: I would say that three of the five stories came, first of all, from an engagement with—and curiosity about—certain places. In “Everglades City” and in the title story, “The Beauty of Their Youth,” these are places I experienced as a visitor, a tourist—and that’s the case for the stories’ central characters as well. Both of these stories are about an outsider’s view of a place (or places), and also, to some degree, that outsider’s inability to fully grasp and understand the place she’s found herself in. Certainly that’s true for Inge, the young German woman at the center of “Everglades City.” In “The Beauty of Their Youth,” on revisiting Rome and several sites in Greece thirty years after being in there as a college student, the central character, Fran, realizes how limited her understanding of these places—and certain of their inhabitants—was as a younger woman. The other two stories—“A Better Law of Gravity” and “Benedicta, or A Guide to the Artist’s Resume”—began in playfulness, in an effort to play with form, and with certain expectations about short stories and their characters.
In terms of choosing the angle from which to tell each of these stories, I believe I was always looking for the perspective of a character who seems particularly bewildered—or maybe, by the story’s end, amazed.
VP: Memory plays an important role in these stories. It transports your characters from the present to the past by creating a swirl of time that releases them from a restrictive, linear understanding. Can you talk about how you wanted time and memory to unfold in these stories? What does the past tend to mean for your characters?
JH: I’ve often said that as a writer, I seem to be cursed with an inability to tell a story in a straightforward, linear way. (Another way of saying this, I suppose, is that I’m not enamored of traditional plotting in the writing of fiction.) Maybe this is connected to my own tendency to dip in and out of memories—even very brief, fleeting ones—as I go through each day; this has intensified as I’ve grown older. These memories sometimes originate in a wistful longing for the past, a kind of nostalgia, but often they don’t; the best ones are just images, honestly—the feeling of wind blowing in my face on a rapid downhill ride on my bike as a child, moments of visual or aural wonder during my travels as a younger women. That sort of thing. I like drawing on those moments in imagining and creating characters, and then I guess I like giving my characters a similar sort of delight—or sometimes longing, or even deep sadness—in experiencing these arresting memories that seem to come from nowhere. And so those characters’ experience of time becomes like mine: caught in the inevitable rush forward, grateful for the pauses when memories glimmer in our consciousness.
VP: In the title story, a mother and her college-age daughter return to Greece and Italy where the mother had travelled when she was her daughter’s age. The daughter has an understanding that as American tourists they’re on the outside of the worlds they visit, but the mother only more slowly comes to understand this as the truth of her past is revealed. In another story, a German tourist veers away from her travel plans to live in the Everglades with a man she’s just met. Again, she’s an outsider looking into another country that only slowly reveals itself and changes her. Can you share your thoughts about the territories of culture and time that start out opaque in your stories but become less so as the stories unfold?
JH: This is such an interesting question; I love the idea of “territories of culture and time that start out opaque . . . but become less so.” Partly I think this is simply a function of growing older, and recognizing one’s youthful naivete (as for Fran in “The Beauty of Their Youth”). But it’s also acknowledging the ways in which one’s desires can muddle one’s thinking about and perception of the world; that’s the case for Inge in “Everglades City,” but also, I’d say, for other characters in the collection—FJ in “A Better Law of Gravity,” Joan in “Polymorphous,” the Painter Van Lloyd in “Benedicta.” I’m glad to realize as I write this answer that not all of my characters who recognize this about themselves are middle-aged women like me!
VP: Your story Benedicta is told through an unusual and inventive structure of an artist’s resume. I’m curious how you landed on that as a way to show not just the career of the artist, but the arc of his life, especially in relation to other historical artists.
JH: I know that when I began writing “Benedicta” I was thinking a lot about autobiography, and particularly about what seemed to me at the time (and continues to seem to me, if I’m honest) a gendered assumption about women writers and artists: that their work is almost always some kind of reworking of autobiography, of their own lived experiences—while the work of men is more expansively imaginative, and creative. I think it’s interesting that there is (or perhaps was) almost a kind of shame in the idea that art could emerge from lived experience, particularly in an age of such fascination with memoir (and now, also, with autofiction—and so maybe this is less true now). I wanted to explore a male artist who resists the call for autobiography in the creation of his artist’s resume, and who seeks an alternative way of understanding artists and their subject matter by drawing on the ideas of certain male artists from the past (Thomas Eakins, Walter Sickert, Ben Shahn). But then ends up, despite himself, revealing lots of details about his younger life, and how those lived experiences clearly shaped his art.
VP: I enjoyed the range of behavior in your characters. In A Better Law of Gravity, one character is manic and wildly unpredictable; in Everglades City, the main character ends up making strange and unwise choices; and in Polymorphous, a daughter only comes to vaguely understand her deceased mother’s unexpected behavior from the past. People are not what they seem and the boundaries for their actions are pretty wide open. Can you talk about how your characters’ unpredictability unfolds?
JH: I’m sure you feel as I do, Ginny, that the only characters I’m able to stay with, for the duration of a short story (and certainly for a novel) are the ones who surprise me, who reveal hidden reserves—maybe of strength, maybe of desperation. When I read “A Better Law of Gravity,” which is a story I wrote long ago, now, I feel a rush of happiness in seeing FJ’s discovery of her own strength, despite the depressive funk she’s been steeped in for quite a while. Though I was playfully attempting to imagine the character of Frankie from Carson McCullers’ The Member of the Wedding several years after the time of the novel in writing that story, I feel like I also wrote it for all the young college students I’ve taught through the years—battling all their sadness and doubts and, these days, their profound anxiety, every day, in order to get up in the morning, show up, and do their work. When you keep on doing that—and also, as I try to remind my students, when you remain open to the possibilities afforded by taking risks (as FJ does in climbing into the car with her sister-in-law Janice)—there’s no telling what might happen. What remarkable things you might accomplish, what gifts you might offer to those around you.
VP: You are the author of another collection of stories (Tell Me Everything, which won the prestigious Bread Loaf Bakeless Prize), and two novels. How does the writing of short stories differ from novel-writing? Do you do them in tandem, or at different times? How do you know when a story is better suited to be told as a full-length book or as a shorter work of fiction?
JH: I’m not sure I do know when a story is better suited for one form or the other; I feel like I’ve spent a lot of time, over the past ten years or so, struggling with that very question. I have two novel manuscripts from those years that haven’t quite worked yet, and it’s possible this has to do with form; one, for instance, should perhaps be three interconnected novellas—and I suppose that if I’m honest, I’d have to say that I’ve resisted that realization out of an awareness that the publishing world is more interested in novels than in shorter forms. I haven’t typically worked on short stories and novels in tandem; I’ve more typically worked on stories during periods when I wasn’t actively engaged in work on a novel. Right now, though, I’m pretty steeped in a series of linked short stories, and I’m enjoying the way that form allows for the satisfactions of writing both short and long fictional works. We’ll see how that goes!