16. In chapter 26, the narration switches from third person to first, with June telling her own story. What is the effect of the change in narration? Why do you think McBride does it?
17. Why does Coral choose to share the story of her upbringing with Malaya? Does it help Malaya? What effect does sharing the story have on Coral?
Topics & Questions for Discussion
1.When Augusta asked Coral to host the family Christmas celebration, telling Coral that hosting was becoming too much for her, “Coral knew that this wasn’t true. Moving Christmas to [Coral’s] house was Augusta’s way of anointing Coral’s home.” Why is it important that Augusta anoint Coral’s home? Who hosts major holiday meals in your family?
2. Read We Are Called to Rise with your book club and compare it to ’Round Midnight. Has McBrides’s writing style changed since the release of her debut novel?
3. Las Vegas has occupied a special place in American mythology. To June “Las Vegas was the future.” For Honorata, it is the first place in the United States where she has been treated with kindness and where she can make a home. Have you visited Las Vegas? If so, what are your impressions of it? And if not, how do you imagine it?
4. To learn more about Laura McBride and read more about her other books, visit her official site at http://lauramcbrideauthor.com/
A Conversation with Laura McBride
When you released your first novel, We Are Called to Rise, it was a critical success. Booklist proclaimed you “without question . . . a truly commanding literary presence.” How did the experience of writing ’Round Midnight compare? Did you feel added pressure while writing it? If so, how did you handle it?
There were times when I wondered if I would have the persistence to write a second novel, and days when I worried that I had charged into the story without giving it enough consideration in advance. Looking back, I see those were confidence fears. In fact, I’m dogged when I want something, and I had considered many possible stories, some at length, before feeling electrified about this one.
When the novel clicked together in my head—that I would use these characters, that the plot would develop in this particular way—I was just racing to get it on paper. I couldn’t write fast enough or get enough writing time to lay it down while it was all in my mind. That was the pressure that never left me through the whole writing period: this thrum of anxiety that I might not have enough time to write it out, or to go back and make of it what I wanted.
We Are Called to Rise has been a book club favorite since it was published, and you speak to several book clubs a month. What have you found most rewarding about speaking with book club members?
I love the stories readers share with me—of their children, their losses, their hopes. It’s quite moving, the way that talking about a book can catapult people into these honest and personal revelations. It’s a privilege. Also, book group folk are nice. I am showered with compliments, which is not at all good for one, but feels wonderful. And many book groups serve dessert.
Can you tell us about your writing process? When you started writing ’Round Midnight, did you know how all of the characters’ stories would fit together?
I had a short period to get ’Round Midnight going, and then I had to write it in all these weird moments and places: on planes, in hotel rooms, between classes. And it drove me crazy not to be able to concentrate for long periods of time in a quiet place. But in the end, it still got written. Which feels unbelievable to me. I half expect to wake up and find out I never did finish that novel.
In general, though, I like to have a strong conception of the story before I begin. I want to know the first page and the last page, and I want to know some of the ways that it is going to get from the one to the other. Writing something as long as a novel is a process of discovery—characters and circumstances grow—but I choose to twist those curling vines around a strong branch. So while I had a plan and a conception for the whole story, I also followed ’Round Midnight where it led. I let the characters evolve, I let the plot change course. That’s the fun of it, really.
Do you have any advice for aspiring writers? Is there anything that you wish you had been told at the start of your writing career?
I wish that I had not abandoned writing when I was younger and waited until I was fifty to take it up again. I quit because I didn’t see a path to publication. I thought about what I was doing as “writing a book,” and if I couldn’t get that book produced and into the world, I didn’t see the value in doing it. So I stopped writing and turned outward. I started teaching, I did a lot of volunteer work, I focused on my community.
When I’m in the thick of a story, when I’m writing feverishly and surely and intuitively, I am a pure form of myself. I’m both conscious and unconscious of what I’m doing, like a basketball player in the zone. Perhaps we aren’t blank slates when we are born, perhaps we inherit certain kinds of knowledge—as salmon born in a particular river do—and given the chance to be the people we are born to be, we should take it. I turned my back on the person my seven-year-old self knew I was, and I wish I hadn’t.
I hope I haven’t given the wrong impression. I don’t mean that my writing is inspired or even good; I mean that it’s part of me, that it’s natural to me, that I knew I could do it as soon as I was introduced to words on the page. I have always made sense of the world through story.
So, my advice. Write if you love it. Write if it’s your natural gift. Write if it makes you feel as if you are in a conversation with the ages. But don’t write for publication. Don’t write for anyone else at all. These things are out of your control, and they poison the well.
Your descriptions of Las Vegas are so vivid that it becomes another character in ’Round Midnight. Did you base any of the descriptions of the city and its inhabitants on people or things that you encounter in your daily life? Did you conduct any research to create the historical scenes?
Well, I call my research a novelist’s research, which means that I read idly, and listen in on conversations that are not my own, and ask people random questions about the details of things they have casually mentioned. I think my friends are on to me—they suspiciously say, “Is this going in a novel?”
I’ve lived here for three decades, and in a city that has changed as much as Las Vegas has in that time, that’s a lot of acquired but not necessarily verifiable information. So I often write from what I think I know, and later I try to verify that my memories are correct (they aren’t always), and I try not to let this whole question of perfect accuracy get in my head. I want my novels to be grounded in truth, but they aren’t textbooks, and as a fiction writer, I am seeking the subjective not objective view.
Joanna Rakoff praised ’Round Midnight, saying “I’m not one to pull out the term “Great American Novel,” but Laura McBride’s sublime ’Round Midnight demands nothing less." Were you inspired by any “Great American Novels” when you were writing? Can you tell us about them?
I think that anything I could say in response to such a glorious comment would just be piling on. But I love that you asked me a question that included it. I wish everyone would ask me a question that included Joanna’s comment. If I get to meet her in person, I’m going to give her a crushing hug.
’Round Midnight spans many generations and many points of view. Was it difficult to switch between time periods and characters’ viewpoints as you were writing? Did you write the characters’ sections consecutively?
I wrote the story in the order one reads it, and the structure of this novel allowed me to generally be in one character’s head at a time.
I did spend a lot of time trying to immerse myself in the particular area of the Philippines where Honorata grew up, and in the area of Mexico where Engracia is from. I wrote pages and pages based on these explorations, and then deleted nearly all of them in the first revision. That writing was self-conscious in its effort to prove I knew what I was writing about. It interrupted the story; those painstakingly acquire
d details were things the characters would neither notice nor report. So I would have four or five pages that took me a week to put together, and I would keep one tiny detail about the sound of a particular frog, and be back to the story in my head.
I finally just had to laugh about it. Working that hard freed me. Knowing that information, even if I didn’t include it, gave me the confidence to keep imagining. It’s really scary to write about the other—and a novelist has no choice but to do so. The essence of fiction, to my way of thinking, is the empathetic journey that writer and reader take. But making that imaginative leap into an other requires an assertion of the self that I, and perhaps many women, have learned to quell. The decision to write about people whose lives are different than mine was daunting. I could only begin by accepting that I might fail.
What would you like your readers to take away from ’Round Midnight?
I hope it’s a pleasure to read. I hope they care about the characters, and immerse themselves in an imagined world. That’s what I was doing. I was caught by the idea of these four women: one rich, one poor, two American-born, two immigrants, four mothers. (Actually, I wanted Coral not to have children; I didn’t want four mothers, but the life that she happened to live without children took me down a different path and away from this story, so I rewrote it.)
I wanted to write about women, about the intensity and intimacy of their lives; I wanted to capture some of those voices I hear when I walk in the park, or talk with people in my college, or work on a community project. I’m interested in experiences that are different from mine, in people who see the world differently than I do and who believe things that counter my own beliefs. In the world of possible questions, I like why.
Is there anything that you have found particularly gratifying about publishing ’Round Midnight? If so, what?
It was inexpressibly thrilling to have my editor’s first response be, “Thank you very much for writing a new novel, and thank you extremely much for writing this one.” On my end, I could hardly breathe for wondering what she would think, and on her end, she was thanking me for this particular story.
I didn’t know that I would be even more thrilled the second time, or that I would have an even clearer sense of how lucky I am to have this creative opportunity. All through writing this book, I told myself that lightning doesn’t strike twice, that the act of writing was the point, and that I must not count on anyone wanting to read it. I think that was a legitimate way to think about what I was doing, and yet, lightning did strike twice.
Are you working on anything now? Can you tell us about it?
I hope so! I’m answering this question eight months before ’Round Midnight comes out, and at this point, I’m not much past daydreaming. I spent the summer plotting out a new book, but I think I’ve dropped that idea. For me, preparing to write happens on two levels. I have to choose the story, and I have to make a plan for when I will write the book. It’s hard to predict how long the first takes—I’m letting my mind spin, and trusting that the characters and the situation will emerge—but I have a plan for the second. I’ll be ready to go when the story hits!
Turn the page for an excerpt from
We Are Called to Rise
1
* * *
Avis
THERE WAS A YEAR of no desire. I don’t know why. Margo said I was depressed; Jill thought it was “the change.” That phrase made me laugh. I didn’t think I was depressed. I still grinned when I saw the roadrunner waiting to join me on my morning walk. I still stopped to look at the sky when fat clouds piled up against the blue, or in the evenings when it streaked orange and purple in the west. Those moments did not feel like depression.
But I didn’t desire my husband, and there was no certain reason for it, and as the months went by, the distance between us grew. I tried to talk myself out of this, but my body would not comply. Finally, I decided to rely on what in my case would be mother wisdom, or as Sharlene would say, “to fake it till you make it.”
That night, I eased myself out of bed carefully, not wanting to fully wake Jim. I had grown up in Las Vegas, grown up seeing women prance around in sparkling underwear, learned how to do the same prancing in the same underwear when I was barely fifteen, but years of living in another Las Vegas, decades of being a suburban wife, a mother, a woman of a certain social standing, had left me uneasy with sequined bras and crotchless panties. My naughty-underwear drawer was still there—the long narrow one on the left side of my dresser—but I couldn’t even remember the last time I had opened it. My heart skipped a little when I imagined slipping on a black lace corset and kneeling over Jim in bed. Well, I had made a decision, and I was going to do it. I would not give up on twenty-nine years of marriage without at least trying this.
So I padded quietly over to the dresser, and eased open the narrow drawer. I was expecting the bits of lace and satin, even sequins, but nestled among them, obscenely, was a gun. It made me gasp. How had a gun gotten in this drawer?
I recognized it, though. Jim had given it to me when Emily was a baby. He had insisted that I keep a gun. Because he traveled. Because someone might break in. I had tried to explain that I would never use it. I wouldn’t aim a gun at someone any more than I would drown a kitten. There were decisions I had made about my life a long time ago; firing a gun was on that list. But there were things Jim could not hear me say, and in the end, it was easier just to accept the gun, just to let him hide it in one of those silly fake books on the third shelf of the closet, where, if I had thought about it—and I never did—I would have assumed it still was.
How long had the gun been in this drawer? Had Jim put it there? Was he sending a message? Had Jim wanted to make the point that I hadn’t looked in this drawer for years? Hadn’t worn red-sequined panties in years? Had Jim been thinking the same way I had, that maybe what we needed was a little romance, a little fun, a little hot sex in the middle of the kitchen, in order to start over?
I could hear Jim stirring behind me. He would be looking at me, naked in front of our sex drawer. Things weren’t going exactly the way I had intended, but I shook my bottom a little, just to give him a hint at what I was doing.
He coughed.
I stopped then, not sure what that cough meant. I didn’t even want to touch the gun, but I carefully eased the closest bit of satin out from under the barrel, still thinking that I would find a way to slip it on and maybe dance my way back to the bed.
“I’m in love with Darcy. We’ve been seeing each other for a while.”
It was like the gun had gone off. There I was, naked, having just wagged my fifty-three-year-old ass, and there he was, somewhere behind me, knowing what I had been about to do, confessing to an affair with a woman in his office who was almost young enough to be our daughter.
Was he confessing to an affair? Had he just said he was in love with her? The room melted around me. Something—shock, humiliation, disbelief—perhaps just the sudden image of Darcy’s young bottom juxtaposed against the image I had of my own bottom in the hall mirror—punched the air out of me.
“I wanted to tell you. I know I should have told you.”
Surely, this was not happening. Jim? Jim was having an affair with Darcy? (Or had he said he was in love?) Like the fragment of an old song, my mother’s voice played in my mind. “Always leave first, Avis. Get the hell out before they get the hell out on you.” That was Sharlene’s mantra: get the hell out first. She’d even said it to me on my wedding day. It wasn’t the least surprising that she’d said it, but still, I had resented that comment for years. And, look, here she was: right. It took twenty-nine years. Two kids. A lot of pain. But Sharlene had been right.
It all came rushing in then. Emily. And Nate. And the years with Sharlene. The hard years. The good years. Why Jim had seemed so distant. The shock of Jim’s words, as I stood there, still naked, still with my back to my husband, my ass burning with shame, brought it all rushin
g in. So many feelings I had been trying not to feel. It seemed suddenly that the way I had been trying to explain things to myself—the way I had pretended the coolness in my marriage was just a bad patch; the way I had kept rejecting the signs that something was wrong with Nate, that Nate had changed, that I was afraid for Nate (afraid of Nate?); the way that getting older bothered me, though I was trying not to care, trying not to notice that nobody noticed me, trying not to be anything like Sharlene—it seemed suddenly that all of that, all of those emotions and all of that pretending, just came rushing toward me, a torpedo of shame and failure and fear. Jim was in love with Darcy. My son had come back from Iraq a different man. My crazy mother had been right. And my whole life, how hard I had tried, had come to this. I could not bear for Jim to see what I was feeling.
How could I possibly turn around?
I AM NINE YEARS OLD, and inspecting the bathtub before getting in. I ignore the brown gunk caked around the spigot, and the yellow tear-shaped stain spreading out from the drain; I can’t do much about those. No, I am looking for anything that moves, and the seriousness with which I undertake this task masks the sound of my mother entering, a good hour before I expect her home from work.
“Yep. You sure have got the Briggs girl ass. That’ll come in handy some day.”
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