John C. Crow, Mark Bradford, “Esq.”, David Gilman, and Fred Schneider provided me with clarity on numerous legal issues; a special bow of appreciation goes to attorney Laurence Lebowitz.
It seems I cannot write a book unless I begin it at the home of Susie Walker, nor without encouragement from my cousin Joan Stern, nor without my brother, John Seeger Gilman, vital reader, brainstormer, and anchor.
A glass must also be raised multiple times…To the rest of the Most Amazing Book Club that cheered me on: Brigette De Lay, Margot Hendry, Anne Kerr, Suzanne Muskin, Cristina Negrie, Mary Pecaut, and Jean Swanson…To Michael Cannan and Hannah Serota for crucial inspiration…To Stephane Gehringer, Anke Lock, and the staff of the Cambrian Adelboden. To my teachers and mentors, writers Charles Baxter, Rosellen Brown, Nicholas Delbanco, and Al Young, whose lessons continue to resonate throughout my life and work…And to novelist Richard Bausch for sustaining me with his posts of wisdom.
The New-York Historical Society and the Tenement Museum provided crucial resources, as did Avvo.com. Among numerous books and articles that proved vital were Jeri Quinzio’s Of Sugar and Snow: A History of Ice Cream Making; Linda Stradley’s “History of Ice Cream Cones” and the Web site What’s Cooking America; Una Storia Segreta: The Secret History of Italian American Evacuation and Internment During World War II by Lawrence DiStasi; 97 Orchard: An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One Tenement by Jane Ziegelman; The Emperor of Ice Cream: The True Story of Häagen-Dazs by Rose Vesel Mattus; and Streets: A Memoir of the Lower East Side by Bella Spewack.
Last but not least: I swoon with gratitude before my husband, Bob Stefanski, who read, edited, and discussed this novel with me endlessly. My Love, I cannot thank you enough for your wisdom, humor, faith, passion, friendship, patience, exquisite judgment, and kindness. You make everything possible. Je t’aime.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Susan Jane Gilman is the bestselling author of Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress, Kiss My Tiara, and Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven. She provides commentary for NPR and has written for the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Ms. magazine, among others. She earned an MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan and has won several literary awards. She divides her time between Geneva, Switzerland, and her hometown of New York. You can visit her at www.SusanJaneGilman.com.
ALSO BY SUSAN JANE GILMAN
Kiss My Tiara
Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress
Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven
A CONVERSATION WITH SUSAN JANE GILMAN
Q: Your last book, Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven, is a nonfiction account of your travels in the People’s Republic of China in the eighties. Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress is a coming-of-age memoir. And Kiss My Tiara is an advice book for the “SmartMouth Goddess.” All are very different from a sweeping historical novel. Why did you decide to jump to fiction?
A. It’s always been my plan to write a novel, actually—ever since I was eight years old, when I fell in love with reading and started to write my own short stories in little notebooks I bought from Woolworth’s, illustrating them with Magic Markers. From then on I always assumed that one day I’d write some sort of wonderful, fictional opus. Yet as I grew up, I kept getting sidetracked. Although I got an M.F.A. in creative writing and published short stories and even won literary prizes, things in our culture kept pissing me off so much that I felt compelled to respond with books.
In the late nineties, for example, as I was working on a novel, someone handed me a bestselling dating guide that essentially advised women to act like diet soda: be artificially sweet and bubbly for the rest of your life, the authors insisted, and you could trick a man into marrying you. Ugh. It was despicable on so many levels—insulting to women, insulting to men. “What about blueprints for catching a life, not a husband?” I cried. That’s how Kiss My Tiara: How to Rule the World as a SmartMouth Goddess was born. I had a book of short stories and a half-finished novel that my agent was shopping around, but I landed a publishing contract overnight for this guide to power and attitude. It became my first published book.
Although readers always tell me that Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress makes them laugh out loud, it actually grew out of the tragedy of September 11. Again, I was struggling to write The Novel. Yet for months after the attacks, I was simply a basket case. All I wanted to read were funny memoirs. However, the ones written by women all seemed to be about (a) being single or (b) going shopping. Oh, puh-lease, I thought. There is so much more to our lives than that.
That’s how Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress took shape. Tales of growing up groovy and clueless—all the misadventures of coming of age, right up through adulthood—are in it. It debuted on the New York Times bestseller list, and I was dubbed “the female David Sedaris.” Praise and excitement rained down on me like gold confetti. But it was nothing I’d set out to be.
So finally, again, I turned back to The Novel. I was writing one based on a real, harrowing backpacking trip I made through China in 1986 with a classmate. She and I had decided we wanted to be the female equivalents of the Kerouac and Cassady characters in On the Road—except internationally. We planned out this huge, around-the-world trip on a placemat at the International House of Pancakes after—need I say?—a night of copious collegiate drinking. “Let’s start our trip by going to China!” we said. No one we knew had ever been there before. It was crazy and ambitious and completely misguided—the equivalent of backpacking through North Korea today. But off we went! We landed in Hong Kong without knowing a single word of Cantonese or Mandarin or anything about the People’s Republic of China at all. And so, perhaps unsurprisingly to anyone but us, we quickly found ourselves in completely over our heads. Soon our adventure deteriorated into a modern Heart of Darkness. It was so unbelievable, in fact, that I assumed it was best used as the basis for fiction.
Yet then, alas, in 2003, I heard President G. W. Bush say that invading Iraq would be a “cakewalk.” “He has got to be kidding,” I said to my husband. “That sounds like something stupid I would’ve said as a drunk twenty-one-year-old back at the IHOP.” Soon after, a number of travel memoirs began captivating the public as well—tales of women traveling to another country and renovating a house in Tuscany or going to an ashram in India in order to get over a heartbreak. We Americans seemed to view other cultures simply as arenas for our own personal makeovers or national enrichment. And so it became imperative to me to write my story from China as nonfiction instead—to tell the truth in all its messy, naked, improbable humiliation. I felt that it was important to counteract the American assumption that travel is about “conquering.” Hence my third book was, again, a memoir: Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven.
I never expected to be a nonfiction author at all. It was an accident! THE ICE CREAM QUEEN OF ORCHARD STREET may seem like a departure to my readers, but it doesn’t feel like one to me at all. Finally I’m coming home—back to my first love, to what I intended to do all along.
Q: Does THE ICE CREAM QUEEN OF ORCHARD STREET have anything in common with your previous nonfiction works?
A. Well, all my books, it seems, are notorious for their humor. Certainly there’s a bit of a smart-ass in Lillian Dunkle. And the concept itself—of an ice cream lady who hates kids and would rather drink a martini—initially appealed to me because of its absurdity, its great comic potential.
Also, THE ICE CREAM QUEEN OF ORCHARD STREET does attempt to expand upon the way women are so often portrayed in our culture. At least I don’t see a lot of female antiheroes in literature who are seventy-five, handicapped, and under indictment.
Whether I’m writing fiction or nonfiction, I’ve always had an impulse to push back against the boundaries of “acceptability,” to pop the balloons of presumption—particularly about women.
Q: It’s clear that a great amount of research went into the writing of this book and that some scenes are inspired by real-life events—the invention of soft-serv
e, for example, is credited to Tom Carvel, who began selling melted ice cream after a tire on his truck went flat. How much of this book was inspired by real history? Did you learn anything surprising while you were researching the story?
A. Tom Carvel’s story was a key inspiration. I bow before him and his fabulous ice cream cakes! I initially got the idea for THE ICE CREAM QUEEN OF ORCHARD STREET when a friend and I were reminiscing about these cakes and the wonderfully croaky, homespun Carvel ice cream commercials we used to see on TV when we were kids; Tom Carvel himself would rasp, “Please, buy my Carvel ice cream?” He sounded so grandfatherly, so woebegone and choked, that you wanted to run right out and buy a Brown Bonnet ice cream cone—if only to keep the poor guy from having a heart attack!
Googling “Tom Carvel” on a whim, I learned that his story was a classic American-immigrant rags-to-riches saga. This struck me as a wonderful basis for a novel. However, as I began reading the biographies of Tom Carvel—and then of the Mattuses, the founders of Häagen-Dazs, who were also immigrants—it appeared that ice cream makers are generally phenomenally nice people, with a great love for children and ice cream and charity work.
Writing about good people making a delicious confection, however, held zero appeal to me as a writer.
For some time I had been yearning to create a modern female antihero—a sort of combination of Scarlett O’Hara and Leona Helmsley—who was supremely difficult, amoral, and conniving (yet not a murderer or mentally ill). My two ideas fused. Why not write about a businesswoman who sells ice cream to the public in the guise of a sweet, motherly ice cream lady—but who in real life is a mean-spirited, difficult, kleptomaniacal drunk? That tension and contradiction appealed to me immensely.
Yet at the same time, I knew, such a protagonist had to be compelling, if not sympathetic. So I asked myself: What would make someone become so difficult? Again I looked to the story of the American immigrant for answers. Slowly, an epic developed—especially as I began to research the history of ice cream. I realized how much the ice cream industry was directly affected by the greatest events of the twentieth century. I began to see how these events could parallel and shape Lillian’s own life beautifully, and how she would become motivated to lie and cheat over time.
I also needed to understand the nuts-and-bolts of ice cream making. So I contacted my inspiration—the Carvel Ice Cream Company itself—and arranged to work at a Carvel ice cream franchise out in Massapequa, Long Island. The guy who owns that Carvel franchise, Zaya Givargidze—it turns out he had inherited the store from his parents, who were Greek immigrants themselves. They had known Tom Carvel personally! Zaya knew all the history, all the ins and outs of business. It was like hitting the mother lode. It was like a visit to Lourdes. I was beside myself. I’m amazed he didn’t throw me out of his shop. I kept running over to the freezers and pointing ecstatically at the ice cream cakes I had loved as a child and shouting, “Look! It’s Cookie Puss!”
For two days he let me go behind the scenes, learn the ropes, don a Carvel T-shirt and paper hat, and work as an ice cream maker serving customers. I loved every minute of it—though I have to confess I was slightly disappointed that I got to do a lot less…ahem, “personal quality control” than I’d expected. I’d secretly imagined, I suppose, that “research” would really mean being allowed to lean my head back beneath the soft-serve ice cream dispenser and let it swirl endless amounts of chocolate ice cream directly into my mouth. Yeah, well, no such luck. Zaya was bighearted, but no dummy. He wouldn’t let me near that ice cream machine unsupervised.
Everything during my research seemed like a revelation! All the inventions around ice cream, the chemistry of ice cream, and, of course, the way in which the evolution of ice cream paralleled so many historic events in twentieth-century America. The more I researched, the bigger the book became. At one point it ran almost seven hundred pages. It was like the Moby-Dick of ice cream. That’s what I even wanted to call it: The Moby-Dick of Ice Cream. But cooler heads prevailed.
Q: Lillian Dunkle is a colorful but troubled protagonist, in many ways an antiheroine. Was she a challenging character to write?
A. Actually, Lillian was the easiest part of this novel to write; her voice came to me in the proverbial flash. As I sat down to hammer out the beginning, I heard her speaking, and that was it—I just had her. Yet making her truly real was the tricky part.
While the idea of this mean, manipulative ice cream lady who hates kids and would rather have a martini is funny—and her shtick is amusing—she could too easily become a punch line, and that’s the last thing I wanted. Irony is not enough, and a colloquial voice often risks sounding cartoonish. To hold my interest as a writer, and certainly to hold readers’ attention, Lillian, as a character, had to have depth, texture, complications, contradictions—all those things that make someone real. And so, once I had her voice—and the book’s premise—I worked backward. I had to ask myself: What would make Lillian become so difficult? What would make a woman like her human? Compelling? While I did not want to make her likable, I wanted readers to feel empathy for her—to root for her some of the time.
Q: THE ICE CREAM QUEEN OF ORCHARD STREET is arguably a love letter to New York City and to the American dream. What compelled you to write about twentieth-century New York?
A. In my daily life, I’m generally obsessed with three things: sex, New York City, and ice cream. Since I’m no good at soft-core pornography, I figured I’d better write about the other two.
Seriously, embarking on a book—be it fiction or nonfiction—is like asking someone to move in with you. You’d better be prepared to want to look at that person for years, even if you’re not feeling particularly aroused or inspired at any given moment. There’s a myth about us writers, of course, that we just sit down to write and ta-da! Once we’re seized by the muse, we’re off typing like maniacs. But more often than not, we’re awake at 3:00 a.m. worrying the same goddamn sentence or paragraph or scene over and over and over. At those moments, when you’re hating yourself and second-guessing everything you’re writing—you want to make sure there is still some eternal flame of love there to sustain you through the struggle to the other side. You need that emotional basis, that engine. That’s why you have to write about something that turns you on, that fascinates you, that you love.
Me, I’m a made, born, and raised Noo Yawkuh—a cliché in a big, fat, I ♥ NY T-shirt. The city’s grimy fingerprints, rhythms, and sensibilities are all threaded through my DNA. I live abroad right now, in a blessed and beautiful country, yet I miss my hometown every day. So I had to make my first novel a valentine to it.
Q: Do you believe that the rags-to-riches story Lillian tells would be possible in today’s big cities?
A. “Rags to riches” has always been a long shot. In the past few decades, we’ve conflated it with the American dream—which it is not. It’s the American fantasy.
The American dream, as I understand it, at least used to be more modest. It was not rags to riches so much as rags to store-bought clothes. Rags to a house and a car. Rags to my children doing better than me. It was the hope that each generation would step up a rung on the socioeconomic ladder.
Whenever I’m back in New York, or Chicago, or Washington, D.C., or San Francisco, I am always encountering new immigrants who are working their butts off—in small businesses, driving taxis, cleaning hotel rooms, taking college classes—and they have big dreams. They tell me they’ve got a kid graduating from high school, or that they’re saving up for a house, or that they have an idea for starting their own company one day. Even in today’s lousy economy, they hope and strive. They certainly know that times are bad, but their drive is still fierce. And they seem to make some inroads.
So maybe our original, more human-scale American dream is still possible in our cities, though it’s getting tougher and tougher. But rags to riches? That’s more on the scale of winning the lottery. Because I’m an American, part of me wants—or even needs—
to believe that such a spectacular rise is still possible. And it is, I suppose. But so is winning the lottery. The odds are long. I refuse to speculate.
Q: What are your favorite novels set in New York City?
A. A few classics, naturally: The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger. Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. The Collected Short Stories of Dorothy Parker. Manchild in the Promised Land by Claude Brown.
Otherwise, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love by Oscar Hijuelos is one of my all-time favorites; reading it made me swoon. Jonathan Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude was the first contemporary novel about New York that captured the essence of my own childhood. Although his book is set in Brooklyn, the dicey neighborhood where I grew up in Manhattan had the same vibe, the same street dynamics, the same frisson of excitement, anxiety, racial tensions, danger, possibility, and poetry. He really nailed it.
Richard Price’s Lush Life is up there, too, along with What I Loved by Suri Hustvedt and Mary Gordon’s Spending—a very sexy novel.
And I’m also a huge sucker for Jack Finney’s sentimental time-travel novel, Time and Again. I did a radio piece about it for NPR’s “My Guilty Pleasure” series a while back. It’s a delicious, almost comic book–like read. I go back to it every few years when I’m feeling particularly homesick for New York.
READING GROUP GUIDE
Questions for Discussion
Lillian frequently attributes moments in her life to fate: her accident, her arrival in New York City the same year that continuous freezing was invented, et cetera. Do you believe it was fate? How does Lillian’s assertion about fate “shaping” her destiny square with her story?
The Ice Cream Queen of Orchard Street: A Novel Page 48