By: David Dudley

Jean McGarry is the author of seven books of fiction. She has been a faculty member in the Johns Hopkins University’s Writing Seminars department for more than twenty years, serving as department chair from 1997 to 2005. Her first novel, 1985’s Airs of Providence, mined her working-class Irish-Catholic youth to chronicle the coming-of-age of a pair of sisters; her most recent, A Bad and Stupid Girl, traces the relationship between roommates at a Catholic girls’ college. In February, McGarry spoke with Urbanite’s David Dudley about her short story “Dream Date,” the perils of writing about family, and the strange autobiographical pull of Rhode Island.




Your previous collection of short stories was also called Dream Date. How did that title come to rest on this new story? Did you feel that there something left unsaid in that book?

That’s a good way of putting it. There was a game when I was growing up called “Dream Date,” and it just fascinated me. I never played it; when I looked at this game I thought, “What a silly thing this is.” But the game and the name just lingered. I can’t even remember why my collection was called Dream Date. I think I had a story at the time that was called “Dream Date,” but it was wrong; I thought, “No, I don’t really want that story.” When I wrote this story, it was clear to me that this was—not the missing story of the collection, but that the collection had kind of spawned it in a way. 

I’ve now written two stories about this sort of spunky, plucky kid. Because I wasn’t really that much like that myself—I was as dopey as she is, but I wasn’t that spunky. I think it was almost a compensation. The way, aesthetically, to work with this abusive environment was to create a kid who could really take it. This is an especially spunky character.

At this stage in your career, how much of your work is explicitly autobiographical?

When I started out writing, I wrote about [my hometown of] Providence, and I wrote about my family, and I wrote relentlessly. And then I stopped.

One of the reasons I became a writer was there was this family across the street, the McClanigans. I remember when I left Providence—and I couldn’t get out fast enough—when I got into the larger world I thought that nobody will understand what this family is. Nobody will get it. Nobody will understand how much we revered and adored this family. This family ruled the roost in Providence. And one of the reasons I wanted to learn how to write was to get across some of those Irish morals. But it took a very long time to write about that family. So a lot of time went by before I could get to this material that I always wanted to write about.

These were the inspiration for the McIninnies of “Dream Date.” And the quarrelsome Finnegans, I suppose, are based upon your own family. Is the story an accurate picture of how your family spoke to each other?

I think one of the things that took me a long time to realize was that the language in my family was a kind of Army language—it was a language my father had picked up in World War II in the Army. Pithy, abusive, funny, very condensed. To me, it was just the way people talked. But I’m sure that one of the reasons I became a writer was hearing this language that was kind of a foreign idiom, in a way, because nobody else was speaking it. My father must have absorbed it like a sponge. Every other word or phrase out of his mouth would be an order of some kind. “Look alive!” and all this. One of my favorites was “Don’t kill the job.”

What does that even mean?

Well, it’s telling your fellow workers not to work too hard. Don’t work so fast.

What did he do for a living?
 
I think I was interviewed about him at one time, and I said that he was a truck driver. He corrected me. He said, “No I wasn’t—I was a driver-salesman.” He sold bread, a kind of bread that doesn’t exist anymore—Bond Bread. I was mortified. I thought, “Oh, I’ve put him down in some way.” 

He was a tremendous talker. Tremendous. Talking all the time. And a lot of my stories were about him. He’s been dead for about fourteen years but even after he died I was still writing about him. I think it was the combination of always talking, but never talking about what his life had been like.

Growing up in that household, did you and your siblings have to out-compete each other verbally, or did that sort of drive you into silence?

I don’t think anyone was as good at it as he was—pithy like that. But that language of abuse was definitely what we used on each other.

Is there something different about going back to this autobiographical territory now, as opposed to writing about Providence earlier in your career?

Yes. The first time through, there was a kind of necessity to write this. I was very close to the material. It was my ambient, even though I was living elsewhere. I wrote my first book in California, so it wasn’t my literal ambient, but it was really where I was living mentally. You know, it’s like aesthetic material. I'll hear a voice coming back to my mind.

I guess this story came out of the idea of “the outsiders,” because that was a term, as the first paragraph explains, that blocked off everything—whenever you needed to block something out, that’s what you could say. So in other words, I’m just a late-stage, older writer, so it’s really textual and verbal rather than autobiographical.

Right—as time passes you’re released from that obligation to correct the record on certain things.

Well, for a while my father was correcting the record. This was another thing. When Airs of Providence, my first book, came out, my parents were both very upset with me, very angry, because I thought of it as a comic novel, and it was reviewed in Providence as sort of tragic. It came as a surprise to me that it was seen as such a diatribe.

Couldn’t you have anticipated that, based on what you knew about the city?

I should have been able to. But over time, and with great difficulty, my family began collaborating. Especially my father. A story would come out, he’d be very upset about it, and then he’d correct the record. He’d say, “You know, that’s not really how it happened.” And so then I’d have the material for the next one. 

Right before he died I had this beautiful moment with him. We were in this place, this derelict beach colony where his family had a beach house, but the hurricane of ’38 had knocked all the houses down. He just started describing what life was like then, and he said to me, “I wish I could describe it to you. I wish you could see it.” And it was really our last time together before he left, and at that point I thought, he really understands what I’m trying to do.

Was that a long journey for your family, to deal with your compulsion to fictionalize your life?

Well, I’m almost like a psychopath, in a way, in that I never thought about this angle. I never thought, “Is this going to hurt people?” 

Really?

Not for a second.

Well, that’s a powerful tool for a writer. Of course then you have to deal with the fallout.

I guess I never thought that a book by the Johns Hopkins University Press was going to get to Providence.

And if Providence is anything like Baltimore, if there’s anything written about it, there becomes this urgent and immediate need to respond to it.

A funny thing happened. My family was very excited about this book, They went to the bookstore on its publication date. They kept hearing these two guys talking about this novel they were looking for, and it was called Queers of Providence. And, being my family, they found this very funny. Of course, when they finally read the novel they didn’t think it was so funny.

What else drives the way you’re writing right now?

Because I’ve been a teacher for so long, I think I’m almost entirely a literary person. It’s almost a problem. My whole life is books. That’s the ambient now, just as the ambient earlier was the sound of Providence. Now it’s Proust and Virginia Woolf and [Yasunari] Kawabata. That’s what I have in my head. I’m always thinking that so much literature already exists, and I’m always asking myself, “What doesn’t exist?” And then I’ll say, “Oh, that’s where I’m going to go.” The literary landscape is so full, and I’m very aware of that, but that’s where my standards are. I never think to myself, “Oh, I want to represent a real life, or I want to be like the movies, or I want to write a real love story.” For me, the literary landscape is where I’m living.

Having spent a career in academia, are you ever tempted to start producing thinly disguised fictional treatises about academic life?

I think I’ve been more focused on the students. My last book, A Bad and Stupid Girl, is about two college roommates. But I was less interested in faculty politics than in this experience of how people learn. No matter how smart they are, there’s a part of any young person that’s totally ignorant. How do they get from there to acquire a kind of sophistication?

You started out as a newspaper reporter. Is there a part of your writing that you still feel is journalistic?

That’s a good question. One of the things I think I try to do is reproduce the feel of a place, which I think journalists always have to do. I guess it’s an imaginative act, but it’s also sort of an act of memory, the right detail. Where journalism helped me as a writer is you have to be so concise—that was the ideal, to be so simple and concise. I always have the pencil in the back of my mind, taking words out.

But when I was a journalist, it was in the days before photo offset, and so there were typesetters, linotype operators. I remember the physical reality of the copy, which would be on a roll of coarse paper, and the editor would be using a big, thick pencil and blocking out things he didn’t want. It would be all these pages that were glued together, rolled up, and put in a vacuum tube. Just the physical reality. But I think, on top of that, I discovered the idea that somebody could cut through a text that way. At first I thought it was appalling, but I have that impulse now. With my students, too. I’m a great eliminator.





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