Gayle Forman is the author of several best-selling novels, most of them starring young adults. With her latest, Leave Me, adults take center stage. It is a novel about motherhood, family, friendship and personal identity within the context of each.
We caught up with Gayle Forman during her recent tour in support of the book to discuss its genesis and themes.
Jedd Beaudoin: Where did Leave Me start for you?
Gayle Forman: About five years ago, we were on a family vacation. My husband, our two young daughters and our friends and their kids. It was this idyllic, lovely beach vacation except there was me, up at a window with the best [signal] reception, Googling heart attacks because I’d been having chest pains all week. My mother had bypass surgery when she was 48, despite having no obvious risk factors aside from some bad genetic luck. As I started thinking, ‘What if I have to have that brutal surgery that she had?’ I started to get really fearful for whoever had to take care of the kids. I was the default parent at home with them. Then I wondered who would take care of me. The pains turned out not to be my heart. The urgency went away. But we’ve been having this national conversation about default parents. I realized that I had some strong feelings about the expectations we have of women and the ones they have of themselves. The initial questions I had came back to me in slightly different form.
You have traditionally written novels read primarily by young adults. This breaks from that tradition. There are some authors who refuse to go against their established image and others who say, ‘This is something I have to do.’ Was there a big conversation about that shift?
I like to say that Leave Me is my first book starring adults. There’s a lot of adults who read Young Adult fiction, and I’m sure there're lots of teenagers who read adult novels. I didn’t feel like the process was any different. I think that if somebody has connected to my YA books, they’ll probably connect to this as well. I wanted to write a book about marriage and motherhood, and I didn’t see a way to do that without aging up my characters.
I do have a couple of younger characters in Leave Me, and it was always a pleasure to see them again, like old friends.
You write about a woman who has had a heart attack. This is a transformative event.
I think there’s something symbolic about the heart. It’s your life force; it’s your place of feeling. That really does make people feel vulnerable. From that, you can come back to a place of strength and greater understanding. But, from people I’ve talked to, one of the greatest challenges is the incredible vulnerability after. There is that physical component, but there’s also a spiritual and metaphoric component. It’s your heart.
You also challenge another notion. There’s this history of stories where men abandon their families, and that act is seen as something that men can do, whereas for a woman to do it, it becomes a strike against her character. There’s a stigma that’s not always attached to men who do this.
It’s such a taboo with women. When I was working on the book so many women told me, in confessional tones, that they had this fantasy of running away, and they all acted almost ashamed of it as if they were the only one. That response was universal among them. When my readers have a strong reaction and say they’re angry with Maribeth, I ask them how they’d feel if it were a man. I can think of novels I’ve read where male characters leave the family for reasons that are not as extreme as the one described in Leave Me. If they come back at the end, it’s just accepted as a thing that they had to do. A mother doing that hits on a tender spot culturally.
So, when you’re writing, and you make a decision to have a character take an action that will raise eyebrows, what do you do?
There’s this side of me that wants everybody to like me, doesn’t want anyone to say mean things about me. I’m a little fearful of that. But I want to tell the truth. So, honestly, if people have a reaction to Maribeth, whether they relate with her deeply, whether they hate her, whether there’s a little bit of both, then I’m pleased. It means I’ve put my finger on something. Maybe we can start having an open conversation because I think that so much of the talk we have about mothering is pantomimed under this veil of perfection and everything is great and mothers love caring for their families all the time. I don’t think anybody actually feels that way. I think everybody fantasizes about running away, but to even say you feel like that makes it transgressive.
Why this book now?
This is the book I felt I needed to write. But I think it’s interesting that it’s come out at a time when the internalized expectations we have of women are very much coming to the fore. Right now we’re having this big debate over a presidential candidate not revealing that she had pneumonia. For a lot of the working women, I know they’re saying, ‘Seriously? A woman powering through while being sick, and minimizing that? How is that news? That’s what we do.’ That wasn’t on my mind at the time I wrote the book, but I think it’s interesting that it’s become relevant.
Gayle Forman appears at Watermark Books on Tuesday, September 27.
--
Jedd Beaudoin is the host of Strange Currency. Follow him on Twitter @JeddBeaudoin.
To contact KMUW News or to send in a news tip, reach us at news@kmuw.org.
