While I Was Gone
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Where heart meets hearth: A conversation with Sue Miller
INTERVIEW BY RON FLETCHER "Is it by will, then, that we are who we are? Do we decide, do we make ourselves, after a certain point in life? These questions, posed by the protagonist of Sue Miller's latest novel, While I Was Gone, reveal a theme at the heart of the author's oeuvre. "With each work I feel I'm playing around with the idea of self," explains Miller in a recent interview in Boston. "To what degree is the self something we will? To what extent is it shaped by circumstance? These questions make for fascinating exploration."
Attracted to such abstractions as self and memory from the beginning of her writing days, Miller reveals the initial failure encountered when attempting to find in fiction resonant expression of such slippery terms. "The first novel I wrote, which was never published, was one in which nothing happened," recalls Miller, a bit bemused. "Now nothing happened rather elegantly in my view, yet there's no denying that nothing happened. "It was a post-suicide story that focused on the wife's attempt to understand her husband's tragic action. It was one idea stretched gossamer-thin over three hundred pages . . . I couldn't get an agent for that novel. "Soon after I turned to Grimm's Fairy Tales. I was struck by the directness of the stories, the swiftness with which the reader was dropped into the action of the tale. I thought, this is what I have to do. This is what I need -- incident. "I discovered that the more event there was, the more speculative I could be, because there was enough life to underpin the abstractions. I think of incident as the pegs on which you hang everything you plan to dwell in." In While I Was Gone, a novel replete of incident, we witness life from the perspective of Jo -- individual, vet, mother, wife -- as she tries to handle the past's ceaseless invasion of her present. "It seems we need someone to know us as we are -- with all we have done -- and forgive us," she says. "We need to tell. We need to be whole in someone's sight: Know this about me, and yet love me. Please." In While I Was Gone the matter of telling is placed at times in a religious context. Jo's husband, Daniel, a minister for whom the private, silent act of remembering is a "gift from God," often proves an enigma to his wife. Through Daniel and Jo, Miller deftly explores both the possibilities and limitations of prayer as well as conversation: the often uneasy way in which the sacred and the secular coexist. The predicament, she suggests, ensnares many today. "Daniel has God for forgiveness. He is not a person preoccupied with the issue of self. Jo is someone for whom a struggle with self fills a particular void in her life. I see her as being like a lot of people now who feel cut off from the religion of their parents and grandparents," says Miller. "This seems to be our contemporary lot: We live outside the world of religion yet with a diminishing awareness of its great importance." Descended from a family of ministers and academics, Miller sees certain strains of those professions in her work while acknowledging significant differences as well. She shares Milan Kundera's view that the "wisdom of the novel comes from its having a question for everything." "I do think there is a didactic purpose to raising questions or making people speculate about what they are doing," offers Miller. "The literature that most holds us and that we return to again and again makes us rethink our lives." She places John Cheever and Flannery O'Connor among her most admired writers, apt influences for a novelist whose works address the grand issues of sin and forgiveness through a careful, nuanced consideration of the quotidian. We, as readers, are moved to witness Jo unmask mundaneness to locate a solace of sorts at home: "The abundance of ordinary things, their convenient arrangement here, seemed for a moment a personal gift to me," she realizes. "As did my ability to notice this, to be grateful for it." Domesticity and family create the canvas onto which Miller has painted all of her characters. "American fiction has turned away from home and the family with Hemingway leading the way, saying you need to have adventure," says Miller. "And today we have Tom Wolfe saying that you need to be writing about big world issues. "But if you consider literature throughout the ages, and take a look at a writer like Tolstoy, a writer whose work endures, you realize that everything comes back to the hearth. Yes, there was war, but the main focus was domestic: Who gathered around the hearth? Why were they there? What had they experienced? What stories did they tell?" Miller declines politely an invitation to reveal the subject of her next novel, but will divulge one element of the work she is currently sketching: abandonment of the first-person narrative. "I have grown impatient with the limitations of observing from a single perspective. In my next work, I will be floating above everything and commenting on it," she says. "I won't be locked inside the perceptions of one character." With five novels to her name now, Miller admits a change of perspective on her approach to new work. "I was startled by the success of my first novel, The Good Mother. It changed my life quite literally," recalls Miller. "It was like what getting tenure used to mean: Now that you're safe do something brave. So I experimented quite a bit with my second novel, Family Pictures. I haven't felt so much that way since then. Now I feel I'm lucky if I have any idea at all." The silence of a time remembered ensues before Miller adds, "Thank God I have something to write about." Ron Fletcher lives and writes in Milton, Massachusetts. |
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Chary of grandiosity, she adds with a smile, "Not that I have any answers."