Author2Author: Maureen McHugh & Sarah Willis, pt. 2

Maureen McHugh: One of the things I'm just coming to in the last couple of years is writing about Ohio, about family and about the suburbs where I grew up and now have moved back to. Your writing always seems so grounded in specific places, and places that are personal to you. You do research, I know, particularly historical research but also the kind of research you did with social services for The Sound of Us. Could you ever set a story in New York City, or a farm in Mississippi, or someplace you were less familiar with? Do you start with the place when you write? (It worked for William Faulkner...)

Sarah Willis: Well, yes, I have based characters on people I know, but I'm doing that less and less, doing what you do now, taking a gesture, or a way of speaking, or a bad habit, or a good habit from people I know and adding these things to the characters I'm making up. But with my first book, Some Things That Stay, I even used some real people's names, like the Burns, who were friends of my family and did rent us a farm house where they left us the dog and cows for the summer. They were wonderful people, great characters, and I wanted to write about them. It never really occurred to me that the novel would get published, and when the editor at FSG bought it, it was a little too late to ask him to change the names. Actually, if he reads this, it will be a bit of a surprise to him. But they were dead, and I treated them lovingly. Still, I wouldn't do that again. I did make up the part about their son dying of leukemia. They didn't even have a son, but did have two daughters. I ran into one daughter at a book signing and she thought it was all fine, except she said, "There wasn't a bathroom on the second floor." I told her that I made that part up.

For The Rehearsal, I was writing about actors. I grew up in the theatre, at the Cleveland Play House where my father was an actor and director, so I knew many, many actors. I didn't base any character on any one actor, but I did use traits and sensitivities and idiosyncrasies of several of the actors, and created new characters from that. In A Good Distance, I used my mother's time-line for the character of Rose, then asked my mother about the things that she did when she was six, or twelve, or nineteen, etc. The character of Rose is not my mother, but I did use a few wonderful details of my mother's life, such as the fact that she was the first female president of the student council at her high school, and a star swimmer, and avid about politics.

As a matter of fact, one of the things I told myself I would do with my novel, The Sound of Us was to completely make up every character from scratch, but guess what? That's impossible, at least for me. All sorts of little things about myself slipped in there, and people I know. I won't say what, though. I guess I'm getting a little more secretive in my old age.