During her senior year of college in Tuscaloosa,
Alabama, Helen Ellis was wracking her brain trying to come up with
a subject for the short story she had to write as her thesis. Finally
her mother suggested that she write about the unusual friends she
had growing up. Years later, when she decided to expand that story
into a novel, Ellis knew one of the protagonists would be a
homecoming queen, but she wanted to make the character
distinctive. "I'd had a girlfriend who was an overacheiver, who's
now a doctor, and she'd had those crooked fingers, which are a
normal recessive trait like attached earlobes," Ellis explains, then
shrieks when I hold my fingers up in the air. She continues, "Her
mother had taken her to the doctor because she wanted to have
them broken and reset. They were the one thing that wasn't perfect.
And my other friend was the doctor's daughter. He came home and
told her about it, and said that he would never do it, that it was just
barbaric. So she never had them fixed, but I thought, well what if her
mother wouldn't take no for an answer?"
The result is Eating the Cheshire Cat, a hilarious novel that follows the
high school and college lives of homecoming queen Sarina and Nicole, the
obsessed classmate in the house across the street...and Bitty Jack, the outcast
girl who still remembers Sarina's cruelty as an adolescent. (And that doesn't
even begin to get at the myriad connections and tensions between all the
characters in the novel.) Think of a morbidly funny, slightly (but not
predominantly) queer version of Endless Love set in the deep South, and
you've got a hint at what Ellis has in store for you.
RH: Are there any aspects of the novel that are
autobiographical?
HE: I think each of the three characters is very much a part of
me. Obviously there's Bitty Jack--as a preteen, I was very much as
she was described: awful skin, not neat, nervous just crossing the
room. I wrote a book [about her] I wanted to read, a story about an
ugly duckling that stayed an ugly duckling, but it's still a happy
ending. Not every ugly duckling becomes a beautiful swan, but they
can be successful and happy.
Sarina wants control over her life and everyone in it, just as I want
control as a writer. If the towels are peach, it's because I say they're
peach. If the situation doesn't work out well, I'll just delete it and
start over again. I sometimes like to take the same approach to my
real life, but as you get older, you realize you have no control over
anyone else, and barely any over your own. And that's what Sarina
discovers as she keeps getting shut down. And Nicole is who I know I
would become if I didn't bathe for two weeks and let every instinct
that I have come out, if I didn't put a leash on myself. It was very
hard for me to finally let her go nuts, because I understood her so
well. So they're all me. Not the me I'd let out at parties, but all me.
RH: If Bitty Jack's story is a wish fulfillment of sorts for
you, it's a very dark one, wouldn't you say?
HE: Yeah! I think people are surprised by the ending, but I
think it's a happy ending. There's no white knight that comes in and
saves the day. She saves her own day. I was just so sick of reading
stories and seeing films where everything was okay as long as the
girl got back together with her boyfriend. A lot of readers have
asked why she doesn't go back with Stuart. He's sorry for what he
did, they argue, he really is regretful. But she's going to be okay.
She's 21 years old, and there will be other boyfriends, other
adventures.
RH: There are definitely points where it looks like you
had fun pulling all the stops out.
HE: I'm a big reader, a huge reader, and I like a book to hook
me. Now there are different ways to hook, but I want a book to grab
me and tell me its story. You know how it is in the South--the whole
family are storytellers, so you have to come up with something to top
everyone else's story, and sometimes you just have to exaggerate.
RH: This is a very Southern Gothic story, wildly funny
but also horrific in spots.
HE: I was down in Jackson, Mississippi, where my mother has
a lot of relatives, and they all came out of the woodwork for the
reading. They asked me if my mother had told me about her friend
in elementary school, and I said no, and they said, "Oh, we thought
that's where you got the part about the beheading in the car wreck."
So they told me about this boy my mom knew who was sitting in the
back seat of his parents' car, driving home on a foggy night, and a log
truck was stalled on the highway. They drove right into it, both their
heads came off and rolled into the back seat, and he woke up with
his parent's head. And then they told me story after story just like it.
RH: How about your portrayal of the sorority culture at
Southern colleges?
HE: That's on the money. That's very true. What's been
surprising is how many sorority girls like the book. I thought there'd
be a huge backlash, but I guess the Tri-Deltas think that I feel their
pain.
RH: Who are some of your favorite authors?
HE: I just loved Amy and Isabelle by Elizabeth Strout.
It's her first novel, and it's just outstanding. I read it and thought,
"That's the kind of book I want to write." I was in awe. Stephen
Dobyns' The Church of Dead Girls just blew me away. It's the
scariest book I ever read, so well-written, so compelling. It made me
sit up in my bed, I was so scared. And I've read all of Stephen King.
His new book, On Writing, is the best book I've ever read about
writing. It was so close to my mentality, the way I work. It's a
mentality that's pushed down in college and graduate school,
thinking about writing as a business, or better yet as a job. Ninety
percent of getting a book written is sitting your butt down at the
keyboard. It's not about waiting for inspiration, because it's not
coming.
RH: You're lucky, in that most writers have to try to find
time to write around a full workload, but you...
HE: Luck had nothing to do with it. When I was in graduate
school, I was temping the whole time, a forty-hour week in addition
to my classes. When I got to Chanel, I knew I could do the work, so
when I was offered the job, I asked for what I wanted, which was to
work four days a week, nine hours a day. So it's a full-time job, but I
have those three days to work.
It was the first time I didn't hide my writing. All the jobs I'd had
before, I never told anybody. I had one long-term job at a financial
magazine, and when I left to go to graduate school, that was the first
that anybody knew that I had any desire to write. The Chanel job
was the first time in my life that I made everything revolve around
the writing. And on those other three days, I work from 7:30 in the
morning to noon. So I don't stay out late at night, or if I do, I just
show up to write anyway. If you want to get a book done, you have
to carve out your time and be dedicated to it.
You have to want it more than anything, and that's what I've been
dealing with over the last year, since the hardback came out. I got
what I'd always wanted, I'd been running this race for years and
years, and when I crossed the finish line, I thought, "Now what?" So
this last year I've been doing more socially, knowing that it's okay to
take a week off. I know I can write one, so I know I can write a
second one.
RH: What was the reaction around the office when they
finally found out what you'd been doing on that extra day
off?
HE: For two years, every Monday one of my two bosses would
ask how the writing went and I'd say, "Fine." Everybody was a bit
surprised when it came out; I don't think they knew I was really
doing it. Every secretary has something else they want to do, so they
were surprised when I actually did it. And they're probably a bit
surprised that I'm still there (laughs), but I say if it ain't
broke, don't fix it.
For the longest time, I was sort of a ghost. I work at the highest level,
and very few people get to that office. So if I'm wandering around in
the halls, very few people actually know who I am. My boss jokes
that when I have two books out, I can drop down to three days a
week, three books two days a week, so when I have five books
published I can quit. And I'm sticking to that. (laughs)
RH: Do you really see yourself writing fulltime
somewhere down the line?
HE: That's the ideal goal, but I have no need for it now, and I
still work well on my current schedule. And I work very well under
pressure. Yesterday at the office, I was thinking to myself,
"Tomorrow I get to write," and on Sunday, I'll be thinking, "I have to
finish this because I have to go back to work tomorrow."
It'd be great to get up every morning to write, have lunch, and then
watch Oprah, but this is New York City, and even when you get a six-
figure advance, it's hard to make that last. Your agent gets some, half
of it goes to taxes... It's not like winning the lottery. Even when Oprah
picks your book, you don't get all that money upfront.
Keeping the job lets me enjoy the fruits of my labor. I can take two
weeks off to go to a writer's colony, or a month off for a book tour
like I did last year, and to have a steady income that my writing
supplements. I never believed in being a starving artist.
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