The title of Saturn's Return to New York comes from a
prominent feature in the astrological chart that the novel's protagonist, Mary
Forrest, gets for her twenty-ninth birthday. It seems that this is the year that
Saturn returns to its original position in her birth chart, bringing with it a
slew of personal upheavals. Soon Mary finds herself trying to cope with her
mother's increasingly frequent memory lapses, the return of a vanished
lover, and--for comic relief--the ultimate in insane, backstabbing coworkers.
Those scenes, set in the offices of an online bookseller, seemed to mirror my
own experiences working for online booksellers so accurately that I was sure
Sara Gran must have been working for the "noble" competition. But Gran soon
set me straight. " I had been working in bookstores for a long time," she said
over lunch at the Boerum Hill Food Company, "and when I started the novel, I
was managing a small bookstore, so I guess I thought of that as maybe the next
step up in a bookselling career. And it was something I'd always thought was
interesting, something I'd like to do. But I don't even know anyone who works
for a company like that."
RH: What made you want to sit down and write this novel?
SG: There was no one thing in particular, no one driving focus. I was writing
another book, and I got halfway into it, and I realized that two of the characters in it, a
mother and daughter who talked about living in New York, were so much more interesting
than everything else I was doing in the story. So I just started a new book with them. That
other book was really a mishmash. I had all these ideas that I threw into that story because
it's what I was working on at the time, but I realized later on that they were really ideas for
several different stories that I just squished together.
RH: New York is still a very important component of the relationship
between Mary and her mother.
SG: It seems more commonplace now to comment on how much the city has
changed over the last couple years, but when I started writing this novel, it was at the
moment that those changes were just beginning to take place--all around me, it felt like.
Now we're all used to seeing a Duane Reade on every corner, and Domino's everywhere,
thousands of people moving here... Even three years ago, when I started writing, those
changes didn't seem commonplace at all.
RH: Was that novel you abandoned halfway through your first try?
SG: No, I actually wrote an entire novel previous to that, which was never
published, for which I'm now very glad. I spent about six months sending that novel out to
agents and publishers and getting mixed rejection letters, some of which were nice at least.
There were a lot of suggestions on revisions, and I really didn't want to revise it, so I
decided to start something else instead. So I started that...which, come to think of it, I'd
actually started halfway through that first book.
Writing was always something I enjoyed, and I started thinking seriously about it as a
career at the end of college, and the real decision came about a year after I graduated, when
I was living in the city again. You know how it is, you try different jobs until you figure
out what it is you want to do. Working in an office turned out to be not for me, not at all. I
would just sit there at my desk and cry sometimes, and that was when I realized that I was
spending all my free time writing because that was what I really wanted as a career.
RH: What's your personal take on astrology?
SG: I love astrology, but it's not like I have a literal belief in it. And when I say
astrology, I'm not talking about the stuff in the daily paper, but about getting your chart
constructed, having it read. When you get to that level, it's very useful, very helpful, and
there's a lot of truth in it. You would never want to be one of those people who can't do
something because their moon is in Venus that day, but I still think there's a lot of truth in
it.
I have a friend who knows his way around constructing birth charts, and he helped me out
with Mary's chart, figuring out the houses and the signs.There's a few inaccuracies, to be
honest--a few manipulations I had to make, moving a planet from one house to another
because that was where I needed it to be for the story. But it was mostly a real, accurate
chart.
RH: I've always thought astrology--and tarot cards, too--can
potentially be very interesting tools for writers. You don't necessarily have
to have a literal belief in their validity, but they can provide very
interesting narrative structures.
SG: They give you useful metaphors for organizing the way you look at a story.
It's just another way of looking at the world around you. You could say you got a certain
tarot card in your reading, or you have a Saturn return--they're just metaphors to help you
understand a certain time in your life. They're a basis, a starting point. Like with tarot--you
can go in any number of directions with a given card, except usually the Tower. I did a
reading for myself recently and got the Tower in my immediate future, and I was a little
freaked out about that...
RH: Although for New Yorkers, it might be the perfect image to
represent our immediate pasts... I've talked to a couple writers about the
difficulties of writing about life in New York after September 11th. What
are your thoughts?
SG: It's really hard to conceptualize right now. You either have to spend a lot of
time figuring out how to deal with the changes, or you have to set it in the past. It's similar
to the way we have to make sense of this in our personal lives--you can't spend every
moment thinking about it, but sometimes you just feel as if you have to. It is the
most momentous thing that's happened in my life, in the lives of just about anyone you or I
know in New York. But you have to get on with your life somehow... It'll be interesting to
see how authors deal with that, with how this one day had such a huge impact on all our
lives. I don't know what I'm going to do when I get to the point in my current story that I
have to deal with that, and I'm worried about it.
RH: How was your 29th year?
SG: Certainly not as big as it was for Mary. But there is that thing about turning
30...and I'd read somewhere recently that maybe the reason that the dread of turning 30 so
universal has to do with Saturn's return. I just turned 30 a few weeks ago, but I didn't
have any huge outward changes. No deaths in the family, no bankruptcy. So now that I'm
past that, it doesn't seem like a big deal to be 30, but for the last few months... I
was glad to have the book come about before my thirtieth birthday, so at least I had that one
huge plus in my favor for my first 29 years.
I just turned in another book to my agent, waiting to hear back from her about the revisions
I've made at her suggestions. It's about somebody who's possessed by a demon.
RH: Have all of your stories had these fantastic elements?
SG: Not until Saturn's Return, really. But I've always been into that
stuff. I've read tarot cards for years, and I grew up reading about Bigfoot and ESP... The
astrology was one of the last things I added to this novel, actually.
Sometimes it doesn't seem like that sort of material is "up to par," that it's not good enough
to put into a serious or literary fiction. But it's what I like, it's what I'm interested in. Still,
the novel I've just started doesn't have anything like that.
RH: Who are some of your favorite writers?
SG: I just read Anagrams, by Lorrie Moore. It was so good that
when I got to the end I went right back and read it again. I can't recommend
that book highly enough. Right now I'm rereading Nicholson Baker's Room
Temperature for about the third or fourth time. He's one of my favorite
writers.
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