RH: What was the first image that came to you
and made you decide that you had a novel to
write?
JM: I don't know that there was an image. My
daughter, who's 21, has had diabetes since she was four and
a half, and my father had it, so that's always been an issue
of mine. As a parent of a child, I know a lot about the
disease, and try to keep up with the efforts to find a cure.
Then I'm a Beckett person, and those two themes started to
come together...
...The first draft of the novel was from a male point of
view at the University of Illinois at Chicago, about a man
with diabetes who couldn't complete his disseration on
Beckett. There was no road element, no bear, no female
voice. I was remarried in 1992 and went to Alaska, where I
saw grizzly bears -- huge blond grizzly bears -- in the
wild.
And about ten years ago, I used to run and play tennis and
basketball, activities where there's a lot of impact on my
knees. Things happened to my knees that kept me from doing
those sports the way I wanted to, so I started riding a bike
and hiking. I took some long-distance bike trips.
The combination of these themes started to appeal to me. I
wanted to add the road element, and the grizzly attack, and
the way these themes came to me, there were female
perspectives involved. For example, a colleague of mine had
lost her fiancé in 1981, and she still hasn't fully
recovered from that fifteen years later. My daughter has
diabetes, and my sister has been in a graduate program for
about seventeen years unable to finish her dissertation.
Under those circumstances, it seemed inevitable that the
protagonist of my novel would be female, and after that I
considered it as a literary challenge, inspired by other men
who had written from a female perspective, particularly
Joyce's Molly Bloom and Norman Rush's novel
Mating.
RH: How does your daughter feel about the
book?
JM: She read the novel when it was in manuscript, and
she said she liked it a lot. She cried a lot as she read it,
and felt that Penny's story ended positively,
optimistically. It was emotionally wrenching to write the
book, but not as wrenching as raising a daughter with
diabetes, and the book was able to help us share our
experiences with her diabetes differently than we have
before.
RH: As I read the book, the combination of
diabetes and Beckett seemed very natural and
uncontrived.
JM: I was very happy with the way the issues of
Beckett, diabetes and bicycling dovetail. I teach Beckett
fairly regularly, and have tremendous enthusiasm for his
work, so there was originally too much Beckett in the
book. The first draft was 950 pages, with lots of stuff on
Beckett and the pathology of the disease, but not enough
action.
RH: When did you decide to introduce Ndele
Rimes?
JM: I needed action. Once you get out on the road,
you have to have an adventure. In addition, I wanted to have
a counterpoint in the story to Penny, a frail, physically
impeded woman, and who could counterpoint that better than
the ideal physical specimen of our age, an NBA player. Then,
if I tear a ligament in his knee, he becomes vulnerable too.
So the physical specimen and the regular person with a
disease can be united in their vulnerability...A lot of good
things are generated from his presence, such as the
suspense. I thought it was important not to be certain if he
was really who he claims to be, bringing up all the fears
white middle class people have even though they don't want
to be racist.
RH: One of the interesting contrasts in the
novel is the one between the different sexual
tensions that Penny has with Ndele and with Leona
Marvin, her faculty advisor.
JM: Originally, I had written the scene between Lee
and Penny in Minot so that Lee seduced Penny, who is very
conflicted about whether she wants that to happen or not. I
was persuaded, however, that it was a bit over the top, so I
rewrote the scene so that the seduction is much more
tentative and half-hearted, although Penny does get some of
what she wants from Leona anyway.
RH: That tentativeness runs throughout the
story, right up to the ambiguous ending.
JM: There are several possibilities to Penny's final
destination, but it's my hope that no matter where the
reader thinks Penny goes, they see it as a triumphant,
positive courageous act on her part. I can't control how
people will respond to it, but I hope that they won't see
her as slinking away from her decisions at the novel's end.
It's a long slow grind across the country, up the hill, but
the accelerated pace of the last section of the book is one
of the things I'm most pleased with.
