Julia Fierro plays many roles—in her works of fiction and life. She is the author of the novels The Gypsy Moth Summer (June 2017) and Cutting Teeth (2014) as well as the founder of The Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop, a home to more than 5,000 writers in NYC, Los Angeles and Online. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and her work has been published in The New York Times, Buzzfeed, Glamour, Poets & Writers, and other publications.
12th Street picked Julia’s brain about craft, process, sex, and politics.
12TH STREET: One of the first things a reader notices about your novels is the multiple POV structure. It’s already a feat to tell a story through multiple lenses, but your characters are so diverse.
Was it daunting to write from the perspectives of people of various ages, races, and sexualities? What was your process like in order to make all of these characters believable and three-dimensional?
JULIA FIERRO: I get asked this question a lot, as well as “How do you keep all those plates spinning in the air?” Luckily, the multi-point of view structure has always felt most natural to me. Maybe because I’ve always sought out and enjoyed books that employ this same structure—The Leftovers by Tom Perrotta, The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver, and novels by Tana French, Justin Cronin, Jesmyn Ward, Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison and others. I often walk into a bookstore and ask the booksellers if there are any “new alternating third-person novels.” I’m grateful that they put up with my hyper-specific book requests!
After many years of teaching writing workshops, I’m come to see structure—the way a story is packaged and delivered to the reader—as an extension of the author. Often, the structure a writer chooses for her or his story is a reflection of the way in which she or he interprets the world, and, perhaps, mirrors the bigger question that writer is exploring in all his or her stories. I’ve always been obsessed with the infinite variety of interpretation at the crux of the so-called “existential dilemma”—the fact that a group of people can experience the same events at the same time and in the same setting but have incredibly varied interpretations of the meaning of those events. All the characters in The Gypsy Moth Summer experience the events of the summer of 1992 differently, depending on what “story” they need to see, tell, experience and come to terms with, despite the fact that they live on a small island with only one exit where everyone knows each other’s business. My job as the reader’s guide is to make sure each character’s interpretations of events feels undeniably unique to his or her “story” as filtered through each character’s needs and fears. For sixteen-year-old Maddie, that means feeling loved in a safe relationship; middle-aged Jules is desperate to save his “secret garden” from the ravenous gypsy moth caterpillars; matriarch Veronica hopes to make amends for her mistakes before she dies; and Leslie, of course, craves revenge.
To write only through my own perspective seems cowardly, and to be honest, a bit boring. In some ways, I feel more comfortable writing from perspectives different from my own—partly because I am able to be more emotionally honest cushioned by the distance, but I also know that I, like so many readers and writers, practice my humanity on the page. The books that affected me most as a young reader, books that challenged my narrow perspective and revealed the world to me, feature experiences unlike my own as a privileged white woman. Native Son by Richard Wright, The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, and Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko are just a few of the books whose protagonists made me a better person by immersing me in stories I would never have experienced. As a writer, my most important job is to examine humanity through diverse perspectives with as much empathy as possible, and to do so with the awareness that I am using a point of view not my own. This requires extra respect, compassion, and work outside the writing. For example, I read many memoirs by African-American men when working on Jules’s chapters, “coming out” personal essays for Dom, and historical nonfiction books about military life for Veronica and The Colonel.
STREET: Actors often like to think of themselves as lawyers or advocates for their characters, no matter how unlikable they may seem—you do this very effectively for each of your characters. Those characterized by others as unlikable get a voice too. For instance, before we get a glimpse into Tiffany’s perspective in Cutting Teeth, she is dubbed: “The mom everyone likes to complain about the most.” But soon we discover her troubling past and can empathize with her.
You, as the actor of all of these characters, are in a unique position in that you are at once advocating for each one, but also judging them from another’s perspective. How do you build your characters with all of their flaws, attributes, secrets, and prejudices? Do you have a particular method of keeping track of them and their relationships to each other?
FIERRO: I love this question, and really appreciate the way you’ve inspired me to look at it from a new angle, that of an actor. This dual duty of advocating for your characters while also exposing them, with compassion, is one of the biggest reasons I write. As I mentioned above, I’ve always been compelled to study people. As a kid I snuck into the true crime section of our local library and spent hours reading books about history’s most notorious characters—serial killers, con-men, dictators—desperate to figure out what compels people to make choices that often go against his or her own preservation. It is the characters that make the poorest choices, some quite aware of the consequences, like Tiffany in Cutting Teeth, who interest me the most, and who end up becoming my favorite characters. Some readers dislike Tiffany so much that they cannot sympathize with her, and this is a failing on my part. Tiffany is, surprisingly, the character that means the most to me in Cutting Teeth exactly because she is so flawed and makes so many damaging choices. That said, she is also the character who I admire the most in the book (after Tenzin, the Buddhist nanny) because she is a survivor. At the end of the novel, I’m least worried about Tiffany, knowing she’ll go on with her life, she’ll survive—she’s already survived so much. In both of my novels there are characters who, for me, represent the American Dream, the relentless forward momentum fuelled by desire for wealth, status, power that Fitzgerald speaks to at the end of The Great Gatsby: “Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther…” Tiffany is my Gatsby.
STREET: In The Gypsy Moth Summer, there are a few critical scenes in the point of view of a watching character, not one central to the scene. Sometimes we are shown the same scene from multiple perspectives. It’s in moments like this where we are invited to ponder what matters more—what really happened or how an onlooker perceived it. Even between two people, it becomes hard to know which account is more valid.
How did you dictate which character would narrate what part of the story? Do you have strong instincts about who should tell which part or do you try out a scene from a few perspectives and see which resonates?
FIERRO: I am so grateful that you recognized this technique because, as I mentioned above, the infinite variety of interpretations characters can have is the big question I’ll be investigating forever, in both my writing and in real life. I’ve struggled with obsessive-compulsive disorder most of my life and while my OCD can be a distraction I also understand how my hyper-active observations make me a strong character writer. When I teach writing workshops I talk about the three levels of point-of-view technique—observation, interpretation and imagination. I wrote a short essay about my theory here for Writer Unboxed. After years of examining hundreds of writers’ technical choices in workshop (for the first seven years, I taught all the classes at The Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop which I founded in 2002), I believe point-of-view is the filter through which all other structural elements are established—pacing, order of information, timeframe, tone, plot. And this is true for language and character elements. If your point-of-view is inconsistent or inadequately developed, symptoms will be evident in an unclear timeframe, an underdeveloped tone, choppy pacing, etc.
I will sometimes write a scene from multiple points of view in order to determine which character deserves to be the “guide” for that scene but I often simply trust my gut. I ask myself which character’s storyline will be best served by what that particular scene reveals. For example, I knew Veronica’s first chapter had be the tense family lunch scene. Group scenes are a challenge but also so much fun to write—who doesn’t love a good party scene? The family lunch scene was a perfect vehicle to show Veronica’s polished exterior—in many ways, she is the glue that holds the dysfunctional family together—while revealing to the reader, through Veronica’s carefully chosen interpretations and imagination, the truth of her situation—a truth that, for most of the book, only the reader is privy to. Secrets can be a helpful structural tool in writing a novel. Give your character a secret and most of the choices she or he makes will focus on hiding that secret, and, voila!…instant plot.
STREET: One thing that struck me about your work is your unflinching detail of the characters’ sex lives. Desire is a great leveler in these stories of many protagonists; it’s one thing that we can track in the private lives of all of your characters regardless of their age, class or race.
You paint such a realistic picture of intimacy and how it evolves through different stages of life. Could you talk a little bit about the role of desire in your work and what it says about each character?
FIERRO: Thank you so much—it means the world to hear that the intimacy feels genuine. As a writer with a literary background and an MFA, writing about sex, especially dramatizing sex scenes, was something I felt insecure about for a long time. It wasn’t until I sold Cutting Teeth and was making edits based on my editor’s suggestions, that I realized how much I was avoiding writing about sex. I traced this fear back to my MFA years and examined how the constant emphasis on avoiding melodrama and sentimentality, had us writing stories devoid of sex scenes, and, sometimes, empty of emotion. When I founded Sackett Street in 2002, where, in the earliest days, almost all of our classes were filled with experienced literary writers, this avoidance became more obvious. In every session, we discussed why we were not, intentionally or not, writing sex scenes. While every artist has to be aware of the risk of exaggerated emotion, how can a writer know what is at the heart of their story (excuse the sentimental cliché) if he or she doesn’t step right up to the edge of that sentimentality to inform him or herself? I wrote about this phenomenon in an essay for The Millions, examining how the fear of being sentimental while writing not just about sex but about general emotion, a fear more common in literary writers, drains authenticity from a story.
A confession…I’m a bit of a prude in real life. My fiction is no different from the fantasies of everyone else—a safe place to explore sex in all its complexities. After my The Millions essay was published, I was invited to participate on writing conference panels on the topic of writing about sex. I was definitely the shyest among the authors.
STREET: 12th Street is a journal for Writing and Democracy. Both of your novels tackle political, racial, and class issues through social interactions and relationships.
What is your process of incorporating politics into your work? How did you choose the time and political backdrop for each novel?
FIERRO: I believe every novel is political. Every work of art that revolves around the story of humanity is political. In the last few years I’ve started to look at so-called domestic fiction—stories that revolve around families, relationships, the day-to-day life of communities—as, perhaps, more political than ever. It is the tense conversations around the dinner table, the whispered secrets in a public-school bathroom, and the celebrations in a community like Avalon Island (4th of July fireworks) that inform us of who we are on a micro level to our families, and who we are on a macro level as citizens in a country divided. The summer of ’92 with Bill Clinton campaigning for the presidency was an interesting time in my own childhood, and a political shift was felt across the country. Though that shift seems minor in relation to the last year since the 2017 election. Writing The Gypsy Moth Summer revealed so much more to me about a time I experienced at a naïve time of life. Like I said, we write to inform ourselves of ourselves. I began writing the novel before Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton began campaigning, and it was a remarkable experience writing about one Clinton (Bill) as another (Hillary) fought for the presidency.