 I want to read you just a short section from Cave Dweller, and I want to read shortly in the book after Delia falls apart. I want to chose this part because I've been traveling since the beginning of February. Pretty much steadily. I've been home three weeks total in however many months it's been. I've lost track. And I am dressed to get on a plane when this is all over because I have to go to New York and do some television in the morning. So I am falling apart. I am ready to just go to bed, turn my face to the wall and cry for weeks and weeks, and then get up lightened in spirit. So I want to read this section in the book where Delia does that. I have to change glasses. If anybody knows any sexy way to attach your glasses to your body, let me know. All my rings that I could attach them to are far too down low to be of use. This is San Francisco, we can say anything. All through Delia's crying season. MT used her hard-won capital. All the sympathy, understanding, all that had come her way for how her husband had cheated on her, how she had stood up for him. All that she directed at Delia, her oldest, dearest friend. Most of Cairo felt that Delia's condition when she came home, the empty grief that burned on her face, the months she spent working in Sally's cleaning crew. All that was justifiable penance for a woman who had abandoned her own girls. Opinion had not shifted enough in Cairo to forgive or understand the sin, nor enough to consider that a woman in danger might have lost those girls running from a man who would have surely strangled her if he'd caught her. No, Cairo still believed Delia a sinner and crying season. That was a penance they understood. They liked to see it. Delia with her mouth soft and her eyes sore at the corners. MT's smartest move was to drag the unresisting Delia to Cairo Baptist Tabernacle week after week. Every Sunday, Delia sat on that hardwood pew, sallow, pale, eyes vacant, hands raw and swollen from scrubbing floors and swooshing toilets. God, surely keeps track, don't He? Reverend Miles said to MT the first Sunday. MT linked her arm with Delia's, gave one careful acknowledging nod. She knew what she was doing. On the 10th Sunday, the 10th, Mrs. Perlman put one hand on Delia's shoulder as she pushed herself painfully up the aisle. That was an accolade. No matter arthritis, hip replacement surgery or pain past comprehending, the truth was Marsha Perlman would never have touched the sinner without proof of repentance. It was a promise of forgiveness, if not actual forgiveness as yet. In the way of things, women screwed up like men did, but women's sins were paid for by children and women friends. The debt had a ready and simple dimension. A woman who had run off and fallen into the good life, that woman could never be forgiven, but the woman who came back, ruined, wounded, painfully sober, stubbornly enduring, that woman, that woman who suffered publicly and hard, that woman had a chance. That woman could be brought back into the circle. Suffer a little more girl, Marsha Perlman's hand said. We understand this. It was fortunate that Delia was beyond understanding. Her pride would never have survived that touch. The Delia who'd sung with mud dog would never have stood for it. The Delia who had fought and fled Clint Windsor, she would never have endured it. Only the Delia of crying season could sit, head down, and never notice when the hand of God reached order. Not forgiven, but understood, not forgiven, but enjoyed. And all the pleasure they took in seeing her like that. No woman in the congregation would speak of it, but all of them knew. Look at her now, Lord. Look at her now. Marsha Perlman's hand on Delia's shoulder said more than all M.T.'s whispered justification had spoken. Marsha Perlman's hand said, Suffer a little more, woman. Suffer a little more. We'll invite you home again. Technologically apt. I'll just knock this thing over. Hey. Hey. So let's talk a little bit about this new book, Caved Weller. All right. The first novel was semi-autobiographical bastard out of Carolina. Less so than people believe. Less so than people believe. Well, then let's talk about that. Let's talk about how less so than people believe. Novelists are liars. You know this. You've been talking to novelists a long time, right? I actually think that novelists are the last people to be asked and probably should not be trusted. It is a simple fact. You make these stories up. You take some things from your own life. I steal from friends and lovers. Hell, I steal from people on television. And then you move away in the course of writing it. And you're not really to be trusted. I've always said that bastard out of Carolina, the first chapter is autobiographical. It is a retelling of everything that I was ever told about how I was conceived and born. But I'm very blunt. My family is full of very fine storytellers, none of whom can be trusted. And if I don't have documentary evidence, I never believe a thing they tell me. I think that you should take that assault for what I say. The problem is that I'm also a political activist and I'm very matter-of-fact about being an incest survivor. Very matter-of-fact about growing up in a family in which there was tremendous physical violence. And that's the subject of Bastard Out of Carolina. So people think I'm bone. That's why they wanted me to write Bone Goes to College. Bone gets a girlfriend, moves to California, lives right, you know. It's a novel. Yeah, it's a novel. It's a fiction. It's a lie. So the story from Cave Dweller, does that have a basis in fact or is that going in a different direction? It has two basis in fact. One, when I was in my 20s, I went caving. And I was really bad at it and I absolutely loved it. And it was very sexual and sensual for me, particularly afterward. After you come out alive and look what I did, that's very true. And a lot of all of the sections on caving are written from my experience. I'm the mother of a son, so I know about mothering to a certain minor extent. And I'm a daughter and it's a daughter's novel. And for five years I lived in a small town in Sonoma County and I got to watch really closely how small town people behave. All that is absolutely true in the rest of its lies. Now, were you doing anything consciously? Did you set out to accomplish something when you started writing Quick Andrew? I set out to write a book as different from Bastard as I could make it while being in the same territory. It had to be a third person, had to be multi-generational, had to be long, had to be an epic, had to prove that I wasn't a dancing dog. And what did you learn while you were writing this book? That all your good intentions go to hell. You know, you start out with this notion and you have a plan, you have an outline. I have a rough outline, I don't outline, but I have an idea where I'm going. And it always goes differently. It always goes completely in a different direction, takes you somewhere you hadn't intended, winds up emotionally where you wanted to be but not in the way you thought you'd get there. But you knew where you wanted to go emotionally? I knew where I wanted to go. I wanted to write about forgiveness. I wanted to write about the day-to-day of forgiveness and how good families are made out of bad ones. And I had some very strong notions about that. So I knew it had to be a decade long and that the beginning would be deal you going back to K-Rogue to try to get her girls and that the book would end when the girls left her. Basically when they were grown enough to be strong on their own. And when she had accomplished what she set out to do. But when I started out, my notion was that true redemption required enormous suffering and one of those kids was going to die. I intended to kill one of them. I tried. It's just that it wouldn't work. It really wouldn't work. There are lots of things I'd love to write but I can't make them happen and if they don't happen then I don't, you won't ever see it. I won't publish it. So the characters just kind of take off on their own. It took off and they do their own thing. I didn't know deal you was going to shoot Nolan. I knew she was capable of it. I didn't know that Amanda was going to take to whiskey. It didn't occur to me. No, all that stuff happens in the course. I knew their natures and I knew who they would be and I know that people are unpredictable, difficult and especially southern girls. Was there any notion? I mean I kind of thought about that in Bastard out of Carolina the mother takes off and deserts her girls. Was there any consciousness of a mother coming back to pick up her girls? This is why I think you shouldn't trust writers because I didn't notice that till I was done. Now everybody else noticed it. The first thing they said, oh yes, the mother goes back. Just like the mother who left. Oh, I thought, oh my God, you're right. Felt like a damn fool. Yeah, no I didn't intend that. Now you've spoken really and written very eloquently about why you write. Yeah. Would you speak eloquently to us about why you write? Besides liking to tell lies. I'm liable to say something entirely different anytime. I write because I don't know anything else to do. I write because I would write. I would tell stories if I couldn't write. And I write essentially because I'm not happy with the way the world is and I think that writing, telling a really, telling a mean story beautifully has the possibility of changing how people think. And that's what I want to do. I don't want people to think about poor white trash, the way they were thinking about him when I was a girl. I don't want people to think about little baby dykes in Georgia, the way they were thinking about him when I was a baby dyke in South Carolina. I don't want people thinking about rape children, the way they thought about him when I was a raped child. You write that story. You invite the reader into that mind. You make them feel what it's like to be that person. They don't come out the same. We do enough of this. We might make the world a little different. A lot different. I'd be happy. So how did you first start writing? Was there someone who introduced you to books in the first place? My mother introduced me to books. My mother introduced me to Readers Digest Condensed Editions. And Mickey Spelane. My mother loved mysteries. Which is not actually true. I figured it out since that she didn't really love mysteries. She loved adventure novels featuring tall, lean, dark men with large guns. My mother had a fetish. So she read Ross McDonald and Mickey Spelane. Or is it the Executioner series? Do you know what I'm talking about? Those books? They're all very predictable. But she read them in great quantity. And then she would give them to me. I would read them and think, And then I'd trade them in for other books. I fell in love with Modesty Blaze, who was dark, lean, a thief, and carried a big gun. So I have my mama's girl. Just a slight variation. And what about books that actually got you excited about? When you start out as a kid reading, you don't realize that I didn't believe there would be any books about people like me. And I remember when I started finding books about poor Southerners, about queers. I remember the shock and the joy. And I found terrible books, you know. Because I was born in 49. So I found all those terrible, covered books of lesbians who killed themselves. But then I found James Baldwin and I found Flannery O'Connor and I found Tennessee Williams. Generally in those cheap paperback editions that I would get in trade for the books my mama gave me. I remember when I got three by Flannery O'Connor with the cover torn off. And all of a sudden it was like fiction wasn't just a world where you went to hide out. Fiction might actually talk about me. And every night again might say something that I recognize as truthful about people like me. Instead of just making me hate myself or be convinced again that the world hated us. I remember when I read Taylor Caldwell too. Do you ever read Tobacco Road? Don't. It's an ugly portrait. It's an ugly portrait. But you don't write a sympathetic portrait. I mean you don't write a... You write a sympathetic portrait, but you don't write, you know, the poor boy makes good da-da-da-da-da-da. That is not your experience. That is not your experience. No. My experience, poor boy marries poor girl, beats the... behaves badly. Sometimes, sometimes figures out what's going on and behaves a little better. No. I believe in stories in which you read The Bluest Eye. I remember when I read The Bluest Eye and I read Pecola. And all of a sudden, it was extraordinary. This was a story about a small black child who was held in contempt, who hates herself, who was raped by her father. And all of a sudden I was reading about me and I didn't hate her. Instead, I was angry at the world for not saving her and I suddenly had... I had the grace of Toni Morrison's language and I had this vision of the two little girls who were actually telling you the story, who were friends of Pecola's. And the world looked larger and brighter and whiter and suddenly it seemed to me that things might... might could be changed. So I write terrible stories about people who change. Bachelorette of Carolina is a novel about a young girl who hates herself and who, by the end of the novel, begins to become angry and has, therefore, the possibility of changing and surviving. It's very simple. Cave Dweller is very simple. It's about a woman who is doing herself to death and one day stands up and says, I might not be able to change this, but by God I'm going to try. I'm writing very simple narratives. So the writing, how old were you when you actually started writing? First time I tried to seduce a girl, I was nine. I wrote stories to get people to fall in love with me. Other little girls, teachers, ministers, grown women, I didn't care. I understood that telling stories, especially written stories, especially poems, was a way to get people to look at you and see somebody somebody different. Instead of looking at you and seeing just another little white trash piece coming down the road, all of a sudden you become real. And not only that, you become romantic, especially if you write a story in which you and the little girl you've addressed the story to run off. So that's how I started. And then I wrote poems for my mama, really heartbreaking, wretched poems. And were there teachers that encouraged you along the way? Yes. Yeah, but I went to school in Greenville, South Carolina, the worst school system in the country, next to Mississippi. The motto of the school system in South Carolina was thank God for Mississippi, because clearly they were not going to spend any money or make any changes. So thank God there's somebody worse. We can feel better than. It was a terrible school system. I had one decent teacher in the entire time we lived in South Carolina, and my education came from paperback novels. I barely learned to read at school. I hold some people responsible. Yeah. Let's talk about coming out. You said nine years old, you already were. I knew, yeah. Didn't you? Took me a while. Well, acting on it, that's something completely different. I never intended to have sex. Get real. Sex was filthy and dangerous. You had to admit that you were in love. No, no, no. I just wanted to seduce them, have them fall in love with me and pine for me. I was a Southern girl. I was very clear about how this worked, and I was an ambitious Southern working class girl whose mama started telling her when she was very young, me, I'm putting me in the distance. My mother told me that I was going to college and started saving money. Now, when it actually came to it, we had no money, and all those saving accounts that she put together never had a dime in them. But she told me. So I thought of myself as this person who was going to be different and had to really be serious, and I knew I was a lesbian. And everything that I saw about lesbians told me, lesbians become alcoholics, get killed, go crazy, or move to New York City and live very quietly in the village. I was aiming for the ladder. I was going to get to college, move quietly to New York City, and find Bebo Brinker. But it's very hard to, it's hard to get to that place when you're from where I started as a kid. No, I never intended to have sex. I intended to be in love. Then hormones happened, and some of that changed, not for a long time. So were you out of South Carolina, out of your mama's home when you did first have sex? I didn't really have what I think of as real sex until I went to college. There was something about not being in my stepfather's house anymore. One thing I got to sleep through the night, didn't have to put nothing against the door, and there were all these girls. Jesus. There was just an entire world of women that were interesting, that read books, like the one I fell in love with, my resident advisor, who was a Russian student. She had short clipped hair. She walked around very military. She spoke in Russian. I wanted to have sex with her like nobody's business. And she was very clear that she was straight, and I was completely clear that that could be changed. And did you change that? No, but I got the next one. The next resident advisor. She spoke Chinese. I think when you come out of a very poor background and you've developed this whole fantasy of life, I think this is not nice or clean or pretty, but I collected girlfriends with talent. I wanted girlfriends who either spoke Chinese or Russian or were musicians or painted or rode horses. I wanted girls so different from me, they were just like, you know, Audrey Hepburn in the movies. Romantic and astonishing. Unfortunately, once you sleep with them, they're not as astonishing as they were. And everything changed. And did you have to hide who you really were? Oh, yes. I went to college in 1969, 1970. And my freshman year in college in the middle of the night, some people showed up and hauled out the young woman in the room next to me. Her family showed up with a psychologist. They put her in a straight jacket and took her out of the dorm. Oh, my God. And it was patently obvious that the reason they took her out was because she was a lesbian and because she was being very public about it. Her first act, because I remember seeing her do this, they delivered her to freshman dorm and she took all of the dresses that her mother had packed up and hung in her closet and stuffed them in the garbage in the bathroom and wore nothing but blue jeans and t-shirts, white t-shirts. And I immediately understood, dykes wear white t-shirts. And then very shortly I discovered dykes get taken away in the middle of the night and put in a mental institution, come back a year later after a great many shock therapy treatments. I was very careful. I kept a boyfriend. I had to find a gay man who was willing. But, you know, it wasn't that hard. It was the early 70s. There were lots of gay men who were like, let's be boyfriend and girlfriend and let's date each other's boyfriends and girlfriends. It was a different world. I think it was the normal world for lots of people that I met in that decade. And it was a world that was just on the cusp of completely changing. Because the year that I graduated from college, that year there were women's liberation meetings on campus at Florida Presbyterian College where I was attending on scholarship. And I remember going to one of those meetings, standing in the hall outside and thinking, this is dangerous. This is very dangerous to me personally and not going in because I was a dyke. And there was still women's liberation dykes. And I was still scared. A year later, I went to women's liberation meetings after I was out of college and nobody could put me in a mental institution. Everything changed. What happened? What did you get out of that beginning, being in the beginnings of feminism and women's liberation? A whole new population of girlfriends. Oh, come on. Early women's... Why do you think we went to all those meetings? It was... I went to women's liberation meetings, go to consciousness raising meetings and could be a lesbian. Because you couldn't say dyke. It was 1972, 73. It was still tricky to say dyke. But you could go and you could be a lesbian in public. You could wear commie dyke pins. How many people here have a commie dyke pin? I have my commie dyke pin. It's 30 years old now. I'm very happy with it. The whole world opened up. All of a sudden, I was living in a women's collective. This women's collective. We kept one straight girl just to... Just because. We didn't want to be prejudiced. But all of a sudden, from living, literally in terror, that I could be put in a mental institution of therapy for my own good. I was... I moved to Tallahassee, Florida, joined the women's collective, moved into a 12-bedroom household with 12 other women, all of whom were having sex with each other. And marching. We were demonstrating for civil rights. We were running the child care center. Me, a dyke, running the child care center. Doing rape crisis. Doing peer counseling. It was like everybody else being political. It was still the anti-war days, but we were going to change the world at the most basic level. I was very happy. And do you think we succeeded? No. However, we've done a lot. Um, my girlfriend is 10 years younger than me. When I first met her, one of our major topics of conversation, aside from the fact that I'm like, 10 years younger than me, um, was the fact that she came out into a world in which she could be a lesbian. She never was afraid that she was going to be put in a mental institution. That completely was gone. You know, she... She lived in San Francisco. She thought this was like normal world. I lived in the south. But that decade, everything had altered. Nothing is exactly as I would like it. Um, you say feminism now, and people are like, oh, that's so tired. Feminism, as it has been in my life, is a force of revolution. It completely remade things. Listen, I got almost fired. I got almost fired for wearing pantsuit to the Social Security Administration. That basic thing. Can you imagine that they would really, you know, fire you and put you on the street because you showed up at work in trousers? No. And all of it had this subtext of queerness. Everything we did that was feminist was in some essential way queer because to be a woman that was in rebellion against all the rules, wasn't going to marry no boys, wasn't going to make babies for everybody else, wasn't going to have your typical day job and be miserable and drink yourself at night. No. All of a sudden the world changed. I actually threatened to file legal action against the director of the Social Security Administration who told me that they could fire me for wearing pantsuit, and I told him he couldn't. I wouldn't have known I could say that if I hadn't been going to the women's center all the time. And he would have gotten away with it, by the way. 1975. He could have fired me and gotten away with it. The whole world is different. You can wear multiple piercings in your eyebrows and they can't fire you now. Yes, the world is different. Yes, it's still dangerous to be a lesbian. Yes, it's still dangerous to be a feminist. No, there is not justice. But there's a hell of a lot more possibility for justice. Yeah. So I had read somewhere in Skin that while you were working for the Social Security Administration you began writing letters that turned you into the writer that you are today. Yeah. Writing letters to girlfriends that I never mailed. Yeah. On some basic level, writing is about explaining the world to yourself. And the letter form was a way that I started and sometimes just trying to explain my family to myself and to my girlfriends. Because I tended to date. You remember that thing about women with talent? They tend to be middle class. Trying to explain working class families to middle and upper class girls is a lot of how I started writing fiction. Hmm. Trying to make them, trying to make my people, my family, my neighbors real, but not frightening and not caricatures. That's very complicated. Yeah. That's how it started. That and the desire to write music. I wanted to ask you about music because a bone in Bastard out of Carolina is in love with gospel music. Do you use music in your writing? Oh, sure. Yeah. But I'm a child of rock and roll. I'm much closer to deal you than bone. I deliberately gave bone on my mother's music. Some of it I did live when I started working on the novel. And because she loved great, she had some real, she had my mother had fine taste in gospel. She loved the Carter family and all of those old, amazing songs. And she had a very small collection, but she had Ruth Brown. Do you know Ruth Brown? Who was here? Yeah. Yeah, but Ruth Brown's early songs Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean and she had that boiler house way of singing Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean. That's tough. That's like, that's gospel on some basic level, that kind of gospel. So the entire book, I built around my mother's music. At the very end of the book, you get one reference to Elvis Presley and then it shifts into Patsy Cline. It was also my mother's music. It's Patsy Cline and I forget the other singer that I use at the very end of the book. But that's the music that I played in the book. Because I think a lot of timing and meter is unconscious when it's done, when it's at its best. So I play the music to get the timing and meter in my head but I play the same stuff over and over and over again. That tends to make you phase out, you don't hear the words after a while, you just hear the music. I make tape loops and play them when I'm working and generally different characters have different tape loops. It's pretty deliberate. Drives everybody else crazy. How many times can you listen to Walking After Midnight? I can listen to it for years but my girlfriend lost her patience. Now you got in trouble with your community itself when your sexuality turned out not to be plain vanilla? Yes. There's a lot of different communities within the women's movement within the lesbian community within the feminist community. I always believed and I still believe that feminism was about insisting on an essential integrity of sexual desire for women and within that I thought all sexual desire. So when it and honey, look at me I'm like, I'm Southern White Trash Femme. There is only one sexual object for me. It's kind of a female James Dean. But imagine James Dean drunk and really pissed off. That's my object of choice or it's not even a choice, it's just a really dangerous dark-eyed woman comes in the room and every little hair on my body goes really sweet good natured girls come in, smile at me, be nice to me. Nothing. No, no, no, no. So aside from whether S&M, any kind of sexual experimentation, I like rough trade. At least the semblance of rough trade because you know, when you get right down to it, most of the time it's more about the semblance than the reality. And I was always trying to construct a life without a kind of a fearless life, a life without hidden sources of danger which meant to me I had to be very matter of fact about the nature of my desire, the way I had to be matter of fact about being an incest survivor because any time that I started trying to hide or pretend or be careful I started wanting to die and being very frightened and ashamed of myself. Shame for me is very dangerous. So my version of feminism was about an adamant matter of factness about sexuality. Well honey, in any period in history this is going to get complicated but in the 70s and early 80s it got intensely complicated because a sector of the women's movement became stringently anti pornography and subsumed a lot of lesbian sexual desire under that rubric so that butch femme became unspeakable. Leather sex, oh honey. You might as well just give it up and stop doing that at all. There was also this concept of after the revolution which I actually had someone say this to me it's like yes I understand that you have this kind of twisted nature to your sexuality and I'm sure that it's a product of your terrible upbringing but let's, I think we have to wait and deal with that after the revolution. Someone actually told me it's like you can have orgasms after the revolution. When were you scheduling the revolution? Like maybe I could hang on for a day or two but if we're talking decades in millennium it ain't happening. It's absurd but I still think it's absurd at the time however people were intensely serious about it. So yes I did get into a certain amount of difficulty. But I think that's interesting what you were saying about the importance of telling the truth for you. And being somewhat realistic about people's real lives because I used to date some of the very girls that were talking bad about me in public. They were dangerous, what can I tell you? So how has motherhood affected you? Got in the way of sex rather considerable. Yes, yes. I tell people that my son is easily two books and I won't be able to write because he's that demanding. He's also a hell of a lot of orgasms mama just didn't have. It's everything alters, everything alters. One, you give up sleep and sex for at least a year, sometimes two. In our case we squeezed it but still yeah I know. And then things happen that I hadn't expected or understood. The whole world looks different. We only have to think about school systems. Now a lot of how I have thought about myself in the world has always been that I am intensely I identify strongly with my sisters and their children. So I've always worried about schools especially for working class kids and I have always worried about healthcare but now I have a child now I want to grab the world and kick its ass. You have no right requiring me to raise a child in which there is not an easy accessible good uniformly good education system for everybody and I'm very serious about this. Now I thought these things before but Wolf has put me into overdrive. My child you know this little boy that I had to deal with the St. Luke's Hospital people with rather seriously and all of a sudden I have to do basic fitness education for people who don't see it coming because I show up and I dress nice when I go out with my boy I show up with this six year old and people say things and all of a sudden I'm doing feminism 101. Yes, he's my son my partner Alex my female lover is his mother and then we have to do that whole thing and my son is being very patient. All of a sudden you have to become an advocate for normal lesbian family life I don't use the word normal easily and and I have trouble with this whole family values thing but all of a sudden I'm a paragon of family values we're an alternative family values family but what the hell it gets it gets very complicated because also I have a six year old who gets embarrassed easily mom it was really great when he couldn't talk and I have to do all this stuff and pay attention to all this stuff would be so easy just to be the lesbian artist flirt with dangerous women now I gotta go do childcare talk to the PTA Jesus God and it is all very very boring and very very basic and very necessary and I'm no longer as sexually interesting as I used to be I can tell you show up and you flirt with the dark dangerous woman and she says and you got a kid it's all over I'm trying to change that you're talking about the importance of education now that your mom and the importance of libraries must be in there too my boy loves this library you guys been up to the children's library section here he thinks this is just too cool he thinks they need more computers cause he has to wait in line and he has his mama's patience but one of the things the huge disappointments of growing up in a state where the schools are so bad is that the libraries are worse I think part of why I had to become a writer was the books I read in South Carolina's libraries one thing they seem to want to write books about kernels amazing to me how many military men became the subject of novels you'd find in libraries in South Carolina and then when I moved to Florida much better libraries in Florida we moved to Florida when I was 13 much better libraries they had paperbacks which meant that they had books that were published within the last decade which is really important for a good library then I moved to New York City and I discovered that you could do research in libraries all of a sudden the world opened to a whole degree that I hadn't imagined living in the south and going to the kinds of libraries you find in the south the great thing about it is you find other readers it's like going to really good bookstores but you find other readers who don't have money to buy books which is me and my people and working in New York all of a sudden I discovered scholars using the library and all of a sudden have you ever been to the reading room in the New York Public Library? It's like a temple and I suddenly felt like I am in my place this is my place when I came here and there's all that light pouring in it's like this is another one this is my place but doesn't the light hurt the books? I worry about things like that when I was a kid I wanted to grow up and be safe be able to be matter of fact and who I was and be able to read anything libraries are the place where that happens that's why I give books to the library I'm a judge for the National Book Awards this year one of the things that happens when you do that is you agree to accept 300 books that come to your house and then I can't have any more books in my house I can't afford any more shelves they're full so I called the branch library I'm going to get a lot of books this summer would you like them? they're like yes what kind of books she said novels yes I like that I'm going to open up to this sea of smiling faces and see who would like to ask a question what we're going to do is the beautiful Miss Daphne is going to bring a microphone around hi what a pleasure you said that one of your goals in writing Cave Dweller was to prove you weren't a dancing dog what's a dancing dog what were you at to prove I used to work at a magazine called Conditions in Brooklyn and Cheryl Clark and Jewel Gomez and I were editors on the magazine and Cheryl did a conversation with four other black women writers and this concept came up of the dance and dog it's not that you dance well it's that you dance at all and in terms of black women writers it was about they don't even believe we can write much less that we can write well and that's pretty much how I feel as a lesbian working class writer wasn't that I was good no so one has a tendency to want to prove that one can do more than just be a phenomenon kind of humiliating sometimes being a phenomenon a whole new audience to flirt with and one thing about the New York public library's reading room is that that was the first public room in the United States to have electric light and the aim of that was how workers could come and read after work and it was open late with those little cool lights green shades it's wonderful I have two questions when you discuss the nature of forgiveness which I thought was very interesting for say we're in the same age group and how easy it has been for cynicism and brutality to rule in novel writing but I mean, you're describing a town that's being brutal to a woman my first thought was the scarlet letter and how you were writing a novel that I unfortunately haven't read it but you seem to be opposing a theme in American literature of brutality toward the the rebel, the wounded one and if you would like to talk about that topic I think that I'm going to be California for a second I actually think that the essential person who has to be forgiven is the self you have to forgive yourself but then living in the real world you really do need to seek forgiveness in your community how you define your community I deliberately sent Delia Bird back to Cairo, Georgia a small town that really holds her in contempt and it's a very Christian Baptist small town so there are a lot of very traditional Baptist attitudes toward women like Delia who also has an illegitimate child there will probably always be an illegitimate child in every book I ever write I don't think that the things that they're ready, that they're withholding forgiveness for are the things that Delia is really seeking forgiveness for I think the definition of the book is more about how small town life works and how resentment, jealousy, fear and shame works no I wanted to write out how you forgive yourself and I think it's a slow process and I think you do, I'm going to be really tacky you do good works you work it, you take care of your kids you're responsible in your community you're real in the world it's a long book that's pretty much what Delia does she does some things that as a feminist I don't approve of she doesn't let herself be in a real relationship because she's putting everything into raising her three girls and as a feminist I'm appalled that I wrote that but it did seem to me to be what Delia would do, what the character would choose to do be in who she is and she pretty much you know she's a very gifted, talented, extraordinary woman who buries herself in a small town deliberately because she wants she wants to give her girls a family the kind of family she didn't have she does a great job of it now in the way of the world I'm not sure that mothers get a lot of thank yous and appreciation in fact I'm pretty clear they don't so in the way of the world I have to write a novel in which a woman doesn't need a lot of public demonstration of success that in fact her success is looking at her girls and knowing they're okay it's a bit complicated but next time I'm going to write big and flashy and kill somebody this young man with his hand up doing that great things with his glasses young man not really first of all I'm really thrilled ma'am to be here and it's an honor it's almost like seeing Albert Einstein you know in one of his emotional sides you were a genius to write this book and I actually brought two copies for myself and my best friend Steve who plays Jeopardy with me to be an autograph but I have actually three things that I wanted to point out my name is Larry Pasquine I'm trembling as I say this but one of your ventures was to collaborate with a lot of movie stars the movie itself did you feel that they did a good justice about it and what was your experience working with the big Hollywood buffs as they translated how you really felt about the movie and before you answer that by the way this was one of our requested reading for the class of 97 of South San Francisco High School so this was you know really a great deal and I wanted to give credit to my teacher Miss Amin who that was her last year of teaching in our school and you know she sent a lot of people to Harvard University and Cornell just because of this book and we thank you for that you're a sweetheart and also my friend here who's an artist I'm raising my boy to say yes ma'am every occasionally no ma'am but mostly yes ma'am movies I had very little to do with the movie I did go to lunch at Angelica Houston's house she sent a car and as I've said before she's a very persuasive woman she did a really it's very complex it's a good movie and it's a great piece of work it's extremely useful I was telling people I was in Albuquerque I was in some town in the Southwest I was a little fuzzy on it because I was very tired and I met some people from the medical school who told me that one of the teachers there require young doctors in training to read Bastard out of Carolina and to see the movie because she felt that the movie shows them something they don't have a good imagination for and I think that's real I think that Angelica Houston brought to the screen something that had not been brought to the screen before when you see the man who plays Daddy Glenn in that movie pick up Jenna Malone and by the neck and shake her you see something that a lot of us have experienced but nobody's ever seen it that way it's enormously powerful it really works at making an audience highly motivated and extremely emotional all that is terrific and as a novelist she just about drove me crazy because three quarters of the book isn't in the movie and there's some very deliberate things that I did in the book that are missing in the movie that make it really hard for me I wanted to show how how a young girl develops the kind of capacity for survival that Bone develops a lot of that is about the kinds of stories that her family tells her the kind of a sense of humor that the family brings to tragedy that's not in the movie and that's so it's very hard and then of course there's Raylene who becomes she wears overalls in the movie and she looks good but there's no explicit recognition of the fact that she's a lesbian and that in fact she's gonna raise Bone when the movie ends so that makes it very complicated given all my petty complaints I still like Angelica Houston but this was way small time for movies this was a four million dollar movie as they have explained to me I tell you this is nothing child it ain't the real big time I'm waiting to see what that's like I suspect they'll make a really bad movie God she moves good doesn't she if you have to carry a microphone you better move good okay Dorothy my name is Kathy and I have a couple of really big open-ended questions for you and one is regarding feminism and I just want to say I mean you've probably been asked before you know what should feminists do nowadays and live as long as possible that's okay but I think young I think all feminists and especially in this area the country are doing a lot of things right and are doing a lot of good things in the community I would like to see a little more cohesion and communication but I'm just wondering if you can comment on that and also I have a seven year old son I'm wondering what your comments are on being a lesbian and raising a son boy two biggies on raising a son I got my son in a karate class it's one of the things I did as a lesbian feminist raising a six year old I got him into karate last fall one reason was because he got beaten up in childcare and he never let that happen again but also I want him to in a strange way karate for me was spiritual and taught me something about gentleness and I wanted my boy to learn that as a mother of a six year old lesbian feminist I put him in karate I think feminism is generational but I think all political activism is generational and I actually think that it kind of breaks out naturally and I think that's a great thing I don't date very very young girls no more so they're gonna have to do it on their own I think that the issues I know it'll come you'll figure it out it'll get to I think that the issues that are important to each decade or each generation are distinct so I'm quite clear I mean I barely go on the internet really it's just it gives me a headache I do have like a wire I go on and check AP when I discovered that I could read the news and didn't have to read the paper that was a big deal but other than that I'm not into online activism but I know a lot of young feminists who are and who are doing zines online and who are doing news groups online and this is a whole area that I am really competent in and this is a good thing I think that as a political person as a politically active person mostly you have to pay attention take a deep breath and think before you act and speak which is hard for writers because you know how the damn silly thing it is you go places and people are like and what would you say to Bill Clinton if you had him here now and I'm like what do I know if the man's a cad what do I care you know he voted against welfare I don't care who he sleeps with you know writers don't know more than people on the bus we just tell stories good I know more as a politically active feminist than I know as a writer but I can't always put that in novels and I'm not always competent to talk about it in public if you have some ideas about things feminist you should tell me and I'll tell them in New York in the morning we're going to do two more questions but he did such a great paint job don't you think hi I'm Alder and thank you very much Alder let's see first of all I wanted to say that I did see you in a documentary last week here at the library and it just brought so much back to me we're about the same age I was born in 48 and it was brilliantly done which documentary I don't know oh it's premiered yeah I haven't seen this did I say anything reasonable because I haven't seen this well you probably did but I have a horrible memory you know it's that age but anyway I have a son and I am a lesbian and he's 24 and I had him when I was let's be getting sleep and sex again oh yes not yet but eventually I had to step back a few years for some personal stuff I had to work on on me but we had witch hunts when I was in the army that was when I was stationed in Germany with his godmother and so what we had to do was move off post I mean because there was no way you know if you were queer you know got busted and so that's what we had to do to protect ourselves and he was born at Letterman and I've always been out with him about who I am but you know it tripped his godmother I was with her at the time and she hated and she didn't want me to be out to him you know she wanted she couldn't handle it but I've always been very honest with him and even taken him to quite a few marches you know here in the city and up in Sacramento you know with Baffer and we're very close and he got embarrassed you know when he was five and six oh mom you know he even had to be the flower or the ring bearer and the money I had with the woman I was with for ten years but you know we had the car all decorated in the back you know driving down Gary Boulevard out to Sutro Park we didn't do it that way yeah so but anyway I'm really glad you're here and yeah hope to say hi out front too okay thank you we got one more question then we're gonna let Dorothy sign books we'll go to ten percent of the sale we'll go to the library more shelves hello ma'am my name is Maria I'm from Greenville North Carolina oh baby I'm wondering do you think you would have become the artist you are today to your own personal satisfaction if you had stayed in the south do you ever think about moving back I'm not leaving California I go to visit a lot I actually might go teach for a semester in Georgia just because it would make so many people unhappy that's complicated I left Tallahassee Florida after somebody came to our house and fired a shotgun in the front door you forget that this was like we were lesbian feminist activists now the truth be the guy was drunk and it's fortunate that he was so drunk because otherwise he might have waited until somebody opened the door before his shot instead of just shooting down the door and I don't think he wasn't really aware of the fact that we were feminists but he was clear we were lesbians and we were getting some and he wasn't it was pretty much when I decided you know I think I want to move north where they don't just have shotguns waiting to shoot you on a regular basis but more than that I get guilty about not living in the south especially when I go to the south and I go and speak to students or do talking or do the stuff that you do if you're a writer in America in this century and I go to visit my friend Mab Segrist in North Carolina who's with the anti-clan activist who has her address they keep publishing her phone number and address on the clan watch line which is not what you think it's the clan information line and they say that dyke in North Carolina that Mab Segrist she lives at 201 and then they give her phone number I go visit Mab and she's living in North Carolina in this community a lesbian, a writer, an activist she's got a nine year old daughter she lives in the south I look at her and I think I'm living in California in paradise and I get guilty so I go to visit a lot and I do a lot of activism but I don't want to raise my boy there I don't want to raise my boy in South Carolina where adopting children for gay people is illegal according to the state legislator I don't want to raise him near who are rednecks with guns in attitude and racist consciousness and who might make him go in directions I don't want him to go because they're so romantic and sexy you know they are I don't want to raise him in a place where I'm scared all the time even though I think I should be there so when he's like 24 or 26 I might wind up back in the south but I love this place I was real happy to get here you'd have to really work to persuade me to leave and no I wouldn't be a writer if they hadn't shot down my door and threatened to fire me and scared me to death and made me so mad and so indignant that I had to write a book to explain what that feels like I'm going to take one more question from the lady with the stripes I didn't realize you had been a judge for the National Book Award just this year it's a great tribute to you and to all of us who have supported you and I thank you for giving your vote I assume you might have to Alice McDermott and to Allegra Goodman I'm voting for this fall I'm leaving everything now well tell us the process for what you get 300 books what do you do? read them, give them to the library make notes the other judges it's a great panel I get to talk to Terry McMillan Charles Johnson, Scott Spencer and Allegra Goodman these are all like real writers God knows what we're going to like I've already got some books I want to suggest but we'll see and I get to meet Oprah Winfrey because she's been invited to the 50th anniversary because you know if you're in publishing these days you love Oprah those of you who were here last week to see Wally we love Oprah, she got good taste yes did you have a question? no I love charming Billy aren't they great? we could talk books I'll see you outside let's thank Dorothy Allison for being here and she'll sign books out back