Q: The characters in Girl Talk—especially Dotty and Juniper Fiske—often shift seamlessly from comedy to tragedy, from blithe asides to poignant revelations. But all the while, their choices and behaviors are utterly believable. Are these women based on any real-life models?
A: When my mother read Girl Talk as a short story, she gave it to her friends, saying, “The mother is me.” This, of course, confused people since we don’t live in New Hampshire; my father wasn’t a gynecologist; he didn’t have an affair with a red-headed bankteller; my mother is from Raleigh, North Carolina, not Bayonne, New Jersey, et cetera. But there are undeniable similarities: my mother’s accent comes back when she chews gum, she adores girl talk, she believes that nuns, in many ways, saved her life. And so I’ve taken bits and pieces, little details, and created something completely, extravagantly untrue. As for Juniper, she’s whimsy. I’m not sure where she came from, but she did so with such strident confidence that she became immediately real for me, and therefore easy to write.
Q: From Kitty Hawk to Church and Piper Fiske to Jacko the dog, your characters have such unusual, quirky names. Where do they come from? Do you plan and mold a character’s personality and then pick his or her name based on the personality, or does the name drive the character?
A: Most of the time, I don’t know where the names come from. I adore names. And, when one of them comes to me, the character becomes real from that moment on. Names are incredibly important. I couldn’t write a character without a name, and think, Oh, I’ll fill that in later. While writing Girl Talk, my husband and I rented out rooms to foreign students, mostly Asian. They often would take on an American name, like Sally. I always loved this. So I came up with Kitty, and then it was a natural association: Kitty Hawk. My husband works at a prestigious boarding school; it’s an endless source. I look through phone books and often rely on last names of people from high school (I went to grammar school with a Nancy Pantuliano, for example. The bully in my son’s preschool class, at that time, was Dino). There have been times that, for one reason or another, I’ll have to change a character’s name and it’s terribly uprooting, virtually impossible.
Q: If you were to write a coda of sorts to this novel, what would be going on with Lissy and Dotty? How will Dotty react to Lissy’s pregnancy and motherhood?
A: Oh, Dotty will be thrilled about the baby. It will fill the void over the loss of her husband. It will redirect her life. Lissy will have to deal with her mother’s intense focus of love, but she will need her, too, as a single mother. They will form a new family unit. I’ve actually envisioned the last scene in screenplay terms, and I think of the three of them about seven years in the future, having returned to that lake where Lissy had vacationed as a kid: the three of them, Lissy, Dotty and the little girl, holding hands, floating on their backs.
Q: You’ve rendered the settings in Girl Talk so vividly as to almost make them characters in themselves. What sorts of research did you do, geographically or otherwise, to write this story?
A: My husband grew up in Keene and so, through his stories, it already has inhabited my imagination. I had a live-in fact checker. As for Bayonne, I went shopping for it. I knew that I had to describe a place in a time that I wasn’t yet alive, so my own perceptions wouldn’t be as important as my source’s impressions. So, I interviewed my parents and their friends, looking for the person who had the deepest, most storied memory of the setting of their youth. Isabelle Murray won. I asked her about the Catholic church, and she said, “Which one, the Polish or the Italian?” And in that detail, she was giving me not only factual setting, but conflict, plot. Kathleen Middleton’s book on the city was also very helpful. I fell in love with Bayonne. Who wouldn’t? My second novel is also partially set there.
Q: Can you tell us a little about the specifics of writing Girl Talk? Did you come up with a complete outline early on? Were you surprised by the course the story ultimately took?
A: I always have a map. I always know what decisions the characters have to face, but I don’t always know which route they’ll take. The Miss America Family’s ending was written a number of different ways. I was most surprised while writing Girl Talk, not by how it ended, but by all of the unexpected twists and turns in the middle. The intervention, for example, came out of a phone conversation with a friend whose big family had planned an intervention for their brother, but everyone was too polite to bring up the subject, so it went undiscussed. I used it immediately. It was a wonderful surprise.
Q: Which novelists and poets do you most enjoy reading? And which of these would you name as the primary influences on your own work?
A: I adore Gabriel García Márquez, Italo Calvino, and Fred Chappell. They were huge influences early on. I’m a fan of John Irving, Lome Moore, and Stuart Dybek. I love the poets Andrew Hudgins, Linda Pastan, and Rodney Jones. Right now I’m reading Michael Cunningham’s The Hours and a book of poems by Olena Kalytiak Davis, And Her Soul Out of Nothing. Both are fabulous.
Q: Is it accurate to describe Girl Talk as a feminist book?
A: I never write with politics in mind. I only think of my characters. I fall in love with them. Girl Talk is about two different generations of American women in the sixties and today, therefore it will deal with feminist issues. It’s inevitable. I consider myself a feminist, but I wouldn’t label my fiction as such. Feminism is complicated and I think this novel talks about the generational complications and evolutions of feminism, but that wasn’t my goal. It was a product of the characters that I was committed to writing about.
Q: You’ve spoken elsewhere about your hopes to one day write a book about your grandmother. When can we look forward to some Julianna Baggott nonfiction?
A: My grandmother was raised in a whorehouse, and she’s a natural storyteller. It’s the kind of writerly gift that you have to accept. Although I’ve no idea what shape it will take, I will certainly write about my grandmother’s life. There’s no question.
Q: Can you tell us about your next novel, The Miss America Family?
A: The Miss America Family is about a former Miss New Jersey (1969-70) and her sixteen-year-old son, Ezra. In the summer of 1987, it seems like she has the perfect American family: a son, a daughter, a second husband more reliable than the first. This time around she’s got an ex-quarterback with a solid dental practice. Ezra, however, is not convinced. He feels disconnected and has set out to define himself by inventing his own list of Rules to Live By, falling in love with Janie Pinkering, the rich podiatrist’s daughter. But when his grandmother, disoriented from a stroke, reveals dark family secrets, his mother reclaims her tragic past through a series of odd, dangerous choices. Ezra is a wonderfully sweet, smart character, and his mother is mysterious and unpredictable. Together they try to find a way to turn it all around.
Reading Group Questions and Topics for Discussion
1. Girl Talk features a rich cast of lively “minor” characters—Juniper Fiske, Ruby Pantuliano, Kitty Hawk, Peter Kinney, Jacko the dog. How does each character contribute to the overall flavor of the novel? Compare Julianna Baggott’s narrative and characterization techniques to the techniques of such writers as John Irving, Jane Smiley, and Anne Tyler.
2. What is the particular role of humor in this novel? Discuss the ways the author fuses comedy and pathos in many of Girl Talk’s scenes. How would you describe the tone that results from this delicate combination?
3. Discuss Baggott’s novel alongside recent films, plays, and other novels which similarly illuminate: the dynamics and intermittent fracturings of family relationships; the transition from girlhood to womanhood; the alternately comforting and haunting specter of the past on our present lives.
4. The persistence of memory—the ways in which remembering one’s past continues to color and influence one’s present—is certainly among the chief concerns in Baggott’s story. What does the author achieve by switching back and forth between the present and the past?
5. One of the dominant m
otifs in Girl Talk considers the subtle distinctions between honesty and truth. Lissy tells us that her mother instructed her to “choose the truth.” But later, Lissy realizes “that nobody seemed to know the truth.” And elsewhere, the act of lying is held up as a sort of art form, one to be honed and developed. What is Baggott up to here? Is truth inherently subjective? Dotty’s ultimate lesson for Lissy is to, again, “choose [her own] truth and move on.” Which of Baggott’s characters seem to have the firmest grasp on truth and reality?
6. How do sexuality and sex figure in the lives of Dotty, Lissy, Juniper, Ruby, and Kitty Hawk? What compels Dotty to share such intimate and often graphic details about her sex life to her young daughter? Discuss Baggott’s portrait of Dotty as a whole. How does Dotty’s relationship with her own mother, Evelyn, for example, come to color Dotty’s subsequent relationship with Lissy? And how does Dotty’s alternating candor and ambiguity with regard to talking about sex seem to affect Lissy’s attitude toward and relationship with her own sexuality, both as a girl and as a woman?
7. “The summer that never happened” was, in fact, possibly the most influential summer of Lissy’s life. So why the “never happened” label? Discuss the disparate elements of irony, repression, and melancholy which inform Dotty and Lissy’s largely unspoken feelings about that pivotal summer.
8. Julianna Baggott is a celebrated poet, and to read Girl Talk is to understand exactly why. Discuss Baggott’s vivid use of recurring imagery (especially that of water), her lyrical evocations of Lissy’s memories, and her skillful use of rhythm and well-placed silences to convey different emotions.
9. Talk about the mothers and the fathers in this novel; the ones who disappear, physically or emotionally, the ones who stay and the ones who never come into the picture in the first place. Is there a pattern here? Who is the ideal parent? Is Juniper the sort of person who should not have become a parent? Why? What sort of mother is Dotty? What sort of father is Bob?
10. Lissy imagines Bob’s homecoming after the summer that never happened. Likewise, she pictures her own consummation in a tent at Woodstock. Discuss these scenes alongside others in which Lissy endeavors to imagine events that she can never know firsthand. In Lissy’s renderings, what clues can we glean about Lissy’s feelings for her mother—whether of resentment, understanding, or affection?
11. Is Girl Talk a love story? If so, whose love story? Lissy claims that it’s certainly not hers. Why not?
12. In the particular emotional realm of this novel, what does it cost to love—and what does it finally mean to love? Considering what happens to her characters and their relationships in Girl Talk, what does Julianna Baggott seem to be suggesting about love and the ways it has evolved over the course of the novel’s two generations?
13. Lissy chooses in the end not to follow Church across the country. Dotty chooses not to follow Anthony into the crowds of Woodstock. What parallels and distinctions exist between these pivotal decisions?
14. Imagine an alternate version of Girl Talk in which Bob does not come home at the end of the summer that never happened. Or one in which Dotty actually knocks on Anthony’s door—and he welcomes her in? What if Lissy told Peter she was pregnant with his child? Would any of these choices ring true, considering the characters we’ve come to know? Why or why not?
15. “You can choose to be happy. You can pick it up, like a dress from a hanger, and slip it on.” Dotty’s conviction here contrasts sharply with the way Church comes to see the world. “We have no control,” he says at one point. “All I want is control over my own life.” Here, Baggott underscores the principle tension plaguing her novel’s heroine—the struggle between notions of an immutable fate and an ever-malleable free will. Who in this novel would you say ultimately wins the most control over her or his own life? Explain.
16. Lissy tells us that she is “more like my mother than even my mother.” At what points in your own life—including the present—have you been able to identify wholeheartedly with this statement, for better or worse? Discuss the ways Lissy has come to feel caught between choosing not to follow Dotty’s path in life and being unable to break the pattern. How much, in fact, does Lissy resemble Dotty? And in what ways is Dotty like her own mother, Evelyn?
17. “There’s only a tiny sliver of this story that I can tell with any precision,” states Lissy. Is Lissy a “reliable” narrator? Why? Discuss the richly comic irony in the fact that Lissy—a narrator so tirelessly preoccupied with the relative truth and honesty and accuracy of her story—is ambivalently pursuing a career as, of all things, an advertising copywriter.
18. Dino says growing old allows you to pile up more and more regrets. What do you suppose Dotty regrets? Evelyn? Explain.
19. Discuss the intermittent mythological and biblical references in Girl Talk. Lissy likens her father’s affair to a “miraculous” event, and she compares her own mother to Mary and Bob to Joseph. Later, a therapist tells Lissy she suffers from two Electra Complexes as a result of her having two fathers; and the one-eyed Anthony comes to resemble Cyclops in Lissy’s mind. How do these allusions contribute to Girl Talk’s central themes?
20. “Sometimes the only way to fix a mistake is to make it twice.” Dotty’s assertion to Lissy is echoed later in the novel with an even more hopeful—and vaguely spiritual—tone when she says that “our mistakes lead us to grace.” Does the truth of these statements bear out when we look at the major choices and mistakes made in this novel? What “grace” is discovered by Baggott’s characters in the end?
JULIANNA BAGGOTT is the critically acclaimed, nationally bestselling author of eighteen books, written under her own name as well as the pen names Bridget Asher and N.E. Bode. Most notably, she’s the author of The Pure Trilogy, an Editor’s Choice in The New York Times Book Review. With approximately seventy-five foreign editions of her novels published overseas to date, Baggott has had work appear in The New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, and on NPR’s All Things Considered and Talk of the Nation.
Books by Julianna Baggott
Pure
Fuse
Burn
Which Brings Me To You: A Novel in Confessions (with Steve Almond)
The Madam
The Miss America Family
Girl Talk
As Bridget Asher
The Bloomed Life of Harriet Winslow
The Provence Cure for the Brokenhearted
The Pretend Wife
My Husband’s Sweethearts
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
A Washington Square Press Publication of
POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com
Copyright © 2001 by Julianna Baggott
Originally published in hardcover in 2001 by Pocket Books
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.
For information address Pocket Books, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020
ISBN: 0-7434-0083-6
ISBN: 978-0-7434-0083-1
ISBN 978-0-7434-2143-0 (ebook)
First Washington Square Press trade paperback printing January 2002
WASHINGTON SQUARE PRESS and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Cover design by David Scott, front cover photo by Luigi Ciuffetell
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Julianna Baggott, Girl Talk
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