>>From the Library of
Congress in Washington DC. [ Silence ] >>Ned Marcelle: My
name is Ned Marcelle. I'm the Editor of the Style
section of the Washington Post and the Post is proud to be a
charter sponsor of the festival, and every year, Maria Arono, who
helps organize the whole affair, chooses one of us from
the Post, and a writer, and it's like this big yenta of
matchmaking us, and I always figure out what's the connection
that she saw, and sure enough, in Julia's biography, it's clear
that she's, she spent a lot of time in magazines, like
I did in New York, and she worked in the
copy department. And, as an editor at a magazine, I know that the Copy Editor's
respect standards in this unique way and perfects sentences for all
these writers who are far-flung and put together this package. And, they have a sort of interior
life that is always well known in the office, but they
don't quite share readily, so it makes perfect
sense that in 2002, when Julia's Three Junes came out,
it emerged as a fully-formed novel, her first, and won the
National Book Award, and lead to an amazing literary
career that we're still enjoying, and welcoming new readers to
it every year, as this year, with her publication
of Widower Tale. So, without hesitation, I invite
you to welcome with me Julia Glass. [ Clapping ] >>Julia Glass: Wow, this, I,
this is my third time coming to this festival, and every time
the turnout is bigger and bigger and it's so gratifying, and
I'm just going to assume that there's no doubt in your mind that I might actually
be Ken Follett. [Laughter] Okay. I also want to say that
it should have been obvious to Ken that, to Ned, that
the reason that he was picked to introduce me is that
we're both so stylish. Wow, you know, this is
obvious to you I'm sure, but we writers are readers too,
and one of the things that's so fun about this event is that we
get to meet and listen to some of our favorite writers as well. I got to listen to Susan Collins
this morning, my son and I are, you know, who isn't big fans of the
Hunger Gang series, and this morning at breakfast, Rosemary Wells came
up to me and wanted to meet me, and I was just like, "Oh my God
the Buddy Planet", and, you know, I've read her books so many,
many, many, many times to both of my sons when they were small. So we, we are thrilled to
be here with other writers, but mostly to see that there's
still so many readers in the world. Well, I'm a little cross-eyed
because I'm actually smack in the middle of a book
tour for my brand new novel, came out two weeks ago called the
Widower's Tale, and I can tell you, thank you, that the number
one question I'm getting from early readers is this one,
where in the world did I come up with my lasted protagonist, this
cranky, eloquent, vital, veral, romantic, snobbish,
mildly chauvinistic, politically irreverent,
retired male librarian, and he's not based on Dr. Belington. Anyway, that is the kind of
question that I most like hearing, because every story, I create,
begins with a single character. If you, the reader, can't
fully enter the mind and soul of my protagonist, you don't
have to like them necessarily; at least not to begin with,
you're not going to like my book. And, when I get a bad
review, I can always tell it's because the reviewer just
couldn't stand my character. Often the characters personality
comes in to focus first. That was the case with Fenno McLeod,
in my first novel, Three Junes, a good heart and a clean
mind, shrouded by fear and emotional inhibition. True, also, with Greenie
Duquette, the pastry chef who takes center stage in my
second novel, The Whole World Over. I wanted to write about a woman
whose confidence and gusto for life defined her weaknesses
as well as her strengths. And, sometimes a character
comes to me with a predicament more
than a personality. As the novelist John
Ducrane likes to say, "Fiction, it's only about trouble. Without trouble, you've
got no tension, no suspense, and in fact, no story. Trouble may come from inside the
character, the urge to go to sea, a disturbing childhood
memory, or even a disease. Or trouble might come from outside
the character, the child she gave up for adoption tracks her
down, her country goes to war, a tree branch severed in a
violent storm falls on her head. Or the character might make a
choice that begets the trouble, have an affair, buys
a house, quits a job. But trouble it the one thing
we can always count on. In fact, I've always said
that fiction writers have to be part sadist, because
it's our job to inflict a lot of pain on the people we create. But, sometimes I think of a
novel's plot as nothing more or less complicated
than an obstacle course, a decathlon requiring
a variety of feats, some practical, some spiritual. In a Julia Glass novel,
you make sure that a number of feats will be familial. The lucky individual who gets to run
this course, it's always my first and most important character,
who will come to me unexpectedly, when I'm mindlessly rolling along
in my everyday groove, showering, shopping, driving, cooking,
getting the kids to school, the garbage on the street,
the groceries in the fridge. From that character sprouts other
characters, parents, children, colleagues, neighbors and even pets. The story of this one individual
grows the way a sapling becomes a tree, the trunk widens,
the bark thickens, limbs proliferate bearing leaves and
flowers and then fruit, squirrels and birds move in, the
occasional cat prowls through in search of a meal. Each of my novels, by the time I'm
finished, feels like a complete and self-sustaining cosmos,
that I never forget the seed, that one character who
seeped into my consciousness. I may even remember
precisely when it happened. Percival Darling, the eponymous
hero of The Widowers Tale, I have to say I love that word
eponymous, it sounds like a creature from Greek Mythology like a
cross between and elephant and a Shetland pony or something,
I love that word eponymous. So, Percival Darling came to me on a
late winter's night in January 2005. After 24 years of living
in New York City, a fellowship had lured me
north, along with my family to my native Massachusetts. My parents were still living in
the house where I lived from age 9 through all of my college summers, and I decided to rent
another house nearby. By happenstance, it
was the former home of my best friend from
junior high school. Its rooms and scrolling lawns,
familiar to me in a general way, but now, three decades and many
occupants later, completely strange. So, there was a very
surreal quality to this move. So, there I was, after more than a quarter century's
residence elsewhere, living again in my childhood town,
a place that's astonishingly rural, for a community just half and hour's
drive from Boston, where houses, both historic and modern,
are sheltered by thick woods or command sweeping views of
pastures and placid ponds. When I was young, it
was home to a lot of what I called barefoot
intellectuals, absent-minded, Ivy League professors, modernist
architects, quazee-hippie lawyers and doctors married to
trust-fund origami artists. [Laughter] Years later, through my frequent
but brief holiday visits, the town had [inaudible]
reassuringly unchanged. So, I was aware that the
real estate prices had soared and if I looked closely, I noticed
how many of the rustic crooked edges on the landscape had been
straightened, how the catena of things, once left to the
anarchy of time and weather, had been scrubbed and polished. A few fine but unpretentious
houses appeared to have sprouted stone
pillars at the entrance to their long driveways, and
the Victorian town library, where I'd spent hours
as an underpaid Paige, a building both stately and frumpy,
had received a [inaudible] makeover from a renowned architect. Tumbled stone walls
had been disciplined. Trees that once formed
shaggy tunnels above the roads had been tamed. Some of those roads, once
narrow and chaotically potholed, were wider and smoother now. But, not until I lived there
full-time as an adult shopping and picking up my mail at the
quaintly antique post office, as a parent with children
in the local schools, did I see how much more had changed. The social zeitgeist of the town,
due to its pumped up wealth, seemed to have become simultaneously
more liberal and more conservative. The politically correct idealism
of raw milk cooperatives, hot yoga classes, and composting
workshops, in direct contradiction to four thousand square foot
house, and gas guzzling SUV's, taking my children to
birthday parties, I discovered, deep in the woods, new
developments of houses, that looked like country clubs. Complete with in-ground
sprinkler systems and video surveillance cameras, with signs on the lawn
reading, "Saved Our Four". [Laughter] These people clearly wanted to have
their cake and save the planet too. No longer did local teens
shovel snow or plant grass. Instead, platoons of Hispanic,
of Hispanic workers shuttled back and forth on flatbed trucks,
with squadrons of lawn equipment. Some of the changes I saw were
simply a sign of the times, but some of them felt like a sign
of a decadence portending a fall. Here's something that
particularly amused and annoyed me. The abundant wildlife, attracted
to the ample woods and swamps, which back in my childhood was
taken for granted as something to celebrate, had become, to many
new residence, pure nuisance. The deer that dependably ate all the
tulips, if you were foolish enough to plant tulips, the raccoons
that would raid your garbage cans, the barn swallows, that having
set up house in an open shed, would dive bomb your dog and
your car and your children, once their fledglings were
hatched, the fisher cats that would snatch any house
cats left out after dark. A new neighbor of my
parents that complained that wild turkeys enjoying the
warm tarmac in front of her garage, were constantly preventing
her from parking. And, at one town meeting while
I was there, dog owner lobbied to have horses barred from the
towns miles of conservation trails. What if the horses stepped on their
dogs or what if, heaven forbid, their dogs should eat the manure? I began to feel vaguely
offended, as if I owned the town, as if its citizens had any
obligation to preserve the place as I had known it, my personal
snow globe of lazy days reading in unkempt hayfields, surrounded
by Joanie Mitchell songs, rotary lawn mowers, rusted Volvo's,
the reassuring, self-righteousness of Eugene McCarthy era outrage,
that typified the views of most of the residence back then,
except, I might add, for my parents, the token old world Republicans
who's contrarian views kept me thoroughly and appropriately
embarrassed throughout my teens. But, when I was eleven or
so, in the late 1960's, a perfectly stenciled peace
sign, two-stories high, appeared on the side of a barn. So, there I was, having
lived in the is familiar, yet disturbingly different
town for five months, when a spectacular blizzard hit. It snowed for a day and a
night and most of another day. That second night, after my boys
were in bed, I bundled up and went for a walk down a long wooded
lane, now a tunnel of waited bows and tall banks of snow,
made blue by the darkness. Deep in the woods to either
side, the houses glowed. Here, I thought, was
the town I knew. Its new fangled glossiness
erased by the elements. Yet, if I looked closely
through the window, I could see the ostentatious
prosperity that stood for everything I had
become to despise. I recognized myself, not for
the first time, by the way, as a premature kremudgin [phonetic],
not yet 50, railing against a kind of change that is, at least on
the surface, harmless, selfish and myopic perhaps, but
in the global scheme of things, fairly benign. I stood still in the
middle of the road, glaring into a blindly
well-lit, far too large, granite appointed kitchen,
and I imagined a cantankerous, fossilized old-timer, a man who can no longer tolerate how fast
the world is changing around him, mostly because its
leaving him behind. And, I knew that in this man, an
alter ego of my least tolerant, least adaptable self, I'd found
the genesis of my next novel. Why a man, not a woman, I can't say, though maybe the gender switch
was a way of holding this part of myself at arm's length. I began to think a lot
about the nature of change. Whether its technological,
intellectual, or aesthetic, what it gives us, what it
wipes out, the risk and dangers that always come with its
privileges and luxuries. I thought, too, about the subtle
evolution that takes place when our youthful selves, who
earn for change, who can't find or make change fast enough, turn
a corner and begin to fear it. When does progress begin
to resemble entropy, a threat to civilization
as we know it. Eventually, this chain of
daydreaming lead me to conceive of the novels second most important
characters, Percy's grandson Robert, a 20 year old, pre-med student,
who becomes involved with a group of bold, but naive
environmental activists. Within days of dreaming up Percy, the title of the novel
came to me as well. I'd call it, Everything Must Change. In the end, I changed my mind
about that, but never about Percy. The tree that night, on
that road, in my beloved but irreversibly altered
hometown, had begun to grow. And now, I want to say a little
bit about fiction in general and the heroes that
fiction contains. Rumors about the death of fiction,
the end of the novel have become so common that they're tiresome. But, it's true that one day
we could wake up and find that nobody we know bothers
to pick up stories anymore, or even download the onto a screen. I actually have a friend that
told me that he read Ana Karina in two different translations on his iPhone this past
summer, blew my mind. I think one of those Russian names
would take up the entire screen. [Laughter] Maybe we'll feel a vague nostalgia
for novels and short stories and for poetry too, the way you
might feel nostalgic for cars of the 1950's or drive-in
theatres, or Polaroid camera's, or as writers sometimes
do, for typewriters. Do you remember the bell that would
ring every time you reach the right hand margin? The swoosh of the carriage return? But, unlike carriage returns, novels
and stories are irreplaceable. Nothing we know in our culture,
with the possible exception of very good movies, which, as
we know, are increasingly rare, can possibly fulfill what
novels and short stories do. Fiction reminds me of the
space program, an opportunity for noble exploration that many
people now view as frivolous or irrelevant, yet, if we put an
end to it, we may lose, forever, the chance to glimpse distant
realms filled with revelations that we can't begin to guess at. A friend of mine recently shared
with me a graduation speech, that was given by Alexis
Mobahill, and English teacher at a private high school in Berkley
California, addressing a group of people on the cusp of adulthood, she told them why they
must keep reading books, fiction in particular, and
I'm going to quote from this. "We are living through an
age that feels, at times, like a constantly rebooting
emergency. Things are dire and then oil
spills and earthquakes happen, pushing us into a new, more
horrifying sense of dire. Was it always this way? I'm not sure. Maybe this is a new awful, or maybe
it isn't, but I know, for sure, that as you move through your
life, our world will call to you, will require time and effort and
compassion and ingenuity from you. Some of you will go to work
for doctors without borders, and some of you will work
on climate change issues, and some of you will become
lawyers, who help people in need fight a system that
seems set against them. Some of you will raise children,
or teach, or paint, or own a shop, and that will be the way
you position yourself between vulnerability and chaos. No matter what you do with your
life and your talents, however, you will need to cultivate
compassion, to open yourselves to people who need you,
even if they are all the way across this great wide world. To be a citizen of this world, with
any chance of being productive, or at least maintaining your sanity,
you will need to practice, empathy and intellectual imagination. The reading of literature
will help you with this, because it speaks straight to the
heart of your life, and to the lives of everyone else around you. Reading is an opportunity for
the purest possible compassion, a chance to channel
another life, another place, another time, another soul. A novel is like a portable
church, an opportunity for passion, and compassion, for community, for
communion, confession, reflection, redemption, elevation, revelation. Novels are centers of
feeling of a nerve, they are performers of
our highest humanity. You will need this opportunity to
practice the way the world will be." In closing, I'd like to read
you part of an email I received from a friend of mine, who read
my new novel, a man in his 30's. Dear Julie, You've written
another marvelous book with the coolest 70 year old I
have ever encountered in fiction. He skinny-dips, he flirts, he flirts
when shopping for bathing suits, he is indifferent to
the charm of toddlers. His story, his tale, shows life as
funny, tragic, confounding, joyful, regretful, hopeful,
ordinary, and even magical. In other words, life
as it really is. Percy is my hero, and if he
were gay and I were single, I would be asking you
for his phone number. That's the great, when
somebody wants a phone number for an email for your characters. By the end of the book, I marveled
at how many people his special combo of archness and warmth had touched. I can see Percy now, swimming across
the harbor in the September sun. I know that despite his recent
trials, he swims with some sense of satisfaction that
he's done his best. I can only hope that I'll be
doing something similar at 71. I said earlier in this talk, that
what I always hope is that you, the reader, will be able to fully
enter my characters, but really, it's the other way around. What I want is for my
characters to fully enter you. When the heroes I create
become heroes to my readers, I know
I've done my job. I've enlarged my readers
vision of themselves, magnified the way they seem
themselves in a world that is as fragile and tender as it
can be brutal and frightening, inspired them to leap their own
hurdles, and live as gracefully as they possibly can, with
whatever changes come their way. Thank you. [ Clapping ] So, I think I have time
for a few questions, if anybody has any questions
at all, about any of my books. >>Actually, I haven't read any
of your books, but I might. >>Julia: You're here for
Ken Follett, aren't you. You're just holding
a place, I knew it. It's okay. >>But, as a participant in
this National Book Festival, how do you feel about
the electronic readers? >>Julia: How do I fell
about the e-readers? You know, I used to feel
hostile toward them, as I have felt hostile toward
every technological advance, until I had to get it into my life. This is what I think about them. I think that any, any medium
that makes it easier for people to read stories is welcome. My only objection is the price
point that's been set up by some of the merchants, namely Amazon,
and, the issues that authors and agents are trying to
work out with publisher. I mean, the truth is, we make a lot
less money when you download a book than if you buy it, but you
know what, it's great, I mean, I have to tell you
I was hugely amused by this friend reading Ana Karina, he downloaded two different
translations and he'd go back and forth, and I just thought,
okay, if that's the future of reading literature,
then let's go with it. >>Thank you. >>Julia: Yes. >>Hi, its, I enjoyed so
much the first two books and the character Fenno and I
wondered where that came about and is there a Fenno
in the third novel? >>Julia: Well, as I, as I
said earlier, Fenno McLeod, the hero of Three Junes,
and as, I think he also is in the Whole World Over, really
came out of a corner of me. He's sort of, he's a part of
me that was a very emotionally, cautious, fearsome person. I'm not quite that person anymore,
though I have tendencies that way, and I wanted to sort of
write a cautionary tale for myself in some ways. But, he's also the case of character
that I never dreamed would become as big as he did in the book. I thought it was going to be
really the story of his father, and I really fell in
love with him, and, and he's a character I
may not be done with. I don't know. I don't mean to be coy, but
I'm thinking about him a lot. Yes. >>Thank you for being the
warm up for Mr. Follett, I think you've done a great job. [Clapping and Laughing] >>Julia: Thanks. >>And, first, I wanted
to congratulate you for apparently writing a book about
a male, who is multi- dimensional, who's not perfect, but who has some
positive characteristics and traits. Given that, an earlier
author this morning seemed to have a very strong
dislike of men in general, as she made several comments that
were not very positive about men. But, my question to you
has to do with process and what you need as an author. And would your satisfaction about
writing your novel be as complete, if there were no readers? >>Julia: Wow, you started out
talking about my writing men, and then you're, are you
asking me two questions, or you just wanted to
comment on the male? >>No, I just commented on
that, but I wanted to ask you, from your perspective as an author. >>Julia: What would
it be like to have, to know that I was
writing for no readers? >>No, it's exactly, as a
writer, is it necessary, and I think you were alluding to
it a little bit towards the end of your presentation, is
it necessary for a writer to have readers for the
novel to be truly complete? >>Julia: Okay. Oh, well, is it necessary for
the novel to be truly complete, maybe not, but I will say this,
the most, people ask me, you know, what was the most surprising
thing to happen to you, when you had your first
novel come out. It might be winning the
National Book Award, that's true, but I will tell you
that when I started to meet total strangers who'd
invested their precious time in reading my books and wanted to
meet me and talk to me about it, blew my mind, and I have to say
readers are my number one addiction, so I'd go through terrible
withdrawal if I lost readers. I've got to know I have them. But, you know, writing that first
novel without a contract, without, you know, just in a cave, was
a very different experience, that sometimes I wish I
could recapture a little, because sometimes I have to stop
myself and not think too much about, about what I know about
people who've read my books, what they expect, you
know, what they hope for. It's important to keep, to
keep a little at arm's length when you write, but I
don't know what it would be like to write my books
without readers, at this point. It is, I think it is
important actually. >>Thank you. >>Julia: Yeah. >>Hello. >>Julia: Hi. >>Your speech was amazing. You sort of answered
my question partially, I just wondered what your
inspiration for Three Junes was? >>Julia: My inspiration for
Three Junes, well, you know, every book is a sum of
so many life experience. You know, Three Junes grew
out of a time in my life that I've often talked
about, I think I talked about it here the first time I came,
I had a really rotten mid-thirties. I lost my only sibling to suicide,
I was diagnosed with cancer, and I went through a divorce, and
you know, it was a terrifying, demoralizing time in my life, and that's when I started writing
Three Junes, but I didn't know, until after it came out, and
people started to talk about it, that it really is a book about
enduring the kind of heartbreak, regret and emotional fear that
you think you're never going to get through. You know, and really, it's true that
all the novels that I love the best, are about nothing more than human
endurance and also our ability to rise above our own folly. I'm always interested by how,
and I know this from my own life, how do really really smart,
good hearted people make such stupid mistakes, and then
live with the consequences of those mistakes, and live
through them and beyond them, and I know that's what
Three Junes came out of, but I didn't know it at the time. >>Thank you. >>Julia: Thank you. So, anymore questions? Well, I'm going to
move over for Ken. Thank you. [ Clapping ] >>This has been a presentation
of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov.
