Lee Matalone, HOME MAKING
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[1:13]I'm on Skype today with Lee Madeline, who's the author of debut novel Homemaking.
[1:19]Her writing has been featured in Lit Hub, The Rumpus, The Offing, and Denver Quarterly.
[1:24]She is currently a lecturer at Clemson University and lives in Greenville, South Carolina.
[1:29]So welcome, Lee.
[1:30]Thanks so much for coming on Mom.
[1:31]So I have time to read books.
[1:32]Yeah.
[1:33]Thank you so much.
[1:34]So can you please tell listeners what Homemaking is about?
[1:37]So I'm generally terrible about talking about my own work, but I'll do my best to offer
[1:42]some sort of coherent summary.
[1:44]So the novel really follows these three characters who are on these individual yet intersecting
[1:50]journeys.
[1:51]If you could call it that to figure out how they fit into the world.
[1:54]So one of those characters is Sybil, who is born in occupation, erotocchio, to a young Japanese
[2:00]woman in this French soldier.
[2:02]They have this brief affair as child is produced.
[2:05]And then this baby is subsequently adopted and brought to the United States by an American
[2:10]general and his wife.
[2:12]So one thread of the novel follows Sybil from childhood to adulthood.
[2:16]The next major character is Sybil's daughter, Chloe, who the narrative follows as she's
[2:20]sort of trying to remake a home in the wake of her marriage dissolving.
[2:24]I'll try not to give more away than that.
[2:27]And then there's both this Chloe's best friend, and he's sort of shepherding Chloe
[2:31]through this period of time in which she's grieving.
[2:34]And at the same time, he's trying to reconcile his own romantic failings and rekindle
[2:38]this relationship with a man from his youth.
[2:41]So all three characters are really united in this quest.
[2:44]I suppose you can call it to isolate some sense of identity or belonging, however romantic
[2:50]that notion may be.
[2:52]So how did you come up with this?
[2:54]How did you come up with the characters?
[2:55]How did you come up with their relationships to each other?
[2:59]Honestly, the scene at the orphanage in the beginning where the baby is reaching out and
[3:06]grabs the American general and that changes the trajectory of basically everyone in the
[3:10]book.
[3:11]But it's stayed with me that's so visual and how, anyway, I didn't explain that well.
[3:15]So maybe you want to take that and run with it.
[3:19]I can talk generally just about my interest in the space making and house aspect of things.
[3:27]I've always been really interested in how we construct spaces, which sounds lofty, I think.
[3:32]But really, I'm just interested in putting houses together.
[3:35]I've always enjoyed that sort of domestic activity, really good at cleaning things or like
[3:40]finding things that antique stores and thrift stores and making them work in a home and cooking
[3:45]and the thinking about the conversations we have in these private spaces and around
[3:49]a table or in our bedrooms.
[3:51]So those things have always been fascinating to me.
[3:55]But in the germination stage of the book, I was reading a lot of architectural theory
[4:00]and books on aesthetics.
[4:01]So I was reading Lake Hombusier and Bachelard, the book, The Poetics of Space that pops
[4:06]up overtly in the novel and then Tanazaki's and Praise of Shadows.
[4:11]So I was just immersing myself really in these ideas.
[4:15]And at the time, I was also really interested in the work of this artist James Terrell,
[4:19]who talks a lot about perception and his medium is light specifically.
[4:23]But I was living in New Orleans when I started writing the book and took a few trips
[4:27]to Houston where there was one of James Terrell's sky spaces.
[4:31]And for anyone that's not familiar with them, there are these structures and the one in Houston
[4:37]at Rice University is built on a small hill.
[4:40]And there's this seating oriented beneath this flat ceiling with a square cut out.
[4:45]And it brings the sky down to your level and sort of alters your relationship to space.
[4:50]So he talks a lot about how we create these realities that we live in and that perception
[4:54]is really an important aspect of how we exist in the world.
[5:00]And I was really interested in that idea of creating our own realities, especially as it
[5:04]relates to our homes and the spaces we live in.
[5:07]I think our homes and how we configure them say a lot about who we are and what we value.
[5:13]So like the books on our table, our coffee table, say something about us, how we arrange
[5:17]the plates and our cabinets, say something about us.
[5:19]So we really do construct these little worlds and realities.
[5:23]And I think that's really rich fodder for fiction.
[5:27]So I'm hoping that the way I arrange the stuff inside my pantry cabinet says nothing
[5:33]about me because you don't even want to look at like the food, like oh my gosh, plates
[5:39]I think plates are okay, plates are stacked, that's pretty simple, but pantry.
[5:44]Yeah.
[5:45]I loved how you structured the book and then in the beginning it was more about the
[5:49]characters and then you went into each room, each chapter is named after a certain room.
[5:54]And the theme of making your own house like per the title and everything course through
[5:58]everything, but really it was just the stage on which you had the characters live sort
[6:02]of play out.
[6:03]How did you come up with the idea for the structure of it and also the alternating viewpoints
[6:07]of the different characters?
[6:08]Yeah.
[6:09]So the alternating viewpoints in the structure of the book as a whole is really evolved
[6:13]significantly over time before I started working with my agent, each character section
[6:18]was presented in full before moving on to another character sort of section or life.
[6:23]So for example, the Chloe section was one novella length piece.
[6:28]So the dining room chapter would lead directly into the kitchen chapter, which would lead
[6:32]directly into the next chapter.
[6:34]So you got a full character in one big chunk.
[6:37]And then my agent really helped me to establish this structure and make this critical structural
[6:42]choice in weaving the narratives together.
[6:45]And I realize how much richer Chloe's narrative or bows narrative is or are when you take
[6:52]them as these like pieces, these threads that are sort of interacting with one another.
[6:57]And you see how their concerns are really of a piece and that I think there's a certain
[7:02]universality to this idea of making a home that we all sort of want to do that and all
[7:07]the characters are trying to do that in their own way.
[7:10]And I think that woven structure really conveys that message.
[7:13]As far as the rooms individually, I'm not sure where that exactly came from.
[7:19]It just felt organic and sort of an appropriate way of sort of engaging with the ideas
[7:26]like your romantic relationship, a bedroom, the bathroom you share with your significant
[7:30]other, these sort of ideas and things you think about in those rooms, it just seemed like
[7:35]a natural way of approaching these subjects by engaging with the rooms themselves.
[7:40]So you seem like a total pro in terms of all the thought that went behind it and the
[7:45]research.
[7:46]And yet this is your debut novel.
[7:48]Did you just decide I want to write a novel?
[7:50]Like where did this even come from in your life?
[7:52]I never decided consciously to write a novel.
[7:56]I thought as a writer, I would never write a novel.
[7:58]If you look at my other work, I write really short things and I really like the short
[8:03]sort of micro length work and what that can do.
[8:06]So it was really an accident that this happened and I have never certainly renovated
[8:12]a home or even owned a home.
[8:13]And I think it's more an idea that I would like to engage with one day in a real way.
[8:19]But yeah, I think I was just like I said earlier just thinking about a lot of these things
[8:23]and obsessing over them and then it grew from a story into a novella into a novel.
[8:29]So it sort of felt like I sort of felt inevitable, which I think is, I think a healthy
[8:35]way to write a novel.
[8:36]I don't know.
[8:37]It never never felt forced.
[8:38]I wasn't trying to write a novel.
[8:39]It just happened.
[8:40]So.
[8:41]Excellent.
[8:42]And let's talk a little more about the book.
[8:44]There's this one long quote that I just have to read if you don't mind.
[8:47]This is in the chapter from Ayumi, your quote is, okay, for those that didn't have
[8:51]happy childhoods, there are two ways to parent if you choose to enter motherhood and
[8:55]you put that with a capital M.
[8:57]You can hammer into your own child the lessons you were forced to learn, spanking the way
[9:01]you were spanked, refusing to doubt the way your parents refused to doubt on you to show
[9:05]the child the world is cyclical and that you don't deserve anything better than what you
[9:08]yourself got from your mother and father or you, the parent with the unhappy child, you
[9:12]can say, I'm going to give this child everything I didn't have and you will commit entirely
[9:17]to this thing.
[9:18]You will give everything to this child, to this role of mother capital M, even at the expense
[9:22]of your own personal gratification and independence because what matters is showing your
[9:26]child that not all people are hopeless, that things can be good.
[9:29]They can.
[9:30]You can choose the second option because you understand you can never forget the childhood.
[9:34]You are delivered.
[9:35]Wow.
[9:36]So it talks to me more about this passage and where this idea of taking your childhood
[9:43]into your parenting came from.
[9:45]I know you don't have kids of your own, like where did this whole thing is you have
[9:48]a lot about conscious decision making as a mother and why the capital is.
[9:54]I think this is an idea that I sort of assembled from observing my own.
[10:00]when parents and the way that they were parented
[10:02]and then the way that they parented my brother and I,
[10:05]my mother's adopted and I think the child who is,
[10:10]an adopted child or someone who is adopted
[10:12]has a unique perspective on motherhood or parenthood.
[10:16]I talk about motherhood a lot more in the book
[10:18]than about fatherhood, so I'll just say motherhood here.
[10:22]So that relationship or that dynamic was always interesting
[10:27]to me and then I think my father similarly had,
[10:29]not similarly, but in his own way,
[10:30]had a difficult relationship with his parents.
[10:33]So I think I just sort of gleaned that mothering
[10:37]and parenthood was never something
[10:38]that you just sort of fell into,
[10:40]that there are sort of choices to be made
[10:43]and whether constantly or not,
[10:45]I think we decide to parent a certain way of we humans,
[10:49]not me, as you said, I don't have children,
[10:51]but, and so I think that I saw parents
[10:54]who had poor childhoods or difficult childhoods
[10:57]either parent in a sort of vindictive way
[11:01]or a sort of iterative way,
[11:02]like things need to continue on this pattern
[11:05]because I was treated this way,
[11:07]I will continue to act this way.
[11:08]This is the model of passing down from one parent to another
[11:13]and then maybe on the other side of things,
[11:16]like a parent who will parent in a merciful way,
[11:19]like I want to make this better,
[11:21]I want to show my child that you can have a happy childhood
[11:25]and grow up and have hope.
[11:27]So, I mean, I think in the book,
[11:28]I made it a little more black and white
[11:30]than in reality for the sake of fiction,
[11:32]but yeah, it's an idea that's really compelling to me
[11:36]of the ideas we inherit from the way we were parented
[11:39]and how we can pass those on
[11:41]in our own parenting styles for our children.
[11:43]But I suppose you're a mother
[11:44]and I don't know if it's fair to ask you like,
[11:45]what is compelling about that concept to you
[11:48]or can you relate to that?
[11:49]I can absolutely relate to that
[11:51]because I'm always like, my mother,
[11:54]even something as simple as eating, right?
[11:56]Like, my mother used to hide chocolate chucukis
[11:59]on a higher shelf so I couldn't reach them.
[12:01]So now I'm like, I have,
[12:03]we have cookies for breakfast over here.
[12:05]I mean, like things that she restricted,
[12:07]I want to make sure I never restrict.
[12:09]So some of the things are conscious, yes.
[12:11]And like the things that hurt you,
[12:13]you overcompensate perhaps and not doing the same things.
[12:17]I'm sure I've made other mistakes that my kids
[12:20]will then compensate by doing the opposite with their kids,
[12:23]but it's all, I agree, it's like a cycle.
[12:26]It just, the importance you gave to the mother
[12:29]with the unhappy childhood
[12:31]and the decision to parent a certain way.
[12:34]I don't know, I just thought that was really cool.
[12:36]Like, Barry, you know,
[12:38]it's nice to have a literary interpretation
[12:40]of my everyday life.
[12:41]And so I liked it.
[12:44]So back to this homemaking aspect of the book,
[12:47]Chloe, who's the daughter,
[12:48]who then grows up and has her own story, the novella.
[12:51]She doubts herself and her ability to make a home,
[12:53]which I think also a lot of people can relate to
[12:55]and she thinks,
[12:56]some women do this all their lives.
[12:58]Iron, rear, sweep, wash, fold, brush, wipe.
[13:01]For the entirety of their adult lives, they make homes.
[13:04]They make other people, they make families,
[13:05]but no one talks about how difficult it is.
[13:07]I don't think it's any easier for a woman
[13:09]with a pretty husband and a pretty six-year-old daughter.
[13:11]Beneath the prettiness, we are all a mess.
[13:14]We are all struggling.
[13:15]We do not know how to make a home.
[13:17]This is how you feel in any way.
[13:18]I know you're not aspiring necessarily
[13:21]to create this per se in your life right now.
[13:24]But do you think we're all a mess?
[13:26]Do you feel like you're a mess?
[13:27]I think that we're all have a lot more going on
[13:31]than we make it seem like, perhaps.
[13:34]And I think that the domestic realm
[13:36]is just a really rich sort of arena
[13:38]for engaging with a range of issues.
[13:41]So I remember as a younger writer talking with this novelist
[13:47]who her, she's a fiction writer for its stories
[13:49]and novels, but she, her first book was really about
[13:51]sort of stereotypically masculine issues of work
[13:55]and violence and things like that.
[13:57]And it was much celebrated.
[13:59]And then she spoke about having a child
[14:01]and after that and how her life became breastfeeding
[14:03]and the sort of typical things that have to do
[14:05]with the domestic life and how she as a writer
[14:08]felt sort of crippled by the fact that maybe her new life
[14:11]wasn't rich enough for fiction or something.
[14:14]And I thought that was really interesting idea
[14:18]for a female writer to grapple with.
[14:20]And I felt I empathize with that a little bit as well.
[14:22]And obviously I've come to terms with it
[14:24]and began to understand that, you know,
[14:28]these are a really rich sources for fiction
[14:31]and for narrative and that our lives are extremely complicated
[14:34]even like, you know, when we invite someone over
[14:36]to our house and how we present ourselves
[14:39]when we open the door and how we engage at our kitchen table
[14:42]is like these little mannerisms that we share
[14:44]and the things that we do in our homes are really complex
[14:47]and nuanced and worthy of digging into.
[14:51]So yeah, I don't think messy,
[14:54]I don't mean messy necessarily the worst way
[14:56]but I think just messy in that it's like complicated
[14:58]and yes, this is where I keep using rich.
[15:00]So I guess if lives weren't complicated,
[15:03]we wouldn't have all these great books, right?
[15:05]If everybody just had like a perfect simple life,
[15:07]there'd be nothing fun to read about.
[15:09]And yeah, I'm sorry to talk about her anyway.
[15:13]This one sentence struck me as just so sad
[15:16]when you have this couple moving into their first home
[15:20]and building it together.
[15:21]And you say part of building a house
[15:23]necessitates living in denial
[15:25]that it could ever fall apart.
[15:27]I feel like you just like took a sledgehammer
[15:29]on the like housewarming party, housewarming,
[15:33]like happiness and you know,
[15:36]it's like pointing out that everybody get,
[15:37]half of people get divorced on the wedding day
[15:39]or something, you know, it's like a sad reality, right?
[15:42]So how do you come to terms with the fact
[15:44]that people are always making homes?
[15:46]And yes, that's what happens.
[15:49]Yeah, I mean, I think this building a home
[15:51]is just a great metaphor for like building a relationship
[15:54]with someone, you know, it's in similar ways.
[15:56]You can't buy a house thinking about all the work
[15:59]you're gonna have to put into it.
[16:00]And otherwise I feel like no one would ever do it.
[16:02]And same way with a relationship,
[16:04]you can't go in thinking about the potential for abandonment
[16:07]and all these things like get a certain point
[16:09]if it comes to self-fuling prophecy, right?
[16:11]Like you can't, you have to just go into it
[16:14]being hopeful.
[16:15]So I just think it's an appropriate metaphor
[16:17]for relationship building.
[16:19]And I guess I don't see it totally in a totally bleak way,
[16:22]but it's more like you just have to be optimistic.
[16:25]Yeah, right.
[16:25]It's true.
[16:26]I guess it's how you go into it, right?
[16:28]Yeah.
[16:29]So can you give me a little more background about you?
[16:32]Like where did you grow up and how did you end up
[16:35]where you are now and like your education,
[16:37]how writing came into it and just how we ended up
[16:41]scribed together today, sort of?
[16:44]I did grow up in Virginia.
[16:45]I grew up in the suburbs of DC
[16:48]and I studied at the University of Virginia
[16:51]and I actually didn't really start writing
[16:55]in an active way until probably my freshman or sophomore year
[16:58]of college.
[16:59]I went into university thinking I would go into politics
[17:03]and that was an IR major and then made this shift to English.
[17:07]I took a creative writing workshop
[17:09]and then it sort of just took on a life of its own, I suppose.
[17:12]So I did somewhat of the traditional route.
[17:16]I did do an MFA in Louisiana,
[17:19]which I finished actually a year ago somehow,
[17:22]but I took some time off about five years
[17:24]and I was just living in New Orleans
[17:26]and New York City and meandering about for a little bit.
[17:30]And that's sort of what took me to this place now.
[17:33]Excellent.
[17:34]And now that you've written this first novel,
[17:36]well, first of all, so you got an agent,
[17:38]how did you end up with your agent and all that?
[17:41]I think since I was an undergrad,
[17:43]I've just been publishing stories
[17:45]and I have a website and had a story up there
[17:49]and my agent found it and found my email
[17:51]and reached out to me.
[17:52]So sort of the most fortuitous way
[17:54]of things working out with an agent.
[17:56]So we talked and it just seemed to be a really good fit.
[17:59]She's a really great editor
[18:01]and that was really important to me
[18:03]in working with an agent.
[18:05]Not just someone who would find the book,
[18:07]package it and sell it,
[18:07]but someone who would actually engage
[18:09]and really understand what I was trying to do with the work.
[18:11]And so Kylie, Kylie Raymond, she's really great.
[18:14]So she found me and where you've been together
[18:17]a year and a half or something like that.
[18:19]And how do you feel about the book coming out?
[18:22]I know it's a long process, but it's anxiety inducing
[18:26]as they have the least.
[18:27]But I'm trying to be grateful
[18:30]and excited at the same time
[18:31]though the gut reaction is just fear.
[18:35]Are you working on anything else now?
[18:37]I am working on a few different things.
[18:39]I'm working on stories
[18:41]and I'm working on a longer nonfiction book project.
[18:44]But that's at a very early stage
[18:47]and I think I'm just trying to prepare
[18:50]for the book launch in February.
[18:52]So that's kind of occupying most of my mental space.
[18:56]We're better or worse.
[18:57]Do you have any advice for aspiring authors?
[19:00]It seems like a lot of,
[19:02]you're making it seem pretty easy, right?
[19:04]Like, oh, the novel just, I mean, it sounds in a way
[19:07]like it organically unfolded and then the agent came to you
[19:10]and now you have this beautiful novel that's coming out
[19:12]and what was like the hardest part?
[19:15]What part did you really struggle with along the way?
[19:17]Tell me, give me some of the pain that went into this.
[19:21]Well, I don't mean to make it seem easy.
[19:24]I think also I was very lucky
[19:27]and that a lot of this process is locked honestly.
[19:30]The painful part of it is,
[19:33]I think just writing for years in a vacuum
[19:35]and thinking that no one will ever read anything
[19:39]and just like, you know,
[19:40]it's not exactly the most lucrative career path.
[19:43]So I think you're sort of just working away
[19:46]in a room by yourself for years on end
[19:48]and you feel sort of like a mad woman
[19:50]and then one day it may or may not click,
[19:53]it did click for me.
[19:54]So to go back to your original question
[19:57]about advice for younger writers.
[20:00]sort of aspiring writers, I think that I would just say that you just need to write consistently
[20:06]and sort of take any advice you get with a grain of salts. I think there's, especially now
[20:12]there's just so much out there of craft essays, but then like the Twitter conversations and then
[20:17]people telling you what you shouldn't do when you should publish what magazines you should publish
[20:21]in and all of this. And I think it can be really overwhelming. It was for me as a younger writer.
[20:26]And oftentimes I think it made me feel like I didn't fit the mold and therefore would never be
[20:32]a real writer, whatever that means. So I think just trying to ignore as much of that as possible,
[20:39]taking what you find useful obviously and being open to criticism certainly, but also just writing
[20:44]and believing what you do and keeping at it and also reading. Reading a lot, reading as much as
[20:49]possible, but that's probably my best advice for writers. And just one other question on something
[20:55]you mentioned that your mother had been adopted. When she read this book, I'm saying, has she read
[21:00]this book? I shouldn't assume. Yes, she read, yes, yes. And how did she feel about it given her own
[21:05]experience? It was a conversation I had with her. I took some elements from my life in her life
[21:13]and put it in the book and I was nervous about that, but my mother and I have a really good
[21:18]relationship and I think you'd have to ask her how she feels about it. But I think probably a mix
[21:24]of emotions like I have about the book, but overall she is very proud of me and of the work
[21:31]and I think happy with the product. She's not angry at me in other words. Good, well that's good.
[21:36]It's always good when our moms are not angry. That's always a good day. Great, well thank you so
[21:41]much for coming in, mom. Don't have time to read books. Thank you so much. It's been great to
[21:45]an honor. I love you. You've been listening to moms don't have time to read books with
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