THE LITBLOG CO-OP

LBC Podcast #3: Gina Frangello

Nominator:  Kassia Kroszer

Nominee: My Sister's Continent, Gina Frangello

Subjects Discussed: Margaret Atwood, violence, Freud's "Dora" study, Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres, psychoanalytical theories in the 90s, Erica Jong's Fear of Flying, unreliable narrators, epigraphs, the presence of current events, hysteria, Ayn Rand, the influence of Kathy Acker, the "viciousness" of the sexuality, the influence of contemporary music, Nine Inch Nails, writing about Chicago in Amsterdam, shopping the book around, and chick lit vs. edgy fiction. 

Backup Link: (MP3)

(A co-production of the LBC and The Bat Segundo Show.)

Interview with Gina Frangello

The following is an interview with Gina Frangello, author of My Sister's Continent.  She is also the Executive Editor of Other Voices literary journal and their new fiction imprint OV Books.  Gina lives in Chicago with her husband and three children.  Her website is www.ginafrangello.com and the Other Voices website is www.othervoicesmagazine.org. 



Dan:

Hello Gina.  Thanks again for taking some time from what sounds like a pretty busy schedule to answer some questions.

Gina:

It’s my pleasure.  Carving out time away from my two-month-old son is about as difficult as rocket science these days, but it’s refreshing to take some time to talk about literature!  Of course, I’ll probably be taking several breaks to nurse—one great plus of the Internet!

Dan:

Let's start off with your writing.  Your debut novel, My Sister's Continent, was published by Chiasmus Press in February.  How long a process was it for you to write, get an offer, edit and so on?

Gina:

Well, this is a really complicated question when it comes to my novel, because My Sister’s Continent grew out of a series of short stories, that grew out of a much earlier attempt at a novel.  The short answer is that the novel took four years to write—but the longer, more accurate answer is that I began writing about Kirby and Kendra in 1993, thirteen years before My Sister’s Continent’s release.  In the earliest version of their story, they were fraternal twins and it was a very Gen X kind of novel, full of their twentysomething friends and all these subplots about the Chicago bar and café culture.  Kendra was a struggling writer—Kirby’s fiancé, Aris, owned a café.  The sisters’ parents were more minor characters, although the sexual abuse storyline was actually much more explicit and black and white in that version.  Michael Kelsey was a smaller character too, and his ex-wife and daughter never made an appearance in that story.  That novel, which was called Angry Words, never really left my drawer, but it did convince me to defect from my budding career as a therapist—I was working in New Hampshire and Vermont at the time with battered women and foster girls with abuse histories—and instead to go to graduate school for creative writing.  I started the novel the year I got married, and the following year my husband and I moved back to Chicago, where I’d grown up, and I started the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois at Chicago

A couple of years later, I started writing a series of stories about Kendra and Michael.  Most were in first person from Kendra’s point of view, and a few were third person from Michael’s perspective.  In these stories, Kirby was a minor player, rarely mentioned.  I think she only makes an appearance in one of the published stories.  In it, she’s already out as a lesbian and living with her girlfriend.  I wrote quite a few of these stories and published at least 5 of them in magazines . . . but the problem was that when I tried to compile them into a novel-in-stories, they felt a little claustrophobic.  Kendra’s voice was just too intense—it worked for a short story, but not something book length.

Then in the late 90’s, I was teaching lit at UIC and I devised a class that would draw on my previous background in psychology—I called it “The Hysterics in Literature.”  In that class, we read Freud’s “Dora” case study, Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, as the introductory “novella,” and went on to talk about other famous hysterics, like King Lear.  But when I was reading the Dora case, I was so blown away by similarities to the short stories I’d been writing that I started conceptualizing the novel as a kind of contemporary retelling of Freud—similar to the way Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres is to King Lear.  Instead of trying to compile the stories, I started from scratch, and chose Kirby as the overarching narrator, because I thought she would be a more approachable “guide” for the reader. 

The publishing question is a whole other one.  I found an agent in 2002, a really funny, smart agent whom I adored and who was having great successes with other clients, but he couldn’t sell my book.  Editors kept freaking out.  One, at Houghton-Mifflin, allegedly told him, “I had to keep putting this novel down and leaving the room, it was so disturbing.”  Another editor said, “I couldn’t explain this novel to a marketing rep without blushing or breaking down.”  A couple of editors at the more literary big houses tried to champion the novel, but were always overruled by higher-ups.  So the writing seemed on the wall that MSC wasn’t a mainstream novel—or that at the very least the corporate publishing world didn’t want it to be one—but my agent wasn’t interested in submitting to the independents.  A lot of agents aren’t because there’s no money in it, and distribution is small, and publicity can be nearly nonexistent.  My agent wanted me to write a new novel, and figured once we sold that, we’d return to My Sister’s Continent.  I went along with his plan—but in 2005 his agency dissolved and I was suddenly faced with having to look for new representation.  Instead of sending My Sister’s Continent to agents all over again, I sent it to three independent publishers, one of which was Chiasmus.  It was accepted within the week.

Dan:

With all the indie presses out there, how did you decide to submit to Chiasmus?

On Twins and Freud

[Gwenda enters] I'm also in the "haven't read Freud in ages" camp. I believe the last time I did was for Psych 101; the instructor -- who was so in the throes of menopause the windows were kept open during November -- kicked off the course with the declaration: "I'm here to tell you there's no such thing as penis envy, but there is breast envy." Half the guys dropped the next day.

Anyway. The dark sexual aspects of the novel are definitely a huge part of its appeal. One of the things that most sticks out to me is the way in which Kirby talks about sex, and in general, throughout. She's very matter-of-fact and acidly funny. I think maybe that's why the voice initially scanned as masculine for you, Jeff -- we don't often get this kind of female narrator. What really makes Kirby's voice interesting though, is how constrained she is in many other ways, compared to Kendra. It's that tug of war that makes her so complex. Ultimately, it's Kirby's anger at the "case study" that seems to have freed her to really explore her sister's continent, herself and all the family secrets.

A little sidenote: I think this novel would make a great counterpoint to read alongside my other favorite dark female twins novel of last year, Marcy Dermansky's Twins. And then there's that great Stacey Richter short story Twin Study from a few years ago. What is it about twins that lends them to such witty exploration of female relationships? Is it because as Kirby asserts "identical twins are mutants"?

[CAAF strolls onstage] It’s funny you mention Dermanksy’s Twins, Gwenda. I’ve been thinking what a dream syllabus one could put together around My Sister’s Continent, and I had Twins on the list. Also, Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, which I recently reread and which struck me as being a model novel of female hysteria, complete with sexual repression, a fraught female friendship, and episodes of fugue-like disassociation — all the great Freudian underpinnings, minus only a case of serious bubbling bowels (as poor Kirby suffers — her bowels being, as Jeff pointed out in an email, the novel’s most truthful character). Also, Sarah Waters’ Fingersmith, Mary Gaitskill’s Two Girls Fat and Thin; what others?

Kassia, you asked what we first noticed about the book. The dark sexy aspects did stand out for me as well (to the extent that I’m currently agitating behind the scenes for an amendment to the LBC charter, to be called the Frangello Rule, that would mandate that we read at least one (1) dark sexy book (DSB) per season). More seriously: I think my thoughts were something along the lines of what you say, Gwenda, we don’t often get female narrators like this: So acid and intelligent. Or if we do get one, they are usually British and past the age of 50. Not 20-something, in Chicago, cracking jokes about French theory and having massive attacks of diarrhea in their loft as their fiancé sits bemused on the other side of the door, thumbing through his copy of The Fountainhead (another great sub-joke of the book).

Gwenda, I love your point about the wit of using twins to explore female relationships; it can work like a shorthand for the intense physicality and identification of certain female friendships. It also seems witty in terms of Freudian theory. If Freud gave us a submerged self, then a twin is a sort of manifest of that — our other self floated up to the surface.

[Kassia] I think the use of twins to explore the complexity of female relationships works very well here. Also by playing with the good twin/bad twin (or Madonna/whore) stereotypes, we're also reminded that so often sexual behavior serves as character definition. It is often curious to me how women in novels cannot simply enjoy sex or have a healthy relationship with their bodies. It is even more curious that in this day and age, we see such direct, frank words from a female narrator as unique and refreshing. Real women are blunt to the extreme, yet fictional women never seem to equal their peers.

(As for amending the LBC charter, I believe a simple quorum is required).

Getting back to Jeff's question and at the risk of sounding overly Clintonian, I guess it depends on what the meaning of truth is. I think that Kirby constructed a reality that both opened her eyes to the secrets that have held her family hostage *and* allowed her to move on with her life. She ends up in a comfortable, if not happy, place, so to her she has a truth. I am reminded of a woman I know whose husband committed suicide. She found the body. She made the necessary phone calls. And she lives her life as if none of it ever happened. She has constructed a reality that allows her to remain sane.

Kirby's use of Schrodinger's cat as an example exposes the tenuous nature of truth and reality reminds us that no story is told without bias. In this book, we have an unreliable narrator being filtered through an unreliable narrator, and that makes me wonder which character in this book is the most trustworthy?

[Jeff] Well, I would say Kirby's bowels but they seemed to play too fast and loose with poor Kirby to be completely trustworthy. So I'm going to throw a vote out there for Aris. Sure, he had his moment of indiscretion but eventually came to--or out of--his senses when he sees Kendra's bruises. Or so that's the story we get through Kirby's reading of Kendra. Honestly, though, I'm not sure that I find any of the characters trustworthy. How about you?

[Kassia] Gives new meaning to trusting your gut, huh? I think you're right in suggesting that every character in this story, even as filtered through the eyes of Kendra and Kirby, has something to hide. My first thought when I tossed out this idea was that Leigh Kelsey won my vote, but maybe because I just loved the way Gina Frangello described this woman. After the waifish Kendra and somewhat frumpy Kirby and even the mouse-like mother, we're treated to a true woman. I just loved this: "Towering over me by half a foot, with blatantly D-cup cleavage and full, apple-hips, the specter of her was even more impressive within the confined delicacy of the shop. Some women, even at forty, especially at forty, are just too beautiful."

[CAAF] As Kassia mentioned, the 150th anniversary of Freud’s birthday was this weekend. The Independent has a piece on his legacy (link courtesy of Jeff, incidentally), which includes this apropos bit:

It is, in fact, writers and artists who are continuing to keep the Freudian flame alive. For AS Byatt, it has been a love-hate relationship. As an undergraduate at Cambridge, she was hugely irritated by "amateur psychotherapists who told you that things were about resistance or penis envy", but the writing itself was a revelation. It was, she explained in a panel discussion with the poet and critic Al Alvarez, while working on the novels of Iris Murdoch that she fell in love with the man she had previously dismissed as a bore. Murdoch's novels are, she said, "patterned on Freudian descriptions of the self", a concept she found "very exciting". "I don't think I work like that at all," she confessed, "but I started to love Freud when I read Beyond the Pleasure Principle. I loved it for its strong pessimism. Most of all, I love Freud for his quickness of understanding of metaphor and language and illusion. I love the way he understands how fairy tales work in the mind."

Freud wrote, according to the German psychoanalyst and Freud scholar, Ilse Grubrich-Simitis, with a big, fat fountain pen on large sheets of paper, specially cut to size. He needed to have plenty of white space around the words. He also needed a fog of cigar smoke and a cluster of Egyptian and Roman statuettes. These factors together provided an appropriate air of solemnity to help him overcome his dread of the (sorry, but inescapably phallic) pen. He wrote quickly, once he started, with few corrections. Lacking, at least until 1919, much sense of the demands of posterity, he chucked out his handwritten versions as soon as the typed ones appeared. It was a process that clearly owed more to religious ritual than to the scientific method.

"Freud," said Alvarez in the discussion with Byatt, "was writing rather like a novelist, creating a form and significance out of the chaos of theunconscious.”

Truth Reality and Evil Therapists

This week, we're celebrating Spring nominee My Sister's Continent through song and dance--okay, no song, no dance (though it would be somewhat appropriate). But lots of words, from discussions to guest-blogging by the book's author, Gina Frangello, interviews, and a podcast. Jeff Bryant and I opened up a discussion of the book over the weekend -- others will be adding their insights as well.

[Kassia] Having decided once was enough when it comes to Freud (hey, today's his birthday!), I haven't read the "Dora" case study, and I suspect that's just fine. However, anytime you add dear Sigmund to the mix, the topic of sex is rarely far behind. When I went back and read some reviews of My Sister's Continent, many focused on the dark sexual aspects of this novel -- which made me wonder if I was reading something else. When you think back to your first impressions of this novel, what stands out in your mind?

[Jeff] The dark sex definitely stands out but not as the reason that I really liked this book. For me, this was the one book of the current LBC selections that I couldn't put down. I was fascinated by the story from the beginning, including its relationship to Freud's "Dora." It had been a while since my last read of Dora but I did recall some of the parts of the case study that were relevant to this story: the adulterous relationship by the father, the hints of sexual abuse by the father, the seeming failure of the part of the therapist to cure the patient. If I remember correctly, Freud diagnosed Dora with hysteria, which could be an interesting subject for a later question. Anyway, back to my first impression, I'll say that it took some pages into the novel before I figured out the gender of the narrator, Kirby. Am I the only one?

[Kassia] I got a real female vibe from Kirby right from the beginning (maybe it was the mention of unshaven armpits on the first page -- we're so weird about body hair on women in this country that the reference could only come from a female, at least to my way of thinking). I'm glad you mentioned the failed therapy. My first thought was that it was a tick, a way of getting into the story, but the more I considered the whole novel, I realized that Kirby's initially emotional response to the therapist's presumption that she could even do a case study was critical. That was the only way Kirby would be able to face the reality of her family. Kendra dealt with the dark secrets of her family through increasingly masochistic acts; Kirby pretended everything was normal. Both approaches were physically (and emotionally) violent. Would Kirby have ever faced the truth without the therapist's "help"?

And, yeah, we should get back to they hysteria notion...

[Jeff] I think my confusion over gender was more just a close reading deficiency. I missed the underarm thing and the whole "identical twin" mention in the first few pages, I suppose. But there is something about the confrontational tone of the narrator or even the nature of her confrontation that had me reading "maleness" into the voice early on. Anyway, did Kirby really face the truth, since in reality she was doing it through writing what had been left unwritten, or as she puts it in her opening letter "to construct from the rubble of her clues and my own subconscious a version more whole than the divergent realities we each clung to that final year." I guess the therapist brought out the narrative, but do you think that Kirby ever really got to the truth?

Discover the answer in Part Two, coming later today!

MY SISTER'S CONTINENT by Gina Frangello

There is nothing in this world more brutal than family. Nobody can twist the knife like a parent or sibling. The attacks come from all angles, and you never know whether to duck and cover or join in the fray.

I always laugh when women talk about sisterhood like it's a kumbyah thing. It can be, sometimes. And sometimes it's a war. Yet even when you swear you hate each other, the fact of the matter is your sister would do anything to save your life. And that brings us to Gina Frangello's My Sister's Continent, my nomination for Spring 2006.

Two years after her twin sister disappeared, Kirby Braun tries to piece together the truth of her sister's life. Kendra returned home just as Kirby entered therapy to deal with what is apparently a case of serious pre-wedding jitters. Kendra's very presence unleashes chaos, shattering the veneer of the Braun family. Without their glossy All-American surface, this family cannot hold together.

My Sister's Continent is a contemporary reworking of Sigmund Freud's "Dora" case study. As Kirby digs into her sister's journals, she discovers ugly truths about Kendra's world -- and the source of her twin's penchant for multiple types of masochism. Each layer of Kendra's life reveals another secret. While Kirby discovers her true self in her exploration, she learns the secrets that lead to Kendra's ultimate act of self-destruction.

A description of My Sister's Continent cannot do the story, the writing, the raw edges justice. This is a book that requires reading to appreciate the frankness and violence. And what better place to start than with an introduction:

Like most siblings, Kendra and I went to school, took family vacations. We separated when she went away to New York while I remained behind, close to our parents, whose sole attention was finally mine. Had she never moved back to Chicago at all (as was her intent), everything would have turned out differently. She did return, and we welcomed her, a prodigal daughter who, as always, would frighten us a bit but make our lives more interesting. My father, mother, and I, who had always formed a tentative union against her impropriety. Her impropriety. Mild by most standards: she was neither junkie nor criminal—not even prone to interracial dating or homosexuality. We were a tame family, and her small-scale rebellions, such as they had been, were enough to keep us awed and ill at ease. We worshipped her, and resented one another for it. Or do I misremember everything? You had known us, some of us, for a decade. No doubt there were demons to which you became privy that even now I cannot glean.

The storm that had been brewing in my family for that entire decade, though, did not officially hit until the November of my twenty-second year. The world was approaching a millennium. Nuclear weapons were becoming popular again. America had divided along lines of those who believed Bill Clinton the devil, and those who thought the devil to be Kenneth Starr. In a recently gentrified area of Chicago, in a newly constructed loft, I was living with my longtime boyfriend, Aris. Aris and I were getting married. Everyone was happy about the engagement. Everyone likes weddings, particularly when they are expected. My engagement ring was quite big. Aris made a good living considering his age, which was twenty-six, but the ring was a family heirloom, so neither of us was responsible for its grandeur. Since getting the ring, I had taken to polishing my nails. They were short and stubby, but looked reasonably nice if I didn't paint all the way to the sides—just a slash of red to elongate. I'd learned the trick from my mother, who despite her devotion to God, always managed to know such worldly details. Because my sister lived far away, in a universe where the ghost of Balanchine was the only parent a ballerina required, I was often able to receive the full brunt of my mother's considerable wisdom.

Kendra did not approve of my engagement. She found me, I assumed, a pathetic sell-out to some lofty, unspecified goal that marriage at an early age would surely thwart. Luckily, nobody much cared what she thought, since she rarely came home, and the fanatical rigor of her life, with its accompanying dismissal of love as a lower art form, made us squirm. All we required was that, come the following October, she dutifully don a maid of honor's dress that would not outshine my restored, Victorian wedding gown, and give a well-mannered toast before getting sloshed. Then she'd be free to seduce a groomsman or glare at my new husband as she chose.

First, however, before my father would fork over the requisite miniature fortune for my century-old dress, he insisted I make an appointment with his former psychiatrist (that'd be you) about the matter of my diarrhea. Mere vomiting he might have understood: we all have delicate stomachs in my family, and somebody or other was always throwing up in the bathroom, the car, along the side of the road. Even my mother began to suffer from nausea the longer she was exposed to my father's lineage, as if having borne my sister and me was enough to transmit our shortcomings into her purer blood. But diarrhea was another thing entirely. Vomit is bad, but shit transcends all boundaries of good taste.

Come back the week of May 8 to join in the discussion about My Sister's Continent. Gina Frangello will be guest blogging, Ed's put together a great podcast, and we'll be talking about the book. A lot.