Atticus Lish revisits painful memories
His new novel is an emotional tribute to his mother, who struggled with ALS
When Atticus Lish published his 2014 novel “Preparation for the Next Life,” it was both a surprise … and somehow not. In his early 40s at the time, Lish had already confounded expectations by dropping out of Harvard to take a job at a foam factory in Gardena, work at a hot dog joint and serve a brief stint in the Marines.
So yes, it was surprising when his novel — about an illegal immigrant, a Uighur woman from China, and her unlikely romance as she struggles to find her footing in America — appeared, earning rave reviews and won the Pen/Faulkner Award for fiction.
On the other hand, Lish, who moved to Pasadena in July, was born to privilege — “I probably had two silver spoons in my mouth” — and not just the financial kind that sent him to boarding school and Harvard (to which he eventually returned and graduated from): His father, Gordon Lish is the renowned (and sometimes controversial editor) of writers like Raymond Carver and Don DeLillo (the latter even used some lines of 9-year-old Atticus’ writing in his 1982 novel, “The Names”). It is clear, however, that Lish spent a fair amount of time rebelling against his comfortable circumstances.
And that has never been more true than with his new novel, “The War for Gloria,” which arrived in stores Sept. 7. The book, filled with powerful, emotionally draining scenes, tells the story of a working-class single mom, Gloria, and her son Corey, who have formed a tight unit as they struggle to get by — they have to live out of a car briefly — and how that unit comes under attack when Gloria is diagnosed with Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, more commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease, and Corey’s irresponsible father invades their lives.
Lish’s mother, Barbara, died at age 56 in 1994, after an eight-year struggle with ALS. It was a devastating blow to Lish, exacerbated by the way he felt he mishandled his mother’s final days and also by the book his father wrote about it. Gordon Lish’s novel, “Epigraph,” tackles his wife’s decline and death that deals with his grief in a more oblique and ironic, post-modern manner: An Esquire review called it “a stinking belch in the austere sanctuary of sorrow.” The father and son were estranged for many years after Barbara’s death.
Atticus Lish spoke by Zoom recently about “The War for Gloria” and the emotional core of the story. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q
You were obviously born into very different circumstances than your characters in both books. Is this a conscious decision to explore these different worlds?
A
I tried to go with not so much what I know but with what had a magnetic pull for me. It’s not so much the facts as it’s what the story feels like. I wasn’t actually homeless in my mother’s car. But when I think of my childhood, it feels like being isolated with my mother in a car, with the other member of that nuclear family as an outsider, a sort of shadow who would visit once in a while. So the story is more psychologically accurate than factually accurate.
Q
Early on, the book has a slippery sense of narrative perspective as it shifts between Corey and Gloria, who are such a tight unit. As their lives diverge, the shifts become clearer. Was that a conscious decision?
A
I was aware of that wobbling in the beginning, and I was worried that I wasn’t focusing in on a particular angle of attack. But the book is about a single cell dividing into two cells.
Q
You draw vivid images of even the most minor characters, so that they seem so important to Corey in the moment, even if we never see them again.
A
At Harvard, I took a summer school course on short story writing with a terrific teacher, Deborah Wilkes. She said that Flaubert gave this advice: ‘What a writer has to do is put slippers on clerks.’ There’s some line in “Madame Bovary” where Flaubert takes the time to tell you the clerk is wearing slippers. The mind likes something specific. The human eye doesn’t like things fuzzy; it likes things clear. These characters are who they are and nobody else.
Q
Do you worry about going too far with the details, say with the discussions of physics, or when there’s a brutal autopsy report about a minor character that gets gruesome?
A
You’re salting the soup. Salt is delicious but too much is not. It’s about proportion. Maybe I walk the line of hitting something too hard. Some things grab me and I see them vividly maybe because they disturb me so I write a little extra on them. You’re not the only person to remark about the autopsy thing. I got comments like, “We’ll allow it, but it’s on the border of too much.”
Q
The book is exhausting emotionally for Corey and Gloria, who are trying to cope with their world falling apart. Was it difficult to capture the sense of grieving for someone who is dying so slowly but all at once?
A
ALS is a care-intensive illness. It’s really 24 hours a day; the patient doesn’t get a break, neither does anyone else. It is grueling. When it came to writing it, I was reliving it emotionally and there were things I’ve been waiting to say for 30 years. I recalled a lot of it vividly and still felt a lot of it.
Q
How difficult is it to get out from under when you’re a teen and you make mistakes with your family or have gotten in trouble with the law?
A
You pay for everything. I made a lot of mistakes when I was pretty young and they had a long lifespan. You gotta take chances and I did. But if you take stupid chances, with a ‘What the hell does it matter’ attitude, and especially if you hurt other people, those things last a long time.
Q
How do you cope with the consequences and the regrets?
A
If you hurt somebody, you pay for it for the rest of your life. I wrote this book because of a sense of having failed someone, and it’s something I can’t undo even though at the time I said, ‘I can rationalize this.’ My mother died alone in her hospital bed without anyone by her side. There’s no book I could write to change that.
Q
When you’re writing in part to expiate guilt, do you have to take a step back at points to differentiate between your own feelings and actions and your character’s?
A
There’s a point that comes in writing where I have to separate from the book, cut the umbilical cord and make it stop being about me and make it an art object, make it a thing potentially of beauty and coherence. An emotional detachment has to happen so you can polish it like a sculpture and see where the parts should actually go.
Q
Were you also writing as a tribute to your mother?
A
Yes, I did want to memorialize my mother and remember her as she was. I didn’t want her to pass into the dust of yesterday without anyone remembering her. The other member of my family has written about her and did so in a typically ironic, postmodern way and I didn’t think it was a subject fit for irony. I wasn’t laughing.
Q
Did writing the book lift some of the emotional burden you’ve been feeling?
A
Yes. It was a marathon to write, took me seven years. I definitely changed while writing it — I’m wearing glasses now, which is a change and a certain degree of entropy has taken over in my body, but I’ve also definitely evolved. I feel like a different person coming out the other side of it.