Berkeley author Laurie Ann Doyle discusses her first short-story collection.
Everyone in Laurie Ann Doyle’s debut short-story collection is searching for something — a man for his brother, a woman for her son’s birth mother, a party-girl funeral director for an end to loneliness. It’s a theme that explains the title: “World Gone Missing” (Regal House, $15, 195 pages).
“Relationships continue for us, even when those you care about are no longer there. The people left behind struggle to fill that void,” Doyle says from her Craftsman-style home in Berkeley’s Elmwood district. She has lived in Berkeley for the past 30 years, but her roots go back further; in the 1930s and ’40s, her grandmother and mother lived in a house a few blocks away. Doyle’s parents met at UC Berkeley (her own alma mater), and her father’s job took them around the country. But most of the dozen stories in her book are Northern California-centric, some from her childhood memories of visiting her grandmother.
Doyle didn’t get serious about writing until a decade ago. While she admits to having dabbled in “purple prose” since high school, she had an 18-year career as a health educator at Kaiser Permanente. But she still had a passion for writing. Doyle quit her job and got her master of fine arts degree at the University of San Francisco, with the full support of her husband and son, who is now a teenager.
Grad school gave her a set of tools, Doyle says. But that’s where she also learned to follow her instincts, elevating setting to be an important aspect of her stories, right up there with the characters. She, unlike many writers and teachers, is adamant about the importance of describing the smells, the tastes, the geography, every little detail of a place.
“The setting is often the first little glimmer I’ll get for a story. And when I get those glimmers, I pay attention, because it can lead to something really interesting,” she says.
The Bay Area setting is expansive in the collection’s first story; Oakland’s Lake Merritt, Golden Gate Park, the Haight and Stern Grove are just a few of the settings a newlywed couple search when the husband’s brother goes missing. “Bigger Than Life” is also the first short story Doyle wrote, based on a family member who disappeared 21 years ago and remains missing.
“I completely fictionalized the characters and specific plot points. What remains true to life is the feeling you get when a loved one seems to vanish into thin air,” she says. “It is a sinking, helpless sensation, with no resolution in sight.”
Doyle has been published in numerous literary outlets, and she won the Alligator Juniper literary award in 2010. But short stories were not her focus, at first. Actually, she thought she was a poet. Then a friend lent her Alice Munro’s “The Moons of Jupiter.”
“She used a lot of novelistic techniques. I loved it, and it got me hooked,” Doyle says. She began buying the editions of “Best American Short Stories” every year and devouring them. “I loved the fact that I could hold the whole thing in my brain. I’ve become somebody who really advocates for the short story.”
Doyle says some short stories have made significant contributions to the art world, noting that popular movies were adapted from genre examples such as Truman Capote’s “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” and Annie Proulx’s “Brokeback Mountain.”
“Short stories have been really important to literature. I’m on my high horse, I guess,” Doyle adds with a sigh. “I don’t think we should have novels and short stories competing with each other. We need both in this world. I love long fiction. I love immersing myself deeply into a novel, when the characters change and grow and surprise you. But I’m always blown away at what a short story can do.”
But, we ask hesitantly, why is it that so many short stories seem to have ambiguous endings, and … well, are sort of depressing.
She laughs. “I think it’s hard to write a happy short story, because you don’t want to be glib. I think a successful happy short story could be a novel, too, because you’ll have to show the underbelly of the happiness.” She mentions that an author read one of the stories in “World Gone Missing” and criticized it for being too happy. Doyle didn’t change it.
“And the happy scene was in a hearse!” she says. “But we’re all in the hearse. It sounds awful, but we are. We just have different amounts of time.”
The beginnings of that story, “Here I Am,” came as a glimmer when Doyle read in The New York Times about a Brooklyn woman who was both a colorful character and the director of a funeral parlor. “And she had buried two boyfriends. I just thought, ‘Wow! That’s the story I want to write.’ ”
Another story, “Hateman,” is also based on a real person, a well-known voluntarily homeless man in Berkeley’s People’s Park. Doyle spoke to him before he died this year. “It was hard to write, because I kept wanting to be true to the real man, but you have to let the characters morph.” She ended up writing it from the point of view of the middleaged daughter he’d abandoned.
Doyle is currently in the early stages of writing a novel. Her inspiration starts in her subconscious in the very early hours of the morning. With her eyes still shut, she lets the ideas percolate, then writes on a pad in longhand before transferring it to her computer. Her goal is 300 to 500 words a day.
“I’m not recommending this, because for some people, it shuts them down. But for me, if I have to throw out 200 of those words, I still feel I’ve progressed.”
Aside from her bed and a little home office alcove, Doyle’s other favorite writing areas include the Doe Library at UC Berkeley, Cafe Roma on College Avenue and at San Francisco’s Grotto, where she likes being with other authors. She also teaches writing classes at the Grotto and at UC Berkeley.
“At the Grotto, I’m sometimes intimidated by how great the other writers are. But other times, I think well, they did it, so I can do it, too. I refuse to think there’s something I can’t do,” she says, laughing. And she adds, “But I have to do it my way!”