Volume 3, Issue 3 – June, 2000
Patricia Gaffney: Swimming in the Mainstream
(photo by Michael Priest, courtesy of HarperCollins Publisher)
A genre isn’t a life sentence. Just ask Patricia Gaffney, who took off the “mask” of her romance persona after 12 much loved historical romances — many of them nominated for the genre’s top awards — to write mainstream novels about contemporary women.
Gaffney’s fans followed her into this brave new world confident the complex, appealing characters that marked Gaffney’s historicals would shine as brightly in the present as they did in the past. After all, Gaffney made similar leaps before — from 18thcentury London to the Chinatown of pre-1908 San Francisco to a 19thcentury Cornish mining village. Shortly before she embarked on her promotional tour for Circle of Three, Gaffney talked to Crescent Blues about the evolution of her career, the care and feeding of reader expectations, and how she really, usually, identifies more with her heroines.
Crescent Blues: Your current release (and second mainstream novel), Circle of Three, features three generations of women. Especially vivid is the matriarch of the group, Dana Danziger. Was Dana modeled on a particular person or is she a synthesis?
Patricia Gaffney: Do you think Dana is especially vivid? I thought Ruth, the mixed-up teenage daughter, was more colorful. Certainly she was the easiest to write. And I felt closest to Ruth, since I am often about 15 years old in my emotional maturity.
What was the question?
Oh, Dana. Well, to the extent she’s modeled on my mother, God love her, it’s in her southernness, her bluntness, her absolute certainty she knows what’s best for her daughter — well, for everybody — and her constant and unconditional love.
How close does Dana come to your own vision of yourself as an older woman?
Dana — like my mother — is terrified of getting old. I’m not wild about the idea myself, so it’s not hard to imagine getting drunk on my 70th birthday and insulting all my loved ones. I just hope when I’m Dana’s age I’m more at peace with my lot, and past blaming other people for my dissatisfactions. I know I’ve made better life decisions.
Dana made a serious mistake early — she married for security instead of love — and paid for it ever after. But she’s strong and tough, and one of her saving graces is that (except for that 70th birthday party) she never feels sorry for herself. In the end, she’s reconciled to the rest of her life, finally achieving the closeness she’s been wanting with her daughter — if not her inattentive husband — and by no means giving up on the possibility of change.
What prompts you to use a particular person as a model for a character? How does this process compare with developing a character from whole cloth? Do you find it easier or harder?
Before The Saving Graces, I rarely based characters on real people, at least not consciously. (Don’t tell my husband; I told him he was the hero of all my romances.) Meraud in Lily, the old “witch” who lived alone on Dartmoor — I modeled her after Cottie Herndon, my landlady in graduate school. Other than Meraud, though, most of my historical romance characters came straight — or twisted — from my imagination.
The four women in The Saving Graces, on the other hand, were “inspired,” as they say, by friends, real people. They’re not verbatim translations, not by a long shot, but similarities can’t be denied.
Easier or harder? I’m not sure. Even if you’re brilliant at inventing characters (and I’m not), the ones based on people you know are probably richer because they’re more complicated, they do contradictory things, their behaviors are more complex. But complex, contradictory, complicated characters aren’t always what you want. Sometimes the smoothing-out process of pure fiction — the (less fertile) imagination versus bumpy, messy reality — makes your theme clearer or your pace faster.
Art is not life, and real people don’t make book sense. When I write a novel, I’ve got an agenda; I’m trying to tell you something. I might put in a character who acts an awful lot like my Uncle Jack, but there’s going to come a time in the book when what Jack would do doesn’t mesh with my agenda, and that’s when I stop being true to Uncle Jack and start inventing.
You’ve mentioned that Isabel in Saving Graces was modeled on a friend who died of breast cancer. How did the other members of the women’s support group to which you both belonged react to your tribute?
Well, you know, we weren’t a support group in the beginning, we were just a group. Support was the last thing on our minds when we had our first meeting back in May of ’79. We were young and carefree, healthy and immortal; support groups were for survivors of this or that catastrophe. We just ate and drank and gossiped.
Years passed. We became a support group.
The woman we lost, “Isabel” in The Saving Graces, was a lovely, wonderful friend. For years, long before her illness, the group had been telling me I ought to “write a book about us.” When I finally did, they were honestly thrilled. I took many liberties with the literal truth, but apparently I got the main thing right — our friendship.
Circle of Three and its mainstream predecessor, Saving Graces, paint the years between 35 and 50 as ones of particular power for women and men — a time of change and renewal. What do you see as the well-spring of this mid-life courage?
I’m not trying to make a statement in my books about any particular demographic, but that’s an interesting question. Those of us who came into adulthood over the last few decades have probably lived through more changes than any generation before, and that experience might build new personal resources, provide a “well-spring of mid-life courage.” Or it might not. From the standpoint of fiction, I’ve certainly found that writing about women over 30 is a lot more interesting than writing about 20-year-old virgins. But that could just be me getting old.
How much do your mainstream novels Circle of Three and Saving Graces reflect personal experience? What are some of the challenges of working in the framework of “real life” as opposed to the “fantasy” of your earlier romances? And do you ever miss the fantasy?
I do miss the fantasy sometimes. The trouble with writing about “real life” is that not nearly as many interesting things happen. Where are the horse races? The kidnappings, the sword fights? Where are the pirates? I love a good amnesia story. Terms of the will, secret baby, stolen bride — mainstream fiction disdains these contrivances. So it makes me wistful to think that I’ll never be able to deal with them again.
Well, I’m joking. I do miss a few over-the-top aspects of genre fiction, but it’s a trade-off. Now I get to write dialogue as I hear it, the way my contemporaries really speak it. As a narrator, I don’t have to take on a persona anymore, I can pretty much be myself — that’s liberating. Writing is self-expression, and I express myself more fluently and more honestly now that I’ve taken off the “mask” I wore as a romance writer. Off with the conventions, on with something closer to the truth of my own life.
Saving Graces explores the reactions of four friends to crisis. Circle of Three focuses on a watershed year in the lives of three generations of women. And you’ve described the next novel in the group as love story, which would appear to concentrate on two people. What was the intent behind this progressive narrowing of focus?
But that’s too literal a way to see the progression — four, three, two. (Besides, if that’s way things are going, the next book will have to be about a hermit.) All the books — you’ll have to take my word for the third, which I’ve just started — have ensemble casts. It’s true, there were four Saving Graces, and there were three primary women characters in Circle of Three. But I don’t think the focus narrowed significantly in the second book, and I know it won’t in the third. Which brings me to your next question —
Would you care to tell our readers something about your next book? Does it signal a return to the romance genre?
wish I could tell you the title, but I don’t have one yet. Will it be a romance? No, but it’ll be much more of a love story than either of the last two. It’s so hard to talk about a work in progress — I’ve just started four different sentences trying to explain what this book is going to be about. Love, bad timing, loneliness, pride, family. It’s set against a backdrop of a busy Italian restaurant in downtown Washington, D.C. — a favorite setting for me, because it’s the only big city I really know. Large cast of characters. Everybody’s got heart troubles. Hero’s a bird photographer. That’s the best I can do!
This year, Dorchester Publishing will re-issue a number of your early romances, including your first, Sweet Treason. How well do you feel those books hold up today? Knowing what you know now about writing and the market, is there anything about those books you wish you could change?
Yes, Dorchester reissued my first five books, Sweet Treason, Fortune’s Lady, Thief of Hearts, Lily, and Another Eden. I can’t bring myself to reread any of them, so I can’t answer your fascinating question with any authority. I loved them all when I wrote them. I mean I loved them. I expect they’ve held up as well as most ten-year-old historical romances, and I’m quite sure there are large chunks in all of them that would make me hide and quake under a blanket if I read them. Which is why I make it a point not to read them. I do think the quality of my work took a quantum leap when I moved to Penguin and began writing for Audrey LaFehr, who’s a fabulous editor. Plus I just got better — more experienced, more confident, less tied to the conventions.
Well, now I’ve thought this question over, and here’s my answer: I regret nothing.
What prompted you to start writing romance?
I’ve wanted to be a writer since I was about eight years old, but I didn’t have the courage to try — too afraid of failing — until the day I found a lump in my breast. They gave me a 70 percent chance of surviving but, not being an optimist, I seized on the 30 percent chance of dying. Quick, time to decide what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.
I was stuck in a job I didn’t love: court reporting. It was easy and it paid well, but it hadn’t challenged me in years. If I ever wanted to write, it looked like now or never. Besides, what was the worst that could happen? I might write a bad book, maybe an embarrassingly bad book — but so what? By the time it came out, I’d be dead! A win-win.
Next decision: what kind of book did I want to try to write? Fortunately, I had another life-changing realization around this time. Besides fear, the other thing that had been holding me back all my life was a conviction that in order to write novels, you had to know the answers to the major life questions — Why are we here? Is there a God? Why is there suffering? How should we live? If you didn’t know the answers to those questions, you had a lot of nerve, I thought, not only writing a book but expecting people to buy it and spend precious time reading it. And since I had no clue to any of those questions, not the slightest idea — that let me out.
But then — Eureka! — just in time, I had a brainstorm. It suddenly hit me that in order to write books, you don’t have to know the meaning of life — you can just tell stories! A genuine breakthrough. Figuring that out released me from my life-long writing paralysis. Just tell a story.
This was back in the mid-1980s, a time when I was first discovering the delights of historical romance via Kathleen Woodiwiss, Rosemary Rogers, et al. I loved these books. They were sexy and wild, not very respectable. Outlaw books. If I hadn’t been dying, I might’ve chosen something else, something more respectable — a mystery, maybe; I also loved whodunits — but time was running out, and I wanted to spend my last days writing something for the pure fun of it. I couldn’t think of anything more purely fun than a romance.
So I wrote Sweet Treason in about nine months and sold it to Dorchester. It did pretty well; in fact, it won the Romance Writers of America (RWA) Golden Heart Award. My editor started asking me what I was working on now. I wrote another book. One day I woke up and realized two things: I wasn’t dead, and I had a new career.
What challenges you most: plotting, pacing or characterization?
The three jobs you’ve listed all challenge me about equally. You haven’t named the really tough one — sitting in the chair and not getting up. The distraction factor. My husband just designed and built a new office for me. It’s up in the attic, quiet as snow; it’s got a fireplace; it’s got a stained glass window; it’s gorgeous. Do I get a lot more work done now? No, I gaze around and admire things. I gloat over how pretty it all is. Everything distracts me. Dust motes. I can find a hundred excuses a day not to sit at my desk and work. Plotting, pacing? A bagatelle. Self-discipline — that’s a challenge.
Your novels appear to fall into distinct groups, particularly the Wyckerly novels and your wonderfully humorous westerns Crooked Hearts and Outlaw in Paradise. How difficult was it to move from one sub-genre of historical romance to another? What prompted the transitions?
A low boredom threshold and a reluctance to write the same thing twice, at least on purpose. Sometimes I like to write comedy, sometimes I like to write trouble and heartache. And no, it wasn’t difficult to move around among the sub-genre, because of the aforementioned Audrey LaFehr. She wholeheartedly supported every proposal I ever ran by her — and I know other editors who would have objected, on the grounds that that much hopping around would confuse reader expectations or delay the happy phenomenon of name recognition. Audrey always said the book should come first.
Now that you approach the publication of your third mainstream novel, are you feeling restless? Are there new literary playgrounds you’d like to explore?
Not restless yet, no. I think it’s because what I’m trying now is so much broader than what I used to write. I’m not even very good at it yet. I could see my romance novels improving as time went by — I’m really hoping something similar happens with my mainstream stuff.
Are you ever surprised by reader reactions to what you write?
Not really; I can usually predict what’s going to provoke controversy (Sebastian in To Have And To Hold, for instance), and if I’m excited about a book when I finish it, that’s usually a good sign that readers will like it, too. Same goes for the lukewarm ones. But speaking of Outlaw in Paradise — and you were — I guess I was surprised by the readers who didn’t get that it was a comedy. Not many, but the fact that there were any really confounded me. Could the humor possibly have been too subtle? Hard to believe. I’m still scratching my head over that one.
Of all your novels, which characters have struck the deepest chords among your readers? What do they find most compelling about those characters?
n my romances, readers seem to really go for the heroes — which is interesting, because I usually care more about the heroines. Sebastian in To Have And To Hold really got some people where they live; I had more mail on that guy than any other character I’ve written. They loved him — or rather, the ones who didn’t hate him did. But the four women in The Saving Graces have provoked the most commentary, I’d say, with readers eager to tell me which one they most identified with, which one they liked best, which one was just like their best friend from college, etc., etc. Isabel resonated with them, probably for obvious reasons. Also Emma, who’s my favorite character.
Which of your characters strike the deepest chords within you?
Emma in The Saving Graces basically is me, although she’s younger, prettier, and has a more exciting love life. (Hey, writer’s prerogative.) Anne in To Love And To Cherish is my romance-self, highly idealized. I gave her a first-person viewpoint by quoting extensively from her journal, and when I write in the first person it seems to free up a lot of honesty inside me. Something to do with the right brain, maybe. I guess the moral is I like best the characters I most resemble. How egotistical.
Your academic career displays both a literary and philosophical bent. What influence (if any) do you feel your education had on your fiction?
When you major in English — at least at my college — you don’t do any creative writing. You study literature and write papers about other people’s books, which I’m sure is instructive and forms lifelong habits, prejudices, tolerances, bents, predilections.
I could more easily tell you what books influenced my writing than how my education — which, frankly, I can barely remember — did, or how the jobs I’ve had over the years colored my work. I was a court stenographer for about 15 years; briefly I was a photographer; even more briefly, an English teacher. When you’re a court reporter, you’re invisible; ditto photographer. So, being an introvert, I thrived on those jobs.
Teaching English, on the other hand — which requires being front and center — brought on for me deep psychic nausea. I only lasted a year in that job, had to get out. What I liked about court reporting was the chance to study people. You could be up close, but covert — perfect. I’d watch a guy’s tie flicker up and down with his heartbeat, and realize he wasn’t as relaxed as he wanted to look. Fascinating. I can’t help but think that’s been useful when I write my own characters.
What do you feel were the strongest influences on your fiction? Do those influences remain strong?
I think most writers’ — most people’s — strongest influences are the books they read when they were adolescents and young adults, and I think the obsessions those books engender last the rest of our lives. And so the writers who’ve most influenced my fiction were, and are: Thomas Hardy, Jane Austen, Samuel Richardson, Kingsley Amis, Dorothy Sayers, D. H. Lawrence, Margaret Drabble, Anne Tyler.
Wait — are you talking about people? I was thinking you meant books and authors. If you’re talking about people as influences, I’d have to say my mother. She taught me to read, love reading, want to write, love writing.
In the romance genre, who are your heroes and why?
Oh, if I answer that question I’ll just start naming friends. I’m lucky to be pals with my favorite romance writers — Nora Roberts, Jennifer Crusie, Judith Ivory/Judy Cuevas. I don’t read extensively in the genre anymore, truthfully, but I also admire Eileen Dreyer, Kathleen Eagle, Ruth Wind/Barbara Samuels, Diana Gabaldon. Of course, Laura Kinsale.
How do you feel about political correctness in romance? Do you find mainstream novels subject to the same limitations?
This issue usually boils down to how much macho behavior you can put up with in a hero, which you must admit is a pretty narrow definition of political correctness. And no, of course mainstream fiction doesn’t have that limitation. Except for someone like Bret Easton Ellis [author of American Psycho], the subject simply doesn’t come up.
How do you address those limitations in your work? Are you ever tempted to write something totally outrageous or does your muse work in different ways?
Luckily, I don’t have to address those limitations anymore. But when I did, I was much too mature to react by writing something outrageous just to thumb my nose at the genre.
Ha ha ha ha ha.
No, really, the only time I can remember deliberately flauting the romance convention was when I wrote the character of Sebastian in To Have And To Hold, and that wasn’t — honest! — just to prove that I could. But I do remember thinking as the manuscript went along: “You’re going to do this? My God, you’re going to let him do that?” And each time the answer was: “Yes, I am because that’s how the story goes. I’m not responsible.”
As to political correctness — sure, it’s a bad thing in fiction, it’s self-censorship, it’s cowardly, it’s self-defeating, because it makes for sameness and decay and moribundity. It takes a healthy, vital genre and knocks it unconscious, makes it dull dull dull. On the other hand, writers who ignore reader expectations (and some of those readers really are “gentle” — they’re tender flowers with delicate stems, and they don’t care to get smacked upside the stamen with a shovel by writers being politically incorrect for the hell of it) do so at their peril.
What are the best and worst things about being a successful novelist?
Best: working at home. Not having to put on pantyhose or makeup. This cannot be underestimated.
Worst: having to go out in the world for publicity and promotion. It’s embarrassing. And I hate to talk, I realize in my old age. Speaking is hard work. I have to go on a book tour for Circle of Three soon, and the prospect of speaking to groups, speaking on the radio, speaking on TV, is making me ill. Not that I don’t like people. I do, very much, but I like being among them, not the center of their attention.
If you could create a fantasy book tour, what would the schedule look like? Where would you go?
Monday: Begin book tour. Respond to e-mail questions in privacy of beautiful new office from brilliant reporter for respected national publication with worldwide circulation.
Tuesday: Book tour ends. Champagne for everyone.
Anything you’d like to add? Any topic you’d like to cover? Soapboxes provided free of charge.
Hm. Very tempting, but I think I’d just like to say thanks to anybody who’s ever read a book of mine and liked it, then written me a letter saying so. That was awfully nice of you, and I appreciate it.
Also I would like to say, on rereading this interview I am not quite as curmudgeonly as I sound. Really.
Jean Marie Ward
In addition to editing Crescent Blues, Jean Marie Ward writes for a number of Web-based and print magazines, including Science Fiction Weekly. She is the author of Illumina: the Art of Jean Pierre Targete (Paper Tiger) and several short stories, including “Most Dead Bodies in a Confined Space” in Strange Pleasures 2 (Prime Books). Her first novel, With Nine You Get Vanyr, written with Teri Smith, is scheduled to be released by Samhain Publishing in late 2006..