LORRAINE ADAMS

An Interview with Lorraine Adams

Michaux Dempster: I’m Michaux Dempster interviewing Lorraine Adams in the Cabell Room of VCU’s library for Blackbird. We’re so glad to have you.

Lorraine Adams: It’s really wonderful to be here.

MD: You talked about how Harbor sort of grew out of this desire of your’s to talk about more than one character. And you had an editor at the Washington Post that really insisted on just focusing on one for the journalism article that you did. Could you talk about that a little bit, sort of tell that story?

LA: I’d be happy to. It’s actually one of my favorite stories about Harbor becoming a novel. What happened was I had written a magazine story for the Washington Post, and the story was about a group of young Muslim Arab men who were refugees from Algeria, and I had done something of a group portrait; and my editor had just returned from the Nieman Conference on Narrative Journalism where the techniques of fiction are discussed and how to apply them to long-form narrative magazine journalism, which of course is practiced in the New Yorker and to some extent in the Atlantic and overseas at Granta. There’s . . . a very fun thing that happens is that when people go to these conferences they start to take as gospel certain ideas, and one of those ideas that he picked up on was that you can only have one character in a magazine piece that’s aspiring to this kind of literary journalism that makes use of the techniques of fiction, such as point of view and plot and various other novelistic devices. And I felt that writing about one character was an oversimplification, and I was being kind of pigeon-holed into this little space where I needed to make reality fit, and my anger about that was one of the motivating reasons why I wrote Harbor because I wanted to write about more than one character.

MD: When did you decide to go into another character’s point of view? I noticed in the novel you go into the hospital nurse’s point of view early on and then eventually into the minds of other Algerians besides your main character, Aziz. Did you have differences with the editor of the book on these decisions as well as the struggle you had with your editor at the Post?

LA: You know my editor is such an amazing individual. Really brilliant. Really empathic. I’m just so lucky to have her as my editor. The issue about going inside other characters’ heads, though, is something that we discussed. The book is mainly inside the head of Aziz, he’s the main character and he was the character that my magazine editor forced out of the story, so he in the book becomes the character we know the most about. We’re inside his head the most. I sometimes go inside the head of other characters like the nurse who treats Aziz in the beginning, and then I go into the head of Heather, who is a female character, who is a girlfriend of some of these young men; another character named Ghazi, I go into his point of view and even the FBI agents’ in the story. I think that a lot of people wanted me to stay in Aziz’s head, and when I say people, I mean my agent. My book was sold at auction, so there were other editors who said, “You know, I really like this book, but why can’t we just stay in Aziz’s head?” So the mania for one point of view followed me into novels. But my editor at Knopf, Robin Desser, wanted me to keep the other points of view. That’s one of the reasons I really . . . Well, it’s just a manifestation of how special she is, just one small example, and there’s lots of others.

MD: And it’s so important to be able to see eye-to-eye with your editor, to trust that person.

LA: Yes.

MD: Especially with a first novel. You did a lot of research for the novel, while you were researching for the journalistic piece. One question that I always like to ask first time novelists and any novelists is how much time did you spend doing the research versus the actual sitting down and writing the book?

LA: It’s a difficult question to answer because I was working as a reporter, and I was investigating a particular terrorist, counter-terrorism investigation which was an international investigation, and I reported in Vancouver, Seattle, Montreal, Boston, Brooklyn, so it took me about a year to do all that. At the same time, I was doing other reporting. And did all of that research fall under the rubric of material used in Harbor? Not necessarily, but I would say it took . . . I would say if you count that and you count the time I spent actually writing Harbor, and then there would be research I would be doing as I’m writing, all together, maybe a year of research for me. Yeah, because this is a novel about people that are entirely different from me. So there really was nothing for me that came . . . naturally if you will.

MD: That was one thing that was so pleasing about the book, and that pulled me in when I read it right away, was the authenticity of the voice and how I really felt as if truthfully I was in the mind of an Algerian young male immigrant; and so I think you did a great job.

LA: Thank you. It was very fun for me to live inside particularly Aziz’s head. I was so sad when I was done writing because it meant I couldn’t see the world the way he saw it anymore, that my kind of filtering of experience through his was done. And that was a loss to me.

MD: It’s almost like acting isn’t it? Writing through another character’s eyes and you get to pretend to be someone else.

LA: Yes, exactly.

MD: You spent about a year doing the research, what about the actual writing? You were still working as a journalist, you were working in the evenings doing the novel.

LA: I quit the Post in the summer of 2001 and I then went on contract. I stopped being a staff writer and I became on contract, which means I didn’t have to go into the office. It also meant that I only . . . the terms of the contract were that I would write book reviews and write about arts, culture, I did a profile of Jonathan Franzen for Style. Those kinds of things. Much less demanding work than I had been doing as an investigative reporter. So I worked on the novel really in between doing the book reviews and so forth. I started the novel in September of 2001, and I finished it in April of 2003.

MD: And just working at home in between doing the book reviews and the other things for the Post.

LA: Yeah, I find that writing book reviews and writing a novel at the same time is a really useful thing. Reading other people’s work from an analytical, critical standpoint helps you to focus on what works, what doesn’t work. It keeps you on your toes as a writer because you don’t as easily fall into this self-indulgent kind of byways that you sometimes can if you’re not reading other people’s work.

MD: I would have thought that would be really tempting with this particular subject too. And I actually looked at a review that you wrote about several post-9/11 terrorist insider novels.

LA: Yeah, they were actually nonfiction. But yeah, it was an article in the Washington Monthly, “Terrorism in the English Language.”

MD: And I’m thinking of an article. It was O.J. Simpson’s attorney had written one of the books, and then somebody from Harvard had written another one.

LA: Oh, yeah.

MD: And you were talking about . . .

LA: Yeah, Alan Dershowitz was the one you’re talking about who represented O. J., and he also is a professor at Harvard. He had written a book about terrorism.

MD: Right, and he talked about sort of the law behind it, and you seemed really peeved about how these authors seemed to be sort of withholding information, sort of for their own authorial ends. Did those books and learning what not to do influence your decision with Harbor, how you were going to write it?

LA: Well, you know, I think there’s two sides to me, and one side is the wild, creative side. And then the other side is a much more critical, analytical side. And it was that side that took issue with a lot of those nonfiction terrorism books. They didn’t really inform how I wrote Harbor, but what they did accomplish for me was refining my thinking and making more rigorous my analysis about how to tell a story or to tell a set of events, to marshal an argument for a certain point of view, and the manipulations both rhetorical and intellectual that a lot of writers writing on terrorism are particularly susceptible to.

MD: It was really interesting to read that, and you provided some information that they had withheld, which cast a completely different light than probably what the writers were intending with those books.

LA: Yeah, I think this has come up a lot with James Frey. And I think that there isn’t enough what I would call investigative reviewing in which people look at issues, records, documents, other works, and compare them to what the author is writing. I think it’s something that we really need in our culture and we don’t have yet. But I’m actually kind of cheered by the Frey episode because I think it might mean that there’s a growing awareness that we do need that.

MD: I certainly agree. And I was really interested in the research that you had done. You had counted how many times each person had appeared on television and sort of correlated that with the success or failure of their book. It was very interesting to see just facts placed in contrast to the spin that was going on all over the country at that time about terrorists, where they come from, what their mindset is, what can we do to prevent it, this whole sort of scare.

LA: Yes . . . yeah.

MD: My favorite moment of Harbor is when the Boston Algerians are trying to come up with American slogans to put on these coffee cups. They had sold very well in Montreal.

LA: In Brooklyn, actually.

MD: Oh, was it Brooklyn? Okay, and they had written Islamic sayings on paper coffee cups and sold them on the street. And they sold like crazy. And then they tried it in Boston and it wasn’t working very well. I’ll never forget one person suggested an American slogan, they were trying to see if that would change the tide. Maybe if they would sell better. And someone suggests: “slow and steady wins the race.” And the Algerians are completely stumped. They have no idea what that means. And I wanted to ask if that was a moment from real life that you’d researched, and sort of what the significance of that was when you were writing.

LA: That is an entirely made-up scene,as is the whole concept of writing the sayings, the Arab sayings on the coffee cups and selling the coffee with them in Brooklyn. I made that up entirely. That never happened. I wanted to use it because I think it speaks to several things. The first thing is that it speaks to a kind of sweetness in Aziz. That he has this idea about how to make money. And it is very modest in its way, but it also has something to do with writing. Because I think Aziz, in a lot of ways, is a character who even though he isn’t a writer, does believe in the power of the written word, and he translates this into the only means available to him, which is to sell coffee on the street in Brooklyn. There’s a lot of people selling stuff on the street in the part of Brooklyn where he finds himself, and in fact, when I was in Brooklyn I did see a lot of that actually happening, but no coffee cups. But then when he comes to Boston and he tries, one of the big problems is that it’s so cold in Boston and so people aren’t willing to spend much time outdoors, buying the coffee. It’s winter when he tries to do it, so the whole notion of trying to transplant an idea from one place to another is kind of a metaphor for the way in which trying to transplant who he is from Algeria to the United States doesn’t always click. And it’s also, by using the Arab sayings in an Arab neighborhood where that was a very simple equation, when he tries to sell Arab sayings on cups in American neighborhoods, of course it doesn’t work. And trying to figure out what Americans would like to see in terms of sayings is like trying to read hieroglyphics for him so that “slow and steady wins the race” is utterly baffling to these Algerians because it doesn’t correspond to any kind of cultural referent that they have. And that again is another way of looking at one of the book’s overarching metaphors, which is the way in which we all mis-see one another. How hard it is for us to see one another clearly.