then abandoned? What are the “object lessons” that you think the characters—Maggie and Connie in particular—learn in the book?
AQ: Oy. Do I have to tell the truth about this? I am terrible with titles, although I’ve gotten better and better over the years. But Object Lessons was my first book, and so I found it particularly difficult to reduce this one to a handful of words. I remember saying, “Titles are so reductionist,” and having my editor reply, sensibly, “Yes, but a book needs to have one.” In fact I dithered so persistently that we dummied up one version of the cover with the line Title TK, which means “Title to come.” Then the director of publicity at Random House read the book and said, “Well, I think it’s all about object lessons, about those central tenets we learn from experience.” It was kind of a kaboom moment. I only wish it had been my kaboom moment!
JMG: You frame the book from its very first pages as taking place in a summer that’s “the time of changes.” Why did you decide to mention explicitly the events that take place later in the novel, like John Scanlan’s stroke and the demise of Maggie and Debbie’s friendship, in the first chapter of the book? Did you know what would happen in Object Lessons when you started writing, or were you surprised along the way?
AQ: I always know what will happen at the end when I begin a novel. The beginning and the end are never really the journey of discovery for me. It is the middle that remains a puzzle until well into the writing. That’s how life is most of the time, isn’t it? You know where you are and where you hope to wind up. It’s the getting there that’s challenging. Besides, I don’t think the trajectory of Object Lessons is about John Scanlan, or even Debbie. It’s about that moment when Maggie can think of herself as an individual separate from others. That’s the ending.
JMG: Object Lessons is set in the 1960s as sweeping social changes are beginning to take hold in the United States, but these changes are slow to creep into the town of Kenwood. In what ways did you intend to depict the town as an idyllic place in which to grow up? How did you picture it as being “frozen in time”? How do you think that Kenwood’s reaction to altering the status quo mirrored the reality of the world at that time?
AQ: I don’t think most of what we call the ’60s actually took place in the ’60s. In San Francisco and New York and on some college campuses, sure. But if you go back and look at photos in most places, of most people, you don’t see long hair or tie-dyes. My high school yearbook, circa 1970, has a handful of hippie looks, but mostly people are pretty straight. But the fault lines were beginning to subtly appear. The changes in the Catholic Church. The growing political disenchantment in the years after the Kennedy assassination. The peace movement and women’s liberation. The earth was rumbling during the time covered by this novel. It hadn’t opened yet.
JMG: Some reviewers have wondered if Maggie is, in some ways, a young stand-in for you. How much of your own character is in Maggie? Why do you think that readers are so intrigued by trying to figure out how much autobiography exists in a writer’s fictional works?
AQ: Oh, I think everyone wants to disbelieve the notion of fiction. It’s too much to think that someone could invent an entire believable world from scratch. And that goes double if you’ve been a newspaper reporter as I was, trained to deal in something approaching literal truth. There are certainly similarities between Anna and Maggie, although she is preternaturally wise and a little judgmental in a way I was not at her age. I find her a bit of a pain.
JMG: The struggle between parent and child is paramount in this book—from Maggie and Connie, to Tommy and John, to Connie and Angelo. Which parent-child pairing comes the closest to understanding each other? Is there any element that you view as an “irreconcilable difference” in any of the relationships?
AQ: The most irreconcilable of those relationships is the one between Tommy Scanlan and his dad, mainly because it’s not really a loving relationship on the part of the elder man. It’s one of dominance. That’s always doomed to failure. I think