Connie and her father have a genuinely loving bond, although he comes from a culture that likes to keep its children close, and so he is distressed about the obvious ways in which she has pulled away. It’s too soon to know how the relationship between Maggie and Connie will develop, but I will say that of all the characters in the book Connie has the greatest capacity for unconditional love. And that carries you a long way in the long run.
JMG: In which ways is Connie a renegade, and in which ways does she want to fit in? How does her relationship with Joey break boundaries? How does it put her in closer touch with herself?
AQ: I don’t think she means to be a renegade. She’s not born to it the way Celeste is. She’s just wound up in this role because of the ethnic tensions in her marriage. Reading this book in the early ’90s, people thought I had exaggerated that. Someone said to me, “You made it sound almost interracial.” At the time in which these people were growing up, that’s exactly what it was like. (Maybe now that everyone has seen My Big Fat Greek Wedding they’ll understand the intractability of certain groups about having their kids marry outside the clan!) It gets tiring always being the outsider. The relationship with Joey is all about spending time with someone who speaks your language and doesn’t see you as the other.
JMG: It’s interesting that John Scanlan loathes the Kennedys, as he seems such a Joe Kennedy type in many ways. Did you have any inspiration for this larger-than-life personality? Why do you think he and Maggie have such an affinity toward each other?
AQ: A lot of Irish-Catholic patriarchs of a certain age loathed the Kennedys. It was jealousy, pure and simple. They couldn’t break through with the WASPs of their own communities. Somehow, to a limited extent, Kennedy had managed to do so. And these men had as many sons, but none of them fledgling senators or presidents. Some of them felt the same way about the Kellys of Philadelphia. “Who do you think you are?” might as well be tattooed into the forehead of certain old Irish Catholics, they ask it so much. “Too big for your britches,” too. I think at some level Maggie likes the old man because he is strong and sure of himself. And that’s what she wants to be. And he likes her because she’s smart.
JMG: You set up a marked contrast between Monica and Maggie. Why do you think Monica harbors such vitriol toward her younger cousin? Why does John Scanlan see through her, while few others do? Are they cut from the same cloth, so to speak?
AQ: In some ways Monica and Maggie are protoypes of two very different types of women who will do battle over and over in the decades after the action of this novel ends. One is the woman who will play by all the rules in order to win, who will dress correctly, pretend to be tractable, make herself alluring to men and do whatever it takes to succeed, although the standard of her time is that success comes only through a man. She is basically a hard case, and she is about to get harder because all the rules of what makes a successful woman are about to change on her. Maggie is the kind of girl who will be the beneficiary of those changes in the years to come. She is intelligent and thoughtful. She is interested in prospering on her own terms, and the old ways of female manipulation either don’t interest or don’t occur to her. The Monicas and the Maggies will always have a hard time getting along. John Scanlan is amused by the combat. He sees Monica for what she is because he, too, is a hard case.
JMG: How is Maggie’s desire for order tested by the events of the summer? How is she similar to Tommy, who is a self-admitted “slave to routine”? Will his status as a creature of habit change?
AQ: The change of that summer is the catalyst Maggie needs to become herself. It tears her apart, but at the end she can put herself back together. In that way I think she is prototypically female in some sense, and her father prototypically male in that he is quite passive and likely to remain so. The one upheaval he has allowed himself in his life