was to marry Connie. But I don’t think he’ll see the like of that moment again.
JMG: Maggie is drawn toward unconventional female figures, like Helen Malone and her aunt Margaret. What about these women appeals to Maggie? Was there a particular female character whom you most enjoyed writing?
AQ: Helen Malone is actually based on an older girl that I saw and knew in my own neighborhood growing up, the kind who had the self-assurance of physical attractiveness and the allure of sexual experience. Those girls suffered. They were golden one day and cast out the next, almost always because of pregnancy. It’s one of the ways in which the world has changed for the better since I was young; you don’t have to pay, all the rest of your life, for a mistake you made when your hormones were in overdrive. I was mesmerized by those girls growing up, because they had so much, and because it was so fleeting. It made me very suspicious of those things that came to you because of your physical allure, and I was very determined to develop my intellect and my will.
JMG: There’s a constant theme of artifice in Object Lessons. Who do you think is the most masked person in the story? Who’s the most true to his or herself? How do you seek to strip away artifice as a writer?
AQ: That’s something I’ve never thought about. I suppose it’s the neighborhood, actually, that’s most artificial, because everyone collectively pretends that life is one way when deep underneath there are all sorts of fissures. It’s like that moment near the end when Maggie can see this couple who has moved into one of the new houses. It seems a tableau of success and contentment, but she intuits that there are endless fault lines. And that’s correct.
JMG: Object Lessons touches on social issues—divorce, infidelity, and teenage pregnancy, among others. Did you consciously set out to write a novel that included social commentary? Or did these issues emerge while you were writing?
AQ: My feeling is that things become social policy issues because they are happening in life, not the other way around. So if you set out to write a realistic novel about America, social issues will inevitably arise in the text. It would be almost impossible to write a novel about, say, marriage, without writing about infidelity. Even Tolstoy had to do it in Anna Karenina, and that was more than a century ago. These are the ways of the world. We just call them social issues when we’re trying to quantify and analyze them somehow. I only do that when I’m wearing my columnist’s hat.
JMG: I was struck by a statement of Connie’s at the end of the book: “Everything in your life is who you marry.” Would Tommy agree with this? Has Connie truly forgiven Tommy and accepted the realities of her marriage?
AQ: Oh, sure. I don’t think you can even argue with that. Who you marry determines what sort of children and family you’ll have, and that shapes your entire life. I don’t think Connie understood that going in. She thought it was all about her and Tommy, when of course a marriage is a much larger circle than that of two people holding hands. I think she’s made her peace, but she’s going to keep kicking at the larger indignities. Frankly, she’ll be a much happier woman the day after John Scanlan’s funeral.
JMG: You open and conclude the book with the concept of “here and hereafter.” How do John Scanlan and Maggie share a similar worldview with respect to those two concepts? Does this jibe with your perception of the world?
AQ: Well, the obvious reference is a religious one. In many ways this is a profoundly Catholic book, and I am a profoundly Catholic writer. But it also refers to the future. John knows that things are changing, in his business and in the lives of his children. He has only to consider his half-Italian granddaughter to know that. And I think he suspects that the hereafter for her will be in a much different society. So does she. That’s the moment at which both of them are poised. One regrets, one embraces. But both understand.
JMG: In a commencement address at Mount Holyoke, you said, “Listen to that small voice from inside you that chooses to go the other way.” Who in this novel truly takes this advice to heart? How does it represent a struggle for them? How