A Note by Alice Mattison
WHEN WE ARGUED ALL NIGHT is set in Brooklyn, where I grew up. It was after the time of immigrants from Europe and their politically radical children, but before the borough acquired its present lively cultural life. In the Brooklyn of my childhood—the late forties and fifties— the Dodgers played in Ebbets Field, the Brooklyn Public Library in Grand Army Plaza smelled new, and each year school closed for Brooklyn Day, with a parade including scout troops and mothers (no fathers) pushing baby carriages with crepe paper streamers wound around the spokes of the wheels.
I grew up near Highland Park, at the northeast end of the borough. Intellectual life was in Manhattan, where my college friends and I saw films at the Thalia, believed that the paintings in the (free) Frick Collection and Metropolitan Museum were our personal property, and walked the island late at night.
Living at home, I commuted to Queens College. My spare time was spent not with fellow students in a dorm but with relatives who loudly said what they thought whether or not it made sense, and who stuck to positions so outlandish that anyone listening who cared to write would eventually write about people like them. While living the heartbreak and comedy of family life, I studied English literature, Latin, and Greek. The disparate parts of life had to be made to connect, and figuring out how could be a life’s work.
After earning a doctorate in English literature at Harvard, I taught composition, mostly in community colleges; I was no scholar but loved to teach. I now teach fiction in the Bennington Writing Seminars, an MFA program at Bennington College.
With my husband—who directs a project employing people with a history of mental illness, addiction, or homelessness—I live in New Haven, Connecticut, where we brought up our three children and where I am a longtime volunteer at a soup kitchen. My fiction, I believe, reflects a life spent in close touch with others, always— paradoxically—seeking time alone for writing. It’s about urban people with close bonds. My characters are often of my parents’ generation, and their concerns are not quite those of the present day—but are ours with a difference. I return to certain questions: How can we live morally in private life? How can we live private life at all, given history’s ravages? What are our responsibilities to the larger community? How can we endure the people we love?
When We Argued All Night is Alice Mattison’s sixth novel. Her others include The Book Borrower, Nothing Is Quite Forgotten in Brooklyn, Hilda and Pearl, and The Wedding of the Two-Headed Woman; her four story collections include In Case We’re Separated: Connected Stories. Mattison’s stories, essays, and poems have appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Times, Ploughshares, The Threepenny Review, Ecotone, and elsewhere, and have been anthologized in The Pushcart Prize, Best American Short Stories, and PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories.
“My fiction, I believe, reflects a life spent in close touch with others, always— paradoxically— seeking time alone for writing.”