A. M. HOMES
Leigh, when did you first have a sense that your family was different?
LEIGH NEWMAN
About three years ago, when I decided to write a memoir. I think we all grow up with this notion that the way we grow up is the way other people grow up.
A.M. HOMES
Not me.
LEIGH NEWMAN
Maybe that’s better. I think embracing your difference is the way to go. But I come from people who don’t talk. In Alaska, they talk about fish or about caribou. So I never really talked about my past much.
A. M. HOMES
Did you have a sense of looming danger or insecurity? Your father was this hyper-competent person, but it also seems like there was an undercurrent of fear that it could all go terribly wrong at any given second.
LEIGH NEWMAN
That’s correct. I think denial is one of those ever-reliable emotions, and I grew up with it. Even though I knew that danger was always around the corner—and clearly through the book I almost died like eight hundred times—I always thought my dad would fix it. So I wasn’t as scared as I should have been. It was a combination of your youthful understanding that you’re not going to die because you’re young—and also thinking your dad is a hundred feet tall in hip boots.
A. M. HOMES
Can you talk about the decision to write a memoir? What finally prompted you to write the book?
LEIGH NEWMAN
Total abject failure. I wrote a novel, and it didn’t work. I think it was well written, but it just flopped as a story. It had too many narrators. When you fail at something you have to think about what you did, and change it radically. So I had written a novel about Alaska, about a bunch of swashbucklers who lived in Anchorage with a lot of money and guns and power and shopping malls. I had also written an essay in Tin House, a funny essay about food and chicken-frying caribou. I thought I had to do something, or I might actually go into a tailspin. So I’d better do something completely different—something I don’t even want to do, but something I think I might be able to do.
A. M. HOMES
What was that process like? I know in terms of myself that writing The Mistress’s Daughter was like picking at a wound, or picking at a scab every day thinking, “Let’s see if I can get it to bleed again today,” as though that was fun. Was it a kind of excavation, did you learn things that you didn’t think that you had remembered?
LEIGH NEWMAN
I actually felt in many ways it was a relief. I’d been writing and looking at the videotape for so long, it had interfered with my life in so many ways. There was no point or place that I went in the world where I wasn’t thinking about these things. I just wasn’t talking about them, ever. So writing about it was deeply personal and deeply emotional. I would often kind of fall apart. I don’t think it was a fun time to be around me. I felt like I had to gallop through it, like I was ice-skating on this very, very thin ice, and underneath the ice was every single person and every single thing that ever happened to me, sort of yelling at me. I had to keep going or I was going to fall through. So I would really gallop through the pages, and then cry, and then go do something stupid like go eat a big meatball sub. There was this Chinese restaurant with fried chicken and I would go there every day and ask for six pieces of fried chicken and a Coke.
A. M. HOMES
Is there a sense of relief now?
LEIGH NEWMAN
I feel a sense of ownership.
A. M. HOMES
Of yourself?
LEIGH NEWMAN
Yes, and I wasn’t expecting it. I went into it just trying to write a good story. I had been trying to write something hard and compelling and true and language-focused and that’s what I went in for. But, again, denial, my friend, we walked through three hundred pages together. At the end I realized that the book did change my life. It gave me confidence. I also wrote the memoir out of love for my parents. Things were really radical and eccentric in my house. People were almost dying all of the time, and fighting, and burning down houses. But I loved my parents, and it was a great way of looking at them and finding an adult sense of love for them: where you understand all their flaws and why things went wrong, but you love them all the same.
A. M. HOMES
In your daily work as an editor you are working constantly with writers. What was your experience as a writer and how has that changed your work?
LEIGH NEWMAN
I wrote the book kind of loose-cannonish for the first two years. Then the last year I was editing other people and I learned a lot. With nonfiction you really have to make friends with telling a little bit more than with fiction. That is something, a skill. So I’ve been working with all of these wonderful writers: Jim Shepard and Jeffrey Eugenides, and last week, Toni Morrison. You really do see the value of telling, and how to use it to your best advantage in nonfiction.
A. M. HOMES
How about your relationship to fact and to accuracy? Often, as a novelist, when I’m writing nonfiction I’m very aware of what is fact and what is not.
LEIGH NEWMAN
It was a disaster. I was calling up my dad, for the first year, every five minutes. I’d be like, “Was it Grove Peak or Rainbow Peak? What kind of plane were we in?” I called up the Alaska State Library and made friends with the librarian. She’s mentioned in the credits. Actually, in the book at one point it says there’s an eight-point-six earthquake, the Great Alaskan Earthquake, but that was the number I got from what hit in Anchorage. Elsewhere in Alaska it was nine-point-two. So many people read the book and they want to dispute me on that.
A. M. HOMES
Those fact-checkers, you got to be careful.
LEIGH NEWMAN
Yes, daggers, daggers in the eyes. So those are the fact parts, and then the question is what actually happened.
A. M. HOMES
What about the emotional parts? The emotional truth of things?
LEIGH NEWMAN
I gave the book to both of my parents.
A. M. HOMES
How did that go?
LEIGH NEWMAN
It went okay. I think everybody was shocked. They had this idea that I was writing a book about fishing and hunting. I also had this idea. This was the worst part. My parents were totally supportive while I was writing. I gave them the book expecting them to be like, “Yeah! Great job, honey.” My dad was like, “Oh, my God.” We cut out a couple of things together that were emotionally untrue. He is actually a very good reader. A big outdoorsman, who also plays classical piano, huge reader, kind of sophisticated in his tastes, and he cut out maybe three scenes, but they were good cuts. I’d dissolved into that judgy tone, which I so did not want to be in the memoir.
A. M. HOMES
What did it sound like?
LEIGH NEWMAN
Whining. The Great Alaskan anti-quality. They were a little whiny.
A. M. HOMES
Whining in Alaska only refers to an engine. It’s never used for a human, is it? I don’t think humans whine in Alaska.
LEIGH NEWMAN
They don’t. They go under the water or they stay up and talk.
A. M. HOMES
Are there things about Alaskan cuisine that we would want to know?
LEIGH NEWMAN
Honestly, yes. When I first came to New York I never ate any salmon and was a total snob. It wasn’t real salmon, but like poached Atlantic mess. It’s a hot mess, very different from Pacific salmon, especially wild fresh Pacific salmon. But now you can just order all the salmon you want. They catch it in the water, they freeze it on the boats, they ship it out. It seriously is as good as you’re going to get in Alaska. It’s like email, they’re emailing the salmon to us.
A. M. HOMES
Have you ever killed and eaten anything on your own there?
LEIGH NEWMAN
A lot of ducks. I was big into shooting ducks as a kid. I could shoot them but I just couldn’t hit them. I’d go out hunting and I’d be shooting holes at the sky. I’m a little blind, I’m out of practice, the ducks run away. There always is a catch in my throat, though. I think it might be psychosomatic. I like watching wild things be free. That is what stopped me from killing. There’s a scene in the book where I talk about trying to kill a caribou, which is a big tradition in Alaska. You go out with your dad, you kill it and butcher it. I refused to do it when I was thirteen.
A. M. HOMES
We have that here, it’s called a bar mitzvah. Though the rituals are slightly different. But, what happened? You went out with him?
LEIGH NEWMAN
I went out and I refused to do it and I brought a camera with me. I somehow pretended that I was going to make a photo essay. He thought I was going to take pictures of him killing this caribou, and that he would look like a butcher. And that I would keep them, and make him look like a bad guy. I know he was thinking this, and in fact I was also thinking this. But once again, no access to the narrative in your brain. We tromped through the woods … Actually, there are really no woods in Alaska, it’s really just miles and miles of empty tundra and it’s very spongy.
A. M. HOMES
Spongy Alaska. We haven’t seen those books on “Spongy Alaska” yet. Is it squishy?
LEIGH NEWMAN
It’s squishy. You squish along and half of them are sinkholes that you fall into. And when you’re carrying a gun, a pack, chest waders, you can really sink under and it’s hard to get out. We would just hike for seven or eight miles and then just camp on the ground. My dad was a big fan of not bringing enough gear, and so often it would be like, okay, let’s just lie down in the dirt and sleep. Now he’s gotten older and he likes canned food.
A. M. HOMES
Do you have a firearm in New York? Do you feel safe?
LEIGH NEWMAN
I don’t have a firearm, absolutely not. I’m pro–gun control, and I feel like a gun in a city environment is just you waiting to shoot your neighbor because they came in to borrow a candle in the middle of the night.
A. M. HOMES
And in Alaska is that any different?
LEIGH NEWMAN
No, it’s not actually any different. I grew up in a house like that. We had a very clear gun closet that was built into the bottom of the house, so if anyone broke into my house my father would have had to go down two stories of stairs, go out, then take the ammo out of the ammo drawer, put it into the gun, load it. It would have to have been the slowest criminal in the world.
QUESTIONS FROM THE AUDIENCE
How did your experiences growing up affect your child-rearing today?
LEIGH NEWMAN
I think on the one hand they made me much more on it as a parent. I’m like the classic New York parent: you must go to school, get out of bed. I skipped a lot of school. On the other hand, I’m more adamant about teaching responsibility to kids. Even just simple things, like, “You want a glass of water? Go get it.” My little one is three. I want him to be able to put on his own clothes, get his own water, brush his own teeth. I’ve taught them how to ski, I’ve taught them how to fish. I’ve taken them on duck-hunting trips with me in Idaho. I do want them to have that exposure to the wild in a way that impresses on your imagination.
A. M. HOMES
I was curious about the sense of being an outsider wherever you were, and this is both as a writer and also in thinking about Alaska. How did you manage to write about that?
LEIGH NEWMAN
One of the things I most related to with your memoir, and I thought a lot about, was the sense of illegitimacy. My parents divorced, my father stayed in Alaska, he remarried, and he had two kids. I was living with my mom in Baltimore, and we didn’t have a lot of money and things were very tough and my mom was up and down. Then I would come back and see my dad and everything there would be the perfect Alaskan life. You know, they’d have cross-country skis with wax. They’d have Patagonia pullovers, matching. And the kids were going to the school that I would have gone to if I’d lived there. For me that was excruciating, I’m not going to lie. That was a real sense of loss and I never talked about it. I never wanted my brothers to feel the things that I had felt. I was so afraid of talking about it with my dad. I felt like he had chosen his second wife over me, and my mom, and if I made a big problem he was going to do it again. I think that’s the bass note of that situation. I guess there are bolder kids who tell their parents, but my dad was a god with a fly rod and I couldn’t do it, I couldn’t make the words come to my mouth. It took me a long time to get over it.
So you’ve talked about the denial that you’ve lived in with your family. Now that you’ve written the book, has it changed?
LEIGH NEWMAN
No, my parents are completely behind the book. They’ve both called me and been like, “I support you, I’m really excited about the book.” But we never discuss it. My two younger brothers have both come out and written me beautiful letters and they’ve been very supportive in all of the events. My mom went to a reading in Baltimore. Look, denial is always given this bad rap. Just like fear is given a bad rap, just like competency is always given a good rap. There are always multiple sides to these things. Quite frankly, we all know how to function. I said what I needed to say. Everybody knows it. Everybody has dealt with it. We had beautiful long conversations when they were reading the manuscript. Life-changing, intimate conversations. Now I feel like everyone thinks we’ve all said enough.