Lisa Gornick

Lisa Gornick has been hailed by NPR as “one of the most perceptive, compassionate writers of fiction in America ... immensely talented and brave.” Her novels include The Peacock Feast, Louisa Meets Bear, Tinderbox, and A Private Sorcery. Her essays have appeared widely, including in the New York Times, the Paris Review, Real Simple, and the Wall Street Journal. A graduate of the Yale clinical psychology program and the psychoanalytic training program at Columbia, where she is on the faculty, Gornick was for many years a practicing psychotherapist and psychoanalyst. She lives in New York City with her family.

Gornick's new novel is Ana Turns.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

Writers often go through hell with their titles—with the process sometimes devolving into a focus group with editors, publishers, marketing departments, and publicists all weighing in. For my first two novels, dozens of options were considered, and the title was changed at many stages. Since then, I’ve had the title as an anchor early on—though with this novel, I did waver between Ana Turns and Ana Turns Sixty before recognizing that the sixty made the title too “on the nose.” It was only after I had the finished book in my hands that I more deeply understood how Ana Turns encapsulates the central theme: a moment in a woman’s life, her sixtieth birthday, when she turns away from ossified views, turns back to what she cherishes, and turns towards a vision of what she wants next in this blink of a life.

What's in a name?

I’m smiling at this question because it’s taken up in the second paragraph of my novel:

My mother, who’d wanted Anna, was disappointed when my father insisted on removing an n because he deemed the double ungainly, and then disappointed again when I more closely resembled an androgynous Giacometti, collarbones in lieu of cleavage, than a stolid milkmaid like her Swedish forebears.

As a novelist, we can grant our characters names that seem simpatico with who they are—though if we do this with too heavy a hand, the reader will feel manipulated. For me, Ana’s solid loving husband had to be Henry. Her lanky boy-man lover had to be Lance. And her mother, deemed by Ana’s best friend Fiona “more battleship than mum,” had to be Jean.

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your new novel?

In an interview in Esquire, novelist Lauren Groff describes one of her characters as “not not me.” Late in the novel, Ana reflects similarly on her own teenage self—that she’s not not her. My teenage reader self—a shy girl writing cryptic poems, including one about a boyfriend’s mother that won a local prize, which meant that she had to read it in front of her subject’s women’s club—would, I think, say the same of the adult novelist I’ve become.

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

I spend a very, very long time in what I consider “pre-writing”: allowing shadows of characters to slowly gain flesh until they are as real to me as my intimates. Ideas begin to whirl about what happens to these characters—in other words, what is the story I’m going to tell? Then comes the harder work of figuring out how I’m going to tell that story: from whose point or points of view, in what time frame, how the dramatic arc will be shaped. I go through dozens of possibilities before settling on the opening of the book.

Ana Turns had too many drafts to admit – but after I wrote what would become the final sentence of the book, it felt like a click on a lock and I never changed it.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

With Ana’s chapters narrated in the first person (and then interspersed with chapters written in the third-person from the points of view of her husband, her father, her brother, her lover, and her lover’s wife), I suspect some readers will presume a connection between Ana and me–but that would be a mistake: Ana’s biography, like that of all of my characters, is both invented and a mash-up. The well that I draw from is subterranean: what I’ve come to understand on a psychological level about myself and others who I’ve been privileged to know intimately. For me, fiction involves alchemy: combining elements of something observed in oneself or others to create something entirely new.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Having trained as a clinical psychologist and then psychoanalyst, my beliefs in how the unconscious works, the past influences the present, and personality is revealed in action are foundational in my creation of characters and story lines too.

Like many contemporary writers, I’ve also been influenced by film: how the camera moves in and out, taking different perspectives. I recently read Noah Gallagher Shannon’s profile of Jack Fisk, the production designer who worked with Martin Scorsese on Killers of the Flower Moon. Fisk’s approach to creating the visual elements of a film as world building “for character and through character” strikes me as similar to the process I go through with my characters: imagining their bodies, their clothing, their homes, what they cook, what they read, the furnishings they inherit or choose.

As an amateur pianist, I studied with a teacher who’s both a classical pianist and master improvisationist. She taught me that composition is improvisation and that with anything we do—playing music, cooking, and writing too—we can find a balance between assuming the position of an acolyte—learning from the masters—and breaking free to proceed in a way that opens a window for inspiration. It won’t arrive on any schedule, but if you show up every day for your work, you’ll be there when it does.

Visit Lisa Gornick's website.

--Marshal Zeringue