Marisa Silver

Marisa Silver is the author of the novels The Mysteries; Little Nothing; Mary Coin, a New York Times bestseller and winner of the Southern California Independent Bookseller’s Award; The God of War, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction; and No Direction Home. Her first collection of short stories, Babe in Paradise was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and was a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year. When her second collection, Alone with You was published, The New York Times called her “one of California’s most celebrated contemporary writers.” Her fiction has been included in The Best American Short Stories, the O. Henry Prize Stories, as well as other anthologies. She is a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Cullman Center for Scholars and writers. She lives in Los Angeles.

At Last is Silver's new novel.

My Q&A with the author:

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

At Last follows the lives of two women who enter into an uneasy, often competitive relationship when their children marry. The lengths they go to prove that they are the more essential matriarch is sometimes comic, sometimes heartbreaking and often both at the same time. But underneath all of their missteps lies their desire to love and be loved by their children, their granddaughter, and, in the strange ways that love shows up, by each other — at last.

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

I wasn’t the most dedicated reader as a kid. This is an understatement. My free time was mostly spent sitting in a swivel chair in our den daydreaming or staring out the window, observing people on the street, and wondering about their lives. My parents were great readers who considered reading to be maybe the only valuable way to spend your spare time. They found my lack of interest troubling, maybe a sign that I just wasn’t going to measure up to their hopes for me. Often, my mother would come to me with a book she’d just read and loved, urging it on me. And because I wanted to please her and maybe because I secretly believed my parents might be right, and that I wasn’t going to amount to much, I read what she gave me: the works of writers like Paula Fox, Toni Morrison, Alix Kates Schulman, Marge Piercy, Eudora Welty and Flannery O’Connor, to name a few. My mother was interested in the lives of women, and although I don’t think I would have been able to articulate this when I was a teenager, she was interested in the ways women claimed themselves in worlds where they were not always given agency. I like to think that had At Last been published when I was a kid, it would have been one of the books she would have found compelling for those same reasons and that she would have pressed it on me, and that I would have read it.

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings?

When I start a novel or a story, I feel like I’m circling a monolithic building that has no obvious doorway and I’m trying to figure out a way in. And then, after a lot of thinking, some pounding (i.e. my head against a wall) a little fissure opens up and I slip inside and begin. I tend to start in the middle of something that’s already going on. In the case of At Last, the two central characters are stuck in a car together as they make preparations for the wedding of their children. They’ve never met before. The intimacy of the tight space horrifies them both. This seemed like a great way to begin a story about the battle of two formidable wills.

I never know where I’m heading with a novel and so I don’t know where things will end up. I like to work this way. I want to discover and be surprised by what I write just as much as I want a reader to be surprised by how the novel delivers more than what might be obvious at the outset.

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

When I was a young girl, my parents would go on holidays and leave me and my older sister in the care of our grandmothers. One day, when one grandmother was driving us to the other’s house, she said “You love me more than you love her, don’t you?” I have never forgotten this, and I wrote At Last to explore what might have made her say that. But beyond that, the novel and its characters are imagined. Figuring out how to make a pure invention make what we think we are familiar with and know, unfamiliar and new – that, for me, that’s the challenge and the joy of writing.

Visit Marisa Silver's website.

The Page 69 Test: The God of War.

--Marshal Zeringue