John A. McDermott

John A. McDermott was born and raised in Madison, Wisconsin. He now serves on the board of directors for the Writers’ League of Texas and teaches creative writing at Stephen F. Austin State University. Prior to teaching, he worked as an actor, bartender, house painter, and advertising copywriter. He lives in Nacogdoches with his wife and teenage daughter.

The Last Spirits of Manhattan is his first novel.

My Q&A with the author:

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

The Last Spirits of Manhattan is pretty direct in two respects: the novel has ghosts at a cocktail party (hence two kinds of spirits) and it’s set in Manhattan. “Last” is the tricky word; are these the final spirits or the latest spirits? I’d like to leave that to the reader. The title wasn’t always so directly informative; for a long time, it was called The Direction of Rented Spirits. Direction was a play on both film directors, since the party is hosted by Alfred Hitchcock, and the life-changing choices confronting the characters. What direction are they heading? Rented played on the idea that the house where the party happened was an old rowhouse rented for the evening by Hitchcock—and rented in the sense of torn. There are lots of emotional scars on these ghosts. The published title is more informative, though I was sad to see the play on rented and direction go, but last gives it the interpretive options I wanted.

What's in a name?

The novel is based on a family story my mother told me years ago, so the original incarnation of my protagonist was named Marion, a nod to my mother’s middle name. The further I progressed into the manuscript, the more I fictionalized the source material, the harder it was to make Marion do things that caused interesting plot points. I was hampered by her being too close to my mother’s personality; she needed a change. My mother’s first name was Cornelia, so I mashed Cornelia and Marion together, and with a nod to Carolyn Keene of Nancy Drew fame, my Marion became Carolyn. Once she was Carolyn, I found her much easier to write. She was no longer my mother, she was her own woman and gained some of Nancy Drew’s energy.

The weirdest character name in the book is an advertising executive, Bob “The Duck” Buck. As he solidified, he became simply “The Duck.” I don’t think I’ll ever have another character with a capitalized article again because it was a proof-reading nightmare. But it fits him: he is The Duck.

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

My teenage self would be surprised I’m a writer, since he was obsessed with theater, but it was a logical creative move to go from acting to writing fiction. The topic wouldn’t surprise him too much. I’ve always loved old family stories and ensemble casts and Manhattan, though I grew up far from it, in Madison, Wisconsin. The weird mix of mystery, ghost story, comedy, and family drama would amuse him. I’ve always liked novels that were hard to categorize.

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

I find it easier to write beginnings, at least with this novel. The prologue of the published novel has been in the manuscript since my first days with the project. Endings are trickier, although one character thread of this novel ends with a scene that I wrote before I wrote anything else in the entire book. (It’s a scene with Hitchcock in a hotel bathroom, but not the sort of scene you might expect with Hitchcock and hotel bathroom in the same sentence!) My biggest challenge was choosing an ending, not so much writing one. My editor told me after a round of edits that he thought I had three endings and I needed to choose one. He was right but it meant yanking an epilogue I’d spent a lot of time on and was inordinately fond of. One day maybe I’ll put out an edition with the lost epilogue. Or at least put it on my website!

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

Honestly, I think fiction writers inhabit all of their characters as we play out emotions we have actually felt or try out choices we are either too scared or polite or sane to make in real life. My favorite aspect of writing fiction is pretending to be all of the characters (that’s my theater background, I guess), but it’s also why I love reading fiction. Losing myself in someone else’s world is such a joy. Empathy’s a hot button word now, but for me, writing (and reading) fiction are acts of empathy, trying to think like someone else and why they might make the choices they make, but writing a novel is a constant mix of using my own choices and asking but what would this person do?

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

To get into the right mood to write this novel, I listened to a lot of 1950s music, singers like Blossom Dearie, Sammy Davis Jr., and Ella Fitzgerald, and a host of jazz musicians. There’s a playlist available at both my website and the Simon and Schuster site that explains a bit of my musical influences. For a historical novel, it felt necessary to listen to the music that my characters would know. I love film, too, and with a novel with Alfred Hitchcock as a primary character, I had to watch his films from that era. The tonal span between the comedic The Trouble with Harry and the tragic The Wrong Man might explain the tonal shifts in my novel! I go from comedy to tragedy in one night and I think Hitchcock might have inspired that. His TV series of that era was helpful, too, because I could study the cadence of his speech. The research I did for this novel was so much fun—the music and the movies of the era are just two examples.

Visit John A. McDermott's website.

--Marshal Zeringue