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			Catherine Chung Matt Salesses
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Deb Olin Unferth is the author of the memoir Revolution, finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; the story collection Minor Robberies; and the novel Vacation, winner of the Cabell First Novel Award. She has received two Pushcart Prizes and a Creative Capital Grant for Innovative Literature. She teaches at Wesleyan University.

Months and months and months ago, she was kind enough to answer my questions for an hour.

***

Did you find big differences between writing a novel and writing a memoir?

They are very different creatures. I tried to be, in my memoir, as accurate as I could. I worked hard to stick to the truth. But beyond that, the arc of a memoir is different from the arc of the novel. In a memoir you know what happens to the person: you turn over the back of the book and you see a picture of a writer, where they're teaching and live and so on, so you know at least they don't die. You can't hang tension on that. You have to come up with a different way of building tension. So that's part of it. Also I feel that memoir can be a more philosophical form. Memoirs are about identity, memory, and time, how identity is slippery, how time works, how some things seem so long ago and some things still seem present to us. It's about how time is such an unpredictable feature of our lives.

When you were writing Revolution, what sort of problems of memory did you encounter?

I was eighteen when I took that trip, so it was a long time ago. A lot of it was gathering materials. I wanted to write about George with accuracy. I wanted to have him read the book and tell me if there were inaccuracies. I hired a private investigator to find him, and we got pretty close, but he wouldn't respond.

You sent a private investigator after him but he wouldn't talk to you?

Yeah, basically. There’s a little more to it than that.

So you couldn't have your memories validated? He's basically the only other person who lived through that with you, right?

I had my parents read it before it was published. They weighed in on things they thought I was misrepresenting. So I either changed those things or wrote their doubts right into the text, “my mother thinks this or that happened differently,” and so forth. In cases where I wasn't certain about what happened, I wrote my own doubt into the book. And I did that in a lot of different ways. I didn't want the book to be just about me going on this trip. I wanted this story also to be a study of memory, which is the job of memoir.

Do you have any memories that just don't make sense as you remember them, that you know must not be entirely accurate?

Yes. When I went back to Central America and was having a look around, there were things that I thought I remembered that couldn't possibly have been the case. I remembered a hotel on a certain street, but when I went there no building stood there at all, or I thought I remembered something about a particular town but it turned out to be a different town. There were a lot of things like that, which worried me, because then I thought I'm probably remembering all kinds of things wrong. But, now, as I go through my day, there are always things like that. I would swear such and such and then it turns out that such and such isn't the case. And that's disturbing.

Do you think writing and remembering are similar kinds of creative acts? Does that make it harder to get at the truth?

I've been writing fiction for so long, and I'm so used to using memories when I'm writing fiction, that when I first began writing the memoir, without even noticing what I was doing, I was adding all kinds of lines of dialogue and such that hadn’t happened. So I had to go back and start over. I had to keep stopping and asking myself, “Did this really happen? Do I have a specific memory of this?” Perhaps the memory inside of us is the only true thing. Once we start speaking it or writing it, it becomes distorted immediately, partly because you can't express a memory in words. It's an abstraction in your mind. It doesn't have three dimensions, it doesn't play like a movie on the page. Memory's not like that.

Did you do any research on memory when you were preparing for the book?

No, not really. I read a lot of memoirs. I thought about how other memoirists were doing it, and how accurate I thought they were—not in recording facts, but in expressing memory. The early memoirists didn't even try. The early modernist ones—Gertrude Stein, Paul Bowles. They were writing autobiographies, more like catalogs, a list of things they had done from time A to time B, and they would sometimes add their opinions. They weren't trying to represent memory.

Are you working on a book now?

I have two books that I'm working on and they're both very hard. I don't know if either of them are going to work. One is a graphic novel.

Awesome!

That’s the thing. People keep saying that, but I don't know how to draw. So far it’s horrible, not awesome. It's awful.

Are your drawings really that terrible?

They're pretty bad. They're not realistic at all. They look like little cartoon characters. I went to see my aunt who's an art historian at Yale and I told her that I was doing all of the drawing and she said, “That is such a bad idea. You'll never be able to do it.” So I stopped doing it for a month after that.

What is your graphic novel about?

It's about this little guy. [Deb draws a cute little guy on a post-it note.] His name is Laker. He has a girlfriend and his girlfriend is house-sitting $100,000 worth of parrots. She has to take care of them for two weeks.

What about the other story?

It's about chickens. About egg-laying hens. The reason it's such a mess is that I think it might become non-fiction. I've been writing it as fiction, but I've been doing so much research for it that it might become non-fiction made up of tiny pieces like in my book Minor Robberies, each piece describing a very strange industry, the egg-laying industry. I started researching it and writing these short little pieces, thinking oh, well, these are just research pieces. But then I thought maybe it would be cooler to make it just about the research and not try to make it into fiction.

Tell me something about the egg-laying industry.

Okay, so how do you move chickens? When you have 80,000 chickens in a room and you have to bring them to the slaughterhouse, how do you move all of those chickens? Well, it depends on whether they're walking all over the floor or if they're in cages. If they're walking all over the floor, you have a few options. First, you can hire chicken catchers—six guys who will come and catch all of your chickens in the middle of the night. They can catch 40,000 chickens in a night. There are videos of them on You Tube. They run in and grab chickens by the legs and put them in these drawers that are on wheels, and then they wheel them out. It’s a very violent process. A more high-tech way is that you can buy a giant chicken vacuum. It's a huge machine with a vacuum attached to it and rollers attached to the vacuum. A guy stands there with a remote control, as if it were a remote control car, and he guides the vacuum down to the chickens, and it sucks the chickens in through these rollers and they go rolling up, through the vacuum. Then they get stuffed into these little boxes. It's a pretty horrible experience for them. Oh, and there's a big chicken scooper machine too.

You have a lot of humor in dark places in your work. As passionate as you are about animal rights, how would you talk about something like this and still make it funny? Is it important to balance humor with respectfulness?

I think sad and funny go hand in hand. Revolution had that challenge, too. 75,000 people were killed in El Salvador during the war, and I write about it, and my book is funny. I try very hard to be respectful. And Vacation, it's a very sad situation. That's just my job. I wouldn't want to be pedantic. I wouldn't want my chicken book to be a screed, or an animal rights tract. If I describe the situation I think it speaks for itself.

Do you feel like you're engaging in a particular tradition?

I do. There's a certain minimalist tradition. Lydia Davis is a part of that. Sam Lipsyte, Ben Marcus, and Diane Williams. I want to be a part of that conversation. That's what I aspire to. Jim Shepherd was here the other day and someone asked him a similar question. He said something like, “No, I never think about it. You can't think in those terms because you’re going down a very depressing road because you’ll always worry you aren’t part of it.” Ha! He might be right. Maybe I'm not part of any conversation, maybe I'm just dreaming that I am.

What makes that conversation? If you're writing and you're publishing, don't you necessarily become a part of that conversation? What is this conversation?

It feels like a philosophical conversation as much as it is about aesthetics. It's a philosophical exploration of identity, time, expression, and ethics. Fiction is a really good way to talk about those questions.

Tom DeBeauchamp lives in Middletown, CT. where, on a sunny day not too long ago, he was nearly run-down by legendary psycho-acoustic composer Alvin Lucier, or at least a stunning likeness in a BMW convertible.