AE:
You write in several different genres; you’ve written some
science fiction and romance in addition to mystery. What appeals
to you about writing in different genres? KVF:
I think you tend to write where you’ve read. Again it’s
a generational thing with me, because I’ve been subscribing
to the New York Times Book Review for as long as I remember, and
I can remember when the book reviews were primarily male. People
don’t realize that it was Margaret Atwood’s fourth
or fifth book before she was taken seriously as the world-class
writer that she is. That only really happened in the latter part
of the 20th century.
[Women]
always inhabited the genres; we always had terrific women writing
in the mystery genre and fabulous women writing in science fiction,
and so I loved to read women writers and that’s where I
found them. I grew up loving those genres and reading people like
Ngaio Marsh and Agatha Christie, Ursula Le Guin, Marion Zimmer
Bradley. My science fiction is science fiction in name only because,
again it’s written for a lesbian audience, and Daughters
of a Coral Dawn is the story of a world that women might
build if we were left to our own devices and given our female
nature, and it turned out to be a trilogy… They’re
futuristic novels for my lesbian sisters, they’re not really
heavy duty hardware physics…
AE:
In an interview you once said that there are some things that
only the author will ever know about a book; can you tell us something
about Kate Delafield that is not immediately obvious to the reader? KVF:
Well, I don’t know how many people really see like I do
what the closet has done to her. Because I have letters from readers
who very clearly do get it, and I think almost any book can be
read on any number of levels.
Actually,
the book that I’d like to talk about that I think is a better
example is Curious Wine, because I know that people consider
that to be a very light romance. A lot of people think my work
is really not that political at all, where I think my work is
just as political as hell, beginning with that book, and it’s
because of the choices that I made that were very political. The
fact that these are women who are 32 and 34—they’re
not kids—that was a choice, and both of them had heterosexual
experience, one of them very much so, and I gave them both professions,
and I made one of them absolutely drop-dead beautiful because
the heterosexual belief at the time was that we were lesbians
because we were too ugly to get men.
AE:
(laughing) Some people still believe that. KVF:
I know. So…here were two women who had a lot of choices
in life, a lot of options, and out of all of those options they
chose the hardest one, which was to love each other. These were
things that I feel are very much under the surface of that book
but they were very deliberately chosen elements.
AE:
Who are some of the authors you like to read? KVF:
I always like to answer that with nobody and everybody. I think…we
all stand on the shoulders of the people that inspired us. In
my mind the most significant lesbian writer of the 20th century
was Jane Rule. She’s a Canadian writer, and she also wrote
on a very broad canvas; she was somebody very much ahead of her
time because we’re all doing it now. She didn’t write
the insular lesbian-only novels that a lot of us were doing. It
seems to me like our really good books are coming out of the UK
these days: Sarah Waters…Val McDermid…Emma Donoghue…Jeanette
Winterson. It is kind of good to see writers like Michelle
Tea, coming out with some of the younger voices to give us
more of an idea of what lesbian life is like these days.
AE:
Tell me a little about your most recent book, Hancock
Park, the eighth Kate Delafield novel. KVF:
I’m working with a couple of strands here…Some
of the books are more personal than others. Liberty
Square is probably the most personal of the Kates.
I had so much business to cover in the first four books
that there’s only bits of Kate that came out in all
four, so Liberty Square very much goes into Kate
personally, and I think Hancock Park is kind of
in that tradition. It’s a novel that opens in court
and on the day that she is called as a witness. The book
follows on…from some of the stuff that went on in
Sleeping Bones, [in which] Kate discovers that
she had a brother that she doesn’t know she had…who
has hired a detective agency, ironically, to find her, and
she discovers that she has a niece…[who] is a runaway.
The brother, who is the homophobe from hell, has called
[Kate] to help her; she’s told him to, in the great
Dick Cheney remark, to go fuck himself, pretty much.
And
[Kate’s partner] Aimee absolutely blows up at her because
this is a lesbian child. Aimee
just finally has had enough and so she walks out, and this is the
night before Kate has to bring this case to court. So the strands
are the relationship with Aimee; this niece who does turn up on
the streets of Los Angeles and turns out to be transgender, which
is why she’s run away. So there’s a whole transgender
theme, and I really wanted to do that in this book because I think
Kate being the sort of square she is, is a very good one to bounce
an issue that’s difficult for a lot of people in our community.
I thought she would be a really good filter to look at it. So to
me the subplot, the transgender plot, is very important to me, and
I did a lot of work on that too, speaking of the research part of
it.
I
think it took me this long as a writer to be able to write a book
like that, because the book weaves back and forth in time with
the court case and then it goes back to how they investigated
it, and of course the mystery is central, and it’s a mystery
that does occur in Hancock Park, which is an affluent area in
Kate’s division. And it’s got a domestic violence
theme through it, too, so there’s a lot going on in the
book.
AE:
Sounds like it! Are you working on the next Kate Delafield novel
yet? KVF:
No, I want to think about the next Kate book for a while. There
certainly will be one. As I said, this book is a crossroads book
and a lot of things have come up and are very present for Kate,
and I want to think really carefully through all of them. There
won’t be that many more; this may even be the final book
in the series. There certainly won’t be many more, because
all of the books take place in real time, and if nothing else
she’s going to be termed out as they say (laughs). It’s
fine; there’s a lot of other books for me to write.
