Your story in this week’s issue, “Back Then,” is set over a period of years that a girl spends going to the same cottage by Lake Erie every summer. Were you inspired by a real cottage or summer memories of your own?
My family went every year to Catawba Island (which was not an island but a peninsula), and this story is loosely based on those times. Even though we spent only a week or two there out of the fifty-two, our visits were magical: our father’s car traversing Route 53 each year was a ritual beginning, the old bridge that crossed Sandusky Bay a portal that took us out of our everyday life.
The world you create is almost exclusively a female one: grandmothers, mothers, aunts, sisters, girl cousins. The father seems to drift in and out, if he shows up at all, and the only boys are some rowdy teens at the pool. Where are all the men?
For this story, everything centered on the main character’s trying to find her place as a person and a woman, so the women around her are important in a way that the men can’t be. It’s a presexual world, although that is about to change—and is, by the end of the story, in the process of changing.
The girl is thirteen and feels intensely that she is on the cusp of something. Beyond the obvious physical changes of adolescence, is she metamorphosing in other ways?
I think that the coming of adolescence is coupled for Kathleen with her growing awareness of the world around her, which seems enticing and frightening, just out of reach.
She’s just had her hair cut short, against her mother’s wishes. Why? Was it a rebellion against her mother? A statement of independence? A way to claim her own identity?
It’s all of those things! But not in a thought-out way—it’s instinctive, and, once it’s done, she’s not sure that she meant it or that she likes it. If it’s a rebellion, though, it’s not one that invokes a response, at least not on the page. We don’t know what her mother said when she came back from her errands. The haircut is a gesture, an attempt at taking control, but it also marks Kathleen out in a way that she doesn’t quite understand.
Kathleen talks about another row of cottages, adjacent to hers, which are somehow inferior—their yard is littered with toys and debris; they’re shabbier. And yet she’s drawn to them, curious about them. What is at the root of that curiosity? A dawning sense of class and social hierarchies, or something else?
I don’t think it’s about class—more about otherness, the closeness and utter foreignness of other lives, which is exotic, a little seductive, but also threatening.
The story is set decades ago, in the nineteen-sixties. Why look back on that time period now? How hard was it to inhabit—or re-inhabit—the mind of a girl of that age in that era?
One answer to this is that it’s my time period, my childhood. Sometimes, though, the ideas and ideals, the political issues and upheavals of the sixties seem similar to what’s going on now, and so those times have been on my mind. As for re-inhabiting, it was easy. The fears and obsessions of our adolescence don’t disappear when we become adults. We may handle them better, but they’re right there, ready to resurface, whether called upon or not.
Do you have any favorite summer stories by other writers?
When I think of summer stories, the ones that first come to mind are children’s books that I read lying in the grass during long Ohio summers, like “Gone-Away Lake,” by Elizabeth Enright; Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons series; or “Dandelion Cottage,” by Carroll Rankin. But there are also wonderful stories, like John Cheever’s “The Swimmer” or “Goodbye, My Brother.” Sections of novels not set exclusively during summer, too: I’m currently rereading Olivia Manning’s Second World War novels, the Balkan Trilogy, which have lovely, long descriptions of the Romanian summer.
