Valerie Trueblood
Valerie Trueblood
Late bloomer or ahead of her time, Valerie Trueblood published her magnificent debut novel — serendipitously — at age 62.
BY NAN GOLDBERG
Valerie Trueblood recently published her debut novel, Seven Loves (Little Brown, 240 pp, $23.95). I have no idea how many first novels are published each year, but the number would certainly be in the hundreds, if not thousands. Seven Loves stood out as unusual: first, because Trueblood is 62 years old; and second, because after reading the first few pages I knew I was reading the work of an author who had mastered every literary challenge that fiction writing presents – character, structure, style, plot, and most of all, her unique way of forcing literature to echo the rhythms of life.
May, the main character, is a widow when the book begins, right before a stroke that will partially incapacitate her. She is the mother of two daughters, Laura and Vera, and a son, Nick, who had had a serious heroin addiction and had died many years earlier. But the book is not structured chronologically; its seven chapters (each about a person whose life dramatically changed May’s life) are arranged in what seems like random order, ending with a chapter about May’s childhood. Random as the novel’s structure might seem at first, by the end it cannot be imagined any other way – not, at least, by me. I was awed. Subsequently, Barnes & Noble chose Seven Loves for its Discover Great New Writers program.
Trueblood and I had a long talk by phone a few weeks ago, touching on many subjects including how this novel came to be published, how she writes, what her life has been like and is like now; and of course her stunning novel, Seven Loves:
NAN GOLDBERG: So you are 62 and this is your first novel. Is it your first, or is it the first one published?
VALERIE TRUEBLOOD: Well, it is my first novel – if it is a novel – because I’m really a short-story writer, but I didn’t publish my fiction until the last couple of years. I mean, I submitted things in the ’70s. My stories are long, and they just weren’t what people were publishing in the ’70s, and it just sort of crushed me. I kept writing them, but I just put them away; I didn’t submit anymore. I didn’t try.
What caused you to submit, finally?
The sudden realization that you could just push a button on your computer and then not have to stand by the door and wait for something to come back through the mail slot and hurt you. That helped. One day I was reading about a new magazine, and I thought, well, my stories are long and they say they’ll take stories up to 8,000 words; and I fired off a story for the first time in many years. And they took it, which is how [this novel] got published, actually. Somebody saw the short story and liked it.
Where was it published?
It was in One Story, which is, or was then, anyway, a relatively new magazine in New York that published only one story in each issue; every few weeks, you’d get one story in the mail. It’s a lovely idea, and they can be long, which is why I did it.
How long did it take to hear from them?
I heard from them immediately and they said it had not arrived in a readable format because I was a using a Mac, and they had whatever the other thing is, so they were very friendly and nice and we did get it to show up on their screens. Once they could see it, it was quite rapidly that they said they wanted it.
That is just amazing. And then an agent contacted you?
Yes. It was like a crack opened up, and I just put my hand through it to another dimension; it was very strange. I had almost given up.
Then shortly after that I sent in a little tiny short story, “Street of Dreams,” to the online magazine Wordsmitten and it won their Top Ten Contest. The stories have to be exact 1010 words, and you win $1010! And this all happened in my 60th year. You know the Japanese or Asian idea that your 60th year is the year when you begin a second life? There’s this idea – in Japan they call it the Kanreki birthday – that you start a new childhood at 60, and I love the idea. You put on a red vest and a red hat and everybody comes to see you, and it’s an important milestone, not a dreary one.
So I felt like that sort of happened to me, that year. It happened to me totally serendipitously. And if that’s true it can happen to anyone. You just have to do it. People should literally never give up.
Were either of those stories in this book, Seven Loves?
No, the long one was a story called “The Magic Pebbles,” and the only place you can see it is in the One Story little booklet; they’re not online. Then that story – and all of this happened all at once – that one got picked as one of the notable stories in The Best Short Stories 2005 (Houghton Mifflin, 432 pp., $14; paperback original). So this all happened to me after 60, when I had already settled into this life of quiet resignation, where I write every day. I have my whole life, but I just didn’t think anything was ever going to happen, and I thought, “Okay, when I die somebody’s gonna come and pile all this paper up and take it to the dump.
But that never stopped you from writing?
No. I kept thinking I wouldn’t do it anymore, but I just couldn’t stop. So I have many short stories and some of them are linked, and several of them became this book.
Really? So you don’t actually see the book as a novel?
Well, I’ve been led, I guess, to see it as a novel. It is a novel to me now. But it’s sort of a novel by happenstance. It existed. All the stories were about the same person, and the agent who called me said, “This is a novel. Did you not know this was a novel?” So I had to say no, I didn’t.
When you sit down to write, is there any kind of rough plan in your head?
I do it by intuition rather than plan. Plan is a hated word for me; if my husband says to me in the morning, “What’s your plan today?” I just can’t stand it. I don’t like to think any day has a plan.
But because I’ve been working in the short story so many years, and loving the short story and writing about people’s short stories, it feels like the short story is almost like a poem that comes to you whole.
Yeah, you’re right, you’re absolutely right. I mean, it changes as you’re working on it, but in the beginning it appears like a full vision.
It appears truly like a little received work. Did you see [the Woody Allen section of] New York Stories, where the mother appears in the sky as a hologram? Well, sometimes I think a short story is a little bit like that. You see this wavering hologram and then you just try to put it down on paper. I don’t know if this is true for all short-story writers, but it would be fatal to outline it, for me anyway.
Tell me about your life, where you grew up. Did you always write?
I did, I’ve always written. I grew up in Virginia, and I went north to school, to Brown. After school I went to Chicago for five years or so, where I was a caseworker. In those days you could be a caseworker in the welfare department without anything but a B.A. Well, it was horrible then and it’s horrible now, if they’re still doing that, because I was 21 years old and [the agency] just pushed these veritable children into interfering in people’s lives. I was completely unequipped, and knew it, and left after a year or so.
I met my husband there, Richard Rapport; he was a medical student and we got married in 1972. We eventually moved to Seattle for his surgery residency and have been here ever since. My jobs have been mostly temp secretarial [during his training] and afterward volunteer, because I’ve been lucky enough to be able to write full time. I’ve done work for several peace organizations here, with a special interest in (obsession with) nuclear-submarine accidents, and I also volunteered at a soup kitchen for 25 years. I’ve been writing fiction since my teens, and that’s my life.
Richard writes too – Nerve Endings came out from Norton last year – and my son, Daniel, is 26 and is a guitarist.
I want to talk to you about your character, Nick. Do you think some of your experiences as a caseworker came through in that child in this novel?
I don’t think so, because the children that I saw then were so young in my little brief caseworker stint. But at the soup kitchen, I got to be close to some of the people there, and I think the children I saw in the soup kitchen over the years had an effect on me. I saw some of them grow up, and I saw children being taken away from their parents, who were pretty much street people, and going into a series of foster placements that were horrific. They were group homes mostly, where there were abusive counselors. You would hear it all through the prism of the parent who had lost the child, so you would know there was more to the story than they were telling, but you could also see that the lives of their children were getting more and more dead-end.
I also have friends whose kids had serious drug problems, so Nick felt like someone very near at hand to me. My own son is not Nick, in any way, but Nick felt like someone I knew.
It seemed to me that this book was about three big ideas. Well, of course it was about a million things, but there were three huge themes that were the umbrella of it. The first is about randomness: The random quality of just about everything that happens in a life, anybody’s life: whom you meet, whom you fall in love with, what children you have, who they are, the physical ways your body supports you or lets you down.
It seemed to me that the people May meets and becomes involved with aren’t similar in any recognizable way, and some of them might only have played tangential roles in her life, in other circumstances. And yet, people like Jackie [a co-worker], Arne [a cop who played a part in Nick’s death], and Sven [one of May’s caregivers after her stroke], not to mention Cole [her husband] and later Nathaniel [her lover], come into her life by coincidence and then have this deep impact. They themselves probably have no idea how powerful they are.
Well, that is my philosophy of life. I wasn’t thinking of thematic things when I was writing this, but randomness is just a huge thing to me, and although I don’t think I’ve thought about it coherently enough to give a theory of randomness, I think you put your finger right on it.
I don’t think our lives go the way novels go, which is why I’m so interested in the short story. The short story is very like our actual memories. There’s a haloed moment – a moment with this light around it that we remember, but it’s not as if it announces itself before it happens. So I think life is filled with strange moments and strange series of moments that become the really important matters of our life, but often aren’t recognized when they’re happening to us. We recognize them as women, I think, when we’re telling other women: “What happened to me”; “What happened when I took the train that time”; “What happened to me when I met that guy when I was already married.” These are things that come to the surface as women start to talk to each other. It does seem random. For instance, sometimes you have a conversation with someone and it just reverberates for years; it’s just everything to you later. So I think randomness is very much at the center of life; maybe it’s the meaning of life.
I don’t think life is a linear thing, I think it’s a mosaic. I mean, an attempt to give a plot to life, to say that you go from point A as a young person to point Z as an old person, just isn’t the truth of life. I just don’t see life chronologically, and I can’t force myself to see it chronologically.
I can’t see a plot to life, or a question that gets resolved – and so the order of Seven Loves has some sort of mosaic effect for me.
Is May like you?
No, she’s not me. I’m nothing like that, although there are always bits of a writer in her characters, of course. But no, she’s not me, and her family background is not mine at all. But I do like her, and if I had to choose an attitude toward life I would choose the willing rather than the unwilling. I’m not an optimist at all, I’m a sort of pessimistic person. May can’t be said to be an optimist, but she just sort of goes through life, and I think in a way that’s what we all do. Things that happen in a lot of novels, the healings that happen, the closures, the resolutions, are not really true to life. It’s like you have to just take what happens and form it into your life.
Which has to do with that randomness that I was talking about, and also one of the other themes in the book: Living with the unbearable, even beyond-unbearable – not so much the how of it, the moment-by-moment living side by side with unthinkable grief, but about the fact that it can be done, and is done, all the time, and that joy is still possible and sometimes its even impossible to prevent that kind of joy, those moments you talked about that don’t announce themselves. And it seemed as if you were portraying that living with the unbearable as an achievement that is almost an act of grace.
That’s wonderful, that’s exactly true. I just look around me and I see my friends’ lives and the lives of people I know or know of, and there’s so much pain, and yet I see people soldiering on. It’s like that thing that Philo said, “Be kind, for everyone is fighting a great battle.”
The third big theme is the most obvious one: It’s about love. It’s what your title is, it’s what your chapters refer to.
I’m glad you put that third, that’s so subtle. Everyone thinks it’s a love story; when it’s been reviewed it’s been just plot summary: “Well, she loved this person here, and she loved that person there.” Admittedly the title is Seven Loves, but in a way it could have been "Seven Griefs," or "Seven Happinesses," it could have been Seven Happinesses. This goes back to your point about randomness. It sort of depends on how you identify what happens to you, and what you call it.
Yeah, I’m thinking of Arne here, the police officer who came upon Nick breaking into a car and chased him into the lake, and then dove in to try to save him. He could have believed he’d tried to rescue a boy. But instead, he believed he’d killed a boy. It’s all how he defined it to himself. It was only one action but it had so many possible definitions that had huge impacts on the lives of all the people it affected: May, Cole, and their daughters. So are you working on something now?
Yes, there’s a collection of short stories that I hope Little-Brown will take. It will depend on how this book does. I just can’t judge how it’s doing; it seems like it’s doing okay, which I think is a surprise to them.
And in a way, I’ve reached an age where it’s not of first importance to me, which is good, because if this had happened when I was 30 I would have watched every little flutter that the book did on its way, but it’s good when it happens later in life because you think: “A lot of things have happened in my life already, and this is only one of them.”
