Q. Trying to describe The Lovely Bones to those who haven’t read it - without depressing them - seems impossible. How would you do it?
I’ve struggled with this myself. The booksellers I’ve talked to tell me that they start out and then just end up saying, “You just have to read it,” which I like-a book that won’t give itself up in two sentences. That said, here’s a shot at it: The Lovely Bones is a novel about a murdered girl named Susie Salmon who tells her story and the story of those she left on Earth from the vantage point of her own unique heaven. It hopes somehow, through the voice of a fourteen-year-old girl, to touch on love and loss and hope-huge universal themes that are often bashed but, in my opinion, are huge and universal for a reason!
Q. On the face of it, this is a deeply sad story, yet it is also full of hope. What are you trying to say to the readers?
I wrote once that my personal goal was to be able to hold both hell and hope in the palm of my hand, and I think The Lovely Bones achieves that. It comes from my basic distrust of any story that is either all good or all bad. I sincerely believe that good can come out of great trauma and tragedy. It is not good that it happened, and once it has, you can’t change the fact of a murder or a death. You can work with how you respond to it.
There is no simple formula for how to sustain such a great loss. If there were, we wouldn’t be so afraid of it. I think deep dark black sooty grief is essential, but rising up out of it is essential, too. It can take a few years or half a lifetime to recover from trauma. Why judge how long it takes for one person over another? As long as those left behind are looking for the light, and persist in trying to find hope, that’s what matters.
Healing isn’t a timed competition; it’s an individual process. To heal you have to believe that, in some sense, you have all the time in the world. I guess part of my work is motivated by wanting to give us all permission to feel what we feel and not judge ourselves so harshly for it.
Q. Susie’s heaven is not harps and angel wings. There are a lot of dogs and some strange musical interludes. How did you create Susie’s heaven? Did you watch heaven movies and read heaven books?
Actually, I avoided all heaven movies and books like the plague. I explored many versions and ideas for heaven in the novel. My closest friends are under strict orders never to speak about some of my early ideas to me. They are absolutely hilarious in their utter wrongness, but I may have felt them quite passionately at the time. I think writing about heaven was sort of like diving off a high platform over and over again and not caring if you did a belly flop eight hundred times because you are so determined to nail it eventually-black-and-blue belly or no.
Reading poetry helped because in poetry, unlike traditional narrative, there are fewer rules and boundaries. Images float and have great power in poems and that’s what I wanted for my heaven. I would read a poem by Stephen Dobyns that had a red geranium in it, and the image would work its way into a flower on Earth that Susie wanted to make bloom for her father. She was ultimately incapable of doing it, but the flower bloomed in heaven a thousand times.
Q. Susie’s voice is so real. Was it as effortless to write as it seems?
Writing The Lovely Bones was just one of those rare experiences where a character presented herself to me, and I knew immediately that I was going to follow her wherever she wanted me to go. Susie’s voice came to me fully formed, but, in drafting, part of the constant discipline was to make sure I remained true to her. I had a sign I put up over my desk that said THROUGH SUSIE, and I was rigorous in cutting out anything that didn’t meet that standard.
Q. The family members in The Lovely Bones are all so distinctly drawn. We feel like we know each of them intimately. Are they based on your own family?
No, actually. Some of the trees in the yard or the architecture of the houses certainly springs from my suburban upbringing, but the family is entirely fictional. My sister is very much alive. I have no brother. My mother . . . well, she would be horrified if she thought the mother character was based on her. In my experience, imagined characters are always more vivid than ones based too closely on real life.
Empathy and compassion are central to writing for me. What are my characters saying to me? Who do they truly want to be? Nothing should ever come easily in answer to these questions because humans aren’t easy. I distrust the “aha!” moment both in life and in writing. As soon as you think you know someone, there is something you haven’t seen. My characters guide me to the right way of telling their story just as, when I taught freshman composition, my students guided me in the right way of trying to teach. I pitched myself into the lives of my students who came from every background and represented every age.
Q. Mr. Harvey, the neighbor who murders Susie, is quite compelling in that you see a human side to the person who’s done such unspeakable things. Where did his character come from?
Mr. Harvey was another character, like Susie, who just landed on the page fully born. I know he comes from my firm conviction that murderers are not animals but men. That is what makes them the most frightening. I felt great compassion for Mr. Harvey even though he killed my main character. I think the way into a character, even the most heinous, is through working compassionately with them, through a desire to understand them. Certainly it is scary territory, but we fool ourselves if we believe criminals don’t kiss their wives or trim their lawns in between slaughtering their fellow humans.
Q. The father seems to know, without evidence, that Mr. Harvey killed his daughter. How is this possible?
I really believe that in certain cases, people’s heightened response systems can lead them to seeing things others might not. Victims of violence often possess a sixth sense. It’s dangerous territory because if the conclusion is wrong, as the police first believe Jack Salmon’s is, it can be disastrous. Some call it post-traumatic stress disorder and others call it street smarts. When your world is turned upside down, you adapt. Jack Salmon shares an experience with his daughter’s killer, and it is just odd enough in its individual moments for him to glimpse the truth.
Credit: Straits Times Singapore - reporter Ong Sor Fern
