An interview with author Melissa Bank.
We spoke with literature’s latest discovery, Melissa Bank during her recent visit to Munich about working with Francis Ford Coppola, the label of “women’s fiction” and finding one’s way in the world. munich found: How is it to see your work translated into so many different languages? Melissa Bank: It’s amazing. The amazing thing is to talk to readers from other places and have them identify with the character. That is really thrilling. MF: Do you ever get nervous that it might be translated inaccurately or that your humor won’t hold up in other languages? MB: I do. I actually worked with the German translator a little bit. I don’t really know how the translation is because I don’t read German, but she was very conscientious. There are certain jokes that you just can’t translate. For example, in “The Best Possible Light” there is a line when the mother asks her son if “he has a date for the wedding.” His response is, “Well, I think I should take Laurel. (his fiance).” Well, of course you can’t translate “date” so that is has the double entendre that it does in English. That was a hard joke to lose. MF: What was the reaction of readers? Do they ask for your advice? MB: Nobody has asked me for my advice, but I have gotten letters from all over the country sort of saying “This is my story.” They really like Jane. And weird letters from men. There was a profile of me in the New York Times and from that I got a lot of weird letters. I call it my FBI file in case I ever need to provide any background information for stalkers. But mostly [I get] really nice letters. MF: Do you have a problem with the label “women’s fiction?” MB: I do. When a man writes a book no one ever says, “Oh, it’s men’s fiction,” even if it is about war or only men are in the book. I loved Nick Hornby’s book High Fidelity. If there is any relative of my book then that is it for me. I felt like he did a lot of what I was trying to do. It really is a man’s consciousness through and through. It is a much closer relation than Bridget Jones’s Diary or any other “women’s fiction” to which it has been compared. I think it denigrates women to say that just because it is about a woman or written by a woman that it is “women’s fiction.” MF: Maybe it’s because women have waited so long to see books written about their issues? MB: Yes, I think that’s true. I think sometimes you write what you want to read. I felt like there were books that women in my office read like romances, splashy books, but no books about real women and what it is like to try and find a career and then not really find one. It didn’t seem that there were many books that were serious, when I say serious I don’t mean not funny, I mean serious in that they dealt with issues in a complex way. There are books written about women’s issues, but they aren’t written for a literary or for a more esoteric audience. They aren’t necessarily that accessible. MF: Because you have admitted that there are some autobiographical aspects to the book, do you find that people think you are Jane? MB: Yes I do. There is a lot of me in Jane, and a lot of Jane in me. I spent years developing and evolving Jane. So, I think in a way, its funny, I feel almost like a parent to Jane. Like I don’t want to take too much credit for her because she is her own person. A fictional creation is always a fictional creation. I think in fiction you have to come up with your own truth and the fictional truth is not like reality. Jane makes a lot more sense than I do. MF: You touch on a lot of different issues in your book, it is not just about love and romance as some people might think. MB: No, it is really about how you find and create your life. MF: Would you say that loss is the major theme of the book? MB: It is a lot. I think of loss as the thing that actually makes us grow up. In every stage — losing the illusions you have about your family and a lot of it is just the losing of your parents, the sense of your own mortality. I feel like loss is what has made me stronger and able to have the things that I want. One thing I notice in people who are in their early twenties is that they still have the sense that “everything is going to work out.” And it does, but there is a suspended sense of reality and you can tell when the change happens in yourself. I feel like I recognize every moment of loss in my life. Everyone has those moments. And you always gain something. After my own father died, I lost the sense that I was blessed. That nothing bad would happen to me. I had lost a lot at that time, my teaching contract at Cornell had just ended. I remember reading the newspaper about a potter’s field in New York — a place where people who don’t have any money are buried. This article was about a potter’s field for babies that had been abandoned, they called them ‘Baby Jane’ and ‘Baby John.’ I realized, at that moment, that I was part of this other world where I understood pain and it connected me to those children. The world was full of grief and I had just gotten my toe in it. The world is also full of great happiness, but it is important to know that other side. You can only have that depth of feeling once you have lost something. I had gained compassion, I felt connected to humanity. It helps you with your relationship to yourself, like you become someone who you might want to be when you begin to achieve that kind of depth. MF: Francis Ford Coppola has bought the rights to the title story. What was it like writing the screenplay for him? MB: Oh, it’s so different. It was really hard. When you write fiction you are in charge of it from the very beginning to the very end and when you’re finished that’s it. But when you are writing a screenplay, that is just the first step. I was surprised how little all of the years of writing fiction helped me because it is a totally different medium. In fiction you tell the reader what is happening, but in film you have to evoke what is happening, you don’t want them to know everything through talk. Screenplay writing just didn’t feel real to me, fiction always feels so deep and this felt very superficial and it was, the first draft was very superficial. I had to learn how to be as deep in writing a screenplay even though it was just the surface that I was showing. It was hard too, because you learn so much just from Jane’s voice and how do you translate a voice into a tone or a vision? It was hard, I read all the books like “How to Write a Screenplay” which only convince you that you never want to write a screenplay. The only thing that those kind of instructions work for is baking a cake. MF: Can you imagine any specific actress cast as Jane? MB: Right now I can’t, but when I was writing it I saw the actress Janeane Garofalo. I used her for timing and voice in some ways. My only concern is that it not be an incredibly stunning Hollywood actress because then it wouldn’t make sense. People like Jane because she is real. I mean, Jane isn’t ugly, but she isn’t a supermodel either. If she were a model she would have different problems. MF: The story in which Jane has breast cancer was so genuine. Have you had much reader reaction to that story? MB: I haven’t had any letters from women with breast cancer. But have had several from friends or family of women who have fought it. Mainly saying that Jane’s story is the story of their friend. MF: Humor is such a great tool for healing. Do you think it is also what makes Jane so strong? MB: It is Jane’s best survival tactic, it makes her life not just something that is happening to her. If you can laugh about it, it is yours but it isn’t you. It is a way of dominating it. I think there are all sorts of ways to be the hero of your own life and for people who survive, it is a source of strength for them for the rest of their lives. <<<