Julie’s Comments (group member since Feb 22, 2011)

Julie’s comments from the Julie Orringer Discussion Group group.

Dear Goodreads readers, thanks so much for all your questions this week! It was lovely to get to hear your reactions to The Invisible Bridge and How to Breathe Underwater. I wish you more good reading and discussion here and in your book groups. I’ll be checking in to see what you’re reading!

QUESTION: "Do you have any advice for beginning writers? Can you speak to the importance of an advanced writing degree, like an MFA? I'm starting a masters writing program in the fall, and it would be great to have some insight into how best to take advantage of my time there, and what to do after."

ANSWER: I had a wonderful experience in the MFA program at Iowa, which has a reputation for competitiveness but was an exciting and fertile place to study—there were so many talented writers in the workshop, and the professors were brilliant. Perhaps one of the most important things an MFA program can do is to help you articulate your craft problems. Another is to expose you to many different literary styles. Another is to allow you time and freedom to produce a great deal of new work. Yet another is to let you know what you might want to read. Another is to help you learn how to revise. The best way to use the time is to set a writing schedule early on and follow it assiduously. That’ll help once you’re out, too. Enjoy the exchange of work with your fellow writers; the hope is that you’ll continue to show each other stories after the program. Once you’ve graduated, one of the greatest challenges is continuing to find time to write. There are many great fellowship programs to apply to—the Fine Arts Work Center at Provincetown, or the Stegner at Stanford, to name a couple—and residencies, like MacDowell and Yaddo that give invaluable gifts of time. If you have a job, make sure it’s one that allows you the mental space for your writing, and set up a schedule that lets you get some writing time every day, no matter what.

Thanks for such a great question, Alison!

In a way, the process was similar. I tend to write stories chronologically, from beginning to end; I wrote the novel the same way. I wrote a number of drafts of each story before showing it to other readers; I followed the same practice with the novel. Of course, one major difference was that the novel required so much research. The stories mainly required knowledge of what it feels like to be a young woman growing up in America. I wrote the stories for How to Breathe Underwater over a seven-year period; during that time, I wrote at least fourteen other stories that didn’t end up working out. It took a long time to figure out the common threads that would link the stories of the collection, but once I did, I knew there were a couple more stories I wanted to write—one with a protagonist who was in her mid- or later twenties, and one that took place in rural Louisiana and involved complications of race and religion. When I had nine stories that felt like they belonged together, my agent sent the book out. I was aware of the publishing industry’s wariness of the short story, but I couldn’t worry about it—I loved the short story form, and wanted to finish the book. Fortunately, in the years just before I finished, there were a couple of short story collections that had phenomenal publishing lives: Nathan Englander’s For the Relief of Unbearable Urges and Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies. Maybe those books made publishers more willing to take a chance on a first book of short stories; maybe they raised readers’ awareness of the form. In any case, I was delighted to find an editor who wanted to work with the collection, and also that the book found readers.

Readers! Thanks for another round of excellent questions. Here are some answers.

QUESTION: “I have another question that I wondered last year as I was reading The Invisible Bridge. Out of all the themes you covered throughout the book, what made you finally decide on that name? Or did you know from the beginning what the title would be?”

ANSWER: It took me a long time to find the right title for the book. I didn’t consider “The Invisible Bridge” until about a year after I’d finished the first draft of the novel. Just the other day, actually, I was thumbing through an old notebook and came across my original notes about that title: “The invisible bridge between Budapest and Paris? The bridge he wants to build between his apartment and Klara’s? An invisible bridge between Andras and his brothers while he’s away? Between Andras and Klara while he’s in the work service? In the forced-labor newspaper, there could be an article about how architect-engineer Andras Lévi creates the perfect bridge. ‘The materials weigh nothing, and it can be constructed in almost no time’...etc. Could also suggest a bridge to an earlier time before the war, when Andras was a student; as a means of crossing the border when they’re leaving in 1956; as a way of remaining connected to Tibor. Storytelling is another invisible bridge.” The more I considered it, the more connections seemed to arise, and the title stuck.



QUESTION: “I was wondering--as a writer, when you first set out to become published, how long did it take you to secure a literary agent and see your work finalized? With The Invisible Bridge, did you encounter any resistance due to the length of the story? Many writers have shared that it is very difficult to publish books beyond a certain word count. I am interested to hear about any of the challenges you faced as a writer seeking to become published. Do you have any words of advice?”

ANSWER: I started working with my literary agent, Kim Witherspoon, after a story of mine was published in The Paris Review. I wasn’t really looking for an agent then; I’d published only a few short stories, and didn’t know if I’d ever want to write a novel. But Kim contacted me and asked to see more work, and soon afterward we met and decided to work together. She urged me to keep writing short stories. Three years later, after I’d written and revised nine of them, we decided to try to find an editor for the book. Fortunately, around that time, I started thinking about a novel too. We placed both books under contract at the same time. I knew the novel was going to be a long one, but my editor at Knopf, Jordan Pavlin, liked the idea and made sure I had time to finish it. Neither she nor Kim ever rushed me toward a deadline or made me feel as if I should start making cuts before they looked at the manuscript. When my students ask for advice along these lines, I tell them they should write according to the demands of the story, rather than according to some idea of what the market wants. Of course, a novel requires great economy too, even or especially when it’s a long one. Every word and image must count, just as in a short story. The first draft of this novel was about nine hundred pages, and I ended up cutting almost three hundred.



QUESTION: “I am writing a novel based on my father in-law's memoir. It starts after his liberation from the camps when he returns to his village in Hungary to await the return of any other family members. I haven't found much research about how people returned from the camps (actual methods and length of time) and what happened when they returned home (i.e. his home was occupied by a local communist official). Based on your research can you recommend any sources for liberation and return stories? I loved Invisible Bridges and it is definitely acting as an inspiration for a first time novelist like me.”

ANSWER: What an interesting subject. That was such a crazy, chaotic time—many people had difficulty returning home, and some (like my grandfather) were deported to the Soviet Union along the way. I found interesting accounts of post-camp experiences in the work of Randolph Braham—he has a few books in which survivors’ stories are collected, and he also has a wonderful and comprehensive two-volume work called The Politics of Genocide, about all aspects of the Holocaust in Hungary. Most good research libraries have copies of his books.

Because so many have asked what I'm writing about next, I thought I'd put the answer in a separate topic so that it can easily be found.

The new novel is about Varian Fry, the New York journalist who went to Marseille in 1940 to save 200 Jewish and anti-Nazi writers, artists, and intellectuals who had fled to occupied France and had been blacklisted by the Gestapo. His clients all faced deportation to Germany if they were caught; originally he had a month to try to find them and get them out, but he ended up staying for more than a year and saving nearly two thousand men and women, among them Max Ernst, Hannah Arendt, Marc Chagall, André Breton, and Lion Feuchtwanger. I’m writing his story as a novel; fictional events occur alongside real ones.

Wow! It's nice to hear from so many of my readers. Thank you all for your kind feedback and for your questions. Let me answer a few here:

QUESTION: “I was wondering, did you have to learn a foreign language in order to complete research for the novel, like French or Hungarian? Or did you already know a foreign language? It just seemed to me that there were such authentic details mixed in, that you would have had to get from original sources in Europe!”

ANSWER: From the outset, I knew it was going to be difficult to write a book in English about a Hungarian protagonist who’s trying to learn French; his friends speak Polish, Yiddish, Czech, Italian, German, Hebrew, and Russian, among others. I knew French when I started writing, which was very helpful for my research in Paris; I went to archives and libraries and read old newspapers and architecture books and city histories and accounts of wartime experiences. Hungary proved a greater challenge. Though I’d grown up around Hungarian speakers, I’d never learned much of the language myself; since my grandparents had escaped Hungary under difficult circumstances, they weren’t too keen on passing the language along. But I did end up absorbing enough to make my way around in Budapest and Debrecen, and I had a translator—a wry and talented young medical student—who helped me with my archival and library research there.

QUESTION: “How long did THE INVISIBLE BRIDGE take to write?”

ANSWER: Seven years in all: three years to write the first draft, three to revise, and a year to edit the manuscript with my editor at Knopf.

QUESTION: “A quick question -- how much documentation of your research is necessary when you submit a historical novel? Did your publisher want to see yours or do they just trust an author to have their facts straight?”

ANSWER: The publisher trusts the author. But I had a wonderful copy editor who checked my dates and details and asked for sources for many pieces of historical information. She went far beyond the call of duty to make sure the book had all its facts, large and small, absolutely straight—or as much so as possible. It was important to me to be historically accurate, not just because I wanted the book to feel real and to reflect real experience, but also because I wanted to learn the facts myself.

I see a few questions about how my family's history inspired my novel, so I thought it might be helpful to speak quickly to that here:

The Invisible Bridge started with a story my Hungarian grandfather told me on the eve of my brother's college graduation. When he was a young man, he said, he had a scholarship to study architecture in Paris; he studied for two years, then lost his student visa when the war began. Upon his return to Hungary, he was drafted into a forced labor battalion of the Hungarian army. As soon as I heard that story, I knew it had the contours of a novel--probably one that would be quite long and would take years to write. I'd been a short story writer until that time, but gradually I began to consider taking on that longer project. A few years later I started researching it, and as I did I began to think about elements that would differ from my grandfather's experience. I thought my protagonist might fall in love in Paris, for one thing; to that end, I invented Klara and her daughter and their complicated history. My grandmother wasn't a dancer, and didn't have a daughter when she was fifteen; she was a dressmaker in Budapest, eight years younger than my grandfather. She did, however, survive the Siege of Budapest in an International Red Cross shelter, and many of the details of that section come from her stories about the war. The sections that take place in the Munkaszolgalat, the Hungarian Forced Labor Service, come in part from my grandfather's experiences, in part from his brothers' experiences, and in part from personal narratives written by other men who made it through that horrible time; they are also, of course, partially invented. But I do have a great uncle who was an acrobatic tap dancer, and another great uncle--named Tibor--who was a medical student before the war began, and was conscripted into forced labor like his brothers. That great uncle was sent to Bor, Yugoslavia, and died trying to save sick members of his battalion on the way home.

Hi Everyone! Just reading over some of the wonderful comments and questions. Thank you! I'm going to respond here to a comment/question left by Kathleen and I will re-post what she originally wrote so my reply makes sense:

KATHLEEN: “As one of the authors of "Reading Between The Wine...the story of a traveling book club" and a book club member for 10 years I am always looking for the perfect book to add to our list. 'The Invisible Bridge' proved to be one of the best stories of 2010. The harshness of landscape balanced with the softness of souls brought us to tears and wonder more than once.

We must take the time to ask ourselves where does courage develop? Is it in our DNA or a refection of our surroundings or both? All the questions of humanity are forced to the surface and made us wonder if we could display such sense of devotion.”


MY RESPONSE:
I thought a lot about the origins of courage as I wrote this book. At the outset, the kind of courage that's required of Andras is the kind many of us face when we're entering a new phase of our lives: how will we meet the unknown factors (in Andras's case, of language, education, and location) that we'll face in the days ahead? How will we recognize ourselves, or change, or build new selves, when our environment changes? How will we bear the separation from our families? But as the novel develops, and the political situation worsens, Andras has to develop different kinds of courage still. First there's the kind that allows him to keep going to a school that he knows is peopled in part by antisemites; then there's the kind that lets him pursue a relationship with an older woman, one whose past is partly unknown to him. Later there's the kind of courage that comes from finding himself in circumstances beyond his control. That's the more challenging kind, the kind more difficult for us to imagine from our relatively protected point of view. There are moments when Andras loses his humanity; it's through his connections to the people he loves that he finds his way back to it.

Hello, Goodreads readers! Thanks for joining me for this weeklong chat. I'm writing to you from Brooklyn, NY, where I'm working on a new novel, taking care of my nine-month-old son, and anticipating spring. Please ask anything you like about The Invisible Bridge, How to Breathe Underwater, or writing in general. I'll be reading your questions and posting answers daily.