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MaileMeloy.com
Maile Meloy is
the author of the story collection Half
in Love,
the novels Liars
and Saints
and A
Family Daughter.
Meloy’s stories have been published in The
New Yorker,
The Paris
Review,
Zoetrope:
All-Story,
Granta,
and other publications, and she has received The
Paris Review’s
Aga Khan Prize for Fiction, the PEN/ Malamud Award, the Rosenthal
Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a
Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2007, she
was
chosen as one of Granta’s
21 Best
Young American Novelists.
She lives in Los Angeles.
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Short
Story Collections
Both Ways is the Only Way I Want it
(Canongate, 2010)
reviewed
by Sara Crowley
Half in Love
(2003)
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Interview
with Maile Meloy
The
Short Review:
How long did it take you to write all the stories in your collection?
Maile Meloy: Three of them were written and published years
ago, before or between my two novels. A few of the stories I'd
begun even before that, but I'd never been able to make them work.
In the fall of 2006, I was working on a novel when Granta
magazine called and said I was on their list of 21 Best Young
American Novelists -- and that they needed a short story for the
issue in a month. I was thrilled to be on the list, but I
didn't have a short story. So I looked at the abandoned drafts
that seemed like they might be salvageable, and by then enough time
had passed that I could see ways to fix them. I got one ready
for Granta, and found I was still interested in the others, so
I kept working on them. That got me used to the short-story
pace again, and I wrote a couple of new
ones. So it might have taken eight or nine years in total, but
they were all written at different speeds.
TSR:
Did you
have a collection in mind when you were writing them?
MM: Only in the sense that I always hope a short story
will someday find its way into a collection. At some point in
the revising of the stories, I realized that I might have enough for
a book, and when I wrote the last two, Two-Step and Spy
vs. Spy, I was pretty sure I was close. But I didn't
realize how much the stories had in common until I read them all
together.
TSR:
How did
you choose which stories to include and in what order?
MM: I included the ones that were ready and finished
-- so which stories was an easy question. The order of
the stories is more difficult, and I wrote an essay about it for
Amazon that you can read here.
Some stories should go early, some should go late, some
shouldn't go next to others. A story like The Girlfriend
can't go too early because you have to build up some trust with the
reader first. And it needs a light story like Liliana
to go after it. I knew which story would go first and which one
last, but I moved the ones in the middle around for a long time until
I felt I'd solved the puzzle.
TSR:
What
does the word "story"
mean to you?
MM:
A narrative in which things happen, and in which
you want to know what comes next. And in which you're surprised
by what happens but it also makes some kind of recognizable sense.
TSR:
Do you have a reader in mind when you write stories?
MM: Sometimes I think about people who are going to
read the stories and I put things in that I think will amuse or
entertain them. But mostly I'm thinking about the characters,
and what happens to them. And I'm trying to amuse and entertain
myself.
TSR: Is
there
anything you'd like to ask someone who has read your collection, anything at all?
MM: I don't want to give anything away, but I'm
curious about when Two-Step starts to tip its hand.
TSR: How does
it feel knowing that people are buying your books?
MM: Lovely! It's what you want, when you start,
so I was surprised by how shy it made me. When my first book
came out, a friend of a friend said to me, "We're all going to
read your book!" And I said, "Oh, you don't have to
do that." And she said, "No, we are. And then
we're going to think secret thoughts." Which still
makes me laugh. And cringe. But in the end it's very
moving, to have this thing that you spent so much time alone with out
in the world, where other people have their own experience with it.
TSR:
What are you working on now?
MM: I just finished a novel called The Apothecary,
and am beginning another novel, but I'm only in the very early
stages. I'm trying to make myself take a small break in
between.
TSR:
What are
the three most recent short story collections you've read?
MM: Anthony Doerr's amazing Memory Wall
which comes out in the U.S. this summer. Marisa Silver's Alone
With You, which was published this spring and is also utterly
lovely. And Sum: Forty Tales of the Afterlives, by
David Eagleman, which I think counts as a story collection and which
I instantly wanted to give to everyone I know.
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