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How to pronounce Chris Bohjalian: boh-JAIL-yen
Author Chris Bohjalian chats with BookBrowsers
We'd like to welcome author Chris Bohjalian to our discussion. Over the years BookBrowse has reviewed many of Mr. Bohjalian's works, and we recently hosted a discussion of his latest novel, The Jackal's Mistress, on the BookBrowse Community Forum. You can find information about the book at BookBrowse.com and view the BookBrowse Book Club discussion here.
BookBrowse: Which of your books was your favorite to write? Which one are you most proud of? Which was the most challenging?
Chris Bohjalian: Favorite to write? Perhaps The Flight Attendant or The Lioness. I had a blast interviewing flight attendants (my aunt was a flight attendant). I find their job unbelievably hard and under appreciated, and yet they are so tolerant of the people they see at their worst. And they have all seen wild stuff while trying to keep us safe at 35,000 feet.
And writing a novel such as The Lioness demanded going on a safari and researching old Hollywood. I loved every moment of both elements.
Now, I can tell you that I am LEAST proud of A Killing in the Real World, the single worst first novel ever published, bar none.
I think my historical fiction — novels such as Hour of the Witch, Skeletons at the Feast, The Jackal's Mistress, and The Sandcastle Girls — may be better than my thrillers, and so, perhaps, I take more pride in them. But it's obviously subjective, and my opinion changes daily. Ask me tomorrow, and I might be feeling that The Red Lotus is my best novel. Or, some days, Midwives.
The most challenging novel to write was The Double Bind. That's the only book I've written where I knew the ending when I started to write, and I found it difficult for me to get from point A to point Z. It was like having a jigsaw puzzle with the border complete, but no idea what the image was inside.
BB: Have you ever started a book thinking you had a set direction, only to have it wide up somewhere else completely? Or have you had a character "hijack" a story - demand to be heard, or to have their story told, even though it's not what you intended?
CB: Can I answer "all of them?" Or, perhaps, "most of them?" I rarely know where my books are going. I depend on my characters to take me by the hand and lead me through the dark of the story.
BB: Is there a book you've written that you feel should have received more recognition than it did?
CB: Oh, when you write 25 books, some will always draw more attention than others. But I have so fortunate to be the flavor of the month four times: Midwives, The Double Bind, The Sandcastle Girls, and The Flight Attendant. Now, I do wish more readers had discovered Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands, but because the narrator is a teenager, a lot of folks supposed mistakenly it was YA and passed. The reality, of course, is that lots of adults read lots of YA: there are, after all, SO many brilliant YA books. But, for whatever the reason, that novel – which I think is among my best – never caught on.
BB: How do you determine what subjects to write about? Do you usually have more than a single book in the works at any one time, or do you work to completion on one before moving to the next?
CB: I never begin a new novel until I have turned in the second draft of its predecessor. (My books always go through five or six drafts.)
But given the time a book spends in production, I am always polishing one novel while I am writing the next one.
And I only write a book if it's interesting to me: if I'm not enthusiastic while writing it, it's unlikely a reader will be enthusiastic while reading it. I have cut bait many times.
BB: Where does your inspiration come from? I'm curious about how you came up with the idea of writing about a safari gone wrong during the Golden Age of Hollywood, for example. Your books cover a wide range of time periods and topics. Are you constantly thinking, "Hmmm… that might make a good book"? Or do you have people approaching you all the time saying, "You know, [this] would make a GREAT book…"?
CB: Ah, The Lioness. The novel was born in a movie theater. I emerged from a matinee in August 2019, squinting against the high summer sun, and thought to myself, "My God, I love movies. Why have I never written a Hollywood novel?"
When my books work, and heaven knows they do not always work, one of the emotions that keeps you turning the pages is dread. I know so many of my favorite novels, movies, and TV series live at the nexus of anxiety and fear.
Moreover, I tend to be writing novels these days that have multiple geographies, some that are romantic or (and this is an important distinction) romanticized. In the last ten years, I have set novels with scenes in Syria, Armenia, Italy, Manhattan, Dubai, Moscow, Sochi, Vietnam, 1662 Boston, 1864 Virginia, 2022 Las Vegas, and (yes) my beloved Vermont.
So, I wanted a venue in addition to Hollywood: where I could send a Hollywood entourage that would put them completely out of their element, and in deep and real danger? Who would rise to the challenge of survival and who would not? I knew this would be set in one of Hollywood's big screen golden ages from my childhood, which meant it would be set during the Cold War.
And that led me to East Africa. I was originally thinking the book would be The Poisonwood Bible meets And Then There Were None. But now, thanks to Jordy's Book Club, I view it more as Evelyn Hugo meets Jurassic Park.
And, yes, like most novelists, I am always thrilled when I have one of those epiphanies, those "ah-ha" moments when I have found what might be my next novel.
BB: Have you ever asked yourself where in the world you'd like to visit and then ponder if that locale has the roots of a story just waiting for you to write? From your previous responses it seems the glimmer of an idea comes to you first followed by the research that might necessitate travel. My question could be described as the "chicken before the egg or egg before the chicken" syndrome. Where in the world would I like to visit and then delve into the surrounding history or where does the historical research lead me?
CB: Great question. Only once have I been somewhere and thought, THIS is a novel. That would have been on my third visit to Tuscany in 2008. (I have friends who live there, and I used to bike there.) I realized it had been a battlefield in 1944, and The Light in the Ruins was born.
Usually, I have had a premise for a book and THEN gone to the geography — i.e., Vietnam or Tanzania.
BB: How do you go about researching your books? Has that changed since your first novel was published in 1988?
CB: Lord, 1988 was the Mesozoic era. Everything has changed. I wrote my first novel in longhand, using fine point Bic pins and yellow legal pads.
I do all my own research. All of it. When I'm interviewing an expert, I never know where the conversation will go, and I want to be present to ask unexpected follow-up questions. I was a newspaper columnist for decades and a magazine journalist for years. I enjoy this part of the work immensely.
To research a novel such as The Jackal's Mistress:
• I read secondary sources, books about the Civil War, especially those that had a focus on the Shenandoah Valley.
• I read primary sources, letters and memoirs from the era.
• I interviewed historians who knew about the Vermont Brigade, Civil War medicine, and the war in Northern Virginia.
• I traveled from the Museum of Civil War Medicine in Frederick, Maryland to Harper's Ferry, West Virginia, then through the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia (visiting such key sites as the Third Battle of Winchester), and into Richmond.
The Wedding People
Broken Country
Martyr
Memorial Days
Challenger
Going Home
North Woods
Colored Television
Intermezzo
The God of the Woods
Yellowface
Come and Get It
Grief is for People
Chain Gang All-Stars
* * *
For additional interviews with Chris Bohjalian, please see the reading guides for Midwives and Skeletons at the Feast
The story behind the story: The kernel that led to the novel, The Sandcastle Girls
Sometimes my novels have positively elephantine gestation periods - and even that, in some cases, is an underestimate. A mother elephant carries her young for not quite two years; I have spent, in some cases, not quite two decades contemplating the tiniest seed of a story and wondering how it might grow into a novel.
Moreover, in the quarter-century I've been writing books, I've realized two things about a lengthy gestation period. First, the longer I spend allowing an idea to take root inside me, the better the finished book; second, the more time I spend thinking about a book, the less time I spend actually writing it. Here's a confession: The first draft of the novel for which I may always be known best, Midwives, took a mere (and eerily appropriate) nine months to write. Skeletons at the Feast, another book I will always be proud of, took only 10. But I spent a long time pondering both of these novels before ever setting a single word down on paper.
Perhaps in no case has the relationship between reflection and construction - between the ethereal wisps of imagination and the concrete words of creation - been more evident than in the novel I have arriving this summer, The Sandcastle Girls. The novel has been gestating at the very least since 1992, when I first tried to make sense of the Armenian Genocide: a slaughter that most of the world knows next to nothing about.
My first attempt to write about the genocide, penned 20 years ago now, exists only as a rough draft in the underground archives of my alma mater. It will never be published, neither in my lifetime nor after I'm dead. I spent over two years struggling mightily to complete a draft, and I never shared it with my editor. My wife, who has always been an objective reader of my work, and I agreed: The manuscript should either be buried or burned. I couldn't bring myself to do either, but neither did I ever want the pages to see the light of the day. Hence, the exile to the underground archives.
Moreover, just about this time, Carol Edgarian published her poignant drama of the Armenian Genocide and the diaspora, Rise the Euphrates. It's a deeply moving novel and, it seemed to me, a further indication that the world didn't need my book.
And so instead I embarked upon a novel that had been in the back of my mind for some time: A tale of a New England midwife and a home birth that has gone tragically wrong.
Over the next 15 years, all but one of my novels would be set largely in New England. Sometimes they would be about women and men at the social margins: homeopaths, transsexuals, and dowsers. Other times they would plumb social issues that matter to me: homelessness, domestic violence, and animal rights.
The one exception, the one book not set in New England? Skeletons at the Feast, a story set in Poland and Germany in the last six months of the Second World War. That novel is, in part, about a fictional family's complicity in the Holocaust. Often as I toured on behalf of the book in 2008 and 2009, readers would ask me the following: When was I going to write about the Armenian Genocide? After all, from my last name it's clear that I am at least part Armenian. (I am, in fact, half-Armenian; my mother was Swedish.)
I had contemplated the subject often, even after failing in my first attempt to build a novel around the Meds Yeghern. The Great Calamity. Three of my four Armenian great-grandparents died in the poisonous miasma of the genocide and the First World War. Moreover, some of my best - and from a novelist's perspective most interesting - childhood memories occurred while I was visiting my Armenian grandparents at their massive brick monolith of a home in a suburb of New York City. Occasionally, my Mid-Western, Swedish mother would refer to their house as the "Ottoman annex of the Metropolitan," because it was - at least by the standards of Westchester County in the middle third of the twentieth century - so exotic.
In 2010, my father's health began to deteriorate badly. He lived in Florida at the time, while I lived in Vermont. I remember how on one of my visits, when he was newly home after yet another long stay in the hospital, together we looked at old family photographs. I was trying to take his mind off his pain, but I also found the exercise incredibly interesting. In some cases, these were images I had seen on the walls of my grandparents' or my parents' house since I was a child, but they had become little more than white noise: I knew them so well that I barely noticed them and they had grown as invisible to me as old wallpaper.
Now, however, they took on a new life. I recall one in particular that fascinated me: a formal portrait of my father when he was five years old, his parents behind him. All of them are impeccably coiffed. My grandfather is seated in an elegant wooden chair in the sort of suit and tie and vest that he seemed always to be wearing when I was a boy, and my grandmother is standing beside him in a beautiful black dress with a white collar and a corsage. I can see bits of my daughter - their great-granddaughter - in my grandmother's beautiful, almond-shaped eyes. My father, a kindergartener at the time, is wearing shorts, a white shirt, and a rather badly knotted necktie with a cross on it.
I knew almost nothing about my grandparents' story. But that picture reminded me of those moments when, as a child myself, I would sit on my grandfather's lap or listen to him, enrapt, as he played his beloved oud. I recalled the wondrous aroma of lamb and mint that always wafted from their front door when I would arrive, and my grandmother's magnificent cheese boregs. I thought of their library filled with books in a language - an alphabet - I could not begin to decipher, even as I was learning to read English.
And at some point, the seeds of my family's own personal diaspora began to take root. I had no interest in revisiting the disastrous manuscript that was gathering dust in my college archives. But I knew that I wanted to try once again to write about the Armenian Genocide. A good friend of mine, a journalist and genocide scholar, urged me on.
Ironically, I was about 90 pages into my new book when Mark Mustian published his beautifully written and deeply thought-provoking novel, The Gendarme. I felt a bit as I had in 1994 when I read Carol Edgarian's Rise the Euphrates. Did the world really need my book when it had Mark's - or, for that matter, the stories and memoirs that Peter Balakian, Nancy Kricorian, Micheline Aharonian Marcom, and Franz Werfel had given us? It might have been my father's failing health, or it might have been the fact that I was older now; it might have been the reality that already I cared deeply for the fictional women and men in my new novel. But this time I soldiered on.
I think The Sandcastle Girls may be the most important book I've written. It is certainly the most personal. It's a big, broad, sweeping historical love story. The novel moves back and forth in time between the present and 1915; between the narrative of an Armenian-American novelist at mid-life and her grandparents' nightmarish stories of survival in Aleppo, Van, and Gallipoli in 1915. Those fictional grandparents are not by any stretch my grandparents, but the novel would not exist without their courage and charisma.
Is the novel among my best work? The book opens with memories from my childhood in my grandparents' home, what my mother referred to as the Ottoman Annex. In other words, it has been gestating almost my entire life.
This essay appeared originally in The Armenian Weekly in 2012.
Unless otherwise stated, this interview was conducted at the time the book was first published, and is reproduced with permission of the publisher. This interview may not be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the copyright holder.
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