Lisa Borders joins the show to talk about her new novel, The Fifty-First State! It's a fine book about mismatched half-siblings brought together by calamity, set in an area of New Jersey overlooked by most everyone but its residents. Lisa and I have a fun conversation about her work and influences, how her science background informs her writing process (she's a part-time cytotechnologist), why form has to rise from story, how to teach novel-writing, why she stands by Jonathan Franzen’s novels, how a Michael Cunningham short story changed her life, and whether southern NJ should secede and become America's fifty-first state.
The Virtual Memories Show
Season 3, Episode 28 - You Can't Get There From Here
[INTRO MUSIC] Welcome to The Virtual Memories Show. I'm your host, Gil Roth, and you are listening to a weekly podcast about books and life, not necessarily in that order. You can subscribe to the show on iTunes, and you can find past episodes, and get on our email list, and make a donation to the show, at our website, chimeraobscura.com/vm. You can also find us at facebook.com/virtualmemoriesshow on Twitter at VMSPod, and at virtualmemoriespodcast.tumbler.com. This episode marks the 51st interview that I've posted. I should have mentioned that during last week's episode, because 50 is a round number, and that's kind of an accomplishment, but I forgot. That's on me. On the upside, our 51st interview is with the author of The 51st State. This week's guest is Lisa Borders, who just published her second novel, The 51st State, from Engine Books. The 51st State takes place in the southern farmland of New Jersey, which is a really different New Jersey than my wonderful abode here in northern part of the state. The plot of the book is that this 17-year-old kid's parents die in a car wreck, right at the very beginning, and his half-sister, who's about 20 years older, and this artsy photographer in New York City, has to move back to their hometown to take care of him through his last year of high school. It's kind of a simple pitch for the book, but what's intriguing about it is how emotionally real it all is. Lisa does a great job of really capturing what it means to be a 17-year-old bundle of hormones who's also going through this incredibly tragic event and how grief sort of warps his behavior, and at the same time, what it's like being a woman in her mid-30s who has to give up her life in the big city to move back to her hometown and sort of reconnect with the half-brothers she never got to know. Even though her life in New York wasn't exactly a barrel of monkeys and she wasn't really setting the world on fire, she still has to reconcile this old life and her new one. What I'm saying is it's a good read. It's a really engaging novel, and I'm happy that I had a chance to read it this year. And now let's enter the 51st state with Lisa Borders. ♪♪ ♪♪ Welcome to Ringwood, New Jersey. Thank you. Actually, you're only the second guest to come to the house. Oh, no. And you are in the only town, as far as I know, that has ever been listed twice on the EPA's Superfund list, which I know is part of your life. Yeah. It's a great achievement for us that we managed to get re-added for not cleaning up well enough after one of those New Jersey level toxic spills. Well, and I think what's interesting is like most Superfund sites in New Jersey, it looks beautiful on the surface. Yeah. It's one of the -- again, out here, it's a real spread out town, but there are sections where it's pretty clear that this is where the Ford Toxic Sludge is still bubbling up from underground. But it's quite a town. It's my New Jersey. Now, let's talk about your New Jersey. Your book is the 51st state. It deals with southern New Jersey and a very, well, agrarian section of southern New Jersey. Tell me about growing up in that region and how it informed the new book. Yeah. So we lived -- I actually grew up in two parts of New Jersey. So we lived in central Jersey between the ages of 6 and 13 for me. And then we moved to south Jersey when I was starting high school. So I kind of figured -- and, you know, when I say central Jersey, you know, sort of think Bruce Springsteen area. So I kind of thought, well, we're moving two hours south in the same state. It's not going to be that different. It'll be about the same. And it was culture shock. It's -- I don't know if you've spent much time down in the first state, but it's really different. It kind of felt like moving from a New York suburb to Alabama when we first moved down there, which I'm exaggerating a little but not that much. And most of the people I know who live down there usually sort of nod when I say that. It's rural. It's just a completely different way of life. And I think that it's a lot -- I mean, obviously it's south Jersey, but it feels -- at least to me moving there. It felt in many ways more like the south than like a part of New Jersey. And it's -- for most people, if you mentioned south Jersey, their image is the Jersey Shore and the accompanying MTV craziness. How do you -- how do you convey your New Jersey to people given the existing stereotypes of, you know, the turnpike, the shore, et cetera, how do you sort of -- when I try to explain to people that it's north Jersey and we have a mile of woods behind the house and they don't really get that idea. How difficult has that been in your time? It's -- well, it's been -- I think the most interesting thing and I mean, this has happened even all over central and north Jersey is, you know, when you say south Jersey, people kind of say like, you mean like Cherry Hill, you know, and which to me is a Philadelphia suburb, I mean, that's not really south Jersey. You know, the real south Jersey to me is like Cumberland County, Salem County, you know, way down there. And it's -- what I find interesting is it's almost easier to explain to people who are not from New Jersey. Because you kind of, you know, you kind of give them a little primer on the state and the differences between the regions and they get it. But a lot of people in north Jersey and even central Jersey kind of really don't understand how different it is. Because they don't usually go that far south. Often Cherry Hill is the farthest south they've gone. So they kind of think, yeah, it's way down there. I took a long ride south and that's south Jersey. Or they did the parkway and went all the way down to the Wildwood and Cape May. They don't know that that's central part of the state. Which is esoteric subject to work on. Although that's -- it's the setting for the novel. What led you to, you know, put the book there and use that as an area for exploration for these characters? So when I -- when we first moved down there when I was in high school, yeah, I was a little bit resentful at first. I had a little difficulty kind of adapting. And, you know, I ended up adapting fine. But I think I spent about a year floundering before I kind of figured things out, which is probably pretty common. What happened was I went away to college. I came back, I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. And I ended up living at home and working on my hometown newspaper for a year and a half. And one of my assignments was to go down to the Delaware Bay communities, which were left impoverished when the oyster industry went under in the '50s. There was a parasite that swept through all the oyster beds. And it was pretty dramatic. It -- people who had been extremely prosperous were put out of business within months. And the legacy of this area was that descendants of the oyster shuckers, who had been -- many of them had been brought up from the south because there was work here in New Jersey and the oyster industry. These people just kind of fell into abject poverty. And I was assigned to do a series of stories about what this was in the '80s, about what, you know, what the Delaware Bay communities were like now and what was happening in terms of, you know, housing and things like that. This area is about 15 miles from where I went to high school, and I had never been there. I didn't even know it existed. I mean, I shouldn't say I didn't know it existed. Like, I had heard of the towns, but I just didn't really know anything about them or what they were like. And I went there, and there were a few things that struck me. I mean, the history of the region, you know, at that point when I was finally in my early '20s, I found the history of the region really fascinating. But I was also struck by the extremes. So the physical landscape is incredibly beautiful. I honestly think it's one of the most beautiful places on earth. The photo -- the little photo at the bottom of my book is taken there. It's because of the way the book cover is done. You can't really see it that well. But on my website, there's a version of it where you can see it a little bit better. It's extremely photogenic. I mean, you really can't take a bad picture of some of the parts of that region. But so you have this beautiful physical landscape, but then it's juxtaposed with, you know, rusted out trailers and sort of shacks that are falling down that people are living in. But then a half mile down the road may be a really big, lovely house that's a holdover from when the oyster industry was prosperous. So there are a lot of extremes thrown together in that area, which I found really fascinating. And I think at that point I was just kind of dabbling in fiction writing, and I knew I wanted to write something that was set there, but I wasn't sure at that point if it would be non-fiction or a novel or what it would be. But it's something that I turned over in my head for a long time. Yeah, how did you get started in fiction? Well, when I was a kid I wrote poetry as a child. Really, really bad poetry. Well, is there any other kind when you're a kid? And it got worse in high school because then it was all the "I'm angry at my mother" poetry. She rules my life with an iron hand, you know. I mean, it was all cliched and it was all anger. I think it was, even, I was actually a biology major in college, but I took creative writing classes, and I was taking poetry then, but I was kind of realizing that my poems had, you know, characters and sort of plots, which you don't really have in a poem, and they started going on for pages and pages. And I think it was probably not 'til my early 20s. I was still trying to write poetry, and it was just not working very well. I finally made the switch over to fiction in my early 20s. And once I started writing short stories, it kind of felt like, even though the early ones were not great, I sort of felt like I had found my form. Like, I thought, okay, I can do something with this. Whereas, there was a point where I came to realize with poetry that it was just not something I was ever going to be very good at. The upside of that was, and I was bummed when I ran out of these, most of my poems, they were mostly really bad, but there was usually one good line in every poem. And what I ended up doing was mining them for my early short stories. So, even some of the stories that were published, a lot of them start with the first line that I took out of one of these poems. So, once I had no more poems left to mind, I was like, "I really gotta just start making stuff up." The work at this now? Now, who were you reading? Who were your influences that led you into short fiction, and then onto the longer form? Yeah. I was a huge Laurie Moore fan early on. Her first collection, Self-Help, was probably a big early influence on me. Unfortunately, it also led me to write a couple stories in the second person, because most of the stories in that book are in the second person. Everybody tries. Yeah. I actually had one published in the second person, and I think it worked. The other ones were not good. She was an early influence. I found Alice Monroe pretty early, which was awesome, and sure it's always awesome for everybody. Well, this wouldn't be the earliest, but when I was in grad school, I discovered Michael Cunningham's first novel. Before he wrote the hours, he wrote this novel called A Home at the End of the World. That book was so important to me. So, I was in a graduate program in the late '80s at Temple University in Philly, and it had a heavy experimental bend. I really didn't belong in that program, and it was just my own naivete applying that I ended up going there and staying there. It really wasn't a great fit for me. Although, there are ways in which I'm glad I went there, because I think it exposed me to types of writing that other programs might not have, and that I never would have sought out on my own. But I just felt like most of, I had one or two really good professors, but who I felt got what I was doing. But I felt a lot of the teachers there were just trying to push me into doing something really, really experimental, which wasn't-- Late '80s, you're in the academic deconstructive mode, and, yeah, everything was post-modern. If it wasn't post-modern, it was minimalist, you know, and, yeah. So, the best American short stories that came out in '89 had a short story by Michael Cunningham called White Angel, which was an excerpt from "A Home at the End of the World." And I read it, it was like food to a starving person, because the sentences were beautiful and lush and evocative, and the characters were compelling and believable and heart-wrenching, and it was just this gorgeously constructed story. And I had ended up being a huge fan of modernism, not the real experimental modernist, but, you know, I loved Edith Wharton, and I kind of-- I was feeling at the time like I had to go pretty far back in the past to find the kind of writing that I actually loved. And then, you know, I read this story and I realized that this is what I want to do. If I can write one sentence that's as beautiful as any sentence in this story, I'll be set. So he was a big influence, and that novel was also a big influence in terms of theme, because it was about people' friends kind of cobbling together a family. And my first novel, Club Koopu Land, was about that, too. So he was an influence in a lot of ways early on. And moving forward, who do you find influencing you nowadays? Oh, boy. [laughs] Um, you know, this is going to sound like I'm totally stuck in the mud, but a lot of the people I loved when I was young are still people I love, the people I mentioned I revere. I'm also-- I know this is controversial, but I'm also a big fan of Jonathan Frans, and I know a lot of people hate him. [laughs] No, no, that's fine. Okay, he's published far more than I have, so I, you know-- I love the corrections, and I loved freedom. Yeah. I think they're great novels, and I'm always willing to duke it out with people. I think-- my feeling is that sometimes his personality in interviews gets a lot in the way of people being able to enjoy his writing. That's the cult of the image where we live nowadays, so. Yeah. I mean, I can understand why his writing style might not be for everyone, but I think the level of hatred that he generates. I mean, I've seen people post things on Facebook. It's-- That's hatred of success. That's just a, you know, I can't get a book publisher. I can't get more than 2,000 sales, and, you know, I'm going to resent everybody who does well. Why do they have a deal, and I don't, you know? I think that's definitely part of it. I mean, I can't remember the writer's name, but have you seen-- there was a writer recently who got a $2 million advance for a long novel. I don't know if you saw that. I can't-- it was only-- it was an article that was floating around on social media shortly before I left to start all my readings. And it-- to me, you know, from what I read, this was a guy who'd been working really hard for a long time, you know, being a writer, and by all accounts, his writing is terrific. And I sort of feel like I'm happy that they're buying novels again. She'd be happy the money is out there. That's, you know, it's a lot better than, well, yeah, we really love this guy. Here's $5,000. Exactly. One book that I-- even though it came out a while ago that I read fairly recently that I've been madly in love with is Elizabeth Strauss, Amy and Isabelle. I had read Olive Catridge, which was-- I think-- I can't remember if that one of-- I think it was a Pulitzer Prize that it won. It's a collection of short stories, even though they tried to call it a novel, but it's really a short story collection. And I thought that was terrific, but when I read Amy and Isabelle, I felt like it was one of the finest novels I had ever read. It centers on a mother and daughter, and it's set in the '70s. They don't make it clear when it takes place, but you can tell from various references that it's probably sometime in the '70s. And one of the-- I mean, there are a lot of things that are really interesting about it, but she plays with time in a way that I haven't completely figured out yet. Like, I've read it twice, and I'm still puzzling at how she makes it work, because-- But it does work. I think it works spectacularly, but to me, it feels like it shouldn't work. Yeah. Because she kind of creeps up-- she forecasts a major event in the very opening. You don't know what happened, but you know that something happened. And then she creeps up on the event, and just when you get to the moment where you should see what happens, she cuts a couple months to the future. And it should irritate me, usually things like that do. And I think it's just because the writing is so spot on, and the construction makes a certain-- I think the construction makes a certain kind of emotional sense, even if it doesn't make logical sense. So it bypasses the logic center of my brain that says I want the Aristotelian plot, and it just works. And I think for me, because I do tend to write in a very linear fashion, it's a really good book for me to return to, to maybe shake things up a little bit. Is that a way you'd want to move in future at all, or something you'd want to experiment with? Possibly. I mean, I usually feel like in terms of form, it really has to rise from the story. Because I think that the stories I like that are experimental in nature, it feels organic to what's happening in the story. I think David Foster Wallace was good at that. Again, he's somebody that generates love and hate on both sides. And I'm probably more of a fan of his essays than of his fiction. I think his essays are phenomenal. Who writes better essays? Nobody I can think of. But even in his fiction, I think that the form and the crazy footnotes usually make sense for what's happening. It doesn't feel like it's just imposed on the story. And without naming names, I think there are other experimental writers where it really does just feel to me like they're taking almost a very pedestrian story and trying to jazz it up with some certain techniques. And then look what I'm doing here. Exactly. It's almost like trying to cover up for some lack. I think that was one of the things I felt in grad school that really annoyed me that people would hand in these stories. It would be like there's no there there. But because they had done all these crazy little tricks that were sort of flashy, they'd sort of trick people into thinking there was something there. Not everybody. There were great people in my program, but there were a few people like that. I'm sure with any arts field, that's one of those things where the style can overcome a complete lack of substance. Yeah. Who else do you find particularly influential? Another writer, I mean, I don't know if I would say influential, maybe someday. I love Amy Bender's writing. I don't know. It's A-I-M-E-E, Bender. How can I describe her stories? I wouldn't call them magical realism, but surreal things happen in a very realistic context. Again, I think they bypass my logic center. They make emotional sense, and then they connect to that part of me. I find her work really moving, even though it's very, very strange. Her last novel, which I adored, was The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake. It's about a girl, it starts when she's nine years old, who suddenly one day develops this ability to taste the emotions of the person who made the food she's eating. It's a very straightforward writing style. There's nothing really flashy about it. It feels believable that it's what this nine-year-old girl is going through, even though what's actually happening is not strictly believable in a realistic sense. You discover later that there are other people who have other strange talents like this that they've kind of hidden. In the end, it's one of those books that the ending really snuck up on me. I was actually at a writing colony revising the 51st state when I was reading her book, and I think I read it in two nights. The last sentence actually just made this gasping sob came out of me. It's not like some giant thing happens, but I think the emotional force of the book was this very slow build. When I got to the last sentence, I was just blown over by it. That's a book that I want to reread. I haven't had a chance to read it a second time. Do you ever aspire to have that effect on someone? I definitely think what I would take away from that is that I would like to have that effect. That's an influence. Definitely. How's the tour going? How's the book been received? You've done a bunch of South and Central Jersey appearances? I have. It's going really well. One of the things I'm finding interesting, with my first book, I did some readings around, but I didn't have the kind of tour that I put in place for this book. I sort of naively thought it would be all fun. It would never feel like work. It would just be 100% joy. The readings themselves are 100% joy, but getting from place to place and kind of just dealing with living out of a suitcase. I'm a big music fan. I'm starting to understand why bands break up on the road. I might break up with myself at some point. I've been feeling really good about it. I've been feeling like there's a lot of energy around the book. Both my Boston launch and my South Jersey launch, there were 90 to 100 people who came, which blew my doors off. I was so touched that that many people wanted to come out and support my book and hear me read from it. It's been going really well. The New Jersey dates have been kind of like old home week because I've been connecting with different friends and family members. That's been really cool too. You've been a natural draw in South Jersey at all. Given the setting of the book being down there, has that been a local press thing? We actually got an amazing amount of press down there. There were a couple of feature stories in different newspapers. I think because of newspaper consolidation, it turned out that several of the newspapers in Central and South Jersey are all Gannett papers and they all ran the speakers. The same piece. I was pretty happy about that. The upside to consolidation, that's great. Exactly. It's definitely been getting a lot of attention in the state for obvious reasons. The Star Ledger did a review a couple weeks ago. That was really cool. I was very happy about that. I think formerly the fifth largest paper in the country, back when there was a scale to this sort of thing being suburban New Jersey. I know it's still the largest paper in New Jersey. I don't know. It's only two left. It's us in the Bergen record. I think that's pretty much all you have. For majors up there. Then it's all the little suburban trends type things. It's just life in this. It's a different age and we grew up in. Definitely. Your bio also includes a mention that you're a cytotechnologist. First, what is that? A cytotechnologist screens pap smears using a microscope looking for abnormalities, precancerous or cancerous cells. That stems from your bio history as an undergraduate? I actually had kind of a weird path to that. I was a biology major. I thought I was going to be a veterinarian because I was an animal lover. I decided my senior year that I didn't want to do that, but I wasn't sure exactly what I did. I kind of knew I wanted to write vaguely, but I also was concerned about supporting myself. I went into journalism because I thought, "Well, I can write." It would be the worst of all possible words. I mean, no, it looked good at the time. It's really interesting. I actually really enjoy writing features, but it was when I had to do the zoning board meetings. The zoning board meetings and planning board meetings or the worst thing was cover some kind of tragedy and ask people how they felt. There are very gifted reporters who can do that in a way that it doesn't feel intrusive to the subject because I've seen people do that. I was not good at that. I was extremely uncomfortable and my discomfort was very obvious and it made the person I was talking to uncomfortable. I went on to a second newspaper in southeastern Massachusetts after the first one I worked on in New Jersey. There was a point where I had to interview a woman who's a fishing widow, a woman whose husband had died out on a fishing boat. It was like outside the funeral and her little seven-year-old daughter was nearby. I was so uncomfortable. I felt so horrible about it and I just thought, "I have to get out of this. I can't do this anymore." So back to science? Well, what happened was I applied to grad schools in creative writing then. I went to psychology school a year after I got my master's in creative writing. Because I finished my program, did the thing where I was proofreading for university press and teaching freshman English at community college. I felt like I was working all the time and I still couldn't pay my bills. So I decided I needed to figure out something that would be my day job. I knew someone who was a cytotec and then I did some research on it and it was only a one-year program with my biology degree. So I went back to school for something completely different. My grad school professors thought that I was nuts or that I was just leaving it all together. It's one of those weird instances where I made a decision that actually turned out the way I had hoped it was. That rarely happens to me, but my hope was that I would eventually be able to do it part time after I got some experience. And that's how it's worked out because I have a half-time job in cytology and then I teach creative writing. So it gives me a nice balance and then it gives me some flexibility to have time to write. How do you manage the day job and the creative outlet? How do you find the time and make sure do you have particular writing habits and rituals or are there other practices you have to make sure you're actually working on a book? I tend to be a binge writer. We are in the middle of National Novel Writing Month right now. You're not cranking out another one, are you? I don't understand why they do that in November. I feel like that's the worst time to be. There's Thanksgiving. It's a short month. Why isn't it January? It's January is the month that people have downtown. They're more aspirational too that month with the whole resolution thing. Yeah, I don't understand that. I just feel like November is always a bad, crazy month for me. But would it usually boils down to both of my novels have taken me about seven years to write? Obviously not writing every day. Sure. I'm usually, when I'm starting something new, the first year or so, a lot of the work is just in my head. I'm figuring out characters and thinking about the plot. I'll definitely make notes and write some things down, but I'm not even really trying to write the book itself at first. So once I get ready to start sitting down working on a draft, that's when I actually schedule writing time into my calendar so that I do it as many days as I possibly can. I'm very lucky that my job in the lab is flexible in terms of when I work the hours. So my basic schedule, I usually go in three days a week, but sometimes when I'm writing, I'll actually spread it out more so that I can write in the mornings and then just go in for a few hours afterwards. It often works really well for me. If I'm really intensely working, I may not teach a class that term just to give myself a little extra time. What's the nature of what you teach? So I teach at Grub Street, which is an independent writing center in Boston. It's actually the second largest independent writing center in the country after the Loft in Minneapolis. I've taught every iteration of fiction that there is. I've been there since only a few years after it was found. I've been there since 2001, which is a crazy number of years. You have to realize how those are piling up on us? Yeah. It's a little disturbing because it's like, oh, I just started teaching there a few years ago. No, actually, no. I started out teaching fiction one and fiction two, and then when I think after my first novel came out, I started switching over to teaching the novel. I actually developed a series of courses called the novel in progress classes, which the idea behind it is when I feel that when you're working on a first draft, really, really intense detailed criticism, it is not a good thing. I think it's kind of antithetical to what you need to do in a first draft. So my idea was that people, but you do need some support. You kind of need an idea if you're going in the right direction. So my idea was to have a class where people didn't do outside reading. They bring in a short excerpt from the book, read it aloud. We all, you know, might make little notes while we're listening. We kind of read along with copies, and then we talk about what the writer just read. And what I found is people actually get better big picture feedback that way because sometimes when you hand things out for writing workshop a week in advance, you know, people will nitpick on a metaphor or, you know, some tiny little thing in the story. And when you're just reading stuff aloud and people have to evaluate it quickly, they don't have time to, they really can't nitpick like that. So they end up focusing on big picture issues. And it ended up, it started as an experiment about, I think, seven or eight years ago. And it's now one of the most popular classes there that we run like three different levels and we run a master level. So that, that was a really cool thing. But then two years ago back in 2011, I co-developed with the author Michelle Hoover, a year long course called the novel incubator. And the, the theory there is you get your entire novel read twice. So people apply to the program, they have to have a full draft to apply. And we, in the first part of the course, you read each person's novel, you read a novel a week for ten weeks basically. There's ten students in the program. Then the middle part of the course is, you know, helping people figure out how to revise, coming up with a strategy. And the final part of the course, people hand out the revised versions of the novel and we reread them and reevaluate them. So I, it was amazing. We co-taught it for two years. We've already had two students get, get book deals who were in that program, which we're very proud of. And the only reason I stopped teaching it was that I had a book coming out and I knew that I wasn't going to be able to, teaching that with my other job was working full time, almost plus. So the problem was, A, I wasn't getting any of my own writing done, and B, I had a book coming out. So I've stepped down from it, but I'm still involved behind the scenes because I just love the course so much and feel really strongly about it. And is that your favorite segment within Grub Street? Of what I've taught. Honestly, I think that the novel and progress courses and the novel incubator program, it would be like choosing between different children, if I had children, which I don't. One of our dogs is far smarter than the other one. I'm perfectly honest about it. I love them both equally, but one is far, you can also say one's far dumber than the other. But again, in your case, they're Sophie's choice level. I really love them both. I just think they're for writers in different stages of their careers. So looking at pieces of a book when people are just starting it is very different from looking at a full draft, even if the draft is very rough, but I really enjoy both. Do you think the study and practice of science has influenced your writing? I've had people ask me that before and I don't have a good answer. I used to say that it hadn't because I don't really write about science and I've never really seen the influence, but I've come to believe, and I think teaching is what's really brought this home to me. I do think that I try to be as scientific and logical as I can be about constructing an outline, constructing a draft. My writing is very realistic and I tend to be pretty methodical in terms of my approach, so I think some of that plays in. Which is my suspicion. That's why I was wondering, because it's a very, the 51st state is a very, I don't want to say plainly written, but it's very clear in what it is. It's very emotionally real in a way that I wasn't expecting when I started it, but I'd wondered after reading the little qualification of your biology bio, I guess. I was wondering if that all plays into sort of the thought processes behind either writing or at least the structuring of writing, which again is why I talk about going all meta and crazy like that. No, I think that's true. I think the emotional aspect is probably the more creative heart side of me, but I think the writing and the plotting probably comes more from my scientific side. What writers do you feel influence that, again, that emotional realism, that sense? Do you feel that comes from the Laurie Moore, Alice Monroe, Cunningham, or are there other writers who you feel that sort of reflecting, even if they're not seen as a huge influence? Yeah, I mean, honestly, I feel that when I read Franzen, although I know a lot of people, again, disagree on that, but I find his characters to be. One of the things that I love about his writing is that the characters are very complicated. Nothing about them is completely lovable or completely hateable for one of a better word, and to me that feels real. I've heard people say they find all of his characters unlikable, and I don't see it. To me, they sometimes think really unkind things about other people, and that's what I think. Maybe I'm just a horrible person, but I read that, and I think, yeah, this is how people are. So I'm always kind of taken aback when people have that reaction to his writing, but I strive for that in terms of my characters. I really want them to feel like full, real people, and I try to get emotional complexity in them. You certainly achieved that in this book. I've felt very as characters in full. I guess in that round character, Sensity Enforcer, talks about that sense of their people. When it comes to the unlikable characters, I realized when I was loaning out a Martin Amos book to someone that once you gave it back to me with, I hated all of these characters. I couldn't read past 50 pages. I thought, you're right. That's a writer who you're not going to like anyone he's writing about, but the prose is pyrotechnical, so you'll stick with it if that's your thing. Another question I had, some of your nonfiction deals with pop culture topics, John Hughes movies, your history with R.E.M. or particularly with Michael Stipe. The history in my head with R.E.M. I was going to see your one-sided history with R.E.M. Within, at least within 51st state, there's very little pop culture reference. There's a few bands that get named, mainly fictitious things. While the book does take place in a certain year-long span, '06 to '07, the external world doesn't intrude so much. It's not a political novel. It's not one that's showing what's happening in America reflected in this state. It's really this much more personal cosmos that these characters live in. I was at a deliberate choice on your part, or is it just something you don't want to expand into what the rest of the world has going on and how it's impacting them? I have a couple of things to say about that. The first draft of this novel was 820 pages long. There was a lot more about a lot of things, including pop culture in the early draft. There was a lot more about Dami in Dark, and Hallie's history with him, who is, for people who haven't read the book, is a fictitious goth musician, kind of an aging goth musician in the book. Those things are always really fun for me to write, but a lot of that stuff fell by the wayside in the editing process. But I do think that because a lot of the book deals with grief and deals with these two half-siblings who don't really know each other very well, trying to cleave together and form some sort of relationship, it made sense to me that the outside world would just kind of be this amorphous thing to them. And I think when you're deeply in grief, you just kind of feel like you're in this vacuum, and it's kind of hard to have awareness of everything happening around you. It certainly wasn't meant as a criticism at all. It really holds up in this very personal sense in this world that again seems, well, it's only two hours from where we are right now, but it's an absolute other cosmos that we're in. Which gets me to my big question, do you think South Jersey should split from North Jersey and become the 51st state, or are they worried about invasion from Delaware or Pennsylvania? Is there any, you know... They're really worried about the shore community. Oh yeah, I wouldn't want them as part of it. You may be an annex like the Gaza Strip that could be part of, you know, North Jersey, I guess. I think economically it would not work, but I really understand the animosity that South Jerseyans have towards North Jersey. And I think you can see it in almost any state. I think Colorado just had a question on the ballot about part of the state splitting off. And upstate New York versus, you know, those heathens in New York City. Yeah, in Massachusetts it's Eastern Mass versus Western Mass. It's generally the rural, more agricultural part of the state usually gets less state funding. People end up feeling like all the money goes to the urban part of the state, and I think that happens all over the country. So I definitely understand why people in South Jersey feel the way they do about it, but I think, like with most of those movements, that sort of economically depressed rural part of the state is not going to do any better by being its own state. You know, it's kind of how are they going to generate the funds to keep the state going? Exactly, but I do really get why people feel that way. And I don't know if you're aware of this, but there was actually a ballot question in the early 80s about whether South Jersey should secede, and the five southern most counties voted in favor of secession. Last question, who are you reading? What am I reading while I'm on tour? This is embarrassing. I am reading like really just trivial things, because I've been doing so much press and promotional stuff, you know, kind of leading up to the book coming out a month ago, and then now that I'm on tour, I like to read really cheesy stuff when I'm traveling. So I have a stack of old entertainment weeklies that I never got to read because I was so busy. So they're actually, some of them are so old, I don't even know why I'm reading them. I also have a stack of old rolling stones, and I actually have to figure out how many I can take with me on the west coast and how many I need to leave behind, because they're going to really weigh me down. But I'm basically catching up on pop culture while I'm traveling. And what are you working on next? I know you're doing a publicity tour for a book right now, but... No, no, I don't mind answering, although it's not as easy as a single answer, so I'm actually working on two things, and I'm trying to figure out which one will win my heart to be the next book. I think I think I will probably write both of them, but I'm just trying to figure out which one to commit to. Seven years at a time, you need to allocate well. I'm really hoping I can get faster, but I don't know if I can. So one is, it would be three novellas that my hope is would work as a novel. I've written the first one. I wrote it thinking it would be a standalone, but then I had an idea for two others. And those would be set in and around the Boston rock scene going from about 2004, probably about 10 years out. So a lot of it is people who are kind of veterans of that scene who were becoming middle aged, not to give anything away, but I kind of fall in that category. The second one is, it's something that I've been trying to work on for about two years, and I can't get the voice working. And for me, it all kind of starts with voice. So if I can't get that right, I just can't really write very much until I can get that working. And it's about middle aged woman who flees her life from somewhere in the northeast where it snows a lot, but I keep trying different settings and I can't. I've had her from South Boston and I've had her from Philly and I'm just having trouble. If you're worried about snow, just go to Buffalo. I've got friends that will send you a note. That's stuff you could fill in afterwards. It's the feeling oppressed by the weather. But I think to understand her, for me, I have to have a sense of the region she's from. But I'm currently thinking it might be a small town in New Hampshire. Anyway, she gets really tired of shoveling snow and basically abandons the family member she's been taking care of. She doesn't have kids, but these are older family members and drives to Florida because there's no snow there. And ends up working in a sanctuary for chimps, for primates, and where she starts to kind of form a little bit of a family with a transgender teenager and an elderly man who the man who funds the shelter who they start to realize may have a violent criminal past. So I feel like I know the story really well, but I'm still trying to get that voice working. One thing to psychoanalyze you slightly, it seems that between the 51st state and the other projects you mentioned, family building is the central theme for all of your work. Is that a problem at all? My family, my dad died when I was young, so my family is a little bit fractured in certain ways, and I have family members I'm really close to and family members I never see. And I think since I lived away from home most of the time since I went away to college except for that year and a half that I went back and worked on the hometown newspaper, I've kind of learned, I was also single for a really long part of my adult life. So I kind of had to cobble family together from friends. And I mean to me my close friends are as much my family as the people I'm related to. So I think that is really important to me. And I personally think it's a pretty healthy thing to find people who you have things in common with and who are supportive and nurturing and take the best of all the relationships. I don't mean taking it in a horrible selfish sense. But build from what's the, take the good stuff. Exactly. Exactly. And this episode is going to air right before Thanksgiving. So do you have those crazy family thanksgivings or are you more the island of misfit toys where everybody just kind of, everybody who doesn't have a family gets together? What's your thanksgiving? I actually usually do spend thanksgiving with relatives and that's always kind of been my favorite holiday. I had an aunt who actually lived in Rumson, which is Central Jersey. And for most of my life really, I went there for thanksgiving. She died a few years ago and my cousins were doing thanksgiving for a while. And it's kind of, you know, people have gotten married and moved away and it's kind of gotten all over the place. And actually last year and this year I'm spending thanksgiving with my boyfriend's family, which is also really awesome. You know, it was a great time that I'm looking forward to. But there have been times that I wanted to kind of do the friends thanksgiving where everybody does a potluck. But it's just always kind of worked out that I've spent it with family. Which is probably the best thing. I think so. Lisa Borders, good luck with the 51st state and have a happy thanksgiving. Thank you, the same to you. [music] And that was Lisa Borders. You can find her website at lisaboarders.com and you can find her new novel, the 51st state, as well as her first book, Cloud Cuckoo Land, at your favorite bookstore. And that was the Virtual Memories Show, your weekly podcast about books and life. Well, I'm not quite sure about next week's episode. There's a postponement that just threw off my schedule. So you're either going to get Peter Tractenberg talking about cats and his disintegrating marriage, or you're going to get a former US Marine Major talking about his favorite books and how he managed not to kill two innocent people in Afghanistan. Really, it's one or the other. If you have any ideas which one you'd like more, let me know. But for now, go visit iTunes to subscribe to the show and leave a review and visit chimeraobscura.com/vm to find past episodes and make a donation to this ad-free podcast. Until next time, I'm Gil Roth and you are awesome. Keep it that way. What if we give it away? [music fades out] (gentle music) You