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When I received a review copy of Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It, the latest collection of short fiction by acclaimed author Maile Meloy, now available in paperback, I already knew what to expect. I hadn’t read her first story collection, Half in Love, or her two novels, Liars and Saints and A Family Daughter but I knew. Oh I knew all right. I knew all about it, and I had her pegged.
After all, critics everywhere were drooling all over her work, calling her a natural-born storyteller, praising her sparse but striking prose and her clear-sighted yet deceptive talent for writing realistic stories as both a novelist and a short fiction writer…And I knew.
Of course she was a bestselling author, and her list of awards I knew would be impressive…And I was dead-on right. Even Oprah had her latest book on the list of hot summer reads for 2010, and I knew. I knew!
But then I started reading the first of the eleven short stories In Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It and, before I knew it, I was on page 20 and completely immersed in the story and invested in its characters as if I was reading a novel, a really good novel. The tension was real, and I checked to see how many pages were left. Only five! What was going to happen? How would it end? I didn’t know. I had no idea.
I started over and reread the first 20 pages, thinking I had missed something. I hadn’t. It was all there. All that was left was the conclusion that I both wanted and didn’t want to know.
I repeated this process with most of the stories in this excellent collection of fiction – stories which were mostly about the difficult process of making decisions and the lingering effects left behind (sometimes for life) by the choices we do make.
There’s a broken, lonely, but romantic Montana cowboy whose chance encounter with a young lawyer could be the chance of a lifetime. There’s a father whose 15 year-old daughter’s innocence is the only barrier in possibly securing a witness for his brother’s big legal case. There’s another father who seeks answers about his daughter’s murder straight from the murderer’s girlfriend. There are stories about adultery, about sibling rivalry, and even one about whether or not a friend of a dead colleague should help his girlfriend raffle off her body in order to get the money she needs to get out of town for a chance at a better life.
Bottom line: Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It by Maile Meloy lives up to the hype. It’s a powerful collection of short stories that you’ll finish long before they’re finished with you.
If you’d like to meet Maile Meloy in person, she’ll be discussing and signing her book at 7 p.m. tonight, Tuesday, July 13, at:
Barnes & Noble Bookstore
1201 3rd Street, at Wilshire
(On the 3rd Street Promenade).
You can also learn more about Meloy and her work at her official website.
The LA Books Examiner had the great opportunity to interview Maile Meloy about her work and her life. Please take a few more minutes to read the revealing Q & A below.
Q. Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It is your second book of short fiction. What was different the second time around?
A. I'd written two novels since my first book, Half in Love, and maybe for that reason the stories got longer. The stories in Half in Love were all very short, and very controlled. I think I've learned in some cases to let the story go past the point that might have seemed right to end it before, and let things get a little more out of hand.
Q. Is it true that many of the stories from Both Ways were unfinished works that you revisited? What was that process like?
A. Yes, it's true -- when Granta magazine needed a story within a month, I dug out the abandoned stories that seemed promising. It was rewarding in that I could see, once time had passed, ways to fix problems that had seemed insoluble. And I think that the fact that there was something difficult for me in the stories meant that there was something promising in them. But it made me feel unsure about the collection, because I'd thought of so many of the stories as rejects for so long.
Q. When it comes to writing success, you have it both ways, as a novelist and short story writer. But what if you couldn’t? Which would you choose? Which is tougher?
A. Oh, that's an impossible question. I can't choose. Stories are tougher in some ways because you're always starting over with new characters and new situations, and everything in them has to count. It takes longer to have enough stories for a collection, for me, than it does to write a novel. But I started as a story writer, and I think that 10-15 pages is sort of my natural length, in terms of phrasing, in the way that runners naturally run the 100-meter-dash or the 800 or the marathon. Sustained narrative was more of a challenge for me to take on, and my novels, so far, have been made up of fairly story-like 10-15 page chapters.
Q. Your characters seem so authentic to me, whether they’re lawyers, ski instructors or factory workers – especially your male characters. How do you prepare for or research writing these characters?
A. Thank you! I start with little details that I've learned somewhere -- the builders playing pranks on the paging phones in the nuclear power plant, for example -- and then forget the research and try to make the characters human, and write an emotional story. When I think I have that, I go back and see what I got right, and try to add in more details to make it feel real.
Q. Much is made about the sparseness of your writing – and rightfully so. What is your editing process? Do you make an effort to pluck out the flowers, or is it just natural?
A. I revise a lot, but I don't tend to have flowers. I want to know what happens, in a story, and I want to write what happens, and I feel very strongly about how beautiful prose works, and beautiful sentences, but it's totally about rhythm to me, and not about ornamentation. When the rhythm is off in prose, it's like watching someone dance off the beat. So I read things over until something stops me, and I change it, and I keep reading it over until nothing stops me.
Q. Many of the stories in Both Ways take place in Montana , but you’ve lived in California for a long time now. What does Montana mean to you as a writer, and will we see any stories set in California in the future?
A. Montana is the place for which I have the deepest reservoir of details, and the place I have the strongest connection to. Long sections of my two novels were set in California , though they aren't exactly California novels. Sometimes I think it can be hard to write about a place that you're in every day, and it can help to have some distance, so you aren't overwhelmed with the day-to-day reality of the place. My next book begins in LA but it's mostly set in London in 1952. And the next novel I want to write isn't set in California. So I don't know how soon there might be California stories.
Q. There are a lot of surprise twists in the stories in Both Ways. Do you know how it ends when you begin writing a story?
A. No, I never have any idea where the stories are going. There's a story about some writer, I think it was F. Scott Fitzgerald, who lost his only copy of a story on a train. Someone asked if he was going to rewrite it, and he said, "Why? I know how it ends." I feel like that. When I surprise myself, I'm happy.
Q. Your brother is a writer as well. What’s that like? Are you competitive? Do you collaborate? Who gets the leg at Thanksgiving?
A. I'm an enormous fan of Colin's music and of his writing. I don't think we're competitive. We've never collaborated, and I don't think either of us is a turkey drumstick person. But even if we were, there are two.
Q. This question is just for me. What happens to Chet Moran? I can’t stop thinking about this guy. Can short stories have sequels? Will we ever see Chet again?
A. Other people have asked me that -- some very fervently. A woman at a reading in Utah asked if I would please write a miniseries in which Chet Moran and Beth Travis eventually end up together, over time. I do have characters I go back to, so maybe Chet will be one of them. I want things to turn out well for him.
Q. What books are on your nightstand right now?
A. I'm on the road, but the books I have with me are When You Reach Me, by Rebecca Stead, and Reading Like a Writer, by Francine Prose, which my mother's book club was reading in Montana. While I was on a river trip, I was reading a memoir called The Curve of Time that my stepmother gave me, about a woman who took her five young kids on a boat all up and down the coast of British Columbia after her husband died in 1926. There's a great scene in which she has a panicky feeling while fishing and finds that a strange man in black has been staring at the kids all morning from the end of a deserted beach. She thinks it's an odd place for a clergyman, and then the man starts lumbering toward them and it's a mother bear and they have to drop the fish and race for the dinghy. I have John Le Carré's new book, A Most Wanted Man, as an audiobook on my iPod. I left Philip Pullman's The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ at home because it was in hardcover. And I've had The Road toVerdun, which is a stand-alone novel about WWI in a French series of novels called Men of Good Will, on my actual nightstand for about a year and a half.
Q. Besides the LA Books Examiner, are there any writers you feel deserve more attention than they currently receive?
A. I'm a big fan of a Percival Everett novel called God's Country, which I don't know if a lot of people have read. Also The All of It by Jeannette Haien. I've been telling everyone I know about a book called Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives, by David Eagleman. And I love Barry Hannah's stories, and was really sorry when he died earlier this year. But mostly the LA Books Examiner.
Q. What’s next for Maile Meloy?
A. I've written a young adult novel called The Apothecary that's due out from Putnam in the fall of 2011. It's a Cold War thriller with kids and magic and totally unlike anything I've ever written before. It was an absolute joy. I hope actual adults will be willing to read it, too.
Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It by Maile Meloy. (Penguin Group. July 2010. 256 pages).
Read more great author interviews from Frank Mundo, the LA Books Examiner.
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