Author Lisa Alther at her home in Vermont. photo: Sara Bostwick

VW: Your third novel Kinflicks was published in 1976 to critical acclaim. What inspired that book? Is it autobiographical in any way?

LA: I loved Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks, which is what Germans call a bildungsroman. It featured a young man coming of age. I wanted to write a bildungsroman about a young southern woman as protagonist. Kinflicks is autobiographical in the sense that Ginny, my main character, experiences many of the situations I experienced—high school in Tennessee, a women’s college near Boston, a back-to-the-land scenario in Vermont. But Ginny is much more goofy than I am. If I had been doing all the things she does, I wouldn’t have had time to write a novel about her.

VW: There were several more books before your latest one, About Women, in which you and the French artist Françoise Gilot—who became a friend—dialogue about your lives and work. How did that book—and your friendship with Gilot—come to be?

LA: Françoise Gilot and I first met in Paris in 1986. My third novel Other Women was being published by Des Femmes, the publishing arm of the MLF, a French feminist organization. The MLF owns a bookstore and art gallery in Paris, and the launch of my novel was happening there at the same time as the opening for a show of Françoise’s paintings. So we were thrown together that afternoon and later at parties people gave for both of us. Some members of the MLF tried persuading me to go with them on a chartered plane to the Arctic Circle for the summer solstice. I wanted to go home to Vermont, but I felt I had to go on the trip because these people were my hosts. Françoise overheard the discussion, and noticing my reluctance she pulled me aside and said, “Look, you don’t have to go to the Arctic Circle if you don’t want to.” That gave me the courage to decline their invitation, and it was the beginning of our long friendship.

Later, when I was living in Paris, my editor at Des Femmes encouraged me to write a novel set in France. So I tried to understand the mysteries of the French. One day I was meeting with my editor when her door flew open, and an attractive young member of the MLF walked in toting several bulging shopping bags. The editor demanded that she model her new purchases for us, so she stripped down to her lovely lace lingerie and began trying on her new outfits. My editor critiqued them, saying things like, “That hem needs to be an inch shorter” or “That’s a lovely color for you.”

Once outside, I was baffled because fashion shows represented everything American feminists were trying to escape from at that time. Most American women I knew dressed in jeans and hiking boots and were working to establish rape crisis centers and battered women’s shelters. The idea that fashion could be of concern to feminists was startling to me. Françoise was working at her studio on Montmartre, so I went there and described what I’d just witnessed. She tried to explain French attitudes towards women, feminism, and fashion. What she was saying was so interesting I began taping it. We talked many more times, and I taped those sessions too, and then had the tapes transcribed.

Then I returned to Tennessee to help my elderly parents. I ended up staying for 10 years while our manuscript moldered in a drawer in my New York apartment. After my parents died, I spent time in New York again and found the abandoned manuscript. Françoise and I read it and thought it was more interesting than we’d realized, so we reorganized the chapters, did some editing, and gave it to my agent, who liked it. Nan Talese at Doubleday also liked it and bought it for her imprint.

VW: You also developed a friendship with the iconic writer Doris Lessing. How did that happen and what has been its impact in terms of your writing life?

LA: I first read Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook in 1968. [Lessing won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2007]. It knocked my socks off, so I read everything else I could find by her. For the first time I understood that you didn’t have to write about going to the sea in ships, or fighting in a war, or exploring a wilderness, and you didn’t have to use fancy symbolism. You could write in everyday language about what you saw around you in your daily life—relationships and childbirth and housework. And if you did it well enough, you could call it a novel. So I wrote Doris a fan letter, and she answered me. I wrote back to thank her for answering, and she replied again. Our correspondence lasted, off and on, for 40 years until her death in 2013. Whenever I was in London or she was in New York, we met. Occasionally, she came to visit in Vermont. She loved our rural lifestyle with gardens, animals, woods, and fields. When my then husband and I went to live in London for several years, Doris often invited us to Sunday lunches at her flat along with people from all over the world.

I didn’t tell her I was writing because I didn’t want her to think that was why I wanted to be friends, because it wasn’t. But she heard through another friend that I’d finished a novel, so she asked to see it. It was Kinflicks, which I had placed with a publisher who wanted me to cut several chapters. I asked Doris if she thought I should agree, and she said absolutely not because it would ruin my novel. She said I should let her show it to her editor, Robert Gottlieb at Knopf, to see what he thought. He agreed I shouldn’t cut any chapters, and then said I should let him publish the book as it was. Doris provided a wonderful jacket quote, and the book became a bestseller. Subsequently, we rarely talked about our writing, but watching her deal with issues involved in writing and publishing helped me handle similar issues as a writer. She was a loyal friend and a generous mentor to several other younger writers too.

VW: It seems fair to say that Gilot and Lessing have been among your muses and mentors. Who else has influenced your work and in what ways?

LA: My mother was an English teacher. She loved books and reread Jane Austen every year. She also wrote a wonderful weekly letter to her children once we left home, which allowed me slowly to absorb some of her considerable writing skill. I think I wrote partly to try to get her attention, and I was absolutely thrilled when a reviewer of Kinflicks compared me to Jane Austen. I sent her that clipping with the quote underlined in red.

I’ve been fortunate to have been involved with friends and partners who’ve supported my writing, critiqued my drafts, put up with my moods, and facilitated the absences I needed in order to get my books written. My daughter once said she wished I would work at IBM, but she was always very sweet about accepting my bizarre work schedules. I’ve also been lucky with my agents and editors, all very supportive in an industry that has grown increasingly impersonal and dismissive of authors.

VW: You also interacted with the noted editor Robert Gottlieb. Was he influential in the development of your career?

LA: Bob published my first three novels at Knopf before leaving to edit The New Yorker. He was an ideal editor and insightful reader, but he didn’t insist that you agree with him. He presented his observations and suggestions, and then let his writers make final decisions about which to heed and which to ignore. Two of the most important things Bob taught me were how to cut repetitions and how to line edit. I tended to overexplain, and he showed me that less is usually more. But he also disliked obfuscation for its own sake. He had a plaque on his desk that read, “Give the reader a break.”

VW: Do you consider yourself a feminist writer? A feminist and a writer? A writer who happens to be a feminist? Where do feminism and writing intersect for you?

LA: Feminism and writing are both central to who I am, so I don’t know where one leaves off and the other begins. I’ve never written with the intention of promoting a political agenda. I’m usually just trying to tell a good story. But I’m sure my feminism must permeate my work. I don’t know how it could be otherwise. For instance, in my narrative history about the Hatfield-McCoy feud, Blood Feud, I mock the macho gun culture of the southern Appalachians, not because I adhere to any particular party line but because the story I was telling about men senselessly slaughtering each other seemed so idiotic to me as to merit authorial intrusions about my own reactions. In other words, I write out of my own personal convictions and emotional responses, but some of those convictions have been shaped by feminism and are shared by many feminists.

VW: You spent your early life in Tennessee, but you have strong ties to Vermont too. Can you say a bit about the experience of living in both places? How have those two quite different settings influenced you personally and professionally?

LA: My mother was from upstate New York and my father from Virginia. I have lots of relatives in both places, so I grew up with the Civil War being fought inside my skull. My Yankee cousins insisted southerners were stupid, and my Tennessee playmates insisted Yankees were rude. But I knew lots of rude southerners and stupid Yankees, so I wasn’t quite convinced. Growing up, I always thought I had to choose between the North and the South, so I veered back and forth, championing first one, then the other. I went to college near Boston, married a man from New Jersey, and lived in Hinesburg, Vermont, for 35 years. Some of my mother’s favorite ancestors lived in Rockingham, Vermont, so I felt at home. And the topography of Vermont is similar to that of Tennessee since they’re at opposite ends of the Appalachians. The stoic temperament and the dour sense of humor of local people are also similar in both places, even though the accents differ.

Since 1999 when I returned to Tennessee to help my parents and ended up staying for a decade, I’ve concluded that it’s impossible for me to choose between the North and the South, and that the only way to reconcile the two halves of my psyche is to alternate between them like a migratory bird. There is so much that I love and admire about both regions, as well as a few things I dislike about both. But I think having had to juggle my love for two such different parents and their two antagonistic cultures of origin forced me to accept the fact that every place and every person is an amalgamation of admirable and less admirable qualities. I think my hybrid upbringing was an inoculation against any type of fanaticism because I’m incapable of embracing anything wholeheartedly.

VW: Where do you want to go next as a writer? How is your voice—and what you want to write about—changing in today’s challenging world?

LA: I’m between projects right now and don’t have any sense of what comes next. Usually, when I finish a book I want to retire. But after a while new ideas creep into my brain, prodding me out of my lethargy and making me realize that writers probably don’t get to retire. As long as the thoughts keep coming, I’ll no doubt keep on scribbling about them, trying to make sense of them.

VW: Do you have any advice for budding authors in the context of today’s literary world challenges? For example, can you rise above the clutter without knowing Doris Lessing or having an introduction to someone like Robert Gottlieb?

LA: I look back on the publishing world of the 1970s when Kinflicks came out as a kind of lost Eden. In those days, novels were a part of the national discussion in a way that they aren’t now. There are so many other forms of entertainment now that novels have become a specialty interest. Having fewer people interested in fiction is hard for all fiction writers but especially for new ones. Some agents and editors talk about “brands” and “platforms,” which most writers don’t have when they’re starting out. Of course, self-publishing is now available and works well for some writers, but it’s difficult to distribute and publicize a book on your own, and it takes time away from writing.

Nevertheless, it’s always been difficult to get published. It took me 14 years. What I told myself during that time was that publishers had to publish someone so it might as well be me. I kept going because I loved to write more than almost anything else. Also, writing a story was how I made sense of things I didn’t understand in my life. Writing is a craft, and I could feel myself getting better at it.

Watching my progress gave me great satisfaction. If you can’t take pleasure in the writing itself without worrying too much about the publication process, you should probably find other work. If you do find pleasure in the writing, that’s reward enough. If something gets published, that’s frosting on the cake. But the struggle never ends. Even though I’ve published 11 books, I still get rejections regularly. So writers have to develop and maintain a thick skin while at the same time guarding the inner sensitivity that allows them to write what they need to. A writing career isn’t easy, but as I observed during my Tennessee childhood, it’s a whole lot easier than working on an assembly line or harvesting tobacco.

Elayne Clift is a journalist, writer and lecturer. She lives in Saxtons River,Vermont.