INTERVIEW:One of the best reads for the summer? BELINDA MCKEONadmires the stories of Amy Bloom
‘THERE’S A LESSON I’ve been trying to learn for the last 50 years,” says Amy Bloom. “That there’s a difference between what you see and what you say. That even if you see something, you don’t have to comment on it. You don’t have to say what you think. But that doesn’t mean that you don’t see. It just means that, at that moment, you don’t let the object of your gaze feel your gaze.”
She may regard it as a lesson she’s still trying to learn, but in truth what Bloom is talking about is something in which her fiction, from the start, has been a masterclass. Her short stories and her novels portray human relationships with an insight that can leave the reader feeling as rattled as they are compelled; her fiction sees so much, so piercingly that, reading Bloom’s sentences, you begin to wonder if you have been walking around with your eyes fully open at all.
Her new book of stories, Where the God of Love Hangs Out, throws an unforgettable floodlight on to unforgettable corners of experience. Two middle-aged friends embark on an affair, a "sliver of marriage". A woman and her stepson move on after a terrible misstep, something which makes her "sorry enough for this life and the next". They are situations particular to her complicated characters, yet such is the richness and the penetration of Bloom's writing that they reach the reader with uncanny – almost uncomfortable – intimacy.
All of which makes it something of an unnerving experience to sit across a cafe table from Bloom, warm and thoughtful and open as she might be in conversation. There it is, the gaze that takes everything in; there it is, the watchful intelligence. The fact that Bloom was a psychotherapist for more than 20 years makes perfect sense; she listens, she weighs, and she sees. In fact, psychotherapy very much came first for Bloom – it was only at the age of 34, having established a successful practice, that she turned to writing, gaining attention when her first published story, Love is Not a Pie, was selected for the Best American Short Storiesanthology in 1991. Now 57, Bloom has published five books: two other collections ( Come to Meand A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You), two novels ( Love Invents Usand Away), and a non-fiction book about gender variance, Normal. She wound up her psychotherapy practice five years ago to concentrate entirely on fiction but, she says, she doesn't rule out the notion of settling back into the therapist's chair sometime in the future.
“I miss it,” she says, “because I was good at it. And because I knew more about what I was doing than I do as a writer.”
And yet Bloom doesn’t talk about the process of writing as a difficult one. Rather, in talking about her characters and their situations, and about the work of creating them, she gives constant glimpses of the many-sidedness of the job – the details to remember, the traits to notice, the background that might never make it into print but which is vital to the story all the same. She gets to her characters by believing in them, she says; by hearing them and seeing them. She has to force herself, often, not to forget to think about aspects of their lives – not to skimp on knowing how one character feels about another, how they envy each other, how they frighten each other, even if those feelings are not something the reader ever needs to know. And she needs to play God often, she says – observing parts of her characters’ lives that even the characters themselves can never observe.
In Where the God of Love Hangs Out, we as readers watch in shock and in sadness as two of our favourite characters die before our eyes. We've been in their minds, we've followed the contours of their hearts. And now they're gone. And that's not easy for their creator, either, says Bloom. "I did really miss those characters once they had gone from the stories, but there were so many things going on for the characters left behind that I had to focus on those characters. And in a sense, they were then the people that I felt most deeply. Because once you're gone, you're gone."
Bloom takes obvious pleasure in putting her characters in conversation with one another; she gives them dialogue that is sometimes sparky, sometimes shifty, but always irresistible, and frequently hilarious. Meanwhile, her characters’ inner monologues provide us with a window right on to the parts of themselves which, perhaps, they’d prefer not to share.
Bloom married for a second time in 2007 and lives with her husband, an architect, in the rural Connecticut village of Durham. When we meet, it is in the nearby city of New Haven, where she teaches creative writing at Yale. She has three adult children, all of whom, she says, found it “incredibly boring” to grow up in a place like Durham, but all of whom, at the same time, kicked up hell when, a few years back, she proposed moving to Brooklyn. She laughs at the memory of her daughters sending in “the big gun, their brother”, who called her and told her not to become “one of those women who has a futon for her children to sleep on”. But she prefers living in a boring place, she says; it’s better for a writer. “I’d be too distracted in New York. In Durham, there’s nowhere to go, nothing to do. Nobody is saying, come to this opening or this cocktail party. They say, well, I could meet you at Dunkin’ Donuts for a coffee . . .”
Bloom says she feels lucky to be able to focus on her writing as much as she does, to give herself to it as fully as possible. “When I’m really in the midst of something, all bets are off,” she says. “I say to my husband, ‘good luck to you, there’s a chicken in the fridge’. He’s lucky there’s even a chicken in there, I say – some writers-in-the-midst wouldn’t even make it as far the supermarket to buy the chicken in the first place.’’
Where The God of Love Hangs Out, by Amy Bloom, is published by Granta Books, £10.99
