Jami Attenberg: The Kept Man
Book Club Discussion
June 5, 2009. Queenie C has the chance to talk with Jami Attenberg about her new novel,
The Kept Man.
Book Club Discussion: Interview with Jami Attenberg
I
loved that all it took was something as simple as the washing machine breaking to get Jarvis back into the world. Why did you use that as her
staring off point?
Laundry
is a pretty obsessive thing in New York City. Unlike most parts of the country, having a washing machine in your home is a real luxury, and there
are Laundromats all over the place here. Do you drop it off and pay the extra ten bucks to have someone do it for you? Or do you have hours to
spare to sit there and do it yourself? And there is nothing so humbling as dragging a big bag of laundry down the street. In modern life, we
can get our food delivered to us, pay our bills online, do our communication online as well. And if you had a laundry machine, you could feasibly
never leave the house. That was pretty much how Jarvis had set up her life. I guess it needed to be something unavoidable to get her out of the
house and back into the world.
Book Club Discussion: Interview with Jami Attenberg
"Life
gives you what you need." What have you needed that life has given to you?
I
know great people, first and foremost. And I think I have a good mind, and I treasure all the things that come from using it. The rest seems to
follow.
Book Club Discussion: Interview with Jami Attenberg
Have
you ever had someone close to you in a coma? How were you able to describe the emotions of both Jarvis and Martin's parents so well?
I
have not known anyone in a coma. I've known people who have had tragic deaths at a young age. I'm not sure how I knew what they were thinking. I
definitely identified with Jarvis. She and I are not alike necessarily, but she feels like a peer to me. And Martin's parents seem like someone
I might have known in my past. As with any of my characters, I just tried to put myself in their position and hoped that I did them justice.
Book Club Discussion: Interview with Jami Attenberg
Book Club Discussion: Interview with Jami Attenberg
The
Kept Men's club was an interesting twist to group meetings. Do you know of any men in such a "club?"
I
personally don't know of anyone in a club, though I have known men who have lived off their wives. I believe there was a New York Times piece that
came out after my book where they had found a group of stay-at-home dads who met fairly regularly. Again, it was just a case of my imagination
working overtime!
Book Club Discussion: Interview with Jami Attenberg
Book Club Discussion: Interview with Jami Attenberg
Did
the cat that appeared in the photographs and with Martin have any symbolic meaning?
I
always think of him as a magical death cat, for lack of a better expression. That he was sort of taking care of Martin – and Jarvis, in a sense –
until it was time for the next phase.
The cat came from two places. I used to work in a nursing home, and it was a very special place where the residents were taken care of very well.
There were cats that lived there, and I had heard that the cats took on favorites, especially people who were very sick or lonely. And then eventually
those people died and the cats just moved on and found new favorites. So I'm sure that was in the back of my mind.
And then when I first started writing the book, I was at a friend's place in Livingston, Montana, at this historic hotel that was supposedly haunted.
There was this rocking chair in the room where I was staying, and one night, before I knew very much about the book or what was going to happen in
it, I had this vision of this white-yellow cat glowing in that rocking chair. So I knew that a cat needed to appear at some point, I didn't know
when or where. But the cat seemed very important to me.
Book Club Discussion: Interview with Jami Attenberg
Book Club Discussion: Interview with Jami Attenberg
Can
you tell us anything about what you are working on now?
My
new book, The Melting Season, is coming out early in 2010. It's about a woman from small-town Nebraska who steals all of her husband's
money when their marriage falls apart, and everything that happens after she hits the road.
And I'm about halfway through a novel that is very loosely inspired by the events of my life in the past year. And that's all I can say about
that until I'm done.
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