Joshua Henkin Interview
Exclusively with Book Club Queen

People always ask if Matrimony is autobiographical, and the short answer is no.  Maybe that's why it took me ten years to write the book and I threw out more than three thousand pages!  It takes a long time to imagine things! 

There are certainly elements from the book that are borrowed from my own life in that I have lived in many of the places where the characters live.  Like Julian, I grew up in New York City and live there again, and I've lived in a lot of college towns, including Ann arbor and Berkeley.  But in deep ways the book is made up. 

Unlike Julian, I didn't meet my wife in college (I met her many years later), and my wife's mother didn't die of breast cancer, and my wife didn't sleep with my best friend.  Or if she did, she hasn't told me yet!  And unfortunately, I'm not nearly as wealthy as Julian is.  In fact, if anything, I'm probably more similar to Mia than I am to Julian. Like her, I'm Jewish and the child of a professor. 

What I was doing was writing about the KINDS of characters who are familiar to me, but the actual characters and the situations they find themselves in are inventions.  I basically have followed Professor Chesterfield's advice, which is to write what you know about what you don't know or what you don't know about what you know. 

The only character in Matrimony who is based on a real character is the dog--who, breed and sex aside, is a dead ringer for my wife's and my dog.  All the other mammals in the book are invented.

Joshua Henkin Interview with Queenie D, Question 1

But he's inspired loosely by my first writing professor, Leonard Michaels, who was a terrific writer himself.  And though my own style as a writing professor is much different from Professor Chesterfield's (I'm much kinder, I hope), most of this commandments (and he puts 117 of them up on the board over the course of the year!) are things that in some form or another I believe in.




Queenie D: I love the commandments!  In my creative writing classes in college I wish my professor had given us some of them to follow.  We DEFINITELY all always said "show not tell" to each other.  It was infuriating   Your book really moved me on a personal level because I've been in the process of trying to write "my book" since college and so I felt that I shared many feelings with Julian.

Josh: I'm glad the book helped inspire you, and as someone who's been in a lot of writing workshops, both as a student and professor, I know how "show, don't tell" gets uttered as a kind of mantra, but to me it's a kind of lazy-speak between professor and student that doesn't get at what's really important in writing. 

Joshua Henkin Interview with Queenie D, Question 2

I do feel Julian and Mia love each other very much.  At the same time, they have been through difficulties, and the very circumstances of their marriage were brought about by Mia's mother's death.  That death, to me, is the central incident of the book. Who Julian and Mia are culturally and generationally (they go to Graymont, a college based loosely on Hampshire college in the late 80s), are not the kind of people who get married at 22.  Yet Mia's mother's death leads them to that decision, and then they're off to another college town, Ann Arbor, where you're considered a freak if you're married at 22. 

So I see Julian and Mia as two people who love each other very much but who got married too young and never had the chance to develop on their own. 

Some readers have commented on the abruptness of their separation over an act of betrayal that happened 9 years earlier, but what people have to remember is that even prior to Julian’s discovering that act of betrayal, there were some real problems in the marriage, born mostly from the fact that Julian and Mia got married as young as they did and in the circumstances in which they did.  I think they love each other and are suited for each other but that they need time apart to fully discover this and to be able to grow up on their own.

Queenie D: That leads me right to my next thought about Mia's relationship ideas and actions -  obviously she had a hard time committing which is usually the case for the man in a relationship. I have the nagging feeling this has something to do with her childhood. Was she afraid she’d end up like her mom with a dissertation in a drawer, living in a strange place all for a man?

Josh: Definitely.  I think she takes her parents' marriage as a cautionary tale.  Not that it was a bad marriage, but she was determined not to repeat her mother's actions of giving up her career for her husband.  And so in certain ways, Mia, perhaps subconsciously, tries to reverse things. 

She makes Julian follow her. Not that he has to give up his career, since he can write wherever he is, but there's a way in which she's calling the shots. The dinner party scene in Ann Arbor where Julian experiences what it's like to be the outsider is central to a certain part of what the book is about.  Anyone who has lived in Ann Arbor and who's not affiliated with the university knows what it's like to feel like a third wheel. 

Although Mia has gone through tragedy, Julian begins to feel that that tragedy serves as a kind of trump card for Mia.  They get married when Mia wants to because her mother died, they stay in Northington for a year because her mother died, they move to Ann Arbor for Mia's career.  After a certain point, Julian feels, enough already.

And yes, I do think Mia has fears, at least when she's younger, in terms of whether she can commit to someone.  When she's in France, the year before college, and she spends all her time with Derek, one of the things she most fears is that she'll never be able to fall in love.  Why, she asks herself, can't she love Derek? She has no idea and  this terrifies her. 

She comes to college determined to prove to herself that she's able to fall in love. So when she does fall in love with Julian, it comes to her, among other things, as a huge relief.

Queenie D: I'm glad that they really love, not just think they do because I wanted their feelings for each other to be more than just need, desire, or a sense of comfort from being together for so long.  I felt for Julian that Mia's mother's death was the defining factor of their relationship.  That and then the affair with Carter. 

Joshua Henkin Interview with Queenie D, Question 3

To me, what's striking about Carter is that he's gotten exactly what he always wanted.   He wanted nothing more than to be fabulously wealthy and successful, and here he is, having made 17 million dollars at a very young age and graduating at the top of his law school class, and simply seeing Julian out in Berkeley for graduation just enrages him. 

Julian doesn't have to do anything besides simply be himself to make Carter feel terrible about himself.  He has a chip on his shoulder that he can't remove simply by becoming wealthy.  He feels eternally like the outsider and that people are always patronizing him whether or not they are. 

I think Carter is just a more extreme example of something that's characteristic of most of characters in the book, and of many people in general, which is the fundamental Freudian idea that our childhoods shape us deeply, at times irrevocably.  The first three words of Matrimony are "out!  out!  out!" - the first three words Julian ever said as a toddler, and they become his motto of sorts. He's going to get out--he's going to set his own course and not follow in the footsteps of his republican, investment banker, father.  And in a lot of ways he succeeds. 

Yet at the end of the book he's back in New York living in a brownstone in the west village thanks to his father's largesse.  So thinking are a lot more complicated than they first seem.  I think the same is true for all the characters it the novel--they are shaped and determined by their pasts, Carter perhaps more than anyone else.

Queenie D: So Carter and Mia's one night stand truly was just another chance Carter took to be more like Julian - to have some of the life he so desperately coveted.  Does that mean Carter actually took advantage of Mia's weakness over her mother's death?  Why would Mia allow it? 

Josh: I think Carter did take advantage of Mia's weakness, and Mia allowed it--well, because she was in a bad way with her mother dying, because Julian was away, because she made a mistake, because she, like all of us, is flawed. 

I’d say what Carter was doing was complex.  He wanted to sleep with Mia because she was Julian's fiancée at the time (remember that Carter and Julian discovered Mia together in the freshman facebooks, and there was a sense in which Julian got to her first) and Carter wants whatever Julian has--note how later in the book carter remodels his bathroom because he's still preoccupied with Julian's parents' bathroom--that seven-nozzled shower that he uses over Thanksgiving. 

But I think also that there's a sublimated homosexual element to Julian and Carter's friendship, as is true of many male friendships.  I'm not saying that Julian and Carter are in fact gay, but that their friendship--the affection and rivalry--partakes of a certain kind of sublimated homosexuality, so that in some way by sleeping with Mia Carter is sleeping with Julian. 

It's all very complicated, but I see him as trying to stick it to Julian, in both the sexual and the violent sense, and we see that coming out in the basketball/tuxedo scene in Berkeley later in the novel.

Queenie D: Wow.  So you really did draw on Freudian influence in these relationships.  Julian and his mother, now Carter and Julian... there is a whole second level of complexity going on beneath what is already quite an intricate set of relationships.

Josh: Yes, the Freudian material is really there, though I didn't think it out in advance.  I plan nothing out in advance, and all the things I'm telling you now are thing I only realized once the book was complete. 

For the writing of the book, I proceeded much more intuitively without any plan.  I'm not saying my intuitions were always right--often they were wrong, which is why the book took me so many years to write and I threw out more than three thousand pages.  But for me, the only way to get things right is to proceed intuitively, through trial and error. 

A friend of mine wrote her psychology thesis in college on how adults group objects versus how kids group objects. The adults group the apple with the banana and the kids group the monkey with the banana.  This is another way of saying that kids are more natural story tellers than adults are, and one of my jobs as a writer and a professor of writing is to teach myself and others how think like children again, albeit very smart and precocious children.

Joshua Henkin Interview with Queenie D, Question 4

We all make decisions in our 20s--where we're going to live, whom we're going to love, what kind of work we're going to do--that have consequences years down the line that we couldn't have imagined at the time.  So I wanted to see that process played out. 

I also was interested in writing about college life and college towns, because I think of college as a time of experimentation and a time when a lot of distinctions, particularly of class, get flattened.  There's a mythology about America that we live in a classless society, but nothing can be farther from the truth.  Yet college is a kind of laboratory where despite certain differences among students (some have to take jobs to help pay tuition and others don't) everyone feels weirdly equal in that they're all taking the same classes and living the same dorms. 

However, once graduation comes, certain class distinctions reassert themselves, and differences of wealth start to be of more consequence.  I'm struck by how many of my friends are quite different from what they were like in college, but quite similar to what they were like before college, and to what their parents are like.  I wanted to sketch the trajectory of change, to see it play out, and I found that covering a lot of years allowed me to do that.

Joshua Henkin Interview with Queenie D, Question 5

Joshua Henkin Interview with Queenie D, Question 6

There are risks to calling a novel matrimony because you set up certain expectations that may or may not be fulfilled.  It's true that the book is about a marriage (several marriages, in fact), but it's also about other things, including class and friendship and reaching middle age, and I of course couldn't have called it "matrimony, class, friendship, and reaching middle age." 

Sometimes it's better to choose a title that's simply evocative but that doesn't try to tell you too much.  My first novel, Swimming Across the Hudson--that title simply comes from a single image in the book.  It's not meant to be replete with meaning, and it's certainly not a novel about aquatics. 

In this case Matrimony felt like the right title, even if it meant risking that someone would think it was a self-help book.  And it seems to be a title that appeals to book groups, certainly judging by the fact that I've participated in about 40 discussions of Matrimony with book groups in person, by phone and on-line, and the book isn't even out in paperback yet.  It will be out in paper the last week of August, at which point I suspect my life will become one big book group which is fine with me.  I've really enjoyed meeting with book groups to discuss Matrimony and I've learned a whole lot from them.

Queenie D: Well the visitors at Book Club Queen are certainly thankful for your time and insight about the book! 

Josh: Thanks, Desiree.  And I hope the readers at Book Club Queen will contact me about participating in discussions of Matrimony.  I can be reached through my website, which is Joshua Henkin or directly by email at jhenkin at SLC dot edu. 

Joshua Henkin Interview with Queenie D, Question 7

But I can tell you what the new novel is about so far, just as long as no one holds me to it! (if I'd been asked early on what Matrimony was about I'd have told you something entirely different from what it turned out to be!). 

In brief, the new novel takes place over the course of a single July 4th weekend at the family's weekend house in the Berkshires, in a town like Stockbridge.  Three adult sisters and their spouses/significant others reunite for the weekend, along with their parents, the occasion for which is the fourth or fifth anniversary of the death of the brother, who was a journalist killed in Iraq. 

When the brother died, he left a pregnant wife and the wife returns to the reunion as well with her three- or four-year-old son.  She's now a grad student at Berkeley and is seriously involved with another guy. She's moving on, in other words. 

The son is the object of struggle, of course.  To the grandparents and the aunts, he's the embodiment of the dead brother, but to the brother's wife, he's just her son, and if she doesn't end up getting married to this new guy she's with, she'll probably marry someone else, and that new man may very well adopt the son. More figuratively, the novel is about the way the past pulls on the present and the future.  It's about time, which to one extent or another is what all my work is about.  So that’s it in a nutshell.

Queenie D: It sounds terrific!  You'll have to come back to BCQ once it's finished and let us review/interview you again!  It's been wonderful talking with you Josh and thank you so much for your time!

Josh: Thanks, Desiree.  I really enjoyed it!

Joshua Henkin Interview with Queenie D, Question 8