Nan Graham, has been editor-in-chief
of Scribner for 15 years; she is also senior vice-president of the imprint. Before coming to
Scribner, she worked at Viking Penguin. In addition to Jeannette Walls, her
authors include Don DeLillo, Stephen King, Annie Proulx, Amy Hempel, Monica
Ali, Miranda July, Kathy Reichs, Colm Toibin and Andrew Solomon. She edited the
memoirs The Liars' Club by
Mary Karr and Angela's Ashes
by Frank McCourt, as well as Living
History by Hillary Rodham Clinton.
In 2009, the New York Times Book
Review named Half Broke Horses one of the 10 best of the year. Graham's
2010 titles include Memory Wall
by Tony Doerr, The New Yorker Stories by Ann Beattie and the Pulitzer
Prize-winning The Emperor of All
Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by
Siddhartha Mukherjee.
How did your editorial relationship with Jeannette Walls begin?
Jeannette's formidable and passionate agent Jennifer Rudolph Walsh sent me 58 pages of The Glass Castle in the summer of 2002. Like The Liars' Club and Angela's Ashes, which I'd edited years earlier, Jeannette's memoir arrived with its title. It never had and never could have had a different one. Those first pages included the fiercely candid opening scene of the final book, in which Jeannette, dressed for a party, wearing pearls, spots her mother rooting through a Dumpster, and slides down in her taxi seat so her mother won't see and embarrass her. They also included the description of the three-and-a-half-year-old Jeannette setting herself on fire while cooking a hot dog, and the gorgeous moment when Rex Walls offers his daughter one of the stars in the sky for Christmas and she asks him for Venus. I fell in love. Deep down, The Glass Castle is about the triumph of storytelling. No matter what else Jeannette's parents did--her mother's denials, her father's betrayals--they gave her a love of language. A year later, we had a complete manuscript, which Alexis Gargagliano and I whittled down a bit. If Jeannette had any flaws at all--and believe me, she's a star-- it was a lack of faith in her own power. She could absolutely nail a sentence, but then she might add another one just to be sure. She also had more stories about her adult life than we thought she needed.
Half Broke Horses is a wonderful example of how a fictionalized biography--in this case, of Lily Casey Smith, Jeannette's own grandmother--can bring out the best of both genres. In your view, is this type of "true-life novel" an emerging genre on its own?
For quite a while, through at least one round of editing, we were all calling Half Broke Horses nonfiction, "a memoir of Lily Casey Smith." But then we began to stumble over details and chronology and what might have been happening in the world outside Lily's life. Jeannette is scrupulous about telling the truth, and she couldn't fact-check Lily's story the way she did her own. We borrowed the phrase "a true-life novel" from Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song, which lots of people remember as nonfiction. So if "true-life novel" is a genre, it's one that's been around for a few decades. That said, there are trends in writing, of course. Fifteen years ago, fiction, especially debut fiction, seemed to be dominated by autobiographical novels. Then we entered the age of memoir. Maybe we're coming to the end of that now, or at least a little slowing down.
Jeannette's lyricism and gift for storytelling are hallmarks of both The Glass Castle and Half Broke Horses, as is her deep personal connection to each narrative. What, for you, are the thematic differences between the two books?
Both books are about brave, resourceful, nonconformist women finding their way in the world, fighting for what they believe in, and making something out of nothing. What readers respond to in The Glass Castle and Half Broke Horses is the first-person voice, the incredibly vivid, compelling, candid narrator who transports you to her world. Jeannette herself is a lot more forgiving than her grandmother, and her journey is more complex. She spent years being ashamed of her past. The triumph of The Glass Castle is not just the astonishing resilience and pluck she shares with Lily, but her decision to reveal the secrets she'd been keeping about where she came from. That's liberating and reassuring for every reader.
No matter how well-deserved or well-managed, the success of one book can create its own kind of pressure for the next. Did you experience any of that pressure while editing Half Broke Horses following the tremendous response to The Glass Castle? If so, how did that affect the process?
I think that, for Jeannette, the first miracle of The Glass Castle was not its phenomenal sales success, it was the fact that she didn't lose her job and friends when they learned who she was. The response of readers--their total embrace of Jeannette and their license to accept themselves--trumped the standard anxieties about the next book. It helped that Jeannette was charting new territory, not writing part two of her own story. Whatever worries I had were about how we identified the work--the fiction vs. nonfiction issue. We all knew we had a spectacular book.
How did you work with Jeannette to keep the voice of Lily Casey in Half Broke Horses distinct from her own voice in The Glass Castle?
From the first sentence, "Them old cows knew there was trouble before we did," Jeannette had Lily's voice, and it never wavered. I could trim or tweak a passage. I could ask a question or say, "More here please." But Jeannette didn't need a speck of help with voice. She had tried writing the book in third person and it felt flat to her. The minute she put Lily's story in first person, the character came to life. She'd sorted all that out on her own. She's about the wisest, most pragmatic and clear-headed writer I know.