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| (photo: G. Culliford) | |
Cara Wall is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and Stanford University. She is also the founder and inaugural director of the Iowa Young Writers' Studio. She lives in New York City with her family. The Dearly Beloved is her first novel.
Tell us about your inspiration for The Dearly Beloved.
I didn't set out to write a story about ministers. I was reading Happy All the Time by Laurie Colwin, which is about two couples. I loved the way she wrote about marriage and explored what happens after the traditional "happily ever after" wedding moment.
I grew up in a church with two ministers. One was very tall and the other was fiery. They were both dignified, commanding and august. This book is inspired by my memories of them, which are full of reverence and the tiniest sprinkle of fear.
My family history is steeped in religion. My mother and father were raised as Nazarenes--my paternal grandmother converted when she had a vision of an angel on the other side of the washing line. It was a strict religion--no drinking, dancing or listening to music outside the church. But my grandparents' churches were also warm and welcoming.
My parents arrived in Greenwich Village in 1965. My father got an advanced law degree at NYU, and my mother got a job as receptionist at First Presbyterian Church. They have been members there for 55 years. First Presbyterian was the cornerstone of my childhood. All my parents' friends were members of the church--which can sound uptight, but Greenwich Village in the 1970s was full of singers and artists and NYU professors. My parents went to church parties every weekend--I was famous, as a toddler, for falling fast asleep beneath whatever coffee table they put me under. Church was not exactly "religious" for me. It was my community, my playground, my second home.
All of that informed the way I wrote about Charles, Lily, James and Nan. I didn't see them, first and foremost, as ministers and ministers' wives. I saw them as people thrown together by circumstance, who have to learn to forge complicated relationships. My main questions were: How do we make friends? How do we become close? How do we create lives with each other? How do we keep from being lonely? How do we trust?
Lily tells Charles early in their relationship that she can never believe in God. But he loves her and builds a life with her anyway. Can you talk about this central disagreement in their marriage?
I see Charles and Lily as very much alike. They are both intellectuals, and both make deliberate decisions about the way they want to live their lives. They both grew up in loving families but felt isolated because they were more serious than everyone around them. Charles hadn't experienced tragedy in the way Lily had, but he was familiar with her feeling of isolation. He and Lily respond to that loneliness in each other--they understand it intuitively. To me, the central issue in their marriage is not religion, per se--it is that Charles wants Lily to be happy, and Lily has accepted the fact that she will never be happy. She lives in pragmatism and he lives in hope.
Also, Charles didn't discover God until just a few years before he met Lily. His faith is still forming as he courts her, and it grows around her in the same way trees will grow around boulders and fences. Her atheism causes him to constantly re-evaluate his life. He is never on autopilot, because he is always deciding what it means to be a minister whose wife does not believe in God. If he were married to a believer he might be less substantial, his faith lighter and easier. His relationship with Lily makes his faith--and his life--richer and more nuanced. More challenging, certainly, but a challenge that makes him stronger and better able to lead a church.
One of Charles and Lily's sons, Will, is diagnosed with autism at a time when almost nothing was known about the disorder or how to manage it. Tell us about writing Will's character and the ways other characters respond to him.
Will was the only character I didn't try to inhabit--I wanted to keep the same sense of remove from him that the other characters feel. I wanted to experience him through Charles and Nan and James and Lily, so that I could capture their bewilderment and desperation.
The hardest character to write about in this section of the book was Charles. He completely shuts down, and it was tricky for me to access his internal struggle. It seems obvious that he would be the character who would say, "God will help me through this." But every version of the story I tried to write that way felt utterly false. In fact, it was intriguing to me that none of the characters chose that path--none of them said, "I'm giving it to God." Each of them took human responsibility for their relationship to Will--real-world, tangible action to the best of their ability. Those abilities varied wildly--which is one of the aspects of the book that keeps it from being just a book about faith. It's a book about marriage and families and crises and healing.
The book tells the story of Charles's and James's work, and how the church responds to them as ministers. That response is sometimes contentious.
The biggest misconception about churches is that everyone gets along. This is not true! A church is like a co-op building--it has a board and voting members. It's a hierarchy, which causes power struggles. For every member, church is one of the most important places in their lives, which means they're intensely invested in how it's run.
Charles and James come into a divided church, in a divided time, in a divided society. They are caught between preserving the historical identity of a respected institution while steering it through the cultural changes of the 1960s in a way that makes it relevant to modern times. This is like turning a cruise ship: there is more than one propeller to redirect, and it takes a long time to head in a new direction. Charles and James make choose that new direction for their church. This is not, generally, the way Presbyterian churches make decisions, so they get in some trouble. But James's inherent need to take action made it plausible that he would bypass tradition for what he thought was right.
Three of the four main characters are people of deep faith, but their faiths are quite different from one another. How did you approach writing about their varied struggles with belief and doubt?
I have every one of the struggles with belief and doubt that these characters have. I parcelled out my own, varied experiences with faith between them. Writing about four different religious lives was freeing for me--I often feel like I have to make up my mind about faith and religion, but while writing this book I was allowed to embrace my indecision. I had the chance to think deeply about the ways our faiths of origin affect the way we see the world and the way we live our lives. Some people follow their childhood faith without thinking, some tweak it, some completely disavow it. Whatever we do, it remains embedded in us. --Katie Noah Gibson