Parlé: Speaking of reality and real problems, I just saw a news article about a kid in Harlem that was upset that his house was going to be renovated to be a luxury condo. So, how much of this story is just an accurate depiction of what’s happening and are you, in that right, just as much a journalist as you are a writer of a novel?
Donna: I think that a lot of what we like to do in a story is to put you some place that is recognizable. Particularly, as of late where the situations are ones that people really are grappling with. In our last book, What Doesn’t Kill You, it was the economy and we had a character that loses her job after twenty-five years and has to re-evaluate everything in her life. We’ve been gravitating towards situations that exist in the world and that people bring their own way of thinking to. They have very particular ways of dealing with what the characters are going through.
Virginia: I think that, much like a journalist, we do a great deal of research on everything that’s topical. Once we knew what Uptown was going to be about, we were gathering newspaper articles, magazine articles and all kinds of things about what was happening in Harlem and has been happening in Harlem for the past twenty years and digesting all of that. Then we learned about real estate development and what happens, and how do you get the land and the permits, and how all of that actually goes from being someone’s desire to actually having the building built. We followed timelines and how long it took for this phase of the project, and this phase of the project because all of that, even though we made up this story and we made up the Dixon Group, we really wanted it to reflect honestly the way the process would take place.
Donna: Whether it’s Harlem or another kind of neighborhood, the case in Connecticut where houses were taken by eminent domain to make way for what I think was a Pfizer plant because that would provide more tax revenue for the town. That went all the way to the Supreme Court because people had been in their homes for long periods of time. So, wherever home is and wherever development threatens them, I think people can relate to the story.
Parlé: Along with doing your research, I’ve only been to New York City twice so I’m just presuming that it very accurately moves its way around the City. How did you do this? Did you get out and do a day trip and write down street corners or was all this solely out of memory?
Virginia: (Laughs) Well, I’ll say this before Donna does – Brooklyn is still really a part of New York. She’s always defending her borough. When I first moved to New York City back in the early 80’s, I lived on 110th Street. I lived on the block that we write about across from the park.
Donna: I really am a lifetime New Yorker, so I could do this tour in my head and tell you where all the places were. I have to say it was fun going back to visit them, which we did, because things really do change a great deal. We took a photo of the block where my mom grew up for instance, 143rd Street, and she was amazed by how much had changed. It was a chance to get to revisit some places and to really get a look at the difference.
Virginia: We’re actually in the process of creating an Uptown fan-page that will have photographs of Harlem and it will have videos of the neighborhoods that we talked about and the new construction and old buildings and all of that. That’s a little project we’re working on in our spare time.
Parlé: Another thing I enjoyed about your writing style is that you’re very cerebral with your characters. You do a very good job of getting into your characters’ heads and explaining to your readers why they’re doing the things that they’re doing. Can you explain to me how you do such a thorough job of creating a character’s “mind’s eye” and truly creating a person?
Donna: From the very beginning, when we started to write, it was very important that characters be three-dimensional. They needed to have the same kinds of flaws and strengths and quirks that make each of us human. When we are starting to think about characters and starting to flush them out, we flush them out more thoroughly than you will ever read in the book. There are things that we know about the characters that don’t necessarily come up in the story, but we know them. Such that we figure out what each character’s speaking style is. They don’t all speak alike and they don’t all have the same way of moving through the world. It was always important to let readers know what that process was so that whatever you related to on the outside, in terms of their action, you also understood from the inside so you knew why they were doing it – even if you didn’t want them to do it.
Virginia: One of the things that we disliked intensely in books that we read was when a character did something that didn’t make any sense and there was no explanation or motivation behind why this character would do this, or why two particular characters would be friends or enemies – it’s just stated as a fact. Part of reading any fiction is that you need to buy into the initial premise and that means that you have to understand enough about the characters to want to believe their story and want to care about it. So, when we first started writing, way back when we did our first book, we wanted to make sure that all of our characters, even the very minor ones, had enough of a back-story that in two sentences we could explain to you who they were and why they were doing what they did. Of course, with the major characters, it meant that their motivation and back-story was continually a part of what was happening to them in the present.
Donna: It was interesting in this book because two of the characters, Dwight and King, were from a prior book, Better Than I Know Myself. So, we went back and read that book so that we could recall the kinds of things that we gave to each of the characters, particularly Dwight, so that we could then build upon that. If you went back to the other book, you would think, “Oh, that’s why he was like this with Jewell,” who was a character he’s with in the other book. So, we really wanted to take who he was and expand on that, and it’s by knowing him so well that we could do that. That’s what readers have often really enjoyed about our books. They feel like they know or understand the character, or the character is like them or like somebody else they didn’t understand but now reading this makes them understand it. So, it’s also a way to let the reader into who these people are and what they’re about.
Parlé: I think that something you two do very well, is that you capture the moral zeitgeist of the time. I think that’s very important for a reader and very much helps them come into the moment. Going along with being in the moment, something I haven’t had to experience is dealing with the loss of a very close family member like your mother or father. The emotions and the things that your characters feel seem so real. It feels like it must have been something that you’ve experienced because it’s not something, without having that experience that I could as accurately depict. So, talk to me about encapsulating that feeling.
Donna: That was very difficult to write because I was calling on something very specific. My mom did have a very bad car accident a couple of years ago. She pulled through that but there are instances like the walking into a hospital room and you see someone in a way that you have never seen them before. A lot of that was very much for me about sense memory and it wasn’t all that long ago that I had to call it up from. It was very difficult. Sometimes it’s harder to write when you are so close to the material that you can’t back away from it for perspective. So, it was trying to find that control of what I was writing so that I was really telling Avery’s story and not mine.
Virginia: One of the things that we always try to do when we are writing characters’ emotional lives is, whether the experience is one we have had or not or positive or negative, we do try to go into our lifetimes, which is a significant period of time, of experiences we have had in terms of emotional response to something good or something bad. We dig up what that actually felt like so that we can then take that feeling and apply it to a different circumstance but similar enough that this would be the kind of a feeling that would be evoked in this circumstance.
Parlé: Well, I hate to leave it on a sad note like that but that was the question I was most curious about. I want to thank you two for your time and look forward to seeing this book on the shelves!
Virginia & Donna: We do too! Thank you very much, it’s been a pleasure!
main image by Bob Gore
Written by Jake Coughlan for Parlé Mag