Voices on Writing: Melissa Fay Greene

by Barbara DeMarco-Barrett

Melissa Fay Greene, a regular contributor to The New York Times Magazine and Good Housekeeping, also writes for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Reader's Digest, Newsweek, Life, The Washington Post, Ms., and Parenting.

She was born in Macon, Georgia, and as a child, moved to Dayton, Ohio. She graduated from Oberlin College in 1975, returned to Georgia to work for the Savannah office of Georgia Legal Services and was a witness to most of the events about which she later would write in her award-winning book, Praying for Sheetrock (1991). It's the story of the political awakening of the isolated African-American community of coastal McIntosh County and the downfall of the corrupt courthouse gang.

Greene's second book, also an award-winner, The Temple Bombing (1996), is about the attack on an Atlanta synagogue in October 1958, part of the violent white resistance to desegregation.

Last Man Out (Harcourt, 2003) is the story of the 1958 mine disaster in Springhill, Nova Scotia, one of the world's first televised disasters. The book was a New York Times Notable Book and was named one of the best books of the year by the Chicago Tribune, the Toronto Globe & Mail, the Cox newspaper chain, and the New York Public Library.

Her latest award-winning book, There Is No Me Without You (Bloomsbury, 2007), is a moving account about Mrs. Haregewoin Teferra, an Ethiopian widow who took in hundreds of HIV-positive orphans and currently houses 40 orphans at her compound.

Greene is married to Donald F. Samuel, a criminal defense attorney. They live with their nine children in Atlanta.

BDB: How did you come to choose your subject matter: autism, Alzheimer's, adoption, AIDS?

MFG: Subjects come, it seems, in four different ways: (1) A topic is offered by a magazine editor (that was the case with my stories on autism and on early-onset Alzheimer's, for example). I can accept or decline a suggestion; I decline plenty. I may not feel like flying to Texas to interview prison inmates just then, to mention a New York Times Magazine story I declined. I really couldn't begin to competently interview a major financier, to mention another from which I fled. (2) I go looking for a topic, working hard to convince myself that it will be the next great thing. (3) A story roars full-bore into my life. This was the case with Praying For Sheetrock, The Temple Bombing, and There Is No Me Without You. Or (4) I ask myself, "What am I most curious about at this moment? What do I most feel like reading next?" Then I try to answer these questions by writing the thing myself. For me, (3) and (4) are the unrivaled best approaches, allowing the writing to re-kindle the pre-existing enthusiasm, rather than trying to force the writing to manufacture the enthusiasm from scratch.

BDB: When selecting projects, do you only look for a good story, or a story which, by telling about it, you might serve a greater good? Can you see yourself telling a story that does not have a basis in a humanitarian cause?

MFG: Another great question. I've learned, first through decades of reading, then through years of writing, that I'm most moved by stories of justice, stories of people intuitively reaching for something—equal rights, dignity, lifesaving medicine—that is denied them. But there has to be a good story! My agent, David Black, always says to me, "Tell me a story." He doesn't want to hear the big picture; he doesn't want me to pitch the ways in which this book will save the world. "Tell me a story." As you all know, you pour so much of your life—your time, your imagination, your energy, for years—into a book project. It would be awful to be two or three years into it and suddenly feel beset by an almost-nauseous sense of, "I'm doing what with my time? I'm writing this? To what end?"

BDB: Any early indications in your writing life that your writing would take a humanitarian slant?

MFG: A combination of coming of age in the 1960s—inspired by the anti-war movement, the civil rights movement, feminism—and growing up in a Jewish community with particular reverence for the words of the ancient prophets. "Justice, justice shalt thou pursue." Magnificent language, paired to street demonstrations. A remarkable epoch. I look to recapture a bit of that: matching stark and potent words to the drive for fundamental human rights.

BDB: How does reporting the intense topics of your books change your own life? Or your perspective? Or do you make those choices because of your informed perspective?

MFG: The heroine of There Is No Me Without You is a middle-aged Ethiopian woman named Mrs. Haregewoin Teferra, who became—after tragedies in her own life—a foster mother to scores of AIDS orphans. Lately I tell people, "I've turned into Haregewoin!" My husband and I have four children by birth and five by adoption, four of whom came from Ethiopia. The newest two—brothers of 10 and 13 who arrived last June—came from Haregewoin's foster home. This book has overlapped and entwined with my life in ways that have transformed my family forever. Amharic is spoken at our dinner table. Spicy Ethiopian stews simmer on the stove at all hours. And we find things lying around the backyard like hand-carved spears. I'm almost as surprised by all this as any of you would be.

BDB: Do you hear from readers who are moved by your book to get involved with the AIDS crisis and millions of orphaned children across Africa?

MFG: All the time. Every day. For example, here's an e-mail I received yesterday from an Ethiopian-American: "thank you for doing this for us. because i am from Ethiopia and i am from the poorest family and i passed through this life. i mean i know how the children are in backhome. when i sew this book it made me cray becase it reminds me how i lost my nebrhood peers. thank you very! very! very much you are doing an amizing job. you will get it from God" [sic]

At bookstore events, I often end up with a bunch of children, adopted Ethiopian children. I tell booksellers, "I can't compete with a Judy Blume, but I'd put my talks up against any other adult nonfiction author in terms of numbers of children who turn out."

People come who read my recent New York Times Magazine story about Ethiopia's AIDS orphans; they come to tell me that they adopted as a result of that story (or, now, of the book) and they want me to meet their children.

But … adoption is not a humanitarian response! A person who is inspired to try to help should volunteer, or give money, or raise supplies. You adopt only because you want a child in your family. I tell folks who ask, "Your humanitarian impulse will last until halfway through your new child's fourth tantrum; then you're stuck for the next 20 years."

BDB: Talk more about how you decided to write about the woman who ran the orphanage in There is No Me Without You. The woman was remarkably frank—how did that come about?

MFG: I learned about Mrs. Haregewoin through the network of Ethiopian and American adults helping orphaned children to find new families abroad. I liked that she was well-educated, middle-class, the widow of a high school principal. It all spoke against the stereotypes of Ethiopia as perpetually in famine (though there are regions frequently facing food shortages). I had no idea how complex and private she was; I had no clue the roller-coaster twists and turns the story would take, while I hung on for dear life. The day she phoned me from prison was a low point in both of our lives.

BDB: When you're working on a project, are you focused on the material only? Are you thinking about your audience?

MFG: I'm trying to do justice to the story. While interviewing, I not only take down a subject's words, I try to absorb everything about the place, the moment in time, the light, the emotions in the room. When writing, my exclusive goal is to be true to that event, to try to bring it to life accurately. I think the same would be true if I were writing fiction. Once I had a scene in mind, I would bend everything to the service of making it come alive.

BDB: You seem like a sunny, upbeat person. How are you able to maintain this sensibility while dealing with the types of stories you do?

MFG: I know! I don't know how I get immersed in these dire subjects. But even when writing about Africa's AIDS orphans—well, especially when writing about them—there was so much laughter, too, so many wonderful stories. Because, of course, one is dealing with children, and they were often full of shenanigans and joy. They'd been through great trauma; they'd survive the worst things that can happen to children—the painful deaths of their parents and siblings. Yet, on any given day, their chief concerns had to do with playing ball or trying a new hairstyle.

BDB: Let's talk a bit more deeply about the writing process. Where do you begin with a project? For instance, do you have to do intense outlining or profiles of your subject(s), before you begin?

MFG: I sketch out the arc of the story, the plot-line, to see if there's narrative backbone there. I've been helped by such screenwriting classics as Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting, by Robert McKee. I personally can get so lost in atmosphere—in the quality of light, in the unique accent and timbre of a voice—that I lose my way completely back to the path of the story. So it does help me to sketch out in advance that this will happen, then this, then that.

BDB: And then, with so many family obligations, are you able to write at home or do you have an office or writing space outside the home?

MFG: My professional life changed permanently for the better when the youngest child finally started full-day kindergarten. The years of my children's infancies, then the years of their little preschool schedules, made it very hard to get anything done. A few years ago, I wrote an essay called "A Writer's Life in A Household of Children." I wrote:

"I've concluded that my part-time hours are, in the long run, beneficial. My work invariably feels like something I escape to rather than from, and I never write so long that I grow weary of it. I can't beat a subject to death because it's always nearly carpool time or dismissal time and, by the next morning, I'm on to new topics. I wrote Praying for Sheetrock during Cliff Valley Preschool hours: Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, nine to one, and Wednesdays, nine to noon. I've virtually never experienced 'writer's block.' It sounds like a luxury I don't have time for. Instead, it feels as if it is constantly, suddenly, 12:45 and my work time is over. I dash away from my manuscript late and guilty, like a kid tearing herself away from a playground at dusk. I believe it keeps my prose livelier. It doesn't matter how magnificently expressive my morning has been: if I'm not at school on time to meet the kids, and don't have cookies and apples waiting for them at home, the children are not going to be impressed."

BDB: How do you know you have something worthy of a book? When might you decide it's a magazine article?

MFG: To refer again to my literary agent, David Black: He always is the first to pose the (infuriating) question, "Is this a book, Melissa, or is it an article?" If it's a book, there's no end in sight. You feel the land widening around your feet. It's like a movie shot when the camera pulls back and back and back revealing, gradually, all of South Dakota. You'll never visit it all in 10,000 words or less.

BDB: Your books seem to entail a great amount of research. How do you conduct your research?

MFG: The usual ways: mountains of reading, years of interviews.

BDB: Any revision techniques you're especially fond of?

MFG: Writing long-hand. Rewriting, rewriting, rewriting. Long-hand.

BDB: Let's take another left turn. What's on your nightstand right now?

MFG: On and under my night-table, right now, today:

• Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance, by Ian Buruma.
• Thirteen Ways of Looking at A Black Man, by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
• Wish I Could be There: Notes from a Phobic Life, by Allen Shawn.
• Cheating at Canasta, by William Trevor.
• The Lemon Tree: An Arab, A Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East, by Sandy Tolan.
• Exit Ghost, by Philip Roth.
• The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good, by William Easterly.
• And, most exciting: The Nature of Paleolithic Art, by R. Dale Guthrie.

BDB: Magazines/newspapers you can't do without?

MFG: The usual: The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books.

BDB: Any last words of advice for the authors and writers of ASJA?

MFG: Don't take along a list of questions to an interview. If you follow a script, you may never reach the truly interesting and peculiar places your subject could take you.

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Barbara DeMarco-Barrett is editor of The ASJA Monthly and author of the award-winning best-seller, Pen on Fire: A Busy Woman's Guide to Igniting the Writer Within (Harcourt, 2004). She hosts Writers on Writing, a weekly show that podcasts at http://writersonwriting.blogspot.com. More at www. penonfire.com.