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Authors: Karen Joy Fowler
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believed that I had to follow the rules or consider anything resembling a âcontract with the reader.â T.H. White is why I never believed that I had to pick a single genre or a single tone or choose between comedy and tragedy, between historical and contemporary, between realistic and fantastical. No reason not to do them all and all the time, either piece by piece or within the same work or within the same paragraph. T.H. White taught me that writing can be more exuberant than is strictly tasteful, and I like exuberance best, though Iâm not sure I often achieve it.
Do you read poetry for fun?
I do. For fun and for fuel. The innovative use of language is inspiring to me. It makes me want to write, which is a helpful first step in writing.
I understand that you are the only science fiction writer in the Baseball Hall of Fame. Is that fair?
Nothing in baseball is fair or foul but thinking makes it so.
Actually, Iâm not
in
the Baseball Hall of Fame. I merely have my own key to the door. They gave it to me because my novel
The Sweetheart Season
was about a womenâs baseball team. At least in part.
What did you think of the film of
The Jane Austen Book Club
? You are allowed to dissemble on this one.
There are parts of the movie I think work really, really well. Some of those parts come straight from my book, but many do not.
There are also parts I donât care for. I donât believe reading Austen aloud can save a marriage. I donât believe a high school teacher should sit in the car necking with a student no matter how poorly she was mothered. My characters would never behave so badly.
And it is tiring to have people approach, as they quite often do, to tell me what they loved about my book, only to realize they are talking about the movie. If I persuade the people reading this of one thing, let it be that. The writer is going to know if you pretend to have read the book when youâve only seen the movie. Donât even try.
But all in all, I like the movie. Itâs not my book, but itâs smart and entertaining and there is a scene (not in my book) in which a nice woman gets falling-down drunk, which is, as already established, the mark of great storytelling.
What will your memorial bench say?
Hey! You, there! Shape up!
THE FURTHER ADVENTURES OF THE INVISIBLE MAN
âFOR RYAN
M Y MOTHER LIKES TO refer to 1989 as the year I played baseball, as if she had nothing to do with it, as if nothing
she
did that year was worth noting. She has her un-amended way with too many of the facts of our lives, especially those occurring before I was born, about which there is little I can do. But this one is truly unfair. My baseball career was short, unpleasant, and largely her fault.
For purposes of calibration where my motherâs stories are concerned, you should know that she used to say my father had been abducted by aliens. My mother and he made a pact after
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
that if one of them got the chance they should just go and the other would understand, so she figured right away that this is what had happened. He hadnât knownI was coming yet or all bets would have been off, my mother said.
This was before
X-Files
gave alien abduction a bad name; even so my mother said we didnât need to go telling everyone. Thereâd be plenty of time for that when he returned, which he would be doing, of course. If he could. It might be tricky. If the aliens had faster-than-light spaceships, then he wouldnât be aging at the same rate as we; he might even be growing younger; no one knew for sure how these things worked. He might come back as a boy like me. Or it was entirely possible that he would have to transmutate his physical body into a beam of pure light in order to get back to us, which, honestly, wasnât going to do us a whole lot of good and he probably should just stay put. In any case, he wouldnât want us pining away, waiting for
Do you read poetry for fun?
I do. For fun and for fuel. The innovative use of language is inspiring to me. It makes me want to write, which is a helpful first step in writing.
I understand that you are the only science fiction writer in the Baseball Hall of Fame. Is that fair?
Nothing in baseball is fair or foul but thinking makes it so.
Actually, Iâm not
in
the Baseball Hall of Fame. I merely have my own key to the door. They gave it to me because my novel
The Sweetheart Season
was about a womenâs baseball team. At least in part.
What did you think of the film of
The Jane Austen Book Club
? You are allowed to dissemble on this one.
There are parts of the movie I think work really, really well. Some of those parts come straight from my book, but many do not.
There are also parts I donât care for. I donât believe reading Austen aloud can save a marriage. I donât believe a high school teacher should sit in the car necking with a student no matter how poorly she was mothered. My characters would never behave so badly.
And it is tiring to have people approach, as they quite often do, to tell me what they loved about my book, only to realize they are talking about the movie. If I persuade the people reading this of one thing, let it be that. The writer is going to know if you pretend to have read the book when youâve only seen the movie. Donât even try.
But all in all, I like the movie. Itâs not my book, but itâs smart and entertaining and there is a scene (not in my book) in which a nice woman gets falling-down drunk, which is, as already established, the mark of great storytelling.
What will your memorial bench say?
Hey! You, there! Shape up!
THE FURTHER ADVENTURES OF THE INVISIBLE MAN
âFOR RYAN
M Y MOTHER LIKES TO refer to 1989 as the year I played baseball, as if she had nothing to do with it, as if nothing
she
did that year was worth noting. She has her un-amended way with too many of the facts of our lives, especially those occurring before I was born, about which there is little I can do. But this one is truly unfair. My baseball career was short, unpleasant, and largely her fault.
For purposes of calibration where my motherâs stories are concerned, you should know that she used to say my father had been abducted by aliens. My mother and he made a pact after
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
that if one of them got the chance they should just go and the other would understand, so she figured right away that this is what had happened. He hadnât knownI was coming yet or all bets would have been off, my mother said.
This was before
X-Files
gave alien abduction a bad name; even so my mother said we didnât need to go telling everyone. Thereâd be plenty of time for that when he returned, which he would be doing, of course. If he could. It might be tricky. If the aliens had faster-than-light spaceships, then he wouldnât be aging at the same rate as we; he might even be growing younger; no one knew for sure how these things worked. He might come back as a boy like me. Or it was entirely possible that he would have to transmutate his physical body into a beam of pure light in order to get back to us, which, honestly, wasnât going to do us a whole lot of good and he probably should just stay put. In any case, he wouldnât want us pining away, waiting for
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