A Conversation with SARA PARETSKY
Best-selling mystery novelist Sara Paretsky, creator of female detective V.I. Warshawsky, was in Boston to promote her book Ghost Country (1998, Delacorte Press.)
Your first book was published in 1982. What led you to become a writer at that point? What was the force behind your desire to write a mystery novel?
I had been writing my whole life, since I was old enough to read. But I'm 50, and I grew up in Kansas, in a very conservative time and place when girls' lives ended with marriage, and we were not encouraged to think about a life outside the home.
And even though that didn't happen for me – actually, when I was 20 and found myself unmarried – I just walked through life in this kind of sleepwalking state, because I wasn't on the script and I didn't have a script. But all this time I kept writing very privately, for myself. I also was an enormous lover of crime novels. It was what I read for years, it was all I read.
When I was doing my Ph.D. in history at the University of Chicago, I read 25 crime novels the month before my doctor's orals. Fortunately, a lot of them were English novels, and had a lot of good history in them, so I was able to get through my exams.
But as time passed, I became very aware of the way women were depicted, especially in American crime fiction, and I wanted my own woman detective. So it wasn't so much that I had this great belief in myself as a writer, but that I had a desire to have a character that meant something personal to me. But it took me a long time – really close to a decade – from first having the fantasy to actually having the emotional strength to try to turn that fantasy into reality.
How did the first couple of books start– Did they come from the character, or from something else?
I had the character first. When I say I spent close to a decade with a fantasy about creating a woman hero, I would write a few pages, but I didn't believe that I could write a novel. . .
I was working for a multi-national insurance company. One day, in the middle of a meeting with a particularly tiresome manager it suddenly dawned on me that what I wanted was a woman who was like me and my friends. We were doing jobs that just hadn't existed for women when we were in school, and we were pioneers. This is when women were first entering management and the professions in large numbers. There were men who were incredibly helpful and supportive and also men who were threatened by our presence, they were just pushing on us. And I wanted a woman who was dealing with all of that, but unlike me she didn't worry about getting fired, or she didn't care what people thought of her, so she just said whatever was in the balloon in her head, instead of keeping it to herself. It was in December of 1978 - I remember it well – because even her name came to me that day as well.
Tell me about the "Sisters in Crime."
We started back in 1986. I have not been actively involved for some years now, but when I helped start it - Kate Mattes who owns Kate's Mystery Books here in Cambridge was also one of the founders - there were a lot of concerns about women in the field. We were very marginalized. At professional meetings, we were either just ignored completely, or put on a panel where someone would ask, "How do you feel when a kitty cat walks across your word processor and destroys your text?" like we weren't professionals, like we did this as a hobby.
More serious professionally was that books by women didn't stay in print as long as books by men. And we were very under-reviewed. We did a study, and adjusting for the fact that men wrote more crime novels than women, a book by a man was seven times more likely to be reviewed than a book by a woman. So libraries that depend on at least two national reviews aren't going to buy your books. Bookstores aren't going to be aware of you. And I was hearing from women like Sue Grafton and Terry White and Phyllis Whitney about a lot of these different concerns. So I hosted a breakfast, sponsored by my publisher at the time, Ballantine Books, at the Crime Writer's Conference that October, to see if there was interested in organizing. I'm the granddaughter of labor organizers, so it's in my blood: (shouts) "To the barricades, women!"
And there was. And the biggest thing we did was to create a Books in Print for our membership. We went directly to bookstores, directly to libraries. What happened was we really grew a readership for the mystery, as well as for ourselves.
We brought people to the mystery who said, "I haven't read a mystery since Nancy Drew, because there's nobody out there I can identify with." They starting showing them this array of books, and they began demanding them from their bookstores and libraries. And it's made an enormous difference in the security of women in the field that we didn't have before.
Are there ways in which you learn something about yourself or the world around you?
What I have always wanted was a world of magic, that I don't believe in but I want to be true. My favorite books as a child were the Narnia books, where you did go literally through a wall and ended up in a magical world where animals spoke.
What I've learned from both writing the book and talking about it with readers is that there are kinds of magic that maybe I've been a little blind to, just the magic even of the word on the page that can take you to another world, that exists only in your mind. That's a form of magic. Or the way in which life can be transformed. I always want the big change. I want - The prophet Amos wants justice to pour down like a mighty flood, and instead, injustice pours down like a mighty flood. So I've been blind to the way in which justice can come down in a trickle and make some lives whole. I think that's something I've learned in writing this book and even more, in hearing people react to it.
What's been most rewarding for you, or meaningful to you, about having been able to be a writer for the last several years?
My own feelings about helplessness and voicelessness, which made me create a character with a really strong voice, that voice has connected me to many different people who also have felt voiceless. My detective grew up in a part of South Chicago where the steel mills used to be and where there's been 50% unemployment for the past ten or fifteen years.
One night, a group of women came to a reading that I was doing in Chicago. They introduced themselves to me afterwards as wives of out-of-work steelworkers. They were working two, sometimes three jobs. They were waitresses, they were check out clerks at Woolworth's or Walgreen's, to keep food on the table. They said to me that they had not read a book since high school, until someone told them that my detective had grown up in their neighborhood. And that V.I. gave them the courage to face this very difficult hand that life had dealt them.
That is the most rewarding thing – I mean, winning the Nobel Prize would not be as meaningful as knowing that I had spoken to someone who needed to hear speech, and needed to feel that there was a voice. That's the biggest reward possible for me.