Mother and Son: Richard Russo Talks About \'Elsewhere\'

Richard Russo's first memoir, “Elsewhere,” tells the story of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist's loving and difficult relationship with his mother, Jean. Mr. Russo's parents separated when he was a child in upstate New York. Raised by his mother, he served as her emotional wellspring, for better and worse. As Mr. Russo became a professor and a successful novelist, he remained deeply devoted to Jean, bringing her with him to Arizona and then back to the East Coast. In a recent e-mail interview, Mr. Russo discussed his decision to write about his mother, the autobiographical elements of his fiction and more. Below are edited excerpts from the conversation:

Q.

Why did you decide to write this b ook about your mother's life now?

A.

In the months after my mother's death, I thought about her constantly, and she was visiting my dreams, as well. All of which suggested there was unfinished business. My last three novels had all featured characters who were puzzled by destiny, asking themselves, “How did I end up here?” Now I found myself puzzling over the same issues with regard to my mother's life and my own. We shared both a genetic (highly obsessive) nature as well as strikingly similar nurture, having grown up in the same small upstate New York mill town. How could our destinies have diverged so radically? It seemed worth investigating.

Q.

Your mother “was deeply mystified by how many people apparently wanted to read stories set in the kind of industrial backwaters from which she'd worked so hard to escape.” Did she express a lot of reaction to your novels? And what was the reaction like?

A.

My mother's reaction to my novels was, as you might expect, complex. She enjoyed seeing the town that shaped both our lives (Gloversville, N.Y.) through the prism of my imagination. Recognizing her husband (my father) in “Nobody's Fool,” she remarked that she was far fonder of him on the page than in real life. But my returning to Gloversville in my fiction troubled her. It meant, I think, that she'd failed in what she saw as her primary duty - to get me the hell away from that place and those people.

Q.

It will be tempting for readers familiar with all your work to experience “Elsewhere” as, among other things, a skeleton key to your fiction. As one of those readers, I'm now wondering if your first two novels, “Mohawk” and “The Risk Pool,” are your most autobiographical, or are there equal amounts of your own experience in each book?

A.

It will please me immensely if readers feel as if they've been granted an insight into a writer's creative process. Like every writer, I'm always being asked where I get my ideas from; well, here's the answer, or part of it. “Mohawk” and “The Risk Pool” are my most literally autobiographical novels, if by autobiography you mean shared facts and data. Still, while there's far more invention in “Bridge of Sighs,” I think of it as the novel that most deeply probes who I am, as a man and as a writer.

Q.

Is there a particular character in any of your novels that was most strongly based on your mother?

A.

Anne Grouse, in “Mohawk,” is my mother on a good day - brave, faithful, lovely, determined. Ned Hall's mother in “The Risk Pool” is the same woman on those days when the demons closed in - unhinged, terrified, needy, ill.

Elena Seibert

Q.

You inherited your mother's deeply conflicted feelings about Gloversville. What's the best thing about the place in your opinion?

A.

This should be an easy question to answer, but it isn't, because I've spent very little time in Gloversville since 1971. In a sense “Elsewhere” is about a place that doesn't exist anymore. The town itself is real enough, but my firsthand knowledge of it is 40-some years out of date.

Q.

Your dad was a frequent gambler but, aside from one stretch you describe, you don't seem to have caught that bug. Is that true, or do you consciously resist the pull of gambling?

A.

No, I think (knock on wood) the bug is gone. A few years ago an academic colleag ue of mine invited me to come to Vegas with him. A tournament-caliber bridge and poker player, he'd always wondered how he'd fare at a table with pros. We arrived in the afternoon and headed to the casino with plans to meet for dinner that evening. After an hour or so of throwing coins into slots, I got bored and returned to my room, thinking I'd take a nap, and there was my friend. He'd won about 500 bucks in the first hour and gotten bored, just like I had. What happens in Vegas, we concluded, didn't happen to us, at least not anymore.

Q.

How do you think screenwriting has changed your process of writing fiction or changed the final product of your fiction, if it has?

A.

Screenwriting, which demands economy above all else, has made me even more expansive as a fiction writer. I love writing dialogue and putting characters in motion, so for me writing scripts is a lark. But when I return to fiction, I'm free t o visit the recesses of my characters' lives that the camera has no access to. It's much more difficult, but also more rewarding.

Q.

There's a theme of “moral outrage” in “Elsewhere” about how industries treat the residents of places like Gloversville. Do you have to consciously make those feelings less polemical in your fiction than the way you feel them in real life?

A.

I think that theme of moral outrage is also present in “Empire Falls” and “Bridge of Sighs.” You can be pretty polemical in a novel. What you have to be careful of is appearing, as author, to intrude upon your narrative. When readers sense a writer pulling strings, then they start thinking of the characters as puppets, not really people. I never want to pull readers out of the dream.

Q.

You mention in the book that, as a novelist, you don't consider plot a dirty word. How did you approach plot in no nfiction, given the length and complexity of your relationship with your mother?

A.

I think the best memoirs read like novels, which means, among other things, that the writer must decide what fits the narrative arc and what doesn't. The fact that something actually happened doesn't mean it should be included. A memoirist isn't free to invent, but the shape of the story is up to him. He decides - as in a novel - how and where the story begins (near the end, in this case). He also chooses, just as a novelist does, when to summarize and when time should slow down for a dramatic scene.

Q.

Did this book get nonfiction out of your system, or did it inspire you to want to write more of it?

A.

I never say never, because that's an invitation to the gods to make a fool of you, but “Elsewhere” seems to have satisfied my need to tell that particular kind of truth.