Austinist Interviews: James Hannaham, Author Of God Says No—Reading Tonight!
Monday, September 14
Domy Books (913 E. Cesar Chavez, Austin TX, 78702)
Free, 7pm
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Texas wasn't part of Hannaham's original book tour, but recently the powers above have seen fit to answer our petition in the affirmative: he will be featured at two in-store readings this week. Catch him at Domy on Monday the 14th or at BookPeople on Wednesday the 16th, both at 7pm. As luck would have it, we recently sat down to talk with Hannaham about LaToya Jackson, McSweeney's, and the pursuit of "a book about gay sex that your grandmother can love." We thought we'd share that chat with you.
God Says No is presented as the memoir of fictional protagonist Gary Gray. Were you drawing on recent memoir literature for inspiration?
None that are so recent. I was thinking of how played out the memoir is, and how thoughtlessly people believe the things memoirists write, as if a memoir got the same amount of fact-checking as science textbooks. But by the time the whole James Frey thing brought those issues into the mainstream, I was already well into a draft of God Says No. One of the book's main inspirations was stuff like this: testimonials of people who claim to have been "cured" of homosexuality.
800-word biographies in which absurd conclusions are reached by searching, earnest men and women, often through surreal revelations. Fascinating, no? Anyway, I thought so. But a few other "non-fiction" life stories also had a lot to do with the germination of God Says No, particularly Mel White's book Stranger at the Gate, Jonathan Coleman's Exit the Rainmaker, and somewhat embarrassingly, LaToya by LaToya Jackson. I read that book as part of my research for a piece about Michael Jackson and was struck by how off-balance it kept me. I couldn't stop thinking, "Some of this has to be sort of true, at least, right?"
Any other big influences?
Right now I'm re-reading Winesburg, Ohio, because I'm teaching it for the 90-thousandth time. In grad school Laura Furman had me read it for an independent study I did on linked story collections just as I was starting to work on the book again, and I'm struck by how much I think I stole from its atmosphere. If ever a book nailed the way in which intense religious fervor clashes with capitalism, sexual passion, and the desire for free will in America, it's Winesburg. It taps into something primal in our national character.
One of our favorite things about this book is the mixture of compelling character drama and hilarious satire. Did you originally conceive it as a straight-out satire, a serious issue book, or something in between?
It was meant to be more satirical when I started out, but it was also about something completely different. It began life as a story that got completely transformed and almost buried in the final draft—a theater company that is actually a terrorist cult and gets involved in a horrible act of violence at an amusement park. I chose the name Concerned Relatives for the company because that's the name of the group that went to Jonestown to see what Jim Jones was up to in Guyana and triggered their mass suicide. Hm. That doesn't sound so satirical or funny, I guess. I'm flattered that you're calling it hilarious; I meant it to read rather dryly, to skip blithely back and forth across the line between comedy and tragedy. But I got more interested in Gary's story and he basically took over the book. Then at some point I realized that I wanted to write a book that you could interpret differently depending on your political viewpoint—a book about gay sex that your grandma could love. I think I might have failed on that last point.
What role did living in Austin play in the creation of God Says No?
Going to the MFA program at UT Austin was pretty crucial as far as time to work and getting great feedback from my professors, and the Michener Center's like, ch-ching! But I didn't pick up much Southern local color from Austin, because, as I'm sure you heard the first week you moved to Austin, Texas ain't the South. It ain't the West, neither. Texas is Texas. I would venture that the opening of the coffee shop Clementine in my neighborhood during my third year helped a whole lot, and The Flight Path is probably still my favorite café to work in, ever.
Did you write much of it here?
I had started it before I got to UT but I did a huge amount of work on it while there. I finished the first draft in July of 2005, at The MacDowell Colony, right before my third year, and I spent a lot of time woodshedding during that last year because I decided to make it my thesis. I also showed it to anyone I possibly could, and Austin is a good place to do that since people seem to have much more time. I miss the Austin social life, which for me mostly consisted of hanging out with Jim Lewis for four hours drinking several bottles of red wine at the Hotel San José and talking about politics and books and art and then having him drive me home at 25 mph.
Did living in Texas help you better imagine your way into the Christian conservative world of the book?
Austin isn't really the place for that, I must say. I did realize something kind of fundamental about the region from living down there, though. I never used to get why you might find, for example, the megachurch next door to the Waffle House in Texas, but now I understand that only Northeasterners hold spiritual hunger in an exalted, intellectual place, on a different plane than physical hunger. For most of the country, it's like, first you fill up on J esus, then you fill up on McNuggets. No qualitative difference at all, Ma'am. Too bad Jesus don't come with dippin' sauce!
What sort of research did you undertake? I'm especially curious about the pray-away-the-gay stuff...
For that I was tempted to go to a so-called reparative therapy clinic, but I didn't want to go under false pretenses, and I didn't think I'd be convincing enough as a fake struggler, especially if there'd been someone attractive there to tempt away from the Lord's path. But I did a lot of reading and then tried to find a parallel experience in my own life, which turned out to be writers' colonies. Once I had written a draft of the section in which Gary goes to Resurrection Ministries, I showed it to a guy who had gone through the treatment and he gave me a lot of very helpful notes.
Everyone we've talked to who's seen the book has remarked on the great job McSweeney's did with the physical product. Can you talk a little about your process of getting the book to press and how you eventually ended up with McSweeney's?
I was actually in the process of looking for an agent, with the help of Jennifer Egan, who almost has more direct influence on the existence of this book than I do. We'd exhausted a long list of names and after a year we decided to try to figure out if there was any rhyme or reason to the responses. Finding none, we continued the search but added to the mix three reputable small publishers where Jenny had personal connections. To our surprise and delight, all three publishers were interested, and through a series of odd coincidences we ended up going with McSweeney's. David Rogers of Picador gave me a heap of great notes, though. Eli Horowitz, who both edits and designs McSweeney's "Rectangulars," can take a lot of the credit for the look of everything coming out of that house. A wonderful illustrator named Kevin Christy endured our endless tweaking of the cover. I mostly kept asking Eli and Kevin to make the illo less tasteful.
Any tips for writers (here in Austin or elsewhere) about how to get a career off the ground?
I'm not sure my method works for everyone. I keep discovering that whenever I try to go through the acceptable channels, I hit a brick wall, and as soon as I try some crazy ass-backward method of doing things that shouldn't work, I succeed. By trying to find an agent, I published a book. By publishing a book, I found an agent. My first agent approached me after a reading. None of what has happened to me could be turned into sane advice for a hopeful neophyte. So all I can legitimately say is focus on your writing. Worry about your legacy—even if you're striving for mediocrity. Get angry about something.
