InterView by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Published: 2021-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

CAROLYN SEE

CAROLYN SEE’s house in Topanga Canyon north of Los Angeles is surrounded on three sides by canyons deep and wide enough to contain whole forests and whole sunsets. In her novel Golden Days she described her first visit to the site: “The house sat out on a wide raw crescent of cut and fill. That half moon of dirt hung, just hung there in the air, over another one of those astonishing cliffs above nowhere. Across the chasm . . . were stones the size of skyscrapers. Due east, a wilderness of bougainvillea and eucalyptus, sage, rosemary, mint, and a couple of blazing yellow acacias.” By the time of my visit, the dirt had been landscaped into gardens, but it was the view over the chasm that compelled me—dense trees, immense rocks, and distant tiny horses on a dude ranch, with ranchers’ voices carrying over the miles of blue sky.

Sitting in the sunny living room of her house at the top of the world, Carolyn See is a neat, attractive woman who embodies in her conversation the wit, animation, and profundity that characterize her writings. Her latest novel, Golden Days, is a stunning, daring book; beginning with hilarity, it evolves into a deeply serious vision of American society and a particular family before and after a nuclear holocaust. See, who was born Carolyn Bowland (Richard Edward See was her first husband), is also the author of three other novels (Rhine Maidens; Mothers, Daughters; The Rest Is Done with Mirrors) and a study of pornographers and the pornography industry called Blue Money.

I told See that I considered Rhine Maidens, a novel about a comically bitter, interfering, and energetic mother, to be a brilliant farce. She told me that “Rhine Maidens is about throttled female energy with no place to go so it turns to destruction; Golden Days is about male energy and science gone mad.” Golden Days earned rave reviews from such different voices as William Buckley, Jr., and Betty Friedan, who wrote of it, “If such a heroine can be so truly imagined here and now, she might embolden us to save ourselves.”

We discussed the fact that her fiction, long respected on the West Coast, has only recently become nationally known and is still underread in the East. She explained that she became a writer “with such ignorance. I was on the wrong coast, I was the wrong age, the wrong sex at the time, and then I did nothing whatsoever to rectify that situation, so that my first novel, The Rest Is Done with Mirrors, had a printing of [only] 2,000 copies.” (Together with her other novels, it has just been reissued in paperback.)

By “rectifying the situation,” See means going to New York, meeting the right people, being smart about marketing. “It’s because I don’t want to move away from here; I do go back to New York a lot but it took me a long time, plus there’s the family stuff. I try in my mind to put my books and my family exactly on a par.

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