Be Safe I Love You (24 page)

A Conversation with Cara Hoffman

Q: What prompted you to write a war-themed novel? Was it something you were considering for some time, or was there a particular moment when you realized it was a topic you wanted to explore?

A: We live with war. The United States has permanent military bases throughout the world. The foundation of our culture is exploitation and conquest. There are many books written about battles, but there are few written about how deeply enmeshed our personal lives—our livelihoods, pleasures, and entertainments—are with war. And very few novels deal with what life is really like for families of returning soldiers.

Q: Why did you opt to have the central character be a female soldier? What particular challenges do female soldiers face?

A: The main challenge that women in the military now face is constant risk of sexual assault by the people they are serving with. It’s something I didn’t write about in
Be Safe
I Love You
, but it would be wrong not to mention here. Rape in the military is at epidemic proportions. Apart from that, women have additional issues when they return home. Particularly if they are parents and expected to be nurturing and to be caregivers for an entire family, women face humiliating kinds of gender-based discrimination at home in addition to those they faced at war.

Q: There are so many vivid details in the story about a soldier’s life in and out of uniform—from Lauren’s thoughts on battlefield religion to the emotions she experiences after she returns home. What research did you do for
Be Safe I Love You
?

A: I interviewed veterans. And my brother was a combat veteran who did two tours of duty and worked as a military contractor. I’ve spent a good amount of time around military people since I was a child and have a good idea of what that culture is like. The character of PJ was inspired by a close family friend who was a Vietnam vet and civil rights activist.

Q: Authors are often asked if they share similarities with their novel’s protagonist. How do you feel about this common trend that links authors’ personal lives with their work?

A: I think there’s been a serious cultural shift in the way people read and receive fiction. The shift was influenced first by the rise of the memoir as a genre, and second by forms of visual media and social media, which normalized self-exposure. I write fiction, not memoir. So I am more interested in talking about language and craft and ideas than I am about my personal life. The characters in my novels, like the characters in all novels, are the result of research, imagination, and experience.

Any personal similarities I have with the characters are pretty generic. I come from upstate, from an Irish Catholic family. I have an older brother who is a soldier and a younger brother who is a brainy sort of guy. But my experience of loving them, of caring for them is universal. Readers might link my experiences with the Danny character, but that would be a mistake. In many ways, we’re all Danny. Living in a military culture and coping one way or another with the fallout of things soldiers have done, the burdens they’ve taken on under the guise of protecting us, the way they shape us and the world we live in. I guess my answer to this question is
Be Safe I Love You
is fiction. And I’d like to keep my personal life private. But I will say that anyone looking for clues about where my life and upbringing intersect with the novel need look no farther than Troy, the Patricks, or the postindustrial towns of upstate New York.

Q: But what about Lauren? In the novel Lauren trains as a classical singer. Is this a talent you share with her?

A: Yes. I trained as a vocalist and sang and performed classical music when I was young, often with my stepbrother, who was a classical concert pianist and accompanist. I went to juried competitions and performed pieces from operas. I still sing sacred music with a choir and enjoy the music my son composes. Had I stayed in school I’d likely have become a musician like him instead of a novelist.

Q: What made Watertown, New York, the ideal setting for
Be Safe I Love You
?

A: There is a military base in Watertown; it has one of the highest suicide rates in New York State, and it’s close to Canada. In many ways it’s the quintessential upstate town.

Q: You note that
Be Safe I Love You
is a homage to Louis-Ferdinand Céline and his work, in particular his autobiographical novel
Journey to the End of the Night
. What other books and authors have influenced or made a lasting impression on you?

A: That would be a long list! And most of the people on it would be French. Céline changed the way people read. He changed our whole conception of narrative. The work is visceral and immediate in a way that I think is unsurpassed. I have read passages from
Death on the Installment Plan
that made me laugh so hard I was crying, and at the same time made me feel like throwing up. He’s a genius. I also love Jean Genet, Gustave Flaubert, Simone de Beauvoir, Virginie Despentes, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus. I love George Orwell—as folks who’ve read
So Much Pretty
know. And then the Americans: Paul Bowles, Joan Didion, Zora Neale Hurston, Flannery O’Connor. It may sound strange but I’ve read with total pleasure everything by Philip K. Dick—including the first 500 pages of the
Exegesis
which is just a lunatic work. I love PKD. Because his books are about Gnostic philosophy and identity and fighting against a false authoritarian world—but the stories are about people living on Mars or spying on themselves from inside disguises. I’ve been deeply affected by David Wojnarowicz’s work, particularly
The Waterfront Journals
and also
Close to the Knives
, which resonates with me the same way that Céline’s
Journey
does—in my view it’s a perfect book. I come back to it over and over again. It’s a source of strength and inspiration, raw and real and filled with beauty and rage. When I read it I feel awed and excited, and very sad that he didn’t survive the plague.

Q: You’ve mentioned in interviews that there is a tendency toward “romanticizing war as a thing that gives life meaning, war as inevitability.” Do you see that view changing with novels about the Iraq war that have been published recently? Why was it important to you not to take that direction with
Be Safe I Love You
?

A: I have no patience for the narcissism of war narratives. People think murder adds gravitas and mystery to their work. But nothing is more superficial, more underdeveloped or unenlightened, than violence and killing. There are ways to write intelligently about war and violence, ways that demystify the mundane causes and get somewhere more interesting and significant, but that kind of work is rarely undertaken. Fetishizing violence and killing, studying battles and weapons, getting a vicarious rush from reading about or seeing brutality is literally the definition of a perversion. It’s an ignorant practice. The fact that any of it carries weight in our culture is laughable. War is state-sanctioned murder. There’s nothing lower than that. It is the conscious misdirection and exploitation of men’s bodies and of hypermasculinity, in order to steal and profit from others’ misery. I don’t see that books such as
The Yellow Birds
take a different direction; the language is utterly lovely but the story is still one of men suffering because of the suffering they’ve inflicted. And it still reinforces the dominant paradigm. It’s time to do something wholly new. Helen Benedict’s
The Sand Queen
was an inspiration and a good start toward capturing the big picture. David Finkel’s nonfiction
The Good Soldier
is brilliant. But the longer we continue to tell epic tales of cowboys and Indians, the longer we’ll remain in a kind of cultural infancy. It’s thumb sucking, plain and simple.

The short answer to your question is that I couldn’t take the direction of romanticizing war because I don’t write propaganda for the government. Poverty and propaganda are what make kids strap on suicide vests, join the Taliban or the IRA or the RUC, help destroy their neighbors with machetes, or leave their jobs at the Dairy Queen and travel thousands of miles to dump white phosphorus on an entire town. I won’t have any part of that propaganda. I won’t pretend for a minute that there’s any meaning at all in that kind of brutality. This is the main way in which the book is a homage to Céline, who understood these things as a soldier and as an anarchist.

Q: “Home is not always the safest place for a returning warrior,” you write in
Be Safe I Love You
. What strides have been made in recent decades to support soldiers when they return from war? What still needs to be done?

A: People can make donations to the Service Women’s Action Network, which works to end sex discrimination and reform veterans’ services.

The “strides” that have been made to support soldiers clearly have to do with transport and medical support in the field. The prosthetics and physical rehabilitation that people can get today are amazing. More soldiers are surviving combat than before because of it. But the suicide rate for returning soldiers is high. The fact is, these folks often end up dead or homeless or abusing or killing people close to them after returning from combat. Talking about what should be done once people return is really talking around the problem. Obviously creating a society where military intervention is not the norm is the goal. But gender exploitation of men to commit violence is not going to change any time soon. So it’s a good question. What do you do once you’ve trained a person to murder and then sent him out to experience extreme trauma? What do you do to help those people? I don’t know.

Q: What would you most like readers to take away from
Be Safe I Love You
?

A: An understanding of how important fraternity is, actual brotherhood, siblinghood, mutual aid, and solidarity—not false brotherhood created by the trauma of war. The book is about how relationships based on hierarchies are detrimental. And how the creative force is lifesaving. It’s about how history and the worship of patriarchal narratives threaten our future. It’s about the power of autonomy and equality, and the terrible things you have to face about the world in order to get that power. It’s about love.

Q:
Be Safe I Love You
is your second novel, after
So Much Pretty
, the story of a reporter who investigates the death of a young woman in a small town. What is your next novel about? Does it share any themes or other similarities with your first two books?

A: My third novel is about a homeless teenage girl living in Athens, Greece, in the late 1980s and early ’90s, who gets involved in some illegal activities. Just as in
So Much Pretty
and
Be Safe,
it’s an examination of institutional violence—and how we cope with and transcend it. There’s a Camus quote that I think sums it up nicely. “The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free your very existence is an act of rebellion.”

Enhance Your Book Club

Pair your reading of
Be Safe I Love You
with Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s
Journey to the End of the Night
, a book that had a profound influence on Cara Hoffman.

Suicide is now the leading cause of death for US service members and veterans, far outstripping combat-related deaths. Please consider making a donation to the Service Women’s Action Network to help end sex discrimination, reform veterans’ services, and ensure high-quality health care and benefits for women veterans and their families.

Go to servicewomen.org, or write to: Service Women’s Action Network, 220 E. 23rd Street, Suite 509, New York, NY 10010.

Arvo Pärt is Lauren’s favorite composer. Listen to his music while reading
Be Safe I Love You
.

Lauren’s favorite poem is “Mending Wall” by Robert Frost. Incorporate a reading of the verse into your discussion of
Be Safe I Love You
.

Visit CaraHoffman.com to learn more about the author and her books.

About the Author

Cara Hoffman is the author of the critically acclaimed novel
So Much Pretty.

Hoffman grew up in upstate New York, part of northern Appalachia, where she studied classical voice. She dropped out of high school and spent her late adolescence travelling and working as an agricultural laborer and runner in Greece and the Middle East.

In the 1990s she returned to the United States, had a baby, and found a job delivering newspapers, which eventually led to full-time work as a staff reporter.

She has been a visiting writer at St. John’s University, Goddard College, Columbia University, and Oxford University, where she lectured on violence and masculinity for the Rhodes Global Scholars Symposium. She lives in Manhattan and teaches writing and literature at Bronx Community College.

ALSO BY CARA HOFFMAN

So Much Pretty