Where the Heart Is (36 page)

Q. Did you sit down and plot out the book character by character, interaction by interaction, or did it come to life as you were writing it? Is Where the Heart Is the novel you set out to write?

A. I had parts of the story in my head when I started. I knew who the major characters were and I knew how the story was going to end, but I didn’t know many of the twists and turns that would take me there. The first time I actually roughed out an outline, when I was seventy or eighty pages into the first draft, I came up with seventeen chapters. As you know, the book ended up being thirty-eight chapters long, so I guess outlining isn’t my strong point. Is it the novel I set out to write? Yes, I’d have to say it is even though I got there almost by accident, just sort of stumbling from one chapter to another, from one event to another.

Q. In what ways did the novel change as you wrote it? Did you find some characters developing in unexpected ways?

A. Forney Hull was a big surprise for me. I knew he was going to be instrumental in changing Novalee’s life by introduc-ing her to the world of books and learning. But I had no notion that he would fall in love with her. When he did, I was really amazed. And when she discovered she loved him, I was absolutely astonished. Astonished, but pleased.

Q. Can you talk a bit about Novalee? How did she come about?

Was she the impetus for writing the novel or did the story come first?

A. I was in Wal-Mart one day and the thought came to me that someone could probably live there for weeks, months

. . . years, maybe, without ever having to go outside. And just like that I came up with the idea of a girl hiding out in that store, living there, because she had nowhere else to go.

Then, as the story began to take shape, the girl became a pregnant teenager faced with some very adult, very difficult decisions. And in Novalee’s case, a teenager who had a history full of grief.

Q. This novel has won awards in the young adult category.

What is it about the book that speaks to teenagers?

A. I’ve heard from young people all over the country—many have written to me; some I’ve met in person—but most have made similar comments: they identify with Novalee because they, too, have felt lost, abandoned, alone; they want to believe there are places in America like Sequoyah, where racism, sexism, and classism do not override hopes and possibility. And because so many of them come from splintered families, they trust that they, like Novalee, might Where the Heart Is

be lucky enough to find caring people out there who will help them build “families” of their own.

Q. Where the Heart Is is set in America’s “heartland” and deals with quintessentially American characters, yet it has been translated into twelve languages. How would you account for its cross-cultural appeal?

A. I don’t know, but I’m glad. I’m glad that Scandinavians and Europeans and Asians and Latin Americans will read about Moses, Sister Husband, Forney, Novalee, and the other fine folks of Sequoyah, Oklahoma, and realize that people of good heart don’t exist just in the pages of books, but live next door, in the neighboring town, in bordering nations, and countries halfway around the world.

Discussion Questions

1. The theme of “home” runs throughout this novel. Would you characterize home as a place, a family, a state of mind, or, as Sister Husband says, a place “where your history begins”? As a home-less person longing for a home, Novalee’s image of home is heavily influenced by the images she sees in magazines. How influenced are we all by portrayals of home and home life in the media, movies, and on television?

2. In the beginning of the novel, Novalee is a poor, uneducated teenage mother whose own mother abandoned her at a young age. Novalee, however, seems to be remarkably maternal and re-sponsible in her parental role. Do you think this is a believable portrayal of teenage motherhood? Is it possible that lacking a loving mother herself she would be such a good mother? Both Novalee and Lexie defy our stereotypes of poor, single mothers.

Do you think this is a strength or a weakness of the novel?

3. Novalee’s superstition about the number seven intensifies after the birth of her daughter. What do you make of Novalee’s seemingly irrational fears? What role do superstitions play in the lives of even the most rational of us? Are there any other patterns or cycles you recognize in the novel?

4. Despite his cruelty, women are attracted to Willy Jack and are willing to take care of him. What is the attraction of cruel men to needy women? Lexie says, “Girls like us don’t get the pick of the litter.” What do you think of this statement? And why do you think that Novalee decides to help Willy Jack when she learns of his plight?

5. Willy Jack’s story is interspersed throughout the novel. Do you think his story is necessary to the plot? Why or why not? If this novel had been told through the eyes of Willy Jack Pickens, in what ways might we see Novalee differently?

6. Novalee takes pictures to “see something in a way nobody else ever had” and Forney reads to explore the world outside the con-fines of his own life. Do you think books and photography help them deal with their lives or keep them from dealing with life head on? In what other ways do we use inanimate objects to either cope with life or hide from it?

7. Children play an important role in this novel. How are their stories important? What do each of the children—Americus, Benny, Praline, Brownie—teach us about love and loss of inno-cence?

8. Despite their struggles, Lexie’s family is incredibly loving, fun-filled, and close. This is what makes the attack on Lexie and Brownie so heart wrenching and shocking. Do you think Brownie’s trust in adults can ever be fully restored? Why do you think the author decided to include such a brutal scene in a book filled with so much kindness?

9. How did you feel when Novalee spurned Forney? Did you believe they would ultimately end up together? Do you think they are well matched? Do you believe that differences in education and social class matter in a relationship, and what do you think makes it possible to bridge such differences? Or do you believe that people with similar backgrounds tend to be better matched?

10. There are no traditional families in this novel. Why do you think the author chose to write a book about home and family yet disregarded established notions of what constitutes each? Though many of us accept and embrace different forms of family life, why do you think the traditional family is still frequently portrayed as mother/father/children? Do you think this remains the “ideal”?

Billie Letts On Billie Letts

I was an only child . . . and an ugly one. I had pumpkin-red hair as untamable as tangled bailing wire, buck teeth that overlapped my bottom lip, and so many freckles that my Uncle Ed called me “Speck”

and teased that I was the only girl in Oklahoma who had a dog prettier than she was.

My Aunt Zora, in a sincere act of kindness, tried to console me by telling me that I was going to be pretty when I got older and “grew into my teeth,” a comment that left me mystified, yet hopeful.

But my physical imperfections, unfortunately, did not end at my neck.

My body looked like a stick figure drawn by a four-year-old with a sharp pencil and a dull sense of proportion. There wasn’t enough meat on my bones to tempt a hungry chicken hawk. Even worse, I was clumsy . . . never quite in control of my feet and elbows and knees, which resulted in a pandemonium of scars, scabs, scrapes, and bruises, cross-hatched with Band-Aids.

I was a mess. But the Oklahoma sun was warm, and I was a kid with good friends and neighbors and relatives, and somehow I could always make them laugh. A tap step here, a piano run there, and always the jokes, the laughter.

The child of parents who were children themselves, I lived much of the time with my grandma, whose house was close enough that I could see my own from her kitchen window, where I sometimes watched my mom and dad do battle. My grandma’s house was always a safe haven for me, and starting school was a reprieve.

The first in my class to learn to read, I zipped through Dick and Jane, then, encouraged by the school librarian, packed home each week as many books as I could carry. By the time I entered fourth grade, I was beginning to yearn for something with more substance than our library could offer.

My parents, both products of the Depression, were uneducated, hardworking, and thrifty—not the kind of people to spend money on books. In our house there were only two: the Bible and a novel my mother must have thought was of a religious nature because of the title, though I’m quite sure she never read it.

I gave the Bible a try, but, finding it very confusing, turned to the novel. God’s Little Acre. Now there was a book! I read it several times and used it as the subject for my fourth grade book report, which caused such a stir that I knew I was on to something. If I had the power to agitate a language-arts teacher in Tulsa, Oklahoma, by simply writing about someone else’s writing, how much power might I have in telling my own stories? I suspect it was then, at age nine, that the idea of becoming a writer took hold.

Fast-forward twenty years.

By age thirty, I was married, the mother of two sons, and about to graduate from college to start my career as an English teacher, a sharp departure from my previous “professions.”

I had, in the intervening years, been a roller-skating carhop, waitress, window washer, dishwasher, dance instructor, and part-time secretary to a private detective who showed me clandestine photographs of my grandma’s long-time evangelist having sex with a teenager on the hood of a car.

For the first few years of our marriage, Dennis, my husband, taught at a junior college in eastern Oklahoma, pulling down just over three hundred dollars a month. Every summer, we loaded up what furniture we owned and moved to Wagoner, my husband’s hometown, which was near Tulsa, and found temporary jobs. The pay was poor, but so were we, and it was the only way we could afford to get through the next nine months on Dennis’s teaching salary.

Friends and family often lent a helping hand. My husband’s mother, who watched our son Shawn while I worked, always had a pot of beans on the stove, fresh vegetables from her garden, and cornbread or biscuits in the oven every evening when I came for him. And though I insisted, on a regular basis, that I had a chicken thawing to cook when I got home, she’d “persuade” me to stay for supper, knowing, too, that if there had been one thawing through the weeks and months I’d claimed, we would have died from food poisoning if we’d eaten it.

Not long after the birth of our second son, my husband was offered the opportunity to go to Denmark as a Fulbright lecturer. From Wilburton, Oklahoma, to Copenhagen, Denmark. A bit of culture shock? You can only imagine. Suddenly we found ourselves with friends from all over the United States and Europe. We watched each other’s children, fed each other, drank beer, and talked about Vietnam and books and politics and, yes, even the human condition. My education accelerated and most of the time I felt amazingly ignorant.

When we returned to the States, I finished an English degree at Southeast Missouri State and began teaching—English in Cairo and Paxton, Illinois, journalism at Southeastern Oklahoma State, elementary school in Durant and Fillmore, Oklahoma.

In 1975, one hundred twenty-five Vietnamese refugees were brought to Southeastern and I began teaching English as a second language. Along with many of the other teachers, I had actively opposed the war in Vietnam. But whatever my feelings had been about the war, I was now faced with classrooms filled with confused, frightened, lonely students. So I learned their names and faces and stories. They met my family and many of them became our friends.

Another leap in time—another twenty years.

As I neared the time to start thinking about retirement, my days of teaching drawing to an end, I had a box of rejection slips, a thick notebook filled with terrible poetry, one play I cowrote with Dennis, six screenplays (four pretty good ones and two miserable failures), a stack of short stories, and dozens of files filled with ideas for more stories.

By then, our younger son, Tracy, was living in Chicago, acting in some good theater and turning out some powerful writing for the stage. Shawn was living in Singapore, doing the work he loves—

playing, composing, and arranging music. And Dennis, who had already retired from teaching, had started acting in films. (As of now he’s been in nearly forty feature films and television movies.) I was still dreaming of becoming a “real” writer, a writer with my name in the credits of a movie or on the cover of a book.

Then, at age fifty-five, I went to a writers conference in New Orleans where, because I had registered early, I had the opportunity to meet with a literary agent for fifteen minutes. The agent was Elaine Markson, a real New York agent, who listened as I tried nervously to sell Where the Heart Is

myself. (I didn’t get my full fifteen minutes because an old friend of Elaine’s dropped by to say hello and my meeting was cut short . . . by two minutes.)

A week later, Elaine called me in Oklahoma to say she had read the screenplay I’d given her and wanted to see the short fiction I’d mentioned, the stories my husband called “Tales from Wal-Mart.” I sent her two, and at the back of the one I’d titled “Where the Heart Is” I’d slipped in a note saying that the story wouldn’t let me go. I was even dreaming about it. I’d left Novalee Nation, a pregnant, broke, and abandoned seventeen-year-old girl, locked in a Wal-Mart late at night and I couldn’t stop thinking about how she was going to survive.

Elaine called as soon as she’d read it, suggesting that it might be the beginning of a novel. It was.

Two years later, Jamie Raab at Warner Books read the completed manuscript and bought it. It was published in 1995.

The first time I walked into a bookstore and saw my book with my name on the cover, I was finally ready to deliver the line I’d been saying in my head since I was a kid: “Now, at last, I’m a real writer.”

But I didn’t say it because I suddenly knew that I’d been a real writer for almost fifty years.