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Emily Chenoweth discusses her. first novel, Hello Goodbye, which was inspired by a week that her family and parents' friends spent in a New Hampshire resort to say goodbye to her dying mother
Can you talk about the real-life event
that inspired Hello Goodbye?
My mother was diagnosed with an
inoperable brain tumor during my first
year of college. The following summer,
my father arranged a family trip to the
Mount Washington Hotel, a big, old fashioned
resort in the White Mountains
of New Hampshire, so that my parents
and their East Coast friends could spend
some time together before my mother
died. I have a handful of pictures from
that week, which I looked at a lot as
I began to write the book. I kept a
journal back then, too, but I lost it
a long time ago. Which could be a
good thing or a bad thing, I don't
know. Right now, if someone asked
me to write down what I actually
remember about that week at the
hotel, I could do it in ten pages or
less. I'm not sure if it's because I have
a terrible memory, or if it's because
not remembering is part of some
psychic defense mechanism.
Your circumstances back then sound
very much like Abby's—but this isn't
a memoir?
No, not by a long shot. I had originally
thought I'd write a memoir (I'd sold it
on proposal as such), but then I ran into
the problem above: How do you try to
tell the truth about an experience you
barely can recall? You can interview
everyone who shared that experience
with you, but then your book ends up
feeling like a piece of reportage. Or you
can go out on a limb and make a bunch
of things up. And then maybe, like James
Frey, you get into trouble for it. Deciding
to make the book a novel freed me in
many ways. I could explore the feelings
and experiences that I did remember,
but I could also craft a story that had a
different arc than my own (and a more
satisfying arc, I hope, since real life rarely
has neat beginnings, middles, and ends).
What are some elements that you
changed for the story?
I gave Abby—the character closest,
obviously, to myself—a sort of
romantic plotline to explore, for
example, as a way to contrast her
coming-of-age with her mother's decline.
I also made Abby an only child, though
I have a younger brother whom I adore,
who wasn't at the hotel with us that
week. I spent many months trying to
build a story line for him, one in which
he remained at home, befriended a
juvenile delinquent named Vic Libby,
and built a shed in the backyard that
became a kind of memorial to Helen.
The brother plotline didn't work,
though, so—guiltily at first, because
I didn't want to deny my brother's
experience—I made Abby an only
child. But I kept the character of Vic,
and I moved him to the hotel, where
he could be a bridge between Abby
and her mother. I also changed the
friends who come to the hotel, and
I made up Alex, the semi-charming,
semi-silly waiter. ... The list of what
I changed is much longer than the list
of what I didn't.
Does fictionalizing a real experience
change your recollection of it?
Yes, mine—and maybe even everyone
else's. Here's a small and sort of silly
example: The Mount Washington
Hotel doesn't have a peacock, but the
Presidential Hotel in my book does.
So about a year ago, my father said
something about how he remembered
feeding the peacock. And I said, "Dad,
there was no peacock at the Mount
Washington." He bet me fifty dollars
that there was, and he was so certain
that he made me doubt myself—had
I just thought I made up the peacock?
So I wrote to one of my parents' friends,
the one who my father said would have
the most reliable memory, and she sided
with me. There was no peacock. Dad
still owes me that fifty dollars.
Which is not to say that my
memory is so infallible. For instance,
I remembered the hotel as a very grand
and fancy place. "Are you kidding?" my
dad said when I mentioned it. "It was a
dump." I was highly skeptical about this
until, in doing research for the novel,
I learned that the Mount Washington
had been in foreclosure when we were
staying there. So while it probably wasn't
a dump, it probably wasn't as nice as
I remember it. (It's been gussied up
a lot since.) But it would have hardly
served the novel for the Hansen family
to be staying at a hotel on the brink of
financial collapse—it wouldn't provide
the necessary sense of escape.
Why did you choose to write a semiautobiographical
novel?
In a way, this is a story I'd been trying to
tell for years. I wrote a number of short
stories that danced around the subjects
of grief and loss, as well as the strange
connections a person can forge in
times of distress. So I guess in the end
it seemed that it was time to tell it closer
to how it happened. It's still an act of the
imagination, of course. Even an attempt
at faithful transcription of past events
and conversations—which, as we've
already established, Hello Goodbye is
not—involves imagination, creativity,
shaping, and editing. And I think that
one's imagination isn't necessarily put
to greater use when it's focused on
the fanciful or the outlandish or the
unfamiliar. Looking deep into what
you know, or think you know, about
yourself can be a strange and surprising
experience.
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