Getting Off Clean: An Interview with the Author

[Fiction]

[Timothy Murphy]

An Interview with Getting Off Clean Author Timothy Murphy

Q: Where did you get the main ideas for Getting Off Clean?

A: It probably started with having been away from my hometown and family for a few years and having some unresolved feelings of bittersweet nostalgia for them both, which I suppose is a pretty common starting ground for a first novel. I have a real love/hate relationship with the area where I grew up, which is a very old part of Massachusetts north of Boston, just below New Hamphire. It's beautiful in a kind of bleak, Puritanical spooky sort of way -- think the poems of Robert Frost and the Massachusetts paintings of Edward Hopper -- and there's an interesting mixture of an old, intellectual, liberal Yankee tradition with a flintier Catholic working-class element, as well. Also, once I had thoroughly "come out" after college, I had a strange new take on my adolescent years -- suddenly all the secrecy and pain and isolation I had repressed during that time seemed very pointed to me, and I wanted to "figure it out" in a narrative form.

And like Eric's family in the book, and so many white families across New England, my own family moved out of an old textile city when it started changing demographically and moved to an almost completely white suburb right next door. But that city informed so much of my upbringing, both in the nostalgic vision of its past that my elders evoked and their later fear of it as a "war zone" full of crime- and drug-addled Latinos -- they talked about this city constantly yet hardly ever went there anymore even though it was right next door. It took on a certain "dark" mythology for me, and in later years, that's something I wanted to think and write about all the political and personal implications of white flight.

Q: What are your thoughts on creating a black character as a white writer?

A: The operative word there is "character," which is exactly what Brooks is -- a character, a fiction. Of course he's informed by all the young gay black men I've ever read, read about or personally known, but I never intended for him to represent them or to stand for some "universal condition" of young black men, or young privileged black men, or young privileged gay black men. I think it would be presumptuous of any writer to do that, especially a white writer, and probably wouldn't make for very good fiction, either. It was an interesting challenge for me to write a novel that didn't skirt around race but also to try not to fall into any of the obvious traps of representation -- for example, Brooks has his share of problems but I tried hard not to make him a patently "tragic" character. He's my favorite character in the book, in fact -- I love his ennui and his wit and also his deeper anger and fear. The odd thing is that there's probably more of me in Brooks than in Eric, racial experience notwithstanding. And I think one of the points of fiction should be to speculate on the lives of people different from you in a way that's about trying to gain some empathy and some insight rather than to reinforce fears and myths.

Q: Who are your writing influences?

A: They're somewhat diverse, but I have a predeliction toward American writers because I'm so interested in understanding the soul of this country, which is so open-minded and so Puritanical at the same time, so deeply scarred by injustice and cruelty yet still so deeply attached to the idea of equality and opportunity, so very imperfect and yet still so optimistic. It's very heartbreaking to me, in a way. Perhaps not surprisingly, my favorite writer is James Baldwin (a quote from whom opens Getting Off Clean), because he cultivated such an incredible gift for writing against such incredible odds, and because he has such a big heart, such a capacity to throw light on the inner life of the families and neighborhoods in which he grew up, but also an amazing talent for writing characters so different from himself -- like Cass, the guilty liberal white woman in Another Country. So much of my own feelings are embodied in this woman, it was just such a great relevation to me.

And besides Baldwin, I really grew up on Fitzgerald, Edith Wharton, Salinger, John Cheever, Mary McCarthy, Richard Yates, Emily Dickinson, and, outside the country, Forster, Dickens, George Eliot, and so on. I like society writers and I love big, fat books with a real sprawl of time and place and characters. And I should mention how much I love Anthony Lukas' Common Ground, the great account of the busing crisis in Boston in the 1970s, and how it shaped so many of my ideas for Getting Off Clean.

Q: What's your process for writing?

A: Flannery O'Connor once said that she wrote to find out where she was going, but I can only do that to a limited extent -- I really have to start with a pretty well-developed outline because I'm picky about plot development and where different things should go, and I'm terrified of writing myself into a corner. Of course I adjust things as I go along, but a chapter breakdown helps me know exactly what scene or segment I'm going to work on when I turn on the computer. I probably write about four or five days a week for a few hours at a time, usually in the late morning or afternoon, less so at the beginning of the book and moreso when I'm approaching the end, because that breathlessness kicks in, which is good I think, because I think writing the story should be somewhat akin to reading it, wherein the momentum keeps building and building. I'm pretty traditional and linear in my structuring, as you can see.

Right now, I'm near the end of my first draft of my second novel, which is semi-incestuous sibling drama set at the end of the 1980s in the lurid, seductive world of the downtown New York club scene, where I've probably spent too much of my time in the past few years, courting cheap thrills and fighting insomnia. I'll be bummed when I finish the draft, because I'll have to take a writing break then and I always get very crabby when I go without writing for too long.

Q: What about that provocative title?

A: It was the result of a great many months of trying out and trashing earlier titles. I like it because it's obviously sexy (paired with the jacket image, you'd think the whole book was supposed to be read with one hand), but it has another meaning, which becomes clear in the book, I think, which is: what does it mean to get off clean, or to get away with something with your resources intact? For Eric, at the beginning of the book, it obviously means keeping certain things to himself at any cost, but as the story goes on, it comes to mean something different, and far more liberating -- or at least I hope so.

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