Interview with the Author

Half-Moon Scar

Introduction

An Interview with the Author

Excerpts:

Excerpt One: "Victoria and Main"

Excerpt Two: "Victoria and Main"

Excerpt Three: "Berwyn Street"

Excerpt Four: "Marquette and 2nd"

Allison Green Interview with the Author

A Chat with Allison Green, Author of Half-Moon Scar

What was the inspiration for Half-Moon Scar?

When I was a kid my family lived in Green Bay, Wisconsin, for five years while my father taught at the university there. We moved into a new neighborhood at one point, and my first day on the block I saw a boy walking around with two tennis balls and a beach ball in his shirt, pretending to be a pregnant woman. I was a nine-year-old women's libber then, and I said something to the effect that what he was doing was offensive to women (this was the early seventies, remember). We became best friends. His favorite game was putting on the prom dresses my mom got me from the thrift store, and one day he put on his mother's wig, fur coat, and makeup, and he came to our house and rang the doorbell. I lost touch with him after we moved away, but I heard from someone that he came out years later, as I did.

I got to thinking about what it might mean for kids, who would come out later, to grow up together in a small Midwestern town. How would they relate to each other? How would homophobia infect them? What kind of adults would they be?

By the way, I've fictionalized Green Bay as Willow Bay in order to give myself the freedom to write about the Green Bay I remember and not the Green Bay as it actually is.

So Half-Moon Scar is partly autobiographical?

The texture of the novel, the landscape, is autobiographical, but the plot is not. Amy talks about her third-grade teacher saying that the Equal Rights Amendment would require girls to go to the bathroom with boys and go to the jungle to handle snakes. My third-grade teacher actually said that. But what happens to Amy, Gavin and Gina as they grow up and become adults is all imagined.

One of the unusual aspects of the novel is that Gavin, a gay man, is anorexic. It sounds, from the book, as if you did a fair amount of research into anorexia in men. What did you find?

I think it's important, first of all, to acknowledge that anorexia is largely a disease of women, and it's not just oppressive standards of beauty that lead girls to starve themselves. There's a lot of societal anxiety about women gaining power, and obsession with diet is a way to keep women under control.

But the fact that there are more cases of men being anorexic is significant. The research I read, although based on small numbers of cases, suggests that more gay men than men in the general population are anorexic. One theory is that young gay men, sensing that their desires are inappropriate by society's definition, try to control their desires by limiting food intake. But there certainly isn't enough research to know for sure.

What I did know what that all three of the main characters feel alienated in some way - for Amy and Gavin, that alienation is marked on the body.