The Mostly Unfabulous Homepage of Ethan Green

Q : What was your inspiration for The Necessary Hunger? How did it come to be written?

A : For me, writing this book was an act of recovery -- both in terms of basketball, and in terms of Los Angeles. I wasn't living in L.A. anymore, and I'd stopped playing basketball, and I missed both of those things tremendously. And it was very important to me to show an inner city L.A. that might be rough and dangerous, but was also beautiful. Nancy Takahiro, the protagonist, loves her neighborhood, and doesn't want to leave. That's one of the central tensions of the story -- how she's coping with the fact that she's going to leave the inner city, and also, with the fact that she's able to leave. Which isn't true for some of the other characters.

Q : Nancy lives in a predominantly African-American neighborhood, and most of her friends are black. She's being raised by her father in a single-parent household. She's gay. You're dealing with so many different issues in this book -- race, sexuality, family, class, sports, the inner city. Did you set out to tackle so much?

A: Yes and no. I didn't deliberately sit down and say, OK, I need to cover these topics or issues. But because of the characters I was writing about, all of those issues came into play. And because there's so much going on for each of the characters, it's impossible -- I hope -- to pigeonhole them into one category or definition. The book isn't "about" being gay, or "about" being Asian-American, or "about" growing up in the city. It's about all of those things. And I feel very lucky to be writing at a time when I can use a lesbian protagonist to explore stories and situations that deal with something more than just sexual identity.

Q: Nancy and Raina, the two main characters, are star basketball players, who are being recruited by dozens of colleges. The popularity of women's basketball has exploded in the last few years, culminating in the formation of two new women's pro leagues. How did you manage to have such good timing?

A: Again, it was totally luck. I started writing the novel way before anyone knew that the sport was going to be so huge. I actually spent my first year on it thinking that it would never be published, because no one was going to want to read a book about a bunch of basketball-playing dykes of color from the inner city! But I chose to write about basketball players, again, because I love and miss the sport. A friend of mine jokes that I became a writer because I failed as a basketball player, and I think there's some truth to that.

Q: The teenage girls in your novel seem so confident and aware of themselves. Is their confidence a result of being star athletes?

A: Yes, partly. But it's also a result of their being athletes at all. Girls in this society are socialized to be the recipients of other people's looks and actions. They're taught that their value is determined by their attractiveness -- by whether people want to look at them and sleep with them. But when you're an athlete -- when you're on the court, or the track, or the field -- you are the one who acts , and your body assumes a power that isn't primarily sexual.

And the confidence and power that a girl feels on the field is going to translate into other areas of her life. A lot of studies, including one last year by the Department of Health and Human Services, have shown that a girl who participates in sports is more likely to graduate from high school, less likely to use drugs or alcohol, less likely to have unwanted pregnancies. She's less likely to develop breast cancer and other diseases. Also, the qualities of teamwork, leadership, and high self-esteem she gets from sports are going to help her later on, in terms of her career. And for athletes like Nancy and Raina, all of these positives are compounded by the fact that they get so much attention for their athletic achievements -- their pictures appear in the papers, they get recognized on the street, they're being wooed by major colleges. They know they're special.

Q: Nancy's father, Wendell, is a funny and sympathetic character. He stands out in the context of contemporary fiction and memoir, where so many other father characters are abusive and terrible.

A: Yes. It was important to me to create a positive image of a father, and also of a father-daughter relationship. Wendell's not perfect, of course -- there are things that he and Nancy don't talk about, and he's dealing, not always effectively, with problems Nancy doesn't understand. But he's cheerful, and supportive, and always very loving. Ultimately, this novel is a love story, and it explores several different types of love -- the love between a father and daughter, and for their neighborhood. And it's a story of how those loves feed into each other, and also, of how they conflict.

Copyright © l998, Nina Revoyr.

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