FF: Well, yes. I think the women I write about tend to be late bloomers, but then women my age and older were socialized differently from men. Men were encouraged to achieve and succeed early in life. I think it took a woman longer to figure out on her own, usually without much encouragement, what she really wanted to do. I think the young women of today have a better handle on what they can do and do it sooner. As far as the meek inheriting the earth, I don’t know if that is true as a concept. I think the meek may inherit a happier and calmer life somehow. Ambition comes with a lot of excess baggage.
SV: Didn’t your mother once demand that you never be seen with a frying pan in your hand, as if you knew what to do with it? Was that loving law laid down the reason why you grew up eating in restaurants? And did you do your first writing in them?
FF: When my mother noticed I was signing up for Home Economics in high school she said with alarm, “Oh no, darling, don’t ever learn to cook or they will expect you to do it!” My mother discovered cafeterias very early on in my life and so I had very few home-cooked meals. I was an only child and my father worked at night and so my mother and I did eat out a lot. I enjoyed it. I still do. I write in restaurants and many chapters have started on a napkin.
SV: I somehow suspect that organization is not your strong suit. Characters, yes. Sheer storytelling, dialogue, subtle everyday poetry, comic timing, yes. But chapters, outlines, transitions, that sort of thing doesn’t hold out much appeal for you. Care to organize an answer?
FF: Organization? Isn’t that like the Elks Club or something?
SV: What devices do you use, if any, to prepare for writing, or once you are well into a book, to stay with it? I heard once something about hanging chapters on a laundry line.
FF: When I am preparing for writing a book I do a tremendous amount of research. I write notes everywhere and on anything and then when I think I have done enough I transfer all my handwritten notes, if I can find them, to the computer. On this last book I wasted an entire hour trying to figure out why I thought a certain kind of bread, eggs, and a can of floor wax should go in the book, only to discover it was nothing but one of my old shopping lists. And it is true that I do use a clothesline down the hall to hang my chapters on. As I said before, I find that I do things backward from most writers. I tend to write a chapter at the end of the book or in the middle before I write the beginning, and the clothesline helps me keep them in some kind of order. I even read magazines backwards. I suppose being dyslexic has caused this or else I am Chinese and just don’t know it.
SV: I know that you tend to disappear into a book and cut off the outside world while in one of your own making. Do you read other fiction while writing, or do you swear off the stuff?
FF: Yes, when I am writing I do cut myself off from everything and just live in the world of my story. I try not to even read the newspaper or watch the news.
SV: Do your stories surprise you? Did you ever start out to write one thing, one place, one time, and find yourself writing about another? Do your characters tend to run away with you?
FF: Yes, my characters never seem to do what I want them to. They are like bad children and do not mind me at all! In this book Hamm Sparks showed up and wanted a bigger part than I had intended.
SV: How do you feel when you start a book?
FF: Excited, scared, wondering if I can do it.
SV: And when you finish?
FF: Great! Even better! I love book tours and I finally get to have lunch with real live people again.
SV: You have some nice touches in Rainbow where characters almost exchange lives. For example the little blind songbird who yearns to see or at least travel the world and the itinerant girl whose idea of the full life is to stay at home. Do you think that many of us would like to exchange lives? Or live at least two? Is this just restlessness or envy or the potential thrill of the unknown life never lived? We are all celebrity-struck while maintaining stoutly that we wouldn’t trade places for the world. Or is it just garden variety schizophrenia?
FF: The grass does always seem to be greener somewhere else, doesn’t it? I think it is just human nature to want something we can’t have or to wish we were somewhere else or somebody else. I know when I was younger I often wished I could live parallel lives. As I recall when I was about ten I wanted to play violin in a symphony orchestra, be a nun, a famous ice skater, play piano and sing in some smoky little cocktail bar in Paris, be married to an Italian and have six children, and here’s the real stretch, be an English professor at Oxford University. But the truth is I have barely managed the one life I have. And I am happy to say as I have become older I am perfectly content with who I am and where I am. A very wise person said, “We are exactly where we are supposed to be.” I don’t know who the wise person was, but I tend to believe that more and more as the years go by.
SV: You consistently show how much you care for your characters. You may laugh at their antics but you never really stand above them, looking down. It’s more like standing beside them, looking on. Where does your feeling for older people come from? And for female friendship? And for strong, not always silent, men?
FF: I’m lucky enough to have a lot of friends, both men and women, and enjoy them thoroughly. As it so happens, many are older than myself. Being an only child, I was around adults for most of my young life. It wasn’t until I was in my thirties that I felt entirely comfortable with my peers, not until they were grown people I could relate to. I still tend to find older people much more interesting. They have so much to tell about and have lived through so much and know so much more. I am waiting to become old and wise. So far I’m older but seem to be none the wiser.
SV: The roles you’ve played are quite varied. You can’t be said to have been typecast. Yet in your novels, you have set a new standard of your own so that other writers’ books are being compared to your work. How would you describe a Fannie Flagg novel?
FF: I don’t think I can describe my own work. I don’t even know what my style of writing is. I don’t even know how I do it. So I am the last person to ask. I am still baffled by the entire process. I still don’t understand how something that was only in my head and can’t be seen can become a book, a solid object that you can pick up and carry around.
SV: Your books have been printed in fifteen different languages. How do you feel about that? How do you think people’s reactions to your novels in Europe or China, etc., differ from those in America?
FF: First of all I am still so amazed that anyone other than Americans understands my books. It is so funny to see them in strange covers and printed in so many different languages. I asked a French friend who had read the French version of Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe how he was able to understand the story and he said France has small towns just like every other country. I suppose no matter where you live people can relate; language may be different but by and large human nature remains the same the world over. As far as their reactions, judging from the letters I receive, they seem to be the same. Only the reviews may be different from the ones I get here, mostly because the foreign viewers do not know me as an ex-actress and tend to review the book only. Most American reviews and articles still mention that I used to be an actress and appear on television.