The Sandcastle Girls, published in 2012, is Bohjalian's 15th book. The story takes place in 2012 Bronxville, New York, where Laura Petrosian is beginning to learn the history and secrets of her grandparents, and more about her Armenian heritage. The story flashes back to 1912 Aleppo, Syria, chronicling the love story of Elizabeth and Armen, in the backdrop of the Armenian genocide and WWI.
Bohjalian's work has been translated into over 30 languages and three of his books have been adapted into movies. His awards include the ANCA Freedom Award for his work educating Americans about the Armenian genocide; the ANCA Arts and Letters Award for The Sandcastle Girls, as well as the Saint Mesrob Mashdots Medal; the New England Society Book Award for The Night Strangers; and many more. He is a Fellow of the Vermont Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Bohjalian was in San Diego for two appearances, kicking off the county-wide One Book, One San Diego events. We sat down with him on Tuesday, September 12th, at KPBS, for this interview. I would like to thank Clare Pister, of KPBS, for helping arrange the interview, and for making a room available for us to talk.
SDLS: You did an interview with Laura Hamlett in which you said that you recvd 250 rejection slips before you ever sold a single word. How did you stay motivated to keep writing in the face of that?
CB: Certainly there were moments when I wondered if I was ever going to sell anything, and whether I was ever going to be a writer who actually had readers. But most of the time, I took great comfort in the fact that I was writing. I write because I love to write. There is little in this world that gives me the pleasure that writing does. I tried to take satisfaction, in the early part of my career, from writing that one really lovely sentence before figuring out precisely the cause and effect of a particular character; why he or she is doing something.
SDLS: So now, you've written 19 books. Your next book, The Flight Attendant, due out in March of 2018, will be you 20th. Are you surprised? Did you think, back 250 rejection slips ago, that you'd be writing all of these books?
CB: There were times, when I was amassing all of those rejection slips, when I simply fantasized about actually seeing a short story in print. Just one short story in print. I would fantasize about seeing one of my short stories in Harpers, or The New Yorker, or The Atlantic, or the Sewanee Review. That was as far out as I was thinking. The idea that I would ever be so blessed as to see 20 novels in print was completely beyond my ken.
SDLS: Did you know you had so many stories in you?
CB: The only time I have writer's block is when I haven't done sufficient research, when I haven't done my homework. I don't think I'm surprised, necessarily, that I found the ideas for 20 books so much as I'm enormously grateful that I get to find any ideas for any books.
SDLS: Was it harder to write that first book, or is it your current book, or the next book that is more difficult to write? Or, is it not hard at all?
CB: I amassed 250 rejection slips for my short stories. When I finally sold one and it appeared in print, much to my utter surprise, literary agents began to approach me. They all said, "Have you written a novel?", and, I hadn't. Prodded on by those agents, I gave up the immediate gratification of the short story to write a novel. And, a year later, I had one. Much to my astonishment, it sold instantly, in a bidding war. It's a terrible book. The single worst first novel ever published, bar none. There is no worse first book than mine that was ever published, but it was published. And I never looked back.
It's dawned on me that some writers are meant to write short stories, and some writers are meant to write novels. I love the novel, and that seems to be what I am better at. I can't even describe a sneeze in less than 50 words, which is why, maybe, I belong writing novels and not short stories. Who knows, maybe if I had figured that out a few years earlier, I wouldn't have managed to write so many unpublishable, terrible short stories.
SDLS: So, would you say the lesson here is that you probably should never have been writing short stories? That, maybe, you might not have gotten so many rejection notices had you started out writing novels from the start?
CB: I think you have to write what you love to read. I have always loved the novel, the idea of immersing myself, metaphorically speaking, on the island of a book. And that is what I love to read. I love reading novels, so I should have started out writing one. I wasn't reading short stories, so the fact that I was trying to write them was simply because I was intimidated by the long form.
SDLS: Even though you think your first novel was the worst first novel ever published, do you feel you learned a lot from that experience? Has it made writing the books that came after it easier? Harder?
CB: Certainly I learned a lot from writing that first novel, and the second novel, and the third novel and the fourth novel. I have a friend who is an artist named Cynthia Price. Cynthia talks often about growth from project to project. The reality is this: I'm not sure that every new book, any more, shows growth because, as you've observed, there's 20 of them. Certainly my 20th book isn't going to be infinitely better than my 19th, which wasn't infinitely better than my 18th. I liken what I do now to a major league baseball pitcher. If you're a starting pitcher in the major leagues, you go to the mound 30 to 35 times in a season. If you're really good, you win about 20 times. You're still going to lose 7 or 8. You're going to get knocked out of the box a couple of times. Of my 20 books, I think 5 or 6 are really good. I think a couple are absolute trainwrecks, and the rest are somewhere in between. When I was a young man, yes, my books showed growth book, to book, to book. Each book was better than the one that preceded it, but I think I've reached a stage in my career where it would be narcissistic to believe that each book is better, necessarily, than the one that preceded it.
SDLS: Many of your books feature female protagonists. Do you do anything in particular to help create an authentic female point of view, to make the female characters believable?
CB: I have always been blessed to have incredibly smart female readers in my life. My lovely wife, Victoria Blewer, and my daughter, Grace Experience, are both instrumental early readers of my work. But my editor, Jane Jackson, at Doubleday, is brilliant. For years, I had an editor named Shaye Arehart, a woman who was also brilliant. My agents, Deborah Schneider & Jane Gelfman, are both brilliant. These are really smart women who have read my manuscripts and have said "that feels authentic" or "that feels inauthentic". I loved one of the earliest reviews for my 5th novel, Midwives. The review ended, "an added benefit of this novel is the candor and the honesty with which Chris Bohjalian writes about her experiences with labor, and what it must have been like for her to give birth." It doesn't get better than that.
SDLS: When you write, do you have a particular audience in mind, or are you just thinking about the story you want to tell? Do you think about who the reader might be when you're writing?
CB: I do think of who my readers are and, because of the digital age, I know really rather precisely who my readers are. But, I don't necessarily write for them. I think it would, in some way, inhibit what I am trying to do with the book if I'm trying to understand what they want. I don't think that's fair to them. If I have any goal in life, it's never to write the same book twice and, I hope I haven't. Over these 20 books, I hope that they are all really different.
That point noted, I certainly am aware of what readers are saying about my books on social networks. I do steer clear of reader reviews of my books on Goodreads, Amazon, NetGalley, and other sites, in the 5 or 6 months before a book comes out, and the 1 or 2 months after a book comes out. I do that for 2 reasons, first of all, I do it for mental health reasons. Self preservation. Secondly, I do it because I'm always writing whatever that next book is, and I don't want to see negative reviews of my prior work because I don't want them to impact what I am writing now. If, for example, people are saying "oh my goodness, I hate this character because she is so young and naïve", I don't want that to impact how I draw my next character.
SDLS: You've said that The Sandcastle Girls is your most autobiographical novel. You've said that Laura Petrosian is you in female form. Why did you want to tell this story as fiction, rather than memoir, biography, or other nonfictional form?
CB: There has been a spectacular memoir written on the effects of the Armenian genocide on a descendant in the diaspora, by Peter Balakian entitled Black Dog of Fate. Peter Balakian's Black Dog of Fate, for my money, is THE memoir of a diasporan Armenian trying to understand the ramifications of the genocide on someone roughly my age. The world doesn't need another Black Dog of Fate, because Peter has already done it. There has not been a novel about the Armenian genocide that was a bestseller since Franz Werfel's 40 Days of Musa Dagh. I am a novelist. That's what I do. So the combination of the success of Peter's book, and the distance from the 40 Days of Musa Dagh, was why I think it was inevitable that I would approach this material as a novel rather than as memoir.
SDLS: My last question could be something of a spoiler, though the book came out in 2012, so maybe not really by now. But, as soon as I finished reading The Sandcastle Girls, I knew I had to ask you this if I had the chance. Why do you think Elizabeth kept the secret about Karine? Do you really believe it is because of the reason Elizabeth provides in the book, that she just wants to spare Armen pain?
CB: I think Elizabeth was brave. I think she was courageous and strong to have kept that secret her whole life. She knew Armen had been through so much, and she didn't want to hurt him.
SDLS: You really think she was courageous and strong? I'm surprised, because I think she was selfish and weak. She knew there was no way they could be together if he knew the truth.
CB: Absolutely. They could not be together if he knew.
SDLS: And Elizabeth knew this. I think she kept that secret, making a conscious, selfish choice, in order to hang on to him.
CB: I can't argue with that. I get asked this question all the time, and you can certainly make the case for your point of view.
SDLS: Well, I was just curious as to what you thought. Sometimes a writer will leave things ambiguous so that the reader can come to their own conclusions, so I was just wondering what your position was on this. Thank you for sharing it.
A big thank you to Chris Bohjalian for taking the time to speak with me! Please visit the KPBS website for more information on all of the One Book, One San Diego events going on near you.