Today I’m fortunate enough to follow up that book review with a full blown interview with the author of this wonderful memoir, Melissa Hart.  As you already know, I loved the book and I really enjoyed getting an insight on what makes this author tick.

Kristy: Why did you write this book? (Why this topic?)
 
Melissa: I wrote this book because I’d explored one aspect of it—my mother coming out and losing custody of her children in the late 1970s—in my first memoir, The Assault of Laughter (Windstorm, 2005). That first book was my Master’s thesis, written several years ago, and it feels clunky to me now. I wanted to examine the under-reported fact of lesbians who lost custody of their children during this era in a more sophisticated memoir that also explored the idea of culture. I’d been thinking of the Camus quote that I cite in Gringa--that without culture, society is a jungle--and it really resonated with me. I grew up ignorant of my own unique and marvelous culture, believing in a narrow idea that culture was limited only to one’s ethnic background. When I began to contemplate writing a second memoir, I despaired over not being gay like David Sedaris, not being Latina like Michelle Serros—and this brought up all sorts of feelings about identity and worth that I wanted to examine in Gringa.
 
Kristy: How did your family feel about your writing a novel that speaks about your childhood? Have they read it? 
 
Melissa: My sister and mother have read the memoir. I’m estranged from my father, so I’m not sure if he’s read it, and I haven’t told my stepmother about it, but she’s quite web-savvy, so I’m certain she knows about it. My mother’s partner hasn’t yet read the book.  
 
 My sister loved it, and told me it was a privelige to have a memorist in the family so that she could read my views on our childhood and adolescence and work out her own feelings about both. She turned into a part-time publicist for Gringa, arranging a reading in Orange County and an audience.   
 
My mother worried initially about my writing and publishing this book, noting that homophobia is still alive and well in this country. She’s a writer, as well, and I think she worried about how particular editors and readers would view her if they recognized her from the book. However, she finished Gringa a few weeks ago and accompanied me on part of the book tour. In San Francisco, she eagerly answered questions from readers at Books, Inc. and she’s been recommending the book to friends and fellow writers.  
 
Kristy: How did you manage to write while working, living life, etc.? (what were your writing habits in order to get this book completed?)  

Melissa: In the summer of 2007, I was fortunate to receive a grant from the Center for the Study of Women in Society at the University of Oregon. The money funded an entire summer spent writing—I taught little during that time, and I hadn’t yet adopted my daughter. The revision process, with my editor Brooke Warner at Seal, got a little crazy at times. I had to craft several new chapters quickly during a full load of teaching, and so I slept maybe five hours a night for a couple of months.  
 
I’m a slow writer. I write several rough drafts, in order to figure out theme and characterization, motivation, and patterns in each chapter. I revise a great deal for the sound of each sentence, as well, reading chapters out loud several times for pacing and flow. I didn’t have the luxury of spending a great deal of time on some of the chapters—it would be interesting to know whether readers can tell the differentce between those chapters I worked on for months, and those I worked on for just a week or so.
  
These days, I’ve been jotting down short travel articles and essays on the backs of envelopes and napkins while I’m on book tour. In mid-December, when the UO term concludes, I’ll go back to a more regular schedule of 10-plus hours a week spent writing.
  
Kristy: Did you have the book sold before you wrote it or after?
 
Melissa: My agent sold a version of Gringa to Seal, but my editor asked me to cut five chapters from it and write five new chapters. So yes, it sold based on a complete manuscript, but I ended up writing a great deal of new material after the deal. Fortunately, Seal gave me an advance which allowed me to teach fewer classes during the final revision process.  

Kristy:. If you were able to write a short epilogue about your family and where they are now, what would it be?
 
Melissa: My father and I are estranged, and my stepmother and I have limited e-mail contact. I’m close to the rest of my family, who live in Southern California. My brother lives with my mother and her partner; he has a job and a girlfriend and a full social calendar. My sister and I visit our moms and brother often for holidays, and my mother comes up to visit me in Oregon several times a year. My mother is a magazine writer, working on a mystery novel, and my sister is an aspiring jazz singer.
 
Kristy: Where is your brother now? (I found him to be one of my favorite people in your novel.)

Melissa: Oh, sorry—I answered that above. He’s 34 now, and he’s completely in love with his girlfriend, who also has Down syndrome. He’s quite high functioning, with a janitorial job and a cell phone and a passion for watching sports on TV and playing them for Special Olympics.  
 
Kristy: Why did you choose to write your childhood around recipes that were pivotal?
  
Melissa: I read Diana Abu Jaber’s The Language of Baklava, which includes recipes, and the memoir made me recall Like Water for Chocolate, which I adored in graduate school for its focus on food.  

Food was, and is, so important to me as a source of comfort and caring and love. It also felt indicative of what I believed culture to be as a chld—I chose to film myself making Frito Boats in the Gringa book trailer (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrQKInQRMis) because the recipe seemed to capture one of the driving themes of the memoir—the idea that my sense of culture, and of authenticity, was pretty delusional. I truly believed that canned chili poured over corn chips still in the bag represented Mexican food, and I wanted to show through progressively more sophisticated recipes my deepening understanding of culture and authenticity.   
 
It’s interesting to note that I’ve made White Girl Cookies (from the chapter “Ethiopia”) for almost every bookstore event. People love them, but I see them recoil, then laugh nervously, about the name. It’s politically incorrect, I know—but I also think that food and its various meanings can be so much fun.  
 
Kristy: Did you imagine your readers stopping and putting your novel down to actually go make some chili? (if you didn’t…I did that!)
  
Melissa: I didn’t imagine that readers would take a break from reading Gringa to cook, but I’m delighted at the prospect. “Annie’s Special Chili” from the book (also with accompanying YouTube video) is actually delicious. Readers shouldn’t be afraid of texturized vegetable protein. I’d add that I have a subscription to Sunset Magazine, which frequently features parties centered around make-your-own sushi and the like. Make-your-own-Frito-Boats are lots of fun as a party theme, as well, if rather tacky.  
 
Kristy: Did you choose the event and realize a recipe fit or did you choose a recipe and realize it fit around a pivotal moment in your life?  
 
Melissa: I wrote each chapter of Gringa and in some cases, a particular recipe was a natural fit because of when I or another family member made it. For instance, in the first chapter, “Salida,” my mother read Steinbeck for a college class just before she left my father and she made up her “Tortilla Flat” recipe to serve to us.
   
In “The Trials and Tribulations of Trailer Trash,” my boyfriend’s father insisted I stop doing hard labor on the ranch and stay inside baking cakes. I can’t bake most cakes—they turn out awful—but I did master the carrot cake recipe, baked in a tiny trailer oven during my stint on the ranch.   
 
The hot chocolate recipe for the last chapter “Citizens of the World” actually inspired the entire chapter. My mother gave me this recipe, in part, I think, as an acknowledgment that although our trip to Spain was mostly a disaster, we did gain a great deal from the experience.
  
Kristy: Your novel left me with a warm fuzzy feeling about the importance of family, memories of childhood and the realization that childhood is “home” regardless of the type of childhood any of us has had, we all "belong" somewhere. Was that the message you were sending?  
 
Melissa: I wanted to leave readers with the idea that comes near the end of the last     chapter—the idea that even though childhood and adolescence don’t often turn out the way we’d like, there’s so much value in embracing the experience and owning both the negative and positive aspects of growing up.  
 
I’m pleased with those reviews that note the absence of a victim in this memoir. I’m not fond of the victim mentality, and I tried to own up to my own imperfections in Gringa. I hoped to leave readers also with a sense that we’re all flawed, but we all have so much to offer if we can keep a sense of humor about ourselves and our experiences.  
      
Kristy: If your daughter one day writes a memoir about her mother and/or her own childhood, what one sentence would you want to see contained in her future memoir about you, her mother?  
 
Melissa: This question makes me laugh out loud. As Maia is not even three, but already recognizing letters, I sense a memoir is a given. I would want to see a sentence by her that I can also quite honestly write about own mother: “She gave me the courage and inspiration to find my own voice.”  
 
Kristy: What’s the last best book or memoir that you’ve read yourself? Why was it good?  I adored Susan Orlean’s short memoir about her chickens in a recent issue of The New Yorker, with an accompanying video that shows her as funny and eccentric and as eager to embrace popular culture and the "It" pet as the rest of us.  
 
Melissa: I’ve just finished Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods, and thoroughly enjoyed it for the way he integrates vivid and humorous personal experience hiking the Appalachian Trail with social commentary and the history of the AT.  
    
Kristy: Is your Mom’s van still around?  

Melissa: My mother donated her VW bus a while back, but my husband and I bought a fully-loaded Westfalia last summer with part of my advance. It’s our mid-life crisis vehicle. We decided to share both the crisis and the VW bus, which we camp in with our daughter.  
 
Kristy: Are you working on something new? (Please do!)  
 
Melissa: I’m finishing up the final draft of a book tentatively titled Learning to Triangulate: A Pregnancy, an Adoption, and a Baby Barred Owl. It’s literary nonfiction about the bizarre worlds of international and domestic adoption, the big business of pregnancy in my sister’s Orange County world, and my passion for training a permanently injured baby barred owl at Eugene’s Cascades Raptor Center to take my mind off the grueling 2 ½ year adoption process.  
 
While the new book won’t contain recipes, it will contain fascinating stories about adoption and owls. Both strike me as a sort of Theater of the Absurd. It’s a fun book to write, especially since I kept a detailed journal of that pivotal 2 ½ years. I blocked out a lot of what happened during that time, and so it's fascinating to go back and read my notes and remember the turmoil from a distance which now adds a great deal of humor.  
 
Kristy: What is your personal favorite book? 
 
Melissa: That’s a difficult question. I love Middlesex and Little Women and March and so many others, but my personal favorite is J.D. Salinger’s Nine Stories. This is the book I reach for if I want inspiration, both as a writer and as a human trying to navigate life’s challenges. Salinger includes so much Eastern philosophy, so much wit and social commentary in this short book. I love recommending it to young people, and just re-reading it once a year to study his amazing characterization and dialogue.

You can find Gringa at your local bookstore and you can read more about the wonderful Melissa Hart at http://butt2chair.wordpress.com/ where she blogs.