Bookpleasures.com welcomes as our guest award winning author Lucy Ferriss. Her recent novel, The Misconceiver has just been published.

 

Lucy was born in St. Louis and has lived on both coasts, in the middle, and abroad. She is the author of eleven books, including her latest collection, Foreign Climes: Stories, and the 2022 re-release of her prescient novel, The Misconceiver.

Other recent work includes the 2015 novel A Sister to Honor, as well as essays and short fiction in American Scholar, New England Review, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere.

Forthcoming in 2023 is a book of essays from Wandering Aengus Press, Meditations on a New Century.

She received her Ph.D. from Tufts University and lives with her husband, Don Moon, in the Berkshires and in Connecticut, where she is Writer-in-Residence Emerita at Trinity College.

She has two strong sons and abiding passions for music, politics, travel, tennis, and wilderness.

Norm: Good day Lucy and thanks for taking part in our interview.

How long have you been writing? And how long did it take you to get your first major book contract?

Lucy: I’ve been writing ever since I could read. I’m told I made up stories in preschool. So I think it was hard-wired.

Norm: Why do you write? Do you have a theme, message, or goal for your books?

Lucy: I write out of curiosity—what would this be like? What could be motivating that person? What will happen next?

That said, the things that prompt my curiosity are often issues that get oversimplified in news and op-ed columns. How does an overstressed mother react when she learns her bipolar son has killed a neighbor’s dog?

What would it be like to grow up in a world where abortion is banned but your mother and sister died as a consequence of providing abortions?

What happens when a young woman from a conservative Pakistani family falls in love with a Jew? I like finding the personal in the political.

Norm: How did you get started in writing? What keeps you going? 

Lucy: I published in school literary magazines, but my first inkling that I could get my work out into the world came from the writer and professor Gina Berriault, who recommended me to my first literary agent. And curiosity keeps me going.

There are so many stories out there, so much I want to be open to.

Sitting in front of a computer searching for words isn’t glamorous, and fiction writing isn’t a path to wealth and fame, so it has to be the language and the stories themselves that keep you in the chair.

Norm: How has your environment/upbringing colored your writing?  

Lucy: I grew up in an aspiring middle-class home, which is to say there were shelves of classic literature in the living room. That surely affected my love of language, and you can’t beat Dickens for characters.

I also haunted the public library, where the librarians kindly let me sneak into the adult section so long as I didn’t check those books out.

Finally, I grew up in a time of tumult, where things that had been taken for granted—gender roles, American exceptionalism, religious faith, the nuclear family—were all being questioned.

Gradually, I began to feel my imagination and ideas could carve out a space for themselves.

Norm: Do you write more by logic or intuition, or some combination of the two?  Please summarize your writing process.  

Lucy: Once upon a time, I wrote quite intuitively. I’d finish a couple of pages, put them away, and the next day think what might go next. I went down a lot of blind alleys that way.

Now, maybe because I’m older, I like to have some idea where I’m going. I’ll rough out an outline, break it down by chapters . . . and then, when I’m actually writing, I’ll deviate from my lofty intentions as the characters and tensions in the story start taking over. So I revise, and break, a lot of outlines.

Norm: What trends in the book world do you see and where do you think the book publishing industry is heading?  

Lucy: As the world of big publishing has gotten into trouble with too many huge advances to name-brand authors, too much conglomeration, too much emphasis on marketing, a strange thing has happened.

People are returning to independent bookstores. Reviewers are highlighting books by smaller presses. Book groups are looking for challenging texts by new authors.

We seem always to be sliding into a place where fewer people read books—but historically, few people have read books.

The ones that do, in the near future, may forgo the blockbusters for books that speak more authentically to the human condition. I’d like to think so, anyway!

Norm: What do you consider to be your greatest success (or successes) so far in your writing career? 

Lucy: I don’t seem able to look back that way. My greatest success is always the narrative I’m working on, because its possibilities are endless.

I do think it took me three or four novels (ten or twelve years of writing!) to understand what long-form fiction is and how it can sing.

Norm: How did you become involved with the subject or theme of The Misconceiver when it was first published in the mid-1990's?

Lucy: Three sources. First, I had just published a novel in which an obese teenager gives birth in secret before anyone can tell she’s pregnant. So the topic of pregnancy was on my mind.

Second, I had had two abortions earlier in my life, and I felt a combination of grief, relief, and shame that wasn’t reflected in the ongoing public debates.

Finally, in the run-up to the Supreme Court’s Casey decision, I was receiving dozens of postcards warning that Roe v. Wade might be overturned. So I thought, What if?

What would it be like to grow up in a world where time and technology have moved forward but civil rights have gone backward? As I started writing, I realized this was also a story about sisters (I have a sister to whom I’m close) and family; about legacy.

Norm: Why did you decide to republish it?

Lucy: Ron Charles, the book critic at the Washington Post, discovered the book last summer and wrote an article about it. Within 72 hours, every one of the few remaindered copies left in the world sold out.

People were writing to me, wanting to know where they could find the book. So I approached Wandering Aengus Press, which gave me their nonfiction award and will publish a collection of my essays next year. And they wrote immediately, saying “Let’s do this!”

Norm: What were your goals and intentions in this book, and how well do you feel you achieved them? 

Lucy: My goal was to set Phoebe, the protagonist, free. She is bound by so much—by the haunting memories of her mother and sister, by the debt she feels she owes her aging father, by a warped American legal system that punishes women, health providers, gay people, and the struggling underclass.

She wants and deserves love, but The Misconceiver isn’t entirely a love story, because the person she needs most to love and esteem is herself. In setting up Phoebe’s personal drama, of course I depict a forced-birth society, where right-wing Christianity is locked in an unholy political alliance. Still, the journey is Phoebe’s, and where it ends may surprise readers—I know it did me—but it feels to me that she’s making her own choices, at last.

Norm: How did you come up with the term “misconceiver.”

Lucy: In the mid-1990s, people seemed afraid even to say “abortion.” So I went looking for a euphemism. I was at Yaddo, the writers’ colony, where a mammoth 1959 Webster’s Dictionary sat on a stand in the main hall.

I flipped through it for abortion synonyms and found four: “mistake,” “misconception,” “monstrosity,” and “failure.” “Misconception” seemed the only euphemism, and it had the added advantage of containing the word “conception.” Abortions became misconceptions, and Phoebe a misconceiver—or as some patients put it, Miss Conceiver.

Norm: How did you go about creating the character of Phoebe? Is she based on someone you know?

Lucy: I struggled in creating Phoebe, because she had to be someone who was born four years after I was writing the book.

She might have been my daughter, except I have only sons. I found her voice only after I imagined that she was an adoring younger sister who had lost her sibling.

She is neither me nor my sister, but that’s a bond I understand, and I created her from that bond and from the pressures I imagined being brought to bear on her. And I came to love her.

Norm: What do you hope will be the everlasting thoughts for readers who finish your book? 

Lucy: Perhaps they won’t look at issues so simply or in black-and-white terms. Perhaps they’ll see how intertwined our personal lives are with our rights, and how much we share that intertwining with others.

Perhaps they’ll think not just about what’s happening today, but about what our actions (or failures to act) mean for our future selves, our children and grandchildren.

Norm: What was the most difficult part of writing The Misconceiver and did you learn anything from writing it?

Lucy: The last scene—and I can’t describe it here for fear of spoilers.

But I wanted one thing for Phoebe, and I found that she wanted another. In the end—I know this sounds weird—it was her book. I’d written it, but she lived in it. And I had to allow her the choice she needed to make.

Norm: Where can our readers find out more about you and The Misconceiver?

Lucy: On my WEBSITE.   And sign up for my newsletter! I only write about once a month, and it isn’t all about me—I’ve got book suggestions, travel anecdotes, exchanges with other readers.

Norm: What is next for Lucy Ferriss?

Lucy: I have two books coming out next year. Meditations for a New Century, from Wandering Aengus, is a collection of essays that work like stones dropped into a pond—they aren’t linear, but follow the ripples outward as the stone descends. Some are funny, some quirky; others speak directly to the moment we’re in.

I also have a book-length, writerly response to Christina Stead’s novel The Man Who Loved Children, which has affected me deeply as a writer, as a woman, and especially as my father’s daughter.

Still in the wings is a new novel about old-age lust, tentatively titled Paris Every Moment.

Norm: As this interview comes to an end, if you could change one thing about the world what would it be? How would it change you?

Lucy: Let’s retire the idea of winning. Winning wars, winning capitalist contests, winning power. “All this winning,” as the former president put it, is destroying our planet and our common humanity.

For me? It would give me breathing room to focus on the one thing for which I have a gift, telling stories.

Norm: Thanks once again and good luck with all of your endeavors

Follow Here To Read Norm's Review of The Misconceiver