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

Jerome: Thanks for having me, Norm. How did I get started? Well, I’ve been writing off and on since I was eight years old. In the third grade my teacher gave us an assignment to write a short story, and I wrote about my uncle who had gone bear hunting in Michigan and had shot a bear after a harrowing adventure during which the bear had charged him.

It was all fiction—I was following my teacher’s instructions to make something up—but when I read it to the class, they believed it was true, even with my insistence that it was made-up.

More important for my later writing career, actually writing the story gave me immense pleasure, so that occasionally over the years of my childhood I wrote other stories even when they were not required for school.

What keeps me going? At root is wanting to experience that pleasure again. I don’t know that I do experience it with such intensity any more, but I always get a measure of satisfaction that borders on pleasure when I think I have written something well, or when I discover something in my writing that I didn’t know I knew.

Norm: What is the one thing other people always seem to get wrong about you? 

Jerome: About me as a person? I don’t know. People don’t often come up to me and tell me what they think of me. At least not since the Viet Nam era ended.

But, regarding that period along with my writing—after I wrote Sergeant Dickinson (it was originally published as The Negligence of Death in 1984; Soho Press brought it out as Sergeant Dickinson in 1999), I would do readings and book signings and there was often at least one person who would tell me, or say to someone else within my hearing, that they found it hard to believe that someone who had fought in Viet Nam could write so well.

One man didn’t believe that I had written it, but didn’t go so far as to say that I had stolen it from another writer. Some people believed that people who had fought in Viet Nam were stupid; the proof of it was that they had gone to Viet Nam when others had found a way to keep from going. One man said exactly that to me. 

Norm: Do you think about your reading public when you write? Do you imagine a specific reader when you write?

Jerome: I don’t think about my audience. For me, writing is an act of discovery, so I almost always write for myself. I should say that I don’t try to publish everything I write.

Some stuff is too close to the bone for me to want to expose it to the public. But when I’m stymied about how to begin something, or what to do to advance the story, I imagine myself talking to a particular person I knew many years ago and I write as though I’m telling him what I have to say.

Norm: What advice can you give aspiring writers that you wished you had received, or that you wished you would have listened to? 

Jerome: I think writers should force themselves out of their “comfort zone.” If possible, they should travel to countries where a language other than their own is spoken.

The idea is to find a psychological place that puts them a little on edge. It is this kind of anxiety, of being on edge, that forces you to see the world as if it were fresh.

Also, writers should read as much as possible. I am often shocked to find a writer who does not read, who may not even enjoy reading. I was at a book fair once and stopped to talk to a writer of crime fiction who had just published his first novel with a major publisher.

I asked him which writers had influenced him—Dashiell Hammet? Raymond Chandler? Simenon? He had read none of the crime fiction greats. In fact, he said he didn’t read at all. “I just write,” he said.

Writers should read writers who are the best, not only in their genre, if they are genre writers, but the best of all who have written. The best are there to be learned from.

Some writers may have to delay reading certain other writers—I was already in my fifties when I read In Search of Lost Time—because they just aren’t ready to absorb those books. On the other hand, I read War and Peace for the first time when I was seventeen, and I just read it for the fourth or fifth time a few months ago.

A novice writer should aim to be as good as, or better than, the very best writer who ever lived. He or she most likely will not achieve his or her aim, but it will help him/her become a better writer.

Obviously I am not talking about writers who write only to make money. Actually, I am talking about writers who probably will make very little money, but who feel that they must write, that writing is a calling, like a religious calling, not an avocation. 

Novice writers for whom writing is a need should prepare themselves to make a living in another way, and practice their “religion” before they go to work, or after they come home. 

I have found that it is best to avoid working in management for a large corporation. Large corporations want to own their managers, meaning they want their managers to be available at any time at a moment’s notice. They want to own their managers’ time, when what a writer needs is time to himself or herself. 

Norm: How did you become involved with the subject or theme of Sex, A Love Story?

Jerome: The subject presented itself through a phone call from someone I hadn’t heard from in 40 years. She and I had been close when we were kids. She had had a recent bout with cancer and wanted to talk with someone who knew her when she was “full of myself,” as she put it.

We talked a number of times and also emailed. I began making notes on our conversations in my journal, but soon I found myself making things up, fictionalizing our talks.

Then I started attributing to her things I’d heard about other people, or things other people I’d known had told me about themselves or about people they knew.

At first I tried to pull myself back, to stick to what my friend and I were talking about, but then I gave up on this and surrendered myself to writing a novel. Something in me was determined to do this in spite of myself. So I guess you say the subject chose me.

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

Jerome: I wanted to show how sexual attraction may lead to love. I think I accomplished this. Also I wanted to induce the reader to feel what my characters were feeling. The book, you know, is a love story, but it’s also about jealousy and adolescence and entering the adult world.

And I wanted to show how kids without the advantages of financial security—my characters do not come from parents who are well off; they, both my protagonists and their parents have to worry about money; my characters are ambitious but not all go to college, and those who do go to a community college, which they can afford, rather than a four-year school—have to deal with the world. 

I think I was successful in doing all of this. At least early reviewers appear to have strong feelings about the book, both pro and con. One reviewer who refused to review it let me know in an email what she thought of it.

She has a family-oriented TV show, and felt the book was not for her audience. But an interviewer from the same part of the country felt the book was something that parents and their adolescent children should read together.

Norm: Please tell our audience a little about the book.

Jerome: Most of the story takes place in Fullerton, California, in Orange County over a two-year period at the end of the Eisenhower administration and the beginning of the Kennedy years.

Another way of putting it is it’s the end of a period of a kind of conservative complacency (for white people) and the beginning of the Sputnik age when the American view of the world begins to open up.

Feminism has already begun, though hardly anybody knows it; the Civil Rights movement is limited to the South; while American Special Forces soldiers have been in Laos, American troops have not yet gone into Viet Nam in any strength.

The world is on the cusp of tremendous change, but none of the characters knows it. 

My protagonists are Bob and Jen. They meet in a summer school class between their junior and senior years in high school. Bob is at odds with his parents and Jen tolerates her mother but adores her father.

Jen exudes her sexuality—she works at it—and Bob is attracted to her. She feels very secure in her own identity, as though nothing bad will ever happen to her, even though she’s aware that bad things do happen to other people.

Bob, on the other hand, is not as sexually experienced as Jen, but has a more jaundiced view of life, owing in large part to the kinds of work he does; he has been working at various unskilled-labor jobs since before graduating from high school.

They begin dating and become intimate. What neither of them has much experience with are the emotions that attach to intimacy. And what the book is about is these emotions, which sometimes seem to have a life of their own, and how these kids try to deal with them.

Norm: What was the most difficult part of writing this book and what did you enjoy most about writing this book?  

Jerome: It wasn’t a difficult book to write. It took me only two or three years, during which time I was working on another book as well.

Most of the novels I’ve written have taken me many, many years. My first published novel, Sergeant Dickinson, took me fifteen years. 

What did I enjoy about writing Sex, A Love Story? The ease with which it came to me. Even the editing, which almost always requires some hard decisions about what to take out and what to leave in, was not very difficult.

Also, I really liked the characters, especially Jen. Had I known her when I was her and Bob’s age, I would have been fascinated by her.

Norm: Are the characters based on anyone you know and how much of you is in the book?

Jerome: The character of Jen was based on a real person, but within only a few pages in the book, started to develop into “Jen,” who combines aspects of a number of girls and women I’ve known as well characteristics I invented.

Much of Bob’s history is my own history. All of the jobs Bob has in the book are jobs I had: agricultural laborer, assembly-line worker, ware houseman, and so on. And several of the situations I describe actually happened. Two examples: one worker attempting to kill another worker; and being fired from a job so the foreman could hire his nephew to fill my position.

Norm: How did you develop the plot and characters? Did you use any set formula?  

Jerome: No set formula. With all of my longer fiction, characters come to me unbidden. Sometimes it’s an aspect of a person I’ve known, sometimes it’s something that begins with a line or phrase that evokes a response in me that I will eventually attribute to one of my characters.

A woman I know once told me about some odd behavior of one of her pets. She used the line, “It was very unsettling.”

Until she said that, I wasn’t much interested in the anecdote. But that line did something to me, and it resulted in one of my favorite stories. 

I don’t think much about plot when I write. I think a lot about my characters. I have a general sense of direction about where I want them to go, but they sometimes go somewhere else.

If the direction they want to go feels reasonable—that is, it feels natural to who they are—I often let them lead me. 

Norm: Are you working on any books/projects that you would like to share with us? (We would love to hear all about them!)  

Jerome: I’m working on a collection of very short stories—“micro-fiction,” as it’s called now. Actually, I may have enough now to make a book. It includes the story with the line, “It was very unsettling.”

I’m also working on a historical (early Cold War) novel based on a true story. A man I used to know had been an intelligence agent in another country when the Communists took over the government.

All foreigners were told to leave by a certain date. He raced to catch a ship that he knew was leaving, but missed it by several hours. Which meant he had to find his way over 2,000 miles of hostile and potentially hostile terrain to get to another country where he would be safe.

That’s all I can say for now. I’ve been working on this book for several years, and it will probably be another couple of years before I’m ready to show it around.

As always, I’m most interested in character, but in this case, the travails my friend and his comrades (he hooked up with four others trying to escape) went through make this book even more meaningful. Not all survived the ordeal. 

The fictional aspect of the story is in the relationships with one another the characters develop, and the psychological adaptations they must make in order to endure. 

Norm: Where can our readers find out more about you and Sex, A Love Story?

Jerome: I don’t do social media. I find it too distracting. Readers can check out Amazon and Barnes & Noble.com. It’s not on my publisher’s WEBSITE yeT—but will be soon. There’s a fair amount about me and my books on-line. Just search for “Jerome Gold.”

Norm: As this interview comes to an end, if you could invite three writers, dead or alive into your living room, who would they be and why?

Jerome: Joan Didion, Albert Camus, Hannah Arendt (a political philosopher, not a writer of fiction). A fourth, if I may be permitted to cheat, would be Farnoosh Moshiri. All are fascinating stylists. More important, all are interested the question, “How are we to live in difficult times?” All, in different ways, lived through difficult times. 

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

Jerome: Thank you, Norm.