An interview with Terry Gamble about her new book, Good Family, April 2005

QUESTION: This is your second novel set in Northern Michigan, specifically in an exclusive summer resort. Why do you choose this setting?

TERRY GAMBLE: This is a setting with which I am intimately familiar. Like the Addisons in Good Family and the Marches in The Water Dancers, my family has spent summers in Northern Michigan since that part of the state first became accessible by train. There is a direct correlation to the emergence of the “summerhouse” in America and the proliferation of trains in the late nineteenth century (please note Maddie’s obsession with trains). Consequently, in the summer, more affluent people from other parts of the country inundated communities that were for the majority of the year populated by locals. When occupied by multiple generations, these summerhouses become the repositories of a family’s significance and identity. Maddie’s family home, The Aerie, is practically a character in the book—at times even anthropomorphized.

Q: Maddie states early in the book that she is not going back because of her dying mother; instead, it is her sister who is calling her back. But what else is calling her back to a place she has basically shunned for over a decade?

TG: She is returning to face her history and everything that she has left unresolved. At nearly forty, Maddie is strong enough to take a look at the events of her life, for better or worse. Prodigals are called home for a number of reasons, primarily to forgive and to be forgiven. In Maddie’s case, she’s also called home to grieve. The Addisons are not a family who know how to grieve well. Grievus interruptus, you might say. Maddie describes it literally being stuck in her throat. Only when she sits on the beach and howls after her mother dies does she begin to shake loose emotionally. Later, she is moved to laughter and hope on the same beach.

Q: You allude to ghosts. What is the function of ghosts in Good Family?

TG: The ghosts are more metaphorical than literal, although some family members seem to have encountered actual ghosts in one form or another. The ghosts, however, are more the shared family experiences, the memories, the unprocessed grief. The Aerie is a ghost-charged house in particular because of the unexpressed emotions projected onto its rooms, its contents, its history. As Maddie says at the end, “We are all part ghost.” In a house in which many families have lived, there are layers upon layers, each being incorporated into the current present, reinterpreted and redefined. There is a lingering sense of what went before, both literally in the notes of a diary or the markings on a wall, or figuratively in the smells and sounds and memories. During my research on Scarlet Fever, which killed Maddie’s great-aunt, I discovered that the theory of the time was that the spores of the disease could live on and infect someone years later. I thought that was an amazing image for the pathologies of previous generations carrying over into the next.

Q: Maddie recalls many memories of her past throughout the book. What are the points you make about memory and perception?

TG: Maddie arrives home with her own set of memories as well as her interpretation of them. In encountering her family, she is forced to reassess the accuracy of her recollections. Many events that loomed large for her were insignificant to her sister, and visa-versa. The point is every character has his or her version of the story. Most of us see ourselves as heroes or victims in our own dramas, failing to comprehend that those around us are dealing with their own challenges, their own realities. Maddie has made a career of using her specific interpretations of reality in her filmmaking. By going home, Maddie moves toward empathy for her relatives, particularly her sister and mother, and shifts toward seeing her story in an even larger context as she learns about her great-grandmother’s tragedy. She compares her emerging sense of perspective to the craft of filmmaking which requires the occasional panoramic shot as well as the closer view.

Q: There are a number of interesting relationships in the book, specifically the intriguing one she has with the twins, Derek and Edward. How do you think those early infatuations influenced her choices later on?

TG: Aren’t we all indelibly marked by our first infatuations? That Maddie’s were for twin cousins of such different temperaments sets her up for a pattern of choosing men from either extreme. Her compass isn’t particularly well calibrated. Both Derek and Edward enthrall her as a teenager, but Maddie views one as good, the other as bad, while experiencing some kind of trauma with each. Both cousins impact her nascent sexuality: she poses nude for Derek (which titillates her), and is embarrassed and humiliated by Edward’s masturbation. It seems conceivable that this would set her up for a misguided marriage with the likes of Angus.

Q: And Ian?

TG: Ian is the closest thing Maddie has to an honest relationship. He also functions as the outsider in the story, the catalyst that allows the possibility of a fresher perception of her family and her past. He can cajole her without diminishing her. Most importantly, he sees her in a light her family can’t, and he loves her to pieces. It’s ironic that Maddie’s mother Evelyn always said she would “take up with a gay man,” and that’s exactly what Maddie does, more or less.

Q: Given that the novel is written in the first person, people will inevitably ask how much of this is autobiography.

TG: All authors bring some personal experience to their work. I can identify with Maddie particularly because I came of age at the same time and with the same socio-economic background. Women from that background, to some extent, were confused by the choices society was offering starting in the sixties. Upper class women are often bred to be hothouse flowers, and woe to those whose intellect, talent, or ambition propel them further. It isn’t surprising that alcohol and sleep are so seductive to those who are attempting to sedate their true urgings. I identify with Maddie’s need to work and be productive, and with the frustration she feels at having no clear model within her family to demonstrate how to accomplish that.

That being said, Maddie’s life and mine are clearly different. For one thing, I have mercifully never lost a child, but can only relate to it as an unimaginable loss. Several people close to me have lost children, and have generously shared with me their experiences about their long journey with grief and how the presence of a child remains long after that child is gone.

Like Maddie, I have lost my parents. I was particularly fortunate to be able to communicate my love and forgiveness before they died, and to let them go. My father died a year ago, and within an hour of his death, I had an experience—too vivid to be called a dream—in which he came to me as a thirty-one year old (instead of an eighty-one year old), and announced that he felt great, and that dying had been absolutely the right decision. It may have been his ghost; it may have been my projection… who knows? But it was as if I had his permission to live life fully and not to worry so much.

Q: So do you believe, like Adele, in reincarnation or an afterlife?

TG: It’s the big question, isn’t it? This is the incarnation that counts, and our job is to live it with all the exuberance and joy and curiosity and experience as we can muster. The character, Adele, talks about children being “closer to the Divine,” and maybe they are. But the Divine, in my opinion, isn’t out lurking somewhere, available only to those who haven’t been born or to those who’ve died. It’s right here, now, for the taking.