I wrote my first novel, Liars and Saints, as maybe many writers do, not knowing if I could. I wanted to write something long, to see if that was possible for me, but until then I'd been writing short stories, and they were very short. If I couldn't sustain a narrative for 20 pages, how could I do it for 200? I'd also thrown away many stories that had once seemed promising, and the thought of writing an entire book, only to find it didn't work, was paralyzing. So I started with two linked stories and some good advice, and felt my way through.
When the novel was finished, I had nothing new underway, and no ideas. I worked on short stories—Flannery O'Connor said that writing stories after a novel feels like a vacation in the mountains, and it felt a little like that, but it wasn't the same as having the sustained, reliable project there every morning. I tried what I thought might be a new novel, and then another, but both fizzled out.
Then Liars and Saints was published, along with an alarming, full-page picture of my head in the New York Times Magazine. You spend so much time alone with a novel, at your desk in the corner of the room, that publication is shocking: the book belongs to other people and, in a way, you do, too. Writing a novel is a reasonable activity for a shy person, but promoting it isn't. At readings, half my mind was on what I was saying and half was wondering if everyone could tell that my legs were shaking. I was told that if I wanted people to read the book, I had to go out and talk about it, and I believed that. But as much as I wanted people to read it, I also wanted to hide in a hole.
Liars and Saints was about an American family called the Santerres and the secrets they keep over five generations. It wasn't autobiographical, but everything you know comes from somewhere. My friends and family were in some cases terrifically amused by things they recognized, and in some cases not, and in some cases thought they recognized things that had nothing to do with them.
Some people read the novel and asked if I was going write a sequel. I said no: it ended in the present. In order to move forward in the characters' lives, a sequel would have to take place in the future. But having a novel published got me thinking: first, what if I dramatized the situation of publishing a first novel; and second, what if the writer were one of the secret-keeping Santerres? At first I thought one of the younger men might do it, but I realized I'd have more to say if the writer were a daughter, a little girl they'd all watched growing up. The Santerre most likely to write a novel was dead, but she didn't have to be, in a new book.
It seems obvious now, but sometimes the heart of a story comes to me slowly: the novel the young woman writes would turn out to be Liars and Saints—a novel essentially about her family. And the publication of her book would be a catalyst for what happens to her family in my second book; it would be an event that comes naturally out of the family's past, and disrupts and changes their future.
So I started working tentatively on A Family Daughter, and it was like feeling a car, after months stuck in neutral, drop into gear.
I didn't talk about the book for a long time, because I didn't want to be told it was a crazy idea and I should stop. It was a book I wanted to write, even if I had to throw it away. I wasn't looking to rewrite Liars and Saints; I wanted to fill in the space around it, and cast it in a new light. I wanted this book to be more playful, but also darker; to answer some questions about the way people imagine and represent their lives, and to raise others.
And mostly I wanted A Family Daughter to be its own realistic story about a family: a straightforward, separate novel, which you could live in for the length of the book. The meta-fictional aspect would be there, especially if you had read Liars and Saints, but I didn't want it to be distracting. (There was a typo in the galley of A Family Daughter, and I crossed it out in the copy I sent to my brother. He assumed, reading, that it was going to be printed with the strikethrough, a meta-meta thing, as if this novel were being revised by an outside hand. He thought, "Maile, no!" before realizing that it was just a correction.)
I didn't expect my second novel to be built on the site of my first, but there was a lot of pleasure in expanding that space. A long section of A Family Daughter is set in Argentina, with some of the Santerres at the house of an aging socialite. I told my grandmother that, and she looked at me sideways and said, "How does that family get to Argentina?" It's one of the wonderful things about fiction, that if you can imagine it, and make it convincing, then those nice, middle-class Americans can end up at the center of a freighted, jet-set house party. Why shouldn't they?
Since finishing A Family Daughter, once again I don't know what I'm doing next, except that I think there will be no third volume for the Santerres. I've spent more time with them than with almost anyone I know. I wish I had something new I was sure of, and I know how difficult it is to get there. But it's also exciting, not to know what the next thing will be.
