When Novels Take on Social Issues

Some social problems are too complex to attack in a 1,500-word editorial.

Question: What new ground
did you try to break for yourself as a writer in your new novel?

Anne Lamott: "Imperfect
Birds" is the third book in a trilogy about these characters, Rosie and
Elizabeth Ferguson.  Rosie is the
child we first meet in the novel, "Rosie," who is six or seven years old
and
whose father has just died. 
Elizabeth is her mother who's very tall and depressed and has a
little
bit of money from the husband's death and has no idea who she is in the
world
except she is very fond of Rosie. 

And in the second book of the trilogy, "Crooked
Little
Hearts," Rosie is, I think, it's been a while, almost 14 and a champion
tennis
player and starting to get very into the world of boys and that she
really isn't
an attractive—she doesn't feel like an attractive girl.  She
is tiny and not developed.  Her best friend is
just this cheesecake
of vanilla beauty, Simone, and ends up pregnant by the end of the book. 

But in "Imperfect Birds," I wanted to see where
everybody
was a few years later.  I wanted to
see if Elizabeth had been able to stay sober, I wanted to see what
Elizabeth's
marriage to the wonderful novelist, James, was like and I wanted to see
Rosie
really spreading her wings and going down some really dark paths.  There are bad drug habit—drug problem
in the county where I live, in fact in all of California, and in fact in
probably in all of the United States among teenagers who discover things
like
ecstasy and then prescription drugs. 
And they're just stealing and a lot of the kids are being
prescribed
Adderall for ADD and ADHD and of course they love it because it's very
nice
mellow speed, and it helps them with their college exams. And we've had a
huge
problem with OxyContin in our area and a number of deaths of my son's
peers.  And so I wanted to write
about it.  I wanted to say, what's
going on here?

Question: How can fiction
explore social issues in ways that nonfiction can't?

Anne Lamott:
Well, it's a very complex issue and it has many causes and roots and
ways to
approach it from, so you really couldn't do it any kind of justice in
1,500
words or something.  There are a
number of characters who are a different manifestations of... the answer
to who
gets into drugs, is it the kids you think of as players? 
Well, Rosie is a 4.2 student headed to
a very good college, who is beautiful, she's a great tennis player,
she's just
a wonderful person, and yet she's got the genetic predisposition because
Elizabeth and her father are both alcoholic.  There's
just no level at which you can achieve that you're
going to feel good enough about yourself to not wonder if you feel a
little bit
better with Adderall or ecstasy or if you might be more attractive to
boys if
you are willing to do this or that with them, or this to them, or for
them.  And then her other friends
are very different than that.  One
friend has been off to rehab already and one friend comes from a very
nutty,
sort of space-case mother, who I don't think has any problem with
substance
abuse. 

So, it's an epidemic in this nation and it's
killing our
kids.  Two weeks before I came
here, a girl... I went for a hike before church and when I got to the
ocean, there
were 150 people searching for her body, and she'd been partying with her
girlfriends by the ocean and had wandered off and wasn't found until the
next
day when she washed up at Muir Woods. 
So, it's a national epidemic. 
It's had a huge impact on my own family.  I
mean, my son's friends, some have died.  One of
them is at Napa State probably
for a very long time, or forever, and he was the golden child; the
golden boy
of the high school.  And I wanted
to go really in-depth into it.  I
wanted to view it from the mother's point of view, I want to view it
from the
point of view of the community, and how scary it is to do anything with
teenagers that might mean they stop loving you or thinking you're the
cool
parent.  And I wanted to write it
from inside the child, the young adult, who is making it all seem like
it's the
parent's problem, or fault.Recorded April 6, 2010
Interviewed by Austin Allen