Good Neighbors(93)

So I had this idea that Rhea has this false self, and it’s exhausting and not serving her and getting in the way of her real relationships with people, including her children. She wants to lose it, consciously or unconsciously. So she seeks out Gertie, whom she believes is the least likely person on the block to cast judgment. But it’s such a scary mission. She’s terrified she’ll be rejected, called out as monstrous. Still, she tries to confess what she’s been doing to Shelly, knowing it’s the best thing for her family—and despite everything Rhea LOVES those kids. But Gertie doesn’t understand. The confession is garbled, arrows of blame pointing in every direction, most of them wrong. Rhea interprets Gertie’s confusion as rejection and decides she’s chosen the wrong friend—that she can never be free of this false, perfect self that is so suffocating.

Writing Gertie wasn’t a challenge—I always loved her. I didn’t arrive at the moment when she drives away from the crescent instead of defending her children until a very late draft. I didn’t like writing it, because I knew the pain she was feeling in doing it. Even as she did it, she erased it from her memory, because the failure was so great.

But I think erasing our failures is very common and very human. I mean, I always know what my husband did wrong when we disagree, but my own questionable behavior is far hazier. I think the job of being an adult is evaluating that instinct and trying to untangle it, which is what Gertie does throughout the action of the novel, and long afterward. She’s the best.

Good Neighbors has been called a blend of Celeste Ng and Shirley Jackson. Were they any writers or novels you had in mind while you were writing it?

I’ve read everything by Shirley Jackson, and I love her. What she does best, to me, is narrate that fugue state all new mothers go through after their children are born. It’s this jarring identity slip, where once you were this person and now everyone seems to see you as a totally different person, and your job is totally different, and you’re exhausted all the time. It’s very disorienting, particularly because it’s never acknowledged.

As I was writing Good Neighbors, I reread Stephen King’s Carrie, Megan Abbott’s You Will Know Me, and Jennifer Egan’s Invisible Circus. These are all female-led page-turning mystery-thrillers. I also read Kate Wilhelm’s Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang. Like Good Neighbors, its themes involve parents and children and the inevitable inversion of those relationships. Stephen King’s It probably played a role in my depiction of the kids. I read that novel young, when those scenes and moments made a deep impression. Finally, I’m a huge Claire Messud fan and read all her novels while writing Good Neighbors, my favorite being The Woman Upstairs, which is about women with different power dynamics, who become very close, until they’re not.

Suburban dramas are in vogue right now. What I’ve noticed and am enjoying about this trend is that “women’s fiction” is happily starting to lose that title. I mean, it’s fiction. Men iron, cook, and rear kids, too. And these lives we’re living behind closed doors, in kitchens and bedrooms and backyards, are where all the important stuff happens.

Was there an element of suburban living that you especially wanted to explore and/or skewer in the novel? What do you think it is about picturesque suburbs that continues to fascinate readers?

My worldview is naturally satiric. It’s just how I tick. If I thought about what I was doing, or that a portrayal might hurt someone, I wouldn’t do it. So, I guess it’s good I never think about it. What I do know is that I never tell stories about things or people that I don’t respect. I only tell stories about things that I love.

So, in suburbia, which is where I grew up (in a town on Long Island called Garden City, which is different from the one in this book), I had a lot of advantages. The schools were great, and I got to keep the same friends from kindergarten through college. It’s a privilege to come from someplace, and I’m glad that I do.

But I was always surprised, growing up, by how much people gossiped. I mean, I couldn’t remember most peoples’ last names, and somehow everybody else knew what everybody’s dads did for a living. This was the ’80s, so nobody mentioned if the moms had jobs because they mostly didn’t, and if they did, you kind of felt bad for the kid, like maybe they had to sit by themselves and heat up Lean Cuisines and that was a tragedy.

The kids gossiped because they’d learned it from their parents, and their parents gossiped to signify status. It was a constant top-dogging, and the more alike we all tended to be, the pettier the criteria for who was on top. There’s a term, narcissism of nearness, that expresses it: the more alike we are, the more we notice and rank our very tiny differences. This tendency has a terrible side effect: conformity.

I’m reminded of the Star Trek episode “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield,” where one people are black on the left side, white on the right. The other people are white on the left side, black on the right. They’re at war and wind up murdering each other to the last man. It’s very important to them, this difference. They’ve decided that it defines them.

It’s a strong argument for diversity—racial, economic, and structural. I think people are just more relaxed about their own identities in diverse places.

Did the experience of writing adult characters versus children and teenagers differ? Was one more challenging (or more fun) than the other?