OBLIGATION TO TRUTH A Conversation with Amy Bloom
1940s, setting the story in a particular time period “hasn’t always been a requirement” for her so much as it’s been a requirement of the story she wanted to tell about one of her favorite subjects: love, death, family, and sex. Among other things, she’s interested in how a period of history “shapes how people can express their relationships and act on their feelings. It doesn’t necessarily change the feelings, except how much one is subject to the opinions of others.” Her collection of short stories, Come to Me (Random House, 1993), made her a National Book Award finalist before her Love Invents Us was published. After a second collection of short stories, a longpercolating idea for a next novel took hold. “It wasn’t so much that I was compelled by the idea of ‘Oh, historical fiction!’ It was more like, there was this story I wished to tell, and it’s set in the 1920s. The heart of the novel was an apocryphal story of a woman who had come to Alaska from Russia and had wanted to go back to Russia and decided to do it by going across the narrow straits at the tip of Alaska.” Bloom had first heard the story from her father. “My family’s from Russia, and my father always said ‘What a crazy person. Who would do that? Who would go back?’ I used to think about that story when I was a girl. I thought you could only go back for love. And that was the basis for the novel, Away.” Bloom explains how “part of the joy of writing Away was excavating what I could find of my family’s past, which was mostly in theory not in fact.” Whatever she discovered about her family’s history, she used to get at the truth behind that journey back to Russia and invented a story about love and determination. Instead of having her protagonist, Lillian Leyb, arrive in Alaska from Russia, Bloom lands her in New York. Determined to survive in a new country, Lillian finds work as a seamstress in a Yiddish Theater on the Lower East Side, becoming the lover of both the theater’s owner and his son. When she learns that the daughter she’d assumed had been killed in the Russian pogrom had survived, she becomes equally determined to return to Siberia to find her.
Among the challenges writers of historical fiction face is how to negotiate the relationship among fact, truth, and story. To create authentic settings and believable characters, we spend considerable time researching the decades or centuries in which our stories take place. The inherent risk of such research is the possibility that the facts uncovered might overwhelm the story, masking some important truth about the past behind a mountain of fascinating details that are irrelevant to the story. In a way, every novelist faces that challenge. After all, as Amy Bloom points out during our conversation, “most novels are historical fiction, since most writers don’t set their fiction in the immediate present.” Without rejecting the category of historical fiction, Bloom nonetheless says she “tries very hard not to care how people describe” her work. Bloom’s debut novel, Love Invents Us (Random House, 1996), is set in the 1970s, “which I suppose is historical fiction of a sort, although not usually what we think of it as. It is, nevertheless, 50 years ago.” The wry humor that readers of Bloom’s fiction have come to recognize as a signature feature of her characters is on display when we discuss what drew her to write a trio of novels about the more distant past— Away (Random House, 2008), Lucky Us (Random House, 2014) and White Houses (Random House, 2018). Although Bloom set each of these novels in a particular decade, whether in the 1920s, 1930s, or
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FEATURES | Issue 96, May 2021
Research for Away led her to think more about improvisational lives, about great road trips and the reinvention of the self during the Second World War. The result was her next novel, Lucky Us, featuring two sisters, Eva and Iris, whose journey across America takes them through landscapes littered with grifters and liars and fakes, as well as some well-meaning folks. In the course of researching that novel, Bloom discovered “a first-person account by an eleven-year old boy who was interned in a camp for Germans in Texas.” Having been unaware of the existence of such camps in the US during the Second World War, the discovery led her to invent a character named Gus whose German background leads to one of the plot twists. “Sometimes the internet is great because you fall down a really fortuitous rabbit hole, but as a researcher you have to be fairly disciplined and recognize the internet’s limits.” Even if you’re writing about something significantly in the past, “you have to be aware of the fact that the past is always receding and it’s like memory: You’re going to get what you get but there’s no reason to think it’s particularly accurate. So you have to manage that, too.” Any novelist must ask herself whether any fact uncovered in research moves the story forward or illuminates character. “I work very hard not to make mistakes,” Bloom explains, “but diverging from the facts is for me not a mistake. If I misunderstood it, that’s a problem. But if I
