The Things We Do to Make It Home: A Reader's Guide

$14.95 US

“Stunning. . . . Lean and supple, completely persuasive, full of nuanced turns, dead on about how people try to bind and repel each other at the same time.”

—New York Times Bo o k R e v i e w

“Evocative. . . . [A] powerful tale. . . . The characters stick with you.”

Gologorsky

Fiction

A New York Times Notable Book

A Los Angeles Times Best Fiction Book

—US A Today

—Book lis t

An emotionally charged story that lays bare the destructive impact of the Vietnam War on the wives, lovers, and children of veterans, Beverly Gologorsky’s haunting story of love, devotion, and loss will speak to anyone who has lived through the last forty years, from the end of the Vietnam War to the latest wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Novelist BEVERLY GOLOGORSKY’s critically acclaimed first novel, The Things We Do to Make It Home, was named a Los Angeles Times Best Fiction Book, a New York Times Notable Book, and a Barnes and Noble Discover Great Writers Award finalist. Her essays have appeared in The Patriots: The Vietnam War Remembered from All Sides and The Friend Who Got Away: Twenty Women’s True-Life Tales of Friendships that Blew Up, Burned Out, or Faded Away. She has written for the New York Times, the Nation, Newsweek, and the Los Angeles Times, among other publications. A longtime activist in the women’s and peace movements since the 1960s, Gologorsky has one daughter, Georgina Lieberman.

Gologorsky lives with her partner Charlie Wiggins in New York and Maine.

Cover design by Jess Morphew Cover art: Mustang © Veer Images; Woman on bed © Getty/Neil Beckerman; Houses © Getty/George Marks; Boots © American Images Inc. Author photo by Marion Ettlinger

isbn 978-1-58322-884-5

Seven Stories Press www.sevenstories.com

The Things We Do to Make It Home

“Haunting. . . . A novel brimming with burning emotion.”

The Things We Do to Make It Home

Beverly Gologorsky

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The Things We Do To Make It Home

BEVERLY GOLOGORSKY

A Reader’s Guide

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A CONVERSATION WITH BEVERLY GOLOGORSKY

Q: Why did you choose to take on the legacy of the Vietnam War as the subject matter of your first novel?

A: Actually, I didn’t. That’s the interesting thing. The women in the book were voices in my head and I wanted to give them life.

They just happened to have Vietnam veterans as husbands and lovers. After I finished the novel, I realized that I had indeed written a novel about the Vietnam War. Yet in my head the impulse for the novel was to explore the limits of love. In much of contemporary literature I hadn’t found women such as these and I wanted their voices to be heard.

Q: Your author biography mentions your involvement in the peace and women’s movements. What impact did your history have on the genesis of this novel?

A: I was intensely involved in the anti-war movement. I spent twelve years working against that war—not just going to marches but writing, organizing, and trying to change people’s minds. I worked on two magazines—Viet Report and Leviathan—that were involved in not just the anti-war movement but also civil rights and the women’s movement. During the 1960s and 1970s, one movement flowed into the other.

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Given the intensity of those years, I was just too close to the war to write about its impact at home. Yet the impact of the war was so visceral, it was in my bloodstream. This was the case for many who lived through the period and one of the reasons why there was not much fiction about the war, except veteran memoirs, until the 1980s.

Q: What kind of research did you do in the writing of this novel?

A: Very little. It interferes with my imagination. I check facts and dates. For example, after I wrote the first chapter on the Watergate hearings, I went and checked the dates. However, I find that too much research gets in the way of my creative energies.

Q: While there is a wealth of fiction (and nonfiction, for that matter) on the experiences of Vietnam veterans and the damage done, your novel seems to fill a relative void on the subject of their families and the longterm toll of the war on their lives. Why do you think this is so?

A: It took a long time to process and reflect on that period.

Although women did not fight on the battlefields, the war was brought home to them by the men so scarred by their experiences. There is very little fiction by women about the women who live with or love Vietnam veterans. I received a letter from a woman who lost her son in the war. She said that it dismantled her family. She wants a wall to memorialize not only the vets but also the families destroyed by the aftereffects of that war. If you think about it, we have Memorial Day, Veterans Day, and all sorts of statues for soldiers, but not even a stone exists commemorating the women and children who dealt with the fallout on the home front. There is nothing out there to commemorate the countless number of women who got up night after sleepless night to help men suffering from one or another manifestation of post-traumatic stress syndrome. If my novel 206 Reading Guide

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helps in some way to bring their stories front and center, that is more than fine with me.

What I think separated Vietnam from other wars was the soldiers’ belief system. During basic training, soldiers are trained to kill the enemy ultimately in order to save their country. But after a short period in Vietnam, so many of the soldiers lost their belief systems; that is, they no longer understood or believed in what they were doing. They came home feeling tremendous guilt and anger without any sense of achievement. Unlike other wars, the majority of the soldiers who went to Vietnam were very young, eighteen or nineteen, straight out of high school.

And the younger you are, the more malleable you are, and the greater the potential for emotional damage. The men were mostly from working class and Third World backgrounds. Most had not been to college or gotten married or had much of an adult life experience before they left the States, so they had not formed lives to fit back into. These vets returned to a void that was very difficult to fill.

Q: Why do you think it was so difficult for these women to let these men go? In other words, why couldn’t they just walk away?

A: It is, I think, a question of conditioning. These women received their conditioning as females in the 1950s—their sense of right and wrong, the meaning and limits of marriage and love. There were few female models to emulate. After the women’s movement developed, conditioning changed. Women began to see they had a right to more than one beginning; that there was more than one possible way to live a life; that they could fall in love more than once. These were new ideas, ideas that hadn’t permeated the atmosphere during my female characters’ upbringings. My characters leave the men because there is nothing more they can do within the relationship and it is no longer possible for them to stay.

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However, their daughters are growing up in a world different from their mothers’. While their mothers were brought up in a world in which marriage comprised two halves making up a whole, their children believe in marriage being the coming together of two whole people. After the women’s movement, women’s consciousness existed on a whole new plane. The female characters in my novel were conditioned before this new consciousness prevailed. Social class was also a factor. They did not have the leisure and opportunities to become students at the universities where much of this consciousness began to permeate.

Q: Was it a painful process writing about the dismantling of some of these lives? Do you feel hopeful about any of your characters’ futures?

A: It was painful in the sense that all writing is painful. Flaubert was once asked how he could know what Madame Bovary felt.

He replied, “Madame Bovary, c’est moi.” All of the emotions that my characters experienced I have seen, felt, and known to be true from life experiences and observations. When I am writing, I find myself delving into the feelings my characters experience.

Sometimes the feelings are too painful and I need to walk away and work out my resistance. I have tried to be very respectful of their feelings and emotions, so I can demand the same of my readers.

I think Sara-Jo is going to be the first female president. I do feel hopeful about the children of these men and women even if you haven’t met all of the children referred to in the novel. As for Lucy, she now has a secret and that’s good. She’s breaking out and doing something in her interlude with Sean that a much younger woman might do. And once you break out, you can’t lock yourself back in. I see possibilities for Millie in California with Pete—she’s going back. What I find hopeful is that all of 208 Reading Guide

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these women have learned from their suffering; they are good learners.

It is different for the men. They are displaced and it will be very hard for them. However, Rod will be OK. Rod and Emma have something good between them. He came back to their marriage and had this stable moment to rebuild his life, which was lacking for the others.

Q: Deede tells the other women, “We don’t matter, not the way we should.” How accurate would you say this statement is?

A: I would say this is very accurate. However, like the witness on the stand who wants to explain everything and is cut off by the lawyer who says, “Just a yes or no answer,” I have to add that more needs to be understood. Loving these women is second to processing the experience of the war. The men’s capacity to love has been altered by their experience in Vietnam. The limits of love work both ways here: The women thought they could save the men and had to very painfully and gradually accept that love alone was unable to provide a haven. The men had to understand that because of the damage of the war they could not give and receive love as they would have liked or perhaps once had.

Q: The past weighs so heavily on the present and future lives of these characters. How successful do you think any of us are in wrestling with the demons of the past?

A: We know that the past can’t be remedied. The best we can do is learn from it and not repeat it. The most progressive mining of the past is using it to determine what went right and what went wrong and then let go of it. Demons need to be demystified and brought into the light of day. For example, Sara-Jo suffers from an absent father and a mother struggling to pick up the slack.

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She battles her demons through the various men in her life. She doesn’t want to drown with the demons. She wants to swim. She doesn’t want limits—something that she inherited from the women’s movement.

However, this is a difficult question to answer in general terms. It depends on who you are and what the past has enabled you to do that will qualify how you see the present and how you handle the demons. The privileged often feel empowered enough to throw the demons over their shoulders and move on.

Lucy is attempting to throw the demons of her conditioning over her shoulder. Her encounter with Sean is an example of her struggle to free herself. On the other hand, Ida (a character I just adore) is mired in the love she feels for Frankie, which will be short-lived because he is dying. Maybe she will also free herself— I am optimistic. However, she does believe love is all, which for some women can be a trap.

Q: Jason declares, “I think Nixon’s men know we have a beef with them and they’re afraid to show up today. And they’re right because we aimed our guns in the wrong direction.” Do you agree with Jason?

How would you judge the government’s role in the fighting of this war and its aftermath?

A: Jason is right. Fifty-six thousand American soldiers killed; almost three million Vietnamese killed or wounded; a country ravaged; and former defense secretary McNamara is still writing books in his eighties. A handful of men guided a foreign policy that destroyed so many lives—thousands of poets gone. It was a small number of people that thought the war should be fought, and so many died carrying out their wishes. The U.S. government’s conduct was abominable.

The Vietnamese say there are people who have small attitudes, people who don’t understand more than their own needs.

This is an apt description of the U.S. government’s role in the 210 Reading Guide

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war. What is remarkable is that the Vietnamese people have always contended that they are angry at the U.S. government, not the U.S. people—they have been able to make the distinction between the leaders and the masses of people.

What is also remarkable is how so many men—veterans in their late forties—are returning to Vietnam in order to close a circle. And they are being treated with great courtesy and respect, something I cannot imagine happening here in the United States. The Vietnamese have a Buddhist approach to life, for lack of a better term, a much more easygoing and accepting conception of human nature than exists for many in the States.

Q: So Frankie’s return to Vietnam mirrors a real-life phenomenon?

A: Yes. Many men are going back to heal, to start businesses in Ho Chi Minh City, to see the places they had been, to make amends. Frankie went back, not to start a business, but for all of the other reasons combined.

Q: Which character presented the greatest challenge to you as a writer?

A: Rooster was difficult. In my mind, he was a sly fellow. I kept hearing him and seeing him, but he was difficult to capture on paper. The women were different because they were my inspiration.

Q: This is your first published novel. When did your writing career begin and how did it take shape?

A: I have been writing for years on topics such as women’s health and other issues. While this is my first published novel, it is not my first novel. The first novel I wrote went nowhere. So when I finished this novel, I was filled with great trepidation. But to my Reading Guide 211

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amazement and joy, my wonderful and enthusiastic agent brought it to Random House and they bought it right away. It was the complete antithesis of my previous experience.

Q: What advice would you give writers struggling to get published?

A: Keep going, writing, sending, doing. You never know. One experience does not teach you what the next experience will be—at least in publishing.

Q: What writers and/or works have most influenced you and why?

A: I have had different favorite writers at different moments in my life. There are some authors and works that I have always loved.

Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and War and Peace. The fiction of Simone de Beauvoir. Nadine Gordimer’s work. Doris Lessing’s early work. All these women are a joy to read and challenging; they gave me a real feeling for literature.

Q: What books would you recommend reading groups add to their lists?

A: I would recommend Nadine Gordimer’s Guest of Honor and Burger’s Daughter. These books are rich in detail and enfold you in a world that you will remember after you are done reading— a wonderful experience. Also the four books in the Martha’s Quest series by Doris Lessing. There are, in each of these books, lives created with a sense of history, and a sense of time and place outside the United States (in Rhodesia and later England) which is so rewarding and makes for the best reading.

Q: What would you most like your readers to get out of your novel?

A: A sense of the travails of women and a sense of their incredible strength—that is, how much these women give and do; also, the 212 Reading Guide

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importance of respecting, honoring, and remembering all women whose lives are similar.

Q: Are you working on a new novel?

A: Yes, indeed. But I’m too superstitious to talk about it.

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READING GROUP QUESTIONS AND TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION

1. Did this novel change your perspective on the Vietnam War? On the role of women? Why or why not?

2. Discuss the different kinds of damage inflicted by the war and its aftermath on the lives of these characters. Do you think there is any kind of damage control that could have averted some of these disasters?

3. The silences in this novel are so palpable and dangerous and destructive. Why do we often have so much trouble talking to the people we love?

4. Discuss the meaning and significance of the title of this novel.

5. Some of the men in this novel are homeless, transient, displaced.

For men such as Rooster, the street seems the only place to be comfortable. Discuss the many reasons people end up on the street. Did this novel challenge your understanding of the homeless?

6. The women in this novel have to create new homes for themselves. What kind of homes do they create, if any, and how successful do you think they are in doing so?

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7. Of all the veterans in this novel, Rod is the only one who seems to have a real home. Why do you think this is so?

8. Do you think Rod and Emma will resist and keep their house?

What do you think will happen to them if they lose it?

9. Why does Frankie decide to return to Vietnam? Do you think this is a wise decision? Do you think he will find what he is looking for?

10. Do you think Frankie’s encounter with J. J. in the bar is real or imagined or a bit of both?

11. In discussing her relationship with Frankie, Ida says, “There is something between us, a kind of space I can’t get past.” What has created this “space”? How does this space manifest itself in the various relationships in this novel?

12. Why is Frankie estranged from his sister Pauli? We do not hear her side of the phone conversations with Frankie. How do you think she would answer his questions?

13. There is a large cast of characters in this novel. Which character(s) and narrative threads do you find the most compelling?

Is there a character you wished to hear more from?

14. Sara-Jo is so angry at her father, Rooster. Do you think she will outgrow this anger? Do you think she should outgrow it?

15. How does Sara-Jo’s understanding of her parents’ relationship change over the course of this novel? How does she help free her mother from the past?

16. These women are all struggling to determine the limits of love.

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Discuss what you think the limits of love are. Or should there be limits?

17. Which of these women do you think will finally free themselves from the demons of their collective past?

18. Can your group come to a consensus on a brief (one- or twosentence) summary of this novel? Do you find that the various members of the group read books very differently and focus on different themes?

19. Why did your group select this novel? How does this work compare with other works your group has read? What will you be reading next?

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