Q: So if Knox is Hamlet, whom do Giselle and Sebastian represent?
A: Giselle and Sebastian together function as Horatio.
Q: What was the deal with the dirty money?
A: Let’s call it the play-within-a-play, ’kay?
Q: Half the characters in Hamlet are missing.
A: Of course they are! It was complicated enough, don’t you think?
Q: Fen’s name. Explain that.
A: Shakespeare based Claudius on a Jute chieftain named Feng. Drop the “g” and there you go. His name is actually James Fenimore Hilliard.
Q: These characters—you—aren’t anything like what I thought Mormons were like.
A: Tribes aren’t a monolith, and we all struggle with the same things everybody else struggles with.
Q: So, um, you do realize that Sebastian and Eilis are first cousins, right?
A: Yes. And? Go see the PLoS Biology Journal and The Straight Dope on that topic. Think what you like.
Q: Okay, but you can’t get married in Missouri if you’re first cousins, can you?
A: There are plenty of other places to choose from. Eilis and Sebastian got legally married in Giverny, France, in Claude Monet’s garden.
Q: Where did Knox get his name?
A: Dead Poets Society. Knox Overstreet, the incurable, unrepentant romantic who wouldn’t take no for an answer and got the girl.
Before I published The Proviso, someone who hadn’t read it looked at me funny and said, “That name just screams country-club trust-fund brat.” That’s because he is a country-club trust-fund brat. “Yabbut it sounds pretentious.” Like … okay? Which part of “country-club trust-fund brat” did you not get? I was thoroughly flummoxed at why this was an issue. It is exactly what I meant it to be. “But you don’t know anything about being rich.” It’s fiction!
That happened almost 20 years ago. I still don’t know what he was smoking, but he’s said stupider stuff since.
Q: You have a lot of characters. Where’s the family tree so I can see who’s who?
A: Here you go!
Q: Do you have a list of all the books referenced?
A: Not all of them, because I’ve probably been influenced by books I don’t remember reading, but this is a good start. Some that particularly informed The Proviso:
A Man in Full, Tom Wolfe
The Gate to Women’s Country, Sherri S. Tepper
The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand
And, of course, Hamlet, William Shakespeare
My penultimate semester of college, I was in a creative writing class. I was also in a Shakespeare class studying Hamlet, which, by the way, I loathe because it’s just stupid because they’re all stupid. I was also working graves at a gas station 50 hours a week, so I did a lot of sleeping in my car. In an east-facing parking lot. In the morning.
So I’m in my little blue Honda CRX hatchback one morning, stretched out as far as I can go (not far), trying to doze and “Walkaway Joe” by Trisha Yearwood comes on the radio. I start wondering about that story from the mother’s point of view. I was not a mother at that time, so this was all a thought experiment. I wrote “John 3:16.” My creative writing prof, who was the executive editor of my university’s lit rag, loved it. He said, “Look, I can’t teach you anything, so you’ve got an A in this class, but I’d consider it a personal favor if you’d come to class and turn in the assignments so I can see what you come up with.” It was mindblowing to get that kind of approbation from someone that weathered, experienced, and lofty, so even though I’d been working all night and this class was at eight a.m., you better believe I was there and turned in everything assigned.
Then my dad died. I didn’t go to class for a while, obviously, but I also didn’t bother to inform my profs I would be gone or why because after 8-1/2 years of this college bullshit, I was just done. My lit prof caught me after class my first period back after the funeral and gives me condolences and I was like, whu? He said he read obituaries and my name is not common and it was listed in the obituary. Oh. Okay. Thanks. We were still on Hamlet. I didn’t dare say I think it’s stupid because I still need to graduate.
But then, as Knox does, he got his hooks into me. Like, WTF kind of a douchebag are you, anyway? And how horrible am I that I came up with this asshole and further, I want to explore him further? But because I was in my antihero phase, I followed that trail wherever it was going to go. My capstone advisor was a Latin prof (why? don’t know) who was fascinated by my novel writingness and she didn’t care what I wrote for my capstone project as long as I documented the creative process. The process was what she was after. So, I was in the throes of fleshing Knox out and my mind went all sorts of places and then settled on Hamlet because it’s stupid and so is Knox.
That was in 1994. I haven’t stopped thinking about this country-club trust-fund brat since.
Q: Where did you get the name Vachel?
A: The Wolf & the Dove by Kathleen Woodiwiss (use the “look inside feature” to go to chapter 1, 5th paragraph down). Vachel de Comte was one of the villain’s henchmen and I remember, as the story went along, learning he was a bit of a victim and feeling sorry for him. Bryce is also named from a character in that book.
Q: In Stay, the Big Bad Senator refers to Vanessa as Ford’s mistress. Is the secret out by then?
A: Rumors had started to swirl that Sebastian was Ford by the time The Goddess and Her Lover got wide press. That, Wild, Wild West, and Rape of a Virgin all feature women who are quite visibly in Sebastian’s close circle. One’s a coincidence. Two is a pattern. Three is a fact.
Q: I want the original (first edition) The Proviso, but it’s out of print and all the used copies are a gazillion dollars. Can I order one?
A: Sure. Email me. Expect to wait a while, though. Because it’s out of print, it has to be specially ordered.
Q: Why do you keep issuing new editions?
A: Why does anybody retcon anything, especially their own work? I shouldn’t, I know. It’s kind of like replaying an argument where you go home and think, “OMG I shoulda said X, Y, and Z!”
1. Because I can.
2. When I was growing up as an aspiring author (i.e., actively submitting work to be published), writers were being inundated with writing Rulez™. These Rulez™ are stupid because they’re unhelpful at best and catastrophic at worst, but they’re still floating around like they were engraved in gold plates, and writer missionaries are going to knock on your door one day and ask you if you know anything about Da Rulez™ and if not, would you like to know more. One of these Rulez™ is, “Don’t use ‘be’ verbs.” That would be “am,” “is,” “are,” “was,” “were,” “be,” “being,” “been,” and of course the infinitive “to be.” The purpose of this Rule™ is to avoid passive voice, but the nuance of passive voice is bypassed for a shortcut that is not at all correlative.
Anyway, when I was writing The Proviso the first time, I was still in Good Obedient Little Writer mode and I was doing everything I could to avoid “be” verbs. I mean, I hadn’t thought too much about it even then, so I twisted my authorial voice into pretzels to follow this Rule™ and came up with some really clunky sentence construction. The bad thing about that was, I knew it was wrong when I was doing it. I knew it made the work worse, but I went ahead and did it anyway. It bugged me for a long time, but I figured nobody would notice and if they did, I wouldn’t know.
I was wrong.
A writer whose work I respect said to me, “I’m enjoying your creative use of verbs.” I fucking died of shame and regret. Not because I did it, but because I knew it was wrong while I did it, and I got called on it. I had to correct that. So, okay. No big, rewire a few sentences here and there and call it good, right?
Nope.
3. There was one thing that readers did give me a lot of flak for, and that was why Eilis didn’t catch on to Sebastian’s alter ego. Ever. This baffled me to bits. Yes, the trope demands the character figure it out and do it quickly or else she must be stupid, but I’ve never really hit any trope just right. In this case, given the circumstances and Eilis’s personality, it would have been intellectually dishonest for me to write it that way. I did not fuck that up in any way, but all right, readers are mad I didn’t do the trope right. I decided to clarify my rationale.
Eilis: “Why in God’s name would you think any reasonable, intelligent, rational person would make that connection? Do you know what psychiatrists call that? Magical thinking. People take drugs to keep them from making those kinds of leaps. [ … ] An artist might have gotten it. A stoic, uptight, dehydrated, starving, and exhausted cat herder in the middle of a financial and emotional crisis would not.”
4. I needed to change Bryce’s wife’s name. “Michelle” and “she-SELL” rhyme. If I ever made an audiobook, I did not want that to be a thing.
5. I was writing Lion’s Share at the same time and I wanted to retcon Finn into it.
6. I put a third edition out because I needed a little TLC. I was going through a very long rough patch and this book is a comfort read for me, but then I started tweaking things here and there, clarifying things I thought were a bit muddy, adding fun tidbits, giving Justice more depth. I wanted to re-introduce this 17-year-old novel to new readers and didn’t want to give them substandard work. Yes, it’s the book of my heart, but the first edition is the worst of everything I’ve ever published. That’s to be expected, since it was the first. In my opinion, my best book is Magdalene.
I haven’t touched this FAQ in 8 years, so things have changed and I’ve gotten more questions.
I’ll add them when I can.