Q and A with Debra Dean

Debra Dean is the bestselling author of four critically acclaimed books that have been published in twenty-one languages. Her debut novel, The Madonnas of Leningrad, was a New York Times Editors’ Choice, a #1 Booksense Pick, a Booklist Top Ten Novel, and an American Library Association Notable Book of the Year. Her new book, Hidden Tapestry, tells the remarkable true story of Belgian-American artist Jan Yoors – childhood vagabond, wartime resistance fighter, polyamorous New York bohemian – and the two women who agreed to share his life. Best-selling author Ross King has called this “one of the most remarkable artistic stories of the twentieth century.”

We’re delighted to feature her on WWWB!

You have said that book club members have been some of your most enthusiastic and loyal readers.  What have you learned from them?

When my first book, The Madonnas of Leningrad, came out, I learned so much from talking with readers. It was like being given the Cliff Notes to my own book. Much of my writing happens at a deep subconscious level—it’s marinating down there and then surfaces as I write. So book club members would make very smart observations about metaphors or thematic threads or the meaning of a scene—“You gave your main character the name of Marina, which is the Russian equivalent of Mary. Did you give Anya her name because in the Bible, Ann was the mother of Mary?”—and I would be startled because if that had ever been my conscious intent I had forgotten it. I’d just say, “Wow, cool, yeah, sure, that was exactly what I meant to do!” The more book clubs I talked with, the smarter I got.

What was it like to have your 2006 debut novel, The Madonnas of Leningrad, become a bestseller and be published in 21 languages? 

It was a Cinderella experience—if Cinderella was 47 years old and the ball was a book launch. I wasn’t an overnight success—I had been working towards publication for years, but I was still pretty naive about the business.  When my agent sold the German foreign rights at auction and called to tell me the winning bid, I was thrilled—if not a starving artist, I was close enough to pass for one—but they could have sold the rights for half that and I would have been over the moon. I had no idea whether that was a typical amount. What I had heard about publishing often turned out not to be my experience. Authors frequently moaned about their book tours, but I had a blast. I knew how lucky I was.

As far as the foreign language sales, that was so amazing, seeing my novel in translation with all these different covers. Even if I couldn’t read any of them except the French, there was something unreal about seeing my name on the cover and then all these pages of words I couldn’t read.

How did you come to write your newest book, HIDDEN TAPESTRY: Jan Yoors, His Two Wives, and the War That Made Them One?  

One of my dearest friends, bookstore owner Mitchell Kaplan, said to me one day, “I have your next book.” Authors hear this a lot, and it’s never true, but I listened as he started telling me this wild story about a Flemish American artist named Jan Yoors (the first hame is pronounced “yawn”) who ran away with the Gypsies as a child and then fought alongside them during World War II and then ended up after the war in a polygamous marriage. The two wives, who were best friends from childhood, shared him and wove the magnificent tapestries he designed.

Mitchell’s sister Susan Kaplan had made a documentary film on polygamy and had gotten to know the two women. One of them, Marianne Yoors, was still alive, still living in Greenwich Village, and Susie arranged to introduce us. I flew up to New York on kind of a blind date. Marianne and I had to check each other out, she to see if I could be trusted to tell her story, and I to see if it was a story I wanted to spend several years of my life telling.

Your previous books were all fiction. Why did you choose to write this one as non-fiction? 

I can’t remember if my initial impulse was to novelize, but it quickly became apparent to me that it needed to be told as non-fiction. With historical fiction, you need to have gray areas, blank spaces in the history that are unknown, where the writer is free to fill in with her own inventions.

So, for instance, with The Madonnas of Leningrad, I stuck very closely to the historical events of the Siege of Leningrad—pretty much everything that happens in that novel really happened—but I made up the characters. With the Yoors’ story, I just didn’t feel like there was room for me to invent. Jan Yoors had written two memoirs and given scores of interviews. The first wife, Annabert, had kept diaries her entire life and had saved everything—every letter, every invitation, every newspaper clipping. And I ended up doing more than a hundred hours of interviewing with Marianne and other people who knew the Yoors. Even if I had wanted to make it fiction, I knew too much.

In HIDDEN TAPESTRY you return to some of the themes that threaded through your acclaimed novel, THE MADONNAS OF LENINGRAD: the heroism of ordinary people in wartime, the mixed blessings of love, and the power of art to save us. Please talk about that some more.

For better or worse, I don’t choose the subject of my next book with any kind of rational deliberation. I don’t think about it in terms of how it will play off of what I’ve done before or what the market for this potential book will be. I have to be haunted by a story or some fragment of a story. If it just won’t go away, I write it. And then only in retrospect do I see how the story I’ve written is connected to what came before. I gravitate over and over again to the same areas of personal fascination.

I’m drawn to stories of survival, how people manage in situations of the most extreme duress. What gets them through? My answers are love and beauty, perhaps because they have saved me thus far. I want to believe that they might see one through, even if the worst comes. But perhaps I’m unsure because I keep returning to the problem, book after book.

Did Jan Yoors really have two wives at the same time? How did that work?

He wasn’t legally married to both of them at the same time. He married Annabert, but then rather than have a secret affair with Marianne on the side, the way people normally conduct these things, he went to his wife and persuaded her to allow him to sleep with her friend. He was purportedly quite charismatic and one has to imagine that this would have required every ounce of that charisma. Between themselves, the three of them referred to their relationship as a “threefold cord”, a phrase from the New Testament.

Theirs was a private arrangement because, of course, bigamy was punishable by law. In public, when it was necessary to make introductions, Annabert was introduced as Jan’s wife and Marianne was her sister. Years later, when Marianne got pregnant, Jan divorced Annabert and married Marianne so that the child could have his name. Annabert became the sister. Both women claimed this didn’t change a thing for them.

What are your top three writing tips?

Here’s some things that help me when I get stuck.

1. If you’re stuck in some part of the story or it’s just turning into a slog, drop it and skip ahead to the part of the story that youreallywant to tell, the part you’ve been waiting to get to. Very often, you’re stuck because you don’t know what happens. If you skip ahead you usually either find out what it was you needed to know to write that scene or just as often, you find out that you didn’t really need that part of the story after all.

2. If I have a character that feels like a stick figure, I will step outside of the story and interview the character, ask him or her questions and then freewrite the answers in the voice of the character. I ask them what they are most afraid of, what’s their favorite article of clothing, what they would like to do in their life if they could do anything, questions that aren’t directly connected to their role in the story. This gives them a chance to talk, rather than simply being the puppet that is saying what I need them to say to advance the plot. And they begin to develop personalities. I write these fast, ten minutes per question.

3. It can’t be said too many times, you have to show up. Set a regular time that you’re going to show up for your writing rather than waiting for inspiration to strike. It’s actually easier if you treat it like a job.

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A native of Seattle, Debra and her husband live in Miami, where she is on the creative writing faculty at Florida International University. You can find her on Facebook and at debradean.com.

About Hidden Tapestry

Hidden Tapestry reveals the unforgettable story of Flemish American artist Jan Yoors–childhood vagabond, wartime resistance fighter, and New York bohemian — and the two women who shared his life and wove his magnificent tapestries. At the peak of his fame in the 1970s, Yoors’ photographs and vast tapestries inspired a dedicated following in his adopted Manhattan. Though his intimate friends guessed the rough outline of his colorful life, Hidden Tapestry is first to detail his astonishing secrets.

Tags: featured, women writers

Category: Interviews