Protective Veneer | A Conversation with Melissa Ginsburg

By Eli Cranor

The sun rises through parted purple shades on the cover of Melissa Ginsburg’s new novel, The House Uptown. Or maybe it’s falling. Maybe we’re witnessing the end of a particularly steamy summer day in New Orleans. There’s no way to tell. The story contained within offers more questions than answers, but there’s one common thread throughout—heat.

The House Uptown is an emotional coming-of-age novel about a young girl named Ava. After her mother’s death, Ava moves to New Orleans to live with her eccentric grandmother Lane and her personal assistant Oliver. As Ava and Lane attempt to reconnect, both the oppressive heat and history of New Orleans bear down on them, forcing a reckoning for which neither is ready.

Melissa, author of the novel Sunset City, the poetry collection Dear Weather Ghost, and two poetry chapbooks, Arbor and Double Blind, is originally from Houston, Texas. She now resides in Oxford, Mississippi, and is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Mississippi.

I recently had the chance to sit down with Melissa and discuss The House Uptown, second-wave feminism, powerful sex scenes, and—of course—the literary landscape in Oxford.

Eli Cranor: Oxford, Mississippi is kind of like a literary holy ground for me. Every time I go there, I meet all these amazing authors. How did you wind up in Oxford?

Melissa Ginsburg: I was living in Iowa City for eight years before I came to Oxford. My husband Chris Offutt got a job teaching for the university. I started out as an adjunct and then my books came out and I got hired on as tenure track. That has just worked out great. I mean, I still don’t understand why there are so many great writers here. It’s so fun. There’s a million writers in Iowa City, but they are not nice to each other. It’s not like that here. This place is just a dream. I hope it stays this way for a long time.

EC: Where did the idea for The House Uptown come from? Do you remember where you were? What actually started it moving in your mind?

MG: I knew it was going to be a book before I started it. I had this idea. I had the people. They had lived in my head for a long time. They felt so real, and I was like, okay, I’m going to make this work. I’m going to make this world for them to live in. I can’t remember how it came together initially. The first thing I wrote was just the scene of Ava on the train down to New Orleans. I knew the ending. I knew the setting. That came out of being a writer and wishing, like Lane (who is an artist) wishes, that I could just be a writer and have no distractions from it. But also thinking about it from a really feminist angle. All the things that wives do, especially wives and mothers, to make things easier for other people in their lives. I was just like, “I wish I had a person who could do for me all the things I do for my husband and my stepkids, my colleagues.” I wanted to give Lane that. Oliver came out of the question, “Who could put up with this woman, and why would he do it?” And, in terms of personality, he’s the character in the book who is closest to me.

EC: Lane is a very successful muralist in New Orleans. Oliver is her personal assistant who basically does everything for her except paint. Oliver was also a drug dealer in a past life. Is that why you feel so connected to him?

MG: Yeah, so, I’ve never been a drug dealer or anything like that. But I definitely share Oliver’s protective veneer. He’s very vulnerable but he doesn’t show it. He doesn’t let people get close to him very easily. He’s got all these defense mechanisms going all the time. So it’s hard to get to know him very well, but he’s still able to navigate a lot of different worlds.

EC: I saw that, especially when he takes his trip to New York. Oliver doesn’t seem to enjoy the city at all.

MG: He’s overwhelmed by New York. He feels lost there. I mean, personally, I love New York, but I get very claustrophobic when I go there. And that’s such a New Orleans thing, too. When New Orleans people go other places they’re always disappointed.

EC: Let’s dig deeper into Lane. You have this amazing section in the book where she’s reflecting on the neediness of men, and I get that. I’m a husband and a father to two kids under the age of five. I try hard to help out, but, at the end of the day, I know my wife carries more of the load. Can you tell me more about where this part of Lane’s character comes from?

MG: Lane belongs to that generation of second-wave feminists. That feminism—or the mainstream version of it that trickled down—was so much about griping over housework and men. So some of it is that. But Lane isn’t able to abide by anyone else’s rules for very long, either. She has this artistic vision. She’s talented. She’s impatient. She knows her own worth and she knows there’s not a great place for her. So she has to make that place for her herself. And that’s also a very New Orleans trait. It’s okay to be different there. There’s a certain amount of embracing of rebellion and eclectic thinking, especially in the art world. You can get away with more of that kind of thing in New Orleans. And that is such an unusual cultural value in the South.

EC: As a writer, I read so many of Lane’s passages and I was just like: “Yes.” She’s basically willing to sacrifice anything for her art. I haven’t gone to the extremes that she has, but I felt it. I thought you just nailed that feeling and it made me wonder if those sentiments were coming from inside of you.

MG: A lot of that does come from me, but I also know a lot of writers and artists, and we all feel it. It’s harder for women, though. It’s harder for women to say no to things and be willing to sacrifice relationships for things that matter only to them. This is another generational thing. I think so many women of Lane’s time were mothers because that’s what they were supposed to do. Lane would’ve never thought not to have a child, but she’s not really cut out for being a parent. She does her best, but she also recognizes her limitations. She’s not somebody who wants to put her time into something she’s bad at. She’s like a lot of artists—and I include myself here—who think having kids is almost impossible. Kids need things and they need them now. Lane loves her daughter, but her daughter makes her feel like a failure. She doesn’t love that. It’s complicated.

EC: To me, so much of the book is about Lane and her art. You do a great job of not choosing sides. You don’t paint her as a bad mother or someone who should’ve gone even farther for her art. You play it right down the middle. But I wanted to try and pin you down on how you view Lane’s compulsion? Should she have been a better mother?

MG: I’m not picking a side. I couldn’t. I don’t feel any judgment toward Lane. I just think this is the situation; the dynamic. And it’s sad. Recognizing the sadness of it is just a fuller understanding of the consequences of her decisions. This is a family of three generations of incredibly strong, stubborn, talented women. They’re all really different from each other and not always good for each other, but I think that’s just family. It’s real. Lane knows she’s hurt the people she loves. That’s a lot of what the book is about. Everyone in the book has hurt people they love.

EC: I was so taken with your style. You’re a poet as well as a novelist. How has that combination influenced your style? Your point of view shifts really seemed to highlight this for me. There are places in the book where you’ll shift a scene’s point of view mid-paragraph. That felt a lot like poetry.

MG: This is the first time that I’ve tried anything like that. My first book, Sunset City, was all first-person, which was so limiting. By the time I was done writing that book, I was sick of the limitations. I wanted to try writing something where I felt as free as I feel writing poetry, which is a crazy goal. In poetry, you can get away with a lot that you can’t in prose. You don’t need to deal with logic or time; you can make all kinds of things happen just through music or placement on the page. So I wanted to find a way of writing prose that could be as fluid as my thoughts are, the way that I notice the world and the way that my characters think. I was worried about it at first. I’d write a paragraph with those point of view shifts then stop and think, “Can I do that? Is one allowed to make a sentence happen like this?” But then it worked, and I liked it, so I just let myself do it. It was fun.

EC: It gave the book great flow throughout. I never felt like the emphasis was on the dialogue, but more so the exposition and the thoughts going on inside the characters’ minds. You also employ shorter than average chapters. Did you combine all of those techniques on purpose, or was it something that just happened?

MG: The focus on the internal came out of working in the third-person for the first time. In first-person I always struggled with getting information across. There were things I knew my protagonist wouldn’t put into language, and I was only using her language. But I’m so interested in people, how they think—thinking about how they think. So the third-person allowed me to put all of that on the page and not have to rely on dialogue so much. I like short chapters. My poetry background makes brevity such a value. I love reading books with short chapters. Especially thrillers. It’s like little pieces of candy that you can just swallow all at once.

EC: I definitely got the feeling I was walking around inside these characters’ minds. There was never a rush for the narrative. I could especially see this in your description of Lane’s art. What was your experience with visual art and/or painting prior to writing this book?

MG: I have a visual arts background, but I never did anything with it as an adult for a long time. I think visually, and I know a lot of artists. I wanted something tactile and physical for Lane to be able to do. She could’ve been a writer, but, to me, that was not as rich on the page. I just thought visual art offered a lot more richness in terms of the depictions and the worlds Lane would come into contact with. I love the idea of her being so technically proficient. I mean, she’s a little nuts but she’s also extremely talented. She is capable of incredible precision and accuracy in her work. I also think that her kind of painting requires such intense focus; you can’t paint like Lane and be distracted. So, all those things she resents that intrude, that’s because they really are getting in the way. It’s not just because she’s grouchy, even if she is.

EC: Artie Guidry, the novel’s antagonist, is a politician. In a time when politics are such a hot-button issue, I thought you handled his profession carefully, without diving too deep into the issues. Was this intentional?

MG: I had Artie pretty fleshed out before Trump won the election in 2016. I was like, okay, I’m writing about this corrupt politician, even if he’s hesitant about his corruption. I also don’t know a ton about local politics in New Orleans. It wasn’t something I was interested in enough to do a ton of research on. I was more interested in somebody who would find themselves in that position of power—how he would be able to sell that to himself and still be able to think of himself as a good person. That psychological situation is very interesting to me.

EC: There’s a particularly steamy sex scene between Lane and Bert that I have to ask you about. I was blown away by how raw—and real—this scene felt. So many authors tend to gloss over sex scenes or skip them entirely. Why did you choose to paint such a vivid picture of these two characters’ most intimate moment together?

MG: It wasn’t in there to begin with. Then I thought, “We need to understand this dynamic between Lane and Bert in order to understand why she has made all these decisions and done all these things for him and his kid (Artie), who she doesn’t care about at all.” I think intimate sex like that is so much about power. I wanted to portray that in a way that was really concise. It was a way to show how devoted Lane was to Bert all her life. I got so close to Lane in this book. I mean, if I can portray the leaps that her mind is making, then I can also portray her most intimate, compelling memories too.

EC: You give a sly nod to Flannery O’Connor in this book. Who are some of your other greatest influences?

MG: I love O’Connor. I teach O’Connor in my classes. It was fun to slip that in there. Hanya Yanagihara’s book A Little Life was such a huge influence on me while I was writing this book. The way she makes room for each of her characters, the compassion and depth . . . I was thinking about that the whole time I was writing. I’m also such an addict of these BBC crime shows. If there’s a new one out, I watch it immediately. The work these shows are doing in terms of compression and psychological portraits and these nonjudgmental looks at really dark, sad lives—that is something I was certainly trying to do. I think of this genre as character-focused literary crime. Denise Mina does that really well. Her prose is so beautiful and clean. I love Donna Tart’s The Secret History. I really love Gillian Flynn, especially her first book, Sharp Objects. I’m always reading that kind of stuff.

EC: You mentioned your teaching gig earlier. We’ve talked about Lane trying to balance her personal life and her art. How do you balance being a teacher and an author?

MG: I love teaching. I find it really rewarding. I teach so many different kinds of classes I can switch it up and not get bored. I’m so lucky to have this job. I teach fiction and poetry at the graduate and undergraduate level. I teach American Literature classes too. But writing novels takes so much time. It’s difficult for my brain to deal with things like plot, which doesn’t come naturally to me at all. I need so much time and concentration. I wrote most of this book during times when I wasn’t teaching—during summers and winters.

EC: So you would let the novel sit for the duration of the semester and come back to it?

MG: Not stop completely, but I could not produce as much or write as well during the semester. But that’s not the case with poetry. I write poetry all the time. We have these super-talented graduate students in this program, and I write better poetry when I’m teaching poetry. But with novels, I need a lot of time. I do think I would’ve written this book a couple of years faster if I hadn’t had a teaching job and was just independently wealthy or something. You know, kind of like Lane.

Eli Cranor played quarterback at every level: peewee to professional, and then coached high school football for five years. These days, he’s traded in the pigskin for a laptop, writing from Arkansas where he lives with his wife and kids. Eli’s novel Don’t Know Tough was awarded the Peter Lovesey First Crime Novel Contest and will be published by Soho Press in 2022.

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