In Conversation with Mitzi Rapkin on the First Draft Podcast

First Draft: A Dialogue of Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, nonfiction, essay writers, and poets, highlighting the voices of writers as they discuss their work, their craft, and the literary arts. Hosted by Mitzi Rapkin, First Draft celebrates creative writing and the individuals who are dedicated to bringing their carefully chosen words to print as well as the impact writers have on the world we live in.

Article continues after advertisement

In this episode, Mitzi talks to Jane Hamilton about her new novel, The Phoebe Variations.

Subscribe and download the episode, wherever you get your podcasts!

From the episode:

Mitzi Rapkin: Since this took years and many many drafts, why didn’t you give up?

Jane Hamilton: I really loved writing this book. I loved being with Phoebe. I love Phoebe. I love those boys. And I didn’t give up because I thought, if I can’t make a book about a girl who runs away and hides away in the basement of a family with 14 children, if I can’t make that work, then I really need to change my profession. What else would you need to follow through on a book?  And also, you know, the coming-of-age story asks, as Patricia Lockwood recently stated, when you’re writing anything she claims you’re asking the questions, what am I? Who am I? What is the performance of myself? What is it to be a human being? And you know, all of those questions are embedded in the coming-of-age narrative. And so again, I thought, if I can’t make this work, then it’s over for me. I was working on other things and always I was happy to be in it. And I don’t know if this is your experience, but I’ve written several failed novels, and when I have gone back to them, the experience is in the body as well as the brain, and in those failures that weren’t going to work I felt ill.  And always with Phoebe, I was just overjoyed to be back with her, so that let me know that I just had to carry on. And also, failure can be very useful, because it can liberate you into a kind of freedom. You know, people were telling me, cut out the hardware store scene, make it this way. And I thought this is never going to be published, so I’m just going to do what I want.

***

Jane Hamilton lives, works, and writes in an orchard farmhouse in Wisconsin. Her short stories have appeared in Harper’s magazine. Her first novel, The Book of Ruth, won the PEN/Ernest Hemingway Foundation Award for best first novel and was a selection of the Oprah Book Club. Her second novel, A Map of the World, was an international bestseller.  Her new novel is The Phoebe Variations.