By Christine Rice
Jessie Ann Foley’s young adult novel, The Carnival at Bray (Elephant Rock Books), is complex and dark and gritty and hopeful. The characters’ struggles seem insurmountable at times, frustrating, and gut-wrenching. There’s a mother whose blind pursuit of a relationship yanks her (and her unwilling family) from Chicago to a small town in north County Wicklow, Ireland. There’s an idealistic and beloved uncle whose addictions tank his dreams. And then there’s Maggie, the novel’s teenage main character, struggling to make sense of it all.
This indie-book-that-could won the 2014 Helen Sheehan YA Book Prize and was recently shortlisted for the 2015 YALSA Morris Award by the Young Adult Library Services Association, one of five books (out of hundreds) shortlisted for the honor.
CR: Congratulations on the YALSA Morris Award nomination. What does this nomination mean to you and to the book?
JF: According to YALSA’s website, the Morris Award “honors a debut book published by a first-time author writing for teens and celebrating impressive new voices in young adult literature.” When my publisher called me to tell me I’d been shortlisted, I couldn’t believe it. Sometimes, when you’re working with a small press, it’s difficult to get the word out about your book because smaller presses simply don’t have the marketing machines that the big publishing houses have. So this award was especially important to me because librarians began talking about TCAB, reviewing it, and ordering it in much larger numbers than they’d been doing before the announcement. I felt so honored to be nominated by YALSA, too, because nobody reads more, or knows books better, than librarians. For them to choose my book out of the hundreds of YA titles they read each year was truly humbling.
CR: Maggie is a wonderfully tangled mass of contradictions (any mother of a teenage daughter knows this to be true). At times she’s confused, confidant, angry, delighted, embarrassed of her family, goes along with the crowd, stands up for herself, hates/loves her little sister. She’s just this wonderful, complex character.
She gets herself in/deals with/and out of situations that we all know girls go through (but we often don’t see in fiction). How important was it for Maggie’s experiences to mirror reality? In other words, this could have been an easy read about a girl who moves to Ireland and has a tough time fitting in but you made it complex and dark and gritty. Why not just set a teenage character in Bray and let her meet a boy wizard?
JF: I love all sorts of books, but as a reader, my favorite type of literature is realistic fiction. So it only makes sense that realistic fiction is also what I write. When I was drafting the book, there were so many times when I asked myself, “Is this what a real 16-year-old might do?” Luckily, teenagers can be totally unpredictable and often contradictory, so I had a lot of leeway. I wanted Maggie to have a core self that she would always be true to, but to make decisions along the way that would mirror the mistakes and triumphs a young person might realistically make.
CR: There’s a really hysterical scene of Maggie’s first kiss (“…jammed a cold, limp tongue into her mouth…”) juxtaposed with a startling scene where Paul pushes Maggie’s mouth down on him and she nearly vomits. Those are such intimate moments. How do those intimate moments help the reader understand the character? How do those moments help you, as a writer, develop character?
JF: That second scene with Paul was really hard to write. But I didn’t include it just for fun. It goes back to your question about realistic fiction. The truth is, if you’re a person who finds your Eoin on the first try, then consider yourself part of a very small, very lucky minority. The rest of us have to deal with our share of Pauls before we find our Eoin, and sometimes those experiences are painful. Paul doesn’t assault Maggie or overtly force her into anything, but she still feels this tacit pressure– which I don’t think boys feel the way girls do– almost like, “well, I’ve gone this far with him, now I have to do this with him.” As Maggie grows as a character, she develops into a young woman who doesn’t feel that pressure, or becomes impervious to it. Part of that is meeting Eoin, but I’d like to think that most of it comes from within herself.
CR: This is just a wonderfully feminist book. Did feminism influence your work/the story in any way or did the story evolve more organically than that?
JF: Thank you! I love hearing that. But no, I was not thinking of the story in feminist terms as I was writing it. Maggie is not representative of any ideal or principle. As I mentioned earlier, my goal was to create a character that makes decisions that a real sixteen-year-old in her situation might make–decisions motivated by love, insecurity, fear, or any other number of totally apolitical factors.
CR: Maggie goes through the breakup of her parents marriage, moves at a crucial time, deals with her mother’s drinking, survives her uncle’s suicide. You teach high school. How much of what you see your students’ going through influences your writing?
JF: I don’t use my students’ stories or experiences in my writing, but I will say that the best compliment I’ve gotten about the novel is when a young reader said, “You haven’t forgotten what it’s like to be a teenager.” That was so cool to hear, and I have my students to thank for that. Being immersed in the world of high school every day will teach you to think like a teenager!
CR: How has becoming a mother influenced your writing process?
JF: It’s totally different now, not just in the way I look at the world, but also on a technical level. For example, when I was writing TCAB, I rarely moved on to a new chapter until the previous one was fairly polished. I did a great deal of fiddling, dillydallying, staring, and procrastinating, because I had the luxury of time. But now, my writing is dictated by nap time and bedtime, and every free moment counts. With the novel I’m currently working on, I have a self-imposed, non-negotiable weekly word count deadline. I’m trying to write a full draft all the way through before going back and rewriting/shaping. So far I have about 50,000 words, but there are huge chunks of it that I haven’t reread yet–not even to spellcheck. I’m sort of afraid to go back when it’s finished and read what I’ve written. There’s a good chance it will make no sense. But I guess that’s why they call the first draft the throwaway draft.
CR: There is such love of and for Chicago in this book. Chapter Nine begins with a lovely ode to Montrose Beach and then there are the club scenes. Why couldn’t this book have happened in New York or LA? Why is Chicago so integral to Maggie’s story?
JF: One of my favorite writers is Stuart Dybek, and even though the Chicago of his stories is often dark and lonely and hostile, you can sense his adoration for this place in his work, which I love. Developing a sense of place is really important to me as a writer, and in comparison to the Ireland or Italy scenes, the Chicago scenes were so much more intuitive for me, because I was born and raised here. And let’s be honest: I think the market for books about New Yorkers doing New York things in New York is pretty well covered.
CR: The music of your teenage years always seems so much more influential than any other time of your life. At least it was for me. What’s the connection between that influence and your writing? Content only? Or is it something more?
JF: One of my favorite parts about writing is how the story can surprise you: you think it’s going to be about one thing, but then you start to discover it’s about something else. I didn’t know that my novel was going to be about music when I started writing it. But as Uncle Kevin developed into an important character, the musical angle grew with him. I had so much fun going back and listening to all my 90’s music–some of those albums I hadn’t listened to for years. It definitely brought me back–as you said, the music of your teenage years is just so influential. I barely remember my first kiss. But I’ll never forget the first time I heard Pearl Jam.
CR: I’ve been acquainted with you and your work for a while now and distinctly remember a short story by the same name published in The Reader. Did you envision TCAB as short story or did you always know that those characters would explode into a novel?
JF: I actually never thought TCAB was going to be anything other than a short story. Then I met with an agent about a short story collection I’d written. After very nicely rejecting me, he suggested I try writing a novel. A teacher of mine from Columbia College, Don DeGrazia, suggested that TCAB had always sounded like a first chapter to him, so I went back and took another look at it. I developed the character of Uncle Kevin, and then the novel began.
CR: You have a wide range of work — from essays to short stories to novels — out there. How has the experience of writing TCAB been different from writing short stories and essays?
JF: I found that writing a novel was really fun because you get to spend so much time with the characters. For months, even years, they’re with you in the shower, and in the car, and pretty much anywhere else where you’re alone with your thoughts. Craft-wise, you get to practice all sorts of storytelling techniques, and if you get a crazy, off-tangent idea for a scene, you can still write it, and possibly even use it, because novels have so much more room than short stories. That said, I still absolutely love the short story form and am working on a new story right now.
CR: Dan Sean was an interesting choice as one of Maggie’s friends. Tell me a little bit about the evolution of his character.
JF: Dan Sean is the only character in the book who is based off a real person. The first time I met this remarkable man (who is actually 102 now), I thought, I need to write about him someday. Although that could have been the incredibly stiff hot whiskey he served me, followed up by a large hot brandy.
And if you’re so inclined, listen to the The Carnival at Bray soundtrack while sipping your own large hot brandy.
