Interview by Christine Rice
Not only is René Steinke’s Friendswood one of Mashable’s ’24 Must-Read Books for Summer’ but Elizabeth Gilbert calls it, “. . . a book of rare power, tempered by equally rare grace.” Darin Strauss says Friendswood is, “A large-hearted, big-brained book.” And if all that wasn’t enough, just last week, producers Elizabeth Fowler (“Devil’s Knot”), Susan Duff (“Material Girl”), and Dannielle Thomas (‘The Client List”), obtained the novel’s movie rights.
In Friendswood, Steinke investigates a town’s response to crimes and misdemeanors, and she puzzles at how fear can turn neighbor against neighbor, jobs trump all, secrets are kept, and how a ‘get along, go along’ mentality makes even reasonable people turn a blind eye to wrongdoing.
It’s also about that one person who digs in her heels and fights back.
Steinke takes the time to dissect her characters’ humanity and, as a result, their complexity needles your conscience; there’s a realtor who prays for prosperity while battling addiction, a grieving mother who goes to extremes to protect a town that has turned its back on her, a football player whose recklessness nearly ruins a young girl’s life.
Steinke’s ability to heighten a small town’s idiosyncracies – to lovingly detail what other writers might sacrifice for plot – transforms the town of Friendswood into a character in the same way Gabriel Garcia Máquez imagined Macondo or Sherwood Anderson presented Winesburg, Ohio.
CR: You’re a native Texan. If we were somewhere in Texas, where would it be?
RS: La Casita Restaurant in Friendswood, because it has such an authentic ambiance and good food, and it’s where I first had important conversations that led to the book. And it was a place where my friends and I hung out in high school.
CR: This book investigates a broad swath of crimes — which ones seem ‘acceptable’ by society, which ones get swept under the rug, which ones get attention, and which ones don’t. It’s also about tenacity and anger and revenge.
Without giving too much away, toxic chemicals are found in a residential area and, as a result, people get sick. After some time, and without proper cleanup, a new developer decides to build on that same site.
It’s almost unbelievable that companies/corporations feel entitled to risk public heath for profit. But it happens all the time. Right now, in Chicago, a company (owned by the Koch brothers) has proposed suing the city in response to regulations on their petcoke dumping site on the Southeast Side of the city.
RS: Yes, these situations happen all the time, all over America. I’m especially interested in what happens to the people in these communities after the media-storm has passed. The environmental catastrophe in the novel was partly inspired by an actual event just outside of Friendswood, when, in the early 1990s, an entire subdivision had to be razed because it had been built so close to an old refinery and a field where petroleum-related chemicals were buried.
CR: One of the main characters, Lee, has been fighting to expose the truth for a long time (and her frustration nearly crushes her). I loved the way you worked the tenacity and incredible frustration of Lee into one character. Is Lee a composite or is her character based on a person you interviewed or found during research?
RS: Lee is an invented character, not really a composite, but I learned a lot about her research and activism by reading interviews with the journalist of the local paper in Friendswood who broke that story before it finally caught national media attention.
Lee’s frustration, I think, echoes the frustration of many people who sometimes feel as if one voice can’t make much of a difference. But her fight gets tangled up with her grief, which is important to the story—
it’s not only a sense of “rightness” that drives her, it’s also her futile attempt to undo the forces that originally caused her daughter’s illness.
CR: Friendswood, Texas is a small coastal town that puts a lot of stock in its football and religion. Your first novel, The Fires, relied heavily on the richness of place, too. Can you talk about the importance of place for this novel? There seems to be a deep understanding of people — Texan or otherwise — here. How did growing up in Texas influence the writing of the novel? How did the marginalized characters help frame the narrative?
RS: Whenever I begin writing a novel, I start with a place. I have strong, but complicated feelings about Texas, and I’m very fond of Friendswood, where I grew up. I don’t write “autobiographical” novels, but as I imagine my characters, they tend to grow out of places that I know well. Details of place are crucial. In Friendswood, the details that anchor the story are the Mexican restaurant, the Quaker church (we didn’t call it a meetinghouse in Texas), the gas station intersection, the high school.
Texas is so easy to satirize, and I very specifically did not want to do that. At the same time, I couldn’t write about a small town in this part of Texas without Friday night football, country music, and the oil business, so I became fascinated by all the tiny details and textures that would demonstrate the particular humanity of these characters. Hal, the former football star, lets his wife teach him to do needlework as part of his recovery from alcoholism. Willa, a teenaged girl, is obsessed with the survivors of the Alamo, and also with Joan of Arc and Emily Dickinson. Dex learns to two-step, first, as a way to connect to his estranged father, and then it helps him to impress older women.
CR: Friendswood is your third novel and you’re an accomplished poet, too. Did you start writing poetry or stories first? How do the forms fuel each other?
RS: I haven’t written poetry for many years, but in my 20s, I studied with Charles Wright, and my first publications were poems. I love reading poetry, and I almost always read poetry before I sit down to write. Poetry helps me think about language and compression and image. That usually can get me started with a sentence at least. And somehow, there seems to be a poet or a poet-voice in all of my books. In Friendswood, it’s Emily Dickinson. And the main character of Holy Skirts, the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, is a poet (among other things, nude model, performance artist, sculptor).
CR: The language in Friendswood is so rich, each page is so dense with imagery, and yet that richness fuels the plot. That’s a difficult balance. Something about it reminds of me Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men. So many novels sacrifice depth for plot. Can you talk about how you struck the right balance?
RS: Wow, thank you. All the King’s Men is one of my favorite novels. I guess I’m always first interested in the what the characters see and think, and I try to find the right language for that, and then the story and dialogue kind of comes along with lots of editing. I start with a lot of pages and scenes and cut to make the story come to the surface. For every page that exists in this book, I cut at least one other.
CR: Can you talk about your research process? How difficult (or not) was it to tackle such a big crime? How many years did it take you to hone in on how all of these subplots worked together?
RS: The sources for researching the environmental catastrophe were mostly available online. I read and reread all the newspaper and magazine articles that I could find, and every month or so, something new would come up in a search. I also talked a lot to people who live in Friendswood, to get a sense of different attitudes towards what happened.
The novel took seven years to write—a lot of weaving together subplots. Once I finally cut enough of what seemed boring to me, in the last six months, the stories rapidly came together.
CR: Who have you been reading lately?
RS: My friend Elizabeth Mitchell’s amazing and brilliant book on Frederic Bartholdi, the French artist who designed the State of Liberty. The book is called Libert’s Torch. Bartholdi’s life story is fascinating and inspiring, a true artist’s struggle, and I love the way Mitchell writes about all of these strange historical details. She makes me see all of those past events in an entirely new way.
CR: In your novel, there’s another crime, a personal crime, (a girl is raped by a gang of boys), that you treat with incredible delicacy.
There are also crimes committed between people at every turn — spouses, lovers, neighbors.
A few characters are thoroughly ‘unlikable’ (Cully, Hal, Jack) and, at first glance, you could have crucified them. Can you talk about developing ‘unlikable’ characters so that they don’t seem like thin, cardboard cutouts?
RS: Honestly, I’m attached to almost all of the characters in the book. I’ve spent so much time imagining their perceptions, their thoughts, their guilt and heartbreak, that I can’t write them off.
Image of René Steinke by Michelle Ocampo
