So, yes, I’m late to this party*. I’ve been intending to interview Matrimony author Joshua Henkin on the site for, oh, AGES, and he’s been entirely gracious during an extended period when I’ve been so busy that pretty much all optional commitments have gotten continually pushed aside. But: We finally managed to get the interview done, and talk about all sorts of interesting things–writing workshops, craft and process (of course), recommendations–so I think you’ll agree it was worth the wait. If you’ve somehow missed the book, check out this review in the New York Times by Jennifer Egan. And now, without further ado…

GB: I usually start out by asking people about their work process and how it changes (or doesn’t) between projects? Can you tell me a little about what yours looked like for Matrimony?

JH: Well, it took me ten years to write Matrimony, and I threw out more than three thousand pages, so I sometimes think that my work process should be an object lesson in how not to do things. But actually, the book needed to brew as long as it did. My first novel, Swimming Across the Hudson, is told in first-person and is set over the course of approximately a year, whereas Matrimony is told from more than one point of view and covers about twenty years. So pretty early on I knew this was going to be a more ambitious novel and that I would need to approach it differently. Part of what I was doing was figuring out how to write a novel, since I was trained as a short-story writer, and though Swimming Across the Hudson didn’t literally grow out of a short story, it has the sensibility of a long short story–say, in the same way that Richard Ford’s early novel Wildlife does. So I was learning how to operate on a bigger canvas.

One interesting thing that happened early on was that my computer broke down, and while it was in the shop I was forced to write by hand. This turned out to be a real blessing. I’m an absolutely compulsive rewriter and reviser, and my natural inclination is to revise as I go along–to try, on the sentence level, to make everything perfect before I move on to the next scene. This approach is possible (though perhaps not particularly advisable) when it comes to a short story because with a story you can potentially see the whole in advance. But with a novel, you can’t see the forest for the trees, and you need to just write for a couple of years without really knowing what you’re doing or where you’re going. If you revise too early, it’s like building a house and working on the ornamentation on the doorpost before you’ve laid the foundation. You may end up with a beautiful doorpost, but it doesn’t belong in the house. Well, writing by hand helped me combat my tendency to revise too soon. There’s something about writing on computer that, in my case at least, makes me feel compelled to try to make things beautiful–probably because the words look neat on the screen and so I’m drawn to trying to make them neat in deeper, more important ways. But because my handwriting is so bad I had no illusion looking at the page that what I was writing was anything but rough, and this allowed me to plow forward without looking back. So even when my computer came back from the shop, I continued to write much of the first draft by hand.

One other process struggle was the simple fact that I was a different person when I finished Matrimony from who I was when I started it. When I began the book, I was single, living in Ann Arbor, and when I finished it, I was married, living in Brooklyn with my wife and two daughters. I’d gone from my early thirties to my early forties, which is a time of significant change for most people, and no matter what age you are, a lot happens over the course of ten years; your preoccupations and obsessions shift. So one of the struggles for any writer, but particularly for a writer whose book took as long to write as mine did, is to keep the voice consistent over narrative time, to make the novel’s themes and concerns part of a seamless whole. A writer wants to make his or her novel feel as if it was written in one sitting, and the farther away the book is from having been written in one sitting the greater the challenge is to make it appear that way.

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An Interview with Joshua HenkinRead More »