A Follow-Up Question for Michael Downing

A new question from the Seattle Gay & Lesbian Book Club for our author Michael Downing, about his novel Breakfast with Scot. Nick & Co. wanted to know if Scot -- the little boy inherited by the central characters Ed and Sam -- was based "on a real boy." Herewith, Mr. Downing's response:

Michael Downing: As a preamble to my response, I should say that I don't subscribe to the mystical school of writing. I'm never attended by a muse. I'm so conventional that I don't think I really understand what is real about magical realism.That said, I have to say Scot invented himself. It's true. I didn't intend to write a book about a boy. I had latched on to Ed and Sam and the intention to write a comic novel about nosey neighbors--something I know something about, as I have long been one of them.It's gets more complicated. I had actually signed a contract to write Shoes Outside the Door--a narrative history of the San Francisco Zen Center, the first Buddhist monastery outside of Asia in the history of the world. After several months of research and interviews, I realized it was going to be a much bigger project than I'd understood--not least of all because I understood that I didn't understand the first thing about the 5,000-year history of Buddhism, never mind trying to get a handle on the slip-knot of zen.I got depressed and wanted to cheer myself up, and that's when I decided to stop and write a comic novel. The only thing wrong with the many first drafts I ditched was that they weren't funny. Then Scot turned up. He entered my imagination fully formed. He was wearing some really bad red corduroy slacks and dragging a boa. I had no idea who he was or what he wanted with me, but he'd just stand there is his slouchy, hands-on-the-hips way and stare, occasionally widening his eyes to convey his astonishment at my failure to introduce myself and get him a cold beverage.Maybe he was an amalgamation of boys whose flamboyant bravery I'd admired. Maybe I hauled him out of my fear that he was the boy people saw hiding inside of me. Whoever he was, he made it clear he wouldn't go away, no matter how often I raised my eyebrows or sighed audibly to let him know I was too busy to entertain visitors.

An Interview with Michael Downing, Part Two

Further conversation with Michael Downing, author of Breakfast with Scot, the first book being discussed in the Seattle Gay & Lesbian Book Club. To read Part 1, click here.

Brad Craft: Religion is at the center of some of your earlier books, but not so much Breakfast with Scot.

Michael Downing: I’m very bad at religion. I gave it up when I realized my practice was a fantastically complicated method of wishing it weren’t so.
I’m not unaware that one of the few tenets common to religions around the world is the illegitimacy of GLBT people—in fact, it seems to the one of the criteria for ascending into the ranks of the so-called Great Religions of the World. It also helps to have a lot of preposterous advice for women. And I know this has made for a lot of misery. But I wanted to get at something that resides well below the level of stupidity and hate and codified bigotry.
I nixed religion in the neighborhood for two reasons. First, I could. Second, I wanted to place Sam and Ed and Scot in a benign world—a world in which more people than not are trying to get it right. (Cambridge really seems like such a place to me.) I’d read a lot of novels about gay people whose identities were formed in opposition to the culture. I got interested in what was at stake when gay people were embraced by the culture—what was at stake for gay people and for the culture.

BC: Our Book Club host, Nick DiMartino is, to use his own word, "obsessed" with first-person narrators.

MD: I share Nick's obsession.

BC: Your earlier novel, Perfect Agreement and Breakfast with Scot both have narrators who seem to share, for want of a better term, a gay sensibility; bemused, ironic, self-consciously, almost preemptively, self critical.

MD: I love the phrase preemptive self-criticism. It conjures up the cartoonish image of somebody constantly punching himself to beat everybody else to the punch. It's funny while it's happening -- and then you see the bruise.

BC: You've said elsewhere that you "wanted to write a genuinely comic novel about shame."

MD: In the most highfalutin terms. For what it's worth, I wanted to make the literal text of the novel transparent. This was in part a measure of how deeply I had fallen in love with the declarative sentence. And it was also something about my own sense that Scot -- all of us, I guess -- was first and foremost a kid, not a cryptogram or a problem to be solved. I figured if the literal text was plain, readers would be in the position all of the other characters -- especially Ed -- are in whenever they encounter Scot: staring at the obvious and turning it into a Rorschach test.

BC: And a first-person narrator, in this case Ed, puts the reader in Ed's position.

MD: The simple answer is that both Perfect Agreement and Breakfast with Scot are novels about community and the first-person narrator created a natural tension. Both Mark Sternum (the narrator of Perfect Agreement) and Ed are reluctant to surrender their singular sense of themselves.
Also, I think I might feel most confident as a writer—maybe I mean, least self-conscious—when I am inhabiting a character who wants nothing more than to talk, talk, talk to the reader. Frankly, nothing makes me weak in the knees like a good conversation. My most rewarding and intimate relationships are fueled by conversation. After a dinner at our house on the first night of a long weekend with several long-time friends, a relative newcomer said he felt like he’d been shipped off to Camp Can’t Shut Up. That’s my idea of heaven: Camp Can’t Shut Up.

BC: Ed is also very funny. I was reminded of other funny first-person characters, like Bertie Wooster. Ed seems to me to have something of that same innocence when we first meet him...

MD: I am a devoted Wodehouse fan. I’d love to think something of him rubbed off on me besides the ink from all those Penguin paperbacks. And I think it is very generous of you to call Ed innocent. If you mean, Ed is one of those people who is constantly astonished that the rest of the world still is not behaving as he would prefer, I agree.
My sense is that the quality all the characters (in Breakfast with Scot) share is almostness. Sam, as a chiropractor, is almost a doctor. Ed, as an editor at an arts magazine, is almost an artist. The neighbors, the Burlingtons are almost a family. Sam's brother Billy is almost Scot's father. Scot is almost a boy. And so on. You get it, I'm sure. The tragic (or more often in bad novels, melodramatic) version of this quality is a sense of fraudulence, of course. I liked the idea of almostness because it gives credit for people trying, for having ambitions and hopes, for taking a shot at something -- love, style, a neighbor's window -- even though they have bad aim. Unlike fraudulence, which is a lonely, unspeakable secret we carry, almostness is something others can do something about, should they be so inclined. Fraudulence gets solved (if it ever does) by the self. Almostness is susceptible to others, to the possibility that completeness is not a singular achievement.

BC: Nick and others have all asked about the movie made out of Breakfast with Scot.

MD: I am so grateful they made it -- I mean both that it got made and that it got made by that particular creative team and not any of the previous people who'd optioned it and seemed not to understand that it was meant to be funny -- that I am a bad reporter. I know that the screenwriter and director and producer were very nervous about showing me the first draft of the screenplay because of the hockey business (the character of Ed goes from being an arts magazine editor to being a former professional hockey player in the movie) -- which I really loved, oddly. It seems to me a genuine idea, and it also had the virtue of turning the project into an adaptation, not a film version of my novel. I love the cast. I wish we had more time with the women characters, each of whom struck me as spot on, as portrayed in the movie. I totally admire Noah Bernett, who plays Scot, and the choice to cast a kid who was not conventionally cute or elegant. I didn't love the choice to make him a great skater. I preferred the idea that Scot didn't come with any compensatory skills or adroitness often assigned to outcasts. And though I didn't love the choice to put Ed (renamed Eric in the film because Tom Cavanagh, who played him, was too identified with his TV show "Ed" -- really) in the closet, though I thought Cavanagh was superb, and I think he put on the screen something really new about what a man will do to himself and everyone around him not to feel what he is feeling.

BC: When are we going to get another novel from you?

MD:All I want to do is finish my memoir, I’ll Make it Up to You, and write a novel. I've been waylaid by the facts for way too long.

BC: Has being labeled a gay novelist limited you at all? Gay fiction seems to be disappearing as a bookstore genre.

MD: As for limits—well, I think the project of my life has been learning to love my limits. I really don’t think my career has ever been adversely affected by my being a gay man or by my choice to write about gay people. There have been three editions of Breakfast with Scot and my publisher is bringing out a new edition of Perfect Agreement at the end of this year. Frankly, the only thing holding me back is what I don’t do every day.
As for “gay fiction”—it occurs to me that genre is a lot like gender. I don’t trust the various categorical distinctions, and I really never think about them while I am writing. I mean, who feels confident about drawing the line between fiction and nonfiction these days?

BC: Thanks, Michael. We'll be checking in again I'm sure before we're done with Breakfast with Scot. Any last thoughts today?

MD: For now: David Geffen throws a million-dollar party for Barack Obama before anybody thinks Obama has a prayer of being elected and two years later Obama invites Rick Warren to say a prayer at his inauguration party—that’s a sublime gay novel just begging to be written.

An Interview with Michael Downing, Part One

Michael Downing is the author of Breakfast With Scot, the first selection of the Seattle Gay & Lesbian Book Club, meeting every Wednesday at 6PM, at Dunshee House, and hosted by our own Nick DiMartino. The novel was made into a movie of the same name, that played here in Seattle just this past Fall. Downing is the author of three novels before Breakfast With Scot, including Mother of God and Perfect Agreement (soon to be reissued,) as well as plays and two nonfiction titles. What follows is an email Q & A based on questions that have already come up in our ongoing Book Club discussion. More to follow in Part Two.

Brad Craft: Thank you for agreeing to do this, Michael. It means a lot to be able to ask questions of the author of our first selection for the Seattle Gay & Lesbian Book Club. Now then, family seems to be the topic, or at least the setting for all your fiction to date. In Breakfast With Scot, that family consists of a young gay couple, Ed and Sam, and Scot, the 11 year old of whom they become the guardians when his mother dies. In the novel, neither Ed nor Sam seem to have much family, other than the reprobate brother of Sam who leaves Scot with them.

Michael Downing: For starters, I most wanted to write about gay men whose relationship to the past was not traumatic. In practical terms, the absence of extended families made Sam & Ed more receptive to their neighbors -- and more vulnerable too. I mean, Mildred (an older neighbor who befriends them) might have been a little less bold had she noticed a woman of her age in the mix next door.

I also wanted to keep the scale of the novel small -- the lived time is something less than four months -- to preserve the fragile, indeterminate quality of the whole enterprise and of Scot himself. One way to do this was to give both Sam and Ed relatively uncomplicated pasts. This also increased their agency, I think. It put the burden of choice -- their choices about Scot, I mean -- squarely on them in the moment. Finally, I wanted to establish their reasonableness quotients so that most readers would want to be aligned with them -- and find themselves in the peculiar position of having to make judgments and decisions that would affect Scot's sense of himself.

BC: And yet, you have given the boys an extended family of sorts, a "family of choice," consisting of friends and neighbors. Many of us have created just such families in our own lives.

MD: That phrase "family of choice" was absolutely in the air while I was writing (this book,) but the comic possibility I saw was in the inverted idea; the problem of being embraced by families we don't choose, families who choose us. That's really the basis for Ed's brief against Scot during the first half of the novel. Suddenly, Ed finds that he's part of a vast, invasive, opinionated, extended Cambridge family. (The novel is set in Cambridge, Mass., where Downing still lives.) It's as if Ed has been adopted against his will.

BC: We're curious about your own family. The bio. on your website mentions your partner of twenty years.

MD: My pal Pete and I have been together for 25 years -- my bio. needs updating, I guess. We have both always been welcomed into each other's families. Lucky us, huh?

BC: Indeed.

MD: And we've lived in Cambridge forever -- a choice I never regret.

BC: And the rest of your family?

MD: My family story is not easy to summarize -- but whose is? For starters, I am the youngest of nine kids, and my father died when I was three. I'd say more, but I'm madly writing the last bits of a memoir these days, and I have to conserve my words. My childhood figures prominently in the first half of the book, and the second half is about a genetic diagnosis that recently complicated the familiar story of my life. The book's called I'll Make It Up To You, and it will be published at the end of this year.

BC: We'll all be looking forward to reading it. To get back to Breakfast With Scot, we noticed that Scot is yet another "lost" child, an orphan or all but an orphan, and that this seems to be a recurring theme in your fiction. Any thoughts on why that might be?

MD: Here's all I know: orphans and castoffs and castaways instantly evoke my pity and my envy. That's an unusual double-header.

Past & Present

It can be quite discouraging, reading and recommending GLBT fiction.  The gay audience for fiction seems to be aging, and the younger generation seems not to find short stories and novels as vital to their understanding of themselves and our common gay culture as we did and do.  Perhaps as a symptom of the wider culture's abandonment of print in favor of electronic media, or perhaps as the direct result of publishing's growing reluctance to support gay literary fiction as the primary focus of gay writing as an art form, but for whatever reason, gay fiction seems to have devolved largely into an increasingly genre-driven ghetto of YA, fantasy and porn stories.

A very interesting discussion on the subject has started online at Afterelton.com., featuring two of the more successful gay authors of today, Michael Jensen and Brent Hartinger.  The interviewer and the writers all seem to assume that the great days of gay literary fiction are past.  They may be right.  (I'd prefer to think that they're wrong, and I suspect they would too.)

Meanwhile though, our own Nick DiMartino continues his effort to preserve and promote the best of GLBT fiction in the ongoing Seattle Gay & Lesbian Book Club -- meeting weekly at Dunshee House, every Wednesday at 6PM.  

Our first book, Breakfast With Scot, is proving to be the subject for a fairly wide ranging discussion of issues of gender, class and gay humor, as well as a grand excuse for homemade eatables, chat and good, multi generational gay company.  Author Michael Downing has agreed to answer our questions and has already provided us with a good deal to think about from our very first exchange with him.  (Keep an eye on this blog for more from the author soon.)

Please come by and check it out.

Seattle Gay & Lesbian Book Club Starts Wednesday!

Dunshee House is pleased to announce the launch of the Seattle Gay and Lesbian Book Club, a fresh, exciting social opportunity for lovers of gay literature in the Seattle area. Open to people from all walks of life—young, old, gay or straight—the purpose of the book club is to create a community of readers and give the solitary act of reading a gay social focus.

Stepping away from the traditional once-a-month format, beginning January 7th with Breakfast with Scot by Michael Downing, the book club will meet every Wednesday at 6 p.m. at Dunshee House, on the corner of 17th East & East Thomas on Capitol Hill. Rather than the typical single meeting moving quickly over many topics, each novel will be discussed for four consecutive Wednesdays, allowing time to follow particular avenues of interest, explore the portrayal of gender roles, parenting, integrity, and the many other issues pertinent to living a healthy gay life today. People with busy schedules can choose whichever date is most convenient. More socially-available readers may choose to come every Wednesday.

Nick DiMartino, online book reviewer, author of three novels and over twenty plays, will facilitate the meetings. Since 2001, DiMartino has been hosting the book club at University Bookstore, selecting the best new novel of the month. Inspired by the recent visit to Seattle of the Dalai Lama, DiMartino decided to create a vehicle to share with the gay community the greatest joy of his life, resulting in Dunshee House’s new, all-community weekly reading program, the Seattle Gay and Lesbian Book Club. “Reading can be lonely,” said DiMartino. “Sharing opinions and reactions, hearing how others experience the same book, can be an eye-opening experience.” The book club will provide a comfortable, safe place to exchange ideas and share perspectives. Brad Craft, UBS bookseller, will give book club members the social, cultural and historical background in which each novel or memoir was created.

Each month’s book will have four discussions, every Wednesday evening at 6. The first six selections have been announced. Future titles include works by Virginia Woolf, Thomas Mann, Jean Genet, Andre Gide, James Baldwin, Yukio Mishima, Dorothy Allison, Edmund White and Paul Monette.