Since her best-selling debut novel, “Gods in Alabama” (2005), Joshilyn Jackson has carved out a niche for herself as a chronicler of the New South. In her books — including “Between, Georgia” (2006), “The Girl Who Stopped Swimming” (2008), “Backseat Saints” (2010) and “A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty” (2012) — Jackson spins the romantic adventures of her contemporary heroines, who often have some of Scarlett O’Hara’s pluck but little of her emotional baggage.
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Jackson’s latest, “Someone Else’s Love Story,” follows Shandi, a 21-year-old college student who moves from rural Georgia to the Atlanta area with her 3-year-old child-genius son, Nathan, whom Shandi believes was the product of a virgin birth. (Shandi’s bookish friend Walcott has dubbed Nathan “Natty Bumppo,” after the hero of James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales.) On the first page of the novel, Shandi meets and falls in love with William Ashe, a brilliant but haunted geneticist with Asperger’s syndrome, while both find themselves caught in the crossfire of a robbery at a convenience store.
Printers Row Journal caught up with Jackson, 45, for a phone conversation from her home in Decatur, Ga. (Jackson and her husband lived in Chicago and Oak Park for several years beginning in the late 1990s while she pursued her master’s degree at the University of Illinois at Chicago.) Here’s an edited transcript of our chat.
Q: You lived in Chicago for a while, but you’re a Southern girl by birth.
A: Oh, yeah. I grew up on the Redneck Riviera, in Pensacola, Fla. We also called it “L.A.,” meaning Lower Alabama (laughs). The Panhandle of Florida is much more Southern than south Florida or central Florida. That’s why it gets called Lower Alabama. Not a lot of Florida is really what I would call the American South, but the part I’m from is definitely the South, for good or ill. Or both.
Q: Your books are set in the South, and the setting is more important in some of the books than others. In “Someone Else’s Love Story,” it’s not hugely important. This story could happen anywhere.
A: Yes, I agree. This is definitely what I would call a New South book, and it’s getting harder and harder to tell the South from anywhere else.
Q: Is that a good thing or a bad thing? Some people have nostalgia for the Old South, and others would say, “Good riddance.”
A: That’s right. I think it’s hard to be a thinking person from the South and not be ambivalent about the transition we’re seeing. So, yes, it’s sad, and yes, it’s wonderful. The South generates writers, you know, because if you’re a thinking person born on “this black and bloody soil,” as they say, there’s a love for your homeland but also an ambivalence.
Q: Ambivalence about what?
A: Our bloody history. Our dividedness. Our tendency to — excuse me — see things in black and white, to think of race relations strictly as a black-and-white issue. Sometimes our small-mindedness. Sometimes our insularness and sometimes our pigheadedness.
But, you know, there’s also some beautiful stuff in the South, culturally, that is neat and interesting: our sense of community, our oral history, the way we tell stories, the way we are so accepting of weirdos and crazy people and grotesquerie of all kinds. In the South, we don’t hide our crazy people. We put them right on the front porch and say, “Well, that’s Uncle Morty.” There’s also our way of speaking — the rich language, the colloquialisms and so on, though we’re losing that, too. It’s sad to see it being whittled away out of the language, so that everybody talks like they’re on CBS.
Q: In the book, the narrator talks to someone and then says, “She probably grew up saying ‘you-uns’ instead of ‘y’all.'”
A: That’s mountain talk. If you’re from the mountains of Georgia and the Carolinas and on up into the mountains of Arkansas, and are socioeconomically troubled, you often say “you-uns.” The first time I heard it was when we rented a cabin in the mountains and went to this little ramshackle store and the girl said, “You-uns got a sweet tooth, ain’tcha?” And I was like, “Wow! What?”
Q: There’s another moment in the novel where Shandi’s mother-in-law, who lives in Atlanta, makes a crack about the schools available in the small town where Shandi’s mother lives. It doesn’t go down well.
A: Yes, and I think that urban-versus-rural thing is a big issue everywhere in the country, not just in the South. But it’s true that in Atlanta people say, “So are you OTP?” Which means “outside the perimeter.” There’s a highway that goes all the way around Atlanta in a circle, and people who live inside the perimeter call everybody else the OTP people (laughs). And, you know, I don’t really like small towns or suburbs. I like cities.
Q: But isn’t Decatur a suburb?
A: Decatur? Oh, no, in Decatur we can spit and hit Midtown! We’re inside the perimeter, dude (laughs)! We’re our own city, like Buckhead is its own city, but it’s inside the city center. Decatur is very artsy-fartsy, like Oak Park. There’s a lot of vegetable co-ops. There’s a lot of tattoos, a lot of divinity students, a lot of yoga studios.
Q: So what was the origin of this New South book?
A: I wanted to write a book about miracles. I wanted to write a book about a virgin birth, a holy sacrifice, and more than one kind of resurrection. That may sound like a familiar story, but I wanted the miracles to be explained and whittled away by the end. But there are two other miracles in the book. They’re tiny, and they’re not explained by anything, and they happen very quietly. They just kind of pop and diffuse out, and they change the course of people’s destinies in the book. But readers might not even notice.
Q: One seeming miracle is that Shandi has had a child before she’s ever gotten to, as she puts it, “second base.”
A: Yeah, the virgin birth is something you just have to roll with for a little while, although I think it’s fair to approach that with a bit of skepticism (laughs).
Q: There are a number of other medical phenomena in the book, including the fact that William, the hero, has Asperger’s syndrome, which is a form of autism.
A: Yeah, William is on the spectrum, although it’s so common now that I don’t even really think of it as a special feature of the book. Remember years ago when people would say, “Why does this novel have a gay character?” Nowadays, almost every novel has a gay character because, you know, everybody knows a gay person. And I think Asperger’s is becoming like that, because people who are on the autism spectrum are high-functioning, super-successful people, and they’re getting married and having children who have the same genes. I have it running all through my family. On my dad’s side of the family, there’s hardly anybody who’s not somewhere on the spectrum.
So to me, that’s just what people are like. There are lots of people like this who are having love stories and finding ways to live in the world and form families.
Q: William’s issue isn’t that he’s not emotional; it’s more to do with how he expresses that emotion, or fails to.
A: It’s about how he processes it, and how he comes to understand what he’s feeling.
Q: Another big theme in the book is how religious belief — Shandi’s mother is Baptist, her father Jewish — can create an additional layer of tension within families.
A: Yes, faith is a powerful force. Look at most wars; it’s up in there somewhere. It’s interesting to me that something that can be so healing and such a balm can also be so divisive and such a weapon. And anything that’s powerful is going to be exploited for purposes of power. It’s interesting to me, and terrifying. So, yeah, I was looking at that in the book.
Q: Your names in the book are also interesting. There are some literary references, Natty Bumppo being the primary one. What’s your process for coming up with names for your characters and how they work within the framework of the story?
A: Well, I start by looking at what the name means. Of course it has to sound right, and it can’t mean something stupid or terrible (laughs). I’m not very literal about it — it’s an organic thing — but the name has to be right, somehow. So I go through a lot of names before I find the right one.
And part of getting the voice right is getting the character’s name right. William — I can’t imagine William being named anything but William. I like that no one calls him Will, except for his wife on two very intimate occasions. He’s William. And Shandi’s name I thought of as a compromise between, like, the parents’ names. You want the names to evoke something. But you don’t want your names to be overly imbued with meaning, because then people come away trying to do crazy numerology on them or whatever.
Q: And Natty Bumppo?
A: It’s quite a name for someone who’s only 3 to have to carry, isn’t it (laughs)? And Walcott is an English major, a very well-read kid. Natty Bumppo isn’t just a literary reference, of course; in a weird way, it’s also a cross-cultural name. Just like Shandi growing up between worlds, Natty Bumppo is a white character who grew up in a Delaware Indian tribe but doesn’t belong to one thing or the other. So it seemed fitting on a lot of levels.
Kevin Nance is a Chicago-based freelance writer and photographer. Twitter: @KevinNance1.
“Someone Else’s Love Story”
By Joshilyn Jackson
Willilam Morrow, 320 pages, $26.99
