Fiction, fact, and everything in between
Lauren Aliza Green discusses her deeply felt first novel for the Kaplen JCC
When a piece of fiction really works for you as a reader, the line between its world — a made-up place — and your own — the real one — blurs. By the end of a successful novel, you, the reader, can feel so firmly rooted in it, no matter what happened in it, that you’re sure you’ve breathed its make-believe air into your actual lungs.
Lauren Aliza Green’s “The World After Alice,” published by Penguin Random House, is an intricately woven piece of writing; characters think silently, talk out loud, and see the same thing differently as they gather for a wedding that’s overshadowed by the death of the eponymous Alice, who killed herself when she was a teenager, nearly 20 years earlier.
On Friday, April 25, Ms. Green is going to be the first author to talk at the Kaplen JCC on the Palisades’ new program, Fiction Fridays, which will begin with the writer having a conversation with Kathy Graff, the director of new initiatives in the JCC’s adult department, and then most likely will move to a question-and-answer session. (See box.)
When fiction writers create characters, those characters often come alive to the writer; when the writer talks about the process of writing and the themes and theories and techniques she uses to bring life to the people who otherwise would lie lifeless on the page, you can feel the life in the room. The border between worlds gets a little more porous.
Ms. Green grew up in Tenafly, she went to school there, and she and her family were active members of the JCC. She particularly loved the drama department, led for decades by the extraordinary Deborah Roberts. “I did it for 10 years,” she said. “I did her after-school program, and I did Center Stage,” the JCC’s summertime drama and comedy camp. “I grew up playing a lot of instruments — violin, piano, guitar,” she said. She’s a singer, she took music lessons at the JCC’s Thurnauer School, and “I probably was in 200 shows with Deb, and with Amelia DeMayo.”
That makes the connections between reality and fiction even stronger. Ms. Green will be a guest at the same JCC where she spent much of her childhood and adolescence. Where she grew into herself. It’ll always be her place, even when it’s not.
“The World After Alice” is Ms. Green’s first published novel. Last year, she said, she published a chapbook of poems, and she’s written short stories for years; the first was published when she was 18. She earned a master’s degree in creative writing at the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin; her thesis was a group of five short stories. Each story was entirely independent of the others, with no shared characters, but the themes recurred throughout the book. “They were all about young women navigating unfamiliar experiences,” she said.
“Alice’s” main characters are the intertwined members of two families; it’s about grief and love, and it’s character-driven. “One inspiration that I had for the book is that I’ve always been obsessed with the story of Adam and Eve,” she said.
Why? In part because “it’s alive in the culture, so it’s all around us,” she said, and also because “I did a ton of theater, and one of the shows was ‘Children of Eden’ by Stephen Schwartz,” who also wrote “Wicked,” “Godspell,” and “Pippin.”
“I’ve been fascinated with Adam and Eve, and specifically I’ve been fascinated by the moment where they are cast out of the Garden of Eden, and then forced to resume their lives. They look around them, and they see a world that isn’t the world that they’d lived in until that moment — but still looks like the same world.
“What’s it like to live in a place that looks like home, but isn’t?
“That’s a good metaphor for grief, and I always knew that it would be the seed of a novel.”
It’s not surprising that when she talks about inspiration, or for that matter almost anything else, she uses lines or ideas from musicals for metaphor and reference. “Because I was in so many shows, even now, I’ll often say something that’s from the lyrics to ‘Guys and Dolls,’” she said.
She’s a member of the choir that has sung in the Christmas concert at Carnegie Hall for the last two years — she loves doing it, she says — and she compares “the way the choir director talks about the overlapping voices in it, because you make such use of counterpoint.”
As a writer, she’s far more interested in character than in plot, she continued. “The plot in ‘Alice’ didn’t emerge until late in the process of writing it. The first draft was almost plotless. There wasn’t even a wedding in it. But eventually I realized that I needed a frame. I needed a compelling reason for them to gather. I was interested in a wedding as a setting. It’s so public. All the characters have their own private desires and struggles, so to bring them all together in such a public gathering was exciting.”
In fact, she agreed that it’s like the “Fugue for Tinhorns” that opens “Guys and Dolls.” (“There’s a horse right here, his name is Paul Revere” blends into more advice about horses, all very confidently delivered.)
Why does she write about grief? “It’s the nature of the human condition,” she said. “We are motivated by grief and love.”
Yes, but why would someone as young as she is — around 30 — focus on grief rather than love? “Even as a kid, I felt the specter of death,” Ms. Green said. “I don’t want to be morbid, but I thought a lot about the finality and the magnitude of it, about the mystery of death.
“There is this vast unknown right around us at all times. I would imagine that my writing is a way of reaching toward it.
“And some of the characters in the book wonder about it as well.”
And of course there is a great deal about love in the book as well. Love and grief are closely connected.
Ms. Green talked about the idea of disliking characters, something she understands intellectually but in no other way. “Some people couldn’t watch ‘Succession’ because they didn’t like the characters,” she said. “Not me.”
Her favorite character in the book, should she have to pick one, or at least the most compelling, is Linnie, Alice’s mother. “She’s polarizing,” Ms. Green said. “I hear from a lot of people who find her reprehensible as a mother. I find her compelling because she married Nick, but she always feels like an outsider. She’s from Minnesota, she dreams of being a dancer, but she falls short of those dreams. She’s good, but she’s not gifted, and that’s a curse she lives with.
“So she pushes her daughter in the way she wishes her parents had pushed her. That’s a choice that readers can judge — she judges herself for it. She has to live with it.
“We are all motivated by what we think is good, and I think that in Linnie’s mind she thinks that something might work for her daughter that never worked for her.
“For me, she is the most accomplished and complex person on the page.”
Ms. Green doesn’t write memoirs, she said. When she was in the master’s program for creative writing “some people were writing autofiction, but the requirement to have the ability to look at your own life and simultaneously to step out of it requires something that I don’t have.”
She kept a journal when she was a kid, she said, but even there, “I would tell stories, but they wouldn’t ever be about me.” Her instinct was less autobiographical than it was journalistic. Tell the story!
Turning the discussion back to the JCC, Ms. Green talked about a few treasured memories. “We did ‘Pirates of Penzance,’” — the Gilbert and Sullivan masterpiece that includes “I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major General” — “and there was a maypole. We spent hours and hours in the dance studio, 35 kids with ribbons. We did a terrible maypole.”
Her favorite role was as Nellie Forbush in “South Pacific” at Centerstage/BergenPAC. “My parents fondly tell the story of seeing me singing ‘I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outa My Hair’ while a gaggle of girls dumped water on my head,” she said.
There will be no buckets of water at the JCC on the 25th, but there will be an in-depth discussion of writing, death, grief, love, and memory, among other things.
Who: Lauren Aliza Green
What: Will inaugurate the Fiction Fridays program with its creator, Kathy Graff
Where: At the Kaplen JCC on the Palisades in Tenafly
When: On Friday, April 25, at 11:30 a.m.
How much: $12 for JCC members, $15 for everyone else
What else: Books will be for sale, and Ms. Green will sign them.
For more information and to register: Go to jccotp.org click on Adults, and then Lectures and Learning, or call Ms. Graff at (201) 408-1454.
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