Michelle Huneven, the author of the novel BLAME, appears Saturday, October 10th at 3:00p.m., on the Columbia Sportswear Stage.
5 Things About Blame
1. BLAME is NOT autobiographical.
Patsy, the protagonist, is taller, much more academic than I am, and she’s also irritatingly beautiful. I have never been a prisoner or firefighter, a historian or married to a much older man. The one thing that Patsy and I share is an uneasy sense about our innate goodness. Neither one of us would assume we’d be among Calvin’s predestined few. Call it a sense of original sin.
Of course, in writing the book I drew from my personal storehouse of impressions, anecdote and knowledge, so that bits of my life float through the book much the way scraps of daily reality float through dreams.
2. BLAME grew from this little seed:
Twenty-odd years ago, I heard a man tell the story of being arrested for killing his ex-wife. She’d died during the last days of his drinking, when he was in a continuous blackout. Maybe he killed her, maybe he didn’t—he had no memories from those days. He assumed he was guilty. God knows, he said, the motive was there. In spite of himself, he had an ironclad alibi and the accusation was dropped. I never forgot how close that man came to a life in prison.
3. And from this short story:
On Easter morning in 1998, I wrote a short story called “THE BELLWOOD HOTEL” about Joey, a 12 year old girl whose mother is dying of cancer. Her whole family is in such crisis that one day, she’s assigned to the care of her black sheep uncle, Brice. Brice hands Joey over to his brilliant, wild, alcoholic girlfriend, Patsy. Left alone together, Patsy and Joey drink beer and take pills, and Patsy pierces Joey’s ears–badly.
I never tried to publish the story. It languished on my computer. Years later, once I decided to write about a crime committed during an alcoholic blackout, I knew who my protagonist was: Patsy.
4. For the longest time, I couldn’t begin BLAME.
In the short story, I imagined the setting as a small western city, Boise or Spokane. Once I decided to make the short story into a novel, I wanted to move it closer for research purposes. In a long bout of exquisitely testy procrastination, I couldn’t settle on a geography—and therefore didn’t start the novel. Sacramento? Modesto? Fresno? Finally, I took an exploratory trip to Sacramento—the first, I realized, of what would have to be many. I tried to write some chapters. Nothing took shape. I equivocated for months more. Then one day, I decided to set the novel in and around Pasadena, Altadena, La Canada—i.e. where I live. And I was off and running.
5. BLAME, the title, was the last thing added.
I began this novel calling it THE MEMORY CONSULTANT, because Joey (when she grew up) was going to make a meager part-time living from selling scrapbooking supplies and hosting scrapbook parties–the term for such a scrapbook profession actually is memory consultant. But Joey took up a different career, obviating that title, and much of the book was written with no title at all. As I neared the end, I came up with some real lame-o ideas like AFTERWARDS, AFTER ALL THAT. My retired agent suggested PATSY’S FAULT, which had an engaging jauntiness but seemed a little lite. My husband lobbied for just the protag’s name, PATSY MACLEMOORE, but I thought it too close syllabically to OLIVE KITTERIDGE. A good friend and fellow novelist suggested BLAME, which seemed strong, perhaps too strong.
Still, I sent the book out as BLAME. Even after Sarah Crichton bought it at FSG, she and my friends and all I kept searching for another title, something less thematically pointed. We searched long and hard and it’s embarrassing how few even remotely decent ideas we had. FOR ALL SHE KNEW. WHAT PATSY KNEW. OY!
BLAME it was, BLAME it stayed. BLAME, it turned out, is exactly right.