An Interview with Michael A. Fitzgerald

By Jenny Shank, 6-15-07

Michael A. FitzGerald is a Boise-based novelist, father, and software engineer with an MFA from the University of Montana.  His debut novel, Radiant Days, features a young American named Anthony who follows a beautiful Hungarian woman to the Balkans, and gets mixed up in an adoption scam, war, and other complications.  I recently interviewed FitzGerald via email about his travels, influences, the Boise literary community, writing sex scenes, and offending his parents.

New West: Did you travel in the Balkans during the time Radiant Days takes place or at any other time? If so, did you keep a journal or take notes about your experiences, and did you use this in writing the novel?

Michael A. FitzGerald: I lived in Budapest and Croatia in the early 1990’s, a few years prior to when the novel takes place. I was just out of college and knew I wanted to write, but like Anthony, I had no idea how. Luckily I knew enough to fill notebooks and many of the book’s landscape descriptions were later culled from them.

NW: Did you have to do much research to write the book?

MAF: It didn’t feel like active research, but during the six or so years that it took to write the book, I was reading what I could about the Balkans. To name a few: Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West; Bridge on the Drina, a brilliant and prophetic book by the Nobel-prize winning Ivo Adric; Eastern Approaches by Fitzroy Maclean—I highly recommend all these. I also read many contemporary books that came out right after the war: The Fall of Yugoslavia by Misha Glenny, Sarajevo Marlboro by Miljenko Jergovic, Sarajevo Blues by Semezdin Mehmedinovic, everything by Aleksandar Hemon, and others.

For the international adoption and orphan trades I read a few books and spent time on various listserves and news groups. There’s a Croatian in Sweden I met on a news group and am still in touch with. He also gave me invaluable help with translations and cultural references.

NW: Did you have any experiences related to the shady international adoption thread that runs through Radiant Days?

MAF: There were two separate experiences that started this plot line. The first happened when I was living in Budapest. For a few months I worked with a Romanian woman translating her unpublished memoir into English. We’d meet once a week and she’d bring in chapters and then we’d try to translate them together. This is an incredibly glib synopsis of her life up to that point: During university, she’d gotten political and ended up on a Ceausescu blacklist. She went on to marry a violinist and they had a child. The blacklist followed her and one day she was inexplicably fired from her teaching job. Soon after her husband was informed he was no longer needed by the state orchestra. His private students suddenly dried up. Eventually the family was homeless. The husband, more or less, went insane and ended up incarcerated in—and I remember this because I didn’t understand what she was trying to say when she gave me the first pass at its translation—“a cell shorter than him.” She lost her baby to the state and eventually fled to Hungary. Her hope was that publishing the memoir would save her husband and somehow get her child back. Eventually she recognized me for what I was and our meetings tapered off. I’m not sure whatever happened with the memoir. (Elena: if you read this, contact me.)

Also, one night in 1993, I was at a bar in Budapest called Fruits & Vegetables. There was a sketchy-looking goateed young American guy with a knockout Hungarian woman sitting at the table next to us. They seemed like an odd couple. We started talking and he told me they were from San Francisco and had come over to get her son. I remember, in the morning, trying to make sense of them, but soon they slipped from my mind. I never saw them again in Budapest. Then in 1995, I was living in San Francisco, and while standing on a BART platform on the way to work one morning, a woman standing next to me seemed foreign and somehow familiar. It took me a second but I realized I recognized her from that night. I asked if she was Hungarian. She was. I said that I thought we might have met before. I mentioned Fruits & Vegetables and the American. This didn’t go over so well. She seemed a little freaked out and when the BART came took pains to sit at the far end of the tram. But that plot line started to germinate that day.

NW: The narrator, Anthony, shares a lot of rather non-pc (and often funny) thoughts about women, sex, and how much he should care about the problems of other countries in the world. Particularly because this is written in the first-person, have you had any problems with readers mistaking the thoughts of your characters for what you believe?

MAF: My favorite writing is when we’re pulled in two directions. I love when something has me laughing and then seconds later feeling awful. And that was my hope with the narrator, Anthony. But, while I wouldn’t call them problems, people have confused me with him.

He might have been paraphrasing someone, but Kevin Canty once told our class, “Your mothers can get over pretty much anything you write as long as it’s reviewed in the New York Times.” This has proved mostly true. My parents, devoted Catholics, are not happy about the book, particularly the sex. My father couldn’t finish it and just yesterday referred to it as that “dirty book.” But I’m holding their grandchildren captive, so we’re still speaking. Also, some very kind and thoughtful relatives have gone out of their way to call my mom and explain that literature doesn’t need to be about ‘good’ things to be good, etc…

In general, there have been a few people, one or two at work, who seem very concerned about what’s ‘real’ and what’s fiction. At first this was all very distressing. I felt like my skin had been ripped off. I just never thought people outside my ideal readers (2 or 3 friends) would pick the book up. I guess this was naïve. But, for the most part, people have been amazing. I work for a not-for-profit medical information company (Healthwise). There are around 40 in-house writers. People I’d never have expected to read the book, never mind like it, have said incredibly generous and perceptive things about it. The degree to which people surprise me on a daily basis with their intelligence and sympathy makes me feel I must be a complete fool.

For the record, I didn’t mean for Anthony’s ‘thoughts’ to be the same as his ‘conclusions’. Most of the reviews, even the positive, are pretty harsh on Anthony. I didn’t intentionally write a monster. I meant for him to be an honest and lucid reflection of a certain niche of young Americans. Anthony was just being honest when he said he didn’t know what to do about the Balkans. Who did?  The real world just ignored the question entirely and hoped the mythical UN would take care of it.

I also think Anthony can sense beauty. I think some of his descriptions of the physical world reflects a reaching for beauty. Finally, we all think off-colored things, the average young male probably more than most. We just do. We’re lying if we say we don’t. My hope was—and it seems I failed in this—that the book itself, was a conclusion, and one that condemns Anthony’s behavior but redeems him, the person, by confessing the story. I meant for Anthony to show a glimmer of self-awareness and I meant for him to be the author of the book. He gets up and later goes on to do something good. To most of the reviewers, I didn’t succeed in this.

NW: I especially enjoyed the character Marsh, who was intelligent and world-weary at the age of only 24. Did you base him on the classic image of the war correspondent, any actual people, or any previous characters in literature?

MAF: I’m so glad you like him! Marsh is based on two good friends who were fledgling journalists in Budapest in 1993. I’m happy to say that unlike Marsh they’re both alive and well. The first is now a bureau chief in a major international city for Newsweek. He has covered Iraq, the Balkans, Chechnya, and other conflicts. The other is a contributing writer for magazines like Wired and Adventure National Geographic. They’re both authors of non-fiction books. Neither really knew I was writing this. It’s been fun to see who appreciates seeing themselves in fiction and who doesn’t.

NW: Did you find Marsh useful for providing historical perspective that Anthony wouldn’t know?

MAF: And yes, as you correctly pointed out, Marsh is used to contrast Anthony and his American-ness. He can give history and a world-view that Anthony never could. In this way, it is very reflective of how I felt when I was 22 and hanging out with the real-life Marsh. I never understood why these people, whose brains were intimidating, were friendly with me. But they were, and I was grateful—which I guess I demonstrated by having their fictional selves killed off.

NW: Sex plays a big role in Radiant Days, as it seems to be the primary drive for Anthony’s actions and travels. There’s a scene from the book nominated for the Nerve.com Henry Miller Award for “the best literary sex scene published in the English language.” Sex scenes are notoriously difficult to pull off. How did you go about writing them in Radiant Days?

MAF: My intention was for ‘bad’ sex to have a big role. I wanted it slightly depraved and hollow, but also somehow lucid and even beautiful. (The Nerve.com excerpt cuts off right before it gets really ugly.) Michel Houellebecq, one of my favorite authors, writes explicit sex, but makes it awful (to the point of comical). I wanted to write awkward lonely young-person sex. Nothing sensual or fruitful. Sex, in the end, really can’t do anything. Selfish desire results in a dried-up stain and little more. Hopefully the scenes leave the reader feeling a little empty inside—which I think is often the case for us when we’re young and sex can get pretty random and is an almost wholly selfish act.

A reader has written “your sex scenes make me want to go hug my wife.” His letter made my month.

NW: Is there any style you were trying to emulate in writing this book? For me, Graham Greene always seems to loom large over any book with international war-and-love themes.

MAF: Greene keeps popping up in reviews. I wish it had been intentional, but to be honest, I haven’t read him since high school and probably skimmed or used the Cliff Notes, so if I took anything from him it was unconsciously. Intentionally though, I tried to emulate some themes from The Sun Also Rises and A Fan’s Notes, and the writings of Genet and, to a lesser extent, Celine. A defective and mostly impotent narrator. And an unattainable object of desire. The first draft of the book had none of the characters actually consummating. It was just scene after scene of almost-sex, near-consumation. And even in the final draft there is only one sex scene where the characters succeed in having anything like normal sensual loving sex.

NW: You live in Boise and earned an MFA from the University of Montana. I’m not sure where you grew up or lived before this but you set the novel in San Francisco and the Balkans. How important is setting to your work?

MAF: Radiant Days mostly got written because of a car trip I took with some friends through Croatia in 1994. It was a short 3-day ride. We were just young and driving around, but inside something ‘changed’ and I knew at the end I was going to write something that had the calm aqua Adriatic in the background. It was just a profound and moving experience, and I knew it as it was happening. I fell in love with the landscape and the two people I was traveling with. I took notes. Thirteen years later, I remember each minute of that trip better than I do this morning.

NW: Have you written much fiction set in the Rocky Mountain region or do you plan to in the future? Do you feel like a “Western” writer now?

MAF: Idaho or Montana has been home for over a third of my life and for most of my adult life, but I don’t think I’ll ever feel like a “Western” writer. I grew up in a small wet village in upstate New York.  But my new novel is set out here.

NW: Have you found the community in Idaho to be supportive of writers and writing? Is it any different in this regard from the other places you’ve lived?

MAF:: We have two small kids.  The poet Catherine Wagner has a great line where she suggests that kids are like a bag over your life. This feels pretty true to my relationship with Boise. I’m not personally too involved in the local ‘community’, but there’s definitely one here. There’s a great reading series The Mouth and Thistle run by the BSU MAFA students. And the Idaho Commission on the Arts, Fishtrap (Eastern Oregon) and the Log Cabin Literary Center are very supportive institutions. And then there are a ton of wildly-talented local writers: Malia Collins, Anthony Doerr, Martin Corless Smith, Kent Anderson, Sylvia Shores, Mitch Wieland, Brady Udall, to name just a few. It’s sometimes hard to believe they’re all walking around this town, buying underwear, picking-up milk. For some reason, even though I’m outside academia and not particularly close with most of these people, it’s incredibly inspiring just to know they’re around.

Geographically Boise is different planet from where I grew up. It’s a high desert and it’s the most isolated metropolis in the lower 48. In the summers it can feel like you live on Mars.

NW: How do you balance writing with your day job as a software engineer and your family life?

MAF: Poorly. Writing with a day job and family isn’t too hard. You just wake up a few hours before everyone else, sit down, and type. You are done by 7:30 AM and you’ve got the rest of the day for job and family. And writing software and writing fiction actually have a lot in common: attributes = character, methods = action, compiler = editor, etc.... But ‘being an author’ is a nightmare. I mean, I’m so freaking thrilled to have a first novel out—it’s a dream realized. But I had no idea how stressful, and slightly undignified, the ‘author’ part can be. We owe it to our publisher--especially with a first novel--, our family, and ourselves to promote the book, to reach out and find readers, etc...and that’s just not something you can do easily at 5 AM. It’s just a completely different muscle than writing a novel. I find myself running out at lunch to mail review copies. Checking my email in the morning instead of writing. Shamelessly bothering bloggers and, as you know, reviewers. You just feel like an idiot most of the time. I’ve found it much harder than actually writing. And both my family and job have probably suffered since the book has come out. I’m just distracted and self-centered in a way I don’t think I was before the book. It’s something I need to work on.

NW: Has the positive reception of Radiant Days been a motivator for you to spend more time on your writing?

MAF: I haven’t really thought about this. A good and thoughtful review is flat-out the nicest thing in the world. I just want to wrap myself around the reviewer’s knees and weep in gratitude. (Actually, I want to do that to anyone who reads the book.) But the bottom-line is that I really enjoy the act of writing. I like listening to my fingers on the keys and watching what shows up. I like revision. I’m definitely not a natural at this, so it’s pretty gratifying when anything at all works. And if I don’t write, I get depressed and confused—the air darkens, I can’t think straight, I just can’t really see the world. If I could, I’d write all day, everyday. So reviews haven’t made it easier or harder, they’ve maybe—the negative ones—gotten in my head a little while writing, but they haven’t changed the motivation to write. And they haven’t made more hours in the day. Reviews just change the ability to get this book read and the next one published.

NW: What are you working on now?

MAF: I’m writing a novel that takes place in Idaho Falls in the very near future. It’s presently called One Potato.