Western Writers

An Interview with Brady Udall, Part 2

By Jenny Shank, 5-04-10

In the second half of New West’s interview with Brady Udall, he discusses how he kept track of the dozens of names in The Lonely Polygamist, how traveling from Utah to Nevada is metaphorically, “like crossing the border from heaven into hell,” how he felt “much more comfortable hanging out with polygamists than going into a brothel,” and how the New York publishing industry tends to ignore Western writers. Udall will be touring throughout the West for the next two months, with stops in Boise (May 10, Barnes & Noble, 7 p.m.), Salt Lake City (tonight, May 4, King’s English, 7 p.m.), Denver (May 5, Tattered Cover, 7 p.m.), Santa Fe (June 7, Collected Works, 6 p.m.), and two-dozen other cities.

NW: In your initial article for Esquire, You quote the polygamist Bill as saying about polygamy: “If it was some kind of sexual thing, I could just go over across the border and pay for whatever I needed.  It would be a lot cheaper that way.” Did that spark the idea in your head for the plot thread in which Golden is building a brothel in Nevada?

BU: What sparked the idea for me is that I’ve always thought driving Nevada to Utah and back again is sort of, in a metaphorical way, like crossing the border from heaven into hell.  On one side of the border is this piousness and religiosity, and on the other side of the border it’s this carnality and sin.  I think I had that idea for a long time of that division between Nevada and Utah.  It’s not that easy, obviously, but I think metaphorically you could see it that way.

NW: The West that makes both of those places possible, because people can pursue whatever they want to pursue.

BU: I love that they’re right cozied up next to each other.  They’re not even separated by a more neutral state.

NW: What was your research process?  I know you visited polygamists.  Did you also visit brothels?

BU: No.  I could have and it would have been justified, but I couldn’t bring myself.  I’m not a prude or anything like that, but I just did not feel comfortable walking into a brothel.  The idea kind of makes my skin crawl.  I felt, honestly, much more comfortable hanging out with polygamists than going into a brothel.  So I did research by reading about brothels.  I drove by them and looked at them and looked around, but I never actually went into one.

NW: How long did you live with polygamists or visit them?

BU: Living is not right—I didn’t live with them.  I just spent time.  One particular family allowed me to just hang out with them for several days, and I got to know them over time, so I got to talk to them over months and months, even after the article came out.  I got to see how they lived, once they got comfortable with me and just kind of went about their business, I got to see them in an unscripted way.  When I was interviewing them, a lot of times I think they were telling me what they wanted me to hear.  But the more comfortable they got—I got to talk to the kids, I got to talk to the wives alone in the kitchen.

NW:The Lonely Polygamist is ambitious in scope—do you think you could have written this novel earlier?

BU: No, I couldn’t have done it earlier.  Each book is different and a new challenge.  But this one was absurd for me, honestly.  I’d only written in first-person before, I was really comfortable writing in first-person.  But to write this big, plotted book, using the third person, even an omniscient third-person, this was a real stretch for me.  But I wanted to do it.  I’d never really written from the point of view of a woman before, and I was really worried about that, getting it right.  Especially doing it from the point of view of a polygamist wife seemed like, for me, the biggest challenge of all.

NW: How did you come up with everyone’s name?  Did you name Golden Richards after the Salt Lake City-raised NFL player?

BU: No.  Golden is a well-known Mormon name.  J. Golden Kimball is an absolutely hilarious guy.  He’s like the original Mormon comedian.  He was an apostle, but he swore all the time.  He was like Mark Twain, he had all these one-liners.  Initially the name of the family was Richards.  I just wanted it to be the most normal name you could think of, but none of the names were right, and I was reading about Golden Kimball, and that’s how Golden Richards came to be.  But the names, over all, just got out of control.

NW: Did you name Ted Leo, Golden’s boss, after the musician?

BU: No.  Ted Leo’s name used to be Ted Leone or something like that, and I just changed it.  I didn’t know about Ted Leo, and now I’ve listened to him—it’s awesome.  I hope he’s not upset.  But that’s what happens when you have so many names.  It’s something close to six-dozen characters.

NW: And you wanted each name to be distinctive so that readers would remember them when they came up again?

BU: Right.  So there’s funny names and strange names.  There’s a lot of Mormon names, like Golden, Parley, Nephi, and Sariah from the Book of Mormon.  I had fun with it, but I didn’t control it very well and I kept forgetting that I would name a kid one thing, and by the time I was done, there were 60 or 70 names of kids when there were only 28 kids.

NW: How did you keep track?  Did you have charts or outlines?

BU: No, it was just the dumbest way to go about this.  There’s not a single chart, there’s not a list.  It was just all in my head.  I teach in an MFA program, and I teach my students to write a synopsis and have a character list, and I just didn’t follow any of my advice.

NW: What about the next book?  Will it be something different?

BU: Yeah.  The next book, I promised myself when I was halfway through this one and it was 900 pages, that the next book would be short.  It will be at least under 300 pages.  I’m hoping under 200 pages, but I don’t know if I’m capable of such a thing.

NW: You should talk to Ron Carlson.  He packs a lot into a 200-page book.

BU: I haven’t read his latest novel.  I read Five Skies and liked it a lot.

NW: The Signal is amazing.  It’s about 200 pages long and it’s got 400 pages worth of plot in it.

BU: Yeah, I need to read it.  I need to read books like that to figure it out.  I get so obsessed and excited about whatever I’m writing about.  In this book for example, I think I probably wrote about 150 pages of background on Royal, Golden’s father, how he came from Louisiana, how he met John Wayne on the set of the movie The Conqueror.

NW: Do you think you might spin that out for short stories?

BU: I don’t know, maybe.  I mean, there’s so much stuff.  It’s years’ worth of writing just sitting there.  So there might be some short stories in there.  There’s some funny, great scenes, like a scene where Royal and John Wayne have this confrontation.  I really enjoyed writing it, but when I got to the end, I realized this was not really relevant to what I’m doing.

NW: Royal is a great character—we don’t really hear much from him after Golden leaves the South to follow him.

BU: I’ve written it all.  And it interested me because he becomes a uranium miner and becomes rich on his uranium mines, and that was important to me for detailing the history and expansion of the West, and how it turned out to be this horrible thing with nuclear testing.  That was big to me, but I could only use so much.

NW: In an interview you did many years ago with Identity Theory, you expressed your dismay with the way the publishing industry is dominated by a New York perspective—do you think that’s still true?

BU: It’s still true.  I’m not bitter, but it is the reality of the situation.  If you pay attention to how the publishing industry works, every year they trot out one or two new, exciting writers and they’re always from New York.  The big things in the New York Times are always about somebody from New York, whether they’re from there originally or not.  I think writers know that they need to move to New York so they can make the connections and get noticed.  I think that’s just myopia.  And it’s an understandable one.  A lot of times New Yorkers don’t know anything exists beyond the skyscrapers.  I was in New York in January and I met a lot of people and one journalist said, “So, are you from the city?” And I said, “No.” And it just stopped her cold because she didn’t have anything else to say.  She didn’t even bother to say, “Where are you from?” Because it didn’t seem to even matter to her.  So she just stared at me.  It’s not just the West that gets left out—the South, the Midwest, pretty much everywhere that’s not the Eastern seaboard.

NW: New York publishers control what they publish and what they promote, and New York-based magazines and newspapers control what they’re going to cover, but they can’t really control what people end up liking.  For example, David Wroblewski, who lives here in Colorado, had a book that was on the best seller list for months.

BU: Yeah, every once in a while, something kind of breaks through the wall.  Like Kent Haruf’s book Plainsong.  Kent had already written two really good books that nobody cared about.  And to his credit, his New York editor really loved the book and decided to really push it.  So that occasionally does happen, but it’s the exception rather than the rule.  But there’s no doubt that the media and the publishing industry don’t tend to push stuff that’s not already established, that’s not from somewhere close by.

NW: Do you see any examples of how things have changed in the publishing industry in the nine years since you published your last novel?

BU: It’s clear that independent stores are really suffering.  There’s not as much in the way of review outlets.  You don’t get as many reviews, so that makes it harder.  Everybody’s scared.  The publishers, agents, and writers are all scared about what’s coming, because nobody’s sure what’s coming.  But on the other hand, it seems that people keep on reading and loving books, and that’s not going away.  So it doesn’t worry me as much.

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