CYCLES OF WAITING:
AN INTERVIEW WITH SIOBHAN
FALLON
Siobhan Fallon is a remarkable
writer and mother, who also happens to be a military wife. She survived several
difficult years of living on insulated Army bases while her husband was
deployed. Most recently she capably dealt with a move from the Middle East to
Falls Church, Virginia during Christmas week - while battling a killer sinus
infection, caring for a sick child and looking for a rental house. Her first
novel, You Know When The Men Are Gone (Amy Einhorn Books/Putnam) is a collection of
intelligent, heart-wrenching, unforgettable stories. (MaryAnne
Kolton)
MaryAnne My first question is going to be a compound
one. Who are you? Where did you grow up?
Brothers and sisters? What was your family like? What drew you to
reading as a child? Please let us know a bit about the "you" before
you became the wife of a soldier.
Siobhan I come
from a family of bartenders. My father was born in Ireland and came over to New
York at sixteen, working his way through high school in Queens, doing a stint
in the Army during Vietnam, then settling down when he married my mother. They
chose to live in the small town of Highland Falls, about an hour north of New
York City, because my father fell in love and purchased a bar/restaurant there,
the South Gate Tavern. Part of this particular Irish pub’s charm is that it
stands right outside of the front, or south, gate of the United States Military
Academy at West Point. And in a small town like ours, where everyone has gone
to school with everyone else, the South Gate Tavern has become a large part of
my family’s identity.
Bartending taught me to examine both the small gestures and
the life-changing ones, to take note of the careful beat of human emotions, to
watch and listen and remember.
MaryAnne Such great links and connections
here. The family bar, a small community in
its own way, the military base, also a community within a
confined space, followed by
your collected, interconnected stories, You Know When
the Men Are Gone.
Sounds like you’ve been collecting and compiling for a
long time. When did you first
decide you wanted to write these narratives?
Siobhan I
began writing these stories when I was living at Fort Hood, Texas. My
husband had already deployed to Iraq and was getting ready
to deploy again when I
began the title story “You Know When the Men Are Gone.”
During his first deployment out
of Hood, I found myself alone in an empty house with
unpacked boxes, not knowing my
way around the base or how to navigate the intricacies of
military spouse life. Less than
a year and a half after my husband returned, he deployed to
Iraq again. By the time that
tour rolled around, I was more connected with the Army
community, had made incredible
friends I could depend on, and had given birth to our
daughter. In the course of those
deployments, I went from being a shy and somewhat misplaced
wife to being a spouse
who could handle a deployment with knowledge and confidence.
And, yes, you are so right, a military base is a confined
community, much like living in a
very, VERY small town. The soldiers work together on base,
or, more intimately, spend an
entire year deployed together, while the spouses attend
company picnics and meetings,
shop at the PX or Commissary, go to the same military
doctors, perhaps live in the same
on-base housing development. So there tends to be a great
deal of overlap in the
professional and personal. You can’t help but learn details
about peoples’ lives that you
wouldn’t necessarily hear in the civilian world. The Army
also tries to instill a collective
feeling of soldiers, as well as spouses, taking care of each
other and “watching each
other’s backs.” This blurring between friendship and
responsibility can make it difficult to
draw the line between being helpful and being downright
nosy.
Add the detail that Army housing is notorious for having
thin walls, and, well, of course I
had to write a story about eavesdropping, about knowing too
much about your neighbor.
Eavesdropping comes up again and again in my collection, it
is something I am fascinated
with, how an eavesdropper, at best, will only get bits and
pieces of the life they are
trying to listen in on. There will be countless inaccuracies
and the eavesdropper can’t help
but unconsciously supply what they want, or don’t want, to
hear. It seems like an allegory
of loved ones separated by deployments.
With such a chasm of distance and time, a spouse can never
get the whole story of what their mate is going through. No matter how much a
couple tries to communicate, moments and memories will be lost. You can’t fill
in all the details of twelve or fifteen months apart with dropped calls or
sporadic email or Skype sessions. And with this nebulous unknown growing
between two people, each person can’t help but imagine what might be happening
to the person they love. Sometimes these
imaginings will be right, sometimes they will be wildly wrong.
MaryAnne Having been known to eavesdrop - on rare
occasions - I do agree that most often details important to the whole remain
unknown. Moving back to You Know When
the Men Are Gone, the story “Inside The Break” is a perfect example of how
strong a woman can become given a certain situation. I admired Kailani so much
for her bravery in not questioning her husband.
I didn’t think much of Natalya in the title story at first, but found
her endearing and courageous when she did what she had to do to save her self.
All of the characters in these stories seem to be making decisions outside of
real time. Does that make sense to you?
Siobhan I am
so relieved that you found Kailani brave. I do too, and she is the character
that seems to bother readers the most. I have read reviews and blogs that take
issue with her acceptance of the possibility of Manny straying, and I am often
asked during book club discussions if Manny indeed committed adultery. When I
say an apologetic “yes,” people react strongly, some readers sigh and say to
their friends, “I told you so,”
and others have said to me, “Well, I don’t think he did.” So
the story has a tendency to
touch a nerve. For me as the writer, it wasn’t really a tale
of adultery, it was, as you
point out, another example of a character having to do
something to save himself. Kailani
comes to the realization that her husband may have seen and
done things when he was
deployed that he would never do when he was safe at home
with his family, and she
forgives all of it, accepts him, moves forward.
In regard to making decisions outside of real time, I guess
I didn’t want the characters’
decision making process to be completely translucent.
Especially in the title story, when
everything about Natalya is filtered through Meg’s slightly
skewed vision. And Kailani’s
dedication to allowing Manny to keep his secrets, well, I
think she surprises herself there.
Her first reaction when she finds out about his affair is
indignation, grief, determination
to leave him—the rational reactions I think most American
women would have in her
shoes. Kailani doesn’t count on her suave husband returning
haggard and a bit broken,
doesn’t realize that she will swerve from wanting the truth
to unthinkingly and fiercely
wanting to protect him, wanting to keep him and her family
intact above all else. I think
people make emotional choices like this all the time, and
they aren’t necessarily wrong.
But they may be something we live with for a lifetime.
MaryAnne
What did your friends on the base think about the book? Is it possible any of
them will recognize their experiences in your stories?
Siobhan To
tell you the truth, I was a little worried about what friends at Fort Hood,
Texas, would say. We
moved from Fort Hood to the Defense Language Institute of
Monterey, CA, in July of 2009 and the hardcover came out in
January of 2011. Some close
military friends in California had read the galleys of the
book and, the way friends ought
to, spoke positively and said the stories resonated with
them. But, really, what else could
they say?
The first stop on my national tour was at a huge Barnes and
Noble bookstore just outside
of Fort Hood. I was scared to death. Scared because I am
always terrified when I show up
at a bookstore 1) because I get quite nervous speaking in
public and 2) I have no idea if
anyone will come to hear me read. But that night was a full
house, no empty chairs,
people were standing in the aisles with their
baby-strollers, and afterwards it took me an
hour to sign books for those waiting. But best of all,
everyone seemed to like it, so many
people came up and thanked me, nobody threw rotten tomatoes
or hissed.
Members of my Family Readiness Group were there, as well as
old neighbors, so it really felt like an extraordinary moment of having both
friends and the Fort Hood community behind me.
And, to specifically answer your question, no one has ever
asked me if a particular story
was written about them. I would have been devastated if my
craft wasn’t strong enough
to weave truths into fiction. Of course I was inspired by
issues that seemed to come up
again and again when soldiers deploy. I’ve seen quite a few
soldiers with the sort of
boot/cast that my character Kit Murphy wears, and I would
often wonder what had
happened to them. My husband, when he was a Company
Commander at Fort Hood while
I was writing the stories, had soldiers in his unit who had
sustained serious injuries due
to IEDs. And, unfortunately, I would occasionally hear
rumors about spouses having
affairs while their soldiers were away, or, more rarely, I’d
learn of a spouse who was
afraid her deployed soldier was carrying-on with another
soldier. So while I wanted the
stories to feel as real as possible, I also very carefully
constructed the backgrounds
and love lives and experiences of my characters so that they
were very different from the
people we knew.
MaryAnne
From “Leave”
“Nick held on to his knife all
through dinner, listening to
another man tease his daughter,
listening to another man chew and eat his wife’s
food....opening beer bottles and
quenching his thirst with all that Nick loved.
From “Gold Star” -
“It was the moments in between
that she (Josie) was the most afraid
of forgetting, the small moments
that were too ordinary for photographs.”
While I loved all the stories in the collection, “Leave
and “Gold Star” were the hardest for
me to read. Two
completely opposite characters, both emotionally victimized by a war
beyond their control. I so wanted for Nick and Josie just
to be “normal” again with no
memories of the past. Can you tell me a little about how
they affected you?
Siobhan An IED
explosion is mentioned in the third story of the collection. That attack
reverberates throughout the book, dominating some of the
stories. One of the characters
most affected by the attack is the spouse who is made a
widow, Josie Schaeffer, the
protagonist of “Gold Star.”
This final story is a military spouse’s worst nightmare, so,
yes, it was difficult to write. I
had a very clear mental image of a woman surrounded by
photos of her soldier husband,
and how those static pictures might begin to alter her
memory of him, reduce him to
posed, flat images devoid of the moments that create a life.
I am not, thankfully, a war
widow, but when my husband was deployed, it was the small
moments that I found most
devastating.
Sure, it was tough when he missed my birthday, an
anniversary, or Christmas, but I could be prepared for the holidays. The times
that snuck up on me were harder to control: seeing the food he loved at the
grocery store, glimpsing his winter coats hanging in the closet, seeing men
playing soccer and for a moment thinking my husband was running across the
field with them. Those moments seemed the most laden with grief for me
separated from my spouse for a year at a time, and, I imagined, for a new
widow.
I also wanted to give readers more than the stereotypical
image of a widow holding a
folded flag at a military funeral, I wanted to show all of
her mixed emotions: rage, grief, confusion, regret. It was important for me to
demonstrate that Josie has a future ahead
of her, which is why I brought in a character who appears
earlier, Kit Murphy. Kit was hurt
in the same IED explosion that killed Josie’s husband, and
his own life has been
irrevocably changed by the injuries he sustained. Kit and
Josie’s friendship seemed like a
way to offer redemption to both of them, and also to end the
book on a hopeful note.
I’ll admit that I still tear up reading the last paragraph
of “Gold Star,” because I know
what my husband’s camouflage uniform feels like against my
cheek, and I can’t imagine
what life would be like if I was never able to rest my cheek
there again.
Writing “Leave” was a bit of a departure. There is a
fantastical, almost ghost story
element to it, so it felt more separate from my own military
spouse experience. And it
was almost fun to indulge in the spooky elements of a
stranger lurking in the basement
while a woman and child ignorantly go about their lives
above. Nick is the husband and
father, and yet his deployment, the constant uncertainties
of his time in Iraq, have
transformed him.
I originally wrote it with a very different ending. I don’t
want to spoil anything for those
who haven’t read the collection, but earlier drafts had Nick
walking out of the house and
heading back to Iraq instead of standing over his wife’s bed
in the middle of the night.
But my literary agent, Lorin Rees, as well as my husband,
told me that this
bomb-diffused kind of ending would never work with the
character I had created, that if
Nick had gone to these lengths to hide and spy on his
family, he would never be able to
meekly disappear. That’s when the story became a lot less
“fun” for me, with many, many
rewrites. Like you, I cared too much for Nick and didn’t
want things to go off the deep
end. But ultimately I had to be true to the story rather
than make my character do
something that wasn’t in his nature.
MaryAnne I love ambiguous endings because they force
the reader to become more invested in the outcome. . .I hear you are working on
a new book and can’t wait to read it.
Any hints as to content?
Siobhan Yes, I am working on a novel. My family and I
were recently stationed in Amman, Jordan, while my husband helped train
Jordanian soldiers in multi-national operations. It was obviously a very
exciting time to be living and traveling in the Middle East, waiting to see
where the Arab Spring would take root next. My daughter and I were lucky enough
to be able to join my husband on his trips to the Sultanate of Oman, Saudi
Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. So naturally a large part of the novel is
about an American family trying to make sense of an Arab world very different
than their own.
And thank you, MaryAnne, this has
been a really lovely interview with insightful questions no one has asked
before! So good of you to take the time to chat with me.
MaryAnne Siobhan, it was absolutely my pleasure. You
are so generous and forthcoming. I am looking forward to reading the new book.
Siobhan
Fallon is a military spouse and writer whose husband has deployed three times
to the Middle East, including two tours to Iraq out of Fort Hood. She and her
family have recently moved from Amman, Jordan, to Falls Church, Virginia, where
her husband remains an active duty Army officer. Her stories and essays have
appeared in Publishers’ Weekly, Women’s Day, Good Housekeeping, New Letters
and Salamander, among others. You Know When The Men Are Gone earned
a spot on several Best of 2011 Lists including New
York
Times
Janet
Maslin
Book
Picks
of
2011 and The
San
Francisco
Chronicle . It is now
available in paperback. Siobhan is currently working on a novel and writing a
monthly fiction series for Military Spouse Magazine. She earned her MFA from the New School in New York
City. She can be found at facebook and http://siobhanfallon.com/author.html and
http://siobhanfallon.com/blog
Author
Photo: Creative Images Photography -
Larry Nordwick
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