“I took a temporary leave from Gravida Publishing, locked up my apartment, and was sent to Columbus, Fargo, Salt Lake City, Nashville, Austin, Seattle, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston, Chicago, and Newport, Rhode Island.3 I was raised in a smallish suburb of Chicago, so before going on this tour, I had only seen that Midwestern city and, of course, New York, where I live. Seeing America as a new author was an incredible experience. I read to eager audiences, signed stacks of my books, was interviewed in hotel lobbies, in white-linen restaurants, in diner booths with gummy tabletops. I was photographed in local libraries and bookstores and, for some unclear reason, photographers posed me outside, on the shores of Lady Bird Lake, on a Newport dock in front of gleaming yachts, with my toes in the sand and the Pacific Ocean behind me, the camera clicking away. Young writer musing is how I imagined those pictures, all pride and intention, eyes lowered against the sunshiny rays, the wind whipping my long hair around my throat until I was sure I would choke.”
The New York Review of Books conducted an in-depth interview with Ashby that coincided with the publication of Fictional Family Life. Much was written about her following Other Small Spaces, but in the NYRB interview, for the first time she disclosed certain salient facts about her upbringing that helped explain her authorial precociousness, as well as the characters she wrote about, the fine line of their actions.
“I was an early reader, maybe because I was an only child, literally made by people not at all interested in me. It seemed to me that I had crashed through some kind of atmospheric orbit, landed on a planet where I definitely did not belong, and was not wanted, left huddling out in the cold, beyond the tight parental circle of two. Whether that circle was forged before I came along, or as a result of my presence, I’ve never known. What I did know was that they had no idea what to do with me, and I was left to my own devices.
“Most children in such underloving circumstances would act out, or demand their rightful attention, but I was made differently: I interpreted my familial outsider status as an invisible cloak granting me freedom, allowing me entry into a forbidden world where I could hear what was unspoken in the silent spaces and watch the misalignment between people’s words and their deeds. I was seven when I crossed over, began stealing what I saw and heard, grafting my thefts onto people I imagined, whose stories I started writing down. My characters became my people, their worlds, my worlds, and it made me feel whole, happy, and safe. Books gave me succor and my parents’ disinterest set me loose as a writer.
“If I had felt a natural kinship with my parents, who knows what I might have found myself writing about, or whether my work would have been of any interest to others. But my parents are who they are, and my upbringing was what it was, and I, through acclimation and natural constitution, was solitary and watchful.
“The concept of love completely mystified me—it still mystifies me—but I have always seen the darkest emotions with absolute clarity, the depths to which people can so easily descend. I gleaned all that in childhood, saw how the theory played out in my own family. It was a short step to believing we all possess the innate power to inflict great damage, even to kill, with the right convergence of events.”
Ashby acknowledged that her parents did not intend to read her collections. “They have no interest in my work, are completely indifferent to me and my career. When I was ten, I handed my mother a story I horribly called ‘The Meaning of Love.’ With that title, no doubt she hoped to read something that might convince her I would end up a normal girl. But the story was about the opposite of love, and she quailed in the face of those I gleefully murdered, her only comment: ‘I don’t understand what goes on in your head, Joan.’ She never again asked to read anything that came from my pen. My father never asked once.
“Their disinterest was my great luck as a writer. I have never felt compelled to harness myself because I have not been burdened by what they might think. My characters fall apart, immolate, decimate, grapple with the sinister impulses in their natures, injure themselves and others, kill too, and I am free from parental approbation. It is a way of writing that I highly recommend.”
When Linder interviewed Ashby again, after the Fictional Family Life tour, she had this to say: “My publisher sent me around the United States for the second time, which I loved, and also to London, Paris, Rome, Zurich and Geneva, West Berlin, Cairo, and Istanbul. Switzerland struck me as odd, but apparently the precise Swiss secretly enjoy reading about lives that are not neat at all. West Berlin was distressing, knowing what was on the other side of the Wall. Cairo and Istanbul seemed like random choices until I was told that FFL was a runaway bestseller in Egypt and Turkey, something I could not have imagined. Of course, I never imagined that either of my books would experience the great success that they have.
“But to answer your question, Mr. Linder, traveling for Fictional Family Life was something else entirely. This was my first time abroad, and being feted in those international cities was exciting. However, there were palpable differences between the two tours, because with FFL, suddenly I was no longer a debut writer, introduced instead, and uncomfortably, as the young and revered Joan Ashby, my name enunciated worshipfully, as if it were suddenly coated in a gorgeous veneer that should have taken centuries to develop. And everyone made clear to me—my agent, Patricia Volkmann, and my publisher, Storr & Storr, the foreign publishers of both my collections, writers I met, journalists who interviewed me, critics who have written about my books—that my first novel is eagerly expected. Of course I feel the pressure. But my own expectations for what I can accomplish likely are grander than theirs, and I feel confident about meeting them.”
During the years when her star shone so brightly, some journalists were intent on positioning her as a feminist writer, though she refused such a limiting designation. “On that particular subject, I will say only this: I am a writer.”
Indeed, when Ashby wrote about so-called feminine themes, such as love, family, and domesticity, she twisted such themes entirely, reversed them, turned them inside out until they were virtually unrecognizable. In Other Small Spaces, her male and female protagonists are children, teenagers, or adults, all ingrained in their lives, and, to various extents, flawed, hurt, suffering, vengeful, angry, kind, thoughtful, sometimes brutal with others and gentle with themselves, or vice versa. The scenes might be domesticated, but she was not writing merely, or solely, about domestic arrangements. With extraordinary beauty and burly power, she wrote about people of both sexes clawing their way out of stifling, smothering, or shrinking worlds, some believing wholeheartedly in living what Ashby called an out-there life, meaning a specifically determined life that did not conform to modern-day expectations. Other writers took Ashby up as a cudgel, as proof that being female did not lessen the impact of the work.