Lan Samantha Chang was already one of literature’s young stars — the author of the acclaimed “Hunger: A Novella and Stories” and the novel “Inheritance” — when she was tapped to succeed Frank Conroy as the director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the most prestigious MFA program in American letters. Her latest novel, “All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost,” now in paperback, is set within a writing program, and the Workshop celebrates its 75th anniversary this year, at a time when writers like Chad Harbach and Elif Batuman have written critiques of MFA culture. So we asked fellow Iowa graduate Curtis Sittenfeld, the bestselling author of “Prep” and “American Wife,” to discuss what really happens at Iowa, the consequences of early literary stardom and whether any criticism of workshop culture and “the Iowa story” rings true.
We’re having this conversation on the occasion of the paperback publication of “All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost,” so I thought I’d start with a few questions about that. The first is a two-pronged question, and I’ll ask both prongs before you answer. One, what is it in human nature that makes us, as readers, want fiction to be autobiographical, or draw from real life? The second part of the question is what is your response to the people who want the writing program in your novel to be the Iowa Writers’ Workshop?
Interesting. OK: What is it in human nature that makes us want to read autobiographical fiction?
Perhaps not seeking out autobiographical fiction, as much as wanting fiction, in this sort of winking way, to draw from real life?
First of all, I think that fiction is deep and wide, and not all readers want the work they read to draw from real life. For example, in our program we have a science fiction writer who is deeply engaged in world building, and I don’t think that most of the people who are coming to his work are interested in his life. They are interested in the world he is able to build. They are interested in a world they haven’t experienced before and don’t know anything about. So that’s one thing. Prong one.
But the flip side of reading is that we read because we want to feel something. We want to get in on it. So there is a lot of reading that takes place where the reader is desiring some kind of inside information, or entrance, into a world that they know something about or nothing about. So it’s a completely different motivation, and these people want to believe that something really happened. They want to believe that what they’re getting is the inside scoop. It’s human nature. This is why people tell stories. The first stories were sort of the “I alone have survived to tell the tale,” and we get to hear the tale. So I guess that’s a pretty natural impulse.
What is my response to the people who want my novel to be about the Iowa Writers’ Workshop? You know, it’s so funny because I kind of knew this was going to happen, and that’s one of the reasons why when I wrote the book it was a secret project. I didn’t tell anyone I was working on it. It was this huge, private pleasure that I afforded myself in the middle of this hectic, chaotic period, which started with getting married at age 39, and then starting my job as director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and then having a child.
My nonwriting life suddenly loomed large, so I think in response, the writing life sort of rose up against it in my mind and it became this secret box I retreated to. I created this secret novel that I thought would never get published because it seemed really kind of private, and it seemed also to be about a world that no one would be interested in. Then at some point I realized that I had written an entire novel, that it could very well be published — and that there were some problems bringing it out into the world. The main problem was that people would think that it was Iowa, and that the characters represented real people, and that I was doing it for the purpose of writing about real people, which was as far from the truth as I can imagine. So I guess I just have to tell people who want this book to be about the Workshop that, in a certain way — now that the book has been out for a year, I can think about it from more of a distance — maybe it is. It’s not about the actual Iowa Writers’ Workshop, but it’s about the part of the workshop that really matters, which is this intimate struggle with art. I have this privilege in my job of experiencing gifted people’s intimate struggles with art, and I wanted to capture what is a pretty ineffable experience of struggle as it affected the lives of two friends and their loved ones. I think to that extent, the story that takes place in the book is the kind of story that would happen to people here in this program, or at any number of places for that matter.
I can see that — the book doesn’t have a dishy feel at all. If you had been told as a student in the Workshop that you would become director of the Workshop, what do you think you would have thought?
Well, you know, the thought did occur to me when I was a student. I would watch Frank Conroy — the director that you and I both knew — and I would think I could never have his job because he had to make tough decisions and everybody got upset with him, and I wouldn’t like that. So I’d never do that.
Ha! Now that you are the director, can you explain how your time is divided? People probably imagine the director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop reads nonstop. What is the breakdown of how you spend your time, day-to-day, month-to-month, etc.?
I do read a lot of wonderful fiction, but a lot of it is student fiction. And it’s true that a lot of the fiction that I read ends up being published, in somewhat different form, or in the exact same form as it was when I read it. But I have to make a concerted effort to read. My time is seasonal. The worst time of the year is in January, because that’s when the admissions applications come in. With the recession, the number of applications we’ve received at our program has jumped. In 2010 it jumped by 50 percent.
Wait, how many applications in 2010?
In fiction, it was over 1,200. I think it was more like 1,300.
What was it in poetry?
Gosh, close to 500. I’m not responsible for reading the poetry manuscripts, thank goodness.
Am I right in thinking that of the 1,300 applicants in fiction, 25 were accepted, and of the 500 in poetry, 25 were accepted?
That particular year I think I accepted 29 people because there were so many good people I just couldn’t resist. The poets accept around 25.
Those numbers are terrifying. For someone applying in fiction, if there are a maximum of 30 spots, and 1,200 people are applying — let’s say you met someone on an airplane who desperately wanted to go to the Workshop. What advice would you give that person?
Well, I would say turn in your best work. That’s the only advice. It doesn’t matter what your letters of recommendation say; it doesn’t matter what kind of grades you got. We just don’t look at that. We look at the work. We’ve done that always, and it’s still true.
Can you describe a little bit about how the admissions process works?
Ultimately what happens is that I choose 50 or 60 finalists, and then the permanent faculty and the visiting faculty read all of the finalists and have a vote. And every year, I’d say there are probably 25 or 30 people admitted to the program in fiction, and every year there are 80 people who deserve to be in the program. So, as you can imagine, we vote down a lot of wonderful people. What’s interesting to me is the number of extraordinary writers who are good enough to get in but who don’t get in because we don’t have enough spots.
Do you think there is an element of randomness? If 80 applicants are qualified to get in, is there much difference between the 30 who get in and the 50 who don’t? Is it the flip of a coin? Is it the subjectivity of the faculty’s taste?
I don’t think that there is one answer for that question. What I have noticed is that among the, say, 50 finalists, it’s often the case that 10 of them don’t get any faculty votes at all. So, then I think, “Is there something off about the way of voting?” so I added a system where the faculty are allowed to choose one or two people that they feel that should get in even if they don’t get enough votes.
I want the admissions system to allow for quirks, because it seems to be that outliers are the ones who often end up being quite good. I don’t know what the difference would be between the people who get in and the people who don’t except sometimes I think it’s timing. A really promising writer in their early 20s who has just graduated from college and applies to the MFA, like straight out of college, stands a lower chance of getting into our program than someone who has been out for a few years and has had a chance to have some experience, and grow, and season, and write some more, and test their writing, and develop a larger body of work. That undergraduate who gets rejected from our program when they’re 22 could easily get in when they’re 26.
There’s the larger question, not specific to Iowa, about the purpose of an MFA: There are some people who lament the explosion of MFA programs. There was that essay by Elif Batuman …
“Get a Real Degree.”
When I was teaching at the Writers’ Workshop last fall, I talked to my students about that particular essay. I thought it made some interesting points. I’m not sure I agree with its overall argument, but it is something that is popular for people to say, that there are too many MFA programs. What’s your response to that?
It’s funny. When I took this job, I certainly didn’t expect that I would be in a position of being expected to defend the MFA system, because, as a matter of fact, I feel that this program is a specific program and that it doesn’t have very much to do with the MFA system at all. It’s its own quirky program.
Do you think, “Fine. Criticize MFAs. Who cares?”
No. It’s so fascinating to me that smart people waste, or spend, an enormous amount of effort criticizing people who love to read and write. You know?
I mean, people enter the MFA system, and some of them are paying money to do so, because they love to read and write. Bottom line. That’s not a sin to me. I feel that people have a lot of reasons for pursuing an MFA and they’re not all the reasons that the critics of the MFA program would necessarily accept and understand. For example, I think when you go to an MFA program, it gives you a different orientation toward time, generally.
How so?
You have time to think and to pursue something that you love. That’s pretty basic. I mean, if the program is supporting you, which I think it should. I think an MFA program should fund its students.
But you have more time to think, and you have time to think about your life. And to think about the lives of other human beings. That is a privilege, but it is something that a lot of people need and want. It’s a privilege and a basic human need. Our society pushes us toward productivity in a way that is antithetical to our basic needs.
Sometimes Iowa is used as a shorthand for MFA programs in general, or among critics there’s the idea of a particular kind of Iowa story, or Iowa novel, or Iowa kind of writing. Do you think that that view holds any truth?
Well, let’s see. First, in regard to people seeing us as representative of MFA programs, I don’t think we are. I should try to explain what it’s like here. For one thing, the Workshop was the first degree-granting creative writing program in the country. This is our 75th anniversary. I think people talk about the Workshop because it has such a high level of accomplishment. For example, in the last 20 years, 40 percent of the Pulitzer Prizes in poetry have been won by former students or faculty.
We’re also strange. I mean, I don’t know how many other programs you’ve been to, but we’re a little odder than most.
How so?
The program is so old, and so geographically on it own. It’s like we’re centrally located and geographically isolated, and we’re big. We’re big enough that we have our own community and our own traditions. And because of that, a lot of good things from way back, decades and decades ago, haven’t really changed. We’re still in some ways very similar to the way we were 75 years ago. An example of this is that we’re still very laissez-faire. We don’t really demand high productivity, and this is the age of professionalization, and in this day and age the degree of individuality that we encourage in our students, as I’ve come to realize, is stubbornly anachronistic. And to a large extent, the Workshop is protected from the current trend of widget-counting standards of the academy, and it works. We exist in order to bring writing to the center of life and to grow writers. Thankfully, the University of Iowa understands this and has been supportive of us for 75 years.
And then there’s the fact that we’re four to six hours by car from Chicago, Milwaukee, Omaha, Kansas City, St. Louis and Minneapolis. What that means is that we’re a high-residence program. So people are really here when they’re here. So some of the most significant learning in the program doesn’t take place in the Dey House at all — the Dey House is where we’re located; it’s our building. As you know, it takes place in the bars and restaurants, and people’s backyards and living rooms, and even though I’m the last person to hear about student romances, I assume in the bedrooms of Iowa City.
So we’re not small. We have, at any given time, 100 poets and fiction writers. We’ve got dozens of former students living in town. We have 10 professors; we have writers from all over the community in Iowa City. Then there are these other great graduate writing programs on campus: the International Writing Program, which is like a writers’ colony for writers from all over the world; the playwriting program; the nonfiction program; and then programs that didn’t exist when we were students — the Irish writing and Spanish writing programs — and then the translation program, which has a long history. Then there’s the thousands of undergrads who now come to Iowa because it has a reputation as a school that values writing. So there’s a huge community here, and that creates a kind of, I think, quirkiness. This is a town where if you say to somebody, “I’m a poet,” the person will be like, “Oh, yeah. My neighbor’s a poet.”
Instead of saying, “What?”
Yeah, “What do you do?”
So, those of us who work at the program, we see the Workshop as a kind of quirky home for gifted misfits. We feel like we’re nurturing young writers, and we’re thrilled by signs of promise. We have our own — and I don’t mean to speak for everyone — somewhat eclectic or eccentric lives. Small town lives. We don’t think of ourselves as representing anything at all.
So it’s more like the Iowa identity is thrust onto the Workshop, or members of the Workshop, from the outside?
I guess because of the place we hold in the history of the MFA, people equate us with the MFA. And actually, the MFA has taken on its own life, and our graduates have sort of coaxed MFA programs out of universities all over the country, and in that way we are related. You know, they call it the Iowa model. So in that way we are related to all other programs, and I think that some of the quirky messages carry along, but I don’t think we really represent anything at this point.
You mentioned that Iowa is a bigger program than most, which might be part of why it seems like there’s a disproportionate number of graduates of the Workshop who have been published. But I think there is an idea that you get a book contract at the same time you get your master’s degree.
That’s not true. You know that’s not true. But I will say that out of my spring semester 2009 workshop, five out of the 10 students in that workshop now have books.
Wait, spring 2009? So it’s been two and half years and 50 percent of them have books?
I guess so. There are a lot of recent graduates who have books, but can I just say, though, that for those of us who work and teach at the program, who see the Workshop as a quirky home for gifted misfits, we’re thrilled when people show signs of promise, but we also know that it takes a long time, sometimes decades, for talent to mature. All the hoopla over the program and the people who graduate from the program has very little to do with the mission of the program, which is to make writing the center of each writer’s life for the brief period of time when they are here.
It’s interesting to hear you talk about your very recent students who already have books in light of your own path. You were in your early 30s when your story collection “Hunger” came out, and then you spent about 10 years writing your first novel, “Inheritance.” What are some of the pros and cons of having a career with that young sizzle?
Not to speak on behalf of others who’ve published books before 35, but I think it can be stressful to move from that period of life when your struggles are huge, private struggles, to suddenly being in a situation where people assume that you’ve never struggled, or have no struggles. And the fact is that the struggles continue. Being a writer is not easy.
And publishing a book is stressful. Very stressful. The book stops being a private thing and becomes a public thing. “All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost” is an example of this. My first two books were about Asian-American immigrants, which I think is pretty much what everyone expected out of me. And then with “All Is Forgotten,” I published a book from the point of view of a man, and it was not about ethnic identity at all. All of a sudden, I found that my work was being scrutinized in a different way and that was a surprise. And because I had lived a private life for 20 years and was now writing about the things I’d learned about the life of the writer, and the influence of art on one’s emotional development, it was a surprise to see that stuff taken out of context and discussed as if I were writing — what did they say? They said it was an MFA novel, which it wasn’t. They said it was a novel of ideas, which it wasn’t. I wish I could write a novel of ideas.
I forget that critics are part of the production and marketing process; that their first job is to label and categorize what they call the product, or what people in business call the product. So it was a real shock to me, I think because I sat so close to the material, I couldn’t see how others might view it more cynically. As I said before, I have this privilege of experiencing gifted people’s intimate struggles with art, and I wanted to write about that, and it was a very strange thing to have it suddenly turned inside-out — from being something very intimate, to something very public.
I think that when you’re a young writer — and often young writers’ first books are about their identity and their life — and you suddenly discover that information is public, and, moreover, that it’s a product, it can be really disconcerting. My big plan when I was a student here was to wait to publish until I was ready. There were all these agents coming in and out of the program, and I didn’t go to a single meeting with an agent when I was here because I just felt like I wasn’t ready.
And when did you feel like you were ready?
Oh, a few years later. I’d revised the work that I did when I was in Iowa, and started thinking about a longer project, and something happened that just made me decide, “OK, I can handle it now.”
It was gradual, and one day I just realized I was ready to approach the world. I’m really glad I waited.
Because?
Because I wanted to have the emotional resources to cope with that kind of change.
You talked about writing “All Is Forgotten” as a secret project. Did you literally show it to zero people before completing it?
When I finished a draft, which is very similar to the current book, I showed it to one friend of mine, an old friend from the Workshop who I trust. I said to her, “Oh, this is this private thing I’ve been writing and I wanted to show it to you to see what you thought.” She said, “This is really good, and you should publish it.” And I thought, “What a strange idea.”
Rebecca Traister’s extraordinary new book, “Big Girls Don’t Cry: The Election That Changed Everything for American Women,” draws on pieces she wrote for Salon during the 2008 election — about Hillary and Palin and Michelle, about politics and gender and her own thorny relationships to each. But it is also the election as you’ve never read it before, a book that renders those now-familiar stories in a compulsively readable narrative and hammers home just how transformative the moment really was. (An excerpt from the book will run in Salon on Monday.)
To discuss the book, Salon asked Curtis Sittenfeld, author of the acclaimed novels “American Wife” (a compassionate, fictionalized history of Laura Bush) and “Prep” (a keenly observed coming-of-age tale), to interview Traister over the phone. A transcript of their conversation follows.
For me, reading this book, there were so many revelations. I thought I had followed the election closely, but as I read I kept thinking, “Oh, I never saw that. I never realized that.” I think a lot of people who read the book will have a similar reaction to mine, but I also think that before cracking it open, before buying it, people might think: What is there that’s left to say about the 2008 election? Do you feel like you’re fighting an uphill battle in terms of that perception?
When Michiko Kakutani wrote her “Game Change” review in the New York Times, she started with some sentiment like, “Ugh, who needs another book about the election?” But my reaction to that — and every other book that is going to come out about the election, including mine — is that, oh my God, everything in America was busted open during that election. Between race and gender and Obama and Hillary and Palin, there was so much that had never happened before in American history. There will be scores more books about this election, and each of them will offer their own set of revelations about this election, which happens to be a completely gripping narrative, by the way. The greatest thing that happened to me writing this book was remembering how great the story of the election is, so even if you lived it, even though I’d written about it as it was taking place, when I went back to write about it in retrospect, I was like, “Did that really happen?”
In 50 years it could be a magnificent miniseries or something. What are some examples of big stories that people either don’t remember or weren’t even aware of at the time?
Here’s a thing that I didn’t know at the time. When Hillary won New Hampshire, she became the first woman in American history to win a primary. I mean, I sort of knew that, of course, what she was doing was historic. But this was a massive thing, a change in 220 years of presidential history. I didn’t know, and it was my job to know.
And I went back and looked at the New York Times article that sort of summed up the events the next day: Hillary Clinton and McCain win New Hampshire. The article goes into great detail about her crying and all that. But it doesn’t mention that this was the first time in American history that a woman had won a presidential primary.
There were lots of smaller things, too. When I tell people about the NPR producer who compared Hillary to Glenn Close in “Fatal Attraction,” people would say “What?! Somebody said that?!”
Yeah, I felt that way reading it.
A lot of the misogyny, as well as the racism. A lot of that stuff on television, because there were so many channels going at the same time, and we were all struggling to keep up, we missed so many of the things that were being said.
That actually leads into my next question, which is about how you make this very convincing case for how shabbily Hillary Clinton was treated with regard to gender. Again and again people would say, it’s not that I object to a woman being president, it’s that I object to Hillary specifically. But then there’s plenty of evidence to suggest, no, you do object to a woman. When did you personally start to see that pattern?
I actually assumed that anti-Hillary misogyny would take the form that it did in the beginning, the Hillary nutcrackers and the “two fat thighs and a left wing” jokes. This loutish, mostly right wing anti-Hillary spew that we have gotten for decades.
The thing that had a radicalizing impact on me began after [Hillary lost in] Iowa. Because there was this pile-on, and to me it was mind-bending. It was coming often from people on the left. It was like something they had been keeping inside as they bit their tongues and covered this woman who had the gall to be the front-runner and the “inevitable” candidate, which was the word that they threw out there. And finally she had shown weakness, and they were just going nuts.
I wrote a piece for Salon about how, despite the fact that I was not a Hillary supporter, had I lived in New Hampshire I would have voted for her that week, because I was so pissed off. I didn’t know it at the time, but Rachel Maddow said something very similar about feeling like she wanted to defend her on air. There was a video made by Dana Milbank at the Washington Post, just laughing, sneering at Hillary for giving a rally where she answered all the voters’ questions and it went on for a long time. Showing these voters yawning and saying, “Whoa, she’s such a snooze.” I began to see in this very active, palpable way how she was being talked about as Tracy Flick, or Margaret from Dennis the Menace, or Hermione Granger — you know, the know it all girl. And that’s when I began to switch.
The evolution of your feelings toward Hillary is really a central part of the book.
Well I was no fan of Hillary going in. For a long time, prior to her campaign, my feelings were negligible. In fact, I felt a kind of embarrassment that women were expected to have such strong feelings about Hillary. I admired her from a distance, but politically I had less and less in common with her as she moved to the center.
I was one of those few, proud, now deeply embarrassed John Edwards supporters. So when it came to super Tuesday I had to choose between her and Obama, about whom I felt roughly equivalent. I wound up almost flipping a coin and voting for Hillary, but I was still completely ambivalent about her.
Eventually I became a lot more aware of the ways in which not only Hillary but also her supporters were being talked about. I became increasingly sensitive to the scorn directed at her, and it built and built as she continued to fight, and it drove me nuts. Because I thought her continuing to fight was awesome and hilarious. I thought it was completely redefining how we view women and our expectations for them in public and political life. She would not comply. She would not give in. She would not do what the pundits wanted her to do, what her opponents wanted her to do, what reporters were insisting that she do, what everyone was telling her was the smart thing to do or, in one case, the classy thing to do. She just kept going.
But the more she did that, the more anger — biting anger — I began to see, both in the media and amongst the people I knew, and amongst Obama supporters, and that was what began to radicalize me in my support for Clinton, so that by the end I was an ardent Hillary supporter. That does not mean that I did not still find fault with her. I did, and I do. And there were a lot of terrible missteps she made during that campaign. But I was a devoted Hillary supporter by the end, so much so that I, with much humiliation, actually wound up crying after she conceded. I was in the [National Building Museum covering the story for Salon], and I had to run out of the press area, and I was trying to find a place behind a column, and I’m, like, choking out sobs, and I realize I’m standing next to Matt Drudge.
Moving on from Hillary, you also talk about the way Sarah Palin was supposedly much more of a centrist as governor. And how in some ways the reception of her — the frosty reception to her, especially by progressive women — pushed her to the right and helped make her the Tea Partier she is. I can’t stand Sarah Palin, but is she the fault of people like me? Did we make her what she is?
I don’t think people who objected to Sarah Palin are to blame for Palin’s turning rightward. Whose fault it is that Sarah Palin has become Sarah Palin is a really complicated question. To a large degree, it’s Sarah Palin’s fault. To a large degree, it’s the fault of Republicans who thought they could bring her in as a toy, a young attractive Hillary replacement. They didn’t ask any questions about her, they didn’t consider her as a real person and a real candidate with a real history. And in part the intense, visceral loathing of the American left, of feminists, of Democratic women helped push Palin further right. As her onetime adviser Elaine Lafferty said to me, you go where it’s warm, which I think is a great line, and Palin was being embraced by these incredible social conservatives. She went where it was warm.
But the reasons for the visceral attitude about Palin from many women, including me, including you, also have a complicated history. They stem in part from the fact that we got why she was going to be so effective. She behaved in very retro ways, ways we’d been fighting for years to not have to behave. People often like to put it in high school terms, and I try to avoid this but there’s an obvious truth to it. We knew there was a mean girl element. And I think that’s reductive, but it’s not bad, actually, as a descriptor of the kind of instinct that overtook a lot of American women.
In that analogy, are American women the mean girls, or is Sarah Palin the mean girl?
Both, actually. And, God this is reductive, but I think we understood, whether or not we were able to put it together at the time, that in part we got a Sarah Palin because of our inability to deal with a Hillary Clinton. That does not mean, oh, Hillary should have won. It means that Hillary as a mold-breaking, ball-busting, aggressive, relentless female candidate encountered a level of resistance from within her own party — and again, I don’t mean that she should have won, I mean that she should have been treated better, and that her historical place should have been recognized more, and it wasn’t. And so it was the limits of our tolerance, and of a Democratic tolerance for this new kind of woman — a relentless, competitive, noncompliant woman — that opened a door for McCain to bring in Palin to begin with.
So you see Palin as more compliant, less competitive, less ball-busting.
Well, by some standards, she was. But Palin, now, is Clinton-like in her refusal to relent at this point. Their politics are wildly divergent, but Palin’s path in some ways does mirror Clinton’s in the last part of the primary season, in that everyone keeps predicting she’s done and she’s not. When she stopped being governor, I thought, well, that’s the end of her. Too bad I’m writing a book about her, no one’s going to care about her in a year. She sends ridiculous tweets, and people think that’s going to be the end of her. She defies every bit of conventional wisdom, and that is very much as Hillary was in the second half of the primary season.
What do you think Sarah Palin will do next?
I think she’ll run for president, I mean I have no evidence ….
In 2012?
Yes! I think she’ll run for president, or emperor, or master of the universe, or whatever position is available. And it could be 2012, it could be 2016, it could be 2016 against Hillary, which would be a show for the ages, really.
You’ll have to write a sequel if that happens.
I mean I think that we would all just grab popcorn and sit there, riveted, that entire year, right?
Maybe Michelle could run, too, in 2016.
Well you’ve covered Michelle. Do you think Michelle wants to run?
If I had to guess, I’d guess no, but it wouldn’t shock me if the answer were yes. Here’s my Michelle question for you: I remember you wrote a piece after the Democratic National Convention where, in addition to expressing admiration for Michelle, you expressed some disappointment about the fact that she’s this very bright, very educated, very successful woman who seems to have to minimize herself and her accomplishments for the sake of winning votes. And I felt like in this book, you were more understanding of the choices she’s made. Would you agree or disagree with that?
I would agree. I wasn’t harsh towards Michelle, but I was upset about what had been done to Michelle. And I still am. I think in this story she’s one of the best examples of the limits of our abilities to stretch when it comes to our expectations for women. Her situation was also deeply complicated by the fact that in addition to being an unbelievably brilliant, energetic, engaged, opinionated, professional, successful woman, she’s also a black woman. The ways in which she was treated as an angry black woman, the ways in which there was always suspicion of her because she spoke too freely about her husband and was not respectful enough of him, those things were always deeply sexist and racist in ways that were ignored for far too long.
At the convention, she got this tremendous makeover, and I got why she got the makeover. This was a big leap that the United States was about to make in electing an African-American president. And everything that could be scary about it to those that found the idea of African-Americans in the White House scary and threatening had to be smoothed down, and Michelle got the brunt of a lot of that. But it was so depressing to me that this was the only way we could make her palatable, and it lasts until now — to make her the wife, the mother, the gardener, interested in kids. None of that stuff is inauthentic. She’s a wife, and she’s a mother, and she cares deeply about those things. But every other aspect of her personality — all of which were so complicated and interesting and modern — were just stripped away. And the fact that that’s the woman whose approval ratings can be super high is endlessly depressing to me.
If you think I’m more understanding in the book, it’s probably true, because after I made a rather harsh assessment of the situation, very soon after Obama was elected, there were several people, including Patricia Williams in the Nation, Melissa Harris-Lacewell, Latoya Peterson of Racialicious, several people made arguments in print and to me about the ways in which holding up Michelle Obama as a maternal ideal, a wifely ideal and a sartorial ideal are actually progressive because African-American women have rarely been seen as those kind of ideals. And that was very eye-opening to me, and one of the many instances during the election and while writing the book that the whiteness of my feminism and my perspective was exposed to me.
I don’t feel any of the frustration that some feminists feel with Michelle Obama. I feel almost defensive of her.
I think you’re right to feel defensive. She’s given every indication of having never really wanted to be a part of this to begin with. I don’t blame her for any of the choices she’s made. But what I find fault with is the American expectations for femininity and for black femininity. I mean look, as soon as she left her freaking garden, and went to Spain …
Yeah, what’s your take on that? How do you think race and gender are tied up in that story?
It’s the whole spoiled rich lady thing, which is a barb that’s been thrown at Michelle. It’s every kind of stereotype thrown at her over the years she’s been in the national spotlight. She’s been portrayed as the sassy, emasculating wife to Barack. She’s been portrayed as the black American princess. This country right now is so stirred up in its aggression toward Obama that I think it’s a kind of miracle that even with her work in the garden and on childhood obesity and keeping as quiet as humanly possible that her approval ratings have stayed so high. And that story kind of broke the wall for her. It wasn’t really about her trip to Spain. It was a lot of people who have been stirred up into this level of aggression toward Obama in general, getting just the excuse they needed to aim a little bit of it at Michelle.
I definitely felt like there was a very racist component in play, too. Like, of course the first lady stays at a five-star hotel. Do you think she should stay at the Holiday Inn Express? It’s almost like people are thinking, “But a black woman doesn’t stay at a five-star hotel.”
Like she’s too big for her britches or something, but why are her britches supposed to be small? I mean there is historical precedent for this. People did get pissed off at Nancy Regan when she did something expensive in the White House. It’s not just race. But yes, I think the characterization of it, as with most everything that has to do with Michelle, is racialized.
Is there any public figure not known to be a friend to feminism whom you’d love to have read your book?
I kind of automatically thought of Chris Matthews, but there are any number of intense Obama supporters who I would love to have read the book. There are a lot of people who just wrote off and who continue to write off concern with these issues. There are a lot of people in the Democratic Party I would like to have read this book.
There’s such an assumption that people who supported Hillary, or who have a feminist beef with Sarah Palin, or people who care about this stuff, or people who complain because reproductive rights keep getting traded away, are just these whine machines. And we just allow that perception to continue and it just builds on itself. So you have more distance, on the left, between feminism and progressivism. This is part of my mission, to explain that it isn’t just angry victimization, it’s agitating for continued social progress, it’s participating in the American conversation. That, in fact, what we are dealing with is a really complex story in American history.
Trisha Yearwood’s fans, if those of us gathered at a Viking store and cooking school in a suburb outside Nashville, Tenn., are representative, are mostly Southern or Midwestern white women in our 30s and 40s, but some of us are men, some of us are gay, and at least one of us has a mohawk. What we have in common, besides that we love Yearwood, is that through local radio contests sponsored by Clear Channel Communications stations in various American cities, 34 of us have won a cooking lesson with the country singer to celebrate the publication of her bestselling new cookbook, “Georgia Cooking in an Oklahoma Kitchen: Recipes From My Family to Yours.” This is how we’ve found ourselves in the sort of mini-amphitheater where a college class might be held, except that instead of a professor standing in front of us, it’s Yearwood, and instead of syllabuses waiting on the desks when we entered, there were deviled eggs.
OK, so I didn’t actually win a radio contest, but I called Yearwood’s publicist to ask if I could tag along, and I’m here as a fan as much as a journalist. Or maybe it’s some combination, because, while exclaiming with contest winners over how tall and pretty Yearwood looks, and how delicious her deviled eggs taste, I’m also trying to find answers to some pressing questions. For example: Given that Yearwood has led an awfully interesting life, why’d she choose to write a cookbook instead of a memoir? Is it weird for her to be married, as of 2005, to Garth Brooks since she’s very successful but he’s very, very, very successful? And finally: What exactly did I do wrong the other night when I tried the recipe for Uncle Wilson’s Baked Onions?
Yearwood, as you may or may not know, has a gorgeous, powerful voice. The winner of three Grammy awards and two female vocalist of the year Country Music Awards, she’s had nine No. 1 singles, and 11 of her albums have gone gold or platinum. Though she doesn’t write her own music, since releasing her first album in 1991, she has cultivated a consistent tone and focus. Has your man left you heartbroken and you just wish everyone would quit telling you to get over him? Yearwood’s been there, as she sings about in “Everybody Knows.” Have you ever given your man his walking papers, then wished you hadn’t? So has she, in “Believe Me Baby (I Lied).” Have you found yourself endlessly revisiting what you and your man used to have even though it’s long finished? Yearwood feels your pain in “Where Are You Now.” And yet, in the midst of all this man-inflicted torment, do you sometimes feel flashes of you-go-girl empowerment and optimism for the future in spite of the fact you’re not a Size 6? Well, have a listen to “I’m Still Alive,” “Real Live Woman” or “Not a Bad Thing.”
Lest it seem presumptuous to read autobiographical elements into her music, Yearwood, 43, actually invites this, telling us during the cooking lesson that she chooses songs “that feel like they’re mine. I like songs for the same reason you do, songs that sound like someone was spying on your life.” To be fair, Yearwood does sometimes sing about love gone right, especially about the promise of an early relationship, and she even sings the occasional song that has not much at all to do with love but focuses more on, say, the pleasures of country living. She’s most well-known for her first No. 1 hit, “She’s in Love With the Boy,” which is one of the songs Yearwood will perform for us later today, but first there are meatloaf, green beans with ham, and brownies to attend to.
In person, Yearwood is warm, energetic and quick-witted. “You guys didn’t really think I cooked, did you?” she asks as she shows us how to make several recipes; meanwhile, the same recipes, already prepared by Viking employees, are brought out for instant gratification sampling. As we watch and chew, Yearwood offers cooking tips and other banter — “Mom said never open an egg over your recipe,” she says cheerfully before proceeding to open an egg directly over the mixing bowl for the meatloaf. She also reassures us that she washed her hands right before the demonstration, tells us that when a recipe calls for room temperature butter and she’s forgotten to get it out ahead of time, she’ll cut it up and set it on the windowsill, and explains, “I’m about using as few dishes as possible. You know how that is.” Oh, and the pressure cooker is, she says, “just a wonderful invention, and they don’t really explode anymore.”
More than once, tabloids have razzed Yearwood about her weight, and there’s something refreshing about a celebrity whose reaction to such criticism isn’t to become a Jenny Craig spokesperson but instead to publish a cookbook featuring multiple recipes that start with melting a stick — or two — of butter. And, although she has spoken publicly about her weight struggles, on this day, Yearwood is downright trim; in fact, with her long, straight, very blond hair, navy blue sweater, fitted jeans and jewelry, she looks kind of like the head cheerleader 25 years out of high school if the head cheerleader had aged as well as possible without medical intervention. At the same time, she’s not so skinny that you doubt she actually eats, let alone cooks. “I love potatoes — they’re my favorite food,” she announces, mentioning shortly afterward, “I like a gooey cookie.” And she’s only more effusive in the pages of her cookbook, where she writes, variously, “I love cheese!” “I love any salad that has bacon as an ingredient!” and, “So to answer the burning question, can you make an entire meal out of sausage ball appetizers? Yes!”
The idea of writing an autobiography did come up, Yearwood explains, but she wasn’t tempted because, as she later tells me in an interview, “I don’t interest myself that much. Maybe in 20 years, I’ll have something to say, but at this point, I feel like it’d be Part One.”
A cookbook, on the other hand, seemed like fun to her. Raised in small-town Georgia by a teacher mother and banker father who both were avid cooks — the cookbook is dedicated to her late father, Jack, who died in 2005 but shows up in photos making yeast bread, barbecued chicken and collard greens — Yearwood decided the project should be a family affair. Her mother, Gwen, and sister Beth are credited as co-authors and, indeed, the title and many of the recipes come from a 40th birthday gift they made for Yearwood after she moved to Oklahoma: a binder they called “Georgia Recipes for an Oklahoma Kitchen.”
The result of this labor of culinary love manages to be glossy and even kind of beautiful at the same time that it feels genuinely down-home. The lush photographs of the food, including shots taken for the book at a Yearwood family picnic, are interspersed with older photos from when Yearwood was growing up. Individual recipes are accompanied by personal commentary from the Yearwood ladies of both the practical and the more conversational varieties. For instance, accompanying the Baked Ham With Brown Sugar Honey Glaze recipe, “From Gwen: If you don’t want or need a whole ham, you can bake half a ham, but choose the butt (meatier) end rather than the shank end.” Or, also from Gwen for Mama’s Cornmeal Hushpuppies: “The idea for adding jalapeños comes from Herb’s sister Patty.” Having read through the cookbook at length, I have to confess I still have no idea who either Herb or his sister Patty is, but it’s hard not to be charmed by these sorts of details. In fact, as you peruse, you may find yourself wishing you, too, were a Yearwood.
Given that the closest most of us can come is just to eat like one, I attempted three of Yearwood’s recipes before venturing down to Nashville: Garlic Grits Casserole (tasty, apparently, because my husband ate four servings), Easy Peach Cobbler (delicious, and also in danger of being submerged under its river of melted butter) and the aforementioned Uncle Wilson’s Baked Onions. With just three ingredients, all of them pretty hard to wreck — onions, bacon and butter — Uncle Wilson’s recipe seemed a sure-fire hit, but when I made it, the onions were about to disintegrate after being in the oven for well over an hour, yet the bacon still wasn’t fully cooked. I was prepared, for the sake of research, to forge ahead and eat them anyway when my husband wisely if inelegantly warned, “You don’t fuck with bacon.” So instead I threw them in the trash.
Back at the Viking superstore, an audience member raises her hand to mention that she too had trouble with a recipe — in this case, with the caramel icing Yearwood’s mom learned to make “as a young teacher in Dawson, Georgia, [when she] boarded with Mrs. Mary Lou Alexander.” Yearwood offers consolation and advice; the icing, it turns out, is probably the most difficult recipe in the whole cookbook.
Yearwood tells us she’s game to answer any of our other questions. “It can be about food or music or me or my husband,” she says. “Anyone? Bueller?”
Her husband — ah, yes, we have arrived at the subject that makes Yearwood’s life story both more interesting and more complicated. Whereas Yearwood, having sold 10 million albums, is by any measure a success, Brooks has sold a hundred million — putting him in a category with only a few other performers, such as Elvis Presley or the Beatles. That alone would seem to create a complex dynamic in a marriage for two people in the same field, but there’s more — in fact, there’s enough back story to fill a novel.
Yearwood and Brooks met at a demo session in Nashville in 1988, and knew immediately they’d like to work together in the future. Three years later, by which point Brooks had become a country star, he invited Yearwood to tour with him as his opening act. Brooks had been married since 1986 and had three daughters with his wife; Yearwood was married and divorced twice, without having children, by 1999. After Brooks divorced in 2000, the two began dating. Not surprisingly, rumors have circulated about exactly when they became involved, and some of the songs they’ve collaborated on — particularly 1997′s “In Another’s Eyes,” which Brooks co-wrote — seem awfully fraught with meaning, with lyrics such as: “In another’s eyes I’m someone who/ Loves her enough to walk away from you/ I’d never cheat/ I’d never lie/ In another’s eyes.”
Both Yearwood and Brooks appear more than a little ambivalent about their fame: Brooks retired in 2000 at the age of 38, arguably at the peak of his career, saying he won’t record or perform until 2015, when his youngest daughter is 18. They live on a ranch in Owasso, Okla., where Yearwood’s two best friends are a dental hygienist and a physical therapist; she and Brooks shop regularly at Wal-Mart; and they faithfully attend Brooks’ daughters’ soccer games. Yearwood calls herself the girls’ “bonus mom.”
Yearwood takes her husband’s staggering success in stride. “I have fans, and he has followers,” she tells me. “It’s a different sort of phenomenon. And I get it. If somebody’s excited to meet me and they go, ‘Well, we were hoping Garth was gonna be here,’ I don’t take offense because that would be the natural assumption. Most of the time it’s that. Occasionally, someone will come up to us and say, ‘You know, Garth, I like you, but I really love Trisha.’ That happens enough for me that it keeps my ego in good shape.”
As it turns out, this is, almost verbatim, what one of the radio contest winners, Candyce Havenstrite, says at the cooking lesson. Havenstrite, an interior decorator who lives in Murfreesboro, Tenn., won the chance to attend the cooking lesson with Yearwood by calling in to a morning show on her drive to work and correctly answering a multiple-choice question about what makes the dirt in Georgia red. (If you’re wondering: iron ore.) Today, Havenstrite’s here with her 9-year-old daughter, Samantha.
About Yearwood’s music, Havenstrite says, “I just like that it’s so real and from the heart, and she has a phenomenal voice.” But that’s not all. “I like seeing her have a whole new life, how she’s happy and content.” Also divorced, Havenstrite adds, “It gives me hope.” Which isn’t to say Havenstrite’s at all surprised Yearwood and Brooks ended up together. “Many, many years ago, I saw her perform on Jay Leno with Garth, and they had such a connection.”
Bonnie Manzeck and Denise Evert, two stay-at-home moms from Milwaukee whose daughters are in school together, echo this sentiment. “I expected it,” Manzeck says of Yearwood’s current marriage. “Any time you saw them, you could see the chemistry.”
Like Havenstrite, Evert is impressed with Yearwood’s air of authenticity. “You could be friends with her,” she says. “She seems so real and genuine and down-to-earth. She looks so pretty and cute with jeans, but not like a diva.”
Listening to her other fans, I’m struck by the thought that Yearwood herself is a lot like her cookbook — that in the age of the vagina-flashing no-talent 20-year-old celebrity, she’s a bit of a throwback to a less sordid time. She’s open enough to be accessible and glamorous enough to be intriguing, but she’s also discreet enough to remain mysterious. We like her not just because she’s lived a real and complex life, including her two divorces, but also because she’s never posed for a magazine in her underpants while talking about those divorces.
Our day of food, friendship, fandom and female empowerment concludes with Yearwood singing several songs, mostly off her latest album, “Heaven, Heartache, and the Power of Love.” And this is another great thing about Trisha Yearwood — she may have found domestic fulfillment at last, but she hasn’t forgotten, as the title of the album implies, what heartache is like; she’s still making music for every mood you might find yourself in, from wounded to elated. Accompanied by two musicians, she’s standing about 12 feet from me, which feels decadently intimate, like I’m that obscenely rich guy who paid $7 million to have the Rolling Stones play at his 60th birthday party. Yearwood’s voice is loud and strong and beautiful, and when I glance around the amphitheater, I see digital cameras held high. Between songs, Yearwood good-naturedly notes the cyclical nature of her career. She says, “You start out playing in kitchens, and you end up playing in kitchens.”
For Melissa Fay Greene, the enormity of the AIDS orphan crisis in Africa became impossible to ignore one Sunday morning in August 2000. After reading an article in the New York Times estimating that more than 12 million children in sub-Saharan Africa had lost parents to AIDS — and that by 2010 those figures were expected to rise to between 25 million and 50 million — Greene wondered who was going to raise 12 million children. Admitting that she and her attorney husband in Atlanta were being driven cheerfully “insane” by their five kids, Greene asked, “Who will offer grief counseling to 12, 15, 18, 36 million children? Who will help them avoid lives of servitude or prostitution? Who will pass on to them the traditions of culture and religion, of history and government, of craft and profession? Who will help them grow up, choose the right person to marry, find work, and learn to parent their own children?”
These questions sent Greene, now 53, on a journey as both an adoptive parent and a journalist. Since that Sunday morning, she and her husband have adopted two Ethiopian orphans, with two more on the way.
This month, Bloomsbury has published Greene’s fourth book of nonfiction, “There Is No Me Without You: One Woman’s Odyssey to Rescue Africa’s Children.” Greene, who has twice seen her work nominated for the National Book Award, is not the titular woman. Instead, it is Haregewoin Teferra who gives a human face to the havoc AIDS has wreaked on an entire continent. A middle-class, middle-aged Ethiopian, Teferra is as surprised as anyone to find herself running an orphanage out of her home in Addis Ababa. In 1990, Teferra’s husband unexpectedly died of a heart attack at the age of 54; eight years later, her adult daughter, the mother of an infant, died of AIDS. Overcome with grief, Teferra prepared to move into a hut on the grounds of a cemetery and live in seclusion. Instead, the director of a Catholic charity asked if she’d consider staying where she was and taking in a 15-year-old AIDS orphan. One orphan became two, and then four, and then — despite disapproving friends and little to no government assistance — 80. Some of these orphans were HIV-positive, some not. With the expansion of the orphanage came problems for Teferra, which Greene does not shy away from describing: Teferra was accused of child trafficking and also of negligence in ignoring claims from orphans that an orphanage employee molested them. These charges led to Teferra’s arrest, though she eventually was exonerated.
In addition to chronicling Teferra’s story, Greene provides a scientific and cultural history of AIDS — one in which she makes withering assessments of government leaders and pharmaceutical companies — and also a history of Ethiopia. But Greene is too shrewd a storyteller to think that it’s statistics that will motivate people to act, or even make them cry. Without a doubt, this is a three-hankie read, but it’s because of the stories about individuals: of those who, like Teferra, have upended their stable lives in order to help those less lucky; of the orphans themselves, among whom it is not uncommon for a 7-year-old to single-handedly raise a 5-year-old; of the adoptive families in America who, in cross-cultural run-ins worthy of a sitcom, must politely decline their new son’s offer to butcher a cow for dinner, or explain to their new daughter that there is no need, in Snellville, Ga., to watch out for hyenas when using the bathroom at night.
Both in print and in conversation, Greene comes off as very much a mom. She is perceptive, compassionate and clearly tickled by a good fart joke: Although the Ethiopians are famously well-mannered, she can’t resist bringing whoopee cushions as gifts for children at one orphanage. Indeed, it is the combination of Greene’s maternal tendencies and narrative gifts that make her the ideal person to tell this timely story.
What do you think motivated Haregewoin Teferra to give her entire life to taking care of these children?
I think in Haregewoin’s case, she was absolutely up against the wall. Grief had completely ruined her life, and she was going to need to leave the world as a result. She could no longer live without her husband and her daughter. That component of the story is so powerful and universal. I think a lot of people have found that the only way to survive is to start reaching out to others and trying to love other people. The children saved Haregewoin as much as she saved them.
How did you cross paths with Haregewoin?
I had heard she had these containers, like a trailer off the back of a truck, and she would cut a door in the container. People were calling her “the Container Lady” and thought she was living in the container with the children. But she wasn’t — she was using that as a dining hall and classroom.
I asked Good Housekeeping if I could do a story for them about her. Good Housekeeping had never done an international story, ever, but they said OK, they would try it.
The response [to the story] was tremendous. Good Housekeeping readers from all over the country sent contributions, $10 and $25 at a time, saying, “We had no idea this was happening.” Haregewoin was so encouraged by that. It emboldened her to keep talking to me.
And yet, while you were in the process of writing a book in which Haregewoin plays a huge role as a heroine, things temporarily unraveled at her orphanage. What was that like?
Last September, I first heard that there were accusations that child molestation had taken place in her compound, it was overcrowded, there were too many kids in each bunk, there were too many kids everywhere.
I did not mention it to my editors at that time because I wanted to be able to confirm it myself and figure out what was happening. I went over to Ethiopia, got what I thought was the story, came back, and then in December, she was arrested. The book was due Dec. 15. And Dec. 14, Haregewoin called me from prison. So then there was a frantic scramble on my part to get on top of events and to deal with my own disappointment and fury.
When I connected with Haregewoin again, I understood what had happened and I felt that I didn’t have her wrong. This stuff was not her fault. She wasn’t getting any help from the government or anywhere. She was taking in all these kids.
I had to forgive Haregewoin, see her as human, understand that she’s more interesting not being a saint, and realize that I sort of messed up because I did think I was writing about a saint. So I had to rewrite the book, starting from the beginning.
By the time you began reporting this book, you already had adopted a son from Bulgaria and a daughter from Ethiopia, in addition to your four biological children. How did you initially become interested in international adoption?
At 42, I thought, if my husband and I are going to have another child, this is the time. I have to do it. Should I do it? And we didn’t. I thought, we’ve got our four, they’re great, it’s enough already. By [the time I was] 46, our daughter Molly was starting to apply to colleges and we suddenly realized this was all going to end. It’d all been so incredibly fun and crazy and nice and she was going to leave. And we got kind of this panicky feeling of empty nest that we were going to be down to just three. At some point, my husband said, “Listen, if we want more children, we can adopt.” I’m sure he just tossed it out to comfort me.
One day I sat at the computer and I typed in “adoption” and suddenly I realized that the entire Internet had been invented for international adoption. I learned about the Internet at the same time that I learned about international adoption. At that point, Bulgaria displayed photos of children in orphanages who needed families, and I came across the picture of this little boy who became our son. He was just a sweet little guy, 4 years old, and needed a family and so we followed all the steps. At the moment that we brought him home [less than a year later], I had this science fiction feeling like I had pushed something on the computer and he’d come out of the screen.
Then a couple of years later, [our son] Seth was ready to go off to college and we thought, Oh God, no! Another one? You’ve taken Molly, leave us someone! So we started thinking about adoption again at the moment that, for me, the headlines hit the kitchen table: Africa is a continent of orphans. So I just thought, if we’re really going to adopt again, could we bring in one of these children?
Was your interest in AIDS orphans originally as an adoptive parent rather than as a journalist?
I sort of used journalism as a cover. I would say, outside a really close circle of friendship, people thought I was sent on these interesting assignments by the New Yorker and the New York Times and Good Housekeeping, and while I was over there, I would meet some nice little kid I didn’t feel like I could leave behind. But that was a total deception. I didn’t want people to think I was completely insane. But in each case, we already were doing the adoption and the article was a way for me to go over and do more research in something that passionately interested me.
I wrote about AIDS orphans for the New York Times Magazine feeling really humble that I was not an epidemiologist, a doctor or a social scientist. I had none of the criteria. But I was a firsthand witness. I could look at something and say what it was I was looking at. I thought, I can tell stories. Even here, I can tell stories. And that’s useful.
What’s it like preparing to adopt your eighth and ninth children?
It’s ridiculous. I almost hate to mention it. It sounds like more than it feels like. We had neighbors years ago in Rome, Ga., who had eight children, and I never thought we would pass that family, ever, ever, in a million billion years. They had eight children and we had a newborn, and the newborn was just about to undo me. I found the change from zero to one to be so gigantic and so difficult and impossible and wonderful, but exhausting, and I was hallucinating from the sleep deprivation. That change from zero to one — nothing else has compared to that. So going from four to five or five to six — once you survive zero to one, I found it manageable. Plus we’re not bringing in little babies, and not everyone lives at home.
My husband and I went pretty quickly from thinking, How could we possibly do this? to How could we not do this? Because we know we can do it. By our Atlanta Midtown standards, it’s a lot of kids and it’ll be a little crowded and crazy, but by the standards of where the kids are, it’s going to be Disney World here. For them, we live in the Disney World castle.
You tackle the science and politics behind the AIDS crisis in Africa, and your portrayal of pharmaceutical companies is incredibly damning. You speak particularly critically of companies like Glaxo Wellcome and Bristol-Myers Squibb who for years protected their patents through legal maneuvering, made drugs expensive, argued that they had to keep prices high because of the cost of research even though most research was government-funded — and made outrageous profits.
World-record-shattering profits were made on these drugs while people died. People in the know, looking at that, have said, “These were crimes against humanity.” There have been all these arguments by the pharmaceutical companies about why it doesn’t boil down to giving the drugs to people. But when you’re on the ground over there, the only thing that matters is getting the drugs to people. Everything else can follow from that.
It was life-changing what I saw when I went over [to Ethiopia] the first time, especially the orphanages of the HIV-positive children where they were all going to die — these were just orphanages that were hospices. We talked to the director of one of those orphanages and asked him what would he do if he had money. And he said he would immediately bring in more children. And we said, “What if it was a choice between buying medicine and bringing in more children?” And he said, “I’d bring in more children.” And we were incredibly shocked. But what he saw was children dying on the streets, so he thought the most good he could do was let the children at least die in a loving circumstance.
Are things still as bad as they were five or 10 years ago?
Progress has been made. The “3 by 5 Initiative” [an initiative by UNAIDS and the World Health Organization to get 3 million people in developing countries on anti-AIDS drugs by 2005], even though it failed to meet its target, still got hundreds of thousands of people on drug treatment. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the William J. Clinton Foundation are reaching tens of thousands of people with the actual drugs that you would get if you lived in Chicago or Las Vegas.
What’s going to happen down the road a few years is that people will start to build up immunities to those drugs and need the second-line drugs, and those second-line drugs still have the high price tags on them. But we’re not at that crisis yet.
You point out that one misperception Americans have is that we’re a leader, in financial terms, in fighting AIDS and HIV. But though the United States does in fact give the most foreign aid money of any country in dollars (over $75 million between 2002 and 2005) — it gives one of the lowest GNP percentages (0.1575 percent).
We’re pathetic in that respect. And we don’t know it about ourselves. We think that we’re so generous and that we’re holding up the world, but we’re not.
You present a few theories about how HIV first spread, and you seem to favor the theory that, with the introduction of antibiotics to Africa in the 1950s, HIV spread through hundreds of thousands of unsterilized needle injections.
I found trusted experts who believe that is definitely the direction of the inquiry. But the force of the research now is behind finding a cure or a vaccine. There are not many people interested in how this happened. But it’s also possible that the answer is so terrible, if it’s truly the result of well-intentioned but misguided health campaigns. That’s a tragic answer. And it’s still going on.
There are regions where safe sex is increasing, condom use is increasing, sexually transmitted diseases are falling — and HIV is off the charts. That’s not explained by sexual behavior. One of the things people think is that AIDS is spreading out of control because of some African hypersexual behaviors. But researchers into sexual behaviors find African men have fewer lifetime partners than American men.
Was your goal in writing this book to move Americans to adopt an orphan themselves? To donate money? Or merely to be more aware of the situation?
I don’t want to promote adoption as the major answer to AIDS in Africa because there’s no way enough families around the world will open their homes to these children. That’s doomed to failure.
I hope to be working against paradigm. The paradigm of Ethiopia is, People are starving and/or People are very fast runners. A lot of the major newspaper coverage begins with images like that. In Haregewoin Teferra, there’s the story of a middle-class educated women whose husband was the high school principal and she too is suffering.
And on the most elementary level, I would love people to read this and think, “Oh my God, they’re just like us! What’s going on is as if my partner and I died and left our children orphans.” The first step is to feel it as an emergency happening to people like yourself.
In the book you describe a white father from Vermont who wonders, when traveling with his wife to Ethiopia to pick up their new daughter, whether there’s an imperialist angle to these adoptions. What’s the answer to his question?
Of course one has mixed feelings looking at international adoption. You weigh what the child is losing: connection to culture and history and language and religion and art and literature. A child is losing the world into which the child was born. And that is almost always a loss. It’s hard to offset that. A child is losing the right to grow up in a family that looks like the child, the child is losing the possibility of going out for dinner on a Tuesday night with his or her parents and not having people look over at the odd configuration of that family. It’s not all good news, and the fact is that people can have incredibly happy and wonderful childhoods outside the U.S. In fact, on every trip I’ve taken into rural Ethiopia, I’ve had the same thought looking around, which is, if you could have enough food, schools and medicine, this would rival any childhood on earth — the freedom of being out on this beautiful landscape and riding a donkey and chasing the geese and climbing a tree and running across the fields with your friends and swimming in a lake. It’s a Huckleberry Finn childhood — if there were food, medicine and schools. And parents.
But all of that is swept off the board when a child is orphaned in a poor country. Then you ask what can you do to make up for what the child has now lost? And what you can offer the child is a new family. And a new family trumps just about everything else. I can’t imagine a child on earth who would rather be speaking their native language in the impoverished orphanage in Romania or Bulgaria or China or Cambodia or Vietnam or Ethiopia rather than learn English with a suburban family in, you know, Dallas. The tradeoff wins out.
It’s a truism in the adoption world that people walking around with their adopted babies or children have observers come up and say, “She’s so lucky, he’s so lucky,” and the adoptive mom or dad says, “No, I’m the lucky one.” But what I’ve learned is that the true answer is, “You’re right. This child has won the lottery. This is a lucky child.”
Curtis Sittenfeld and Lan Samantha Chang 
Rebecca Traister 
