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.
She also claimed male territory as her own, especially in Fictional Family Life, where she wrote deeply about Simon Tabor’s multiple versions of himself, and the adolescent boy’s self-imagined cast of make-believe fathers. In writing those daring and unpredictable fathers, juxtaposed also against Simon Tabor’s real father, a self-destructing stockbroker who finds personal redemption as an insurance broker in the Bakersfield desert, she displayed her dazzling virtuosity, somehow both luminous and formidable.
Ashby writes for the sake of the work, although, when pressed, she did not apologize for seeking her own lasting place in the world of letters. In a 1988 interview with Esquire, she said, “It’s not actually possible to write for an audience. Or at least I can’t. I write for myself and hope others may find themselves in my work. It takes a lifetime to attain a writerly expansiveness, and finding an audience is the least of it. Of course, when I’m honing a story for the thousandth time, I admit my desire for that audience may have become conscious. I labor to be in charge of my own material, and if that hard work allows me to sit at the table with other serious, great writers of this and past generations, I don’t shy away from that. Why would I? I write for myself, but I seek to be read, for the work to be deeply felt.”
The Linder interviews and the Esquire interview are also interesting because Ashby limited the questions she was willing to answer to her childhood, her life as a young writer, her literary dreams. She never discussed her current personal life. As a result, many of her fans were shocked to learn she had married just before the international tour for Fictional Family Life commenced.
In early June 1989, under the bright lights of television cameras, Ashby read to a sold-out, standing-room-only crowd at Barnard College. Afterward, many female members of the audience inundated her with questions about her recent marriage, expressing their dismay. We note that the following transcription of Ashby’s remarks are set out here for the first time. The program that aired on PBS did not include these revelations.
“Sometimes I worry, too, that what I have done will end up disappointing myself. Beware of friends encouraging you to take a break from your writing, telling you to have a little fun and celebrate your success, if only for a long weekend. Beware, because your life may move in ways you didn’t expect, or want, suddenly hallmarked by the seemingly traditional. In other words, beware of finding yourself living an unintended life.
“I don’t normally divulge the personal, but it seems right to share how I ended up here. A road trip a couple of years ago with friends, fellow—or rather female—editors at the publishing house where I used to work. They chose Annapolis because the Naval Academy was there; all those strong and handsome men excited them. I wasn’t interested, I had my focus. But there we were on the July Fourth weekend, in a bar on the waterfront promenade. My friends let themselves be swept away, but I held on to my place at that bar, thinking I’d stay and observe and slip back to the motel, make a few notes for the future. Then a man introduced himself to me and his extravagantly long hair was eccentric among all those shorn skulls of the naval cadets.
“If I had figured out immediately the kind of man he was, things might now be different. I believed then, as I still do, that my writing benefits from my perceptual abilities and my observational skills. So I absorbed this man’s long hair, his long fingers, his long eyelashes, his romantic brown eyes, and I wondered what a painter or a sculptor, some kind of artist anyway, was doing in this naval bar. He struck me as likely leading a peripatetic life, attributing his unsteady schedule to a muse. But my snap denouncement of him was completely wrong. He was at Johns Hopkins, a doctor in the midst of a fellowship, specializing in rare eye surgeries, enraptured by his ability to help people see their worlds again. He was home for a visit with his vice admiral father, at the bar taking a breather from the old man who was still angry that his son had refused the navy.
“Groan now, because I know you will. He bought me a drink and said that when he completed his studies he was moving to a small town that had a world-class research hospital and lab where he would work on his theories
