On April 15, Suzanne Kingsbury came to Mississippi State and read from her latest novel, “The Gospel According to Gracey.” The novel is her second, but she continues to travel and write in and out of the country.
“The Gospel According to Gracey” is on sale now at the MSU bookstore.
Reflector: What age did you begin writing?
Suzanne: I began writing very early. Instead of doing homework at night, I would write poetry. I wrote my first short story in fourth grade and never really stopped. I was always reading and making up stories in my head, which were constant companions when I was young, so I was half in the real world and half in the imaginary world of my stories all the time. My teachers hated it and always told me to, “snap out of it.”
Reflector: What inspired you to write “The Gospel According to Gracey”?
Suzanne: I was inspired to write “The Gospel According to Gracey” because when I was staying in Atlanta, a friend of mine was working with high risk HIV women in the Bluff and I found their stories fascinating, some of them were prep school educated, college graduates, women from Buckhead, doctors wives who had fallen into it and others had grown up in the streets. There was a real range in terms of age, social class, race and I started to think about the people she was working with in terms of characters in a novel. What if I just took a day in the streets of Atlanta and focused on two prep school kids from Buckhead, their parents and a woman who has just gotten arrested who is clean now but who was the wife of the biggest drug dealer when it all began? What if I take a bad cop, a good cop and a transvestite dealer and the novel startedfrom there. It took about three years to write and research it.
Reflector: When writing “The Gospel According to Gracey” you were sometimes undercover, going into bars, standing in line with addicts, etc. Did you ever feel completely out of place and want to give up?
Suzanne: I was undercover at bars and standing in line with addicts and so on…., yes, but I never wanted to give up. It was like I had angels around me while I wrote the book and they kept telling me I had to go on.
I stayed awake with coffee and I was so driven by the intense storyline of the book and the tenderness and reality of the characters. Really the characters seemed so alive to me and they were very loveable and wild and vulnerable and I was so attracted to their stories and desires and who they were. I just kept wanting to find more about them, which meant that I had to keep meeting people and thus I did more and more research.
I met some incredible people and I am still in touch with them today. I feel very lucky to have been able to go undercover and meet them.
Reflector: At your book reading, you mentioned that a film documentary is being done on “The Gospel According to Gracey.” How is that coming?
Suzanne: A film documentary is being done because it was an intense story in itself, going into prep schools and talking to students and alums of the very elite social class, talking to people on the streets, to parents and social workers and methadone clinic workers and people working with addicts just out of jail and finding humanity there.
The filmmaker and I went back to these places and we filmed and talked to people. It was a very rich experience to see that world from a filmmaker’s perspective. He is putting music to it now; I think it went well. I am really looking forward to seeing the finished product. He will be submitting it to film festivals and I will be interested to hear how people respond.
Reflector: Do you have a title for your new novel yet?
Suzanne: I don’t have a new title for the novel I am working on yet. It is about Panama during the time of Noriega, lots of political intrigue and dangerous liaisons, in a way a very different sort of novel for me to do and I am looking forward to it. It also focuses a lot on a boy in the American Army. It is a really interesting time to be writing about the military because the national spotlight is focused there these days.
Reflector: To write “The Summer Fletcher Gill Loved Me,” you moved to Oxford, Miss. What were your expectations coming to the South?
Suzanne: My expectations of the South came from the Southern literature I had read all my life. My father had a master’s in English and library science and had been educated in the South. He had met Faulkner and loved the Southern writers, so I grew up on Flannery O’Conner and Faulkner and Welty and started to read Larry Brown and Barry Hannah as I got older. I was a huge Cormac McCarthy fan and loved Ellen Gilchrist and Lee Smith and Carson McCullers and “To Kill a Mockingbird,” so any expectations I had must have come from those books. Because I was a history major in college with a focus on international affairs, not American studies,
I had a lot of knowledge about foreign countries and not much on anywhere else.
Being educated in New England, there wasn’t much talk of the Deep South. I had these characters running around in my head telling me they were from Mississippi and practically dictating their story to me and all I could do was write it down and follow them to where they were from.
I found a tremendous amount of love from the people I met, a relaxed feeling of friendship and storytelling, a lot of muscadine wine, some moonshine and fishing and great food. I felt like I had come home and I never wanted to leave.
Reflector: When you received 10 phone calls from different publishers and agents regarding your first novel, what were your first reactions to the calls?
Suzanne: My agent sent my first novel out to 14 houses on a Thursday. On Monday morning the phone began to ring. It was probably due more to her fame as an agent than anything else, but I was shocked, amazed. I had not been told it would work like that and I felt overwhelmed and kept wanting to ask someone if this was really happening or was it a dream? The book sold to Gillian Blake at Scribner within the week and Miramax was already looking at it. I was happy but also had the shy feeling of wanting to crawl back in my covers and sleep it all away.