Laurie Foos’ latest novel, The Blue Girl (Coffee House Press), is a story centered around secrets, most notably, that of the Blue Girl herself. A mysterious child living near the waters of a small lake town, the Blue Girl—whose skin is truly a cerulean shade for reasons unknown to both readers and the novel’s other characters—is a fascination for the teens of the town and a confidant for their mothers. Told from the perspective of several of these mothers and daughters, the stories of the Blue Girl and the women themselves, of all their secrets and tragedies, are slowly revealed throughout the semi-magical narrative.
I got the chance to ask Foos more about this Blue Girl, the power of secrets, and the fears she has about her own daughter entering her teenage years:
Author Laurie Foos
Kati Heng: Probably the question everyone asks yet you don’t want to answer—do you have a reason in your mind for what caused the Blue Girl to turn blue?
Laurie Foos: Ha, you’re right—that is a question I’d prefer not to answer. I do have a reason in mind, or maybe a series of reasons, that have more to do with the source of the blueness, but I’d rather not say what that is. Part of the purpose of the reason for the blueness being unanswered is that each character has her own idea about the girl, and my hope is that readers will have their own as well. I feel that if I say what my reason is, then I’d be imposing it upon the reader, which I’d rather not do. (And really, I’m not usually this evasive.) I will say this: she was always blue; she never turned.
KH: What is it about mother/daughter relationships that make such compelling stories? I guess more specifically, what is it about the teenage daughter/mother relationship?
LF: To my mind, mother/daughter relationships are just an endless well of interest, as there are so many permutations. In the teen years, of course, we see young girls working at separation from their mothers and going through periods, even, of disdain for their mothers as they struggle to find their own places in the world. My mother, who is no longer with me, passed away during the writing of this book, used to talk about this period in my life as my being the “Queen of the Eye Roll.” We work so hard to distance ourselves as daughters, and if we’re lucky, as I was, we find great friendship in our relationships in our mothers when we make it past that stage. And then, of course, we miss them terribly once they’re gone. Yet I know many women who have ever felt close to their mothers and even have had to do important work to free themselves. I suppose all of this happens in father/son relationships, but it seems to me the emotional stakes of the mother/daughter relationship are quite high, which is why that relationship makes for great fictional fodder.
KH: Do you have a daughter of your own? What do you fear most about her becoming a teenager?
LF: I do have a daughter; she’s ten, and lovely, and sweet. She is not yet an Eye Roller, and I’m sorry to say that my mother won’t have lived to see me get a taste of my own medicine one day. She still wants to sit in my lap, is not yet embarrassed to hold my hand. I’m very aware of this precious time in our life together. Several mothers and I were just talking about our girls and middle school lying ahead, anticipating the changes we have to face. There is a great deal to be worried about today. In some ways we have a lot more to fear today than mothers did when I was growing up. I think as mothers we have to find new ways to stay on our toes technologically with the advent and explosion of social media. That landscape frightens me a bit, and so it’s become our job as mothers to know what goes on out there. Our daughters are vulnerable from a purely biological standpoint, and so we have to be careful to arm them with knowledge and with wells of self-esteem from which they can draw in later years. I’m trying hard to be sure to do that.
KH: A big part of the Blue Girl story revolves around homemade moon pies, which the mothers feed to the mysterious Blue Girl, hiding, metaphorically or maybe literally, their secrets between the layers. Why this dessert? What’s the significance?
LF: I have to be completely honest here and tell you, as with all of my work, the moon pie came straight out of my unconscious. The novel began for me with that line that came into my head and repeated over and over before I ever wrote it down, “The blue girl eats secrets in moon pies.” As time went on and in the revision part of things, I had to ask myself important questions about this choice—I mean, why moon pies, right?—and for me I think it lies in the fact that moon pies are at once sticky, sweet, creamy, and dense. The dense part of it felt important, along with the darkness of the chocolate. There are lots of tastes happening at once in the moon pie. My late editor, Allan Kornblum, who passed away before the novel was published, was a great resource for all things related to moon pies. That was part of Allan’s particular genius: his fastidious, almost obsessive attention to detail.
KH: A lot of the metaphor of this book revolves around the destructive power of secrets and maybe how the things you hope nobody knows about you are often all too obvious. What’s your relationship with secrecy? Are you more of a private person or open book? As a writer, how has writing affected your ability to keep secrets? What’s the healthiest way you’ve found to release or confide secrets?
LF: In many ways I think that I am both a very private person and also very open, or at least I’d like to think so. But I’m also choosy about who I’ll take into my deepest confidences. In terms of the power of secrets, I do think that they have enormous power. Some secrets are good and fun, like when we’re told that someone is pregnant before the rest of the world knows, or that someone got an important grant that hasn’t yet been announced. But the kinds of secrets I’m dealing with in this novel generally involve shame of some form or another, sometimes unjustly, and what I mean there is that the shame is unjust. All too often, secrets of that nature tend to be “open secrets,” as you rightly point out, which is to say that they’re not really secrets at all. I’m not by nature a secretive person, though some people are; some people seem to want to shroud everything in secrecy. I’m puzzled by people with that impulse. I can’t say that I’ve ever consciously used my work as a means to reveal secrets, to purge myself in any specific conscious way, but as writing is my means of making sense of myself and the world, I’m sure that some are in there.
KH: What are your bookshelves like? How do you sort books? Do you alphabetize? Where all do you keep books? What books have you had since you were 13? What books are you constantly rereading? What books are next to your bed?
LF: In this house I have books all over the place, piled in boxes, on tables, on the staircase. In my previous home I had a lovely office where I kept them in a loft area, and I loved that, bring surrounded by my bookshelves. My dream is to have every room in the house just wall-to-wall books, but I have young kids, so not yet. I was much more organized about my books before I had kids, but you know, things change, and I can live with that. Bizarrely I kind of know where they all are, though, in some intuitive way. Probably the one book I have since I was thirteen is The Godfather, which I read over and over as a kid. My mom had it in one of her book stashes, so now it’s mine. My To Read pile is insane, always, and like most writers, my buying and my reading are never entirely in sync. Right now there is quite a pile next to the bed. In it right now is a novel called Dietland by Sarai Walker, which I highly recommend, a debu—I’m always on the lookout for debuts by women writers—and The Tusk That Did the Damage, by Tania James, as well as Amelia Gray’s new collection, Threats, as well as the novel, The Hand That Feeds You, the new thriller co-written by Amy Hempel and Jill Ciment, which is a tribute to my late and very beloved friend and colleague, Kathy Rich. I re-read One Hundred Years of Solitude and The Sound and the Fury every few years and glow in the awe.
