AAK: Why is the difficulty of maintaining a good marriage a recurring theme in your work?

SM: Chekhov said it: for a good story, all you need is he and she -- a man and a woman. I think that's true; and I think marriage is inherently fascinating and mysterious. Why do some, often the seeming unlikeliest, work, while others which perhaps look dreamy from the outside, not work? Clearly too, marriage is a changing institution in our culture, one which we continue to struggle to have, but which has become more difficult for more people, as statistics tell us. All this makes the problem a rich one, fictionally, and an important one culturally.

AAK: Appearance versus reality in relationships is another major theme in your fiction. How well do you think we can ever know the people we love?

SM: I think the more apt question might be how well we can even know ourselves. We live in a self-conscious age, but one which, perversely, makes self-knowledge more tenuous. We understand all too well the mixed motive, even our own, the denied feeling, the only-much-later-realized emotional reality of some situations.

AAK: Where did you get the idea for The World Below? What inspired you to weave together the lives of two women from different generations?

SM: I'm never sure exactly where my fictional ideas come from, but somewhere at the heart of this one was the notion of EXILE -- the sense we have (I think we may all have) that there was another world somewhere, another place, another time, inaccessible to us now, in which things were clearer, simpler, better, safer. I wanted to explore that feeling, and these two women's lives seemed a good way to do that.

AAK: Do you think that this belief in a safer, better past is the reason it seems especially shocking to learn that grandparents (e.g. Georgia, in The World Below) are capable of having secrets and hurting each other?

SM: I think Cath’s learning about her grandparents’ lives helps her face living her own; helps her understand something about what is the same, always, about the human condition -- its fundamental solitariness, its constant yearning for what is lost.

AAK: In an interview you once said, "You don't change anything by changing your life dramatically. There's the sense that you haul it all along with you. You're accountable finally for your life.... In my work, people pay for things." What do you mean by this? How does this apply to The World Below?

SM: I think by this I mean something about the persistence of CHARACTER. This is something you can explain in many different ways -- genetics, the psychological scars we bear simply from growing up. In any case, something permanent about our way of being in the world that we can perhaps tinker with a bit, but not radically alter after a certain age without losing a great deal. This is a notion which would have been familiar to Georgia; but which Cath is less certain of, at least initially.

AAK: Both Chicago, where you were raised, and Boston, where you now live, figure in this novel. Are other parts of your life woven into the book?

SM: All the places in my life are in this book -- Maine, Vermont, San Francisco, Boston. But everything is changed. The Vermont house, for example, is closely modeled on a house I lived in and loved in Westport Massachusetts. The San Francisco house, which I've never been in, belonged to a strange "outsider" architectural artist named Achilles Rizzoli, whose work I love. Similarly, there are characters I've used, but in parallel ways, made my own.

AAK: Why did you decide to set a key part of the novel in a sanatorium for people with TB? What did that location offer you as a writer?

SM: Basically it seemed to me it would feel like the experience of being exiled to the grandmother -- to Georgia. And of course, the culture of the sanatorium itself is fascinating. But in addition, it offered a world so isolated from the normal universe of its inhabitants that extraordinary things could happen there -- and did. Another fictional opportunity.

AAK: Did you do any research about TB for the book? Why did you choose to focus on that illness versus others?

SM: I did a lot of research about TB, from reading patient newsletters I found on the internet, to reading books about the disease itself, and then also about the social implications and understanding of the disease. I read too a number of first-person narratives about living in sans, most of them fascinating.

I focused on TB in particular because it had such a range of implications at just that time in history -- because it was newly being understood as infectious, and therefore as "dirty"; perhaps a little the way AIDS is now, but with the special emphasis then being on it as an immigrant disease, caused by filthy living; and because having it put you (or could put you) in a quite unique subculture, where the rules were different, and the feeling of isolation was intense. This all seemed rich material psychologically, especially for such a sunny, competent type as Georgia.

AAK: According to the latest census, less than 25 percent of the U.S. population lives in what is known as a “nuclear family,” many fewer people than did two generations ago. As a chronicler of the American family, how has your fiction reflected this change?

SM: I think this change has been at the center of all my fiction, from my first published short story, which concerned a single parent, having sex with someone she doesn't know well down the hall from her sleeping child; to While I Was Gone, my last novel, in which the main character has a whole previous life in which an early, young marriage plays a part.

My first novel, The Good Mother, looked directly at the changes happening in the American family. Anna, the protagonist, had grown up in an extended family controlled by its connections, by the sense all the members had of their visibility to each other. By their lights, she has failed, failed dramatically, with the loss of her marriage. And she feels she’s failed, while she also feels set free a bit, set free to discover who she truly is without that encircling set of relations. Family Pictures and For Love also have characters who are part of this sea change in the way we live our lives; and I look carefully, I think, at both what’s lost and what’s gained when these things change.

The World Below is expressly concerned with this; with the difference between Cath's life -- twice-divorced, living on the other side of the continent from where she grew up, her children scattered all over -- and Georgia’s life. Georgia, whose biggest move geographically was from Maine to Vermont, who loved the same man all her married life. What I'm trying to look at is what is truly different, and then too, what is not. What, humanly, feels the same though so much has changed in how we live, in how we structure our lives.

AAK: What was it like to have your novel While I Was Gone selected for Oprah's Book Club? Did your life change as a result?

SM: My life hasn't been changed by the experience, in part because my writing career started with such a big bang. The big change happened then. But I was delighted to reach the entirely new group of readers being chosen by Oprah's Book Club made accessible to me -- and amazed by the size of that group.

AAK: In the past, you've written short stories as well as novels. Would you go back to writing stories?

SM: I've got one story sitting around which needs some major surgery -- the equivalent, I think, of a heart-lung transplant. But the size and expansiveness of the novel is very seductive. Almost every time I have what I think is a short story idea, when I start to make notes, it complicates itself, it grows, it gets thicker and richer, and I find I'm launched once again into a novel. So I would go back, but it almost seems I can't.

AAK: Do you have any novels currently in movie production? What is it like to watch your own novel made into a film, as happened with The Good Mother?

SM: I have one novel which may become a television miniseries, if the gods of such things do not get pissed off at me. It seems to me the job of the writer when a book is taken to be translated into film -- whatever form of film -- is to take the money and use it to write another book. And hope that the film inspires a few new people to try the book from which it was made.

AAK: What are you working on now?

SM: I'm finishing -- I hope -- a memoir, long in the works, about my father's death from Alzheimer's disease.