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Q: How much of Me Times Three is
autobiographical?
A: Well, I'm
sorry to say that I actually did have a boyfriend
who proposed to me and two other women at the same
time, and like Sandra, I discovered the betrayal at
a party at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. But past
that, the character of Bucky is a composite of every
rotten bastard story I ever heard from other women.
What I finally decided was that there was only one
rotten bastard who was cloned 10,000 times, because
specifics aside, the story was almost always the
same.
Q: The book is clearly a
coming-of-age story. Why was it important to you to
write it?
A: I think the lesson
that is hardest to learn for young adults,
especially women, who are out in the world for the
first time, is that being who you are is more
important than trying to be like anyone else. Living
in New York City, in particular, can be tough. There
is competition for everything--jobs, dates,
apartments--and it is easy to feel that you're
losing that competition if you have one fixed idea
of perfection. What you have to learn is that the
only thing that is perfect is what makes you, and no
one else, happy.
Q: Why did you choose
to set Me Times Three in the
80's?
A: Because that era's
sensibility was Me First Above All Others, I thought
it made the perfect backdrop for the Bucky character
to operate in. Also, during the 80's, I did work at
two women's magazines in New York, Elle and
Mirabella, and the references that were
topical then were familiar to me. Since then, of
course, fashions have changed hundreds of times, but
the personality types of the women who run those
magazines seem never to change. There is always one
who loves torturing the young assistants (she's also
almost always on her co-op board so she can torture
her neighbors, too); then there's another one who
never even acknowledges the assistants, so busy
is she starving herself to death and jetting off to
Morocco in the hopes that a sheikh will whisk her
off to a castle where she can start starving in
style. And there are so many others.
Q:
Most of us have been an assistant at one time or
another in our lives. What advice could you give
someone who's currently serving her
time?
A: Be patient. Just last
week, an awful woman I hadn't seen in years, who was
a fashion editor for about five minutes, called me
up to ask a favor involving the New York
Times where I work. I especially enjoyed her
calling because when I was an assistant, she almost
always ignored me, unless she couldn't find her own
assistant to get her coffee or a car RIGHT THIS
MINUTE. The big lesson, in publishing especially, is
you never really know what that little girl sitting
at the desk outside your office is capable of -
until seven years down the line when you find
yourself begging for freelance work at the magazine
where she just so happens to be editor-in-chief.
Oh, but that's advice for the boss. For the
assistant I would say this: Keep your eyes open and
your mouth shut and work like a dog--maybe even two
dogs. You'll do just fine.
Q: At the time
Me Times Three is set, AIDS was just entering
the popular vocabulary and treatment was almost
nonexistent. Through the character of Paul, why did
you decide to deal with that subject in this
book?
A: AIDS was one area of life
in the 80's where people had no control, no matter
how much money or power they had. And to have the
character of Paul, who is Sandra's best friend and
on his own journey toward self-discovery, not be
able to grow up and find a place in the world, was a
counterpoint to Sandra's journey, an extra lesson
about being who you are and not being ashamed about
it in any way.
Q: The novel is
interrupted periodically by fairy tales, often
involving frogs, princesses and ill-fitting
footwear. Why did you decide to use fairy tales to
help tell your story?
A: Sandra
gets the idea early on to become a children's book
writer, a career she thinks will fit easily into a
suburban lifestyle with the man of her dreams. With
the fairy tales, I wanted to chart Sandra's
emotional growth, or lack thereof, by using them to
illustrate her state of mind along the road to
self-acceptance. So, where she starts off with a
child's wish of finding Prince Charming, she ends up
someplace very different.
Q: What's it
like to be a style news reporter for the New York
Times? It seems like a place where you can't
afford to be meek. Where did you learn to develop a
thick skin?
A: The New York
Times is actually no tougher a place than the
fashion magazines--you just never get to take home
any stocking samples. To be a reporter means being
unafraid to ask people questions they don't want to
answer. Which isn't nearly as hard as dealing with
the internal politics of the place, where as a
woman, you at least have the advantage of dealing
with men sometimes, some of whom are much more
generous to women than the women who run the fashion
magazines. I don't quite know what makes those women
so tough, though it could be utter exhaustion at
running after that ideal of perfection, the quest
that Sandra finally realizes leads nowhere. It's an
awful lot of pressure to live under, plus the fact
that being hungry 24 hours a day can make anyone
seriously cranky.
Q: You grew up in
Scarsdale, a wealthy suburb of New York City, whose
fictional counterpart, Green Hills, is the breeding
ground for snobbery of all sorts. What was it like
growing up there?
A: We moved to
Scarsdale when I was in seventh grade. On my first
day of school, a group of girls sat me down and
asked what my father did for a living. Not quite
knowing all the details, I said he worked on Wall
Street. That seemed to satisfy them, and they each
in turn told me what their fathers did: one
manufactured a popular children's clothing line,
another's was a famous sportscaster, another's
imported jewelry and her family went to Puerto Rico
five times a year. Wow. Here was a hierarchy built
on achievement, money and fame and don't you forget
it. And I never have. Sandra's fight to move past
the lure of grading herself and her accomplishments
that way is part of the long process of becoming an
adult; she learns to develop her own criteria for
success.
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