T Cooper is the author of the novels Lipshitz Six, or Two Angry Blondes (Dutton, 2006), and Some of the Parts (Akashic Books, 2002), as well as co-editor of a forthcoming anthology of original fiction entitled A Fictional History of the United States with Huge Chunks Missing (Akashic Books, August 2006).

Cara Seitchek: Where did the idea for the book start? Are any of the Lipshitz family characterÕs lives based on reality?

T Cooper: The seed for the book grew out of what happened to my grandmother when she came through Ellis Island around 1900. When the family landed, they lost one of her brothers. He was young at the time, and nobody knows what happened to him.

I wanted to write a story that posited what might've come of that kid (in the book he's called Reuven Lipshitz). I also wanted to chronicle a fictional immigrant family's assimilation into American culture over three generations, ending up in cowpoke Amarillo, Texas--which is where my real family established their families and businesses after a circuitous journey, (they were originally following some relatives who came to Texas from the old country via the Galveston Movement). So that life that's detailed in Amarillo, it is indeed loosely based on the lives of my grandmother (who died when I was 12) and grandfather (whom I never knew).

What was so fascinating to me about the story of the lost boy was that there was no more information than that (don't even know his name)--just that when they landed at Ellis Island, he had been with them. But then at some point after that, he was lost, never to be heard from again. It was so strange to me that there was never anything else that was told about the incident, no answers to further questions, like Was it painful? Terrifying? What did they do to try to find him? and so on. It haunted me as a kid; I always figured I'd learn more about it as I grew older, but conversely, the story got fuzzier and fuzzier as time wore on. So that's what got me thinking about the entire notion of constructing (and re-constructing) a history, and whether it's entirely possible, since the moment something happens, it becomes distorted in the re-telling. And through generations, it seems to me that the distortion naturally amplifies. I wanted to pose that question: is it even possible for someone to go back and tell the "true" story of what "really" happened? And does it matter if you can't? Is any one version of the story more "true" than another? These questions were on my mind constantly when I was originally conceiving the book (and that's why I think the modern character in the second part of the book is similarly obsessed with answering these same types of questions about his own family history).

CS: What was your process for writing this book?

TC: This sort of speaks to the next question--I basically started out with a ton of research, note-taking, just reading whatever I found and thought was even remotely related. Books, films, newspaper articles from library research, plus photographs and clippings that were passed on to me by a couple different family members. But the actual writing of the entire first draft of the book took place during two visits to The MacDowell Colony, a year apart, and about five weeks each. I was so fortunate to have that time there, because after all the research I did over an extended period of time, it was so great to just go away and have a time and place to sit down and start weaving it all together. And I'm a very visual person--I had long, wide rolls of butcher paper on which I mapped out different versions of the whole story. I also hung all of the Lindbergh articles and photographs on the walls, or laid them out on the floor of my studio, alongside the butcher paper rolls with my notes--that way I could see better the ways the immigrant family's trajectory was fitting into the Lindberghs'. I wanted to peg different moments in each of these decidedly different American families' lives to one another--and the expansive paper-on-the-wall technique really helps for me to work it out and try different formulations until one seems to work. So I finished a complete draft (just under 500 pages) after those visits to MacDowell, and afterwards set myself to serious revision over about a year and a half after that. I had a trusted reader look at (I believe) a third draft, and then I revised accordingly before giving it to my agent to send out. So I think it went through about four or five full drafts before its final form.

CS: As some of the content is non-fiction, how much research did you do for content or background?

TC: As I mentioned above, I did a great deal of research for this book--about three years of it. There's a varied historical landscape traversed in the novel, so I felt I needed to get a very firm grip on all of it as I was moving through the planning and research stages of the book. A hundred years of history in all--in Eastern Europe, the northeastern U.S. and Texas--plus all of the Lindbergh stuff (all completely factual, as represented in the book through the included newspaper articles about Lindbergh and his family between 1927 and 1942). The story is of course wildly made up, but I wanted first to make sure to ground myself in fact before spinning off from it. The New York Times and other large papers' archives were excellent sources, but I also spent some time in the local Amarillo, Texas library, spinning through microfilm and microfiche of the town's old papers--ironically, I ended up learning a lot about my grandfather Sam (upon whom the character Sam Lazarus is based) through newspapers, almost more than I learned from family members who knew him or knew about him. I thought that was an interesting piece of any story about this family too--that these secondary sources are often more "reliable" than primary sources like the people who actually knew a person and lived through a particular era.

CS: The blurring between fiction and non-fiction has been in the news lately via Dan Brown and James Frey. As you deal with both fiction and non-fiction in your book, did this affect your writing style or approach?

TC: These current debates weren't consciously on my mind while I was working on this book (primarily because my writing and research for the book took place well before all of the James Frey, JT LeRoy and Dan Brown stuff made the news). But I was very conscious of fact and fiction--or more accurately, the gray spaces between them--and wanted almost to play with some of the alleged "facts" in the book. For instance, my naming the character in the last part of the novel T Cooper, and making up a book that he wrote with a similar title to my real first novel--and then blending aspects of the Publishers Weekly and other reviews of my real life book into the included PW "review" of a mostly made-up book that chronicles the story of the fictional T Cooper's real life back in Texas before becoming a writer in New York.

CS: As the first section of the book is a self-contained book on its own, why did you add the second section and change the point of view?

TC: I don't agree that the first part of the book is a self-contained book on its own. By my thinking, and for this story in particular, if the first part were to stand alone, it would be unfinished, like a story that needs a real ending, something that pulls it all together and into the present. Like, why does all this history matter, or why should it matter? To me, the answers to these questions don't come at the end of the first part of the book. That first part doesn't exist without the second, and likewise; the second part doesn't exist without the first. I changed point of view because I wanted to do something somewhat radical with all of this supposed "real" history--I wanted to tell a somewhat neat little immigrant story in the first part, but then consciously rip apart all those neat seams in the second part through the modern character's trying to make sense of all his family history. I wasn't, with this book, very interested in writing a conventional historical novel. My interest is in mixing it up, re-mixing history, and bringing it to the forefront in ways that mirror the past (the parallels with Lindbergh and Eminem, all the forms of identity and passing through the generations of the Lipshitz family, etc..) I shuffled points of view in my first novel too--I used three different first person narrators, and a fourth in third person throughout the novel, rotating. I remember getting feedback that this was "unconventional" then, and I've heard repeatedly that "Lipshitz Six, or Two Angry Blondes" is really "two" books in one. To be perfectly honest, I don't agree--but I also don't really care what it's called. I just don't believe I'm drawn to writing conventional narratives at this stage of my life. Maybe I will try my hand at this in the future sometime--when the story needs it--but as I said, I'm always most interested in the gray spaces between things: fact/fiction, American/foreign, male/female, past/future--all of these supposedly rigid binaries, which I truly believe, upon a little closer inspection, are anything but rigid or stable.

CS: Early in the book, you alert the reader as to the real fate of Reuven, while the family never knows what happened to him. Why did you decide to end the suspense for the reader and give them access to this information?

TC: I don't believe the suspense ends, or I didn't intend it to end. In fact, there are two "fantasies" about what might've happened to the lost child (both the dream Esther has about the Ellis Island doctor taking a young blonde boy home as his own, and also the fantasy Esther has about going on a date with the man from the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, when they see a dead child in the river that is blonde and has rubles pinned inside his coat). There's intentionally no way these two things could've "actually" happened within the narrative of the book--but they are just meant to show where Esther's mind was going as she spun out of control (mentally and emotionally) after the loss of her son. It's meant to be ambiguous, just as it's meant to be ambiguous that Charles Lindbergh ended up being Esther's lost son--there's no way it could've happened, and yet to Esther, it was the truth, so the interplay in a reader's mind is just fine by me. It all might as well have been true, and it all might as well have been false--"Why is it so important that you know?" is an important question for me.

CS: While most of the book focuses on Esther, occasionally other characters are brought into the ÒspotlightÓ (Ben, Miriam), but not all the characters (Schmuel, Hersh) - how did these character get selected for a focused section?

TC: I wanted to feature two leading characters in the book, a modern one (T), and a past one (Esther), but my intention was also to, at times, go into other characters' heads and shift third person limited around a little. For instance, it was important for me that the reader experience the Kishinev pogrom through Avi's lens, and likewise, life for a gay man on the Lower East Side in the 20's through Ben's eyes. Hersh, too: I wanted Esther's spiraling experience tempered by Hersh's take on the disappointments during their lives together--and her continued questionable treatment of him--since well before their immigrating to the U.S.. And even with the newspaper articles, chronicling the Lindberghs' lives: that was yet another "third person" voice chiming in--that of say, a local newspaperman funneling national stories from the AP wire into a small town newspaper format/voice--creating an overall atmosphere and chronicling those major moments in this country's history as the family's story progresses through it.

CS: How did you decide on the title?

TC: I think it reflects the two aspects of the entire book, and of course I just like saying "Lipshitz." Don't you? I mean, on some websites, it has to be written "Lip****z Six, or Two Angry Blondes," so that website-scanning programs don't block it because it contains the whole word "shit." But seriously, also because of the two "Angry Blondes" of the book, Lindbergh and Eminem, it just felt right to have the second part of the title allude to them, to that angry white male phenomenon in American culture, (the term "Angry Blonde" also pops up in Eminem lyrics frequently, as a self-conscious reference to himself). Again, the neat story on the one hand, and the messy ripping apart the seams of the second.

Felicia C. Sullivan: T, we seem to be in an era where truth is a banishing commodity. WeÕre living in a country where truth about global warming, the war (as examples) gets lost in a barrage of misinformation and fear, and the truth has become less accessible, unable to get to the surface, because itÕs hidden. Can you talk about how your new anthology speaks to that? And how important is it, in your opinion, that writers become intimately involved with politics? Books can be perceived as historical documents Ð can you talk on how and what writers can do to help bring truth up, via fiction or non fiction, to the surface?

TC: This is precisely what inspired my co-editor (Adam Mansbach) and I to pull together A FICTIONAL HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES WITH HUGE CHUNKS MISSING (Akashic Books, August 2006). Wanting to do something about the fact that the last few years have been especially hard on the truth, and that lies upon lies are being fashioned into "history" right before our eyes. And nobody seems to be complaining about it--or at least complaining as loud as they do about ridiculous things like James Frey and how expensive it is this summer to fill up our Lincoln Navigators and drive (legally) 70 miles per hour, cross-country. God forbid that there's an ounce more investigation into either topic, for it might tap into some real rage about the real stuff behind the headlines: like soldiers' limbs being torn from their bodies at alarmingly high rates in Iraq, Iraqi citizens dying by the dozens daily, not to mention the fact that one of our most precious and significant American cities has been practically wiped off the continent, while the administration that could actually step up and do something about it looks everywhere but South.

It's hard not to be intimately involved with this stuff--whether you're a writer, stock-broker, teacher, mail carrier, or pied-piper. The "truth" about what's happening in these very scary times is being edited and chopped and re-mixed and spin-controlled practically before the events happen. So, we wanted to do a little re-mixing of our own of so-called American history, and we asked other fiction writers to give us original stories that tell alternate versions of history--the stuff that's just as real as what appears in the history books. Maybe even more real. I believe that those of us who deal in the so-called "lie that reveals the truth" are ideally poised to tell stories that move beyond the obvious and canonical, and show the many ways that national events actually impact people's lives--and not the people you always read about. When taken as a whole, the stories in the collection say something about how a group of really talented fiction writers (and artists) can relate to history and politics through their work during a very dark time in their country's history.

I don't believe this anthology is the end-all, be-all answer, but it feels exciting to go out with one of those old-fashioned, unabashedly political books, getting to do events and talk about this stuff in a public way. With a more hands-on activist background, I personally feel like I'm never doing enough--as a writer yes, but mostly as a human. But I remind myself that that's precisely where our words and stories can and do come in... Telling a truth, even if it's not "the" truth--that, to me, makes history, leaves a historical record that speaks louder than the crap that's being rammed down our throats and passing as reporting and news and history these days. That is truer "historical record" to me.

FCS: The latest issue of Poets and Writers contains a fantastic article on two prominent and prolific writers, Emily Barton and Gary Shteyngart, and their experiences regarding their sophomore efforts. Can you talk about the journey between your first two books?

TC: Like many young writers, I think that when I was writing my first novel, I had no frigging idea whether what I was working on would ever be published; I was just blindly plodding through it on instinct, hoping I was headed in the right direction. This time around, that uncertainty wasn't there as much (I mean, it always is to some extent, just that it was less because I'd already published and toured with a book, learned so much about the process of bringing a book into the world, from stem to stern). But as I was working on the LIPSHITZ project, I saw very specific ways in which I was actually learning, and growing as a writer. I saw very clear decisions I could have made into mistakes, but didn't, feeling much more in control of the material and really confident about my choices in a decidedly different way from the first book. Having those MacDowell fellowships really helped too, to be blessed with that literal support and encouragement... priceless.

And, somewhat like Emily and Shteyngart report, I initially did place great expectations on myself for my "sophomore" effort. But after crawling my way through and then out of that dark period, I just got to work and really tried to stay focused on remaining open to the book I was writing--seeing how it was going to turn out before giving any thought to where it might be published or what kind of response there could be to it. Toward that end, I would have to say that my oft-repeated mantra for the period between books was, "Let go of the outcome." And of course keep hoping that things turn out well. They often don't. But they often do. I agree whole-heartedly with both those authors when they said in their different ways that luck has a lot to do with it. Hard work first, always. But luck too. Don't know whether that's a good or bad thing, but I think it just is.

FCS: Any clues about your next project?

TC: Yes, please give me any clues you can offer... All I know is Cambodia, ca. 1979. But I reserve the right to change that, by a few years up or down. Or a different hemisphere entirely.

Cara Seitchek reviews Lipshitz Six, or Two Angry Blondes