eMusic Q&A: Jeanne Darst
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Jeanne Darst incriminates herself in all sorts of ways in her memoir, Fiction Ruined My Family, but one thing she can never be accused of is a lack of candor. Darst’s book chronicles the ways her father’s literary ambitions and mother’s alcoholism and depression dissolved her nuclear family, as well as the effect that had on her into adulthood, including her own struggle with alcoholism. She spares no icky details: An entire chapter is devoted to the pubic lice she and her sister are besieged with one Christmas, and a particularly grim period of her artist poverty finds her defecating into a plastic bag for lack of her own bathroom. No matter how gross they get, though, Darst relates her embarrassments with humor and pluck.
eMusic’s Jess Sauer talked to Darst about the claustrophobia of an audiobook recording booth, the words you can’t say on This American Life, and what her mother has in common with Edith Piaf.
It’s pretty rare for writers to narrate their own audiobooks. Did your performance background help you?
It is really rare. People don’t do it much. What I know from doing my own audiobook is that it’s really hard, actually. Really hard. Often it’s just that your mouth won’t do what you need it to do. Unless you have training, I don’t know how people read their own audiobooks; I really don’t. I’ve been an actor for a long time, and I’ve done things for This American Life and recorded a lot of stuff, and I’ve memorized things and done them onstage, so there’s a certain preparedness.
So even though you have a performance background, it felt different to read the audiobook than, for instance, to do your one-woman show?
It does, because you’re in a booth and it’s really small, so there’s a claustrophobia element. You’re in there alone, and you start to feel like, “They’re not gonna let me out of here.” You feel like a circus animal, like, “I have to balance this ball on my nose, or I’m not gonna eat for the next week.”
One difference between a one-woman show and reading a book is that the book has been published, so you can’t ad-lib or change something you don’t like while you’re reading it. Did you have any weird editorial moments while you were reading it aloud, like things you didn’t notice before?
You do have weird editorial moments, yeah. I actually found a couple fragments of sentences. I’ve done a couple of readings since my book has been out, a couple bookstore readings, and I have to really edit myself. I sort of “performancize” the book. I’ll sort of abbreviate, make things more performance-ready.
Do you have any performances in the works?
I am working on something to perform, because after having written this book, I want to get out of my house. It doesn’t have anything to do with the book. It’s more of a dance piece. It’s actually a crazy, weird, sort of funny dance piece, because I’m not a dancer. It could be like a play with dancing, if that makes sense.
Speaking of This American Life, I saw on your website that for one of your This American Life stories, Sarah Koenig said that she needed to have a professional discussion with you about “the fart.” You’re pretty comfortable with scatological material. Do your pieces test the show’s boundaries often?
Yes! Basically, most of my discussions with This American Life are like Sarah calling and saying, “We need to talk about the fart. It’s really funny, but we have to get rid of it,” or Ira [Glass] calling and saying, you know, “Jeanne, it’s Ira, um, I talked to our lawyers. Can we use another word instead of ‘cock’?” I’m listening to my voicemail as I’m picking up my kid at school, and it’s like, “How about dick, schlong, hotrod” — he gave me five or six choices for “cock.” And it’s like, “Call me back!”
When you were writing the book, did your editor have any of these sorts of edits for you? Were there any scenes where your editor said, “This is too much?”
Yes, totally. I actually consider the book to be extremely toned down. Extremely. I plan on fully letting loose in my next book!
Do you think your next book is going to be nonfiction as well?
I’m really planning on blending the best of both worlds, definitely, which is more what my weird plays are like. I had this play, Je Regret Tout, which means “I regret everything,” and in it my mom and Edith Piaf save New York from all the people who want to make it happy, mostly this evil pharmaceutical company. They plead for their way of life, which is to drink and smoke and eat steak at midnight. So, it’s using the character of my mom, in the same way that my mom was in my memoir, and putting her in a crazy, fictional setting. I think my next book might be a little bit of a blend.
Toward the end of your book, you worry about how your father might react to it. How did he — and the rest of your family — react to the book? Did you have to put their feelings out of your mind while you were writing it?
I put it out of my mind when I was writing the book, and then once the book was done and they all read it, it became the thing to deal with, their reactions. I couldn’t worry about people’s reactions while I was writing the book, and I think a lot of people probably do worry about that and edit themselves. I can’t do that, but when the book was done, there was a fair amount of trying to make sure that everybody was okay with everything. There was a lot of back and forth with my dad, and it’s not an easy thing, but I think he’s really proud, and he thinks the book is really funny, so it’s exciting. It’s an exciting time.
