Girl with Two First Names: Interview with Alison McGhee

Julia Gillian (and the Art of Knowing) is a charming story about a precocious nine-year-old who makes papier-mâché masks and is crazy about her dog. But on a deeper level, the story tackles some of life’s grittiest challenges. Did you plan to write such a serious story?

Before I began writing Julia Gillian, I treated myself to rereading the Ramona books and I read a couple of the Betsy-Tacy books for the first time. They struck me as classic children’s books. They were never written from that perspective that I just despise, where an adult is really writing from an adult perspective and talking either about how cute children are or how funny and whimsical their lives are. I remember being a child very, very well, and life was serious business—the big questions of life were always with me from the earliest I can remember.

Like what?

You know, what am I here for? What is my life about? What path should I be taking in my life? How can I be good for the world? And the other huge question that every one of us faces is the potential loss of those that we most love. Julia Gillian is facing those questions at the age of nine, and I believe that children always face those questions.

Photograph by Steve Niedorf.

When it turned out that Julia Gillian didn’t like to read, that surprised me, because I just assumed she would be like me and bury herself in books all the time. When I was writing the book, and I pictured her standing outside that bookstore, picking up that green book that has a picture of a dog on its cover….

We should probably explain that Julia doesn’t like to read because she’s scared that the green book is going to have a sad ending—a reminder that her own dog may soon die. By the way, I’ve been to that bookstore.

Magers & Quinn? It’s my favorite bookstore. I set the story in my own neighborhood in Minneapolis because I wanted to set a book here—usually they’re set in upstate New York.

How did you become such a successful writer?

From the time I learned how to write physically, I wanted to be a writer, and so I went to Middlebury College. I didn’t study writing; I studied Chinese. But my goal was always to be a writer. So when I graduated, I never tried to find a real job.

What did you do?

I moved to Boston, and I typed papers freelance to pay the rent. Every morning I would get up early and write short stories. There was nothing overnight about my success. I wrote pretty much every day for six years before I published a short story—and it was 13 years before I sold a novel.

Wow, 13 years. That’s a long time.

I always joke—but I’m not really joking—that there’s a mental illness component to the whole thing. No matter how many no’s the world is throwing at you, something inside you is just stubborn—stubborn to the point of mental illness—“I am not going to quit.” If you become a published author, most of it is hard work, and then comes talent and luck.

Julia’s family loves going to the Quang Restaurant, one of your favorites, too. If our readers drop in, what should they order?

You need to go on a weekend—and go pretty early because they run out of this—but their sea bass soup is unbelievable. And their strawberry bubble tea is one of my favorites, but you’ve got to like the pearl tapioca. I just gave you the best-kept secret in the city.