The Girl Who Fell from the Sky (Algonquin, January 2010), Heidi Durrow's first novel, is a spare, elegant, and complex realization of Rachel's youth, through her own voice and from the vantage points of several people who were once or ultimately become important in her life. Rachel and Jamie lived in the same Chicago apartment building during a time when traumatic events changed the courses of both their lives. But they don't meet until years later, in Oregon, where each has come to live in the aftermath of Rachel's loss of immediate family. LaRonne and Drew are stable, African-American adults who touch and are touched by these troubled youth, while Rachel's parents, already gone from her life when the story opens, have important details to offer both to the other characters and the reader that are essential to understanding the truths behind appearances.
Durrow herself is an accomplished young woman. A Stanford University graduate, she received a masters degree in journalism from Columbia University and then continued her education at Yale University Law School, where she earned her JD. She divides her time between New York and Los Angeles, where she was when I spoke to her in early August.
You tell a compelling and highly textured story through the viewpoints of five characters, without allowing the reader to consider any of them as the "bad guy." Whose story did you begin with when you developed your plot? I started with Rachel's story. The book is inspired by a real event that I saw in the newspaper. I clipped it out and became obsessed with it. As reported there, the girl survived, and I wanted to be able to see how she did that. It didn't seem fair to me in the real event that people were pointing fingers at the mom, so in my novel, everyone is implicated in the story. We can't point fingers; there is no bad guy. It's a bad system. Everyone does try. They're doing their best.
In spite of the hardships the women in this story confront, there are sympathetic men as well. How would you describe your own views of gender politics and socialization? I used as models the best and worst of men I've known. They've been complicated characters and I wanted to make these men complicated. I wanted them to do good things even if they weren't good men. I think the African-American women novelists publishing in the 1980s got kind of a bad rap for writing one-dimensional African-American male characters. But because of that controversy, I was sensitized to that fact as a writer. I wanted to make sure I showed the complicated side. The heroes of this story are men, which I hadn't planned. I love that little dude, Brick. Brick is a great guy. I'm in love with him. I wanted him to be a model for Rachel. He's her mirror image. He can have the hurt and still be open to love. In my next book, I want the maiden on the shining horse to save the day.
Color has a significant role in your symbolism here, and I mean color beyond skin. Would you please describe the place color sensitivity plays in your creative life, both here and beyond this novel? Blue is my favorite color. In this book the image of the blue bottle becomes associated with the blues sound–I wanted to tie in this image in with the sound of the blues. Sight and sound are among the ways we experience the world. When Brick is still Jamie, he experiences the world by seeing it–birds, his mother–these he sees wrong, so then he decides to switch his way to listening. The color blue was a way of seeing the world and then switching to listening. Brick becomes a listener–he carries Roger's song and story, and he becomes a listener in groups as well.
Heidi Durrow
Are Nella's attitudes toward race influenced by your own travel experiences in Europe? A good deal of the story is informed by my own experience. I was raised mostly overseas. My dad, from Texas and African-American, knew what race was. But he never told us. I got here [to the U.S.] at age 11 and was confused by [race]. So Nella's attitudes are really just our attitudes when we got to Portland, OR. Her attitude is no attitude: she doesn't get it, she doesn't get it at all.
If you could take home one of these characters–Laronne, Drew, Rachel, Brick, Grandma–and live with him or her in the future, which would it be and why? Brick! I want to spend more time with Brick as a character–what happened to him during those years on the road? I want him to have a good ending.
Is there a message that you'd like readers to get from your debut novel? I like to stress that it's important for me that young women find this story. It's a way for them to think about themselves–I want them to think that they have value to other people beyond how they look. I'm the first person in my family to graduate from a university; I'm not from a long line of privilege. But if you have a vision of yourself, even doing something no one else you know has ever done, then believe in it. I make sure that part of being in a town is being in a classroom. I want to meet kids because I remember meeting "real writers." As I start telling my own story, I hope it will help them see what's possible.
At a recent event, one girl was surprised to hear that I have been married (for 17 years) while also being a writer, making that girl realize she could marry and have a career. My parents divorced when I was 11. I was raised by a single mother who had been a homemaker before the divorce and she had to find a first job. She was an immigrant; our family was on welfare and food stamps. I try to make sure kids hear this part of my story, because otherwise they won't realize that I came from the same place they do, not a polished beginning. I had a dream for myself, a vision. I had the biggest dream I could and it was work, hard work–but it paid off.
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