Susan Straight talks about writing, music, and family in her answers to the Litquake Questionnaire. 
See Straight at The Other California: Susan Straight and Michelle Tea in Conversation, Oct. 11.
- 1. What is your favorite book?
- Only one! I don’t think I can do that. I’d have to not choose Ceremony, by Leslie Marmon Silko, or Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, by Ernest J. Gaines, or Jean de Floretteby Marcel Pagnol…So I will choose Sula, by Toni Morrison. I have read that novel every year since I was 12 years old.
- 2. Who is your favorite writer?
- You’re killing me with the one! So the above-mentioned, along with James Baldwin, Edith Wharton, Walter Mosley and Dennis Lehane? For right now?
- 3. How old were you when you were first published?
- My first essay was published when I was 20—it was about my brother growing and selling marijuana and my best friends selling harder drugs, and how I missed them. It was published in The Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, under a pseudonym—Lucy Diamond—which I didn’t even get as a Beatles reference because I hadn’t listened to enough Beatles back then.
- 4. What writing style do you most abhor?
- I don’t abhor anything written. I read everything—cereal boxes, graffiti (a very particular language!), poetry, and my daughter’s favorite Tumblr quotes.
- 5. What is your favorite writing cliché?
- You mean one I like? Don’t use a two-dollar word if a nickel word is perfect.
- 6. What is your favorite word?
- Bereft
- 7. When and how do you write?
- I have three daughters—now 23, 21, and 17—but for years my house has been filled with their friends, my nieces and nephews, neighbors, and various people who come by to talk or eat or just sit around. So I write in my car, longhand, on legal pads. I have different colored legal pads for different projects. I wrote most of my last three novels in my car. This last book, Between Heaven and Here, I finished in 100 degree summer heat parked in an orange grove because my house was full of young adults watching Buffy. At night, I type the pages into the old desktop after everyone is asleep.
- 8. What is your greatest fear when you first turn in a manuscript?
- That it will be the last time I have enough brains left to write another novel.
- 9. In what era do you wish you’d been born?
- This question consumed me for three days! No one has ever asked me this, and my middle kid keeps saying she wishes she was born in the 1950s, when black culture meant jazz and clubs and dresses made of satin and cities which she thinks look beautiful. But me—I found myself listening to all my old music this week, thinking about how much my future husband and all my friends and I spent hours dancing and driving too fast in our old cars and partying in people’s houses, how we used to be completely free. (Our lives looked like the movie Dazed and Confused, but with a lot more black and brown people. And palm trees.) I listened to The Jacksons and The Bar-Kays, and to Minnie Riperton (mother of Maya Rudolph!) and remembered all the good times, and even though everyone makes fun of the 1970s and ’80s, we had something.
- 10. Which words or phrases do you most overuse?
- Apparently, I use colors that have to do with food, because I am always hungry. My best friend Holly Robinson is the only person to have read all my work right when I finish, and she always writes in the margins, “Wrapped tight as a burrito? Red as a pomegranate? For God’s sake go get a snack!”
- 11. Which talent would you most like to have?
- I wish I could sing. Not just in the car when no one can hear.
- 12. What do you consider your greatest achievement?
- My three daughters. (See photo.)
- 13. Who is your favorite hero of fiction?
- Easy Rawlins. No question. My eldest daughter wrote her Honors Thesis at Oberlin on why he’s her hero too.
- 14. How would you like to die?
- Too many of my friends and family are already dead for me to think like that. Can’t do it. Only 51. Not ready.
