January 6, 2018
The Perils and Pleasures of Making Questionable Decisions
By Simone Malcolm
Q&A with author Christine Sneed
Ten years in the making, award-winning author Christine Sneed delves into the human condition in The Virginity of Famous Men; which is a collection of short stories about “both the perils and pleasures of making questionable decisions and then figuring out to live in the aftermath of these decisions.”
As this year’s CWA Book of The Year Award winner for Traditional Fiction, CWA chatted with Sneed about the inspiration behind The Virginity of Famous Men, her favorite story from her novel and answers the question on “how do we manage to get out of bed every day and not feel crushed by disappointment or fear?”
How does Chicago influence your writing or writing life?
I don’t identify myself as specifically a Chicago or a Midwestern writer, not really, because most of what I’ve published isn’t set here. Tangentially, I have found that the literary community here is supportive, generous and large – this really is a stellar literary city – a lot of independent bookstores, libraries, reading series, and festivals, every single year.
Give a general overview of your work, what are your main concerns, ideas?
I write a lot about family and romantic relationships, and also, how a person, knowing the world is full of greed and injustice—how do we manage to get out of bed every day and not feel crushed by disappointment or fear? There are quite a few jokes in some of these stories—humor seems to me to be the one thing that can save us from murdering each other, if anything will.
Tell us about the inspiration behind the title of the book. How did you come up with that title?
I remember that I was getting ready for work one morning, drying my hair in the bathroom (this had to have been about 15 years ago now), and I thought, Hmmm, virginity, famous people, famous men…now that’s a trip—as in, men like Robert Redford and Brad Pitt were once virgins—how old were they when they lost their virginity, I wondered, and with whom?
The Virginity of Famous Men is a collection of short stories, what was your inspiration behind these stories?
This collection came together over a period of about 10 years – I don’t really remember what inspired most of these stories, but I know that some of them began with a title: “Words That Once Shocked Us,” “Whatshisname,” “The First Wife,” “Older Sister,” and a few others. I often start with a title. The story that’s written in the form of a cover and a resume began with the concept of writing a true-to-life job application, i.e. I wanted my character to dispense with all the subterfuge we use when trying to make ourselves attractive to potential employers.
What is your favorite story from The Virginity of Famous Men? Why?
I really had fun with the story “Whathisname” – it’s different from the others, tonally and stylistically. It was a lot of fun to write. The narrator is a deadpan, well-meaning young woman who has a goofball boyfriend with mild brain damage from accidentally being hit in the head with a baseball bat when he was in high school, and she’s trying her best to make a life with him, despite the nutty schemes he comes up with. I like “Older Sister,” a very different story, quite a bit too—campus binge-drinking and sexual violence are two topics I wanted to find a way to write about and this story is the one I wish I could talk to people about the most.
In one sentence, what is The Virginity of Famous Men about? Tell me what interests you most about this book — or tell me other things, besides books, that might constellation around it.
It’s a book about how both the perils and the pleasures of making questionable decisions and then figuring out to live in the aftermath of these decisions. Some of the writers I’ve been reading feverishly for the last several years are Mavis Gallant, Scott Spencer, William Trevor, Rachel Cusk, and David Szalay. Alice Munro for the last 20 years. I also read a truly terrific story collection this past year by Rebecca Lee – Bobcat and Other Stories. Oh, that book! So incredibly good.
Christine Sneed is the author of the novels Paris, He Said and Little Known Facts, and the story collections Portraits of a Few of the People I've Made Cry and The Virginity of Famous Men. Christine's work has been included in The Best American Short Stories, O. Henry Prize Stories, New York Times, New England Review, The Southern Review, Ploughshares, and a number of other periodicals. She has received AWP’s Grace Paley Prize, Ploughshares' Zacharis award, the Society of Midland Authors Award in Adult Fiction, the Chicago Public Library’s 21st Century Award, and Book of the Year Award from the Chicago Writers Association. Christine lives in Evanston, IL and is the faculty director of Northwestern University’s MA/MFA program in creative writing; she is also on the fiction faculty of Regis University’s low-residency MFA program.
