Short Story Writer's Debut Explores How to Breathe Underwater

Self-assured and passionate describe both the stories in How to Breathe Underwater and their author, 30-year-old Julie Orringer. This debut collection, published by Knopf in September, showcases the considerable talents of Orringer, a graduate of the Iowa Writer's Workshop and Cornell University and a recipient of a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Creative Writing at Stanford University, where she now teaches.

In his nomination of How to Breathe Under Water for the September/October Book Sense 76, Karl Kilian of Brazos Bookstore in Houston, Texas, wrote: "Orringer's luminous debut collection takes us into the lives of young girls finding their way through the emotional minefields of childhood and adolescence. These nine stories resonate with compassion and intelligence. Welcome one of this fall's freshest and brightest voices."

Orringer's stories have appeared in The Paris Review, The Yale Review, Ploughshares, The Pushcart Prize anthology, and Zoetrope: All-Story. Before becoming a published writer, Orringer worked for a small strategic consulting firm, Ideascope, where one of her clients was the American Booksellers Association.

Julie Orringer spoke to BTW while driving on the Ohio Turnpike on her way to Cleveland from Ann Arbor, Michigan, where she had appeared at Shaman Drum Bookshop. She swore she was keeping both hands on the wheel.

BTW: This probably isn't a question you get asked on your book tour, but -- what was the connection between you and ABA?

JO: This was in 1999 and I was working for Ideascope in San Francisco. Our firm worked with companies at moments of transition -- figuring out how they were going to use new technology or what they were going to do with some new resource. ABA was exploring the possibility of establishing an industry advisory council; Ideascope was called in to help. I was assigned to speak with potential advisory council members in advance of their meeting and to compile some of their good advice to present it in ways that would be helpful yet efficient. It was fantastic for me -- all my previous clients had been in high technology and other types of industries that weren't so directly connected with what I was trying to do. I was working full time and trying to write the short story collection at the same time, which was really tough. It helped so much to be working on something that I felt so connected to. I cared intensely about what was happening to the independent booksellers. Even at that time I knew how vital they were to all writers -- especially to new writers who were trying to put there names out there in the world for the first time.

BTW: What did you learn about bookselling from that experience that has made the greatest impression on you?

JO: I really saw some of what the challenges are. Moreover, that the survival of the independent bookseller is really the survival of good literary reading in America. And it's unsurprising to me that independent bookselling has survived the way it has and continues to thrive in the form of bookstores like Powell's, Elliott Bay, The Booksmith, and a Clean Well-Lighted Place in San Francisco -- simply because those are the places where readers can talk to people who are experts on books, who have been reading the books themselves, and can make good recommendations. They can lead readers toward something that might get them to take a chance they might not otherwise take. They've also been incredibly vital for literary events and book clubs.

BTW: You have been appearing at quite a few bookstores on your book tour. What do you learn about readers and about your writing at these events?

JO: Many people of all ages are reading short stories. You know that some of the stories are pretty difficult in the issues they address -- loss and a lot of pain in adolescence and early adulthood. A lot of questions have to do with my own experiences and how much of my own experiences are reflected in the book.

BTW: When people ask if these stories are based on your own experiences, how do you answer them? For instance -- did you have a very unhappy childhood?

JO: You know it's funny. I feel like with all the misery there was in this book, there are still a lot of funny moments, silly moments. And there is also a lot of love between the characters especially between brothers and sisters, and between parents and children. I was very lucky in my childhood to have a loving family and close relationships with a younger brother and sister. I think that the impact of those relationships are present in the book as much as the difficult things that happened. My mother was diagnosed with cancer when I was 10, and we knew at that time that her cancer had already begun to metastasize. There was always a question as to what her survival was going to be and if she was going to make it to see us through our childhood. So, from a very early age, I was aware of the possibility that I might lose her and I was conscious of mortality not as a vague concept but as a reality. Also we were living in New Orleans for most of my childhood and I went to a private school that was very concerned with class and with social position and it sort of created a very skewed sense of what the world was like. I was more or less an outcast for reasons that were pretty superficial.

BTW: Outcasts are a recurrent theme in How to Breathe Underwater. That status is conferred for being fat, being scrawny and undeveloped, being the only Jewish kid, not being Orthodox [Jewish] enough, losing a mother to cancer, and having a mother around motherless children. You must have felt the outsider's pain very deeply.

JO: We did a lot of moving around. I didn't understand it and it was often very hard for me. I was born in Miami, lived there for four years, then two years in Boston, six or seven in New Orleans, and eight years in Ann Arbor. My family now lives in Cleveland, and I live in San Francisco. Both my parents were physicians, I was born very early in their training -- they were both still in medical school. We lived in Boston for two years while my parents were doing their fellowships. We moved to New Orleans when my father was offered a position at the Ochsner Clinic and he decided to pursue that job.

I entered school in New Orleans when I was six. When I came into the school, if you can imagine, I was this tiny, skinny kid with glasses. I actually wore an eye patch for my second-grade year, because one of my eyes was stronger than the other. What a social disadvantage coming in [to a new school] with this patch over your eye and glasses. I was a year younger than my classmates because I had skipped kindergarten so I was just the world's biggest nerd for most of elementary school and on into junior high school. It wasn't until we moved to Ann Arbor that I saw for the first time that maybe this was not a result of who I was or how my family had raised me, but it was a factor of what that society valued. The values in Ann Arbor were completely different -- it was a much more racially diverse place to live. There was a much greater degree of mixing between the races because, despite the fact that segregation was no longer official in New Orleans, it still existed to a very extreme degree. In Ann Arbor that was not the case. People of all different classes and races went to the same public schools and suddenly I began to have a much broader picture of the world. I was accepted into the social realm of my school in a completely different way. That helped a great deal to provide another base in my life. Things were very complicated at home, with my mother being ill and the responsibilities that went along with that. I had the mental challenge of dealing with the possibility of losing her everyday.

BTW: Did you see writing short stories as a necessary prelude to writing a novel?

JO: For me it was a very good idea [to write short stories first]. I started writing this book seven years ago, and I hope that I'm a different writer now than I was seven years ago. I hope that I'm able to characterize more deeply, to be more aware of the social context in which the stories take place, and to take greater chances with the stories. If I had begun a novel at that time, I might have felt a bit more restricted in the degree to which I was comfortable taking chances or the degree to which I was willing to admit the possibility of failure on a story-by-story basis. You can learn a great deal from novel writing and that kind of sustained narrative. I feel that it was important for me to know that if this story didn't work out, I could write another one, and if that story didn't work out, I could write another. The time investment was not going to be a matter of years for each one, but a matter of months. With each subsequent story [I wrote] I found the narratives becoming deeper and longer -- and edging more toward the pacing and structure of a novel. The novel I'm working on is set in Budapest and Paris before World War II; a Hungarian Jew receives a scholarship to study architecture. It's based in part on the experiences of my maternal grandparents. --Interviewed by Nomi Schwartz