[...] It was so typical of her mother to act like she wasn’t wanted, so manipulative of her to say she wished she hadn’t come, to try to hurt the daughter who was in fact the only one in her life who took the time to talk to her and try to understand her, though it was no use anymore, she went on, straining at the edge of her voice, she was too old to be manipulated like that now, her mother could no longer make her feel bad for things she hadn’t done, she was no longer a child and was too old to keep playing these stupid fucking games.

[...] The most beautiful woman in the world had become, after some years, the woman she found most beautiful, and the woman she found most beautiful had become, after a while, merely beautiful, merely nice-looking, turning, eventually, around the time Navini was sixteen or seventeen, into just another middle-aged Tamil woman in the neighborhood, just another aging immigrant whose appearance was unworthy of remark.

[...] Whatever vague concept of truth I had previously tried to represent in pigment had evaded me, not because I lacked skill but because truth simply did not exist, especially not in art. Yes, I told myself, standing before the unstretched canvas, sipping from a jug of martinis Webb had fixed for us, I would try to take the low road. Wherever it led, I would take it, even if there wasn’t a road, even if it was just a dirt path or not even a path at all, a cornfield or a marshy swamp. Or even if, in all likelihood, the path to success was more like one of those human conveyor belts at the airport, I had to allow myself to take it. [...]

Well, he would go off to the lab, and I would scribble away and type and read. I had written short little novels that were like bad dreams, and randomly I wrote to an agent and sent him one of my manuscripts, because I had enough shame in me to know I had to make money for myself. He said I had to have a genre. I couldn’t just write random stuff like that. He sent me copies of three “sweet nurse” books⁠—they were all about nurses who meet a man and fall in love, but there’s no sex⁠—and told me to give it a shot. So I sat down and wrote West Coast Nurse (1963). Vietnam Nurse (1966) was more demanding, because the war was still happening and I felt responsible for getting it right. After I moved to New York, I went to visit WACs at their offices in Manhattan and talked to them about what it was like. I learned a lot with those books about how you write a novel, like, What’s the subplot? What’s the top plot? I did it just by doing it. The editors never really even read the manuscripts, which is why I could get away with writing a Vietnam narrative where the Vietcong was the hero.

INTERVIEWER

There’s a story in Forty Whacks in which the narrator is writing to a shrink. Did you go see one?

HOWE

I’ve never been a shrink person myself, but I did go briefly because I was ordered to.

INTERVIEWER

Hence the irreverent tone.

HOWE

Well, I never stopped wisecracking or trying to make people laugh, no matter whether I was holding a gun to my head. I think probably everyone goes through a breakdown period, where something ruins your confidence, and that can be an interesting place to retreat to.

INTERVIEWER

Will you tell me about your relationship with Carl?

HOWE

That would be fine. Especially now that we’re both almost dead, it’s a good time to talk about what happened. Nothing was the same after we met. I mean, it was 1967, the civil rights movement was exploding. That was the heart of the heart, the actual breaking, in my life. Just being with someone as intelligent as he was, who was very conscious of what was happening, was a history lesson in the present. If I had just worked for CORE or done those obvious acts of resistance, it wouldn’t have been the same as getting that entangled in someone’s life. I became sort of frantically aware of the social value of writing.

INTERVIEWER

How did the two of you meet, exactly?

HOWE

I was editing a little magazine called Fire Exit with Bill Corbett, and Jonathan Kozol wrote to me and said that he had just met a very good writer whom he thought we should publish. He said, “You probably better meet him, but don’t fall in love with him.” I thought, Why would I? Carl came out to Cambridge from Roxbury and met me in my family house on Highland Street. My father had died, and I was helping my mother pack her things and send them to Ireland because she was moving back. Carl arrived in the middle of all that chaos, and he met my mother. We instantly were able to talk⁠—intellectual, lively, political talk. That was our relationship⁠—it was based in conversation that we produced three children in four years. I could have gone on and had ten children, like Harriet Beecher Stowe writing at the kitchen table while the kids played. I wouldn’t have minded. There was life, not artificial life but real life with laughter and mistakes, though there always were the stirrings of problems with us. The house was in Jamaica Plain, at 1 Robeson Street, and Carl’s mother lived with us. She was basically like my second husband. And we had lots of people living with us and staying there. I had a pot of beans going all day, bubbling for whoever came in. I’m sure we all have such a point in our life, when it’s literally like a pot of boiling beans. [...]