Free Flirt: The Interviews by Lorna Jackson

happening to it is that it’s being replaced.
    â€”You are the king of the retrospective narrator. You often choose the retrospective voice when sons are recalling fathers, and you achieve a lovely split consciousness, at once young and also painfully wise and old. Why do you choose that perspective?

    â€”I can tell you exactly the cause: I read Sherwood Anderson when I was twenty-three years old, and I was so moved by “Death in the Woods,” and I wanted to know why so much that I thought, “oh gee, if I could just write stories like that for the rest of my life, I would.” That’s the exact reason.
    â€”With Earl in “Rock Springs” you’ve said it’s to prove that he made it out of the life he was living, the mistakes he kept making.
    â€”Yeah, that’s right, and the presumption about that kind of a narrative set-up is that somebody has survived it well enough to tell it. And so it is hopeful, perspectively.
    â€” The Sportswriter’ s Frank Bascombe – also a retrospective guy who survives – calls hockey something like “a boring game played by Canadians.” I understand Frank, I think, and know the irony implied in a character like him, one who makes his living writing about something he cares little about. Sure, Frank likes baseball and a little basketball, but that’s it. He has to write about something he doesn’t care about because he’s so undone by grief – his little boy’s death – that any emotion – real passion or glee or sorrow – will unhinge everything and he’ll end up a suicide. So, for him, hockey has to be “a boring game played by Canadians.”
    Because, you see, Frank will never be a player, never a good body, a salvage king, a hero in Hanna, Alberta. He’ll never make it through three playoff rounds and into the NHL finals skating and hip checking and scoring off wrist shots on only one leg, he won’t spend the next year coming back from a litany of arthroscopic invasions, throwing the ball around the yard with his little dark-haired girl, Isabella, maybe croquet, his happy winner’s face made handsome by three hundred stitches in fifteen years. Or, here. Frank will not almost lose his life mid-season to a rogue cancer and, chemo be damned, come back a threat in the playoffs and pass and score while renegades cross-check and board him and test how well he’s stitched together, his blonde Finnish hair just poking through and he looks like a brushcut kid just trying out. Or, here. Frank will never get cut loose from long-term drug rehab to compete – compete in the sexiest and most primal way – in the Olympics because his nation wants him – We
forgive you! – on the ice. No. Frank is too busy. Too busy hunting stupid sex, his grief pushed back and up, back and up, back and up. Frank is too afraid of commitment – way fucked up, in other words – to appreciate the game of Canadian hockey.
    â€”Hold on.
    â€”No, that’s just the rooster.
    â€”Hold on. There’s someone at the door. Hello? No, I don’t need them, just leave them outside the door. What? No, darlin’, I’m on the bed right now, so I don’t want you to make it. No. I’m liein’ on the bed and talkin’ on the phone. Thank-you.
    â€”You wouldn’t be naked would ya, Richard?
    â€”I would be, but I happen not to be. That’s what Scott says, he said, “Now when you talk to her you can sort of lie back on the bed,” and I said, “Oh, is she coming to the room?”
    â€”That’s funny. Speaking of infidelity, it’s obviously a pattern in your work. That was a good segué don’t you think?
    â€”Pretty good. We’ll see.
    â€”I’m wondering if your writing treats faithfulness now with cynicism.
    â€”No, it doesn’t. No, look.
    â€”You’re mad again.
    â€”Look. I’ll tell you something.