About the author

Meet Helen Schulman

A Conversation with Helen Schulman

About the book

The Story Behind the Book

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Author’s Picks

Meet Helen Schulman

Helen Schulman is the author of the novels A Day at the Beach, P.S., The Revisionist, and Out of

Time, and the short story collection Not a Free Show. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Vanity Fair, Time, Vogue, GQ, the Paris Review, and the New York Times Book Review. She is an associate professor of writing at The New School in New York City, where she lives with her husband and two children.

A Conversation with Helen Schulman

© The Paris Review. This interview originally appeared in The Paris Review Daily, August 9,

2011. By Brian Gresko

Novelist Helen Schulman doesn’t shy away from controversial subjects. Her last novel, A Day at the Beach, examined a marriage that falls apart hour by agonizing hour over the course of

September 11. Her latest, This Beautiful Life, follows the Bergamot family. They seem a picture of success: Richard a high-powered if overly-committed university man, Liz the stay-at-home mom, Jake a high school student on the road to college, and Coco, their adopted daughter of seven. When Jake finds himself the recipient of an erotic video made by a thirteen-year-old with a crush, Daisy, he forwards it to his friends. The video goes viral, the story becomes tabloid fodder, and the repercussions undo his life and bring the fissures in Richard and Liz’s relationship to light. In Spring 1995, The Paris Review published the story that grew into her novel The Revisionist. Schulman, now the Fiction Coordinator of The New School’s Writing

Program, chatted with me about the book over a campari and soda and homemade potato chips.

What led you to write This Beautiful Life? It started with what was happening in the news—the beginning of “sexting.” One incident in particular, at Horace Mann, had been written up in The New York Times and caused a scuttlebutt among the mothers. I thought I would write a nonfiction book about it, so I wrote Horace Mann, but I was totally stonewalled. Nobody wanted to talk to me. And so I thought, Well then, I’ll make it up.

Do you feel novelists have a responsibility to make social commentary in their work?

If you tell the truth about the world, you’re always being political, because the world is so highly charged. In these last two books I looked at the times we were living in very closely, almost as if

I were a photographer or a social historian. In A Day at the Beach, I was really interested in the culture at the moment of a big event. I wanted to write about the nineties, but I didn’t know how until 9/11 crystallized it. For This Beautiful Life, there were several events in the decade post-

9/11 that interested me. One was the incredible, unparalleled greed and rush for money. Another was the Internet infiltrating our lives in a new way. The Internet created a divide between parents and kids even larger than sex, drugs, and rock had in the sixties.

In an early interview you described your work as being askance to reality, yet A Day at the

Beach was called “hyperrealistic.” Has your work changed?

The last two books have been different. In P.S. and The Revisionist, the events took place outside of the universe we know. A Day at the Beach, on the other hand, was researched. Everything that happened on 9/11 in the novel had a source, including the radio and TV broadcasts and the menu at The Barefoot Contessa in East Hampton. I had twenty-four hours of CNN tapes that I watched.

If you ever want to blow your mind, watch those tapes.

In all of your novels the characters have a very real presence on the page. They fart, sweat, use moisturizer for their aging skin.

My characters are human, warts and all, and I am surprised by how often people find them too human. When I wrote A Day at the Beach, many editors were so put off by Gerhard that they didn’t want to publish the book. I remember someone said to me, “Does he have to cheat on his wife?” And I thought, but he does cheat on his wife! Gerhard had become so real to me that to have him not be an adulterer would be to cheat who he was in my head. For me, the world is a rainbow of grays. But I feel like my characters always try.

In This Beautiful Life, how did you decide to include the entire family’s point of view?

I started out writing from the mother’s point of view, but all of a sudden I heard Jake’s voice.

Once I wrote his piece I thought it would be the mother and the son, but I felt that the father had been left out, and his plight was powerful to me. Richard is one of these men who have been put in a position where they have all of the responsibility for the family economically. My kids went to school with a lot of children whose mothers had Ph.D.s, were doctors, lawyers, MBAs, engineers, but had stopped working when they became moms because they had the economic freedom to choose to do so. But I thought that a certain class of men hadn’t had their say in this time period.

The idea that money equals happiness is thrown out the window in your novels as a whole.

Being a child in the sixties, when materialism was out of fashion, the unbelievable greed and self-centeredness of the nineties and aughts were shocking. It’s certainly nice to have some money, but all these smart people out there are just making money. It’s almost like a brain drain.

I am appalled by it, frankly.

Did you write a lot more than you included?

I always write more than I include. In the beginning, no matter what book it is, I tend to write sixty to one hundred pages of what ends up being back story. I think it’s my way of figuring out who everybody is.

The novel would unfold so differently if the characters had only talked to one another from the start.

The world is full of people who don’t know when to speak up. For teenagers, a lot of their sexuality is private and a lot of it should be. I remember this time as a little kid, maybe of about nine, when I was walking home with a friend of mine. We stopped in the children’s zoo and one of the attendants flashed us. We told the police, but I never told my mother. I don’t think she knows to this day. It was too shameful to tell her, even though I actually reported it. There’s a funny divide between what you tell your parents and what you don’t tell your parents.

The other parents blame Daisy’s parents for her behavior. But is it Daisy who’s at fault?

I’d hate to blame Daisy. I love Daisy. I think that she was misled by the culture. As somebody who came of age in the seventies, when feminism was everywhere, I was shocked when I’d take my daughter to schools or parties and see how girls dressed and comported themselves. They were sexualized very early.

Kids have always experimented with sexuality, it’s only their ability to expose themselves that has changed. Do you pine for the good old days pretechnology?

I don’t like to pine and I hate nostalgia. I had this interesting discussion with somebody the other day about Anthony Weiner. Without the medium, would he have had a desire to expose himself that way? Was it that he really was an exhibitionist, or did the medium feed into a part of him, becoming catalytic and addictive? I don’t know the answer, but I do think that some kids do things online that they wouldn’t have done otherwise. Right now, in my workshop at NYU, I was telling my college students what my book is about, and several said, “That happens everywhere.”

On the other hand, a couple kids raised their hands and said, “People always say kids do these things, but I’ve never known anybody who did them. I’m tired of reading about it defining my generation.” And I thought, That’s true, too.

The topic of the Internet being a time suck is one that comes up frequently for writers. Is that something you’ve struggled with?

I used to smoke, and surfing the net for news has become my cigarette.

What’s next?

I was hired to adapt a very short story I wrote into a screenplay. The story is about two and a half pages long, so I have to make all of it up. And that’s fun! It’s a relief.

The Story Behind the Book

I consider myself a private person and so when I first began to read and hear about incidents of “private” email exchanges going viral, I was fascinated and intrigued. In or around 2002, a friend sent me a photo of a bridesmaid in a strapless gown reaching ecstatically to catch the bouquet, only to have both her breasts pop out of the dress. I was mortified for this poor girl.

Not only did she have to live through this hideous moment, but then it was caught on camera and sent around the globe. There was a story of a young woman in Britain who sent a guy a sexy email after a date, which he gallantly forwarded to all his friends. By the end of the weekend, the email had been sent to a million people and she was afraid to leave her house. Then there were all the sexting incidents with teenagers; my kids were littler then (barely in grade school), but I found it all kind of terrifying and I worried for them. I worried about how to raise them and protect them with this new technology, this new world that I neither understood nor had any control over.

There was a famous incident at a private school in our area, about a girl sending a boy a sexy video of herself, which I read about in The New York Times. I thought about writing about that incident and actually contacted the school, hoping to gain access to their campus newspaper.

But I was stonewalled. Parents all over the city were talking about it, and I heard tons of rumors, many conflicting, salacious; some sympathetic, some absolutely nasty and heartless. I decided then to take what Henry James referred to as “the germ”—a girl sends a boy a sexy email of herself and he passes it on and it goes viral—and make up a story to go around it. At the time, both of my children were in private school. Because of this, I was closer to wealth and power than I had ever been before in my life. I grew up on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, my father was a doctor, so I was a lucky, upper-middle class kid, but I’d never seen or even known about the kind of money and muscle I encountered in this specific corner of the universe. As we all now know, the decades pre-and-post 9/11 (another obsession of mine) were so materialistic and consumerist and frankly greedy, that they practically brought down the world economy. Manhattan, my home, was once again ground zero. So I was interested in the culture of these schools, of Manhattan, and of its small town atmosphere (the working title of my book was

Manhattanville, because in some ways it is a little hot-house village).

Growing up in the ‘70’s, I spent countless hours sitting at countless kitchen tables with my friends’ mothers (many divorced) chain-smoking and hectoring us: “Go to school, get a profession, never be dependent on a man for money,” and I took all of that feminism to heart. So

I found it surprising, when I met my children’s friends’ mothers, that many of them (certainly not all, but many) did not work. These women were extremely well-educated, they went to the best schools, and they had MBA’s and PhD’s and Law Degrees. But for many reasons—and many of these were good, loving parenting reasons—they chose to stay home. They had choices. They had all the choices in the world. This too interested me. What happens when you take very smart, very driven women out of the workforce—what happens to their lives?

Conversely, the men I met as an adult, for the most part, lived in a very rigid paradigm.

There was no room for this same back and forth conversation for them—work vs. home, home vs. work—there was one choice and it was work, period. The grand scale and high standards of achievement that this group set for themselves seemed to me a vise, a vise that I thought had been loosened by choices posed in the 1960’s and ‘70’s. I thought the world had changed in terms of sex roles, and in some ways of course it has completely, but in other disturbing ways it hasn’t. And this seemed to be played out in some of the families I observed, where attractiveness and sexuality (even early sexuality) for girls and their mothers seemed to be the vehicle to quality of life and lifestyle. Finally, the world we live in has become both so relentlessly public and so litigious, that when incidents that could remain small or private break out in the various schools in our area and also around the country, they become big and public. And that interested me a lot too.

The more I read about these issues—privacy, the internet, kids and the internet, parents and how they handle their kids’ mistakes and foibles—the more I realized that these issues were not just the issues of the wealthy, not by a long shot. They were issues that were arising all across the country. Where there was a computer, there was access, to personal information, to pornography; and once an email was sent, it was impossible to take back.

The arrival of the Internet and its concomitant technology has set off a cultural earthquake perhaps as large as the sexual revolution, and perhaps even the industrial revolution.

None of us truly understand yet the ways the technological revolution has and will continue to change our society, our values, our ideas about privacy and shame, and safety—or even the way we think and concentrate, how our active and addictive practices and work on the internet can actually restructure the brain.

With an impulse and one click on a keyboard, indelible information can be unleashed to almost anyone in the interested world. While adults continually make similar errors of judgment regarding email and privacy—you can read about their foibles daily on your favorite news website or publication—no one is more vulnerable to its dangers than a teenager whose job almost by definition is to be impulsive and resistant to the concept of consequences. These are especially difficult problems and issues for parents to navigate.

Author’s Picks

Books that Influenced Me (Or Would Have if I’d Read Them in Time) The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

This is the best example of “blame the girl” American morality in historical fiction I can think of.

I love how Hawthorne explores his themes of sin and guilt and shame, along with the miracle of slow forgiveness.

The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton

How I wish I could have stolen this title! Wharton so accurately captured the end of an era for the 19th century East Coast upper class and rightly took on the first Gilded Age. I am still astonished when people express disdain for literature that explores the theme of money

(especially if it is not rendered as satire), as if the enterprise itself is distasteful. I think in some ways the story of our time is the ascendancy of the rich in America and the growing division of wealth in our society. Wharton was a master observer and reporter, and a fabulous story-teller.

A personal hero of mine.

As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner

What can I say? This book changed my life and thirty years after I first read it, is still my all- time favorite. The wonder of this novel for me was not only its daring and almost perfect construction, the varied points of view—it is narrated by fifteen characters over 59 chapters, one chapter only five words long: “My mother is a fish.”—but the fact that Faulkner gave the inarticulate the voice of angels by plumbing the depths of their souls and letting that inner roil sing. It was my earliest taste of multiple narrative voices—the kaleidoscope effect astonished me—and I remain staggered by its beauty and its depth.

Mariette In Ecstasy by Ron Hansen

At first blush it may be hard to see how I could have been influenced by this slim, meditative, intensely poetic novel about a young nun who literally becomes ecstatic—swooning as she prays and developing stigmata—except to say that I think Hansen gets under the skin of an adolescent wholly and completely, inhabiting her passion, her drive for piety and perhaps celebrity, without inhibition or heed. He is a marvelous writer.

To The End of the Land by David Grossman

This is a contemporary masterpiece and gets closer to the complexities and the heart and soul of being a parent while still being a person than almost any book in recent memory. To say that the mother, Ora, is both flawed and fierce is pure understatement. She is a woman ruled by love for her offspring, made helpless by love for her offspring, tortured by the actions of her offspring, unforgiving of herself/her family and of her beloved, war-torn, ruined land.

The Privileges by Jonathan Dee

The opening of this gorgeously written novel is I think as close to perfect as one can get, and

Dee’s portrait of the swift rise of a golden couple from modest backgrounds to the forefront of the superrich withholds writerly judgment or divine narrative intervention, allowing readers to mull over their own ethical and emotional responses.

Before And After by Rosellen Brown I read Rosellen Brown’s compelling account of a family torn asunder by the actions of a teenage son when it first was published in 1992, paying full price for the hardcover, which at that time in my life was a rarity. The different reactions of both parents, the moral complexity of their responses, each character’s own surprise at their own behavior and that of their spouse fascinated me. How far goes parental love? To the ends of the earth, apparently.

Bonfire of The Vanities by Tom Wolfe

I include this because a) I so enjoyed reading it when I read it and b) many people have asked me if This Beautiful Life is a “social novel” in a Wolfian sense. What does that mean? In 1988,

Wolfe wrote an essay for Harper’s Magazine, “Stalking the Billion Footed Beast: A Literary

Manifesto for the New Social Novel,” arguing for literary realism as opposed to post-modernism.

He entreated novelists to “head out into this wild, bizarre, unpredictable, Hog-stomping Baroque country of ours and reclaim it as literary property.” I’m not at all sure I do that in this book— and I’m not a big fan of manifestos—but it’s fun to read the sentence out loud. When I wrote

This Beautiful Life I was trying to write a novel about the way we live now. I think that is what

Wolfe actually did when he wrote Bonfire. Hats off to him!