Excerpt, Essay & More

Lauren Grodstein on writing A Friend of the Family – Download The First Chapter

Since the publication of A Friend of the Family, readers have often asked me how I managed to capture Dr. Pete’s very male point of view. I’ve  been flattered by the question,  since many people seem to think I crossed the gender divide gracefully; in fact, the New York Times went so far as to call me a “ventriloquist.” But my answer is pretty simple. While I know that men and women have their differences—if they didn’t, there’d be no need for Maxim magazine or gynecologists—the truth is, as a writer, I’ve decided to disregard these surface dissimilarities. Instead, I’ve put my trust in the opposite notion: deep down, men and women are pretty much the same.

I’ve written two novels now from the points of view of men: one from the third-person perspective and one, this novel, from the first. These two books—especially A Friend of the Family—deal with parenthood, grief, life expectations, career ambitions, and love. Both contain brief sex scenes. Both are heavy on dialogue. Yet while writing these novels, I never let myself worry that I was “getting it wrong,” that I was creating men who couldn’t possibly behave like real men because they sprung from the imagination of a woman. While I did ask my brother, my husband, and certain male friends for their opinions about key activities—for example, what it’s like to pee standing up (answer: easy)—I didn’t ask them how losing their mothers would make them feel. I didn’t ask what they would do if their sons stopped talking to them or what it would feel like for them to be attracted to someone who wasn’t their spouse. I simply imagined how these things would make me feel, and then I did my best to write about these feelings accurately. After all, I believe that although we might express our feelings differently, any man I know would feel the same strength of grief I would upon losing someone he loved, or a similar sense of guilt and lust and heartache upon falling for someone who belongs to someone else.

It was also freeing to realize that men are as various as women are, so while I was writing one man, I wasn’t necessarily trying to represent all men. In drafting A Friend of the Family, I was obliged to make Dr. Pete an individual, more than just his gender. Which is why, one chilly February morning, I just took a deep breath and started writing this man. I was a thirty-one-year-old childless professor in Philadelphia writing about a fifty-three-year-old physician and father in New Jersey—but despite our differences, I knew this guy. I knew him!

So I wrote three pages. The next day I wrote three more. Soon enough, I was feeling pretty excited about Dr. Pete and his story, and I was writing ten pages at a time—until, about four months after I’d started, I’d completed a pretty tight first draft. I was so engaged by Dr. Pete’s voice that I didn’t allow myself to pause and wonder whether I was getting it right. I just kept imagining this particular character, what he’d say, how he’d behave. I believed in him utterly, so that disbelieving his gender would be like disbelieving his profession, or his age, or the fact that he lived in New Jersey. Pete Dizinoff was a man of his own. I was just transcribing him.

Creating another human being out of whole cloth is always an act of faith. Will anyone else believe in this person, in the choices he or she makes? How can I convince others that my fiction is truth? The only way, as far as I know, is to create an engaging, honest character with an honest voice—and that isn’t so easy, regardless of what gender the character is. But when a character appeals to me, and he or she has a good story to tell, I tell that story as best I can. Man or woman, adult or child, doctor or writer—I concern myself with the character, not with his or her demographics.

Then, when I’m done, I hand the book over to my wonderful readers and hope they find a certain truth in my characters. If they can forget that a woman wrote the book—in fact, if they can forget that the book was written by me instead of recorded by the protagonist—I’ve done the job I’ve set out to do. And then it’s time to find a new voice, male or female, child or grown-up, doctor or professor, mother or father, and do it all over again.