» Interview

The Lives I Know: A Conversation with Pat Spears

Hotel Impala
Pat Spears
Twisted Road Publications
$19.95 (392 pages)
Publication Date: September 16, 2024

David James Poissant: Hotel Impala is a novel that tackles, unflinchingly, questions of homelessness and substandard housing in America. By following six years in the lives of the members of an unhoused family, you ask certain questions of the reader. When readers close this book, what do you hope their takeaways will be?

Pat Spears: Those of us who live in cities, large and small, see people with no fixed residence every day. All too often, we look away, so that we can maintain a physical and emotional distance between ourselves and them. But I wonder how often we pause to consider who they are—what their lives are like, how they got where they are, how they live, what hopes they have for themselves. It’s a question I’ve been considering from time to time since I was in graduate school and saw a family with a small child on the street one cold February night. I remember that it was February because my birthday was approaching, and I was thinking about getting out of the cold and finishing off the food from the care package my mom had sent. As I was leaving the campus, I saw them—a man and woman, my age or slightly older, and a child, maybe three or four, huddled together beneath a streetlight. The boy sat slumped on what appeared to be a cardboard suitcase, and I imagined him tired, cold, and hungry. He leaned against the woman I took to be his mother, and I tried to imagine what she might have said to comfort him. The light changed, and I drove away. I felt I should have stopped, although I had no idea what I might have said or done. Until that moment, I had understood homelessness only as a construct. Now it was real.

The image of the boy and his family has stayed with me all these years since. I want to believe that a random encounter, decades earlier, had planted a story seed, an emotional memory that has remained. Perhaps it is true that our hearts hold memories, waiting for our conscious minds to catch up.

What I want Hotel Impala to do is to help close the emotional distance between “us” and “them”—the housed and the unhoused. I want readers to feel their humanity: the pain and fear of life on the streets, but also the yearning for something better. Yes, Grace and Zoey were, at times, cold, hungry, and afraid. They also loved and were loved. They were curious and inventive and loyal. And they each dreamed of some bright future.

David James Poissant: This is a novel that couldn’t be told from one point of view, and the book thrills by accommodating so many characters’ viewpoints. As a writer, how do you move from viewpoint to viewpoint so gracefully?

Pat Spears: The character Leah is clearly not well, but she is frequently in denial. The core of the story is the chaos created by her erratic behavior and insistence that she is fine and that everyone else must see her as she sees herself—“live inside Mom’s twisted reality,” as twelve-year-old Grace puts it. Each character is part of the same dynamic, but everyone experiences the conflict between their loyalty to Leah and their own yearnings differently.

To make the point of view shift work, I chose to follow the chaos, examine the character whose yearning was most impacted in each scene, and show their individual responses.

The Leah character is different from anything I’ve written before. Getting inside Leah’s head was both challenging and terrifying. And of course, it was the fact that she is such an unreliable narrator that made the multiple points of view necessary.

Grace was interesting because she was both truth-teller and advocate for Leah’s and Daniel’s lies. The thing that defines Grace is her yearning for a “normal” mom—or at least one with a noble illness, like cancer, so she won’t have to feel ashamed.

The yearning of Daniel’s character is more toward self-preservation than any other character except Zoey, who just wants what she wants. The thing that drives Daniel is the fact that his love for Leah and his desire to protect his children could be—and is—derailed by his desire simply to survive Leah’s rages.

Josey, Ellie, Jordan, and Moses are at some distance from the chaos but are nevertheless drawn into it. Josey reacts with concern and handwringing, Ellie and Jordan each with their own version of helpful action, and Moses becomes the ultimate truth teller.

David James Poissant: In spite of the horrors throughout this novel, or maybe because of them, there is also a thread of occasional humor. I’m thinking in particular of the tampon conversation during which Daniel feels as though he’s “swallowed an entire hippo in one gulp” while trying to parse the meaning of Grace calling him “basic.” What’s your method for juggling tone in a book of this size?

Pat Spears: Leah’s “flare-ups,” the cycles of her illness, create the rhythm of the story. That rhythm made changes in mood and tone largely intuitive. There are places, particularly after the darker scenes, where it felt like the story needed to take a deep breath.

Much of the humor was in service of the story, of course, but it was also for me. This was not an easy book to write. I write for emotional connection between the reader and the characters. When what I’ve written makes me laugh or cry, I trust the writing.

The humor just comes naturally to me, having come from a tradition of front porch storytellers. My dad could tell a joke at the most improbable, and sometimes inappropriate, times, because that’s what Southern storytellers do. Dorothy Allison said it best, in an interview she did a few years ago. She said of Southern writers: “We can make you laugh and cry at the same time, which is my favorite thing. I work hard to do a kind of seduction in which you read sections that are very funny and charming, and then, two paragraphs later, it ain’t charming. It ain’t funny. It’s horrible. And to have both of those things happen at the same time, that’s life” (Garden & Gun, Nov. 22, 2019).

One of my favorite scenes in Hotel Impala that demonstrates that kind of desperate humor is the one where Leah has lied to a judge to get a restraining order against Daniel, so that he can no longer attend Grace’s basketball games. Grace makes up an elaborate lie to explain his absence and ponders the irony of the fact that her mother’s behavior seems to require no explanation.

“When Grace grew so tired of her family’s lies, she fantasized about a moment when she would grab the mic and give her own introduction: Welcome your Tiger’s leading scorer: at 5’11”, playing center forward, our very own Grace Killian! Daughter of an accused wife-beater and a loony mother! Wild cheering would explode from the fans.”

David James Poissant: From one South-haunted writer to another, place seems important to you. Another novel of yours, It’s Not Like I Knew Her, set in Florida and Alabama, is setting-specific, historically, but I wonder if you see Hotel Impala working in the same way? Seems like there are any number of cities down on their luck that could provide a setting for this novel. Is that choice intentional? Do you see this novel as more universal than your others, or is universality even a helpful construct in fiction?

Pat Spears: Yes, place has always been a critically important part of my writing—almost another character. When I started writing Hotel Impala, I struggled with place. I had set early versions of the novel in several different, specific places. But I gradually realized that my struggle with place was because I was not approaching it correctly.

In the beginning of the novel, Leah and her family appear to others to be somewhat settled, but that is an illusion. Through most of the story, they are transient. The decision to have them occupying an unspecified city was not so much to suggest that the story could have happened anywhere, although I think that is also true, but to suggest their being untethered—that they have no place.

I also wanted to suggest that Leah’s yearning did not involve a “place” in a real sense, a spot on the map, if you will. She’s following her yearning to be healed by the magical power of the whooping crane. Interestingly, Leah’s search for the whooping crane leads her back to my home, to the place I’ve always written into my stories, and connects her to an individual who has been in that place for generations. And a one-hundred-year-old alligator, also a native to that place. Then, while writing, the Moses character arrived unexpectedly and fully formed, and I knew him immediately at an emotional level.

I’m not sure what that means, but that’s where the story pulled me. Maybe it means that, in order to write that final scene, I needed grounding in something familiar.

David James Poissant: Ranking books is a risky business, but Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina is definitely on my list of the ten most important American novels of the last fifty years. Hotel Impala opens with an epigraph from Allison’s novel, and your story “Pink Moon” appears in an anthology introduced by Allison. Can you speak to the influence that Allison has had on your work, over the years, or your ideas of what the novel form, at its best, can do?

Pat Spears: When I need more truth in my stories, I turn to Dorothy Allison. I have always loved it when she talks about the risk you take when you willingly make readers uncomfortable. Her novels, which in my view represent the very best of the novel form, pull readers in and hold them there. She leaves no space for the reader to get comfortable enough to wander off into their own fantasies, thereby becoming the storytellers themselves.

That’s the part of Allison’s work that I’ve tried to emulate: to create a narrative that draws the reader in and compels them to stay. One in which they see and hear and feel what my characters are seeing and hearing and feeling to the exclusion of everything else. Because that’s what novels have always done for me. They have allowed me to walk alongside someone I had never before imagined, much less known, and know them.

David James Poissant: Beyond Allison, which writers do you admire most, and what are your favorite novels or stories? Which books, if any, do you return to again and again?

Pat Spears: When I first began writing fiction, I wrote short stories. It was a decade or more before I even contemplated writing a novel. One of the best short stories I’ve ever read was “A Small Good Thing” by Raymond Carver. I’ve read it again and again, along with every other story he’s written. Carver was, of course, the grand master of the minimalist style and has had a significant influence on my own writing style.

As I began considering writing a novel, Annie Proulx became a favorite, with her mastery of both short stories and novels. In her novel Postcard, there are scenes that are as chilling and as brilliantly written as anything I’ve ever read.

As a writer, when I am struggling with dialogue, I turn to Cormac McCarthy. McCarthy allows one to appreciate the importance of what is not said as opposed to what is said. He was marvelous at infusing dialogue with subtext.

Rick Bragg is one of those writers for whom place is essential, and my favorite of his books, Ava’s Man, is probably the best example. As you read it, which I have done several times, it becomes clear that the story could not have happened anywhere else. Ron Rash’s stories have a similar connection to place.

Other favorites include Colson Whitehead and Louise Erdrich. Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys is set in a location that was practically in my backyard as I was growing up, and I know the setting and some of the history upon which it was based.

Finally, there were two books I referred to over and over as I prepared to write Hotel Impala: Madness by Marya Hornbacher and The Invisible Child by Andrea Elliott.

David James Poissant: Finally, if you could offer one craft tip or nugget of wisdom to the aspiring novelist, what would you say? What do you wish you’d learned earlier as a beginning writer?

Pat Spears: This is a difficult question to answer. Developing as a writer is, by its nature, an extremely personal process.

I will say that I wish I had been braver. I wish I had made the decision to walk away from my work and try my hand at writing much earlier.

The other thing I will say is how important it is for writers to find their own voice and to write their own truth. Reading other writers whom you admire, and with whom you connect, can help, but only as long as you use them as guides and don’t try to imitate them.

When someone asks me to elaborate on my propensity for writing deeply flawed characters, the question is often delivered with a certain hesitancy while the speaker searches for a kind way of asking why I choose fictional losers over rousing heroes. While I find no fault with straightforward heroes, I hold tight to my passion for writing characters that readers may resist but are nevertheless drawn to—not losers but characters and stories that reveal the astonishing lives of those teetering on the edge of human disaster and social acceptability.

I know these characters and their stories because they are my kin—with all their hard-earned wisdom, social warts, and sometimes-devastating consequences driven by ignorant pride. These are the lives I know to write.

Pat Spears is the author of three novels and numerous short stories. Her second novel, It’s Not Like I Knew Her, won the bronze medal for Foreword Review’s Book of the Year in LGBTQ Fiction. Her short stories have appeared in numerous journals, including North American Review, Sinister Wisdom, Appalachian Heritage, Common Lives, Lesbian Lives, and Seven Hills Review, and anthologies including Law and Disorder (Main Street Rag), Bridges and Borders (Jane’s Stories Press), Saints and Sinners: New Fiction from the Festival 2012, and Walking the Edge: A Southern Gothic Anthology (Twisted Road Publications). She is a sixth generation Floridian and lives in Tallahassee, Florida with her partner, two dogs, and one rabbit.