Interview With Pam Ribon

Hello again! Did you catch my book review of Notes to Boys? As predicted, most of my friends are now salivating to read the latest novel by Pam Ribon. She just… she just, well… she gets us, us pseudo-serious writerly girls from the nineties. And we all want to read how someone else has articulated the teen-aged girl experience of the Drakkar Noir-Edie Brickell era. More to the point, few of us (okay none of us) are brave enough to do the articulating ourselves. And because I am the luckiest blogger on the face of this earth, I was given the chance to do some casual Q & A with the author, which I am sharing with you today. You guys, she just remained as true and sweet, funny and comforting, smart and self-aware as ever, right to the last syllable. Please enjoy.

(Warning: two or three moments of adult language are not edited out and could make this interview less than appropriate for young readers. I mean, unless you were as cool-awkward as Pam and I were at that age. Just kidding but not really.)

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Marie:  I’d love to hear a little about the conception of this (very cool by the way) book idea. Was the initial inspiration yours? Or did your Mom find the archived boxes of your writing and give you a little nudge? Or was it something completely different? Did you lose a bet? The idea of my teen-aged writing being unearthed is so terrifying to me that I need to know how this went down, basically so I can prevent it from happening in my life. I’m actually a nervous wreck right now, because I wrote lots of love notes to boys and wrote lots of general junk in my spare time. Just kidding, but please tell us about the creative process here.

Pam: You make it seem so romantic!  No, what happened was I started reading these letters out loud at book readings and posting them on my website and people got a little obsessed with my young, weird self.  I was reading the awkwardica poems at the book party for my last novel when my publisher said, “That’s it.  We have to give Little Pam her own book.”  I didn’t stop to think about what that really meant until I’d turned it all in.  And now it’s all… so very much out there.

Marie: What would Little Pam have thought about you sharing these with the world? I wonder if the notion of world-wide exposure would have shut her down or fueled her? How would the writing have been the same or different?

Pam: I believe actual Little Pam would have thought this was exactly what was supposed to happen with her “writings.”  She was archiving them for a reason, after all.  If anything, knowing people were going to read it would have only made her insufferable.  She probably would have written even more essays on topics she knew absolutely nothing about.  The gun control essay alone would’ve been terrifying.

 

 

Marie: I just want you to come to the farm and watch a Christian Slater movie with me and maybe listen to Pearl Jam and the Doors. I kid you not: some of the lyrics you mentioned in the book are painted on a big canvas in my guest bath. ‘Cause that’s just how girls from the 90’s roll. Also I ran around with a small group of “guy friends” in high school who, in retrospect, might not have seen me the way I saw them? Hmm. Anyway we went to see The Doors together and felt collectively that we were the coolest people ever. My boyfriend at the time was one of those guys, and we listened to the Doors music, burned incense, even snuck out to poetry-reading coffee shops, but never ever past my curfew. Oh I thought I was so cool, then for years I felt so weird, now thanks to you I feel normal. Whew! Question: Assuming Jim Morrison’s actor had aged more gracefully, who is hotter: Kilmer or Depp?

 

 

 

Pam:  Listen.  If you Google my name + Johnny Depp and see the results number, you will have your answer right there. 

True Story: I went to see The Doors with two people from the memoir (K and Super Mario Brothers Boy).  We had to sneak in because people were losing their minds about how R-rated this movie was (due to the elevator BJ scene—remember?! We were so innocent as a nation!), and they were checking ticket stubs at the door.  We bought tickets to He Said, She Said, finagled ticket stubs from some grown-up who looked old enough to just waltz into The Doors, and snuck in.  We did it!  We were gold!  Super Mario Brothers Boy convinced me to go back out to buy him some snacks.  When I tried to walk back to my seat, arms filled with provisions, I got carded.  Busted.  Kicked out of the theater. 

I sat in a parking lot for two and a half hours with all the other pissed-off minors while Super Mario Brothers Boy watched the entire movie without a second of empathy.  That was our high school love affair in a nutshell.

Marie: And the take away here is never to stop sneaking into R-rated movies but rather to never leave for snacks once you’re in.

http://pamie.com/2010/02/when-all-you-wanted-was-to-be-wanted/

Marie: The book is dedicated to both your infant daughter and your husband, beautifully.  As I read the book I thought a lot in abstract terms of her. Whether you hope for her to read this, etc. Then I found your list of ways to write to boys and started crying.  Clearly you had her in your heart as you wrote the entire thing. I know you want her to avoid violence and all forms of injury and invasion. Do you also want her to be spared these more benign heartaches and unfulfilled longings you suffered? Or do you think it’s okay for girls to have these painful teen-aged experiences? How much did it hold you back in life, or how much did it fortify you?

Pam: I was stopped at a red light last week when a group of teen-aged boys walked past my car, all floppy hair and weak necks, holding their skateboards like they were too cool to have wrists, pants falling all over the place, wearing shirts from bands I didn’t know, and I thought, “YOU AREN’T GOOD ENOUGH FOR HER!” 

So, I guess the transition has already happened. 

I know she will fall in love and get hurt and I know I’m going to be hiding in the other room not letting her see me cry for her.  The hardest part will be giving her the space she’ll need to figure out love on her own.  But what’s different about her teen years and mine is that only one boy at a time read what I was writing.  Having been online since 1998, I’ve already made just about every mistake you can writing in a public forum.  I won’t be quiet about those lessons learned.  I am already fiercely protective of her Internet footprint.  She has no idea how annoying I’m going to be when she finally has her own Tw9bot account.  (That’s what I assume the equivalent of Twitter is called in the future.)

Marie: You’re absolutely right, mama. No one is good enough for her. xoxoxo

Marie: Judy Blume. 5^th grade. Please tell me you too got in trouble for reading it? I was in Catholic school at the time and had to go see the counselor (who was a nun) and everything. What other controversial things did you read? I am impressed with Anais Nin.

Pam: Did I write about this in the book, or are you just actually my life-twin?  In the fifth grade I got in SO MUCH TROUBLE when I asked my mom what a menstrual belt was, and she flipped through my copy of Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret.  “This is NOT A BOOK FOR KIDS!” she screeched.  The combination of teen girls celebrating getting their periods and the tips for how to make your boobs grow made her livid.  I remember yelling, “But, Mom!  She wrote Superfudge! You gave me that book!”  Mom confiscated all my Judy Blume and instead handed me: Stephen King’s Pet Sematary.  That is true.  There’s a HJ scene in that book so confusing it messed me up for years. (“Where in God’s name did you learn how to do that?” “Girl Scouts.”) 

So, in my house it was okay to read controversial things, as long as they were for grown-ups, not teens.  I read all of Stephen King.  I read Endless Love.  Roots.  I fell in love with a copy of The Color Purple I found in the trashcan of my parents’ bathroom.  (My father often said, “Women can’t write.”  This is why I am a writer.)

Marie: “I must! I Must! I must increase my bust!” hahaha!! And yes once again, this time to Stephen King. The target audience matters, right? I take it as a compliment now, that my parents thought I was better suited for the latter form of literature than the former. But I’m probably wrong about that, too.

Marie:  How would you speak with your Dad about things now, if he were still alive?

Pam: This week my father would’ve turned 64.  In the twelve years he’s been gone, he missed more than just the birth of his granddaughter or the start of his eldest’s career.  There are all these little things he missed I know he would’ve loved.  Breaking Bad.  Drive-thru Starbucks.  Netflix Streaming. That show where Gordon Ramsay goes into struggling hotels and yells at everybody (which was pretty much my dad’s job). I do wish I could call him right now to listen to him tell me for three hours how much he hated everything about Her. 

We weren’t really able to talk to each other with something resembling respect until the very last of his days.  He had a hard time letting go of how he thought a father was supposed to treat a daughter until he knew our time was running out.  Then he dropped all of that and talked to me like I’d suddenly aged twenty years.  I’ll never know if the dad he was right at the end is the dad he’d be right now.  I’ve decided to believe in it, because it’s the only way I can tolerate the fact that he left my life before it ever really started.

Marie: Happiest birthday wishes and warm hugs to you for your Dad’s birthday week. How poetic that your memoir release right now. It is amazing how relationships can evolve even with a physical separation, and I would imagine your gift with words must have helped with that over the years. “Will ya still need me, will ya still feed me, when I’m 64?” xoxoxo

Marie: Now that the book is printed, is there anything in it you rather wish you had left out? Is there anything not in it you rather wish you had included?

Pam: I know it’s hard to believe, but there are so many more poems and letters I didn’t include in this book, usually because they are about stories I feel aren’t mine to share.  This book is a comedic memoir, first and foremost, so I was careful not to let it get too heavy. You can’t talk about high school without delving into some serious issues when it comes to life as a teenage girl, but I didn’t want to turn this book into an Afterschool Special.  If Facebook hadn’t been invented, and it was still like before, when high school was a time left in the past and you never know what happened to all these people who helped shape who you are, then maybe there would be more stories.  Facebook makes it hard to keep that time in a bubble. 

My mom probably wishes I hadn’t included that sex talk my father gave me.  I also have to legally state here, for the record, that my mother would like to remind people that I’m normally a writer of fiction, so maybe some things in this memoir are a little exaggerated or simply not true, especially when it’s about her sex life with my father, and whatever it was that man said to me when she was not in the room to defend herself.

By the way, to back to your first question, that’s how you know this book wasn’t my mother’s idea.

Marie: So stated. And this reminds me of the review I saw on Goodreads. The one you wrote on behalf of your Mom: “Since my mom isn’t on Goodreads, I’m giving me her five stars. IT COUNTS.”

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Pam, thank you from the bottom of my ink-smeared, Drakkar-Noir scented heart for sharing your youth in this beautiful way. Thank you for taking the time to answer my questions so generously. Thank you for making your peers from that era feel better than normal; you have made us feel rather exotic and interesting. (You should know that I read your remarks top to bottom while holding a pretty bad ass crane pose.)

Happy Valentine’s Day. Happy Birthday to your Dad who obviously loved you more than he could say. And happy LIFE to that baby girl you’ve been given. She has an amazing Mom to guide her through the choppy seas of girlhood.

Riders On the Storm…

Into This House We’re Born

Into This World We’re Thrown

~Jim Morrison

XOXOXOXO