Heroic Measures is the story of one weekend in the lives of a 70-something couple in New York City. Over the course of forty-eight hours, their beloved dachshund's life is at risk, they must sell their home of forty-five years, and the city is on high alert - a gasoline truck is "stuck" in the Midtown tunnel and the driver has fled.
Heroic Measures
I wanted to write about a longtime happy marriage, a rarity in literature. Alex and Ruth, now in their late seventies, must face the inevitable: they are too old to continue living in a five flight walkup. Though they reside in New York's East Village, the novel's setting could just as well be an isolated farm, or a hilltop suburban house after the old occupant's driver's license has been taken away. All over Manhattan, as well as the country and the suburbs, the elderly are as marooned in their homes as shipwrecked sailors on desert islands.
I started this novel shortly after 9-11, an event I witnessed from my rooftop a mile away. But I couldn't find the right balance, a happy marriage as the world topples, until I remembered a lost cat flyer. This flyer-a lost gray cat-was adhered to a lamppost in my old neighborhood, the East Village. In the aftermath of 9-11, flyers for missing persons-photographs, which tower, what floor-began to share the lamppost. At first, nobody covered the lost cat poster, but eventually it was plastered over: the human tragedy consumed the animal's plight. If a novel can be reduced to a single image of conception, then the lost cat poster is responsible for Heroic Measures.
How does it feel to have such high praise from the likes of Alice Sebold?
Nothing is more gratifying to a writer than to have the admiration of other writers.
To what extent do you feel Morgan Freeman and Diane Keaton are right for the roles of Ruth and Alex in the new film?
In the novel, Ruth and Alex are old left-wing Jews whom the FBI spied on during their youth. An interracial couple is a visual way of telegraphing a marriage that had to survive social stigmas and pressures. I thought it was smart casting, and it doesn't hurt that they are two of the finest actors in Hollywood.
What was your reaction when you found out the book was being made into a film?
Shock. Of all my novels, I would have never guessed that this one would become a film.
You have written books, short stories and a memoir, so do you have a preference between each of these disciplines?
The novel. I've returned to it five times.
You are also a professor, so how do you juggle your time between writing and your day job?
I teach creative writing so the juggle isn't so much time as mental quiet. I read volumes of awful fledgling prose, with an occasional jewel. Like most writers I know who teach, I hope against hope it doesn't effect my writing. However, I think my writing deeply affects my teaching. I doubt that writing can be taught, but the few tricks I know, I try to pass on.
Your latest novel will be published in the UK in 2016, so can you tell us a little bit about this?
A phosphorescent fungus threatens the health and happiness of identical twin sexagenarian sisters, their Filipino-American Shakespearean actress landlord and the enterprising Russian girl squatting in her Brooklyn townhouse closet.
Act of god is a legal term-the term that insurance companies use to get out of paying. After New Orleans, and even Hurricane Sandy, with astronomical mold damage everywhere, there's no reason to think that one of these glowing mushroom isn't going to grow at any minute in someone's closet.
What is next for you beyond Act of God?
I hope a long beach vacation.
Heroic Measures by Jill Ciment is published by Pushkin Press (£7.99)