First Draft: A Dialogue of Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, nonfiction, essay writers, and poets, highlighting the voices of writers as they discuss their work, their craft, and the literary arts. Hosted by Mitzi Rapkin, First Draft celebrates creative writing and the individuals who are dedicated to bringing their carefully chosen words to print as well as the impact writers have on the world we live in.
In this episode, Mitzi talks to Sarah Gerard about her new book, Carrie Carolyn Coco.
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From the episode:
Mitzi Rapkin: I think what’s so interesting by sharing the story of Carolyn, who was, in many ways, she was very exceptional. She just seemed to have a lot of passion. She had a lot of youthful energy and a really seize the day kind of thing and I think she felt very deeply. And at the same time, how many women out there have been killed by a lover or roommate or someone else whose life is poetry. Because everybody’s single life is poetry, you don’t have to do anything remarkable, and it’s still poetry. And I’m wondering how you felt, and your experience of thinking about that when you were writing about her. You know, that singular life and you’re putting all these pieces together.
Sarah Gerard: Well, I knew such a limited part of Carolyn. And I think, you know, I kind of wanted to give myself an impossible task to know her in a way that felt entire. I think, for someone encountering her who doesn’t know who she is. And in order to do that, I looked for times in her life when she had to make a conscious choice, right, when she was exercising her agency and deciding who she was and deciding who to associate with or which path to follow. And these things that add drama to every life and make it feel like a story. So, it’s so hard to make a seamless portrait of someone. It’s all about the details, and it’s all about those little stories that you don’t even think are going to be important until someone dies. But also, you know, it’s this sort of an imaginative effort that the reader brings to a story like Carolyn’s where they have to come in and sort of animate it, animate those empty spaces and fill the gaps yourself with things that you might relate to in her story that make her feel alive in it. But it is difficult. I mean there are so many things that I couldn’t even include in this book, which is 350 pages, that are so important to Carolyn’s life, and maybe another person would have chosen to include those things instead of things that I included. And so, that’s where I knew it was going to fail from the start, but I also think worth the effort, because she’s fascinating and so funny and so smart and so unique and so very missed by so many people. So, the things that people repeated a lot in our interviews are ultimately the things that I ended up being able to include. I was like, Okay, this is assuming importance because it’s being repeated again and again and again, right? Like multiple people will agree with me that this is an important event in her life. But, yeah, it was a lot of pressure, I think, being the person to sort of oversee all of that information and decide what to include.
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Sarah Gerard is the author of the essay collection Sunshine State, a New York Times Critics’ and NPR Best Book of the Year, a finalist for the Southern Book Prize, and longlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award; the novels True Love and Binary Star, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times First Fiction Prize; a coauthored art book, Recycle; and the chapbook The Butter House. Her new book of investigative journalism is called Carrie Carolyn Coco: My Friend, Her Murder, and an Obsession with the Unthinkable.
