Interview with Myla Goldberg on the hardcover release of The False Friend

October 6, 2010

Interviewer, Rob Neufeld

R: What led you to write a book about a repentant bully?

M: It’s always a combination of factors, very few of which I have any control over. Between ten and fifteen years ago, I suddenly remembered an elementary school friend of mine I had totally forgotten about. I remembered that we had been friends, but I had forgotten the way that our friendship had gone. I’m a very non-violent person, but all of a sudden, ten or fifteen years ago I remembered—“That was the time I threw a pair of scissors at my friend Theresa! Why would I do a thing like that?” It was funny. I remembered that they hit her and they had drawn a little bit of blood. They were safety scissors. The thing that stuck in my mind that I remember is that she didn’t tell on me. It was because we were best friends, but we kind of tortured each other in little ways, as girls will often do. That brought that whole period of my own life back to me. That is an incredibly trivial and small thing compared to what happens in the book. That’s why fiction’s so cool—because you can start with something so small and almost silly-sounding, and that becomes your springboard to delve into much bigger things.

R: Bullying is a big topic these days. I think this book will get some extra interest because of that.

M: It could be. It’s funny because people have already said, “Oh, she’s jumping on the bandwagon because bullying is such a popular subject. I’m like “No, I’ve been working on this novel for five years.”…The thing that was so remarkable about this memory that I had is that I associate myself with the nerdy kid who would get picked on, so having this memory [in which] I was a bully to someone else made me realize that it’s possible to be on both sides of the equation, and that was a fun thing to explore when I was writing this book.

R: And you had to figure out what was going on psychologically.

M: For me, it always goes back to psychology. I’m fascinated by how brains work and why people make the choices they make. Our memories are so fallible, and yet we rely upon them so fully. It’s a funny relationship because memory can be extremely self-serving and selfish and yet we trust out memories. We have no choice.

R: I was struck by Jem’s quote about how the way to live life is to realize you’re always on the precipice of f-ing up, and every moment you have to fight it—and, he says, “You’re doing it now, aren’t you, Celia?” What has led you to believe that even the most seemingly stable people are on the precipice?

M: Well, we all have our surface that we project. But there’s not a single person alive who doesn’t have some inner conflict, something they’re trying to work through…You can be really good at hiding it or keeping it under control, but I think we all have thoughts, “What if I’d done this instead of that?” Or ideations of, “What if I just ran out into the street” or “What if I decided to go get drunk and sleep with a stranger?” There are always these choices we’re being confronted with.

R: I don’t think a parent would want to convey to a child that nothing is for sure, that everybody’s got this chemical soup in them that could lead them to do something off track because of a false memory. But you’re very happy with that view of life!

M: It’s not that I’m happy with that view. You believe what you believe. Basically, your world view is your faith. And, yeah, I think there’s a lot of really difficult stuff and struggles to life, but to my mind, that’s what gives life its edge and its excitement…If you’re paying attention you’re never going to get bored because there are always these sorts of things to think about.

R: You work in so many interesting details and sub-topics into this novel. I would like to touch on at least one of them.

M: That would be great. Because one thing that’s really interesting—obviously, a novel has to be put in a box in some way, so the bullying thing is what everybody is talking about. That’s a huge part of the novel, but to my mind, the other stuff that’s in there is equally if not more important to me than the stuff that’s touched upon with bullying.

R: Well, that makes me want you to name the topics. What would you want put forward as equally important topics

M: Well, there’s a bunch of them. The setting of the novel is a big one for me. My husband grew up in upstate New York, and so I spent the past ten years getting to know that part of the country, and it’s fascinating. It’s like the land of fallen empire. These were towns that were put on the map because the United States used to be a manufacturing country and the factories made the towns. And they had it! They had culture, they had sophistication. And then the factories died, and the towns died with them. When you go back there now, you see the remnants of those heady days. You see the opera houses and the beautiful limestone architecture, and the Victorian buildings. So many of them are empty, and it’s really fascinating. It’s this beautiful sense of decay. It’s an intellectually vibrant place for me to get ideas because there’s such a contrast between the structures of the place and the life of what’s going on there, living in the shadow of what used to be. That was a big part of it for me. And then another aspect that was a big part was the aging process. Our parents age, and we watch them age. We confront what that’s going to mean for us. And we age, we see the changes in us. That’s tied into the grownups that children grow into. And you always have expectations. You’re in high school with this guy who you’re sure is going to be a big movie star, and then he turns into a podiatrist. You know like, “What happened?” That for me is also a big part of this book—looking back on childhood through adult eyes and reencountering the major figures in our childhood as adults, and just seeing what happened in the ways people do or don’t match up to what you thought was going to happen to them.