Publisher's Description of Novel

          With a tension that builds from the first page, I Loved You All is a lyrical, funny, and moving portrait of family life and of the peculiarly American politics of abortion rights.  With her extraordinary talent for blending the political with the personal, Sharp demonstrates once again that she is a writer of formidable abilities.  Her new novel tells the story of a family living in the bleak prison town  of Stein, New York.  Marguerite Daigle, who describes herself as a “seventh generation lapsed Louisiana Catholic” and “a displaced person in the middle of nowhere,” holds her family together passionately and creatively, if unconventionally.  All that unravels in the summer of 1977 when her daughters are eight and fifteen and the pressures of life as a single mother begin to weigh too heavily on Marguerite’s shoulders.  Her only relief comes in the form of more alcohol than is good for her. When her brother encourages her to dry out at a Louisiana home called The Place,  Isabel Flood, a local baby sitter and religious right-to-lifer steps in to care for Marguerite’s children in Stein.  Isabel Flood’s influence on Marguerite’s older daughter Mahalia grows until it is stronger than her own mother’s.  When Marguerite returns after cleaning up her life, she finds that her life is no longer entirely her own.

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Q:  I Loved You All has been described as a humorous novel about the politics of abortion.  What inspired you to write a comic novel about such a serious and controversial subject?

       Abortion is a very divisive topic in America today, and so can surely benefit from a little humor as well as serious inquiry into the nature of the characters at the center of the controversy. 

Q: Do you consider yourself pro-choice, and if so, did you find it difficult to write a novel that has a pro-lifer as a protagonist?

      I’m pro-choice, but when I choose a protagonist, I don’t look for someone who agrees with me; I look for a good character.  I  never sit down to write a novel until I have a character in my head whom I think I might enjoy following around for a year or more.  I like characters who are complicated and vivid and energetic.  The character Isabel Flood is a right-to-lifer who has dedicated herself to her religious cause, and she acts with complete obliviousness to worldly demands and her personal needs.  She steps into the middle of a family controversy and complicates emotional issues with her own pressing moral concerns.  When I was working on this book, I loved Isabel Flood, because she is so sincere, and so relentlessly herself, and because her vision of the world is so completely her own.  As the narrator says, she’s like a self-built person, made grain-by-grain, from thin air.  

Q:  F.X. Molineaux, the narrator’s formerly blind uncle, sends anonymous letters to Isabel Flood which he writes from the point of view of an embryo and signs “Fetus Elegante.”  To what extent is the character F.X. the book’s authoritative voice?

      F.X. is a journalist who enjoys controversy and has a lively mind.  I don’t think of F.X. as an authoritative voice, although he is certainly a boisterous one. For me, his purpose is that he blows through the narrative like a hurricane whenever he appears, and he has a continual potential for hilarity and conflict.  He’s a perfect nemesis for Isabel because she can’t make sense of anything he does.  F.X. reminds me of many of my Louisiana uncles, who were vivacious people who appreciated high humor and needless drama.  He is modeled in part after a Baton Rouge uncle of mine, who was also  blind for many years before his vision was restored by eye surgery in the early seventies.  When he phoned us after his surgery, like F.X. he reported that he was sorry he could see because he had just watched television for the first time in twelve years and had learned that the governor of Louisiana was just as ugly as he was stupid.

Q: Isabel Flood is always fiddling with metal puzzles she carries in her pocket.  Do they indicate that she puzzles over the world’s problems but thinks she can solve them?  Do you think Isabel is a sympathetic character whose view of the world is justified?  Do you think she learns in the end, and changes?

      I see Isabel as essentially kind, patient and well-intentioned.  Her character was inspired  in part by an adult I was close to and fond of when I was growing up.   Like Isabel, this person was tightly wound emotionally, repressed, awkward socially and isolated.  Like Isabel, she tinkered with metal and wooden puzzles all the time – the difficult three-dimensional kind that most people fail to solve.  When she died, she had a puzzle collection that numbered in the thousands.

     Isabel is someone for whom human society is puzzling – she lacks the benefit of an upbringing among loving adults, and she has no friendships unrelated to her religious cause.  She has difficulty anticipating and recognizing the emotions and moods of people around her, and of her self.  For her, it takes tremendous work, considerable tinkering and relentless perseverance, to figure out social situations to the degree necessary to  carry out her mission.

     After all she experiences by the end of the novel, Isabel’s moral core does not change, nor does her propensity for continuing to act just as she always has.  After the novel closes, I see her as sitting in Bedford Prison, writing letters to various right-to-life organizations, and emerging to continue her mission.  However, she is altered in one important aspect – her heart has been broken.  Thus, while the way in which she affects the world perseveres, internally her puzzle parts have to readjust themselves.

Q: Do you see Isabel as typifying modern right-to-lifers?

       Ultimately, I did not choose a protagonist whom I saw as a “typical” right-to-lifer.  First of all, this would be difficult, because there are many kinds of pro-lifers, and anti-abortion sentiments arise from many disparate moral sensibilities.  In this country, the right-to-life movement has been engendered both by the politics of prominent Catholic Church authorities such as Cardinal O’Connor, and by fairly recent developments in American Protestantism, such as the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition.   Isabel is a devout Protestant, but she does not ally herself consciously with Protestant right-to-life politicians or even with the Moral Majority.  Her mission is peculiarly her own.  

Q: Did you do a lot of research on the Right-to-Life movement for this book?  Was it important to you to create a novel that is historically accurate?

       I pored over every available history and legal article on the American right-to-life movement and abortion politics, because I think historical verisimilitude is a necessary element of most novels, and I read every pro-life pamphlet I could get my hands on.  However, I think a fiction writer’s most important research is done by talking to people.  I talked to everyone I could who was pro-life, scores of people, to obtain a richer understanding of the many possible motives, both religious and emotional, that underlie zealous dedication to the right-to-life movement.

       From the beginning, I wanted the novel’s central drama to revolve around the tension between religion and politics.  When I started the book, I was interested in political hierarchies in the right-to-life movement, and in depicting their effect on individual pro-lifers.  The right-to-life movement that arose in the seventies with the Moral Majority has a complicated  structure.  At the bottom, you have the true believers, who seem principally female, who sincerely believe abortion is wrong or sinful – this is often because they belong to churches that embrace pro-life morality.  These people may or may not be political activists; many are guided by people who have clout and authority, such as ministers, or local political leaders vying for the limelight.  These leaders in turn may ally themselves with larger political groups with a broad array of associated but logically unrelated secular agenda (e.g., gun decontrol, opposing taxation, or advocating capital punishment).  Sincere belief in the right-to-life cause tends to melt away at this level – the frequency of Elmer Gantrys gets a little higher. When religious beliefs converge with political agendas in the realm of party politics -- as in the Republican Convention, for example – you have politicians courting the so-called religious right, and simultaneously struggling for some kind of palatable compromise that will get them elected – and the problem such politicians encounter is that true religious belief does not lend itself easily to compromise.  If you believe that abortion is murder, it’s hard to imagine a middle ground.

        And then, alongside this structure built up of religious and political alliances, you have the wild cards:  extremists and mavericks who derail and abet the right-to-life movement through acts of violence.  Like most American political movements, the pro-life movement is multifaceted, and at times self-contradictory.  Isabel Flood ends up betrayed by her own right-to-life community because she is a true believer who does not really understand or care about politics, and because she does not accurately assess the potential for violence among some of her cohorts.

Q:  Why are the right-to-lifers’ actions in I Loved You All directed at a high school teacher who is teaching a poem about abortion, instead of at an abortion clinic?  Do you see the poem the pro-lifers object to, Gwendolyn Brooks’s “the mother,” as being in favor of or against abortion?  Do you see I Loved You All as advocating a particular viewpoint about abortion?

      A central preoccupation of this novel is language itself – at its heart are F.X. Molineaux, the journalist, who never shuts up, who loves words and language, and Isabel Flood, who corrects the 8-year-old Penny whenever she uses non-dictionary words such as “discombobulated.”  I chose to make Brooks’ poem the center of all action in this book in part because I liked the idea of a single poem stirring up so much trouble, and in part because I think that censorship is at the heart of the pro-life movement engendered by Moral Majority politics. 

       I was also enticed by the power of Gwendolyn Brooks’s poem itself.  When “the mother” first came out in 1945, it was highly controversial, and here we are in 2000, and it’s still controversial – how many poems could that be said of?  A curious fact about “the mother” is that people wildly disagree over whether it’s pro-abortion or anti-abortion.  I’ve heard the poem condemned as apologizing for abortion, and conversely, as unfairly presuming feelings of guilt in people who have had abortions.  I think readers are unsure what Brooks’s poem advocates because the poem was never intended to be a piece of advocacy -- it is an attempt to express the nuances of feeling in a particular speaker, who both believes abortion is not wrong and fears that it may be wrong and so tries to justify having had abortions.  The poem captures one voice with unusual complexity and dexterity and feeling – a feat that only a grand dame of American letters like Gwendolyn Brooks could pull off.

    Without Brooks’  literary bravery, we would have been deprived of brilliant portraits of the most pressing conflicts of our times, such as “We Real Cool,” which was also censored, and her long poem “Riot” about the Chicago riots, and “the mother”.  To me, “the mother” is emblematic of what happens to literature that embraces political controversy or prohibited subject matter; people have the tendency to forget that it’s literature, and to attack it.

      I see I Loved You All  as a comic novel whose purpose is to elucidate and entertain.  While I don’t think there could be any doubt in most readers’ minds that the author is pro-choice, my purpose in writing the novel wasn’t to persuade anyone to adopt a given viewpoint; it was instead to write a lively story that contains vivid characters  who seem to breathe real air, who broadcast their feelings and speak their minds.  Even so, I knew as I wrote the novel that I couldn’t prevent some readers from reacting to the story’s content and interpreting it as pushing one viewpoint or another.  Readers are entitled to their reactions --  if you write a book that touches on controversial contemporary issues, you have to accept all kinds of responses, because this is part of the territory.                                                                            
Q: Did you encounter any special difficulty in adopting your narrator, who is a hyperactive, ungovernable eight-year-old?  What struggles did you have in mixing a child’s perspective with the narrator’s older voice?

        Writing an adult novel with a child narrator is extremely difficult.  Even the best adult books with child narrators often end up being treated as if they’re children’s books – this happens with To Kill a Mockingbird and Huck Finn, for example.  When you have a child narrator, the essential challenge is to communicate sophisticated ideas beyond the understanding of the storyteller.  The central problem of first person narrative is exacerbated – how do you get information to the reader over the head of the narrator?  Do you just resort to the hackneyed device of having her suddenly discover her antagonist’s diary under the sofa cushions?

        When I first set out to write this novel, it descended quickly into an amusing story about childhood.  I threw it away after the first 150 pages, and rewrote it as a third person novel focusing initially on Mr. Coker, a reclusive organic farmer  and right-to-lifer who lives with his daughter Lucy on the edge of Stein. I came up with a grim, dark narrative bent on enticing any sensible reader to shoot himself in the head.  This story eventually wrote itself into a hole by culminating in the death of a child.

     I then started over with Penny again, from scratch.  I longed to use a child narrator because I loved the irony of having the person closest to being unborn, who has no pressing moral viewpoint on abortion, commenting on the actions of adults preoccupied with the rights of (unborn) children.  Only a child could attend a church service and proclaim  that the minister was a man “who could make grown-ups jump from their seats and caterwaul.  They were crazy, all of them.” 

      I also knew that it was possible to write a sophisticated story told from a child’s viewpoint – to succeed the writer has to move up close and then back off like a camera lens, speaking now with the mystification of adulthood and then with the mystification of a child.  It’s difficult to do this seamlessly, however.  Most of my rewriting of the novel centered on the transitions between sophisticated voices (summaries of F.X.’s commentaries, for example) and Penny’s.  Once I had Penny in place as a narrator, I enjoyed her in a way that would have been unlikely with someone older – her uncontrollable exuberance and bouts of hilarity gave an energy to the novel which would have been harder to muster up with an adult narrator.  

Q: How long have you been writing, and what made you want to become a writer?

      I published my first story when I was in my twenties, about fifteen years ago.  I Loved You All is my fifth book of fiction and my fourth novel.  I remember wanting to be a writer when I was in second grade.  I have no idea why I developed this plan; I did not know anyone else who had ever wanted to be a writer.  I loved books, the feel of words in my mouth,  the sounds of foreign languages, the ribald stories of my relatives.  Now that I’m a parent myself, I think that artistic talent in children is nothing more or less than a love of something -- children’s talents find them because children seek out what they love to do.  This is why you find children who play three instruments in a family where no one else is musical.  If the adults around them encourage children to pursue what moves them, they can seize the opportunity to be artists.  I was left to do what I wanted as a child.  I wrote long poems and stories when I was little, and a terrible novel about the end of the world when I was in high school, and in college I read Latin American and German literature and translated and wrote poetry and fiction. Throughout my years of motherhood and consuming jobs, I’ve always stayed on course by composing stories in my head and compulsively taking notes for novels.  I can’t imagine life without stories.  I think I would evaporate if I stopped writing.

The paperback edition of  I Loved You All also includes a readers' guide.

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