Illuminating Fiction

Lise Haines: Blindfolds, Hypnotism, and Chairs

100 Lise Haines Blindfolds, Hypnotism, and Chairs Lise Haines is the author of two novels, Small Acts of Sex and Electricity (a 2006 BookSense Pick) and In My Sister’s Country (a finalist for the Paterson Fiction Prize), and a chapbook of poetry, Thin Scars/Purple Leaves. Her short stories have appeared in literary journals including Ploughshares, Agni and Post Road. Haines has been a finalist for the PEN Nelson Algren Fiction Award. About her first novel, BookForum wrote, “Haines is a published poet, and it shows: her language and dreamy images are striking, unexpected, and beautifully controlled . . . a compelling, wonderfully twisted little book . . . very unlike most of the debuts . . . which would argue for it having the unlikeliest of all virtues: originality.” Haines is a Visiting Briggs-Copeland Lecturer at Harvard University and was Writer in Residence at Emerson College for four years. She has also taught at the University of Southern Maine and in the UCLA Extension Writing Program. Lise Haines spoke with me from her home in greater Boston where she was at work on her third novel, Intense Prolonged Sequences of Disaster and Peril. Sherry Ellis: In In My Sister’s Country you write about twisted love and sisterly jealousy. Did you plan to write about these themes or did they evolve as you were writing? Lise Haines: I write on the organic side, grabbing an image or voice which leads to character and then to story. So I didn’t sit down to write a book about love gone wrong or a book about jealousy between sisters. It evolved out of falling into the dream state that became In My Sister’s Country. Ellis: Molly, the younger sister, has a precocious maturity. She says, “I’m still convinced people can really change, in a second flat. I’ve watched it Lise Haines 101 happen to every member of my family. My father, fueled by his corruption of us—and then gone, vanished. My mother, living in new stockings and hopes—then chemically altered, her body suddenly eating itself from the inside out. Even Amanda, running out of her game, altering the course of her life by deciding to marry. I’ve learned to watch for that moment, catching it midair.” How did you decide to make seventeen-year-old Molly the protagonist of this novel? Haines: Molly’s voice came through loud and clear, and that formed Molly. I saw her older sister, Amanda, soaking in a tub, looking like a crocodile, Molly stealing her sister’s cigarettes. That’s how it started. Ellis: At another point Molly says, “I’m one of those people who believe the Earth will be overtaken by insects someday. Not because I’m a pessimist, and not for personal reasons—like imagining my sister will have her day of reckoning with tarantulas—but I think if anyone does, it’s the insects who deserve the place. They seldom complain, and if there’s mental anguish among them, I can’t really see it.” How does this passage work to demonstrate Molly’s point of view about her life? Haines: Insects exhibit order. The sisters’ father created an exacting, cruel structure for the family to live by. Molly wanted to get away from that order. And her acting out sexually was, in part, an effort to avoid her family’s pain. She often saw the world in terms of enemies, how to extinguish them, how to fend them off. Ellis: You use blindfolds, chairs, and hypnotism as metaphors for control and manipulation. How did you choose them? Haines: It’s funny, when you write a book you don’t always remember everything you’ve planted, because a lot of what you do is unconscious. Sometimes, as you read through later, you realize, “Ah, that’s what I was doing there.” So when you mention the chairs I suddenly think about the Three Bears—which goes to status, power, where we feel comfortable, and where we feel fear. The blindfolds hit something more subliminal and I think this should be left to the reader to discover. Hypnotism is about what we allow into our lives, how we allow other people and belief systems to control us. 102 Illuminating Fiction Ellis: A quote from author Sven Birkerts appears on the back cover of In My Sister’s Country, that Molly is “Holden Caulfield rechanneled as a desperado on a wobbly pair...