Twenty-five years ago, I was an aspiring essayist and freelance magazine writer living in Austin, Texas, writing software manuals to support my young family. Dawn Raffel was the longtime fiction editor of Redbook where she published Margaret Atwood, Alice McDermott, Merrill Joan Gerber, Joyce Carol Oates, Ann Hood, and many others. After she began also working with essays at the magazine, she saw a piece I’d written in the Brown Alumni Magazine and wrote me a note. That was the beginning of a working relationship that lasted through Redbook, her time at O, the Oprah magazine, which she helped found, and an e-book publisher called Shebooks, where she edited collections of my essays.
From The Year of Long Division(1995), she went on to Carrying the Body(2002) and Further Adventures In The Restless Universe(2010), which were intellectual, language-driven, experimental novels, and then to a memoir in vignettes, The Secret Life of Objects(2012). Now she’s moved into narrative nonfiction, a meticulously researched and engagingly told story, complete with voluminous footnotes and dozens of historical photographs.
The Strange Case of Dr. Couney: How A Mysterious European Showman Saved Thousands of American Babies(Blue Rider) tells the bizarre tale of Martin Couney, a man with no legitimate medical credentials whatsoever, who ran a sideshow at Coney Island where preemies were displayed in incubators to paying customers. There was no charge to the desperate parents, who had usually been told to abandon home and found Couney only as a last resort. Dr. Couney’s Wild West neonatology still has that tabloid appeal — some of the first major media on the book came from the New York Post: FAKE DOCTOR SAVED THOUSANDS OF BABIES AND CHANGED MEDICAL HISTORY.
Dawn and I discussed the book, and other matters of mutual interest, about a month after The Strange Case of Dr. Couneycame out this past summer.
MW: As different as the new book is from all your previous work, somehow it still retains the feel of a personal obsession. What is the through-line connecting your books? How do you see your journey as a writer?
DR: Thank you for that question. Everything I write comes from obsession. I don’t think I’d be able to nail my butt to the chair and write a book if I didn’t feel compelled. Historical nonfiction was something I never intended to take on, but this story got its hooks into me, and I realized that I had to tell it–and in order to do that, I would need to find a new way to be on the page.
Well, I’ve always said I would rather try something new and fail than write the same book over and over again, but this book just about kicked my ass. It was years of research and four full drafts, plus another when I re-fact checked everything. The structure was a bear. Just when I thought I had reached the finish line, my editor was fired and the entire imprint within Penguin Random House folded, and I had to revise the whole thing one more time for a new team. Fortunately, they made it better.
MW: That is rare, and great, to hear — usually the story these days is that there’s no real collaboration at all. How exactly did they make it better?
DR: The book still needed sharpening. It’s not chronological, but the structure was tooconfusing before. Also, there are some holes in Martin Couney’s story — questions to which we will probably never know the answers. My first editor wanted me to take a little license, while this version takes none, and I am more comfortable with that.
MW: You’ve published at both the biggest and the smallest presses in the country: Knopf and Scribner, Jaded Ibis, Dzanc and now Blue Rider. I’ve had a similar journey — Villard, Pantheon, S&S, Seal, Counterpoint, Globe Pequot, then back to Counterpoint. I once gave a talk at the Baltimore Writers Conference where I put up a graph of my advances: they had decreased by 50% with every book, so that I had started with a $100,000 hard/soft deal in 1992, and ended up with $2500 bucks in 2013 — and happy about it, too.
DR:I never got anything close to a $100,000 advance! But more than the money, I wish I had been able to stay with a single editor and publisher for the run of my career. I had the great good fortune of starting with Gordon Lish. All of my subsequent editors have been good, with different strengths; some have been more hands-on than others. But I do feel a little envious of writers who’ve had a single editor, someone who has read all of their books and with whom there’s a kind of shorthand. Do you find it tiring to have to keep finding new homes for your work and developing new relationships with editors?
MW: Along with my early big money, I had the great luck of starting with the Robin Desser, a publishing icon who has edited everyone from Sandra Cisneros and Anne Lamott to Cheryl Strayed and Jhumpa Lahiri. Since then it’s been a mixed bag. What’s been kind of amazing is to return to Counterpoint with a sequel to the book I published there ten years ago (The Glen Rock Book of the Dead, now The Baltimore Book of the Dead) and get to work with Jennifer Alton, a bright young editor who’s just beginning her career and has a lot of passion for the craft issues I care about, and Megan Fishmann, a publicist who has dramatically raised the profile of Counterpoint (which I know because I’m a book reviewer as well as a writer).
So, let’s talk about your new book. How did you first find Dr. Couney, this man who basically invented neonatal procedures for preemies as part of circus sideshows, and when did you get obsessed with him? Working on the book must have been very different than your previous projects.
DR: I thought I was going to write a novel set at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1933-34. This was not the famous world’s fair with the Ferris Wheel, where the Devil in the White City is set. This Depression era fair was called the Century of Progress, and it was all about how technology would left mankind to a higher plane. The 1933 program guide read, “Individuals, groups, entire races of man fall into step with the slow or swift movements of the march of science and industry.” From the opposite side of the atom bomb and the Holocaust, that notion was disturbing. Then I saw a photo of the incubator sideshow out on the midway. As I say in the book, “It seemed to encapsulate everything about this fair: science and industry, married to commerce, bathed in voyeurism.” Later, when I discovered that Couney had also been at Coney Island for forty years, that did it. I had to try to get to the bottom of it.
I will say that I had no idea what a complicated story I would find: a man who had fabricated his credentials, working in a climate where eugenics stacked the decks against babies who might need a little extra help.
MW: Do you have any personal connection to the issue of preemies and babies who need extra help?
DR: My cousin’s daughter was born weighing just two pounds and is now a perfectly healthy young woman. But mainly, my connection is simply as a human being.
MW: Concurrent with your writing career, you’ve racked up an impressive resume in the world of magazines. You were an editor at Redbook, More and Reader’s Digest, you were on the original team at Oprah’s magazine. You’ve had an extremely successful career in very difficult times for the magazine industry. How does this work support or interfere with your literary writing?
DR: I enjoyed being a magazine editor. It wasn’t without its limitations, but I got to work with writers I deeply admired (like you!), and I was always trying to push the envelope on what was possible–to run something in, say, Redbook or Reader’s Digest that you would never expect to find there, and put that work in front of millions of readers. I tried to get you into Reader’s Digest too, by the way — remember that? It was energizing. I had less time for my own writing, but the tradeoff was that I didn’t have to rely on my writing to make a living, and that gave me the freedom to take as long as I needed and write what I wanted, regardless of how many copies I thought I might sell. The one real downside was that certain people categorized me as someone who couldn’t possibly be literary and work at those places. Mostly, those were people who’d never picked up one of those magazines and had no idea what was really in them.
MW: Perhaps my favorite of your books is The Secret Life of Objects, which is similar to my Books of the Dead, in that it’s memoir in small pieces, with an overarching structural concept — yours being a kind of encyclopedia of objects, mine being a necrology (I just learned this word, it means a roll call of dead people!) You begin Secret Lifewith a caveat: “All memoir is fiction.” Can you say more about this?
DR: All memoir is fiction because memory is a kind of fiction — it’s stretchy and fragile and unreliable. It’s a story we tell ourselves. And language is a highly imperfect translation of experience and feeling. You’ve written far more memoir than I have. Would you agree?
MW: Totally — in fact Jack Shoemaker, the publisher at Counterpoint, originally suggested that we publish the Baltimore Book of the Deadas fiction! I pointed out that since we’d already identified Glen Rockas memoir, that wasn’t really a choice. Even though I did a lot of research and tried to resolve matters of fact, I can see where the process of imagining and fleshing out my stories takes the book into what is now called autofiction. And when I started, back in 2006, I thought I was writing prose poems.
DR: I love both “books of the dead”–The Glen Rock Book of the Dead and the forthcoming Baltimore Book of the Dead. I find the whole idea of genre confining and artificial; it’s a construct created to categorize books that shouldn’t be easily categorized. I have gotten into arguments with other writers over this. I’d be happy to see us ditch genre altogether. We’re now seeing more of what’s called “hybrid” work, and much of it also includes visuals.
MW: As in Dr. Couney! You have dozens of historical images in the text, and there’s even a picture of you with some of the “survivors” — people whose lives were saved when they were babies by this dubious and amazing man.
DR: I think some of the most interesting writing is being done in narrative nonfiction that’s bending old rules. At the risk of getting myself in trouble, I’ll say that right now, there seems to be more freedom in narrative nonfiction than in literary fiction.
MW: What do you mean?
DR: The big five publishers and the well-established independent houses strike me as being increasingly unwilling to take risks with literary fiction. The most innovative and formally inventive fiction remains marginalized. Often it’s coming from other countries, and it’s published by small presses. Here’s where I’ll get in trouble: Often when I pick up a new book of critically acclaimed literary fiction, I find that it’s beautifully written but doesn’t really offer me the “ticket to someplace new” that I crave. To me, it looks like there’s more license to take risks with nonfiction, and there are a lot of writers playing with form, pushing the envelope of what is possible, as you are.
MW: You’re definitely not in trouble with me.