Michelle Richmond

Now available: The Girl in the Fall-Away Dress

The Girl in the Fall-Away Dress, originally published in 2001 by the University of Massachusetts Press and winner of the AWP Award for Short Fiction, is now available for Nook, Kindle, and other ereaders.

“The stories in Michelle Richmond’s first collection spin artfully off the life of a single character…smart and adept…” The New York Times

“This collection of brief sketches alternating with longer fictions has a novel’s heft, as characters who are just names in one story emerge to take center stage in another. These women’s lives are shaped by fate and by place, forces hauntingly evoked by this talented young writer.” ~The Boston Globe

“Richmond’s writing is perceptive and heartfelt, her subjects at once edgy and familiar. This is a winning debut.” Publishers Weekly

The New York Times Book Review:
The stories in Michelle Richmond’s first collection spin artfully off the life of a single character. Gracie is nearly 30 when we first meet her, sitting in a rented car on the way to the Jersey Shore and just about to break up with her Bruce Springsteen-obsessed boyfriend. Most of the stories circle similar small, critical moments. In the crushingly sweet and brief ”Curvature,” for example, Gracie stands in the doorway of her sister Celia’s bedroom and watches her mother dress the wound on Celia’s back, made by surgery to correct curvature of the spine. A child at the time, Gracie envies the intimacy between her mother and sister and, in those few minutes, recognizes her mother’s capacity for sacrifice and tenderness. In ”Mathematics and Acrobatics,” set years later, Celia and her young daughter, Roberta, witness a bus accident on an icy Georgia road. Celia doesn’t stop to help the victims, and Roberta’s insensitive reaction to the scene makes Celia question both her mothering abilities and her own response to the crash. The settings here — from the Alabama coast to Iceland — frequently shift, as does the perspective; there are stories from the point of view of each of Gracie’s three sisters and a few of her childhood friends…smart and adept.”

About THE GIRL IN THE FALL-AWAY DRESS

A series of locations both familiar and exotic delineate the nineteen linked stories in this award-winning debut collection. Whether leaving, returning, or staying put, the women who narrate these stories are bound to Alabama by history and habit, their voices informed by the landscape and lore of the New South.

Michelle Richmond introduces us to a memorable extended family, in which lies come more easily than forgiveness, and parents and siblings conceal the truth as often as they reveal it. In many cases, the women are forced to choose—between family and lovers, safety and self-sufficiency, the religion they grew up with and the reality of the world they have found for themselves.

In “Down the Shore Everything’s All Right,” twenty-eight-year-old Grace abandons wide Southern beaches for New York sidewalks, only to discover that the Gulf Coast still has a hold on her. In “Intermittent Waves of Unusual Size and Force,” a wayward father is called home from California by a massive hurricane that threatens the lives of his family. In “The World’s Greatest Pants,” three younger sisters watch in awe as Darlene, the eldest and bravest, defies her parents and heads for Texas in a battered El Camino.

An undercurrent of eroticism runs through the collection. “Propaganda” finds the youngest sister alone in an old house in Knoxville, where she forms a symbiotic relationship with a mysterious upstairs neighbor during her husband’s lengthy absence. In “Fifth Grade: A Criminal History,” adolescence and sexuality merge with explosive consequences. A woman dancing naked on a bridge in San Francisco is the central figure of the title story.

The divine and the absurd are uneasy but frequent bedfellows in this volume. “O-lama-lama” portrays the scene of a religious free-for-all at a beachside church in Fairhope, Alabama, while “Slacabamorinico” celebrates the holy commotion of Mardi Gras at a Mobile cemetery. In “The Last Bad Thing,” a love-struck young woman in the Bible Belt is haunted by visions of Ramadan.

Wandering San Francisco with Paul Auster, plus Love in a Ten-Year Key

Has it really been ten years since I walked down the aisle at the little chapel in Yosemite, tripped on my dress, married that boy I met in Arkansas, went a bit too far with the tequila, and spent all night in our room at the Wawona Hotel searching for ghosts in the closet? It has!

Tonight, to celebrate, we’ll spend the night in the city and have dinner at Fleur de Lys. The last time we were at Fleur de Lys was a warm September evening a little more than two years ago, right after I’d interviewed Paul Auster at the Herbst Theatre for City Arts and Lectures. It was a rather surreal evening, as I have long been an achingly devoted fan of Mr. Auster, author of The New York Trilogy and many other wonderful works of fiction. The Gracious Author and I drank single-malt Scotch well into the wee hours, while my husband drank his usual, a single Bailey’s with milk, because my husband prefers his cocktails the way he prefers his entrees: as close to dessert as possible. Mr. Auster told some amazing stories. Some of them, I thought I might have read before in his books, but then I wondered if perhaps his books were so infused with his voice, his own voice so inseparable from his books, that I only felt I’d heard the stories before, when in fact I was hearing them for the first time.

We also talked politics for much of the evening, as the economy seemed on the brink of utter collapse and the presidential election was only a couple of months away. We talked a bit about movies, and houses, and Brooklyn, and Curious George, and an obscure Nathaniel Hawthorne journal entitled “Twenty Days With Julian and Little Bunny Papa.” I believe Slovenia might have been mentioned, for reasons I can’t recall.

Afterward, we went off in search of my Jeep, which I had characteristically misplaced. We walked many blocks and kept doubling back, over and over again, an endless loop. As we were wandering the deserted streets, I kept thinking of that book by Ian McEwan, The Comfort of Strangers, or more precisely the film version of the book, adapted by Harold Pinter, in which Mary (Natasha Richardson) and Colin (Rupert Everett) get lost in Venice, and are rescued by an enigmatic and charming gentleman named Robert (Christopher Walken), who takes them back to his home and tells them some brilliant and terrifying stories. In Pinter’s film, as in McEwan’s novel, things do not end well for the tourists. Of course, this was San Francisco, not Venice, and I was not a tourist but a resident, and I should not have been so hopelessly lost.

Eventually we found the Jeep. It is now, as it was then, an old car, and a beloved one, and it had spent a great many days at the beach with me and my toddler, and it smelled accordingly, as if someone might have put a bucket of seaweed and sand crabs in there at some point and sort of forgotten about it. In such a state we transported Mr. Auster back to the hotel, and he, in his graciousness, swore that he could not smell a thing. And on the way home my husband and I remembered a story of a smelly car, in which the smell turns out to be blood, a story set in Albania. The story was written by my husband long before he was my husband, and I happened to have read it in a small literary magazine several months before he walked into a dismal University of Arkansas classroom in his furry Giraudon boots and changed my mind (I was, at the time, otherwise betrothed) and my life. Amen.

Time. I can’t believe it was fifteen years ago that I met that guy with a curl smack dab in the middle of his forehead. Ten years ago that I tripped gracelessly down the aisle at the chapel in Yosemite, to be wedded by one kindly Reverend John Paris, who, for reasons I have yet to comprehend, kept saying that Jesus was like a fizzy tablet, and marriage was a glass of water, and you just had to drop that tablet in the water and see what happened. I know I remember it right, because when he was saying all that stuff I had not yet had any tequila. My husband had not yet had a Baileys with milk, and he remembers it the same way.

Not long ago I found a piece of notebook paper on which I had written our wedding budget. We paid $150 to rent the Yosemite Community Church from 4:00 to 5:30 p.m. on January 5; $50 for Reverend Paris; $500 to reserve the reception room at the Wawona Hotel. It was a very cheap wedding, as weddings go. We didn’t have much in material terms; we didn’t think we needed it. We were kids and now we’re not. Now we have more stuff, and more responsibility, and a kid of our own, and the man I married still has a curl smack dab in the middle of his forehead.

He is to this day the funniest guy I’ve ever met, with (hands down) the best hair. Happy Anniversary, Kevin. Here’s to ten more years.

Below: apartment in the Marais district of Paris, 2008, on a trip to meet my French editor and translator.

San Francisco’s Wordslinging Women

Thanks to Mia Lipman for this nice write-up in San Francisco Magazine! In the magazine’s cover story, “A Year in Preview,” Lipman writes that the San Francisco “lit scene gets much of its oomph from wordslinging women, including a trio of established authors with distinctly local voices and new books out in 2011. All three have aged gracefully into midcareer success without the boon of a genre-defying debut or an Oprah pick.”

The authors are Ann Packer (The Dive From Clausen’s Pier), whose story collection Swim Back to Me will be released this year; Carol Edgardian, co-editor of Narrative Magazine and author of the forthcoming novel Stages of Amazement; and yours truly.

“And the kid sister in the mix, Michelle Richmond, who just joined the 40-plus club with an international bestseller under her belt (yes, it’s true, I did just turn 40, but I wasn’t quite ready to see it in print!), will start accepting submissions this month for her new indie press, Fiction Attic. We’ll also see her fourth novel, California Street, land in the fall… “It imagines an outlandish circumstance that’s not really that far-fetched,” Richmond says.

Well, yes, I do have a new book coming out in Fall 2011. Finally! While I’m still keeping hush-hush on the details, I can say that it’s been tremendously fun to write, if a bit daunting (considering the 6 months of research that I ultimately threw out with the bathwater). Like my previous two books, it takes much of its inspiration from location. Although this time, I’ve widened my lens to include a broader California backdrop.

Day 49: The Missing Final Chapter of The Year of Fog

Now available as an ebook: the never-before-published original ending of THE YEAR OF FOG. (ISBN 978-1-4524-9639-9)

Spoiler alert: Do not sample this ebook unless you have already read THE YEAR OF FOG!

A note from Michelle: A few weeks before THE YEAR OF FOG went to press, I found myself agonizing over the ending . Was I saying too much? Too little? Should I tie up all the loose ends, or should I go with a more open-ended approach? After much deliberation, I decided to leave Chapter 82 on the editing room floor. I had never set out to write a traditional mystery or police procedural, but rather a book about relationships, guilt, and memory. My choice to cut Chapter 82 from the final version of the book was an attempt to honor this original intent. My hope was that readers would continue to think about Abby and Emma after the last page was turned, and that they would would form their own conclusions about the future of the novel’s heroine.

Since The Year of Fog was published in 2007, I’ve been fortunate to receive thousands of emails from readers, many of whom keep coming back to the same questions. I hope that Chapter 82 will satisfy their curiosity. For those who have asked if a sequel is in the works, I will say that, although I haven’t yet set pen to paper, I do find that Abby and Emma still haunt me. One day, I may yet return to the characters of The Year of Fog.

I’ve had the pleasure of visiting and speaking with dozens of book clubs in the past couple of years. One question is invariably asked at some point in the evening: where did you get the idea for The Year of Fog? In this ebook, you’ll also find a short essay entitled “Girl on the Beach,” which explains how a chance encounter with a young girl on San Francisco’s Ocean Beach nearly a decade ago inspired The Year of Fog.