Novel shows friends coping with abortion choice

Western Washington University assistant professor of English Kathryn Trueblood’s new novel is about five friends from college, now entering middle age, and how the decision by one of them to have a late-term abortion affects their relationships.

Q: How do you plan to talk about some of the issues in this novel in such a public venue, which is unlike most of the other Chuckanut Radio Hour program locations and a bit more self-selective for audience members?

A: Well, I do know the seven deadly words the Federal Communications Commission doesn’t allow on the air, the ones that Lenny Bruce went to jail over, and while it’s really fun to string them all together because they’re so percussive, I’ll probably refrain. Once, when I was moderating a panel at Bumbershoot, a man passed a guinea pig in a jumbo cup up on stage. I guess I like the unexpected.

But seriously, I wrote “The Baby Lottery” because fiction is a way to present the complexity of human experience instead of becoming polarized by politics. Public debate is often framed by all-or-nothing positions that seem to me disconnected from how people live.

I’ve written as authentically as I know how about a group of women whose responses to a friend’s abortion represent a wide range of values. The book is also about middle-class families under pressure, families whose circumstances are precarious.

Q: How did your childhood shape your ideas of family?

A: My mother and her sister married my father and his brother; both couples divorced after having children. This is what made my childhood unique and forged me as a writer: so many voices and versions surrounding a common event. I was always caught in the middle and would grant each relative his or her wish to have the one true version.

I maintain that position now with my characters, and I hope the readers of “The Baby Lottery” change their minds and shift their sympathies countless times.

My parents were both mavericks in their way. My father was a medical resident at Los Angeles County Hospital before Roe v. Wade was passed, and he worked the obstetrics infection ward where women with botched abortions ended up if they didn’t die first. His views as a result of that experience have had a lasting effect upon my writing.

My mother worked as a script supervisor on film crews where she was often the only woman besides the make-up lady, and she worked on early multicultural films like “House Made of Dawn,” based on N. Scott Momaday’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel.

My parents dared to live unconventional lives; they lived with their children, not for them. I think you could say that’s true for me as a mother of two children who also writes and teaches.

Q: What was the spark for this novel?

A: I found the idea for this novel at the bottom of the driveway by the mailbox, that’s where a neighbor told me about a friend of hers who’d had a second-trimester abortion and the splintering effect the news had had on a group of friends. The neighbor moved soon after, but the idea stayed.

Q: In addition to the issues of abortion and of romantic and sexual intimacy, a very important part of this novel is about friendship between women. What are your thoughts on this special kind of friendship?

A: I think in film and fiction women’s friendships have often been idealized, and the intricacy of women’s lives trivialized. You know, the version where women are “always there for each other.” In my book, there are friendships where women are tremendously supportive of each other, but there are also friendships that deteriorate. Women’s lives contrast painfully in their reproductive years, often in ways that are not their choosing, that have the power to destroy friendships. The characters of “The Baby Lottery” illustrate this tension.

Q: How does your writers’ group, which consists of several Bellingham writers, help with each other’s ventures in the publishing world?

A: As I say in the acknowledgements, I’d like to thank and blame my writers’ group. We’ve been working together for so many years, reading whole books, it’s no longer just critique, we act as tableaus for one another’s imaginations. It really mattered to me to create male characters that my readers would find compelling, and I relied on the candor of the men and women in my writers’ group.

Q: What brings you joy about teaching?

A: The opportunity to work with people as they’re stepping off into their own lives makes teaching a joy.

I’m surrounded by tremendous creativity. For instance, two of my former students, Caleb and Joshua Young, have formed a movie production company, Lines and Blood Films (I’m convinced they’re the next Coen brothers). They asked me to play a role in their new movie, which gave me a whole new perspective on film as a narrative art.

Q: What’s fun for you, when aren’t writing or teaching?

A: Hiking and soft-serve ice cream, those are my time-off pleasures.