Seattle author explores one woman's search for her true nature

MARGARET BIKMAN

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Seattle author Jennie Shortridge reads from her new novel, "Love and Biology at the Center of the Universe," about a woman who thinks her life is shattered when she believes her husband is having an affair, and when she has a falling-out with her young-adult daughter.

Question: As in some of your other novels, the issue of control seems to be a theme. Mira, your main character, seems to be a person who wants to be in control of her life; and in this case, so much of it is bound up with her idea of her sexual nature and her "good girl, bad girl" thoughts.

Answer: Yes, Mira is a perfectionist control freak. As a lifelong "good girl" and people pleaser, she must come to grips with what it means to go against all of that and learn to be her more authentic self � a self that includes the long-subdued "bad girl" side of her nature.

| DAVID HILLER COURTESY

MEET THE AUTHOR

Jennie Shortridge
"Love and Biology at the Center of the Universe"
4 p.m. June 8
Village Books, 1200 11th St.
671-2626
www.jennieshortridge.com

I've been interested in the dichotomy of the whole "good girl/bad girl" construct for quite some time. In my first book, "Riding with the Queen," the main character is a bad girl who goes good. This time around, I wanted to explore the flip side: good girl goes bad. What I think I've learned is what Mira comes to know: we are neither good nor bad. We just are.

Q: You acknowledge a great quote from Garth Stein about Mira discovering that the "Center of the universe is not a place, but a state of mind." What can you tell me about each character's state of mind?

A: Mira's father, Big Al, and her grandmother are both enablers of her perfectionism. She is the replacement for her dead sainted mother, and although it's comfortable for Mira to continue that charade, it's also toxic.

Her husband, Parker, and their daughter, Thea, are the ones who must deal with that day-to-day toxicity, and it is their pulling away from her that puts the story in motion. The equilibrium is knocked off kilter if they don't buy into her fantasy of being the perfect family.

Lannie is one of those friends who loves you no matter what � pimples, warts, craziness and all, but she has also known Mira's kindness. Mira saved her when she herself was abandoned. Of course, Lannie is also more of a realist than Mira, the yang to her yin.

When Mira arrives in Seattle, she has the opportunity to be someone new, though she takes charge at the coffee shop over her boss Gus's passive objections. In the end, they too provide a balance for each other: Gus introduces the concept of Zen to Mira, and Mira helps him make his business more successful.

The two young men that Mira meet in the coffee shop, Martin and Doug, symbolize love and biology. She falls in teenage-crush love with Martin, and has a mind-blowing but just friendly sexual relationship with Doug. The best of both worlds, but is that what she really wants? What's still missing in her life? That's what she's there to learn.

Q: How does the issue of abandonment figure into the plot?

A: Mira is abandoned at an early age by her mother. Family is the most important thing to her: her husband and daughter, her father and grandmother. When each of them, in their own way, abandons her after she's spent her life trying to be the perfect wife, mother and daughter possible, she is finally alone with no one to please but herself. As the story unfolds and she learns more about herself and her past, she comes to realize why she, too, has abandoned those she cares about the most.

Q: How does the Pacific Northwest play a role in this novel?

A: The Oregon coast is a magical place to me; I spend a lot of time there writing, which is where the fictional town of Pacifica came from. It seemed almost like the idyllic Kansas farm that Dorothy inhabits at the beginning of "The Wizard of Oz," and then Fremont (in Seattle) like Oz itself: full of oddities and bright shiny objects, and people who are slightly off-kilter and creative.

Q: As in your other novels, music plays an interesting role. How did you choose the songs that are interspersed in this novel, what do they have to do with plot, and what's all this about your own band background?

A: Music is an undercurrent throughout the story. Just as in real life, certain songs seem to come on the radio at entirely too appropriate times for Mira. I like employing music as emotional conduit in a story, another way into the reader's consciousness. As I was writing, I felt certain song lyrics bubbling up, like "Blame It on the Bossa Nova." It starts the story in motion, and is the theme throughout: yes, blame it all on love.

When I was 16, I started singing with my boyfriend's garage band and I ended up being a working musician for many years, in various kinds of bands: country-rock, new wave, standards and blues. When I met my husband, Matt, in a band, I was turning 30 and getting tired of smoke-filled bars and singing my throat raw every night, and we made the transition to acoustic duo, playing in coffeehouses and quiet places. We still play for our own enjoyment, and with friends, but novel-writing has consumed most of my creative energy the past 13 years.

Q: What do you like about having a blog, and how does it connect you with readers and other writers?

A: I like having a chance to just kind of blather about what interests me, especially in connection to the book. Readers often want to know where the story in the novel came from, so it's a peek inside my head, my thoughts, my process. It's a platform, too, I suppose, to say more directly what I try to portray through fiction in a more veiled way. And even better, it's a way to have a conversation with readers.

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POSTED: Sunday, Jun. 01, 2008

Seattle author explores one woman's search for her true nature

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