The Musical Innertube - Volume 2, Number 146 - Lee Upton

JOHN

We are so thrilled and honored to have Lee Upton as our guest today on the Musical Innertube!  Lee had a wondrous, sparkly career as a teacher, scholar, critic, poet, and fiction writer at Lafayette College in Easton, PA, where she and I were colleagues. In 2015, she was named the Francis A. March professor of English there, and she retired from that post in 2020 to write full time - and all of us are the beneficiaries there because, guess what? Lee recently published her first full-length novel, titled Tabitha Get Up! And she's here to talk with us today about it. Welcome, welcome, Lee Upton.

LEE

Thank you. I'm so happy to be here. Thank you for this wonderful invitation.

JOHN

Don and I were gossiping about you just before we went on with this, and, so, one of the things I'm thinking about is your main character, named Tabitha, is a writer, or a would be writer, and we read her journal a lot, and her conversations with her boss a lot. And I'm wondering, with you, in writing this novel, how do you avoid the pitfalls of self-consciousness? Yeah, I'm just wondering how you get to a place where you just can write?

LEE

Well, I guess it comes from a place of hopelessness. Like I never expect anyone will publish the work, let alone read it. So that gives me a kind of freedom, I think. And you know, I think if you expect to be rejected, somehow the blows hurt less, and you know I've had a lot of experience with rejection, a lot of different forms. So, I think that gets rid of some of the self-consciousness.

DON

One of the things that John and I were talking about earlier was, we were deciding which one of us was going to ask, and I guess it falls to me now - with Tabitha being the age and, uh, what's a good word I'm looking for, the attitude that she has. How much of Tabitha is autobiographical? How much of you is in Tabitha?

LEE

I think that in some ways she's composed of some people I've known and loved very much. I think my sisters are both in there a bit. There are some elements though, that I confess that I drew from my own life, and I think always with character is a lot of emotion. I draw from my own life so that I can make a connection with the character that I create. For instance, there's a portion where Tabitha applies for a job as a waitress, and she's not even allowed to fill out an application. That appeared, that happened to me, and even the way that she kind of soothes herself happened to me, because after it happened, I realized I was wearing a really long coat, like something, you know, Brezhnev or Stalin would wear. And I thought, oh, that maybe that was it. I think that not having, you know, enough money, when I was a young woman just, you know, living on popcorn for a while was very familiar to me, and just, you know, trying so hard to make ends meet, that was familiar. At one point, she mentions breaking her foot. I broke my foot in three places, and I always have to wear these little black shoes that give me a lot of support. And what's so comical is the cover of the novel has those beautiful red heels on it. And I love the color because it's like a pulpy, noir cover. Tabitha, in actual life, would never wear heels like that, but they're kind of her fantasy heels, you know, comes with her second life. So, there are, you know, bits, bits of my life, surely, that that came into the novel. It was fun to write from a perspective, or to write a novel that plays with tropes of romantic comedy that doesn't have a 20-year-old or a 30-year-old in it. Life is such that every time you reach an age, you're relearning how to navigate and talk, so I wanted that for her. Also, actually I remember there are different origin points for the novel, but one of them was a very accomplished, beautiful woman was talking to me, and told me how difficult it was to turn 50. And I think that made me think, oh, I'll create a character who just turns 50 and see what happens. But the other origin story, I'll tell you briefly, the novel actually came from a short story, a very terrible short story that was far too complex and too much going on. But that story has been very lucky for me, because I took the complex plot and created another novel, the novel that comes out in 2025. But Tabitha also comes from that failed short story. There was an e-mail at the end of the story where a woman writes to her publicist and tries to secure an advance for herself, and the kind of galloping energy of that voice was what I turned into Tabitha's voice. But originally when I tried to do that, I couldn't use the same character because the character in the short story was really kind of shallow and greedy and grasping and I thought, do I want to spend 300 pages with this awful woman? And so, you know, I changed her, and made her into Tabitha, who has more links to some of the people that, you know, I've lost in my in my life.

JOHN

Ohh yeah, I think, too, that she's got a lot of, in funny ways, she has a lot of stuff that is endearing, even if it's in odd disguises, you know she does. And there is a moment - I'll tell you, when I started to laugh in this book - I found this book hard to read, not because of the book, but because I had to put it down and laugh so often, just to snicker so often. I'm your perfect audience, Lee, you know this already, and I just - when she first, there's one person, she starts interviewing this person. She's supposed to write a book about this person. And she asks one question and then begins to sort of answer the question herself and goes off on this fugue and it is a riot and I thought to myself, OK, where have we gone now? Where will we go next? And it was wonderful. We were suddenly in Tabitha land. And from there, I couldn't come back. I was suddenly there. Suddenly, it was astral projection on a page.

LEE

Thank you! That that makes me really happy to hear that, because she's real to me! I mean, I wrote this book in an earlier draft, and then I missed her voice, and I didn't have a publisher there, and I hadn't sent it out. I wrote two more sequels, which sounds absurd, I know, but I missed her voice, but the sequels, I thought they didn't quite work, so I started cannibalizing the sequels, and then put them into the manuscript. And then again, I finished that, and then I thought, well, I'll never do another sequel, because when you do a sequel, you inevitably disrupt the character, you know, and it's a comedy, so I can't give away the ending, but it's something to disrupt that world a bit. But I have written a sequel. I don't know if it'll get published, but it was partly because she's real to me in a sense.  If someone says something, you know, unkind about her, I just think, oh, but she’s just real. You know that she's just trying. She's just trying as hard as she can. But I think she's - you are the ideal reader, both of you. Thank you for reading it so much and she really means a lot to me. And her struggles mean a lot to me because she has her - she may not always tell the truth to her publisher, but otherwise she has a kind of integrity, I think. And she also has to discover, despite everything the culture might tell her, she has to discover her own worth as a human being. I think that's something you know where we have to discover and re-discover so often, that should be settled. But I think there's so many forces that want us to feel we're not enough.

DON

Yep, yeah, I have a question about the ending that I'll get to in a minute, but first I wanna go, I wanna hone in on Tabitha a little bit and something that you just said. You said that you were denied a waitressing job because you were wearing the wrong coat. Tabitha is denied a waitressing job and some other jobs because she has a reputation for not being a very good waitress, and I think that probably nails Tabitha, right there, nails her personality. She has a reputation in the restaurant world for not being a good waitress.

LEE

Yeah, she, tends to tell diners about things that happen in the kitchen that would make them not want to eat what they're eating.

JOHN

What's been on the floor!

LEE

What’s been on the floor! So, she tends to be transparent in in ways that make others uncomfortable. So, I think that, yeah, that, you know, she's had a number - she's sort of, you know, blown her entire reputation in the town, and in the biographies that she tries to write, so it's really nice when two people come into the town who are a new infusion. One is, of course, the writer of children's books, Piper Fields, who also writes that, um, erotica, with that fanatical cult following. And the other is Brent Vintner, that really too-handsome-for- human-life actor that she meets.

DON

That's the interesting part of the of the way you have arranged the novel. Most of it is Tabitha talking to herself when she's not talking to other people and chastising herself or giving excuses or trying to get the juices flowing, you know, trying to pump herself up and get going. And it seems like one of these things where it's almost like a diary, you're going through her day, you're going through her life. Things are pretty ordinary. And then within a couple of pages, things have completely gone off the rails, and we have Piper coming in, who's got a whole lot of back story on her and a lot of “side story,” maybe I want to say. And then Brent comes in who’s the too-handsome-to-believe movie star, and that starts a whole ‘nother train. So, it's interesting to me that you've got some, the structure of the story is, you've got somebody living their life and then they just kind of get hit from both sides. It's like a car accident.

LEE

Yeah, it is like a car accident, because it crashes up against her sense of reality and her sense of possibility. And I think that she's a kind of a surprise to them also. I think there there's a lot, I think in some ways there's a lot of loneliness in the novel. And I think for my sense with comedy, that comedy always breezes up against, you know, the uncomfortable, the shameful, the embarrassment, your whole high school career at least, is right there. But also against, you know, some mortality. At one point - I should be careful about the numbers here, but I looked up how many times the word “dead” appeared in the manuscript. And I think at the at that point when I looked it up, I think it was 53 times. And the sense of dying and all. I think that that with comedy, there's always, but not always, but at least maybe with what I'm doing, there's a sense of the forbidden is right there. I wrote this, by the way, a lot of it during COVID, and so a lot of it is fantasy, like what could you do during COVID? So, I gave her the world's best bar to go to, and restaurants, and cafes, and parks, you know, before we knew we could walk outside without a mask. And I gave her the sense all these things that I wanted to enhance life. But that's also because there's also the sense that life could end too. So, I think that I think in, in comedy part of the charge or the spark in comedy, it's brushing up against denial.

JOHN

And that explains something that I did notice is that she doesn't like to stay in crowd scenes very long.

LEE

No.

JOHN

And that's something that happens in the book, and then she begs whoever's taking her to this or that party, to take her away, Now, the End Of The World bar, that is our favorite bar, there there are all these little hidey-holes way far apart where you can be far apart from the very few people who are ever in the bar. So, there's no sense of, you know, mortal contact, if you will. But you're right, there is the sense of either being very, being in close contact with only one person, or sort of fuzzy contact with a bunch of people. But you don't want to be in close contact with a bunch of people! You know, one of the first two, very much like the pandemic! I was going to ask you about names. Because this is a feast of names. This is, I would tell people to read this book just to encounter the names of characters. We talked about Tabitha, we've talked about, what's the name of the actor again?

LEE

Brent Vintner.

JOHN
Brent Vintner. Then someone sends a young woman to be Tabitha's (laughing) this is very funny - but to be her intern and her name is outlandish. I wish I had written all these down.

LEE

It's Tinker Flatts.

JOHN

And she says something like, she sounds like a Mesa or a raised, you're right, or a raised geologic structure. At any rate, there are just some amazing names in this. And the naming itself. Well, it's sort of a theme. I mean, people do bear their names out, in some ways.  I wouldn't say it's quite Dickensian. I mean, in Dickens, people's names are what they are, you know, they tell you how people eat and how they walk, even how their bodies are shaped. So, it's not quite like that. But they do seem to be existential walkers, I mean, you know, and we could see a Tabitha, who has to get up. She keeps getting up and it doesn't hurt. I mean, if you know that scene. Is it Paul? I think it's Paul that does the miracle where she...

LEE

I think it’s Peter.

JOHN

It’s Peter. Sorry. Thank you. It's one of the two. So, I mean the, the, the naming is outlandish and marvelous. I hope you got a kick out of coming up with those Lee, ’cause they are wonderful.

LEE

It's a lot of fun. You know, sometimes I can't really get a character ‘til I get a name. There’s a story I tell about this - I've told it before, so I'm being repetitive, but it's probably my best example of this. For a short story I needed a name for a character, and I knew the characters first name was Ray, but I needed a last name, and I just couldn't get it. I couldn't get it and I couldn't get it. And one day I was in my car, starting my car and, you know, the little illuminated panel, and it said “trunk ajar,” and somehow my trunk was open, and then I knew, like, his name is Ray Trunkajar. And it was sort of just perfect. Ray Trunkajar for the character. And Tabitha was fun. I think it kind of, that name partly grew out of the original character who was the greedy, grasping woman in the other, in the failed short story, her name was Tima, and so then softening her became Tabitha, but then it was wonderful. You know, the story of Tabitha raised from the dead in the Bible, and in certain translations it's, “Tabitha rise!” But in others, I love it, it's, “Tabitha, get up!” And she gets up. But we never hear from her again. Yeah, never again in the Bible. So anyway, it was fun. The names  came pretty, pretty, pretty quick, pretty quickly.

JOHN

We'll return to our podcast in just a moment, but first, here's a soothing musical interlude.

DON

Born in Michigan, Lee Upton came to Lafayette College in 1987. That year, she also published her first collection of poetry, The Invention Of Kindness.

JOHN

Other poetry collections followed, including No Mercy of 1989, Approximate Darling, 2000, Undid In The Land Of Undone, 2007, and Bottle The Bottles, The Bottles, The Bottles, 2015.

DON

Her poetry has won the Pushcart Prize, the Poetry Society of America’s Lyric Poetry Award, and many other prizes. She has also been recognized for her fiction, her studies of other poets, and her community service.

JOHN

Lee’s also a terrific fiction writer. She has published a novella, The Guide to Flying Island (2009), plus two collections of short fiction, The Tao of Humiliation (2014) and Visitations (2017). Lee retired from Lafayette College in 2020, since when she’s been writing fulltime.

DON

And now we return you to the Musical Innertube, already in progress.

DON

You have a background in writing poetry. How much did the poetry enter in when you're writing this? Because you have a whole section where they're walking in a park and Tabitha is just enamored with the word “dappled” when she sees dappled shadows on the sidewalk as she's going through the park. So how much did writing poetry get you ready to write prose?

LEE

I will say, about the “dappled” reference, that is autobiographical. When I was in maybe eighth grade or so, we had to put together a little collection of other writers, not our own original poetry, but other writers’ poetry. And I remember there was something about  “dapples” in a poem, and I always loved that word. And so, I give that to her to love it. But it was very hard for me to move from poetry to fiction. I should say that when I started writing poetry, poetry seemed more natural to me. A voice, a rhythm. Move with that. And, like, all along the way, I would write short stories, but they tended to be monologues. They tended to be one voice, maybe two voices. Relatively short. You know, the power of a voice was what I was interested in. It took me a long time to figure out cause and effect in fiction. It took me a long time to make, you know, a sequence of actions that are derailed. I really had to kind of teach myself, and read again and again and again other people's fiction. For natural storytellers, that's easy. That's probably easy for both of you. But for me it was very difficult, but I love fiction so much and I admire, you know, the stories I read so much that I just thought I want to do this, I want to see what will happen. But savoring a scene, it was hard for me to stay within a scene because I'm used to poetry, that kind of absolute concision. And also, the kind of, different kind of movement. In poems, you know, they’re like pinball, each part kind of infects or informs every other part down to, you know, the comma and the spacing, of course. And, you know, the line breaks. Whereas with fiction for me, if I focused on that immediately, the way I do in poetry, I couldn't move into scenes. I couldn't move forward.

JOHN

Yeah, you couldn't do anything else, yeah.

LEE

I think of, you know, the poem more as like a whirlpool, you know, it's moving us inward and I will give, poetry is my fundamental, you know, art that I will never give up. I love it deeply. Whereas fiction, I think of sort of as a swiftly moving river, and it seems very horizontal in the movement. And that wasn't natural to me. It's taken me a long time to figure out, you know, how to get people from one city into another city. And then I learned you can do it really easily. You can just say “in Cincinnati” and then they're there.

DON

Well, but the other thing, too, that that you've done in this novel, is, you don't have any problems with setting up a scene between two people or more, getting through the whole situation, ending on a punch line, and then the next page you're somewhere else, doing something else. So, there is, I think maybe a little bit of the poetry in that, in that you've got a scene, it ends, you're on to the next thing. I think that that works very well in the in the novel, or it did for me. And of course, John and I are used to it because John is entirely a fictional character, so...

JOHN

Speaking of that, I should tell our listener – no, it’s listeners - that there is one little corner of this book in which someone is lying about something very important. But the lie that they're telling is also a lie. It's a lie on a lie. People were passing on this lie, and at each step in the lie it gets more outlandish. We were talking earlier about truth telling. And really, a lot of people in this book are just telling whoppers! You know, a lot of people in this book are either withholding things or not, and enjoying it. I mean, like, it's really fun to lie. I think lying is the only time when the universe acts the way we wish it did, because we just will act the way we want it to act, you know, because it gives you power and everything. But I think that's another thing that's happening throughout the book. The loneliness thing is happening. I think each of the characters is lonely and his or her own way, right down to the end, I think, even though, you know, we should feel happy at the end in a lot of ways. Still, I think the loneliness isn't gone. But what lies do, both funny and destructive, I think that's there as well.

LEE

That’s so interesting, thanks for pointing that out. Yeah, there's a kind of, like a wedding cake of lines. There's so many, so many layers. Maybe because, you know, in some way, she's had to deal with a lot of adversity, or to deal with her mother, which is another, yeah, yeah, thing she doesn’t want to think about. She's pretty good at figuring out that there's a lie here, but not knowing exactly what it is. I mentioned the mother. It was such fun to write the mother. I can't begin to tell you. She is such, so full of self-glorification and self-regard, and says the most hideous things, but I also found her, you know, maybe channeling a bit of Tabitha, bizarrely, you know, freeing and lovable, and partly because Tabitha never has to worry about her because her mother will always succeed, always come out on top, or at least she believes that. So, there's no daughterly guilt for Tabitha here, and that's very freeing.

DON

It's interesting too, because as a title for each individual section of a of a particular chapter in the book, you will talk about. this is an e-mail, this is a text from so and so. And then you'll go on to describe the text. And every one, almost every one, of the voice mails from Mom is “an expected voicemail.” Tabitha expects this from her mom. It's not a surprise, the way the mom delivers. And there's a lot of interfamilial interaction in the book, not only with her mom, but with her nephew Leon, who owns the bar. She has a lot of conferences with him and a lot of heart-to-hearts with him that she probably couldn't have with anyone else.

Speaker 2

Leon, I'm really fond of him. I have a lot of nephews, and nieces, a lot. And, you know, I know some of them are not all that much younger than I am. And in Tabitha's family, of course, her nephew’s a year older than she is, he's more like a brother to her, they were really raised together. They were almost like feral children in some ways. And I had to go and introduce the grandmother - it's always hard to introduce the grandmother, because  sentimentality will enter into people's perspectives, and there's so many, you know, thoughts, stereotypes about older women. But I think if they've only been that mother, I don't know how Tabitha would have survived it. But she had this great grandmother on her father's side who just loved books, kind of gave her so much love and affection and acceptance, and to Leon too, and would brush the burrs out of their hair. I love that. I love that the grandmother feels she would have really understood Sylvia Plath, something about that just seemed so, so sweet.

JOHN

“She gave so much to me!” The last thing in the world I think you'd say about Sylvia Plath. “She gave so much to me!” She gave me so much!

LEE

I think that you know, with Leon too, you know, they’re still bonded, you know, they're deeply bonded. And I think because, you know, they did, they're kind of, they're not ideologically captured, like a lot of children are. Children are told where to sit, how to sit, how to behave, how to eat, and because they're neglected, so much in so many ways, they somehow don't quite fit into the culture in the way others might, but again, it gives some kind of freedom and honesty with one another.

JOHN

I think you think of Leon, and you know that things that aren't always going well with him. And often, when he talks with Tabitha, he won't tell her exactly what's going wrong, but you could tell stuff is a little rough. And yet you never get the sense that things are gonna quite come to smash for him. She never has the sense, she thinks he's gonna make it through whatever making it through means.

LEE

Yeah, there's something very effervescent I think about Leon. That's very helpful to her. And he figures in the sequel quite a bit.

JOHN

Oh, good!  I'd buy the sequel just for him.

DON

And of course, he makes a mean peach drink.

JOHN

Oh my God.

DON

Everybody likes it. Was it a bellini, right?

LEE

Yes. Yeah, he does.

JOHN

The Bellini. Yes. Invented in Venice? You betcha. Man, I was getting drunk just reading some of those drinks. Oh!

DON

So let me ask you about, my question about the ending. Without giving too much away, there's almost two endings. There's one where Tabitha makes a decision, and then that decision is reversed later. Did you have the temptation to end it after her first decision?

LEE

Oh, let's see. Ah, I wasn't very tempted because I really, I just, you know, I was, you know, kind of, it's a romantic comedy. So, without giving too much away, there was a sense that, I guess – Brent Vintner, I can talk about Brent Vintner, and maybe that will answer the question for you. You know, Brent Vintner is an actor, his face is on the side of buses, he's trying often to, you know, get respect at the same time. And I think that happens to a lot of actors, they can be very popular, but they're, you know, an actor. They, you know, you're news one day, and then suddenly no one cares the next. And you can't get another job. So he has a sense of how, in some ways, fragile his life is. She, I think, fits for him a kind of mapping of something from his childhood and he’s there with glasses, round face. He's from Michigan as am I.

JOHN

I noticed that! Yes, I did.

LEE

He understands her language in some ways, if he can't predict it. He likes that she's not always looking at him the way people are, objectifying him in a way, even though she's always focused on his, his infernal and yet heavenly beauty, raw male beauty. So, I think there is a sense there of, you know, both of them somehow need to step out of the harness that the culture puts on both of them about expectations, about how they are to live their lives. And so, for, you know, I think it doesn't have to be this way. But you know, there's a sense of, Tabitha’s always wished for a kind of transformation, or something kind of ecstatic in her life. She's very easily bored, for instance. And she wants a bit more.  And at the same time, she, you know, her relationship with Leon show she's capable of great loyalty and sympathy.

DON

And I think she's good for him, for Brent, in the sense that there's no guile there. I'm sure that are a couple of episodes where he mixes with the other actors that are with him in this town, shooting an independent movie, and she doesn't really think much of the other actors. But it turns out that he doesn't either. And so, yeah, she's probably, he's probably interested in Tabitha for the reasons that most people are that that she's taking him... okay, pardon the pun, face value.

LEE

That's true. That's true. Yeah, yeah.

DON

In the sense that he has a terrific face, but also she's not swayed by that, and he kind of chases her in the in the book which I thought was a very clever way of flipping the romcom a little bit.

LEE

And through the first time, I've really thought of something I hadn't thought about her. She needs to be listened to. I mean, we all need to be listened to, and she's not often listened to. You know her, these biographies, you know, kind of fail, by and large, that she writes, her celebrity interviews get pulled off, off the web,, and he when I think about him, he's very good at listening and listening very closely to other people and that has to be very attractive to her.

JOHN

Well, it's been very attractive to us to have you here with us, Lee. This has been probably the shortest half hour we've had on the podcast. And when you get that, you know the next book, the sequel, when that gets published, we’ve got to have you back on and I sure hope this gets made into a movie. Or a short series. It would be terrific. You know, I could just see it.

DON

And I can I say something?

JOHN

No, Don. No. OK. All right. Go ahead. OK. OK. Please.

DON

Thank God he's only a fictional character, or else I'd be going nuts! When I was reading it, and he's probably too old for the part, but I had John Hamm's picture in my head whenever Brent Vintner came in.

LEE

Oh wow. Yeah. So, yeah, that kind of that kind of outstanding male beauty. Maybe in the sequel!  Or the sequel to the sequel! Yeah.

JOHN

There you are!

DON

Well, there you go! But yeah, I thought of him, and I thought, well, no, maybe he's got a little too many years on him for the way that Brent is described, but those were the qualities that I was seeing in this. Everybody, when they reads a book, are casting it in their head, right? I don't know if you were casting it, if you had people in mind, but...

LEE

You know, she's too young, yeah, the age problem comes up. But you know the wonderful actor Jenny Slate, at all?  Yeah, I thought of her, as Tabitha. Very, very similar, similar rhythms, I mean, she would do very well with those sorts of those sort of speech patterns.

JOHN

Eleanor Barkan came into my head for her mom, you know? “Hello. I'm very afraid.”

LEE

That's really interesting. I love it.

DON

Let's see. So, Hollywood just needs to come to us. We've got it cast, we're ready to go!

JOHN

We have the property right here.

DON

Give us three million dollars and we're off.

LEE

Well, this this has been really, really wonderful.

JOHN

Yes, it has for us, too. Lee Upton, ladies and gentlemen, the book is, Tabitha, Get Up! and it's a joy. You got to read it and we look forward to having you back on this show, maybe talking about poetry next time. Who the heck knows?

LEE

That'd be wonderful. I'd love it.