DW: What wound up being your favorite act?
SG: In the end, the liberty horses.
DW: Describe exactly what they do.
SG: A person, usually a beautiful woman, comes out with a group of twelve horses typically, sometimes all white, sometimes black and white. She stands and makes signals with whips in the air, and she talks to them, and they obey her.
I have a horse, and I think it’s very cool that they can get horses doing that with no restraint and no halter.
DW: Marlena is that woman in Water for Elephants.
SG: Yes, and in fact I modeled her act after ones I had watched.
DW: You explain in a note after the final chapter that many of the details in the novel were drawn from real life, or what passes for it in existing records. For instance, one of the strangest: the scared lion hiding under a sink.
SG: It’s true.
DW: And Rosie was based on a real elephant?
SG: Several elephants, yes. There was actually an elephant that would pull her stake out of the ground to go and steal lemonade, and then she’d go back and put her stake back in the ground and look innocent while they blamed the roustabouts.
DW: You couldn’t have started your research expecting to find enough real-life stories to fill out the novel. Or did you?
SG: No. I had thought that I would make it all up entirely, and of course the main thrust of the story is my own, but there were too many of these wacky anecdotes not to try and fit them in. Then to be able to say afterward, “Yes, this really happened.”
DW: In your research, did you talk to circus fans?
SG: I did, and they led to the portal of the circus folk, who were harder to reach. They have a rather reclusive society because various people are coming after them. It took me months and months to make contact with them, but when I did the real stories began to come out.
DW: What exactly do you mean by people “coming after them”?
SG: PETA, for the use of animals in the circus. Also, I don’t know if there’s an organized group coming after them for the use of freaks in sideshows, but they’ve had enough contact with that type of group that they don’t give out contact information easily.
DW: How did you first make contact?
SG: I was looking for the rights to photos in the book, so I was finding people who had circus archives. And of course they had connections. But it was a lot of give and take before they realized I wasn’t planted by somebody else to come after them.
I actually got the phone number of a guy who owns a sideshow. He keeps human heads in his house. It took me four months to get up the nerve to call this guy, but when I did he was really sweet and helpful. They’re shrunken heads; he doesn’t just go off and behead people. But yes, he has a collection of shrunken heads.
DW: One of my favorite details in the book, having nothing to do with the circus, describes the boys in the hobo jungle: when they sleep, they take off their shoes but tie them to their feet. How did you educate yourself in Depression-era America?
SG: I wasn’t quite sure at first that this was the era I’d set the story in. A circus photo set me off on the path of the novel, but then I got on a sidetrack about hobos and I realized that something like 80 percent of them were under twenty-one. You think about hobos and you imagine middle-aged, dirty men by the side of the track, but no, they were kids.
DW: So much happens on the train or just off the train. It’s the book’s main setting.
SG: The whole of a circus worker’s social life happened on a moving train. When they were off, they were setting up or they were performing or they were tearing down, so everything happened while they were moving.
Once they collected your quarter, they did their act and then they got out. You were leaving by the front end of the tent, and they were hauling the benches out by the back end—they’re done, they’re finished, they want to get on the train.
DW: You mentioned the photo that gave you the idea for a novel about the circus, but how did you decide to incorporate Jacob’s story from the Bible?
SG: I can’t remember the exact moment of genesis, but this is one of the things I’ve always liked about literature: the layers. Margaret Laurence’s The Stone Angel, for instance, has that whole layer in it. It’s a long tradition in English literature. It won’t detract from the story if you don’t know it’s there, but I thought it would be a fun thing to play up for people who recognized it.
DW: The writing wasn’t without its challenges. To finish the book, you shut yourself in a closet.
SG: I had a couple of very long interruptions with this book. The first one lasted eighteen weeks. After that, I crashed out the first half of the book. Then someone from my tech-writing days called me and said, “We have a short, three- or four-week contract. Do you want to do it?” Sure. Easy money, right?
That turned into four months of ten- and eleven-hour days, writing about SQL server databases and XML data files, really serious stuff. I was burned out, and I was having a lot of trouble getting my head back into the characters. I’d left the book at a point where I had something like sixteen plot threads up in the air. I was shopping on eBay and checking my e-mail obsessively, finding a million reasons not to write. That was why the closet. It takes me about an hour and a half to get from the real world into the fictional world.
DW: Back in those tech-writing days, before you wrote Riding Lessons, did you aspire to write fiction?
SG: Totally. I studied English literature because I wanted to write. I had been writing since I was about seven. My first novel filled three exercise books; an imaginary horse shows up in the backyard, and a girl finds him and rides off and jumps fences. It’s always been what I wanted to do.
I graduated, and I had an English degree. What are you going to do with an English degree? I went into tech writing. I liked it—it was fine—but my husband and I had always talked about me retiring early to try writing fiction, to see if it worked.
I was writing for a statistical software company, and I got laid off. I was putting my résumé together, and my husband said, “Do you want to try it now?” I said, “Can we?” So he said, “Let’s give it two years or two books, and if it doesn’t work, go back to tech writing.”
DW: So did it take two years or two books?
SG: Two books, it took. Before Riding Lessons, I wrote what I call “my drawer book.”
DW: Which no one is ever going to see.
SG: My husband threatens that if I die he’s going to try to sell it. If I don’t, no one’s ever going to see it.
DW: That’s reason to live, right there.
SG: Yes. Also, it’s been cannibalized to the point where I don’t think it’s publishable.
DW: I’ve been asking people lately: If you were going to set up your own personal hall of fame for writers from each decade of life, who’d get in there? Who’s been important?
SG: I’m probably the outlier here because I was a fan of Victorian novels as a teenager.