how novelist Edan Lepucki uses close attention, google maps, and deep imagination to time travel in her writing

using "luminous specific details" to move the reader

Today I’m excited to share an interview in the new tending section, which is a mix of essays and interviews about creative practice that do a deeper dive into a particular craft element or process question. I’m experimenting with an interview + exercise format, so below you’ll find just one interview question, then a fun exercise related to that question.

I’d love your suggestions of other writers and artists to feature in this series, so if you have a good idea, feel free to let me know. (You can just respond to this email with a suggestion!)

Today’s interview is with

Edan Lepucki

, whose new novel Time’s Mouth follows three generations shaped by time travel and secrets. I’ve been a fan of Edan’s since she and Amelia Morris hosted the podcast Mom Rage, and I loved her first book, California, so I knew I’d want to read whatever she had up next. Time’s Mouth was a book of the week at People magazine, which called it “rich and riveting,” and it’s gotten praise from The New York Times, NPR, and basically everywhere else. Edan is the New York Times bestselling author of California, Woman No. 17, and Time’s Mouth. She is also the editor of Mothers Before: Stories and Portraits of Our Mothers as We Never Saw Them. Her work has been published in the New York Times Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, Esquire Magazine, The Cut, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, among others. She lives with her family in Los Angeles.

You can find Edan on instagram at @edanlepucki, and she also writes the newsletter Italics Mine.

Below, Edan and I talk about how she imagined her way into all the moments of her time-traveling new novel, from LA of the 80s and 90s to the woods of Santa Cruz to San Francisco in the 50s—and she offers a great exercise for making your own specific, surprising room.

📸Ralph Palumbo

one question for Edan Lepucki

Okay, I want to start by sharing my theory about Time’s Mouth: I think it’s kind of a Trojan Horse. It’s got this great concept about time travel and being able to revisit moments from your own past—but it ends up smuggling in these really deep ideas about motherhood and family and what it really means to love your kids.

There’s a great moment toward the end where Opal, the youngest of the three generations, travels back to an elementary school holiday concert and she sees her dad watching her and doing the little choreographed hand gestures for each song along with her, and she’s able to see, as a teenager, just how much he loves her, like the intensity of it, in a way she couldn’t, of course, when she was a little kid. And this is what Opal sees:

Her dad loved her, and his love, his devotion, was right there, pure and uncomplicated. Her dad knew she had trouble with the song and he wanted to help, to be in it with her.

That’s really it, I think, the magic of parental love: having the full force of someone’s attention. And since Ray can’t travel back in time, he has to give all that love and attention to Opal in the present, instead of always traveling back, as some of the other characters do, into little treasured moments of the past. I think it’s a really beautiful argument about attention as the most important form of love.

But that’s not my actual question. I wanted to talk about the work that went into creating the different historical moments in the book. It covers so much time—three generations, from the 1950s to just about the present day—and it moves from Santa Cruz to Los Angeles. And it just felt like, especially in the 80s in LA and in the almost-present when Opal’s a teenager, you’re creating this really vivid portrait of a time period, and you’re having so much fun doing it.

What kind of research or thinking or detail-gathering went into creating each of those moments in time?

Edan

First, thank you so much for this thoughtful reading of my novel!

It’s interesting that this question comes right after your observation that attention is “the most important form of love” because I think paying close attention is exactly how I create moments in time on the page.

There are some sections of the book that take place in locations I’m deeply intimate with, such as Los Angeles in the eighties and nineties, and some that are totally inaccessible to me, such as a bygone San Francisco, and some that I’m only vaguely familiar with, like the woods of Santa Cruz. In order to make all of these moments of time distinct and believable, I had different approaches, but for every setting I did a lot of seeing closely, a lot of looking again and again—and again.

Though I have a habit of saying “I’m not a research-driven writer,” I’m not sure that will remain true; the more I write, the more I surprise myself by how my process and curiosities change. I will say that, for Time’s Mouth, I did just enough research to send me on my way, and then I simply...imagined.

To write San Francisco in the late 1950s, I admit I only did cursory online research into what the city was like back then. I set the main action in North Beach because I wanted my character Ursa to meet the bohemians and beats of the era, and that narrowed my focus. What helped a lot was looking at old photos online to get a feel for what the streets looked like, what the businesses were. One Google search would lead me to another and another, and along the way I’d discover little gems to weave in. Mostly, though, I dreamed up the world: what is generally known about 1950s San Francisco, and what I knew, specifically, about my character and her situation. Since Ursa is an outsider, she only needed an outsider’s gaze.

What mattered most to me, and always matters most to me, are the details that inform and reveal character, place me in their body and mood and perspective, and provide me a world to visualize and experience. I distinctly remember writing about Ursa seeing Karin for the first time; she is a friend who ends up witnessing Ursa’s time travel and giving her a mansion in the woods to live in and hone her gift. I spent so much time on Ursa’s first glimpse of Karin: the black coffee she’s drinking at an outdoor café table, the cigarette she’s smoking. There are other era-specific details like the “bearded men in corduroy coats” and they create an image and a vibe in the reader’s mind, but the focus is on this confident stranger and Ursa’s awe of her. I was intimidated to try my hand at historical fiction about a city I’ve never lived in, but I was not intimidated to describe a young, lonely woman watching a fashionable, self-possessed stranger at a café. Focusing on the dramatic needs of a moment gave me the confidence I needed to write.

There are a bunch of other settings, and all of them included some minor research, but most of the work was about looking very closely—paying attention—to get the world on the page. For instance, this mansion that Karin leaves for Ursa is a place I had to close my eyes and picture. Yes, I looked (online) at Queen Anne Victorians, both their exteriors and interiors, and I did a bit of looking at Victorian-era furniture. But I mostly walked in my mind through the parlor and the kitchen, and up the staircases. I went into the turret and imagined how that many windows, in a circular room, would feel. I imagined the leather furniture in there, and imagined, as I I were Ursa, how it would feel to lie down on it, particularly after she time traveled and felt exhausted. The room where Ursa time travels—The Eastern Wing—is wholly imagined. Once I was there in my mind, the details came into focus, and so too did the drama.

For the Los Angeles sections, much of it was memory work, rather than imagination work. The locations are from my own life (and past): the first house that Ursa’s son Ray and his lover Cherry settle in is a mash-up of two houses that I lived in as a kid, and the house itself is located on the same street I grew up on. I did read an old issue of a new wave magazine called Wet, and I watched YouTube videos of 1980s Melrose, but I also dug deep into my memory to find the smallest details: the shops I used to go to, the slab of tar on the sidewalk in front of my house, the purple tile in the bathroom. Talk about time travel!

Specificity and the concrete are not only fun for me as a writer, but essential. I dream up these physical spaces, and figure out what’s in them, and the story comes with that imagining.  These details must be accessible and believable, but I also like to pair ordinary and legible with the extraordinary and surprising. Otherwise, what’s the point? Fiction needs to describe a world at once understandable and exceptional for me to care. For me, finding these details enable scene and drama, and it’s through this that meaning gets made. In his book The Art of Subtext, Charles Baxter writes that “a novel is not a summary of its plot but a collection of instances, of luminous specific details that take us in the direction of the unsaid or the unseen.” I guess all my imagination work is digging up these “luminous specific details” to build a story that moves the reader.

if you’d like to try it out . . .

I call this exercise “Imagine a room.” If you want, you can choose a place you’ve never been and that you want to try to explore: a Gold Rush era bar, for instance, or a famous opera singer’s dressing room. Or it could be a place you know intimately or is easy to imagine without research. Whatever you want!

If it’s a place you’re not familiar with, take 15-20 minutes to do some good old fashioned Googling. Image searches are my favorite, and if it’s a contemporary-enough setting, then there will be some video treasures too.

If you aren’t doing any research (or “research” since this is pretty light!), or when you’re done with ye olden Googling, then get ready to write.

First, list eight objects that would be in this space, or eight specific details about the space. The first four can be expected elements that you, and your reader, need to truly visualize the place. The final four should feel believable yet unique to this particular location. For instance, any old kitchen will have an oven and a sink (hopefully...), but what’s on the windowsill? What’s the view out the window—if there is one? What’s that smell? What’s magnetized to the fridge? What’s on the ceiling? You can do more than eight details, but start with that many.

Then, write one more detail that is totally unexpected. Try to make it surprising but not completely unbelievable and absurd--unless that’s what you’re going for, of course!

(I once had a student do this exercise, and the place was a dive bar bathroom. The wholly unexpected object was a child’s sippy cup, which I think is not only brilliant but also, wow, what a plot gem!)

This last detail may just be where the story is.

Now, write a little description of who the characters are, related to this room. These are brainstorming notes, not meant to be read by another person. Perhaps the details and objects in the room have made your character(s) emerge or come into better focus.

After you’ve done this brainstorming, write down a mood you want to explore. What feelings are emerging from all this brainstorming?

Now, after all that, it’s time to write something artful--or in that direction. Describe the room, integrating these objects/details and adding any others that pop up as you write. It’s most useful to consider point of view before you begin writing. Whose perspective does the narrator favor and reveal? Is your character in the space, moving through it? What are they doing? How are they interacting with the space?

Strive to make this a subjective description, rather than a neutral one that you might find in, say, a police report or (even, alas) a screenplay. Make it come alive with specificity and voice.

Enjoy being in that room! It’s yours.

You can buy Time’s Mouth from Bookshop, from your local indie, or anywhere else books are sold. And you can sign up for her newsletter Italics Mine, which is always a delight!

elsewhere in motherhood and time travel . . .

“Motherhood is Time Travel,” an essay I wrote about postpartum anxiety, kind strangers telling you to “enjoy it” when you feel like you might actually be dying, and making peace with not being able to go back and do it better

“The Start of Kindergarten is the End of Babyhood”—Miranda Rake, in Romper, writing about her older kid starting kindergarten and the bittersweet feeling of “nostalgia for a time I’m currently living in”

Write More, Be Less Careful is a newsletter about why writing is hard & how to do it anyway. You can find my books here and read other recent writing here. If you’d like occasional dog photos, glimpses of my walks around town, and writing process snapshots, find me on instagram. 

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