|
•
|
|
An Interview with David Carkeet, Author of Campus Sexpot, A Memoir!
The memoir, Campus Sexpot, by David Carkeet, is the winner of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs Award for Creative Nonfiction. The text of the memoir oscillates between reflections on a novel written by an English teacher at Carkeet’s high school and the story of the young David Carkeet. Throughout the memoir, Carkeet explores the ways that fiction compares to life, as well as the nature of morality and the expectations that family and society have about it.
KP: You’ve written five works of fiction, as well as young adult and short fiction. How did your experience of writing a memoir differ from your experiences writing fiction?
DC: Memoirs and fiction have much in common in terms of technique—character descriptions, reflective language, background information—but the creative acts differ a lot. With a memoir, you’re nailing down a feeling that you had; you’re working your hardest to recall it and feel it again and put it into words that do justice to it. It’s hard, but it’s manageable, like digging a ditch. With fiction, you’re chasing something that’s always heading over the horizon, and you hope you can keep it in view. In both cases there’s a search involved; with a memoir you know you’ll find it, but with fiction you can never be sure.
KP: Koby’s book seems, in a unique way, to be an inverted mirror of your own experiences—in everything from your experiences with girls to fathers. Why do you think you chose this structure for the memoir?
DC: I was struck, on rereading Koby’s Campus Sexpot 40 years after my first reading of it, with its total lack of realism—in speech, behavior, even physics. I’m a comic writer, and he was a sitting duck. But I also discovered ideas in his book that struck a chord in me, like the importance of fathers to a young man’s development. Also, what I was able to learn of Koby’s life reminded me that judging others is a complicated business, since he clearly had some good in him along with the bad. Likewise, my father—a dauntingly good man—almost took a seriously bad turn in his life. I felt challenged by Koby’s novel to make sense of the complicated feelings it triggered in me. Structuring my memoir around his book makes my memoir “experimental,” but that word makes it sound dreadful and difficult.
KP: How did you decide which sections of Koby’s book to use and how to relate them to your own life?
DC: This was tricky. I summarized some of Koby’s story to give my reader a feel for it, but I focused on those elements that triggered associations to my own history, especially my romantic and sexual history, such as it was. Then off I’d go with those personal stories. I certainly don’t retell his whole plot. For that, you’ll have to find a copy of the original Campus Sexpot, which is almost impossible.
KP: Koby’s writing falls into the category of smut—bad writing, “with no literary status” (28). Despite this, you find evidence of writing ability in Koby’s work. I’m curious. What do you see as the most compelling part of Koby’s potential as a writer and of his failed literary life?
DC: Koby’s book shows some psychological insight, and he was capable of thoughtful, even beautiful sentences. I quote a few and praise them, though not very kindly, I suppose—sort of “Hey, idiot, why didn’t you do this more often?” He could handle small moments okay, but then he would run off the rails. He was scattered, unable to sustain an effort.
KP: You also talk about your own goodness (or the expectations of goodness) and your “. . . reputation as a ‘goody-goody’” (8). What do you think is the relationship between the reality of goodness and the expectations of goodness in the book?
DC: My concern with this issue grew out of youthful conflicts between my own sense of myself (capable of bad behavior) and my reputation (goody-goody) and between my resentment of adults (bores, hypocrites) and their power over me—I’m talking about teachers and townspeople here, not my parents. Things didn’t match up. Meanwhile, I was very aware that my father, as superior court judge, was processing bad citizens every day, many of them juvenile delinquent classmates of mine, and he expected stellar behavior from me. Into this environment of moral complexity came Koby’s Campus Sexpot. I was fifteen years old, puzzled by life, and this novel, which portrayed my little Eden in the Mother Lode as a sinister place (not just sexy, but sinister), heaped still more confusion on me.
KP: Throughout the book, we get an idea of your father as the town’s only judge – the decider of guilt and innocence. Can I ask why you ended the story with an image of your father?
DC: I know that the final chapter departs in its approach from the rest of the book, but for me it grows naturally out of all that comes before. Lives can take strange turns, and my father’s certainly did. He drank, and then he quit, and if he hadn’t quit, his life would have been a mess. I was four years old when he quit, and if he hadn’t, my life would have been a mess too. Other children aren’t so lucky, and life is unfair that way. My guess is that fate was not kind to the young Dale Koby, and that could very well have made him what he was. This final chapter, a profile of my father, is also a meditation on the theme of goodness, badness, and forgiveness.
[Campus Sexpot is the winner of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs Award for Creative Nonfiction. David Carkeet’s writings include five novels, three of which are New York Times Notable Books: Double Negative, The Greatest Slump of All Time, I Been There Before, The Full Catastrophe, and The Error of Our Ways. His short stories and essays have appeared in such publications as The North American Review, The Oxford American, The New York Times Magazine, and The Village Voice. He resides in Vermont.]
Read an excerpt from Campus Sexpot, A Memoir! Read more about Campus Sexpot, A Memoir!
|