“Here’s the Story,” your story in the Summer Fiction Issue, which is set in Los Angeles, in 1967, traces the intersecting paths of Ted Martin and Emma Brady, married parents with kids who are chafing inside seemingly happy marriages. Ted watches the Dodgers’ final game of the season and then escapes the stadium for Elysian Park; Emma wanders into a love-in taking place in the park. What was it like to conjure up the fall of 1967 for the story?
It was my first attempt at doing “historical” fiction. My default is to remain in the present, because I am a naturally lazy person and the idea of research sounds like homework. That said, I thoroughly enjoyed reaching back to 1967, the Internet my portal. I watched many YouTube videos of that big Easter Love-In at Elysian Park and read blogmoirs (I just made up that word) and even ponied up $2.50 to the Los Angeles Times archive. Major League Baseball and its affiliate fanatics gave me the entire final game of the Dodger season in a single click. I watched episodes of “Dragnet” and “The Brady Bunch.” So much of my “research” was essentially a reflection of how I normally waste my time when I’m writing.
Your last novel, “& Sons,” which is released in paperback this month, is set in New York, the city where you grew up, and in some ways you’re mapping out the city of your childhood and adolescence. Do you feel the same sense of comfort writing about Los Angeles? Is it a city you know well?
I do not know Los Angeles at all. When I do visit, I am dependent on the authorial tone of G.P.S. to narrate me through the city, and we both cheer when I arrive at my final destination. Sometimes, I think she doubts me as a character. I find L.A. to be confusing yet seductive: the weather, the houses, the beach, the anti-New York vibe. If I lived there, I think I would miss the change of seasons and the lack of earthquakes. For some reason, I have a deep fear of earthquakes. Maybe it was too many disaster movies in my youth, George Kennedy playing the role of my father.
Ted Martin and Emma Brady have, we gradually learn, somewhat more recognizable spouses, Mike and Carol, and offspring, Greg, Peter, and Bobby, and Marcia, Jan, and Cindy. You’re telling the story of the missing parents in “The Brady Bunch”—the partners who had to be absent to allow the blended family to exist on television. When did you first think of telling their story?
In the fall, I was talking to a friend and we were discussing funny story ideas and “The Brady Bunch” came up, the behind-the-scenes life of those kids, the weirdness of the setup with the forever missing parents, which got me thinking: What about those initial spouses? Where are they and why are they never mentioned (except once, in the pilot, by Bobby)? I started to feel sorry for the first wife of Mike and the first husband of Carol, and I sort of wanted to give them their due, to put flesh on their absent story and make them the main characters in this alternate world. And then I liked the built-in irony that their mutual demise is the true story of how this lady met this fellow, and they knew it was much more than a hunch, that this group might somehow form a family—you know the rest.
Did you watch “The Brady Bunch” much when you were younger? Was it a show you watched with pleasure or mortification? Did you look at any of the episodes again when you were working on the story?
I certainly watched “The Brady Bunch” as a kid. Every day after school, I would tuck into an episode on WPIX. My generation grew up with an intimacy of long-ago shows, stretching all the way back to “The Honeymooners” and “I Love Lucy,” all because there were so few channels and so little available content. The history of sitcoms seemed to cycle daily in front of our eyes. I know “Father Knows Best” much better than my father ever did. With the Bradys, I think I understood the ridiculousness of the parents and the kids, the goody-two-shoes attitude, and leaned closer to the groovy vibe of “The Partridge Family,” which in comparison seemed like cinéma vérité (much better songs, too). But I loved the kitschy black-and-white world the Bradys inhabited. I spent a few weeks watching old episodes and reading a slew of Brady quotes to try to incorporate the language of Mike and Carol—like in the pilot, Carol asks a haggard Mike if he needs a tranquilizer. I also wanted Don Drysdale in the story, because of his appearance in the show. Longfellow, too. A vague Hawaii reference. The Sunflower Girls. All these little details that hopefully add to the heartbreak of Ted and Emma.
The premise of the story is comic, yet the tale, it turns out, is a tragedy. After meeting in Elysian Park, Ted and Emma return to the claustrophobic confines of their marriages, before finding themselves, by chance, on the same flight shortly before Thanksgiving. You’ve brought your fictional characters together again, but you’ve put them on a doomed flight. In real life, T.W.A. Flight 128 crashed on November 20, 1967, killing most of the passengers onboard. Did you know from the outset that you were going to use this real event in the story? Were you ever tempted to fictionalize it?
Since the world of the Bradys is such an artificial world, I wanted the world of Ted and Emma to be absolutely real. That was very important to me, for them to fly above the construct of the show, to take on the appearance of living, breathing souls and perhaps, for a moment, gain their humanity and transcend their non-origin origins. I also liked exploring the idea of fate, of assuming your story is the story when, often, your story is merely a cog in a much bigger story. I used Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts” as a kind of inspiration (I know, Auden and “The Brady Bunch,” what a natural fit), with its wonderful evocation of Icarus and the unnoticed event. Once I had Icarus in mind, I needed a plane crash, and I needed an actual plane crash to put the spark into these unknown souls. It all had to be a hundred percent true in order to maintain my faith in the characters. Or, as Joe Friday might say, Just the facts.
Are you tempted to write any more TV back stories?
Not really. Though I’m very curious about Arnold from “Happy Days.” And I think “Manimal” was really misunderstood. No doubt there’s a novel concerning the two Darrins in “Bewitched.”