Toward the end of Rachel Pastan’s fifth novel, We’re So Lucky to Live Here, protagonist Gwen Rivlin reflects on how performing a monologue from Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard years earlier had altered her life’s path: “Hadn’t it changed everything?” she thinks. “Hadn’t it led, more or less directly, to this very moment, sitting in the living room of the turret house with her oldest friend, talking about what art could make happen in someone’s life?” Indeed, the power of creativity is central to the novel, helping characters reckon with the past and make peace with the present.
The untimely death of Gwen’s mother, a beloved high school English teacher in a fictional suburb of Philadelphia, sets the plot in motion. Gwen returns to Inverness to find it transformed by gentrification, though the grand old turret house where she grew up remains largely unchanged. She only plans to stay long enough to get her mother’s affairs in order so she can get back to her regular life as a theater director in Pittsburgh, but to her surprise, she feels compelled to stay, reconnecting with childhood friends and working through the complexities of grief for a mother who seemed to give more of herself to her students than her daughter. Trying to cope with her complicated feelings, Gwen hunkers down in the turret house, ultimately inviting friends to live with her in a warm and communal set-up – until neighbors threaten legal action, thwarting Gwen’s efforts to find an affordable way to stay in Inverness at every turn.
As she fights to keep the house, Gwen turns to the most dependable source of comfort and meaning she knows: the arts. She organizes a production of The Cherry Orchard, which is appropriately about an aristocratic family who is about to lose their property, and stages it in the house. Of course, art can’t bring back the dead or stop gentrification or change the past, but as Pastan shows us in this beautiful novel, it can foster human connection and make the present bearable.
She chatted with the Fishbowl about art, grief, housing insecurity, and how those topics made it into her novel.
Baltimore Fishbowl: You capture something very relatable about the complexities of mother-daughter connections. How did Gwen and Bobbie’s relationship evolve as you worked on the novel?
Rachel Pastan: At first, I didn’t even realize I was writing a mother-daughter novel! I thought I was writing about a young woman who tries to figure out how to hold onto a lovely if decrepit house in a town growing ever fancier and more expensive. To get her to the house, I had to kill off her mother—basically on page one. It was only later that I realized that of course the relationship between the mother and daughter had to be a central part of the book! As did grief.
I was interested in what it’s like to have other people see your parent one way while you have a more complicated experience of them. Gwen loves her mother, but she also resents Bobbie being distracted by her job as a beloved English teacher at Gwen’s high school. Everyone else just sees that beloved teacher, and they have limited sympathy with Gwen’s struggles. Even my editor got frustrated with Gwen, asking me to make her reactions to Bobbie less selfish and more nuanced! Sometimes I took his advice. But also: in a lot of those scenes, she is a teenage girl! Selfish, and not always that nuanced.
BFB: Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard is a vital part of the novel’s plot as the play she chooses to stage in her mother’s house. Why did you choose this play?
RP: When I was in college, I was part of a staged reading of The Cherry Orchard that took place in a beautiful paneled dining hall. At the end, when the orchard gets chopped down, we knocked over the dining hall chairs, which we had been sitting in, one by one, to make the sound of the axe. It was unforgettable.
Just like my novel, The Cherry Orchard is the story of a family trying to hold onto a piece of real estate they can’t afford to hold on to. It’s also about the past and the future. Lots of characters in the play are nostalgic for the beautiful bygone days of balls, and orchards in bloom, and plenty of money. They don’t want their beautiful estate cleared to build houses for middle class people, whom they consider barbaric. They don’t understand that the past they long for was built on the backs of serfs. That they themselves are, in many ways, the barbaric ones.
BFB: I love all the secondary characters! They are so vividly rendered and complex. What is your process for developing characters?
RP: Thank you! I really loved inventing them, especially some of the very minor ones who are cast in the play: the older man who always wears a Phillies sweatshirt, Gwen’s fellow barista with her platinum pixie cut and her large family of biological, adopted, and reclaimed children. I especially love Mrs. Della Rossa, Gwen’s friend’s mother, with her big personality and dramatic dresses and complicated loyalties, who ends up playing the grand dame, Ranevskaya, in Gwen’s play.
Sometimes, when I’m creating characters, it helps me to picture the looks or mannerisms of real people I know only vaguely, or who I remember from my Maryland childhood. But if you ask me about specific ones, I’ll pretend I don’t know what you’re talking about!
BFB: When Gwen arrives in Inverness, one of her mother’s housemates, Kamal, is building a cob house in the backyard. Where did you get the idea for this detail?
RP: I knew I wanted an ADU—an accessory dwelling unit—to be an element in the book. ADUs, or granny flats or mother-in-law suites or whatever you call them, are wonderful! They are small dwellings behind or attached to bigger houses, where someone can live cheaply, someone else can collect some rent, and a familial community can often be fostered. But most suburban towns, including mine and the one Gwen lives in, have outlawed them. It’s as though any creative way you could think of to help people with less money live in upscale places have all been anticipated and forbidden. Interestingly, though, Montgomery County, Maryland, where I grew up, is leading the way on ADUs!
My friend Betsy was the one who suggested that this ADU be made of cob, a way of building with earth from your local landscape. People have done it forever, and they do it in different ways in different places. I like how it makes the ADU in this story a kind of messy, transitory art project, just like the play Gwen puts on.
BFB: How did the issue of housing affordability make its way into your novel?
RP: Housing affordability was where the novel started. A friend of mine had to leave our town after housing prices jumped and the money her family had been saving for a downpayment was no longer nearly enough. Her husband grew up here—his parents still live here—and the idea that this lovely young family, who gave so much to the community, could not afford a house here hit me hard.
I started learning everything I could about housing affordability and about the history of my town, and what other places were doing to help people without a ton of resources live in their communities: legalizing ADUs, building new small apartment buildings in what had once been single-family-only parts of town, and reserving some apartments for people making under a certain household income. I started a blog. I organized to get our borough council to appoint a task force, which I chaired.
And at the same time, I was wondering how to make these important issues part of a story that would engage people’s hearts and make them see what can happen if a community opens itself up to change. And, also, what happens if it doesn’t.
***
Rachel Pastan will be in conversation with Matt Klam at Politics and Prose in Washington, D.C. on September 16. More information here.
