October 1st, 1997 to October 7th, 1997

Author Lynn Kanter

Writes About Lesbians, Cancer and Living On

by Lori Weiner

Lesbian author Lynn Kanter's new novel, The Mayor Of Heaven, centers around charismatic Claire Morganstern-witty, vibrant, and six months dead from breast cancer. In The Mayor Of Heaven, Kanter explores the lives of Claire's loved ones as they struggle with their sudden emptiness. The author took time before her upcoming visit to Chicago to discuss the book.

Kanter will appear at Women and Children First Books on Tuesday, Oct. 7, 7:15 p.m., 5233 N. Clark, (773) 769-9299.

Outlines: From your perspective, what is The Mayor Of Heaven about?

Lynn Kanter: It's about learning to live with absence, and how absence takes up a lot of room, and you have to make room for it in your life.

OL: What inspired you to write the book?

LK: I've been involved for several years with an organization called the Mautner Project for Lesbians with Cancer, which is similar to Chicago's Lesbian Community Cancer Project. It's in Washington, D.C., and it's a local volunteer lesbian cancer project. The reason that I started working there, and the reason that I continued to be involved in it, was just noticing-you couldn't help but notice so many women dying young of cancer. And of course, while lesbians die young of many other diseases and causes as well, this was just a really striking incident. And it seemed to me that considering that the people in my age group were not at war, and lived in a developed country and so forth, that we had a really high death rate. And that a lot of us were living with the kinds of losses that previous generations experienced only when they were elderly, or during wartime. And so that kind of gave me the impetus to write this story not so much about, "gee, isn't it terrible that people are dying," although that's a part of it, but about what it's really like after someone dies, not during the drama of illness and death but the part that you have to deal with afterwards.

OL: Was something happening in your personal life mirroring these circumstances you describe?

LK: There was not anything happening in my life that mirrored that. I don't really know people who are like those specific characters. I know people who have some characteristics of those characters, but I don't know a "Rasheda." I don't know a "Harry." But I do know a number of people who have had these kinds of losses-losses of their partners, of their good friends. It took me four years to write the book, and during that period, two more people died. So I kept having this experience over and over, not having it myself but in terms of knowing people who were going through it.

So I kind of approached it two ways -one was as a person in a community who is connected to that community and cares about it and advocates for issues within that community. The other approach was a more technical one as a writer. What intrigued me about that was the concept of basically writing a book in which the main character is not there, and trying to portray her by the shape of the absence she creates. And the second part was a challenge to me as a writer, to try to write from the points of view of these four characters who are not only very different from each other, but also very different from me. Like "Harry," for example, is a straight man, and I'm not. (Laughs) Really, all of the characters either lead lives that are very different from mine and have personal challenges that are very different from mine or kind of respond to things in ways that I think I would not, and in some ways, I wish I would be more like them! I had to really work to learn who these people were and what they might do or say and what they would be unlikely to do and say, and how they would think. And so, for a writer, that's a big challenge. There's really no way for me to know if it succeeded.

OL: How did it feel? Did it feel like it was succeeding while it was in progress?

LK: I think the process was different (from Kanter's first novel, On Lill Street) because I was a little more experienced as a writer and had more tools to use than when I wrote my first book. But for me, the process is a very sketchy idea, which in this case was, "All right, The Mayor Of Heaven is about a woman who has died before the book begins, so let's already start with her gone. And let's see how this has affected these other people in her life." And then just think about, who would she have in her life? Who would these characters be? And it's basically just a process of sitting down and working on it, starting to write it little bit by little bit, and then saying, "This is terrible!" and getting rid of it.

OL: Did you have many moments like that?

LK: Oh, God, yeah. Every fiction writer I know (has moments like that). (The physical writing process) took four years, though a lot of that time was spent thinking through what it should be like, and some of the time was spent saying, "Oh No! I can't face the keyboard again!" and purposely avoiding the room where the computer is. It's not as if I was sitting there diligently every day for four years ... and I also work full-time.

OL: Do you find (working) hard?

LK: No. I don't think I would want it any other way. I know a lot of writers would give anything to be able to (write) full time, but I like what I do, and I feel that it's important work, and that it enriches my fiction writing. I'm pretty lucky!

OL: Tell us about Claire Morganstern. What about her makes her so special?

LK: I wanted a woman who had a lot of not only energy, but sort of life force-a woman who was really charismatic and powerful in terms of her effect on other people. Because she had to be someone whose loss would be not only sad, but sort of a functional loss. So she performed a function in people's lives, and they then have to figure out how to keep operating without that, after she's gone. So I wanted someone who was a little big, a little bold, could be a little annoying but at the same time somebody who was lovable-not necessarily in a cuddly way, but in a sparkly way.

OL: Were you happy with the ultimate characterization of Claire?

LK: I was. It's really hard to have any objectivity, but I was happy with it because in the end, I was in love with all of these characters, and loved spending time in their world, and was sad when the book ended that I wouldn't be able to live in that world anymore. Part of the goal that I set for myself was to create this character that people would get to know, and that they would end up missing. Like when the book was over they would be sorry that she was dead, even though she was already dead when the book started. The trick was for readers to get to know her through the memories of the other characters, who don't all remember her the same way, or don't all perceive her the same way.

OL: Do you have a favorite part of the book?

LK: I have a favorite chapter, which is the chapter called "TV Time." It's after the four main characters get together for dinner on the sixth-month anniversary of Claire's death, when they all go home and are thinking about what happened that evening. You just get to see all these characters from their own points of view within the same chapter, and there's that theme of television drawing them together. A couple people are watching TV, Rasheda turns it off, Lucy is thinking about being in the TV studio with Claire ... they're all thinking about the same scene, but in their own specific ways. And they're also all thinking, "God, what a weird evening!"

OL: One of the main themes of The Mayor Of Heaven seems to be that no matter how well we think we know our friends, our lovers, or even ourselves, there's always an element of mystery, of something being hidden.

LK: Part of it is exactly that-that mystery that remains no matter how well we know one another. Here is this person Claire, who was really central to all four of the other characters, and they all see her in ways that are slightly different. They all relate to her in ways that are slightly different. The Claire that "Lucy" saw may have been much more, for example, domestic and cozy than the Claire that "Jane" saw who was always saying, "Let's make this work, let's do this and that," though it was obviously the same person. And then the other point that I wanted to make that has to do with absence and specifically with death is that you never get to know any more about that person. You never can ask any other question, no matter how pressing a question is that occurs to you. You'll never know. And that, I think, is something that is really hard to face. We basically live in a world where we can make other chances to do many things, but then there's this whole realm of things where that's it. Your options are over.

Lynn Kanter will appear at Women and Children First on Tuesday, Oct. 7, 7:15 p.m., 5233 N. Clark, (773) 769-9299.

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