DeLaune Michel Interview, plus links to author biography, book summaries, excerpts and reviews

An interview with DeLaune Michel

DeLauné Michel chats with Mark Savas about her life and her latest novel, The Safety of Secrets.

As the title suggests, The Safety of Secrets looks at the costs exacted by secrets—the innocent (or seemingly innocent) ones and the more insidious. And L.A.—and the film business, in particular, in which this story is set—is, in its way, a city of secrets, both manufactured and organic. Can you talk about what drew you to this rich theme?

I wanted to explore betrayal in a lifelong friendship. And it occurred to me that one currency of intimacy in a best friendship is shared secrets, so I wanted to see what would happen to that relationship when its most powerful secret is given away, and given away thoughtlessly, like so many pennies dropped on the floor. I was interested in the way that secrets are used to ally and/or alienate ourselves from those that we love. There is such stark and deep knowledge of one another in an ages old friendship that I wondered about how some secrets are used as a mask to hide and protect ourselves, or are used to continue to be that person that we think our best friend needs, or to try not be that person anymore, even when we still are. I felt there was a mirroring of Fiona and Patricia's friendship's emotional landscape with their careers in Hollywood. All of that layering and hiding are essential tools in Hollywood. I think one trait that distinguishes stars from other actors is their ability to appear completely exposed while in fact they presenting only and exactly what they want us to see.


Among many other things, The Safety of Secrets casts a light onto that unofficial Hollywood caste system that's not talked about much, namely friends who fare differently, who land at different squares of the game board of success. Can you talk about how this informs your characters' relationships and how it informs life in this city?

What I found fascinating about that caste system while writing this book is how much easier it can sometimes be to be comfortable with the enormous success of a new friend as opposed to that of an old. The difference in success is the same, the difference in bank accounts is the same, and yet none of that seems to matter. I wanted to see what, if anything, could hold Fiona and Patricia's friendship together in the face of that. And it isn't only worldly success that wrecks havoc with relationships, but also a great marriage or the birth of a child, all of those life markers that should be the happiest times in our lives, yet sometimes are accompanied by the withdrawing of someone dear.

As far as how that plays out in LA, I think that caste system is one of the reasons the industry can be so addictive: every move one makes is a point gained or lost. It is impossible not to get caught up in the constant scoring, like some giant video game that never ends.


Both of your books draw on your experiences in LA, and although it's the mistake of the amateur to confuse the character for the author, you write with the first-hand immediacy of one who has lived it. How have you managed to navigate the thorny journey of writing a work that is fiction even as it's informed by fact?

I write about the worlds that I know, and I write stories that would keep me up at night if I didn't write them. Some of my work is more fictive than the rest. My first novel, Aftermath of Dreaming, was loosely based on a relationship I had with Warren Beatty. I visited a lot of book clubs with that novel, in person here in New York, and over the phone with groups in LA and elsewhere. One thing I found interesting was that all the LA book clubs knew exactly whom the book was about, while not all the other groups did. But finally, the characters in that novel are characters—it isn't a memoir. As this book isn't either.

Because of all the writers in my family (my mother, Elizabeth Nell Dubus, my uncle Andre Dubus, my cousins Andre Dubus and James Lee Burke, and more), this question has been one I have dealt with my whole life even before I started writing. It was sometimes hard to read my relatives' work and not wonder what was true or who was who. But as a result of that, I learned early on that those questions are not only a waste of time, but also a road that leads nowhere. To try to answer it feels like trying to separate grains of sand: this grain of sand is "true," while this grain of sand next to it is not. What matters is the whole picture and that is a creative work of fiction.


Your books embrace L.A. as a literary setting, and you write expertly about local scenes from Fred 62 to the Bel-Air Hotel. How does L.A. as a setting work its inspiration on you and what are the greatest challenges and greatest joys in capturing this unique city in prose?

I went to LA from New York in my early twenties with a boyfriend and meant to stay only a few months. At that time, I couldn't imagine not living in New York. But I fell completely and deeply in love with LA. It was everything the West is held up to be: open and expansive and raw. Just standing in the sun, in that silver-tipped light, with the desert winds moving around, made me feel transformed. I needed to write about LA the way a child might write about a parent. That city made my adult self. It is an endless trove for me and it can't help but continue to be prominent in my work. But the biggest challenge when one's real estate is well-tread, so to speak, is to write with a fresh view. My answer to that has been to write about the city the way I know it to be, which is to say a wonderful and terrible god that happens to be comprised of people and nature and architecture.


You're a creator of strong women characters who cross traditions of Southern gentility and urban sensibility. What's the source of this interest and ability?

I grew up in an area that is basically almost its own country. South Louisiana has its own traditions and history that are very separate from, not only the rest of America, and the rest of the South, but even the rest of the state. I have always identified myself first as coming from that particular world. My father's family has been in New Orleans since the 1600's. My mother's family—my namesake, in fact, Hélene DeLauné and her husband Jules André—arrived in South Louisiana during the French Revolution. Marie Antoinette gave my namesake jewels help her leave to escape the guillotine. So, I have a deep connection there. And yet, I moved to points north and west where I had to, and continue to, seek out other ex-patriots who understand why my one-word answers are three pages long, and why when I apologize for anything from terrible traffic to the Saints losing again that I don't think I'm responsible. It was impossible, and would have been foolhardy, to live in NYC and LA without taking on some of their mores, and I wanted to. But my core cannot change, thank God. It is where I draw my strength. There have been many times in my life when I have thought that whatever hardship I was enduring was nothing compared to my namesake's leaving the court of France for the wilds of South Louisiana, and that has helped.


Please tell us something about what sparked the wonderful Spoken Interludes series, and how it's faring as a bi-coastal affair?

The series initially grew out of my love for parties. Where I grew up in South Louisiana, the year is governed by the Catholic Church's calendar, so starting with Advent season, life just becomes a long series of parties that build in scale and intensity until their culmination in Mardi Gras. I always get terribly homesick during that season. So, one year, when I couldn't get home, I decided to have those parties myself. This was in LA, so the Catholic rituals and aspect were a bit diminished, but still. So, I had all these parties, and friends came and brought friends, then those people came to the next ones and brought friends, so the parties got quite large.

A few weeks later, I went to the post office after a theatre audition, and I was waiting in line, thinking about my parties and my audition when suddenly I realized that if my parties had been a play, it would have had great audiences. So I thought, "Why not let a performance be in the middle of a party?" Then I decided that I wanted the performance to be stories, since storytelling is the original form of theatre, and because it is what we do when we go to parties—we break into little groups and tell each other stories about ourselves. I wanted it to be as if someone at a party got up and told a story, but instead of a small group of people hearing it, the entire room listened.

At that point, I had already written my first two short stories which had won recognition, and I wanted to write more, but frankly, I do better with deadlines, so I figured scheduling myself to read them in public would be a pretty good deadline. And I had so many friends, including a sister, who were writing that I decided to make it written stories. At that time in LA in 1996, there were many places to read poetry, but very few to read short fiction or essays, so I felt it might be filling a need. I also thought it would be a way for writers to connect with their audience without having to wait for publication. The first show was in May of 1996 and, to my great surprise, it sold out. The series has been going strong ever since.

In the years since, Spoken Interludes has been heard on National Public Radio, and has had special shows in conjunction with other organizations including the Getty Museum. Writers such as Ann Packer, Mona Simpson, Bruce Wagner, Alice Sebold, Michael Korda, Arthur Phillips, Arianna Huffington, and Michael Connelly, including newer voices, have come to read their work.

In early 2001, I made Spoken Interludes a non-profit arts organization so I could develop an outreach writing program for at-risk teenagers. My formal education was cut short at the end of eleventh grade due to family matters, so reaching out to teenagers in that way is very important to me. The Spoken Interludes Next writing program is an eight to ten week writing course where students, in small groups of six to eight, work with professional writers to learn how to write their own short story. The program ends with a graduation reading for the students that family, friends, and the public all attend. The first session was that spring in a downtown LA high school. The following year, we brought the program to a high school in the LA Juvenile detention system. The program continues to teach eleventh graders in both of those schools and is in the process of going into four to ten more high schools in the LA area. Spoken Interludes Next has served homeless and gay teenagers in other facilities. We also had a literacy program for fourth graders, Spoken Interludes Read, in a downtown LA grammar school.

In 2004, I moved to the New York City area with my family, and started the Spoken Interludes reading series here in the spring of 2005. The reception was immediate, warm and welcoming, and I feel the same sort of family connection with the audiences here that I felt in LA. I am looking forward to starting Spoken Interludes Next here, as well.


Speaking of bi-coastal, you've now had a chance to live in two literary milieus, New York and LA. How would you compare life in the two literary scenes—and might there be a literary roman a clef in your future?

Novelists are a small herd in LA. Ever since I started producing Spoken Interludes there, I felt an immediate sense of community with the writers who were part of the series. I think, and hope, that Spoken Interludes became a home to many of them. I meant for it to. A number of writers developed work there, or came to read chapters of novels while they were writing them, such as Yeardley Smith's upcoming book, I, Lorelie: The Mud Letters, Harry Shearer's Not Enough Indians, and Christopher Rice read the story that his first novel, A Density of Souls, was launched from after he read it at Spoken Interludes.

Writers aren't glorified in LA the way actors, or even directors, are. I wanted Spoken Interludes to be one place that they could go where their work on the page was more important than an actor's (eventual and possible) interpretation of it up on the screen.

New York is a different story. I don't get the sense that writers feel that they are coming in from the cold when they read at Spoken Interludes here. And that makes sense because there are so many more places for them to read, and there are lots and lots more fiction writers, but the warmth and connection and passion for the written word is just as strong, and that really is the common bond. In the twelve plus years that I have been producing the series, I can count on three fingers the number of writers who were anything less than wonderful, and I'll never tell who they are. So if I were to write a literary roman a clef, about the reading series at least, I'm afraid it would be quite sunny, and with not enough sex.


Who are you reading these days and who are the authors you most admire and feel influenced by?

I'm reading lots of John Banville, including Christina Falls that he wrote under the pen name Benjamin Black. I recently finished re-reading The Habit of Being—the Letters of Flannery O'Connor. The Emperor's Children by Claire Messud was a great read. I loved Dani Shapiro's Black and White. Ha Jin's Waiting is a new favorite. And I turn to PD James, Michael Connelly, Robert Crais, and T. Jefferson Parker for my ideal indulgence—murder mysteries.

In my teens and early twenties, some of the writers whose work taught me that literature can live inside me were: Joan Didion, Walker Percy, my mother, JD Salinger, Fitzgerald, Milan Kundera, Steinbeck, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Edith Wharton, DH Lawrence, Eudora Welty, and Shakespeare.

But I learned how to live the life of a writer from my mother. She first started writing when I was in grade school, but she needed a place to work, so she shoved aside the clothes in her closet (and my momma loves her clothes), and my father built her a desk and she wrote there. Then when I was fifteen, my parents separated, and my mother and I moved into a small house. She used to get up every morning at 5 or 6 am and write for an hour before she got me up for school and then went to her 9 to 5 to keep a roof over our heads. And from the beginning, she was prolific. She had her own newspaper column, she published five books, she wrote plays, and stories, and musicals, and basically everything except poetry, though I'm sure she has a box of it somewhere and has just never told me.

What I saw early on was that one makes the time and space to write, no matter what. It isn't life's job to make it easy to write. One just writes. And that has been the most important lesson I could have learned. And it was made all the more valuable since I could see first hand how writing transformed her life and gave her to herself.

In terms of the technical aspects of the work, I have learned the most from Chekhov, particularly his plays. He once said, in regards to his play Ivanoff, that if a gun is shown in the first act, it must be fired in the third. But he was a master at creating worlds where anything is possible, and where one keeps questioning the outcome until the very end even though the inevitable finally does happens. I was also influenced by Tennessee Williams because he portrayed the South the way it was, at least the corner I recognize.


Your career stands as something of a rebuttal to the notion that only MFAs are getting book deals these days. What, if anything, would you consider as the value of writing from "The School of Life"?

My education has never been rooted in academia, even when I was in school. I started modeling when I was fourteen (okay, this was Baton Rouge, but still), then at fifteen began teaching modeling to women older then myself and to residences in a home for battered women to raise their self-esteem. In what would have been my senior year of high school, I was living on my own and was the manager and buyer of a clothing store. I basically was living like a 30 year old at 18. Then I moved to New York City, had an unexceptional fling as a model there and in Europe, then returned to NYC, and settled down to what I really wanted to do and began studying acting.

I was fortunate to have great teachers from the Actor's Studio, the Neighborhood Playhouse, and Juilliard. I learned about such things as character development, building an arc, when to start a scene, themes. I just had no idea that I would eventually use all of that in my writing. And acting classes are tough. There is such a stripping down that happens, but finally in a good way. It taught me to hear criticism, but to balance it against what I know to be true. And one of the great gifts that studying and working as an actor gave me for my writing, was that for all those years, I was one of many people all working together to tell a story, and the story had to be (or should have been) more important than any one person involved. That still gives me great perspective when I'm working; I try to make the story that I am writing more important than how I feel about writing it.

Coming to writing from the background of an actor having read and worked on scripts and plays taught me to view the work theatrically, or at least, cinematically. I see the scenes playing out and I hear the characters in them. Many times, they surprise me. It feels a bit like watching my novels unfold in front of me.

I am grateful that I had to and did all those different things which were like a slow unraveling of the outside person that I thought I was or wanted to be only to have this life revealed. There are many times when I think about some of those lives, and the different ways that my life could have gone, and I look forward to writing about what that could have been.


With the understanding that most mothers would consider their proudest accomplishment the raising of their children, what would you—an actress, award-winning author, impresario, advocate of children at risk—consider your proudest non-parental achievement?

Without a doubt, it is creating and teaching in the writing program for at-risk teenagers. It was joyous and heartbreaking and awe-inspiring to work with those kids. They are in such a fragile stage of life, and some of the things they were having to deal with would be completely overwhelming for adults, much less for them. What I learned from teaching them is that everyone has an essential need for their stories to be heard, and that great transformation can happen when they are. I was honored and humbled to be part of what enabled that to happen.

And watching them grow and discover parts of themselves and skills that they have is a true blessing. Many of them discover a love for reading for the first time because they are no longer viewing stories and novels as something "other", but suddenly a thing they have done themselves. One of my students from the very first session sent me an email last week with a new story he had written for a writing course, and I was so happy to read it. But all of the students I taught have had a huge impact on me. It is such a precarious time, that in between right before they go out to the world from high school. It was my mission that the writing program give them the time and space for their stories—and what stories—to be heard.

I am thrilled that Spoken Interludes Next is continuing in LA. I am looking forward to starting it here in New York, so I that can work with kids again. As full and happy as my life is today, I miss that part of it.



Mark Sarvas's debut novel, Harry, Revised, will be published by Bloomsbury in May 2008. He is best known as the host of the popular and controversial literary web blog "The Elegant Variation" which has been covered by The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Guardian (A Top 10 Literary Blog), Forbes Magazine (Best of the Web), Los Angeles Magazine (A Top L.A. Blog), The Scotsman, Salon, the Christian Science Monitor, Slate, The Denver Post, The Village Voice, The New York Sun, NPR and numerous other fine publications. His book reviews and criticism have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Threepenny Review, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Truthdig, The Modern Word, Boldtype and the Los Angeles Review. He is a member of the National Book Critics Circle.

This interview is reproduced by permission of the publisher, Avon Books.

Unless otherwise stated, this interview was conducted at the time the book was first published, and is reproduced with permission of the publisher. This interview may not be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the copyright holder.