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So Much Pretty: Cara Hoffman on Love, Sex and Common Enemies
By
Published: Mar 21, 2012
Category:
Fiction
Cara Hoffman’s debut novel, "So Much Pretty," is a nasty, ugly book — a literary thriller about a missing girl who’s found murdered months later near her home — but it’s so well-written I read it in one sitting. I wrote a mega-enthusiastic review, and then I urged my friend Gretl Claggett to read it. She had the same experience. And she went on to write about the novel for Head Butler: Why are we women so … nice about violence?
“So Much Pretty” has just been published as a paperback. [To buy the paperback from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.] The topic of women’s rights — indeed, their right to have rights — is suddenly in the air. This seemed like a fine time for Gretl to speak with Cara Hoffman about two of their favorite subjects: Writing and Men.
Gretl Claggett: Cara, you were a journalist for years, and your extensive research of sexual assault and murder cases informed the crime narrative of “So Much Pretty.” Did any personal experiences — particularly with the opposite sex — influence the development of your book’s male characters?
Cara Hoffman: Many of my personal experiences as a journalist influenced the narrative. And provincial small town xenophobia is something I’m familiar with. As far as the influences for the men in my fiction, I’m lucky to have a lot of great men in my life, like my partner Roane Carey, whose work I am so proud of. He’s an editor, not an ambulance driver, but he’s definitely my Tom Cutting: the guy I want to read with all day or stay up late with listening to the Ramones. He’s infinitely curious. And he’s great for providing material because he does things like get dressed up to go out for dinner and then realize once we’re standing outside the apartment that he’s still wearing slippers. My brother Noah, who gives men a good name, has also influenced my writing. And raising a son has made it possible for me to understand the particular challenges and anxieties boys and young men experience.
GC: Do you find it more difficult to write from a man’s perspective? How do you shift — without judgment —- into points of view that differ drastically from your own?
CH: I don’t think of characters in terms of their gender. Attempting to write from a male or female perspective (rather than the perspective of a person with certain motivations and characteristics) can result in exaggerating the differences that actually do exist and perpetuate flawed thinking about gender. Our consciousness, our class and culture define us far more than our gender. It’s funny how people rarely ask writers if it’s difficult to write from the perspective of a different class.
GC: Is it easier to be a man or a woman in today’s society? How do perceptions of power and powerlessness play out?
CH: A good question. Women remain second-class citizens. This is clearly about power, but it’s also about certain aspects of anti-social masculinity that are tied to violence and help enforce institutional exploitation. This harms women, but it also harms boys and men who see members of their gender constantly portrayed as violent, irrational, sick, crazed people who engineer genocides. For women there is the everyday threat of violence, the objectification, the sheer numbers of us who are murdered. But women don’t have the burden of being associated constantly with criminality. There are no images in the media of women setting Vietnamese villages on fire with Zippo lighters. One in fifty of us isn’t a rapist. Images of men as heroes dominate fiction and entertainment, but images of men as not much better than animals dominate the news and historical documents. That can’t be easy.
GC: Is there something that women and men can do to stop the violence that often occurs between the sexes?
CH: Violence doesn’t occur between the sexes — it’s perpetrated predominantly by a certain percentage of men, about one in 50, against women. I think the biggest most positive shift has to do with the way we talk about sexual violence. [To read Cara’s ‘Women Under Siege’ piece: Bringing the war home: How perpetrators … get away with rape.)
We need to stop focusing on the numbers of victims and their habits and start focusing on the numbers of perpetrators and their habits. Again, that we understand that we are in this together — and I think the majority of people do understand that we are in this together — is the key. When you look at the kind of stuff the Republicans are on about with birth control and abortion and this outrageous pathetic exclusion of women from discourse, they’re making it crystal clear that men and women have the same enemy.
GC: You’re at work on your second novel. How is it different from So Much Pretty?
CH: My new novel "Be Safe I Love You" is about a young woman returning from a tour of duty in Iraq and adjusting to home life. It’s very different from "So Much Pretty," but I suppose an examination of violence and how we cope with it is also at the heart of this one.
ABOUT CARA HOFFMAN
Cara Hoffman grew up in a depressed upstate town, dropped out of high school, bought a one-way ticket to London, and spent the next three years writing and working as an agricultural laborer in Europe and the Middle East.
In the 1990s, she returned to the United States, became a mother, and began working as an investigative reporter at a daily newspaper. Hoffman covered New York State’s rural and Rust Belt communities for more than a decade, reporting on environmental politics, county legislatures and crime. In 2000 she received a New York State Foundation for the Arts Fellowship for her writing on the aesthetics of violence and its impact on children.
Hoffman received her Masters of Fine Arts in Writing from Goddard College in 2009. She tutors at the Lower East Side Girls Club and teaches English at Bronx Community College. In May, Hoffman will be speaking about violence against women at Oxford University’s Global Scholar’s Symposium. Her web site: www.carahoffman.com
