Q & A: Lisa Tucker

By Andrea Tarr, Corona P.L., CA -- Library Journal, 4/1/2006

Not surprisingly for a writer who once toured the Midwest as a jazz singer, music is a leitmotif in Lisa Tucker’s fiction. The Song Reader featured a character who could read people’s secrets through their favorite songs, while Shout Down the Moon revolved around a band singer. Her new book, Once Upon a Day, is more multilayered and complex, involving a larger cast of characters and four decades, but the sound of music can still be heard.

Could you elaborate on the significance of music in your books?

Music has always played a major role in my life. As a child, I had very few books to read, but I was always taken with song lyrics. I think it was inevitable that music would trickle into my writing. I began using music in my work in The Song Reader, as one of the main characters analyzes the song lyrics stuck in people’s minds to help them makes sense of their lives. Being a jazz singer, I wanted to include jazz in Once Upon a Day. The significance of music for my main character, Dorothea, is that singing is definitely a way for her to deal with her anxiety attacks; music also reconnects Dorothea with Lucy, her late mother, whose lovely jazz singing remains a vague memory from her early childhood.

Did you experience a “slump” in between writing the earlier novels and this one? What inspired you to write this novel?

I’ve been lucky so far: I haven’t had a slump between any of my novels. I usually feel I don’t have enough time to write all the stories I still want to tell. This novel was more difficult to write than the previous two because the scope was larger, and I had more voices that I had to get right. The inspiration for both my first two novels came from my own life as a music fan and performer and from my interest in memory and psychology. The inspiration for Once Upon a Day came from a chance encounter with a New York City taxicab driver.

You incorporate various popular 1970s cultural icons in the narrative, which gives the novel an air of verisimilitude. Did you encounter challenges while trying to reflect previous eras?

Actually, I remember the Seventies quite well and had set my first novel in the years 1979–84. For Once Upon a Day, I researched the films and the film industry of the 1970s, deciding to select this period in which Dorothea’s now-reclusive film director father made his many very successful movies. Charles is not a flamboyant auteur, as are/were so many of his contemporaries I mention. Actually, Charles idolizes and idealizes the “time of innocence,” the Fifties, and most of his films reflect this. In trying to recapture this innocence, Charles has bought into this myth of innocence, but, in doing so, has introduced great trauma to his family.

The title comes from a lovely passage from Cervantes’s Don Quixote: “Dame Fortune once upon a day/ To me she was beautiful and kind/ But all things change; she changed her mind….” How fundamental are the themes of coincidence, fate, and chance in your novel?

I think this question hits on one of the book’s major themes. Many characters in the novel, confronted with what to do when a random act of fate erases all that they love, must decide how to keep going. Stephen, a doctor-turned-cabbie, has lost his belief in a meaningful existence after a terrible accident and sees life as ultimately pointless. On the other hand, Dorothea believes that there is a meaning to life, a pattern behind appearances. While there may be no sanctuary that can wall us from the essential fragility of life, “charming coincidences” in which the unconnected suddenly connect and a pattern emerges can work in our favor. Therefore, when Stephen and Dorothea meet, this encounter not only changes their lives for the better but also positively affects other characters. The beautiful Don Quixote passage is true. A heart can be broken by the tragic events of a single day, but a day can also bring a new chance at love and the opportunity for a deeper understanding of life’s infinite possibilities.