LJ Talks to Tawni O’Dell

By Andrea Tarr, Corona P.L., CA -- Library Journal, 4/3/2007

Author Tawni O’Dell grew up in the coal-mining country of western Pennsylvania, whose rough landscape and tough people she evokes vividly in three highly praised novels. Her first novel, Back Roads (2000) was an Oprah’s Book Club Pick and a Book of-the Month Club selection. This was followed in 2004 by Coal Run, and now comes Sister Mine (LJ 1/07), which Book Sense, the national independent bookstore marketing campaign, has just chosen to be an April pick.

Sister Mine contains more than a few laugh-out-loud moments. What role does humor play in your newest novel, especially in dealing with the demons of Shae-Lynn’s past?

I was raised with lots of humor in my life. For me it’s a necessary tool for coping with terrible situations as well as just getting through the daily grind, and I’ve passed on this belief to the protagonists of my novels. In regards to Shae-Lynn, she had an awful childhood full of abuse and loss and became an adult who continued to encounter many difficult obstacles. She had to find a way to keep both her sanity intact and her hope alive, and one of the resources she used was her sense of humor. Humor to me is a heroic quality and Shae-Lynn is a hero, although maybe not a traditional one.

Your novel tackles complex personal issues—estrangement, forgiveness, betrayal and reconciliation. Would you say love is at the heart of your characters’ lives?

Even though there is a lot of love in this novel, I think the book is more about duty being at the heart of their lives. Love is beyond our control. We love or we don’t love someone; our hearts feel accordingly and our actions follow. Duty is something we choose to embrace. Sister Mine, on a certain level, is about the differences between people who do what they want and those who do what they should. These differences are embodied in the differences between the blue collar and white collar worlds as represented in the book. Is it love or duty that makes Shae-Lynn stay and take care of her abusive father? That makes her take on the responsibility of raising her younger sister, that makes her choose to keep her son, that makes her decide to serve the public as a police officer, that makes her subconsciously sabotage a successful career so she can return to her impoverished hometown full of painful memories? Shae-Lynn reaches a point where she can’t separate her sense of duty from everything else she feels, including love. Her sense of duty is so strong, she even has a habit of ending every romantic relationship by giving the man an important safety tip.

How did you decide on a career in law enforcement for Shae-Lynn?

The character of Shae-Lynn is a cop, and I had little or nothing to do with that on a conscious level. My characters come to me and tell me who and what they are. They are as real to me and as fully-formed as any flesh and blood people. This is not to say that I’m not completely responsible for them on a subconscious level. An artist’s work can’t be separated from his life. Everyone I’ve ever met, every place I’ve ever been, everything I’ve ever seen or heard or read has been absorbed by me like a sponge and influences my work in countless ways. My youngest sister and her husband are police officers. I also dated a police officer a very long time ago. I’m sure that Shae-Lynn would not have turned out to be a cop if I didn’t know some cops in my personal life and felt well enough acquainted with them to write about them convincingly.

Several characters in both Coal Run and Sister Mine are products of single parent homes. How did you research the social welfare angle of your novels?

I don’t do “research” per se in the sense that a social worker or journalist or non-fiction writer might. I don’t drop in on broken homes and interview family members or pore over statistics and studies in a university library. I don’t have to because I’ve already lived what I write about. I grew up in a small town in Pennsylvania coal country and I lived with people who are just like my characters. From the time I was a child I saw how abuse and neglect can make or break character and how good people can be driven to do bad things by the relentlessness of responsibility and poverty. I’ve witnessed the various ways people cope and survive. Because of where I grew up, I have an innate understanding of this without having to study it.

Coal mines are front and center in your novels. What role did the mining industry play in your own upbringing?

When I was a kid, tipples and bony piles marred our hillsides. Coal trucks rumbled down back roads leaving pot holes and broken shoulders in their wake. If your dad didn’t work in the mines, he worked for a related industry such as the railroads or the steel mills. Even the merchants and professionals in our town owed their livelihoods to the mines and the money they generated. A sense of fatalism pervaded the attitudes of most people. We were at the mercy of forces beyond our control both as a community and as individuals. Every day a miner had to ask himself: Will I have a job next week? Will this industry even exist here in another year or two? Will I live through my shift?

My grandfather and my father were both bankers. The miners were their customers and this was back during a time when the men who ran small-town banks lived in those very communities and knew the first names of all of their customers. This was especially true of my grandfather’s generation. I was in awe of these coal miners and had a great deal of respect for their work. Yet I was also afraid of them because I knew some of them treated their wives and children very badly. Violence and heavy drinking seemed to be natural, and at times almost acceptable, responses to the physically demanding, dangerous jobs they performed under terrible working conditions.

Do you think some readers might find the “baby-selling” aspect of Sister Mine may be a bit of an eye-opener?

I don’t find this shocking. You have to be naïve to not be aware that it goes on in this country. Are there women who are as cold-blooded and mercenary about it as Shannon, Shae-Lynn’s sister? I believe there are, and I believe there will be more like them in the future. This is simply what Shannon did and I had to write about it. As the story developed, I realized it made perfect sense for her. As she put it, having babies was what she did best; why shouldn’t she get paid for it? Where Shannon’s behavior becomes “eye-opening” is that she intentionally becomes pregnant in order to sell babies. She is able to completely disregard any maternal instincts or human feelings she might have for her own children and think of them as nothing more than products for sale. She’s a “baby mine” as Shae-Lynn puts it.

Child abuse is an issue raised in all three novels. What were your challenges in writing these situations?

The challenge is being true to your characters and your story and not being tempted to fix things for them, to make their lives easier, or spare them from some episode of abuse or terrible tragedy. In that sense you have to trust your instincts as a novelist and accept your role as a chronicler for the lives of these fictitious people. Sometimes it’s difficult to accept that even in your own novels—as in life—bad things can happen to innocents and it’s beyond your control.