Guide

When and how did you choose this “career”?

I always wanted to be a writer– when I was a child I wrote poems and all through high school and college I liked writing short stories. I worked for several years after college in a variety of jobs (computer magazine editor, health encyclopedia fact checker, journalist, school teacher) and all the while I kept writing on the side. Finally I decided it was time to give myself the time to write full time and that was when I wrote this novel.

Where is the idea of this novel come from? Why this upper class of Boston?

I think of The Hazards of Good Breeding as being about individuals and families and love and frustration more than I think of it as being specifically about this particular world of upper class Boston. The Dunlaps, like so many people out there, have hemmed themselves in with their own traditions, sense of propriety, and social insularity-and they are each struggling, in their own ways, to realize essential connections between their lives and the lives of others outside the narrow slice of the world they inhabit. Whether they succeed or not is up to each reader to decide for him or herself.

Is there any relationship with your life?

The novel is really very different from my life. My mother was German and died when I was fifteen and my father is very liberal and certainly not a Fortune Five Hundred CEO like Jack Dunlap. I went to public school all the way until college. But my grandparents (my father’s parents) were from the world I write about and when I got to Harvard I felt this old Boston, upper clas world all around me. So I think of myself as familiar with and comfortable in, but not actually from the world I wrote about.

The novel opens with the description of the Dunlap’s house. It seems to be alive, but it doesn’t participate in the destinies of the people who live there. Is it true?

I think of the Dunlap’s house as a kind of metaphor for the family’s past. Each of the family members relate to it in a way that is analagous to the way they relate to their own heritage and history. It doesn’t actively determine their destinies but it acts as a foil for attitudes which do.

In your novel, as in other novels of American writers, there is a fragile mother - Faith - who, when she has to choose between her role in a family and her mental balance, prefers to leave her husband (here we understand why) and her young and sensitive child. Is it so difficult to be mother and wife in the modern U.S.A?

I am not a mother yet, so I can’t speak from first hand experience about this. I am however a wife. I have never thought of either role as being particularly difficult here in the U.S. versus, for instance, Italy. I think many of the issues Faith, the mother in my book, faces are unique to her own emotional make-up. Some are, however, related to her position as an upper class wife in this particular, old-fashioned corner of the world- a woman living in a world much larger and more open than the one she was raised to expect.

And about feelings, your characters don’t seem to believe in love so much: friendship is more important?

I think my characters do believe in love. They are, many of them, too repressed to recognize it for what it is at first sight, or even to allow themselves to recognize it completely, but this only adds to its power over them and the decisions they make in their lives. Jack Dunlap, for instance, the puritanical father in the novel, is deeply moved by his love for the family’s Colombian babysitter, but he doesn’t allow himself to indulge in this feeling or even see it for what it is until extreme circumstances force him to.

During all my reading, I felt an atmosphere of overhanging danger or tragedy. But, at the end of the book, when I was thinking: “Everything is going well.”, here’s the last chapter! Why have you been so cruel?!

I felt it was important for Rosita, the family’s babysitter, to remind everyone, readers included, that she was her own person with her own set of goals and desires, not simply a pawn in the hands of the Dunlaps. Their world was not the America she came to be a part of, despite the attraction of its stability and wealth.