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| Cinthia Ritchie, Author DOLLS BEHAVING BADLY |
Cinthia Ritchie seems to have a thing against Barbie dolls. In her recently-published novel DOLLS BEHAVING BADLY, her main character is a single mom of a gifted eight-year-old in Alaska. That's not too unusual, but to support herself and her son she has many jobs,
including as “an artist who secretly makes erotic dolls for extra
income.” One reviewer says her book is “A story you’ve never heard before, and
one you won’t forget.”
Ritchie is a former journalist whose career is
full of awards. She lives in Alaska where she enjoys the “indescribable” joy of
running.
Don’t miss the
excerpt following her interview.
Q: What caused
or inspired you to write DOLLS BEHAVING BADLY?
Cinthia
Ritchie: I
was a single mother working two jobs and attending graduate school and my
guilty pleasure was sitting in the bathroom at night and reading novels (the
bathroom was the warmest room in our draft house). One night as I was reading “Diary
of a Mad Housewife” I thought, wait a minute, this woman is stressing out and
she has a husband, a housekeeper and no money worries.
That’s
when the idea of a single mother writing a diary came into my head. A few
nights later, I imagined or perhaps actually saw the ghost of my Polish
grandmother (I was in the bathroom again), and the voice of the book swam
through my head.
Q: OK – I can’t
resist. Did you grow up with
Barbie dolls? Or were you more of a Cabbage Patch doll person?
Cinthia Ritchie: I grew up
with Barbie dolls, though I rarely got to play with the “good” models, since I
had two older sisters and one younger. I usually got stuck with Midge or the
Barbies with crappy hair. I do remember eating the shoes, though. It was my way
of getting back at my older sisters. I’d swallow one of those oh-so-tiny shoes,
and sit there smiling as they frantically searched. Later that night, though, I’d
lie in bed terrified I was going to die. So I guess I’ve always had it in for
Barbie.
Q: How
important is humor to telling your story?
Cinthia
Ritchie:
Humor is very fickle. If you overdo it, it can easily kick you in the butt, and
the last thing you want to do is turn off readers. The voice behind “DOLLS BEHAVING BADLY” naturally developed with a humorous tone—I didn’t really have
to work at it. Really, I
think it was my way of cheering myself up and resolving inner conflict over
many of the choices I had made. The book isn’t overtly autobiographical yet I
think we always write for a purpose: To make sense of our lives and the lives
around us.
Q: One of your reviewers said: “An out-of-the-ordinary setting and cast of characters are the
backbone of Ritchie’s compelling debut novel.” How important is setting to
telling your story?
Cinthia Ritchie: Living in Alaska is like nowhere
else. Even though Anchorage is a city with big-box stories and traffic
problems, it’s unique. Moose stumble down the streets in the winter. Bears are
sighted in city parks. You can see whales while walking the beach late summer
evenings. It’s pretty amazing. You are constantly reminded how small you are,
and how immense nature is. It’s very liberating, and very grounding.
Mostly,
living in Alaska is a dichotomy between beauty and danger. You are always aware
of this, and maybe that’s why people feel free to shuck off pretensions and
simply be themselves. We are an
odd lot up here, and I wouldn’t want it any other way.
Q: Do you have heroes and villains?
Or are your characters some of both?
Cinthia Ritchie: I think we are always our own
heroes and villains, and I wanted my characters to reflect that. Just as we don’t
always like ourselves, we don’t always like the people we love and we don’t
always like our characters, either, or agree with their choices. But we still
love them. I wanted to transfer this philosophy over to my readers, I wanted
them to know that it was okay if they didn’t like Stephanie or Sandee, didn’t
like how they spoke or acted, as long as (and this was so, so important to me)
they loved them.
Q: You have
spent a considerable amount of time as a journalist. How transferrable were
writing skills from journalism to fiction? Which do you enjoy more – writing
fiction or reporting?
Cinthia Ritchie: Oh, fiction without a doubt. I also love
creative nonfiction and poetry but reporting is simply what I did to pay the
bills. I enjoyed it as a job, yes, and it offered opportunities to do and
experience amazing things: Walk on glaciers, fly in float planes over mountains,
kayak across Resurrection Bay. Yet fiction is my true love. I’ll put it this
way: I wouldn’t report without a paycheck. But fiction and poetry? Honey, you
don’t have to give me money, just give me a laptop and the time to write.
Q: Do you write
to entertain, inform and/or influence?
Cinthia Ritchie: Influence first, and inform secondary. I
think that fiction offers readers an invaluable lesson: The chance to see and
feel the world through someone else’s perspective. And really, isn’t that why
we read in the first place? It’s that same curiosity that causes us to look in
other people’s windows when we walk our dogs at night. We are all voyeurs. We
all need the reassurance that we share something with those around us.
Q: When you’re
not writing, what are you doing? How important is running in your life?
Cinthia Ritchie: Oh, I do love running so, so much. In the
summers I’m out running in the mountains and on the trails every night. It
feeds something deep inside of me, something essential and wild. It brings me
such joy. There’s nothing like running mountain trails in the Alaska summer
twilight, no one else around and all of that silence. It’s indescribable,
really.
I
also love to hike, read, swim, write (of course), walk my dog on the beach,
work out and take naps.
About Cinthia
Ritchie
Cinthia Ritchie is a former journalist and Pushcart Prize nominee
who lives and runs mountains in Alaska.
She’s a recipient of two Rasmuson Individual Artist Awards, a
Connie Boocheever Fellowship, residencies at Hedgebrook, Kimmel Harding Nelson
Center for the Arts and Hidden River Arts, the Brenda Ueland Prose Award,
Memoir Prose Award, Sport Literate Essay Award, Northwest PEN Women Creative
Nonfiction Award, Drexel Magazine Creative Nonfiction Award and Once Written
Grand Prize Award.
Her work can be found in New
York Times Magazine, Sport Literate, Water-Stone Review, Memoir, Under the Sun,
Literary Mama, Slow Trains Literary Journal, Sugar Mule, Breadcrumbs and Scabs,
Third Wednesday, Writer’s Digest, Foliate Oak Literary Magazine, Cactus Heart
Press and over 30 other literary magazines and small presses.
Her
debut novel, DOLLS BEHAVING BADLY, released
Feb. 5, 2013 from Grand Central Publishing/Hachette Book Group.
About DOLLS BEHAVING BADLY
Carla Richards
is a lot of things. She’s a waitress at Anchorage’s premier dining
establishment, Mexico in an Igloo; an artist who secretly makes erotic dolls
for extra income; a
divorcee who can’t quite detach from her ex-husband; and a single mom trying to
support her gifted eight-year-old son, her pregnant sister, and her
baby-sitter-turned-resident-teenager.
She’s one
overdue bill away from completely losing control-when inspiration strikes in
the form of a TV personality. Now she’s scribbling away in a diary, flirting
with an anthropologist, and making appointments with a credit counselor.
Still, getting her
life and dreams back on track is difficult. Is perfection really within reach?
Or will she wind up with something even better?
Excerpt
Thursday,
Sept. 15
This is my diary, my pathetic little conversation with myself. No doubt
I will burn it halfway through. I’ve never been one to finish anything. Mother
used to say this was because I was born during a full moon, but like everything
she says, it doesn’t make a lick of sense.
It isn’t
even the beginning of the year. Or even the month. It’s not even my birthday. I’m
starting, typical of me, impulsively, in the middle of September. I’m starting
with the facts.
I’m
thirty-eight years old. I’ve slept with nineteen and a half men.
I live in
Alaska, not the wild parts but smack in the middle of Anchorage, with the
Walmart and Home Depot squatting over streets littered with moose poop.
I’m
divorced. Last month my ex-husband paid child support in ptarmigan carcasses,
those tiny bones snapping like fingers when I tried to eat them.
I have one
son, age eight and already in fourth grade. He is gifted, his teachers gush,
remarking how unusual it is for such a child to come out of such unique
(meaning underprivileged, meaning single parent, meaning they don’t think I’m
very smart) circumstances.
I work as a
waitress in a Mexican restaurant. This is a step up: two years ago I was at
Denny’s.
Yesterday, I
was so worried about money I stayed home from work and tried to drown myself in
the bathtub. I sank my head under the water and held my breath, but my face
popped up in less than a minute. I tried a second time, but by then my heart
wasn’t really in it so I got out, brushed the dog hair off the sofa and plopped
down to watch Oprah on the cable
channel.
What
happened next was a miracle, like Gramma used to say. No angels sang, of
course, and there was none of that ornery church music. Instead, a very tall
woman (who might have been an angel if heaven had high ceilings) waved her
arms. There were sweat stains under her sweater, and this impressed me so much
that I leaned forward; I knew something important was about to happen.
Most of what
she said was New Age mumbo-jumbo, but when she mentioned the diary, I pulled
myself up and rewrapped the towel around my waist. I knew she was speaking to
me, almost as if this was her purpose in life, to make sure these words got
directed my way.
She said you
didn’t need a fancy one; it didn’t even need a lock, like those little-girl
ones I kept as a teenager. A notebook, she said, would work just fine. Or even
a bunch of papers stapled together. The important thing was doing it.
Committing yourself to paper every day, regardless of whether anything exciting
or thought-provoking actually happens.
“Your
thoughts are gold,” the giant woman said. “Hold them up to the light and they
shine.”
I was crying
by then, sobbing into the dog’s neck. It was like a salvation, like those
traveling preachers who used to come to town. Mother would never let us go but
I snuck out with Julie, who was a Baptist. Those preachers believed, and while
we were there in that tent, we did too.
This is what
I’m hoping for, that my words will deliver me something. Not the truth,
exactly. But solace.
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I grew up with Sindy dolls--Barbie was American and too expensive back then.
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