Tiffanie DeBartolo

Interview with Tiffanie DeBartolo, author of How To Kill A Rock Star
by James Marten

James Marten: You write insightfully about love and sacrifice. Does that, or Paul and Eliza’s relationship, stem from personal experience?
Tiffanie DeBartolo: Well, I think everything I write is inspired by some sort of personal emotional experience, but not necessarily factual experience. I can’t say that the relationship between Paul and Eliza specifically mirrors any of my past relationships. Their characters really informed their interactions and brought their relationship to life.

JM: Emotional experience versus factual experience? How do you differentiate the two?
TD: The facts of the story can be-and are often-completely made up, and yet the experience resonates with the writer and hopefully with the reader as if it were true. It’s something my favorite author, Tim O’Brien, taught me: just because something didn’t happen doesn’t mean it’s not true.

JM: As a reader, I had a love/hate relationship with Loring. How do you want the reader to feel about him?
TD: I would never presume to tell the reader how to feel about any of my characters. Readers bring their own issues, likes and dislikes to a book and to the characters. They’re going to feel about him how they will and that’s fine. However, for me, Loring is a very likeable character. He’s such a good guy.

JM: So, is it surprising to you that someone might have a love/hate relationship with him?
TD: No, I completely understand it. But I suspect that love/hate relationship stems from the fact that Loring can be a real sap sometimes.

JM: And what about Eliza? Sometimes I just wanted to shake her and say, “What are you thinking?” Did you have any similar reaction as you were writing?
TD: I didn’t have that reaction while I was writing it, but I did when I read it a couple months later, after I’d had some distance from the story and could kind of approach it as a reader with a fresh perspective.

JM: Did you have any urge to change her character because of that?
TD: Not at all, because she’s going to do what she’s going to do. Sometimes I can’t control her even though it seems like I would be able to. [smiles coyly]

JM: Can you expand on that? You’re the writer. Why can’t you control your characters?
TD: I feel that if I was controlling the characters or judging and manipulating their actions then they would come off contrived. Like a good parent, I let them evolve into who they are going to be.

JM: Do you feel that is important for writers to remember-trying not to control their characters?
TD: I think the key is not to judge them. Ever. The characters do a lot of things that I wouldn’t do or that I don’t necessarily approve of. But if I sat in judgment of them they’d be one-dimensional, perfect people that nobody would either relate to or want to read about.

JM: You seem to have insider knowledge of the music industry. Where does this knowledge come from?
TD: It comes from doing nothing with my free time from the ages of about 4 to 34 except listening to music, reading music magazines, and following my favorite artists all over the country. For the book, I also interviewed a number of music industry professionals-people on both sides of the industry, the artists and the businessmen.

JM: How much has music been a part of your life?
TD: Besides my family, my friends and my work, music is the biggest thing in my life. It’s my religion. It informs and influences everything I do, and it’s been that way since I was very young.

JM: Why is that?
TD: That’s a tough question to answer without sounding sickeningly esoteric or sentimental. But music moves me and inspires me more than any other art form. It also commiserates with my pain and/or my joy.

JM: Who are your biggest musical influences?
TD: My biggest influence would have to be U2. That band truly changed my life. I would not be the person I am today if they did not exist. Of course, Jeff Buckley also had a huge impact on me. And Ours was a big influence on this book, because I started writing it right about the time I discovered their music.

JM: Who is Ours?
TD: A really amazing band from New Jersey. They’re not mainstream-successful but they should be. I actually gave Paul Hudson Jimmy Gnecco’s voice. Hands down, Jimmy has the best voice in rock ‘n’ roll today. [Jimmy Gnecco is the lead singer of Ours].

JM: I was just going to ask if the characters of Paul, Loring and Doug have any basis on real-world rock stars?
TD: I steal bits and pieces here and there, naturally. But ultimately these men are figments of my imagination.

JM: In the book, Doug Blackman says rock ‘n’ roll music is a dying man being crucified. If so, what would you say are the nails being driven through his hands and feet?
TD: Good question. And it’s an easy one to answer. First of all, the higher-ups in the music industry. There are exceptions of course, but the record company executives, the marketing people, the radio conglomerates, these people can’t seem to see beyond the dollar signs. The music doesn’t seem to mean anything to them. But also the music-buying public, most of whom seem to hold their “artists” to such low standards. Having said that, you’re talking to a woman who hasn’t been able to stop listening to “Hollaback Girl” for the past two days, so who am I to sit in judgment of integrity and taste? I fall prey to bad, catchy pop songs just like the heathens and pagans, believe me. I know all the words to Beyonce’s “Crazy in Love” and I’m not proud of it. And let’s face it, there is an element of satire in this story. There had to be.

JM: But Paul sticks to his integrity with his music, or at least he tries to.
TD: It’s interesting. Paul has a lot of integrity when it comes to his music and his friends, but at the beginning of the book he doesn’t have a lot of personal integrity. I think that’s one of the ways he changes in the book. Love brings out a part of him that wants to be a better person.

JM: What was your original inspiration for the book?
TD: It was two things. The first one was that when I finished writing my last novel, God-Shaped Hole…I wrote that novel because I was trying to come to terms with mortality. I was trying to process grief and accept that you can’t change or control death. I needed to make peace with the reality that you can’t bring someone back to life. I began writing HTKARS because I wanted to explore other alternatives to coming to terms with death, which writing fiction allows me to do. Writing is, essentially, playing God. Raising the dead, so to speak.

Second, I wrote HTKARS because I was incredibly disgruntled with the music industry-like I mentioned earlier, I’d discovered this amazing band that I loved so much and I thought was so fantastic, and so few people had ever heard of them. That pissed me off. The story really came out of that.

JM: You’ve said in the past that you let your books develop on their own without creating outlines or storylines ahead of time. Did anything surprise you in the way HTKARS developed?
TD: Everything.

JM: Can you elaborate on that a little more without giving anything away?
TD: It just surprised me how much of a plot there actually turned out to be. I don’t sit down and try to figure that out, but it started getting fairly complicated, and then sort of started falling into place as all of these crazy things started happening. And in the end, I think it worked. Well, after four years and a dozen rewrites, that is.

JM: This book took four years to write versus nine months for God-Shaped Hole. Do you think that is because in part you didn’t have a plotline beforehand?
TD: No, because I didn’t have plotline for the last book. I usually know the beginning and the end and I make up everything in between as I go along. I think what made it take longer for me was that I went through a lot of personal changes from the time I started this book until the time I finished it. When you start a book you’re in a specific place and you have something to say in relation to where you are at the time. If you’re evolving and changing at a rapid speed and things around you are changing the way they were in my life, you go down different avenues and have different objectives regarding the things you’re thinking and feeling and wanting to explore in your writing. It just complicated the themes. After three or four years you’re like, what was I trying to say in the beginning?

JM: Do you want to elaborate on any of those changes in your life?
TD: No. That’s all in the next book [she smiles and laughs].

JM: In HTKARS, Manhattan, particularly the Lower East Side, seems to add its own gritty background soundtrack to the book. Was that intentional and have you spent a lot of time in Manhattan?
TD: I live part-time in Manhattan. It’s my favorite place on earth. I feel more at home there than anywhere I’ve ever been. And I particularly love the Lower East Side neighborhoods. Adding that grittiness wasn’t really intentional, but it certainly felt like it made it more authentic for me. Anyone who has ever spent any time in the Lower East Side knows they could walk down Ludlow Street and see a dozen people who could be Paul, Eliza, or one of the Michaels.

JM: Along those lines, you place scenes in and around specific real-life establishments like Katz’s and Balthazaar. I’m wondering if Paul and Eliza’s apartment has a real-life address?
TD: it does. I don’t know the number off the top of my head, but I have a picture of it. It’s like 170-something Ludlow. Right above Daredevil Tattoo.

JM: So that is the actual name of the tattoo parlor?
TD: Yes. I was almost going to change the name, but I liked it. Their apartment is on the fourth floor. If you’re reading this and you happen to live there you should paint the door red.

JM: What was it like to work 9/11 into the story?
TD: I was writing the book when 9/11 happened. When I got to that moment, that year, that month in the story, I didn’t feel like I could ignore it. I couldn’t keep writing the story and not write about how it affected these people, being that they lived less than two miles from Ground Zero. It wasn’t something I particularly wanted to do, but that was the timing of it and I had to include it.

JM: Was it tough personally?
TD: I just wasn’t sure I’d do it justice. I didn’t want it to be melodramatic or unimportant. So I hope I found a balance. But it couldn’t be a critical part of the story either, because that isn’t what the story is about.

JM: Can you relate to Eliza’s fear of flying?
TD: Yes, though not quite as traumatically. I am afraid to fly, but I refuse to let my fear ground me or rule my life like Eliza does. I’m kind of idiotic in this way-I run directly toward the things that scare me because living in fear, in my opinion, is not living at all.

JM: Finally, you throw in at least one reference to your first book, God-Shaped Hole, when Paul mentions he just read Hallelujah written by Jacob Grace, the main character in God-Shaped Hole. Why did you decide to include this reference, and will we be seeing characters from HTKARS or God-Shaped Hole turn up in future books?
TD: I don’t really know why I included that. It just felt like the right thing to do. It felt like the right book for Paul to pick up in that scene.

JM: So then what about characters from these books showing up in future books?
TD: Well, along those lines, the main female character of God-Shaped Hole does make a cameo appearance in HTKARS, but she’s not named, so if you’re not paying attention you’ll probably miss her. I don’t know, though. Again, I didn’t do either of those on purpose. I wasn’t trying to be clever. It’s the whole idea of letting things happen-if it happens that these people show up then I let them in. Gladly.

I could very easily see a character listening to the radio in a future book and a Bananafish song coming on…you know, years from now when Paul’s songs are being used for car commercials like he said they would be. He’ll be the literary version of Nick Drake!