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THE TALK-FUNNY GIRL
THE TALK-FUNNY GIRL
BY ROLAND MERULLO
ABOUT THE BOOK:
In one of the poorest parts of rural New Hampshire, teenage girls have been disappearing, snatched from back country roads, never to be seen alive again. For seventeen-year-old Marjorie Richards, the fear raised by these abductions is the backdrop to what she lives with her own home, every day. Marjorie has been raised by parents so intentionally isolated from normal society that they have developed their own dialect, a kind of mountain hybrid of English that displays both their ignorance of and disdain for the wider world. Marjorie is tormented by her classmates, who call her “The Talk-funny girl,” but as the nearby factory town sinks deeper into economic ruin and as her parents fall more completely under the influence of a sadistic cult leader, her options for escape dwindle. But then, thanks to a loving aunt, Marjorie is hired by a man, himself a victim of abuse, who is building what he calls “a cathedral,” right in the center of town.
Day by day, Marjorie’s skills as a stoneworker increase, and so too does her intolerance for the bitter rules of her family life. Gradually, through exposure to the world beyond her parents’ wood cabin thanks to the kindness of her aunt and her boss, and an almost superhuman determination, she discovers what is loveable within herself. This newfound confidence and self-esteem ultimately allows her to break free from the bleak life she has known, to find love, to start a family, and to try to heal her old, deep wounds without passing that pain on to her husband and children.
By turns darkly menacing and bright with love and resilience, The Talk-Funny Girl is the story of one young woman’s remarkable courage, a kind of road map for the healing of early abuse, and a testament to the power of kindness and love.
Day by day, Marjorie’s skills as a stoneworker increase, and so too does her intolerance for the bitter rules of her family life. Gradually, through exposure to the world beyond her parents’ wood cabin thanks to the kindness of her aunt and her boss, and an almost superhuman determination, she discovers what is loveable within herself. This newfound confidence and self-esteem ultimately allows her to break free from the bleak life she has known, to find love, to start a family, and to try to heal her old, deep wounds without passing that pain on to her husband and children.
By turns darkly menacing and bright with love and resilience, The Talk-Funny Girl is the story of one young woman’s remarkable courage, a kind of road map for the healing of early abuse, and a testament to the power of kindness and love.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Roland Merullo is the author of the Revere Beach trilogy, A Little Love Story, Golfing with God, and Breakfast with Buddha. A graduate of Brown University, he lives in Massachusetts with his wife and two children.AUTHOR INTERVIEW:
1. Welcome, and thank you for agreeing to an interview for BOOKIN‘ WITH BINGO. Is there any personal information you would like to start out with today?
I’m the author of 13 books, nine of them novels. I live in New England with my wife and two daughters, and there’s lots of information at my web site, RolandMerullo.com
2. Where did you get the inspiration or idea for this book?
I’m not sure exactly. Part of it came from an incident I witnessed in a convenience store in southern Vermont many years ago. There was a young mother in there with her very young child. The child ran down the aisle and knocked over a few cans, and the mother grabbed him and yelled at him and the things she said were so shocking to me—a weird combination of racism and absolute stupidity—that it made me wonder what kinds of lives were being lived just down the dirt roads in those hills. I think rural poverty in America is one of the best-kept secrets in this country. We never see those people, never hear about them. They rarely make the news, but there is a whole underclass living terribly meager lives in the back woods of this land. I wanted to give them voice.
3. How did the title of your book come about?
Well, the main character, Marjorie Richards, grows up in the woods of New Hampshire with parents who try to keep her isolated from society. They themselves live such an isolated life that they develop their own dialect, an odd, ungrammatical hybrid of English. At one point I wrote the whole novel in that dialect, but then I realized that it would be too hard for the reader to follow, so I narrated it in standard English and kept the dialect in portions of the dialogue. The kids in school call her the talk-funny girl, and that’s the title.
4. Do you see yourself in your characters? Which characters are easiest or more difficult to write?
In this case I am a middle-aged man writing about a young woman, a girl really. My feeling is that we all have more in common than we like to admit. We all want love and comfort, we all have fears and dreams. I try to write my characters at that deep level, rather than focusing on the more superficial differences between men and women, young and old, rich and poor, etc. There are little pieces of me in many of my characters; they’re almost always a mix of three ingredients: something of me, things I’ve observed, and traits that are purely imagined. I don’t find any type of character easier or harder to write, though scenes when there are multiple characters are more complicated technically. I studiously avoid taking a person straight from life and putting him or her on the page.
5. What books would you say have made the biggest impression on you, especially starting out? What are you currently reading?
In college I was exposed to the great Russian writers—Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Tolstoy especially—and they made a huge impression on me. When I was writing my first novel, Robert Stone’s A Flag for Sunrise and James Jones’ From Here to Eternity were extremely helpful to me. But I read across a wide spectrum, from Virginia Woolf to Alan Furst, from Anita Brookner to Graham Greene. I tend to like to read mystical and psychological books, religious books across the whole spectrum—Buddhist, Hindu, Christian, Jewish, Moslem. I have a small library in my house and will go to a novel or a non-fiction book and re-read a few pages just to be inspired in a certain way. I am in the midst of a novel right now and when that happens I usually don’t read anything.
6. What is the next or current book/project you are working on?
I’m writing a novel about a devout Catholic woman who has a rich prayer life and feels called to do something that is exceedingly difficult for her. Part of it takes place in Italy.
7. What is something about you that you would want people to know about you that we probably don’t know?
I’m a very good carpenter, a better than average golfer, a not very good swimmer, and being a father is the most important thing in the world to me. I speak Russian well and Italian so-so and English with a strong Boston accent.
8. Do you own an eReader of any kind and how do you feel about their impact on books, as well as you as an author?
No, I do not. I’m very old fashioned, even wrote many of my early novels longhand, and I still sometimes write chapters longhand. At first I was worried about them; now I think, as long as people keep reading, it doesn’t matter that much to me how they read. I still worry about “sharing” which is a nice word for stealing in many cases. But people share print books, too. I hope bookstores find a way to stay in business. I think they will. Every good town has a bookstore.
9. What is your advice to anyone, including young people, who want to be writers?
Find another way to have an income. Learn to deal with rejection. Remember to make the work most important and don’t get caught up in the business end of things more than you have to. Avoid envy and bitterness. I have a little book on this subject, in fact, just published from AJAR Contemporaries: Demons of the Blank Page. It’s not about the technical side of things, but about the emotional side: writer’s block, rejection, choosing readers, managing time, etc. That is the part that separates success from failure, I think. Lots of people can write a good sentence, but not so many people can deal with the ups and downs of this life. If you love it, just keep doing it, never give up, and take what comes of that.
Thank you so much, Roland, for a really interesting interview and wonderful book for my readers!
PRAISE FOR THE TALK-FUNNY GIRL:
“In the searing tradition of Bastard out of Carolina and Ellen Foster… Merullo not only displays an inventive use of language in creating the Richards’ strange dialect but also delivers a triumphant story of one lonely girl’s resilience.”
--Booklist
"Roland Merullo's book, The Talk-Funny Girl, takes place in the gritty real world, but is rooted in a mythic world. I loved the inventiveness, the bits of unusual language, the heart-wrenching story, and the remarkable portrait of a troubled but gutsy girl who battles her way toward happiness. One of the best novels I have ever read. A book for the ages."
--Anita Shreve, author of Rescue
"Roland Merullo has created not just a unique voice but a unique language for seventeen-year-old Marjorie Richards, but what makes The Talk-Funny Girl unforgettable is its young heroine's refusal to succumb to the evil that surrounds her. What a brilliant, great-hearted novel this is."
--Ron Rash, author of Serena and Burning Bright
GIVEAWAY
THANKS TO KATIE AND CROWN AND
RANDOM HOUSE PUBLISHING, I HAVE
TWO COPIES TO GIVE AWAY OF
THE TALK-FUNNY GIRL
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GIVEAWAY ENDS AT
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