Did you grow up in an apartment building like Sonny?” California Book Club host John Freeman asked Dagoberto Gilb, author of The Flowers, at the May CBC event. “I’ve always loved, in your works, this extraordinary ability to take a portrait of a person, and you start from the outside, and it feels, reading your work, like you’re looking at someone, and then, at some point, you’re inside them, and I feel like you have this ability to look at people to see them—to really see them—and I wonder where you think that developed?”
Gilb responded that while he was growing up, his family had been living in GI housing. After his mother divorced his father, he and his mother moved to a complex that was owned by her new husband, a man who was like the novel’s character Cloyd Longpre.
Freeman noted that Gilb has written more books of short stories than novels and that The Flowers, his second novel, is slightly atomized and feels as if he put pieces together. Glib commented that he likes the short form. In college, some people would write 10-page essays and he preferred to write 3-page ones. “It’s just my dance,” he said. “I reduce it to the smallest principle.” He doesn’t want to spend much time on the larger things but instead focuses on the dialogue.
“When you were writing Sonny’s perspective, were there things that you were writing against or trying to correct in how someone like him has been portrayed?” Freeman asked, mentioning that Gilb had written an essay for him, which was published in an anthology, about how college was almost a fantasyland. Freeman sees a bit of that in Sonny—nobody is telling him to study or go to college, and he has to learn by himself. Gilb said he wasn’t a strong student and never took a book home. He remarked, “Sonny is like a little mini me.”
All of Gilb’s fiction has autobiographical pieces, said Gilb, but he fits traits from other people onto his characters. A lot of Sonny’s experiences are versions of his own, and the characters in Los Flores, the fictional apartment complex in the novel, were from the apartment building that he lived in when his mother was married to a guy who had a name like Cloyd.
Special guest Héctor Tobar joined the conversation. After reading a passage from The Flowers, Tobar referenced an essay by Gilb about Gilb’s mother that Tobar assigns to his students: “I Knew She Was Beautiful.” He pointed out the parallels between Gilb’s mother in the essay and the mom in the novel, who is less of a whirlwind. He asked Gilb how he navigated that the fictional mother kept going places and Sonny didn’t know where she was. “What was the relationship of your real mom to the mom you created in the novel?” Tobar asked.
“The character Sylvia in the novel is my mom,” Gilb said, explaining that it was her in a marriage that she hated. His mother didn’t tell him anything about what she was doing when she left while his stepfather was out. Gilb explained that Sonny has a limited point of view: “He sees what he sees; he can’t see what he doesn’t know.” Gilb hoped it would be obvious that the mom in the novel was “doing something.”
Freeman returned to the conversation. One of the audience-member comments in the chat was that there is a parallel between The Flowers and the play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, in which some of the other characters are vaguely aware that there is something bigger afoot. Freeman asked, “I wonder if we could talk just a bit more again about writing into characters who don’t understand but have a sense that something is coming [in The Flowers, the Watts Rebellion] and yet still approaching them with dignity. Because I feel like that’s one thing you’ve done throughout all of your work is you honor the basic dignity of people.”
Gilb responded that he loves talking to people and hearing their stories. “Everybody, if you give them a moment, they tell you the most wonderful things that you can’t imagine going through, and places they’ve been that are, like, right next to you. That’s been me, forever.”•
Join us on June 18 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Susan Straight will sit down with host John Freeman and a special guest to discuss Mecca. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
