Julia Franks

 

Publishers Weekly Starred Review, Boston Globe’s Top Summer Reads, Library Journal’s Audiofiles Magazine Earphones Award

Thomas Wolfe Award, Southern Book Prize, Georgia Author of the Year, IPPY Gold, and the Townsend Prize for Best Georgia Fiction

"Edie Carrigan didn’t plan to “get herself” pregnant, much less end up in a home for unwed mothers. In 1950s North Carolina, illegitimate pregnancy is kept secret, wayward women require psychiatric cures, and adoption is always the best solution. Not even Edie’s closest friend, Luce Waddell, understands what Edie truly wants: to keep and raise the baby." 

What can I say about Julia Franks? Well, the first thing that comes to mind is that she astonishes me. When I first read Over the Plain Houses, I was totally hooked.

I often have to stop, put down her books, and realize I am living her story, her characters' stories: the details of what the character sees as she enters a room, what she feels as she is talking or listening to someone, and then the deep empathy you feel, as reader and witness, for what is happening to her. 

Julia's new novel, The Say So, published by the wonderful Hub City Press, first takes place in 1950's North Carolina, but it could be anywhere in the US at that time. It's about how very young unwed women and their families dealt with an unplanned pregnancies. You'll meet Edie and Luce, and their families and their friends in high school. You'll experience how things were handled then, the trauma, the accusations, the total unfairness of it all.
Then we jump to the 1980's and Luce's daughter Meera, to find how the earlier friendships and relationships have (and have not) changed through those years. You will experience sadness and loss, triumph and deep contentment. All expertly told from each  character's point of view.

One of my favorite passages: 

"The thing about loss, though, is that it's cumulative, one layer building upon the next until the weight becomes heavier and hard to carry. They added up, the kids leaving home, friends moving, someone getting divorced and falling out of touch, lapses and losses and people falling away slippery as water draining down an umbrella. You don't realize they have slid from your life until years have glided past. too late you realize you've lost an easy or fractious relationship and finally see it for what it was: it was love. You'd just never recognized it as such." 

Wiley Cash, author of When Ghosts Come Home praises:

“It’s rare that a novel speaks so eloquently to the contemporary moment as The Say So does. The years may pass but our stories stay the same. Julia Franks has written a beautiful story of mothers and daughters, old friendships, broken hearts, and tough choices. This is a powerful novel, and an important one, too.” 

Now let's find out a bit more about Julia Franks....

Julia, tell me about where you live and why you love it so much.

I feel very much at home in Atlanta, a city with a huge middle class and a huge sense of

diversity within that middle class. 

A lot of my writer friends have moved to the mountains these days, which has its appeal, but I doubt my husband and I will ever do that. There are just so many different kinds of life here. For example, we’re both into salsa dancing, which feels to me quintessentially Atlantan: people of all ages, hues, and body types coming together to do this fun group thing together. 

Where were you living when you were 7 years old? Are they fond memories?

I was an Army brat, and we were living in (what was then called ) Fort Bragg. 

I have great memories of growing up on army bases, despite the war in Vietnam. Military life was in some ways a kind of protected bubble for kids. I sometimes think of it as this experiment in American socialism that’s been hidden-in-plain-sight. All our dads (and sometimes our moms) had jobs and made government salaries that were comfortable but not extravagant. 

                                 

We had excellent safety nets, great health insurance, and what has since been called the best public school system in the country. Even though it was the seventies, we lived in integrated neighborhoods and attended integrated schools—not perfect, but the rest of the country was at the time struggling with busing. We rarely saw poor people, but we rarely had contact with rich people either. In retrospect I realize how lucky we were in some ways, but when you’re a kid, you just take it for granted that that’s the way the world works.

Do you have a favorite children’s book and what about it makes it so?

The first book to really change my life was a children’s book called The Island of the Blue

Dolphins, 

which is this wrenching story of a young girl who’s accidentally left behind on an island when her tribe is relocated. As a result, she learns to do every job—hunting, fishing, cooking, etc.—all on her own. I just remember feeling really empowered by the fact that she was able to figure out everything on her own, but also really devastated by her profound solitude. Maybe on some level I realized even then that those two things--independence and loneliness—could be two sides of the same coin.

Is there a book that changed the way you look at life?

As an adult I think I’ve been most affected by Walt Whitman’s poetry. 

                

It expanded my vision of myself and community and the world but also expanded my sense of what was possible as a writer. 

What are the funniest or most embarrassing stories your family tells about you?

I was the only girl among brothers, and my parents had this very 1970s idea that we should all be treated exactly the same, so a lot of our family stories focus on the physical and social competitions between us. Both my parents like to tell stories about times that I got the best of my brothers, or, more often, times that I had big plans to get the best of my brothers but was foiled in the end.

One particular victory I remember was on a family backpacking trip. When I was seven my

parents bought me my first external frame backpack. At that time my older brother already had one and was already carrying his fair share of weight. But I was just getting used to that

backpack when we went on this hike to Maroon Bells in Colorado, 

so it was mostly empty except a couple changes of clothes. But it looked impressive. My brother and I would race up the trail ahead of my parents, seeing who could get to the next junction the fastest. On that particular day I won because I had an empty backpack, but the best part was that when I got to the top of Maroon Bells, there were a bunch of people there, and they were amazed to see this little kid burst out of the woods with this giant pack on her back. A lot of people wanted to take my picture and know where I’d come from, etc. By the time my older brother and my parents showed up, I was parading around like a movie star in front of the paparazzi. 

How did you meet your beloved? How did your first date go?

We actually met on Match.com.

The funny part is that I’d been through a divorce and wasn’t really ready to meet anyone yet, and I had this idea I would just lurk a while on the site and see what other people were doing. So what I did was write my little profile essay but not post a photo. I figured no American male was going to click on a profile without a photo. So I put this incomplete profile up and was starting to acclimate myself to the idea of dating again. But within a week I got this message from this guy saying that he’d done a search on the words “whitewater kayak”, and that my profile had come up and looked really interesting, and, “assuming I didn’t look like Attila the Hun,” did I want to go out for coffee? 

I read his profile, of course, and he looked to be extremely interesting, clever, and funny. But I just wasn’t ready to date yet. (My brother said later that I should have told him Attila was my uncle and there was a strong family resemblance, but I wasn’t even ready to engage on that level.)

Mostly I waffled back and forth and finally said no.

Flash forward several months, and I decided it was time to flesh out my profile and fully engage with Match and maybe find someone like that Attila the Hun jokester. But there was no one on the platform I was the remotest bit interested in meeting. In the end I had to google his name and profession and kind of stalk him out there in the digital world and then finally ask him out.

It was embarrassing: he’d forgotten all about me and was dating someone else. But in the end we finally did meet.

Julia and her husband on their wedding day.

Is there a song, person or group that you listen to when you are feeling a bit

down? 

Chopin!

How are you different now than you were in your 20’s?

Here’s the most thorough answer, which is probably much longer than you have time for! (But then again, if you read the Author’s Note of The Say So, then you’ve pretty much already read it.)

Julia's Note: Over the years friends have asked my advice about their unplanned pregnancies or their daughters’. I don’t give advice. What I say is that I’m thrilled that my son walks the earth, but that the emotional cost was so much higher than I’d imagined. That there was no ‘clean slate’ afterward, only loss. That if I were faced with the same circumstances a second time, I would probably choose an early abortion. That what saved me in the end was the ability to make the choice myself.

How do you feel about “Independent Bookstores” and their role in your success?

I wouldn’t have much of a career without independent books stores. In particular, it was the

owners of such stores who overwhelmingly recommended that both my novels be included in Indie Next. For someone like me who’s publishing with a smaller press, those recommendations are one of the few remaining ways to be recognized in the national media.

IF YOU COULD GO BACK IN TIME to any period from before recorded history to

yesterday, be safe from harm, be rich, poor or in-between, if appropriate to your

choice, actually experience what it was like to live in that time, anywhere at all,

meet anyone, if you desire, speak with them, listen to them, be with them.

When would you go? Where would you go? Who would you want to meet?

I mostly buy into MLK’s idea that the arc of the moral universe is long but bends toward justice- 

-which means I mostly don’t want to go backwards into the past! I suspect life during most

periods of history was a lot harder than it is today, and I’d be nervous to revisit any time period for very long. That said, I’m curious about periods in American history when we as a nation possessed some hope or quality that has since been lost.

For example, we now live in a time when most contracts for municipal buildings and

infrastructure go to the lowest bidders. But it wasn’t always that way. What would it have been like to live in FDR’s America, when Americans were thinking so differently about architecture and public spaces? I wonder what it must have been like to live in a time period when a majority of Americans wanted to invest money in public infrastructure and art. I’m thinking of bridges and public buildings, but also of all the CCC work that went into creating some of our national parks. I’m also thinking about all the powerhouses built on Southeastern rivers in the middle of the woods that are often beautiful buildings--not to mention the schools, libraries, and museums built in our public spaces during that time. I wonder what it would have been like to live at a time when that many people believed in these community projects, in creating something beautiful for the sole purpose for the masses to enjoy.

Thank you Julia, not just for your incredible book, but for you openness and honesty. You are an amazing writer.

Readers, be sure to read all about Julia's dream in ARTSATL 

Jon, your easy way with writers ( people) inspires me all over to read the books you feature. I will order this from our library. Thank you.

Please send comments to jonwilloughbymayes@gmail.com