Tommy Hays
You know when you're reading a book and you just can't put it down? Tommy Hays has written that kind of book. It flows like a river, every page glides into the next page and you just have to find out what happens next. I can't recommend it enough.
Wiley Cash described it this way: "Tommy Hays has long been one of my favorite writers working today, and The Marriage Bed only deepens my love for his fiction. No one can tell the stories of old love and young love and the inherent complications of both as Hays, and there's certainly no one who can tell them more poignantly."
Tommy, first tell us about your book.
The Marriage Bed is about a poetry professor, Asa Flowers, at a small college in Asheville, NC, who comes home one stormy evening to find his wife Betsy inexplicably distraught. At first he thinks she’s upset because, sensitive about her age, she’s received a form letter from the AARP asking her to enroll. But soon enough he learns she has genuinely devastating news. As the evening goes on, the couple end up in a heated argument that sends Asa to sleep out in their garage apartment for the first time in twenty-five years of marriage. The next morning, he wakes to blue sky and an altered world. Unfolding over a few tense weeks and told from several points of view, the novel explores how a tragedy can assume as many shapes as the people it touches. Asa finds himself reckoning with torn feelings about his marriage and confusion about how to proceed in complicated relationships with his adult children. As he gradually absorbs revelations—so much he didn’t know or understand during his long marriage—he finds himself drawn uneasily toward a new world, one in which he must shed much of his old identity if he is to survive and, most important, rededicate himself to being a father.
Now, tell us about where you live and what you love about it.
Connie and I have lived in Asheville since 1988, when we moved here from Atlanta, but
I’ve loved Asheville since I was a little boy, and my father would drive our family up here
from Greenville for a Sunday afternoon ride.
We rode with the windows down, so we could feel the cool air and hear the trees rustling in breeze. What a relief from the heat and humidity of Greenville. I remember loving how the mountains gave the landscape a cozy intimacy. Connie and I first met in Mars Hill in 1980, married within seven months and then with grad school and jobs, we ended up moving ten places in ten years before we moved back to Asheville where we had our two, now grown, children. We live in an old cedar shake house built in 1904, where both our children grew up in. It’s a comfortable old house always in need of repair. We love the surrounding neighborhoods, home to all kinds of people. We love that we live within walking distance of downtown, grocery stores, restaurants, parks, walking trails and the University of North Carolina.
Where were you living when you were 7 years old?
I grew up in Greenville, South Carolina and had a pretty great childhood.
My mother worked full-time as did my father and so I ended up spending much of my time across town at my great great aunt and uncle’s, sister and brother. Sisters and brothers used to live together more back then. Anyway, they were like grandparents and I loved them very much. They lived across from the old Furman campus, which had been abandoned since the university had moved to its new location a few miles out of town, where it is now. I often had the empty campus to myself, which amounted to fields and trees and crumbling old buildings. Sort of perfect for a boy to explore.
Tommy
While the story is fiction, my portrait of the place and of my time with my aunt and uncle is the way it was for me.
Is there a book that changed the way you look at life?
A Death in the Family by James Agee made me want to be writer.
James Agee
The moment I read his famous opening “Knoxville: 1915” I was entranced. And as I read and reread the novel, the portrait of the family, of place, of how the boy saw the world, felt familiar to me and yet somehow new. My mother’s mother died when my mother was eight, and while she never talked much about it, our house, our world had a distinct melancholy and I recognized that same melancholy in A Death in the Family, which was inspired by Agee’s father’s death when he was a boy. Another writer I was important to me was William Maxwell whose mother died of the Spanish flu.
Do you have a favorite children’s book and what about it makes it so?
I love many children’s books, but I think Winnie the Pooh has to be a favorite.
Our father used to read it to my brother and me when we were little boys. He was a great reader and could do all the voices and make books come alive. When he read Winnie the Pooh, we were with Pooh, Piglet, Eeyore and all the others in Hundred Acre Wood. I think what I’ve always loved about Winnie the Pooh is the sense of community in The Hundred Acre Woods. I loved how the characters were always helping each other, and in that way felt, still feels, like a very compassionate book. It helped that our father was a compassionate man. My wife had me bring Winnie the Pooh to the hospital, and I read to her when she went into labor with our daughter.
What are the funniest or most embarrassing stories your family tells about you?
When my children were younger, I used to get upset when cars went too fast up our street. I worried some neighborhood kid might get hit. Finally one evening I was carrying the recycling out to the street (this was back when we had plastic cartons for recycling rather than the big container we have now). Anyway, I was carrying the plastic carton out to the street, and a car was tearing up the street and reflexively I just hurled the recycling at the car, hitting it. The drive did slow down. A couple of the neighbors saw me do it. I got a reputation.
The other stories have to do with a guy who lived in the apartments across the street. He had a big rumbling Trans Am, that shook our house. And he would drive up the street with his radio blasting late at night and often sit out in his car, the engine running for hours. When I asked him to stop, he refused. He became an obsession and just the sound of his engine shaking our house drove me wild. I seriously considered moving and the kids ended up thinking we really might move. One evening, when Connie and I came home from going out, I walked the babysitter outside and she got on her bike and started riding away. Danny, who was sitting in his car in the dark and smoking, whistled at her. I was furious. I walked over to him and told him not to whistle at the babysitter and as I turned and walked back to the house, he shouted, “You know you don’t like a lot of things.” I never forgot those words, and to this day when I remember them, I can’t help smiling. He was so right.
How did you meet your beloved? How did your first date go?
I met Connie when I came up to Mars Hill in the fall of 1980 to visit her roommate, Paula, an old friend of mine from Furman days. I was immediately smitten with Connie even though she was often curt, didn’t speak much and seemed to be angrily carrying around a basket of laundry for much of the weekend. Turned out she and her boyfriend were going through a hard time. Luckily for me they broke up. But even then, when Paula had gone away one weekend and left us alone, it was very awkward. We realized Paula had been doing most of the talking whenever I visited, so with her away, we were at a loss for what to say. It felt so awkward, I think both of us thought that maybe this wasn’t going to work out. I had gotten a job as editor of the Tri-County News in Spruce Pine and rented a little apartment there. On the weekends, I would meet Paula and Connie at the old rock Micaville Elementary School, where they held a contradance every Friday evening. At some point, Connie drove back home with me after a dance to my little place in Spruce Pine and the rest is history.
Tommy says of this photo, "Connie and I were married at her parents' beautiful house in Jonesboro, Georgia on November 7, 1981. I have no idea why she's put up with me for 44 years. Maybe because at the rehearsal dinner, as people were toasting us, my father -- a sweet, warm and yet enigmatic presence -- stood, raised his glass and declared, 'Confusion to the enemy'."
How are you different now than you were in your 20’s?
I’m so much happier. Connie and I have been married for nearly fifty years and we still enjoy each other very much. We share so much and laugh a lot. And we have two wonderful grown children who like to be with us (most of the time). Also we have our first grandchild, a little girl who brings everyone joy. I’m more confident, and I think having a rich family life has everything to do with that. Also, as I grow older, I’m more appreciative of friends and family and try to make the most of the time I have left to be
with them.
Is there a question no one has ever asked you that you wish they would?
What influence did my parents have on me becoming a writer. Both my parents were writers. My father wrote for magazines and ultimately designed college PR materials for small colleges across the country. My mother wrote for the Greenville News and ultimately ended up at Furman University, as director of the public relations department, becoming the university’s first woman administrator.
Our father always said that my brother and I should pursue our passions. And our mother also encouraged us to do what we loved. So my brother became an architect and I became a writer.
Something, perhaps, that people would be surprised to know about you?
For folks who don’t know me well, they might be surprised to learn that I can be very emotional and reactive. For example the other day I was feeling overwhelmed by everything I’ve been doing to get word out by my new book, I told my wife that we had to cancel our evening plans (that were only an hour away) with friends that night. My wife talked me down off the ledge. And I was able to go out. She’s talked me down from more than a few ledges over the course of our marriage.
We all have or can point to a certain experience where, because of this
experience, it shifted our lives in a way that led to where we are today, it could be
a person you encountered or you were in a certain place or you had a certain
experience or all three, but it was so pivotal that you can say that because of this
experience, I am where I am today as a writer or in a greater sense as the person I
am now.
In 1982, Reynolds Price invited me to attend a workshop he was leading at the Atlantic
Center for the Arts. This ended up being lifechanging for me.
Reynolds Price Louise Shivers Josephine Humphreys
In that workshop was Louise Shivers whose novel Here to Get My Baby Out of Jail had just been published by Random House. There were four other writers, including Josephine Humphreys whose novel Dreams of Sleep would come out months later with Viking. Being among these amazing writers changed me and made me more determined to become a writer myself. Reynolds became a friend and mentor as did Jo Humphreys, who I’m still in touch with to this day. She blurbed every one of my novels, including The Marriage Bed.
Can you remember a particular random act of kindness from a stranger?
1986. Connie and I lived in Boston in an old, roach infested apartment building in
Alston-Brighton. To do our laundry we had to go way down into the grim basement,
where the washer and dryer were. It was always a little spooky down there. No one
was ever around. One day I carried a big load of our laundry down there, put our
clothes through the washer, then loaded our wet clothes into the dryer and went back up to our apartment, where I was working on a story in the tiny kitchen on the Formica
kitchen table on my tank of a Royal electric typewriter. I became so caught up in the
story I forgot about the laundry. When I finally remembered, I went back down to the
basement and found our laundry neatly folded and stacked on top of the dryer. I never
had any idea who did it, but it made me feel fondly toward everyone in the building.
Is there a song, person, or group that you listen to when you are feeling a bit
down?
“Morning Morgantown” by Joni Mitchell, from when I was first getting to know Connie and would visit her at her Mars Hill apartment. I’d play her albums, which used to be a way of getting to know somebody. And it was then that I heard “Morning Morgantown” for the first time.
It was such a light and airy and hopeful song, and I played it again and again and again,
till I about wore the needle down. To this day, “Morning Morgantown” never fails to lift
my spirits.
Were there parts in your book that your editor cut that you hated to see go? If so,
what were they?
Yes, my editor asked me to cut a character named Maggie, who was a student of Asa’s.
She had several scenes in the novel and was another point of view character. My editor
thought we should cut her because she felt we didn’t need another point of view. I was
reluctant. I liked Maggie very much. But I cut her and now that the novel is out, the
general consensus among my writer reader friends who’d read an earlier draft is that
the novel is stronger now.
How do you feel about “Independent Bookstores” and their role in your success?
I’ve always loved independent bookstores. My first real job was working as a bookseller
at The Open Book in Greenville SC, where I grew up. I loved that store and I loved Tom
Gower, the owner. I felt very comfortable there. Then I worked at McGuire’s Bookshop in Atlanta for a couple of years. Another wonderful store in Atlanta. Many writers came in there. Pat Conroy, Mark Childress, Josephine Humphreys and Clyde Edgerton, to name a few. I ended up writing my first novel, Sam’s Crossing, based on my experiences at McGuire’s. Then we moved to Boston for Connie to pursue a fellowship, and I worked at Harvard Bookstore, an incredible indie store where I learned so much.
So I was already very fond of bookstores before I ever published a book. But now that I’ve published a few, I know how crucial they have been for me as a writer. It’s the indie stores with their committed, informed, book-loving booksellers who have sold my novels. Without indie bookstores, I never would’ve published a thing.
And finally Tommy,
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?
And most importantly, why do you think you chose this time?
--
I would want to go back to when my great great aunt and uncle were younger. They
grew up in a large family. Both their parents died young, leaving their children, brothers
and sisters to grow up in an orphanage. My aunt, being the oldest, was the first to leave
the orphanage and make her way in the world, going to college, then getting a job as
the secretary to the president of Furman University, which was right across the street
from my aunt and uncle’s house. There were a number of early deaths in the extended
family, so my aunt and uncle took in many family members over the decades they lived
on Howe Street. I would love to be back in that world, being able to talk to Aunt Eddie
and Uncle Cleve as an adult and to meet those who died before I knew them.
Thank you, Tommy, not just for writing such a wonderful book but also for answering my questions so thoughtfully!
Readers, pick up Tommy's book at your locally owned independent bookstore!
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