In this interview Mark disucsses his book, Search Angel.
Read another interview with Mark about his latest book Primitive.
Why did you decide to write a novel in which all the major characters were either adoptees or birth mothers?
I can’t recall offhand who first said that the author doesn’t choose the novel, the novel chooses the author, but that’s been my experience. Search Angel came about after an old friend told me that she had given up her son for adoption more than thirty years ago. She had told very few people about her boy, and asked me to keep the information to myself, which of course I did.
I realized very quickly, as anyone would if they gave it any thought, that if you were a birth mother it would be almost impossible not to fantasize about your child, and that those fantasies would naturally include speculation that he might be a huge star, which as it turned out is a common fantasy of birth parents, as well as of adoptees who don’t know who their birth parents are. And then, perhaps because I’m always given to noting that the glass is half empty, as opposed to half full, I wondered what would happen if after successfully searching for your child you found not a wunderkind but an absolute nightmare.
This is most assuredly not the plot of Search Angel, but it did get me thinking about adoption, researching it, interviewing adoptees and birth mothers, and all of that led to Search Angel.
Are you an adoptee or parent of a child you gave up for adoption?
No, I am neither, and there is no adoption experience in my family, which is not as common as you might think. Some 80 to 100 million Americans are estimated to have an adoption experience in their families.
How did you come up with the title, Search Angel?
Titles can be tricky, but this one came readily. It refers to the women--and they’re almost always women--who, generally for a nominal fee, search for an adoptee or birth parent. I think they provide a critically important service for the generation of women and adoptees who went through closed adoption. By that I mean an adoption in which the child is never told who his or her birth parents are, and the birth parents are never told who adopted their baby. Dedicated search angels are extremely skilled at tracking down information vital to the discovery of a missing biological parent or child. I really do think of them as “the orphan’s private eye,” a term I use in the book.
So are women usually the ones pushing the whole search process?
Essentially, yes. What you might find interesting, or possibly appalling, is how irrelevant men often are to this process of searching. Women--and there are no studies on this so the information is anecdotal and based on the experiences of experts in the field--generally are the birth parents who search for their offspring; and daughters, more than sons, seem to be the adoptees who go looking for their mothers.
Having said that, yes, men do search for their biological mothers and fathers, and some biological fathers look for their children; but again, women’s efforts generally drive what is referred to as “the search.”
Is Suzanne based on a real search angel?
Not any one search angel, but a number who were gracious enough to let me interview them.
This is a truly terrifying story right from the start. Did you think it would be this scary when you were researching it?
I must say that I had intimations from the start that this would be one very frightening story. Harold, the antagonist, let me know early on that he had a harrowing agenda, and when he began to speak he directed the story to places I never could have envisioned.
How much research did you have to do for Search Angel?
I spent a great deal of time interviewing people with adoption experiences, as well as experts in adoption. There was, of course, a fair amount of reading in the field as well. I also spent many hours on the net reading adoption-related websites. And then I worked the phones, which I do a fair amount when I’m researching a book, digging into crime-related issues. There were surprises all along the way, some pleasant, some not. You’ll see when you read the book.
Are you at all worried that after reading Search Angel people will be reluctant to adopt children?
No, because I believe the overwhelming majority of adoptive parents are unselfish, serious people who give a great deal of thought to the adoption of a child. What I trust will happen is that the more conservative elements of the adoption community will recognize the human rights issue at the heart of closed adoption. No person should ever have to go through life without knowing who their birth parents are. The sense of loss this brings, based on everything I’ve read and the people I’ve spoken to, is so profound as to defy simple description; hence, a novel on the subject. The rights of the child come first, and I find it cruelly ironic that the very elements of our society that champion the rights of the unborn child are usually aligned with those who would damn adoptees to a life of not knowing their biological origins.
But weren’t these birth mothers promised anonymity?
Yes, millions of birth mothers were promised anonymity, but that promise was made to women who had been shamed for their single motherhood; therefore, in my view, that promise was tainted from the start. I see no good reason to continue to promote the promises of shame, and that’s what this silence remains.
There are obvious health issues here, too, for the children of these anonymous birth mothers. We’ve all become aware of how critically important genetic information can be in the treatment of illness, and yet this medical information is denied to adoptees who went through the traditional closed adoption system.
One thing I found fascinating is how few physicians ever screen their patients to find out if they’re adoptees. You’d think that would be routine, given the importance of genetics.
I found something else very interesting, this time in the realm of mental health. I have many friends who are psychotherapists, so I asked if as a matter of course they asked a new client if he or she had an adoption experience. All but one of them had never asked this question. This is the single most critical issue in the lives of adoptees as well as their birth mothers, and yet it is not routinely screened for.
This is all part of what I see as our society’s rejection of the uniqueness of adoptees and birth mothers. It’s as if the legacy of closed adoption--even in an era when open adoption has become legitimized--prevails, as if after all we’ve learned about adoption we can still pretend that the adoption experience doesn’t have profound ramifications for everyone involved.
Why did you let Harold commit such terrifying crimes against really likable characters in this novel? Don’t you risk alienating readers if bad things happen to good people?
I abhor novels and movies in which you can be assured before you read the first page, or see the first frame, that the “nice” characters are going to remain essentially untouched or unscathed by any of the events they’ll experience. That’s not life as I’ve known it. My novels virtually twitch with tension because real life does take some terrible turns. Cruel ones. It’s how people endure and, at times, prevail in the face of such horrors that fascinates me. And how they change. Besides, Harold did what Harold wanted to do.
Harold speaks in the first person, which is a very intimate voice. Why?
I wanted readers to understand the psychopathology of a character from the inside out. Harold’s voice felt extremely comfortable to me, so I let him speak directly to the reader. This way you learn a great deal about Harold, how he grew up and turned into an incredibly complex person. You get to know his deepest thoughts and desires.
Suzanne, the search angel, has a third person point of view, right?
That’s correct. But we go inside her head quite a bit, too, so we can hear her thoughts directly as well. I really fell in love with Suzanne. She’s a reasonable human being who finds herself thrust into extraordinarily demanding circumstances. How she thinks she can cope with the demands placed upon her is what makes her so real, because she, too, suffers delusions, and they extract a very high price.
Both Harold and Ashley Stassler, the antagonist in The Bone Parade, who also speaks in the first person, are utterly convincing and frightening. They seem really smart, but they’re really scary. Do people often ask you if characters like Harold are really you?
I’m asked that quite a lot. An old mountain bike riding buddy of mine read my first novel, Hush, and as we were setting off for a ride in the woods on a dark, cloudy day, said, “Do you think about that stuff all the time?” There was genuine concern in his voice, and I think if I had said, “Why yes, I’m thinking about it right now,” he would have turned right around. Instead, I started laughing and told him the truth, that I didn’t think about it all the time. But clearly I’m drawn to considerations of the demonic.
Why did you set much of Search Angel in the Pacific Northwest?
The physical environment plays a significant role in Search Angel, as it has in my first two novels. I’m drawn to the drooling wetness of the Northwest, its muted colors, finding in this densely vegetative and deeply shadowed world a welcome and complex contrast to the bright, sunny, well-scrubbed shininess of Harold’s Phoenix. Perhaps this reflects my own desire to see the “sunny” expectations of readers turned upside down.
Okay, got to ask this one: Who are your favorite novelists?
John LeCarre, Ian McEwan, Alice Munro, T.C. Boyle, Tom Wolfe, Scott Turow, Norman Mailer, Margaret Atwood, Richard Russo. Those are the authors who come most readily to mind. I’m sure I’m forgetting some at the moment. Just thought of one, as a matter of fact: Joyce Carol Oates.
There are many books written by other authors that I absolutely adored--The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen is a good example--but because I haven’t read their other work I’m reluctant to include them on a list of favorite novelists. That’s my failing, obviously, not theirs.
As you might gather from that brief list, I favor authors who are both fine writers and storytellers.
Read another interview with Mark about the book Search Angel.
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