Talking community action with this journalist-turned author, and how it relates to her own experiences. 

by Kaylen Ralph

“Nonfiction is the genre for saying what must be said, or exploring what must be explored, and fiction is the genre for what can’t be said or what can’t be explored,” says Rachel Louise Snyder. Her book, What We’ve Lost is Nothing, was published in January of this year, and it is proof of the richness that can result from experimenting with genre blending. Her first book, published in 2007, was nonfiction, Fugitive Denim: A Moving Story of People and Pants in the Borderless World of Global Trade.In July 2013, she published a chilling and impactful story in the New Yorker about new approaches to stemming the spread of domestic violence called “A Raised Hand.”

What We’ve Lost is Nothing is told from the perspective of an ensemble of characters. One of the main ones is Susan McPherson, an escort for the Diversity Assurance Program in Oak Park, Illinois, where the story takes place in 2004. The Diversity Assurance Program is based on real initiatives to integrate the housing market and bring on what is essentially the opposite of gentrification (as it is known in other cities) in the Village of Oak Park. As a young writer fresh out of graduate school, Snyder worked with the program as a resident manager, and writing about the program was always something she was interested in doing, however, she never had the journalistic hook to do so. The novel was her opportunity, and it afforded me (and her countless other readers) the chance to learn about the program from the utterly biased and unfiltered mindsets of her cast of characters.

I read What We’ve Lost is Nothing and had the opportunity to talk to Snyder about how her journalistic background impacted her writing of this novel.

Kaylen Ralph: First of all, I loved your book. I think it’s a really interesting blending of genres, so I was really happy to read it and I’m very curious about your process…did you grow up in Oak Park…? I read your piece you did for The New York Times magazine about moving there after grad school, but I wasn’t sure if you were coming back to that place or if it was your first time there?

Rachel Louise Snyder: Well, it wasn’t my first time, but I also wasn’t coming back, how’s that for confusing. I grew up in the western suburbs (of Chicago), and after college I moved to Oak Park. This was ’92, ’91, right around there. And I lived there for a year and then I went off to grad school, and so when I returned in 1995, after grad school, that’s when I started working for the Diversity Assurance Program as a resident manager. So I was familiar with the program already, even thought I hadn’t worked in it. I was familiar with Oak Park and what their efforts were in terms of integration, so it’s not my hometown but I knew about it.

KR: That was my next question. Was their progressive approach to housing something you were aware of and was that an incentive for you to move back here?

RLS: That’s a good question. Of course I knew about the Diversity Assurance Program because I had moved; the building I lived in in 1992 was right on Austin Boulevard, and it was managed by the woman who eventually became my best friend and has been my best friend for almost 25 years. The book’s dedicated to her, all my books are dedicated to her actually, and so she was a manager of that building and she was really the first kind of community activist I had ever met. I didn’t grow up in a house or place in which that was central to sort of the underpinnings of our lives in any way. So for me, I was watching her; she started a recycling program in her building…this was in ’92. These days that doesn’t sound at all interesting, but back then it was the first recycling program in a rental building in the village of Oak Park, and it was incredibly difficult to actually put through. Now we look back and think how could that have been difficult? But it was a huge fight, and she did it. And I was so impressed by the idea that you didn’t have to save the world, you could actually foster change in your own small circles and that had a profound impact on me…really still does to this day. So when a job opened up, she recommended me for it, and I came back because the job was great. It was free rent and I was a writer, but it was also that I just had learned so much from watching her do that…so, that’s a long answer but (laughs).

KR: Cool, so you moved back there for the job?

RLS: I moved back there for the job, and the friend.

KR: Of course! So your character Susan who works in a job similar to yours, I mean with the program (the Diversity Assurance Program), you can kind of sense her getting discouraged at points, and maybe feeling a little bit like her or the program, and I know the book is set in the early 2000s and maybe it’s changed since then, but do you think that the current residents of Oak Park would identify with her feelings on this issue? Is this something that is still an issue, 10 years after the book is set?

RLS: You know, that’s a really good question, and I’m actually not sure I’m in the best position to answer. But I will say I was really concerned about it just because any time you write about something from real life and then you depart from into fictional territory, it doesn’t actually matter if it’s fiction, you will offend somebody, you’ll piss off somebody. And I was sort of afraid of that because I was like, I didn’t want the story to be compromised in service of not hurting somebody’s feelings. Like if you’re story needs to be told this certain way, if Susan loses her idealism but none of the Oak Park housing center escorts ever lost their idealism, it shouldn’t matter to me, basically, because it’s fiction. That being said, I respect the program and the people who work in the program and the people who founded the program and so I called them ahead of time and I told them it was coming and I gave them advanced copies of the book and they were super supportive of it, really happy with it. In fact the head of the housing center today, a guy named Rob Breymaier, appeared with me when I went through on my book tour and we did a Q&A together afterward. So they are supportive of it. The book is also set in 2004 really purposefully in this subtle way because it’s the immediate post 9/11 world and affects some of the things that the fictionalized police chief writes about, about racism that he was hearing and seeing from Oak Park that he’d never seen and heard before, even though crime was down and all this stuff. All of that I got from a real lieutenant police chief (he’s retired now) but he took me around for a day back in 2007 and 2008 when my first book came out and I was there on book tour, and he’s the one who said to me, “A few years ago I was seeing these racist editorials, people saying Diversity Assurance had run it’s course, we should stop putting money into it, so I set it really at that time to try and capture that post 9/11 mood…the sort of paranoia that was all over the US.

KR: Yeah, definitely. I guess because, you’ve kind of touched on this a little bit, but because of the fact that you are…I guess reading the book was interesting for me because the housing situation in Oak Park wasn’t something I was aware of, so reading it, at times, I almost felt like it could have been nonfiction, and I guess it’s almost like a which came first, the chicken or the egg? Did you decide that you wanted to write about this program and the initiatives in Oak Park for more diverse housing, or did you decide you were going to write a novel that took place there and then that kind of worked itself into the story?

RLS: That’s an interesting question. A lot of people tell me that they see my journalistic background in the book, and it’s sort of like trying to find yourself in your own child’s face, like you’re actually blinded to it. My daughter is allegedly a carbon copy of me, and I just don’t see it at all until I look at my own baby pictures. So, I didn’t actually see that. For me, I always wanted to write about the Diversity Assurance Program in some way and I’d never had a vehicle for it. As a journalist, I’d only ever thought about it in terms of non-fiction. As a journalist, you can’t tell a story that’s 40 years old without some reason to tell it now. So it was always in the back of my mind, but I went on with my life and stuff, and then a friend of mine told me about this street in suburban Atlanta back in the ‘80s in which every home, not every home, like six homes, had been burglarized in a single afternoon and how it freaked out the neighbors so much that within like two years all six of those families had left and moved elsewhere. And I said to her, this was a New Yorker writer named Caroline Alexander who only does nonfiction, and I said to her,  “That’s an amazing premise for a novel, can I have that?” And she said sure, so I started writing it from the viewpoint of an ensemble of characters literally the first day…and so I set it in suburban Atlanta initially…I didn’t set it in Oak Park, that came much later. I had written probably a good 120 pages of it before I realized that Oak Park was a much richer, deeper setting in terms of exploring…

KR: It was kind your chance…

RLS: Yeah! So it came much later but I think then it worked out in this funny, serendipitous way.

KR: You kind of answered this question, but I was going to ask why you made the decision to write this story as a novel rather than a magazine piece or a series of articles?

RLS: …You need a hook, you need a hook in journalism. And also, despite the fact that I’m known as a non-fiction writer and a journalist, my only professional training as a writer has been in fiction. My MFA is in fiction, and so I just wanted to return to it, I was ready to return to it. And even now I’ve got another idea for a novel, I’ve got another idea for a nonfiction book. From the time I published my first non-fiction piece, I just always saw my career as being one that could go back and forth between genres.

KR: Yeah, I think that’s really cool. What other social issues in American culture do you think could best be explored through fiction and the lives of created characters? Does anything else come to mind?

RLS: Boy that’s a really great question, and probably almost an impossible question to answer in a way because, well, I feel like fiction allows a different kind of exploration than nonfiction. You know with nonfiction certain things are easier, you still have to find the story, you still have provide a narrative, you have to have a reason for telling the story at the time it’s being told, but like, you don’t have to make up what someone looks like, or you don’t have to make up what someone’s interaction was. So that part of it is easier, what’s more difficult is cobbling all the information into something cohesive and that gets at the larger point, and I think, I just think fiction and nonfiction allow for different kinds of conversations and sometimes things about race are really difficult to talk about, and so fiction is a way to maybe talk about things that are really hard. Maybe a way to think about it is non-fiction is the genre for saying what must be said, or exploring what must be explored, and fiction is the genre for what can’t be said or what can’t be explored. But that’s how I see the difference, really. For me, a white person who grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, it’s very difficult to talk about race. I don’t even know what questions to ask really, all the time. But the book allows me to say, “I don’t even know what questions to ask all the time.”

KR: But they’re questions that we’re all thinking about, or are occurring to us…

RLS: Hopefully.

KR: I think it was in the Washington Post review, that described it as an essay, on the “effects of social engineering,” I guess I was wondering what you thought about that, whether you think that’s an apt description or something you think was intentional, if not at the start, then by the end.

RLS: Well, I think it sounds more Orwellian than maybe people in Oak Park want to believe it is. It sounds a little chilling. You know, I have heard all sides of the argument when it comes to integration efforts, well I shouldn’t say all, there’s probably some out there I haven’t heard, but I read blogs and listservs for a couple of years in Oak Park while I was writing this book, late at night I’d go onto a blog or listserv where people were talking about the Diversity Assurance or the integration efforts or something like that, and so, I kind of feel like, you’re damned if you do you’re damned if you don’t kind of thing when it comes to gentrification and integration, and the one thing that I think Oak Park does that’s different is that they’re moving white people into minority areas. Most of the time it’s gentrified, right, and you kick all of the minority people out for the white people to come in, and then there are no minority people left anymore, and Oak Park is trying to make concerted efforts to not make that happen, and I think they are largely successful. There’s going to be missteps with anything, but I guess I would have to say it’s a fairly apt description however chilling it sounds to me.

KR: I see what you mean about social engineering having it’s own connotations in other dystopian novels I suppose…I know you said you’re working on another book. Is this type of writing something that you’ll use again, kind of as your trademark? Are there other social issues you want to play with in that way?

RLS: The one thing that connects my fiction is not so much social issues but salvation. I’m always exploring how people save themselves, how they get through the things they get through. So if you read my nonfiction, I did a piece for the New Yorker that you probably came across on domestic violence homicide prevention, and it’s all about salvation, it’s all about this intractable, social ill that we have found this amazing solution to. And to me, the novel is about that too because you know, no spoilers, but by the end, the burglaries aren’t important at all, and that was a very purposeful decision narratively, that what happens post-burglaries as a result of the burglaries is the much bigger story, and some of those characters have to survive that, and they do, they’re scarred but they survive it. So I think that’s what I’m interested in exploring. The book I’m working on right now is a memoir so it’s arguably a third genre.

KR: Awesome! When will that be coming out?

RLS: Oh gosh, I don’t know. I’m only 150 pages into it so it will be at least another year before I finish it, and then at least another year before it’s published so probably two and a half years. Let’s give me a deadine of two and half years!

KR: Cool, we’ll put it in print and then you’ll be held to it by The Riveter.

RLS: OK (laughs)

KR: I revisited the piece you did (for the New Yorker) about domestic violence and I was thinking about how you blend the different genres. I noticed a lot of…how with the first sentence…”(she) always knew her husband was going to kill her,” or something, and then you get to the end and it’s so chilling, so I don’t know if it’s a question so much as something I just wanted to comment on because I think it’s interesting how you use the different tactics, so I guess that didn’t turn into a question but..

RLS: Yeah with that piece, I don’t know what other non-fiction writers are like in terms of their own process, but for me, I have to know where a non-fiction piece is going to end, which is different from fiction, with fiction I can’t know where it’s going to end, and I also have to know where I’m going to open, and with Dorothy Giunta-Cotter was her name, with that piece, I researched that piece for three years. It was ethically the most challenging piece I’d ever written and the whole time I was writing about her, she’s been dead for a long time, and yet she haunted everyone who was involved in that program, her presence haunted them. I would ask people about her and they would well up, and she had died in 2002, so I’m researching this a good ten years later, and people are still upset about her death. And even I myself, I never even met her, but I ended up driving past her old house on Green Street so many times while I was reporting this article, so there was just something, I felt like I needed to capture the haunting of that, so that first sentence is, “She knew that she was going to die,” because it always haunted me that she said that, that she went and said that, “I know that my husband is going to kill me I wand to make sure my children don’t die, too,” basically, I mean what an absolutely chilling kind of thing to think or know about yourself, you know?

KR: And then when you get to that, just as your tactic as a storyteller, when you do get to that point where she does die, it’s like a punch to the gut. You’re not expecting it, at least I wasn’t.

RLS: Or at least you hope that it won’t be true.