Review published in Fabula Magazine, November 2001

THE GIRL IN THE FALL-AWAY DRESS
BY MICHELLE RICHMOND

The Girl in the Fall-Away Dress depicts the potent beauty of family and womanhood and the level of despair that only the ones you love most can stir within you. The manifestations of sexual energy, exasperation, and betrayal interweave to form a touching and passionate portrayal of a southern family. Throughout Michelle Richmond's new short story collection, a mother, father, and four sisters each pull away, only to circle back to one another again and again, sometimes for comfort, sometimes for answers. Family binds even the most unwilling, unforgiving, or absent among them.

The deaths, births, marriages, and miscarriages that thread the collection are narrated from the point of view of more than one family member, allowing the reader several versions of life-changing events. Each unique perspective reveals a little more about its narrator and the choices he or she has made.

The Girl in the Fall-Away Dress is like the Pentecostal revival witnessed in its first story, "O-lama-lama." It is intense and strange, wonderful and fascinating. The collection has been awarded the AWP Award for Short Fiction and many of the stories have been published in literary journals.

Its author, Michelle Richmond, grew up in Mobile, Alabama with her parents and two sisters. She lives in San Francisco with her husband and teaches at the City College of San Francisco. We met near her home in the Castro to talk about her collection, her family, and her fresh start in the city.

KA  Who are your favorite writers?
MR: I have writers whom I enjoy, but really I like particular books rather than everything by one or two writers. I recently read Soul Mountain by Gao Xingiian. And I love Italo Calvino, particularly Invisible Cities. I also really like Jorges Louis Borges.

KA  Who/what are your influences?
MR  Teachers influenced me more than writers. I mean I grew up with Reader Digest Condensed Books and Bible stories, but we didn't really have classics. My family was very religious.

KA  How do they feel about your writing?
MR  Mom is wonderful, very supportive, about my writing. However, she does not take kindly to anything that might be consideCC3333 blasphemy. My younger sister reads everything. My mother hasn't read anything yet, but she wants to.

KA  Can you talk a little bit about how growing up in the South has affected your writing?
MR  I feel I didn't grow up in the South, as people know it. Faulkner and other contemporary authors write, naturally or by tradition, in a gothic southern style that gives people not from the south a view of the south that I didn't grow up in. Mobile, Alabama is suburban, not rural. There is some French character, but in my subdivision all the streets ended in a cul-de-sac and were named for trees.

The South of course influenced my writing in that place is always a part of my writing. Even though I didn't grow up in the South that a lot of southern writers write about, attention to surroundings and heat are there. I mean, when we didn't have anything to do, my sisters and I, we went to the mall.

KA  Do you feel a kinship with southern writers?
MR  There are southern writers I like a great deal  Flannery O'Connor and Tony Earley's stories, "Here We Are in Paradise." I don't like the vision of the South as CC3333necks and trailers. I do like the richness and imagery in southern writing. All writers could aspire to that?haunting situations and places.

KA  How has religion impacted your writing?
MR  Without religion I would have nothing to write about (laughs). It's part of my upbringing. It's comforting. Looking back on it now as a woman, it was limiting in many ways. So much of my life as child and young adult was determined by what the church thought was right and proper. God and spirituality. There was so much bigotry in the upbringing that I had. Bigotry doesn't come from God. There were things about it that I was fascinated with and wanted to explore. It influenced my sense of language, reading the Bible since I was very young. Belief in something is very much a part of my life.

KA  How has living in San Francisco changed or influenced your writing?
MR  I've moved around a lot. I really feel that I've found home here and I've only been here for two years. Two of the stories (in the book) are set in San Francisco and the city gave me a title for my book and a focus for my story collection. Over time it will play a greater role in the stories I write. I think it's a beautiful landscape.

KA  Can you talk a little about your next novel? What inspired it?
MR  I'm working on a novel entitled The Dream of the Blue Room, though I may have to change the title because there's a pornographic book of the same name. My book is set in a small town in Alabama and also in Mainland China. I lived there for a few months in 1998. While I was there I found out about this dam being built that will dam the Yangtze River. It's the biggest dam ever. Eight million people are being displaced. 14,000 villages will be drowned. The novel is about this woman from Alabama who's taken this trip to China, as a memorial to a childhood friend, and then travels up the river as the construction is being done.

I finished the first draft on a writing retreat last month. I started it over two years ago and hadn't touched it since I moved to San Francisco two years ago. The only way to start and complete it was going away on separate trips.

KA  If you had only one story you could tell the world, what would it be?
MR  My grandmother, my dad's mother, died, and I hadn't been home in a long time. I spent a lot of time there as a child. There was this wonderful room where I slept with my sisters. The night she died I was lying in bed. I heard someone shuffling down the hallway and I really felt my grandmother's presence. When I was growing up my grandmother would shuffle down the hardwood hallway to check on us to make sure we were okay and warm enough. It was the first time in my life that I felt, without any doubt, the presence of someone who was gone and the certainty that there's someone there and that there is some beauty after we leave here. I've never told anyone but my sister about that until now.

KA  What major events and decisions have determined the shape of your life?
MR  The birth of my little sister. I was eight when she was born. It impacted my life more than any other event. I suddenly saw my place in the world. I understood there was someone I needed to protect. It's the closest thing to experiencing the kind of love that a mother has for their child.

KA  Looking back on your life, describe one of the best decisions you've made.
MR  When I was 22, there was this guy I was dating and I left him and Tuscaloosa and I went to Knoxville by myself. I just took off on my own, for the first time. It was a very liberating feeling. Driving in my crappy little Toyota. The windows down, the wind hot and dry. I didn't have to share it with anyone.

KA  How do you define success for yourself?
MR  There's so much that I want, but I think it's probably out of reach. I know that I've always wanted to write. I'm thirty years old and I took my first writing class in college and I've been writing steadily all that time and only now is my first book coming out. Success is something that takes a really long time. This is a chip off whatever the huge glacier is. But this feels really good.