Samantha Dunn: An Interview

by

Daniel M. Jaffe

Samantha Dunn is the author of a novel, Failing Paris (a finalist for the PEN West Fiction Award in 2000), and two memoirs, Not By Accident: Reconstructing a Careless Life and Faith in Carlos Gomez: A Memoir of Salsa, Sex and Salvation. Her work is anthologized in several places including the short story anthology, Women on the Edge: Writing from Los Angeles, which Dunn co-edited with Julianne Ortale. Her personal essays and articles have appeared in numerous national publications including the Los Angeles Times, O Magazine, Ms and InStyle. In 2000, Dunn received the Maggie Award for Best Personal Essay in a Consumer Publication.

Dunn’s first memoir, Not By Accident: Reconstructing a Careless Life, explores the meaning and significance of a terrible accident. While leading her beloved horse across a stream one day, she was knocked to the ground and trampled as her horse reared in panic, mangling Dunn so badly that her leg was nearly detached. The memoir analyzes her propensity for accidents, and questions whether there might be some underlying emotional reason she frequently took serious risks. I asked her how she came to wrestle in writing with such a painful and intimately personal set of topics.

“I guess you can call me an ‘accidental’ memoirist,” she said. “I had just finished my novel, Failing Paris, when the horseback riding accident occurred. It was traumatic and severe. And news about it spread among the people I knew. I was (and still am) a freelance writer for a variety of women’s magazines. While I was still in the hospital, an editor called to wish me well, and also to suggest that I ‘take notes’ because it would make a good story. Being on a morphine drip at the time, I didn’t exactly have a free hand or the inclination to write.

“After a couple of months, however, I was bored out of my mind with lying in bed and started to write down some fragments. It helped me make sense of what had happened, and it just felt good to be doing something. Then the bills came in, and I realized I would have to get back to some kind of work as soon as I could. I pitched an article on the idea of being accident prone to Shape, thinking that was the end of it. As months went on and more happened to me, more and more editors were calling asking me to write something about the nature of my accident and what I was doing to heal. It was my agent who said to me, ‘I think this should be a book.’ Soon enough, I had a contract.”

Did Dunn anticipate how personal and self-exploratory the memoir would become? “I had no idea at all what I was in for, to tell you the God’s honest truth. I pitched a book more about the research behind being accident prone. My editor, Jennifer Barth, at Henry Holt bought the idea but then turned it around and told me what intrigued her was not so much the research, but my own personal journey. To make that journey a book, I had to go to places in my psyche that I didn’t even realize existed, chambers and hallways that were not always comfortable or pretty or pleasant in any measure. Because of that, I’ve come to realize that is one of the things that makes memoir writing unique—it was essentially a form begun, though there is debate here, by St. Augustine in his Confessions— is the level of direct self-inquiry that is not demanded in other forms. That’s why I don’t call it ‘creative nonfiction’; to me that label goes to great reportage, in the school of Wolf or Capote. But memoir is its own distinct form when truly undertaken as it is meant to be.”

Dunn’s second memoir, Faith in Carlos Gomez: A Memoir of Salsa, Sex and Salvation, analyzes a rather different aspect of life, the changes she experienced during a relationship with a dance instructor and immersion in the salsa culture of Los Angeles. I wondered whether she found this second memoir easier to write than the first. “Yes and no,” she replied, “though I don’t mean to be evasive. It was easier in the sense that I knew, with two of my own books behind me and two others that I ghostwrote for other people, that I could complete a book. (I think that crisis of confidence around whether or not you have the skill required to craft a long work is the biggest problem for new writers, and for writers who are used to working in other, shorter forms.) Yet, this book was harder in the sense that I had substantially less time—only a year—to write it, and, most importantly, I did not have a ‘closed’ ending. While many emotional issues are still up in the air by the last page of Not By Accident, readers have the fact that my leg does heal and I do get back on my horse.

“By the end of Faith in Carlos Gomez, however, I had not met my true love, and other unexpected losses had occurred that I could not have imagined when I signed my book contract (I’d talk about it, but I don’t want to give the plot twists away.) This required that I look very closely at what the whole experience of learning to dance did mean, what had shifted for me emotionally—and all that turned out to be a very satisfying conclusion, at least for me. A funny thing: Now I have met the romantic love, the life partner I was searching for in that book (his name happens to be Jimmy, not Carlos), so I would have a different conclusion if I had been able to wait another two years to write it. That’s not to lessen the arc of that book or the insights I acquired for I love it and find it very complete, a Polaroid of my life at that point.”

Before writing those memoirs, Dunn wrote a highly acclaimed novel, Failing Paris, which the Los Angeles Times described as “the kind of novel that seems polished of every extraneous word, shaped like a bullet for velocity.” How did she find the process of writing fiction as opposed to writing memoir? “It was different in the regard that I began with sense memories, but then asked the question, ‘What if?’ rather than the question, ‘What does this mean to me?’  What I call the ‘heavy lifting’—the work of crafting the language, and the mechanics of moving the narrative forward—is the same in both genres.”

Does she prefer one genre over the other? “I love all forms of writing,” explained Dunn. “At the moment I am writing the screenplay for Faith in Carlos Gomez with a writing partner for Lifetime, and have written a play as well that was produced last year with Noah Blake. I’ve even been known to write a poem or two (which have never seen the light of day). Yet, I seem to go back again and again to memoir and essay. Might be temperament. Might be the fact that I have a journalism degree, and that the nonfiction side of me is deeply hardwired. Although, that said, I have had a novel in the drawer I have wanted to get back to for the last two years, and I have had great fun writing short fiction pieces for the Cal Arts literary magazine, Black Clock.”

I found myself curious about her experiences with her screenplay. Was she enjoying collaborative writing? “Oh! Okay, here we go. Well, it can be great to write with someone, especially someone as talented and as experienced as Ed Horowitz. For years I have sat alone in a room and torn my hair out, now I get to tear his hair out too. Seriously, it is great to have someone to bounce ideas off of, and to learn from. Also, it is really a gift to be able to see your story through another person’s eyes; he often has insights to which I was oblivious. It has been a learning process for me, because I can sit in a room all day and work on one paragraph, whereas Ed just charges ahead and worries about the details later. But for me, it’s all about the details And, like any two people who work together, sometimes we are just in a bad mood and hate each other a little; luckily, we get over it by the next working day.