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Rebecca Rasmussen Talks About The Bird Sisters
Debut novel inspired by grandmother, birds, and timeless love.
Posted April 11, 2011
Rebecca Rasmussen's highly anticipated debut novel, The Bird Sisters, will make you want to read slowly and savor the gorgeous writing and turn the page to see what happens next. It's both careful and daring, quiet and bold... I absolutely love it! Here's more from Rebecca:
Jennifer Haupt: How did you come up with this unusual and beautiful story?
Rebecca Rasmussen: The story of the Bird Sisters belongs to my grandmother Kathryn. Until I was twenty-one, I knew very little about her even though I'd spent a lot of time with her. (I even lived with her at one point.) I knew her father was an extremely talented golfer and her mother was the most beautiful woman in the world, and that my grandmother thought I looked like her. I knew my grandmother fell asleep midway through television shows-that she was getting old. It wasn't until after she was diagnosed with breast cancer, went through the treatments, and went into remission that I got to know her better.
My grandmother and my mother moved to Colorado, where I was living at the time, waiting out those last precious months before I went to graduate school. My mother worked a lot. My grandmother and I didn't. Every morning, we'd go to breakfast together, and it was over our first cups of mountain coffee together that questions started popping into my mind and answers started flowing from her lips. She told me the story of her parents, their heartbreaks and their joys, as if I were a friend instead of her granddaughter. And then she showed me a picture of them at a county fair when they were very young. My great-grandfather and great-grandmother were standing under a cardboard moon, looking at each other with a kind of uncontained love that was rare for photographs of that time. I kept measuring their expressions against the story my grandmother had told me. I kept wondering: where did that love go?
A few months later, I went off to graduate school. A month after that, my grandmother fell down in a parking lot and discovered, after many tests, that she had a brain tumor. After she passed away, my mother sent me her journals, which we never even knew she'd kept. Once I found my way out of missing her terribly and into wanting to honor her, the first draft of The Bird Sisters took me about eight months to write. But, oh, the revisions that followed! The heartbreaks. The joys.
JH: The bond between two sisters is at the heart of this novel. Do you have any siblings, and are you close to them?
RR: I have four brothers-one older and three younger. Erik, Cole, Travis, and Brenner. My brothers are absolutely wonderful, and I know I don't tell them that enough. There is an eleven-year gap between Brenner and me, which could have been difficult but has been joyous instead. I remember one summer I was away at camp and when I came home in August, somehow Brenner had turned from a baby into a little boy. I watched him positively run up the stairs, which only a few months before had been gated to prevent him from hurting himself. What pride! What wonder! What skinny legs! I remember saying to myself, "Remember this moment, Rebecca." Time moves so quickly, doesn't it? I adore my brothers, even if they can all out-wrestle me.
JH: What is the significance of birds in your novel? Why are the sisters so drawn to healing these small, broken creatures?
RR: Once, when I was a girl, a robin flew into our sliding glass door while we were watching television. My mother opened the door and scooped up that sweet little bird like our neighbor's newborn baby. She seemed to know just what to do: make a little bed out of warm towels, get all of us into the car, and drive across town to the bird lady's house. I don't know if that robin lived or not, but for a long time I wondered about him and about the lady who made a life out of saving birds.
Probably every town has a bird lady or a dog man or a cat woman (this seems particularly stereotypical, yet likely), and in every town birds fly into windows and windshields. Sometimes people do something about it. Sometimes they don't. I think what you do when you encounter an injured animal, bird, reptile, etc. says a lot about who you are. I am a person who gathers up warm towels like my mother. I am a person who, when I was eight, covered a dying deer with my winter coat because I didn't know what else to do for it.
Mostly, I am a person who loves birds. In the mornings, I like to watch the little finches in our oak tree. I marvel at how clever they can be. How quick-footed. How zippy. To me, the poet Mary Oliver says it best about a little injured gull she and her partner M tried to rescue. "Bird was like that.... Startling. Elegant. Alive."
JH: What effect does Father Rice's loss of faith have on Twiss? Why is it so important for her to help him?
RR: Twiss is attracted to outsiders. People who don't seem to fit in anywhere, either because they can't or they don't want to. Although Twiss doesn't have a lot of religious faith in the novel-she sympathizes with Eve's eating the apple in the Garden of Eden, for instance, "just to get away from Adam"-she does have faith. In her father. In her sister Milly. In her cousin Bett. Even in her mother, with whom she has a complicated relationship. Father Rice's loss of religious faith is a bit of a mirror to Twiss' loss of faith that everything will be okay again for her and her family.
The Bottom Line: Twiss and Father Rice need something from each other and from themselves, which they work out in the letters they write to one another. They tell each other secrets. They counsel one another. They question. They forgive.
JH: What role does your faith play in your writing?
RR: Although I grew up without a lot of exposure to religion, I was baptized in the Catholic Church at the urging of my stepmother when I was eight. I was happy to be baptized, mostly because all of my school friends had been baptized and I desperately wanted to be like them, to fit in. I wanted so much to go to their Sunday schools and sing in their choirs and recite their Scripture passages, and my stepmother wanted this for me, too, although her reasons were probably different than mine. (For the record: at my pleading, my mother bought me a children's Bible, which I would read on Sunday mornings in my bed. My mother refers to this as my Holy phase.)
Whenever I was visiting my father and stepmother, they would take me to church, which I would try with all of my newly blessed heart to enjoy. The overall and final trouble was that mass frightened me-their was a lot of suffering, blood, and violence!-the wooden pews hurt my knees, and the music that was supposed to be uplifting made me think of all the people buried in the cemetery just beyond the ornate stained glass windows. I was experiencing fear-based faith, which to me is the worst kind.
Eventually, I stopped asking to go to church when I visited, and eventually my father and stepmother stopped going, too. My stepmother thinks it's pretty hard to have faith in an institution that has abused so many children without much consequence. My dad is happy to go fishing instead. It took me a long time to understand that church walls, or any walls for that matter, don't bind faith. It is much more powerful than that.
When I sit down to write, I think about faith in a myriad of ways, but one of the things I always believe is that, in the end, my characters will be okay.
JH: What is the one true thing -- the essential truth -- of The Bird Sisters?
RR: 1) Love is timeless. And...
1 ½ ) Everyone, and I mean everyone, deserves it.
Rebecca Rasmussen live in St. Louis, Missouri with her husband and daughter, where she teaches writing and literature at Fontbonne University. In addition to writing, she's an avid reader, is training for a half-marathon, and bakes a mean pie.
