An Interview with
Sandra Scofield

Interviewer Luan Gaines: As an author best known for your fiction, you have stepped into another arena in Occasions of Sin: A Memoir. Was the memoir more difficult than writing fiction? In what way?

Sandra Scofield: It’s more difficult to organize the narrative. You have so much “material” and you have to discover the principle of selection. Lots of events seem significant to you but you have to choose ones that cohere into a meaningful story, and you are stuck with what history gives you. You don’t have the license you do in fiction, so you have to learn new strategies for crafting your story. It’s exciting, though, because it’s the meaning of your life emerging, like an image in the photographer’s bath.

A memoir is a very personal endeavor and takes an enormous amount of courage. How were you able to open your life so intimately to your readers?

By focusing on my mother. I wanted so much to give her her five minutes. I wanted readers to learn what a lovely woman she was and to mourn with me all that she failed to achieve because of circumstance. There must be so many like her in our collective history.

Personally, I identified with many of your childhood experiences, especially “the Catholic school experience”. Why do you think Catholicism was so appealing to you, as a child?

It was so very sensory, filling you with pleasures and promises, and telling what to do, freeing you from small decisions. And for me, specifically, it was what my mother wanted, and I could share it with her and pleasure her with my piety. In time, I thought I could save her with my prayers.

Your mother was described as “having notions”. Interesting phrase and certainly representative of the 1950’s. As an adult, can you now identify with her vague longings?

Oh yes. I had them too. I had a snotty older educated boyfriend once who introduced me to the term “free-floating anxiety.” Perfect term for notions. I always wanted something out-there. Maybe to be an actress? To write? To see Morocco? I was restless and insouciant and indiscreet for so long. Having a child settled me, having a white knight—my husband—freed me to write and that gave me a funnel for all the notions.

You grew up in an era of strict societal mores and acceptable behavior for women. Can you speak to the views so prevalent in the 50’s and how they restricted women’s lives?

My life was “typical” 50’s if there was such a thing. Not a little white house. Like many, I lived a working class life in a family struggling to survive. My grandmother was angry at life’s hand; my mother’s frailties were the center of everyone’s concerns. I was like a little prize calf. In a sense, I could whatever I wanted, because I wanted approval. What ultimately hurt me was that counselors didn’t help girls in high school. I was clueless about college and careers.

Much has been written about the importance of the mother-daughter relationship. To what degree do you think your mother’s influence defined you as a young girl?

Nothing else mattered to me until I was 15 and first started to think about boys. The church, school, it was all an extension of her; achievement and holiness and love were parts of the same thing, pleasing my mother. I didn’t mind because she was enormously proud of me. You have to remember that in the 50’s most of our lives were contained and small, lots of us didn’t even have TVs.

You make a extraordinary statement in the first chapter of Occasions of Sin: A Memoir: “Somehow, in my little girl’s brain, I caught on that if the provisions for ordinary people didn’t suit me, I could just walk away.” How did this concept affect your interactions at school? In the world in general?

I don’t think it was a problem in Catholic school, because I was a rule-follower, and the exceptions all flowed from my high achievement, not from my demands. The problems arose in young adulthood when I didn’t have good judgment about which rules could be broken without serious consequences. I got hurt a lot and most of the time it really was my own fault. Unfortunately, you get dinged harder when your first bad mistakes occur in your 20’s instead of your adolescence.

You had a special connection with your grandmother, even though her relationship with your mother was often strained. How did your grandmother’s constant and unconditional love affect your life?

It saved me most of the time. I called her “Mommy” and I didn’t confide in her and she didn’t tell me what to do, but she was there, you know? I wanted to be with her. I could call her collect. I didn’t have to ask her if I could eat what was in her refrigerator. Every child needs unconditional love, and when you have lost your parents, it certainly saves you to have that kind of grandmother. I’m sure she didn’t understand me a bit but she didn’t care. I was hers.

Thanks to your mother’s enthusiasm, you learned to read at an early age, in fact became an avid reader. Now you are an established author. How important has reading been in your development?

Reading has been experience for me in many ways. It’s been travel and exploration and discovery. It’s been solace and romance and education. I don’t know how people live who don’t read every day. As I grow older, it’s become more interactive; I counter and argue with authors in my head! I have no time for anything less than fine language, provocative ideas, surprises. More and more I read foreign writers, and writers from the 40’s and 50’s.

Regarding the loss of a mother at an early age, in the memoir you state: “You spend years navigating what amounts to chaos, without any sort of reliable compass.” Can you say more about this insightful statement?

I think that’s what I was talking about earlier when I said I was a mess as a young adult. I was flotsam. I’m not saying I hurt other people or committed crimes, but I certainly didn’t have meaningful goals. I didn’t protect myself emotionally. I was starving for connection but scared of abandonment, so I spent time playing hit and run with men. And jobs? Everything was petty. But hey! Nothing is wasted when you end up being a writer!

In contrast to your mother, your father chose to withdraw from the family. How did this lack of involvement impact your definition of yourself? Did it affect your perception of men, in general?

It was devastating, although I didn’t see it just then. I thought a man—a father figure, mind you—could love me right up to one day and then not care anymore. Not want to know if I was well or sick. I still can’t believe he’s never even seen a photograph of my beautiful daughter. He doesn’t know my wonderful husband. So I guess I always thought men would act like that, and I tried to get out first. It was sheer blind luck that landed me with a kind stable smart funny man who never leaves the house without telling me when he will be back. He says he fell in love with me because I told stories.

The majority of your educational years, through early adolescence, were spent in convent school. How did this lifestyle reinforce your sense of isolation?

I don’t think it did. I think of those school years as safe haven. I wish I could have gone to Catholic College, though; I’m sure it would have saved me a lot of later misery and I might have actually learned something. But Daddy’s new wife didn’t see the point of it.

In terms of difficulty, how did living away from home affect your ability to deal with your mother’s chronic illness? Was it more or less difficult?

I know Mother thought it was better for me to be with the sisters, to get a good education, but I wish I had been with her every moment. I couldn’t give her any comfort. I had no intimacy in my life. When I went home in the summers I had to learn to be there. Children are too often underestimated and left out of painful things.

Obviously, the premature loss of a mother brings up issues of abandonment. Did you have any tools to deal with this kind of trauma? Or does this fall into the category “navigating through chaos”?

You got it. Although I don’t think my mother’s death was so much an abandonment thing for me (like it was for my poor angry sister) as it was bafflement: what do I do now? Who am I? Who were you? It’s the loss of opportunity to sort out your sexual identity while you still have a role model. Nobody’s fault, but it happens when you lose a parent, all too often.

Your memoir ends at a particular point of the story, when you are a young woman. My question, then, is: how have you survived your early significant traumas to become a successful woman?

I stumbled along until I had a daughter. I took one look at her—I was almost 30—and I said, hey, if I’m not the grown up here, who is going to take care of her? And that more or less did it. I put her first. I got better jobs. I went back to school. I married a good person. I worked hard. And finally got to start writing, which means I spend my time weighing life and searching for meaning. I’m lucky, there’s no question; the second half of my life has been very fine.

As I mentioned in my review, I see Occasions of Sin: A Memoir as Part One of your life. Will there be a Part Two?

I’m working on a novel but I do plan a second memoir about my 20’s, which took place in the 60’s, that probably gives you the drift. My best friend, Mary, recently gave me a terrific thing—all my letters to her from that time, dozens and dozens of single spaced long, long typed letters. Everything damned thing going on in my life and in my head. I’m calling the memoir “Oh Baby Oh.” I don’t know if I’ll be sympathetic in it but the reader might have some fun looking back with me.

Have your childhood difficulties made you a stronger/better person?

I don’t know. I’m who I am because of them, and I wouldn’t have somebody else’s hangups.

How much has Texas, the landscape of your youth, dominated your imagination when writing?

All the time, eyes open or shut, there's an emptiness and a sadness, that imbues my sensibility. I know that others find that same landscape beautiful. I had an uncle who couldn't bear to be away from it; he thought other places crowded the sky too much! But to me it's like saying, you'll never see anything else. It's yearning.

Do you think visualizing the open plains and vast Texas sky has allowed you to open your mind in ways that might not have been possible, if you were surrounded by lush and complicated beauty?

The funny thing is, I am surrounded by beauty—gorgeous foothills, the dusting of snow in winter, colors in warm weather, behind me a mountain. But when I sit down to write, it’s west Texas, what can I say? You’ve got your sensibility early. I’m sure I was shaped by inexhaustible desire.

It’s one thing to interview a novelist, but a memoir is so personal that some of my questions feel intrusive and a little uncomfortable for me. How has this dialog, the memoir, been a different one with your readers? Or has it?

It’s too soon to know. Talking about it seems natural. The really hard work is behind me, and the big melancholy was all at the beginning. Though there are parts of the memoir I’ll never revisit. I won’t even reread them. And I’m through thinking about Daddy.

You do a number of workshops with writers, one of which is “Deep Story: Writing the Memoir”. Thank you for that generosity. How does your personal experience enable you to help aspiring writers?

I love story! I love letting writers know that their stories matter and they can tell them. I think it’s the combination of my enthusiasm and practicality that makes my workshops work. I do them in summer, so it’s a kind of vacation. I make a lot of friends.

You are a prolific writer. Does this vision of yourself fit comfortably for the future?

It’s my life. Though I’ve decided to start setting some time aside to paint, too.

Do you have any specific projects planned next?

I’m just completing the manuscript of a book for apprentice writers, Scene Sense and Structure. My summer students urged me to get it down. It’s comprehensive, it’s friendly. Then I’m going to get back to a novel I’ve been thinking about for years, set in a seaside Mexico village being overrun by government sponsored tourism. And then, “Oh Baby Oh!”

Have you any comforting words of wisdom for aspiring writers?

Nothing comes fast or easy. Everything is about discovery. You have to think of writing as day labor; you show up. You work. At night, you study. Only you don’t get a paycheck, you get insight and story. And if you don’t get them the hard way, they won’t be worth very much. If you do, they are grace.

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Contributing reviewer Luan Gaines conducted her interview with Sandra Scofield via email for curledup.com. Click here to read her review of Occasions of Sin: A Memoir. For more information, visit the author's website at www.sandrascofield.com.