A Conversation with Porter Shreve
Author of When the White House Was Ours
How did the idea for When the White House Was Ours originate?
The source of the novel goes back to some of the most eventful years of my childhood in the early 1970s, when my parents received a start-up grant to open an alternative school in Philadelphia. Along with my uncle and his hippie friends, who had just returned from a long, strange (six year) trip out West, my family taught a series of courses, many of them experiential, where they’d use the city as a classroom, studying graffiti as part of art history, for example, or coming up with neighborhood revitalization projects to propose to local aldermen. My parents only lasted a couple years before money got too tight and they had to look for new jobs, though I did recently learn that the school survived for several years afterward. In my novel, I’ve used some of the actual courses my family taught, as well as the real name of the school, “Our House,” borrowed from the Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young tune. But beyond that and a few anecdotes based on true events, like the time my uncle invited some Mormon missionaries and Hari Krishnas to debate each other, this is a work of fiction.
Generally speaking, do you think of your fiction as autobiographical?
My three novels have all been inspired by family stories. The Obituary Writer goes back to my grandfather’s unlikely friendship with a young widow he met while working at the Cincinnati Post; Drives Like a Dream began when I was wondering how my mother must have felt when all four of her kids moved away from DC, where she’d raised us with an all-for-one, one-for-all communal spirit; and When the White House Was Ours is based on my family’s alternative school. Invariably, I begin writing a story as it actually happened, then characters and situations I can never anticipate appear out of nowhere and take over. Often the secondary characters, like the hippies Tino, Cinnamon and Linc in When the White House Was Ours create trouble for the protagonist and the clash has a transformative effect, rendering him or her less familiar to me and in the process loosening my imagination so that by the end of the story there’s little relationship to autobiography, at least in factual terms, though its emotional core remains.
Why did you decide to set When the White House Was Ours in Washington, DC, during the bicentennial, rather than in Philadelphia in the early ‘70s?
I was seven when Our House opened its doors, and though I’ve heard lots of stories about the school my own memories are hazy. I know I took guitar, pottery, and poetry classes and I hung around the Our House coffee shop pretending to be useful. But I recall 1976 very well – it was when I first became aware of politics. My family moved to DC amidst all the bicentennial hoopla, and my father volunteered for Jimmy Carter’s campaign. Like my narrator, Daniel, I became obsessed with presidential history and was so into the bicentennial that I painted my room red, white and blue. I still feel nostalgia for that time, when I sensed my parents’ excitement that a Democrat might win back the White House and bring a new idealism to Washington and the country.
This sounds a lot like what’s going on today.
I do think there are connections between 1976 and 2008. The Middle East is the dominant subject, gas prices are out of control, and everyone’s worried about the economy and rising costs. People also seem tired of Washington insiders, and the candidate who appears to be more of an outsider and who seizes the mantel of “change,” will probably have the best shot at winning. But I didn’t think about any of this while I was writing my novel. I was focused on whether the Truitt family would stay together or fall apart, how the hippies Tino, Cinnamon and Linc would deal with their love triangle, and what kind of havoc the kids who enrolled in the school would wreak. Politics is definitely part of the novel, but it’s more in the texture than on the forefront.
Your title is certainly political. How did you come up with When the White House Was Ours? Did you plan to publish the book during an election year?
I began thinking about the novel during the 2004 campaign season, and was probably so urgent to see George W. Bush retired to his Texas ranch that when it didn’t happen in November I plotted my own small, personal retaliation and titled a book I knew very little about When the White House Was Ours. Like The Obituary Writer, I had the title almost before I’d written a word, and the title took me back to the alternative school, which was something I’d always wanted to write about, and then to the years 1976 and 1977. I remember my whole family standing in the cold on inauguration day watching Jimmy, Rosalynn and Amy Carter walk along Constitution Avenue from the Capitol to the White House. At first I didn’t plan for When the White House Was Ours to come out in an election year, but as the story developed and began to resonate with the elections of 1976, 2000 and even 2008, I realized I was writing both a nostalgic and perhaps even a timely book. The title gave me a firm deadline, too, something we writer/procrastinators are always grateful for.
The inauguration is not the only time the Carters and Truitts cross paths in the book. Did you make a conscious effort to connect the White House where Jimmy Carter lives with the white house where the Truitts start their school?
I was definitely looking to make that connection, but I didn’t want to be schematic or obvious about it. There’s a line at the end of the prologue that sets the idea in motion – “Like Jimmy Carter’s presidency, our years in Washington began with hope then slid into crisis” – and in some ways Pete Truitt and Jimmy Carter are similar. They’re both idealistic; they’re both outsiders who don’t quite understand how Washington works; they both mean well and believe that the White House can run like a family business. And they’re also both victims of their own innocence and stubbornness and of the bad economic timing of the late 1970s, when, as John Updike wrote, “the people out there are getting frantic, they know the great American ride is ending… people are going wild, their dollars are going rotten….”
I also had fun connecting the presidential trivia that Daniel collects in his mini-biographies with some of the events that go on at Our House. The tensions between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson mirror the tensions between Pete and his landlord; the scandals of the Harding Administration are similar to the trouble that certain Our House faculty members get themselves into; and the house seems to be haunted by something: Lincoln’s ghost, perhaps? So in a way the Truitt family is intersecting with many of the first families that lived in the White House — the Carters, especially, but others, too.
You were born and raised in Washington, DC. A true DC native. Yet this is your first book set in Washington. What took you so long?
I was born in DC, then moved with my family to Philadelphia, Charlottesville and Houston before returning in 1976. One reason why I hadn’t written a book set in my hometown is because I needed some distance from the city, both to long for it and to recognize its contradictions. Washington is bureaucratic, a place where people are defined more by what they do than who they are, yet it’s a welcoming, international city, small scale and manageable and less balkanized than most other urban centers. It seems conservative in its outward appearance of order – armed guards, choppers in the sky, statues of horse-mounted generals in every circle – yet it’s one of the most socially progressive patches of land in the country.
I left DC twelve years ago and have spent nearly half my life in the Midwest, which is probably why the Truitts in this novel are a Midwestern family that moves east. My father is fourth generation DC and my mother’s family moved to DC, as many people do, when one of her parents got a government job. So I grew up knowing what it’s like to be from the nation’s capital but also to be just stopping through, and that tension is very much in play in When the White House Was Ours.
The publishing world likes to apply labels – writers come out of a certain school, tradition, region or group. What labels have been applied to you, if any? How would you classify yourself?
I’ve written three novels set in three different cities and have a fourth underway set in yet another. I’ve used first person and third and written from the points of view of a 61 year old woman, an 80 year old man, a 23 year old innocent and a precocious 12 year old boy. So I’m not doing a very good job of classifying myself. I have been called a seriocomic novelist, though I don’t know exactly what that means. I guess I’m neither comedian nor tragedian, satirist nor realist. I do know that my books are more serio than comic – they’re about loss, after all – but at the same time they’re amphibious, like a duck tour. I remember an old Saturday Night Live faux-commercial about a new product called Glimmer. “It’s a floor wax!” says the wife. “It’s a dessert topping!” says the husband. “Hey, hey, calm down, you two,” says the spokesman. “New Shimmer is both a floor wax and a dessert topping!” That’s me, the seriocomic novelist.
Note: Another interview, focused mostly around the connections between 1976 and 2008, can be found at Chelsea Now.