We are happy today to be talking books with a gifted author. Her name is Ann Putnam and she’s the new author of a memoir called Full Moon at Noontide: A Daughter’s Last Goodbye.
When Ann isn’t writing books, she’s teaching creative writing and women’s studies at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington. She has published short fiction, personal essays, literary criticism, and book reviews in various anthologies such as Hemingway and Women: Female Critics and the Female Voice and in journals, including the Hemingway Review, Western American Literature, and the South Dakota Review. Her recent release is Full Moon at Noontide: A Daughter’s Last Goodbye. You can visit her website.
Q: Can you begin by having you tell us why you wrote this memoir?
A: This is not an easy question to answer, as the writing of the book came out of a series of little notebooks of lines, phrases, sometimes single words I carried with me like a talisman through the months when I lost my father and my uncle, his identical twin. Those notebooks seem like relics to me now because I remember the places I carried them, where I sat when I wrote in them: hospital cafeterias, emergency rooms, ICU unites, hospital hallways, elevators, lobbies. I carried the notebooks to keep me safe, to keep me from rushing out the doors of those hospitals and never coming back. Months after my uncle and my father died (six months to the day apart), I realized I had the beginnings of a book, and a book which I wanted and needed to write, not knowing how it would ever see the light of day. What interest might there be in reading of this inevitable journey taken by such ordinary people? Turned to the light just so, the beauty and laughter of the telling transcend the darkness of the tale.
Q: How did you come up with such a unique title?
A: Well, I had wanted to title the book, Lyric from a Thin Place, but my editor was dissatisfied with that. (That remains as a chapter title.) So after much going back and forth, she pulled a line from my book that said, “she was in that shimmering place where one is kept safe from despair by the tugs and pulls from both the living and dead, where the beloved dead are always a full moon at noontide.” Now the phrase is actually a permutation from a line in a Jewish prayer that says the beloved dead are always with us, like the stars, even though we can’t always see them. I used the moon instead of the stars, because of a conversation I once had with a Peruvian doctor, who explained the Peruvian mythology of the moon, which venerates the moon as stronger than the sun, because we can see it always, even by day.
Q: What was the hardest part to write?
A: I would say the first rough draft was the hardest. The first thing I wrote described the death of my father, which comes late in the book as it was finally sculpted. But I’d written that part for a reading at a conference. It was about six months after my father had died and I thought I was ready to write about it. I didn’t sit at my computer with tears running down my face at all. I was cool and very much the writer at work, telling herself that she could do this just fine. But after about an hour, I would begin to feel ill. And sure enough found myself running a fever—the aches and weariness, the works. I’d take a couple of Tylenol and lie down for an hour or so, and it would pass. So I learned that I could only write about an hour at a time through those summer months. That feeling eventually just sort of left me, and only returned now and then. But as I wrote the memoir, I experienced more losses—the death of my mother, and then when I was doing final revisions, the death of my husband. So I guess now that I look at it, it was all very very hard.
