TALK SHOW
Hosted by Jaime Clarke

Topic: Childhood Hero

Guests:

T Cooper is the author of the novels Lipshitz Six, or Two Angry Blondes, and Some of the Parts, as well as co-editor of an anthology entitled A Fictional History of the United States with Huge Chunks Missing. T lives in New York City and enjoys monkeys, dogs, and ferrets. Visit T at: www.t-cooper.com.

Lisa Selin Davis is the author of Belly, a novel, and has written about the environment, architecture, real estate and film (and lots of other things) for the New York Times, House & Garden, Paper, Salon.com and many other publications. She lives in Brooklyn. Visit Lisa at: www.lisaselindavis.com.

Ellen Litman is the author of The Last Chicken in America: A Novel in Stories. Her fiction won first prize in the Atlantic Monthly 2003 Fiction Contest, and she's been awarded 2006 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award, as well as fiction fellowships at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Fine Arts Center in Provincetown and scholarships to the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. Her stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Best New American Voices 2007, Best of Tin House, Ontario Review, Triquarterly, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. She is now an Assistant Professor and the Associate Director of Creative Writing at the University of Connecticut. Visit Ellen at: www.ellenlitman.com.

Elissa Schappell is the author of the story collection Use Me, which was a finalist for the PEN Hemingway award, and co-editor with Jenny Offill of the essay anthologies, The Friend Who Got Away and Money Changes Everything. She is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, a founding editor and now editor-at-large of Tin House, formerly senior editor of The Paris Review, and a frequent contributor to The New York Times Book Review. Her essays and stories have appeared in such publications as The KGB Bar Reader, BOMB, SPIN, The Bitch in the House, The Mrs. Dalloway Reader and the forthcoming anthology of sex writing, Do Me.

Amanda Eyre Ward was born in New York City, and graduated from Williams College and the University of Montana. Amanda's first novel, Sleep Toward Heaven, was optioned by Sandra Bullock and Fox Searchlight. Her second novel, How to Be Lost, was chosen as a Target Bookmarked pick and has been published in 15 countries. Amanda's new novel, Forgive Me, is set in South Africa and on Nantucket. She lives in Austin, Texas with her husband and two sons. Visit her at: www.amandaward.com.


––When and how did you first discover him/her?

Cooper: My first awareness of television as a small child involved M*A*S*H, (well, also The Electric Company, but there were, to be sure, no childhood heroes to be adopted from that show). I was born one month after the M*A*S*H television pilot went on the air in September 1972, and I would say that my deep, abiding love for Benjamin Franklin "Hawkeye" Pierce, developed somewhere during the program's fifth or sixth season. I watched the show religiously, both through the two-and-a-half hour series finale in 1983, and in re-runs throughout my high school and college years. (To this day—in addition to owning every season on DVD—I will pretty much always stop and watch an episode on the Hallmark Channel or TV Land whenever I'm flipping through the channels and see it on. And as much as I appreciate all of the characters, the writing, the politics—pretty much everything about that show—it always has been and always will be about Hawkeye for me.)

Davis: The first childhood hero I recall is Wonder Woman—not the 2D comic version but Linda Carter with her tremendous cleavage and strong thighs: so powerful, and yet wearing a tiara! I’m not sure where I saw her, since we were a TV-free household until I entered third grade. But I loved her in that little girl, secular crush kind of way. When I think about it now, those kick-ass chicks—Charlie’s Angels, Bionic Woman—were a thousand times more compelling than the painted and catty women on, say, Dynasty or Dallas. Although I supposed I was interested in them, too. All that mauve blush! That blue eye shadow! For a hippie kid, it was fascinating stuff.

Litman: It was sometime in the spring/summer of 1983. I was nine, finishing second grade. She was a year older – delicate, pretty, with long brown hair and that crackling smile everyone was so crazy about. She looked good in any clothes. She looked good with pigtails and in a forage cap of Young Pioneers. Most importantly, she was American. Her name was Samantha Smith and that spring she was all over the Soviet papers and also on TV. In case you don’t remember (and most people don’t anymore), she was the girl who wrote the letter to the Soviet Secretary General (Andropov), something along the lines of “why do you Russians want to kill us Americans?” – though, of course, she put it much more elegantly. Now, like all normal Soviet children, I was under the impression that it was the other way around, that Americans were the evil imperialists who exploited the poor and threatened the world with a bomb. So clearly, this Samantha girl was confused. Andropov must have thought so too, because he invited Samantha to visit Mother-Russia and see for herself how peaceful and fair Soviet people were.

Schappell: I discovered Katharine Hepburn when I was ten or eleven. My mother and sister and I were visiting my grandparents, and I couldn’t sleep, so I went into the room where my mother was sleeping, and crawled into bed with her. She was watching The Philadelphia Story. I wasn’t allowed to watch much television, and certainly not in bed, so it was all very exciting for me. About five minutes in I thought, “I want to be her.” She was so unlike any other actress I’d ever seen. She was so funny, but unlike the “funny” actresses I knew like Goldie Hawn or TV-personality Susanne Somers, she was witty, and sharp. While she could be daft and goofy, she was never stupid. She was making the joke, or in on the joke, but she herself was never the joke. In movies like The Philadelphia Story and Bringing Up Baby, which required her to do physical comedy (and always she did her own pratfalls because she said her stunt doubles could never capture her carriage) she was in control. And unlike other funny women Gilda Radner, Madeline Kahn, Cloris Leachman she was beautiful. With her red hair and killer accent (I was always working on an accent of some sort) she wasn’t like any one else I knew.


Ward: When I was in junior high, I saw a cool girl at the mall wearing a FREE MANDELA T-shirt. I just wanted the shirt. I thought some of this girl's magic might rub off on me if I could just dress like her. I was a nerd in beaded barrettes and parachute pants. The striped legwarmers didn't get me a second glance, so I pinned my hopes on the shirt. It was red. Some of the cool girls at school shopped in the Village (the East Village of NYC...we lived in the suburbs). I figured I had to get to the Antique Boutique, and then I could buy a FREE MANDELA shirt and get a metal button that showed I had been to The City. I went on a mission with my cousin, but we got lost. We ended up in Chinatown and it got dark and we took a cab back to her apartment and the cab fare cost all my babysitting money. I read about Mandela instead.