Allan Appel Photo
Make that the eponymous novel, written by celebrated Goatvillian fictioneer Alice Mattison.
Mattison was on hand Wednesday night reading from The Wedding of the Two-Headed Woman as the centerpiece of the latest installment of Placing Literature: Where Your Book Meets The Map.
Author Mattison and host Williams.
The event drew 30 admirers to the community room of the Ives main library branch. Mattison pointed out that it was once the children’s room she frequented when she was raising her kids in town a few decades ago.
Andrew Bardin Williams, the co-founder of the website Placing Lit, had chosen Mattison’s novel precisely because her entertaining tale of her protagonist Daisy Andalusia, a kind of female erotic adventurer who hops between her developer husband’s bed and that of a Yale professor, is suffused with New Haveniana of all kinds — the city’s restaurants, parks, streets, and, yes, its dark sides and criminality.
There are enough town-gown tensions and recognizable locales to prove the point Williams made in introducing Mattison: “Place doesn’t just enhance understanding of a book; the book enhances our understanding of a place, and to care for it.”
“This is my book for and about New Haven,” Mattison said, in a wide-ranging discussion about the truth of Williams’s assertion, as well as the hows, whys, pluses, and minuses involved in writing about your hometown.
One of Mattison’s interlocutors wanted to know if the book could have been set in any other place. She surmised that it might have been set in another small university town, but “New Haven is unique in my experience. You always know people in more than one way.”
Or, as Mattison wrote in the voice of Daisy: “Each man I slept with connected to someone I knew, or a man whose sister cleaned my teeth.”
Beyond New Haven’s population size, the compactness of its geography contributes to this quality of connectedness, like it or not. “We can’t get away,” she said.
Daisy seems to regale in the city’s diversity as well as its problems. Her business, running an I’ll-clean-up-your clutter service, takes her into many people’s homes in different parts of town. Much to her husband’s dismay, she decides to organize a conference on the murders racking the city, and she gets herself involved in a more-than-weird community theater production, with big awkward puppets, including the eponymous two-headed woman. All this activity builds up an appetite, and Daisy’s peregrinations take her often to Clark’s Dairy, Lulu’s, and Thai and pizzeria eateries aplenty.
One of the pleasures of the book, re-experienced by the audience at the event, is recognizing places you’re familiar with.
One audience member recognized Thai Taste, the restaurant underneath the Hotel Duncan, which Mattison has Daisy call Basement Thai.
The reader wanted to know why, if the author had called Clark’s Clark’s, she didn’t call Thai Taste by its rightful name.
“Because it’s Basement Thai! That’s what we called it my family,” came the answer.
As a New Haven lover, Mattison confessed she was a little concerned that some of her material — for example, Daisy’s conference on the town’s murders — might in the end bring bad publicity for the city. It turned out not to be the case.
“My books don’t get enough notoriety to get negative attention,” she said.
Since members of the audience were writers themselves, and asked writerly questions, Mattison, who teaches in the graduate writing program at Bennington College, offered some concluding advice: “When you write about place, you’re writing about it for people who know it — and, on the other hand, I hope people not familiar with New Haven will be interested.”