Q&A: Lorine Kritzer Pergament

An Interview With the Author of "What to Make of Her"

​by Ambar Pardilla

You expect to find the most trite trinkets when searching through someone else’s desk: paper clips, pencils, scissors, staples, and, if you’re lucky, maybe a leftover piece of chewing gum. It’s a place for reverie, reflection, planning, and perspiration. But sometimes a desk can carry secrets, like bills you can’t pay for or letters from your lover. What happens when a confidant or even a stranger stumbles into those things? This is where Lorine Kritzer Pergament’s “What to Make of Her” starts, when Eva combs through her now-deceased friend’s desk and discovers her diary. Eva comes to see that she has a cosmic misunderstanding of their almost familial friendship.

Pergament has contributed her work to Gargoyle and Penn-Union. Her piece “Coming of Age” was published in Bridges and her short story, “Smell the Roses on Your Own Time,” appeared in Amazing Graces: Yet Another Collection of Fiction by Washington Area Women. She’s currently working on a book.
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Ambar Pardilla: What was the inspiration for the story?

Lorine Kritzer Pergament: That story just came out of my head.

I was assigned a story by Margaret Myers [at Hopkins], who was my instructor and who became my mentor and friend. She was my thesis advisor. It was “Fiction Techniques” [class] — she went through the different elements of fiction. But then we each had to write a short story. She didn’t give us any topic. No prompt. It just came to my head.

None of the people are people I know. The only thing — I had a friend whose parents came from Poland and that was how her mother talked. I can remember from childhood. The character of Eva herself wasn’t my friend at all. But I just sort of got the parents, that ethnic thing in because I thought it was an interesting juxtaposition between her parents and Cece’s parents, who were WASPy. I liked having the difference between them and yet, they became good friends.

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AP: Do you remember the first scene that came to you?

LKP: I was writing that story off the seat of my pants. Just sat down and let it flow.

AP: The title of the story stuck with me throughout, especially since there was a tension between what Eva thought of Cece and what we felt about Cece. So I was curious about what you made of, thought of Cece?

LKP: I thought she was just a really interesting person and somebody I admire. I would have liked to have that basic confidence in myself. Now I do but I’m older. It took many years to get that confidence. But Cece’s the kind of person who just has it all her life and breezes through life. And then ends up having a brain tumor. That’s kind of ironic — to see who she is, this perfect person who could do anything and yet not save her own life.

AP: Since Cece is at the heart of "What to Make of Her," could you discuss the choice to have Cece already dead at the start of the story? Did you wrestle with trying to understand what to make of her while showing the reader how other characters saw Cece?

LKP: When I started the story, my focus was on Eva’s loss. As I got more into it, I became more interested in knowing Cece. I did wrestle with what to make of Cece, and I’m still not sure of exactly who she is. I think if I went back to make the story into a novel or a collection of connected short stories, I would be able to learn more about her.

AP: We never see Eva really condemn Cece even as she finds out all of these things that she never thought her friend would do. The friendship between them was something so special, especially considering how women are always seen as competing against each other.

LKP: She obviously has mixed feelings as she’s reading about Cece’s adventures. First she reacts, “Oh my God, I can’t believe she did this and then “Why didn’t I think of this?” and finally "Why didn’t I know?” All these different thoughts are going through her head. She has the feeling, which her husband in the end confirms for her, that they always knew Cece was weird -- she was “a unique package” and that she was going to do things that other people didn’t do. (“A Unique Package” was actually my original title for the story.) I had another whole scene, which I barely mentioned in the final draft where Cece went to Cape Cod with a biker guy, and Eva got very upset.
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Eva’s Eva. She never really gets that judgmental about it. In the end, she only gets hurt because she thinks that maybe she wasn’t Cece’s best friend after all.

AP: Did it hurt to cut that scene?

LKP: It really wasn’t necessary. After all these years of writing, you have to learn when to just cut. In the beginning, you think every word you write is God’s gift to the world and then you realize, a lot of it is crap. [laughs] Boy, you really are making me think about this, more than I have before.

AP: One of the details that I think really showed us who Cece was when she listed the men she slept with in her diary alphabetically, but nicknaming them Mr. A through X. Where did that idea come from?

LKP: What I think I thought at the time was that if she named them, it would be personal. But if she just called them Mr. A, Mr. B, and so on, she could be more objective about it. She started doing it was because was doing an article and helping a magazine writer. The magazine I was thinking of was Ms. magazine.

When I was in my 20s and 30s, Ms. was a big deal because it was the first liberated magazine for women. Every other magazine before that for women was on how to polish a floorboard or buy detergent or decorate your house. Really, all these women magazines were awful. There were no role models for liberated women.

I thought this was more scientific in a sense because she was doing research and keeping track — her diary was her research notes. It just came to me. Some things just come to you and you’re grateful because you like it. I really appreciated when Eva meditates on how Cece’s passing leaves her with the pressure of dealing with Cece’s family and past — looking at grief with sadness but also madness.

AP: Could I ask about where that came from?

LKP: This is what I’ve learned in life.

When my parents died — wow — it hit me like a ton of bricks. I remembered all the feelings and everything I went through when I was writing this. It’s a very complicated thing when you lose somebody. All the things you wished you had said. The things you wished you had asked. Why did I know this? Why didn’t I know that? Why? Why? Why? The person I’m closest with now is my husband. I know if God forbid he dies, I’m going to say, “Why didn’t I do this” or “Why didn’t I say this?” or “Why didn’t I ask this?” But I don’t know what it is I want to ask or say. I tell him I love him. It’s not that. Who knows what it’s going to be?

I think that’s one of the things about being a human being, that things are complex. It’s the complexities that make writing such an endeavor because if everything were easy, there wouldn’t be anything to write about.

AP: I noticed that you contributed to Bridges, a Jewish and feminist journal, and I was wondering how both of those things inform your work?

LKP: The kind of Judaism I grew up with, we weren’t religious. We were secular Jews. We belonged to a synagogue when I was growing up. I went to Hebrew school. But then, in those days, my brothers both had bar mitzvahs, and I was going to have a bat mitzvah. My grandmother said, “Oh I don’t care. Why don’t you have a ‘Sweet Sixteen’ instead?” At that time, girls weren’t as important as boys in the religion. So there was no feminism in my Judaism.

The feminism came in when I was living in New York and single in the early 70s, before I got married. Everyone was reading the feminist books at that time. The Feminine Mystique. I was torn because my parents were very big on education so you couldn’t get married before you went to college. You have to go to college and finish college. But then you should get married after that. And so if I were a real feminist would I get married? It was this kind of ambivalence inside me about whether I really wanted to be a feminist or not. But I realized I could do everything. That that was what feminism was really about, that you could do what you wanted.

The Judaism more affected more culturally more than religiously. I’ve always had a sense of being Jewish and what it means in different societies. I remember wanting to know if it was more important that I was Jewish or American and at one time I asked that question. I don’t know where it came from. My mother said, “You’re an American first. You’re a Jewish- American.” That was made clear to me. But there was always that sense of “We’re Jewish and it makes us a little different than everyone else.” I guess it comes out in my writing in bits and pieces. I don’t think I make it a huge thing, but it’s there. The feminist part, that comes out because I really believe that women should be who they need to be and want to be.

AP: Have you read any work recently that really resonated with you?

LKP: I’m reading a book right now for one of my book clubs that I’m in. It’s called The Last Painting of Sara de Vos. It’s about a Dutch woman who was a painter back in time of Rembrandt. She actually was the first woman who was accepted into the Painter’s Guild but she still wasn’t allowed to put her name on anything. Part of it is about her and part of it is about a woman in New York who is an art restorer who is asked to make a copy of her last painting. The only thing that was left of her. I’m still reading it but it’s really well written. I keep wanting to go back to it and that’s a good book as far as I’m concerned.

AP: You seem drawn to both writing and reading historical fiction. Why do you think that is?

LKP: I never thought about that but that’s true. I guess it’s interesting to read about the past and imagine what it was like to live at that time. That history adds an element of authenticity to fiction in my mind.

AP: Could you describe the DC women writers community and why it’s necessary to have an anthology like Grace in Darkness right now?

LKP: Richard Peabody got so many of us together just by doing these books. He’s a saint when it comes to encouraging women to write. He was teaching in Hopkins at the time I started there. I was going to take one of his classes, a novel class, but I didn’t because I didn’t think I had enough done. But then he also always had a novel class on the side which he would teach in different places. The year I took it he taught it out of his house. We were in his basement. I’ve just known him for years.

Making a place, an anthology, of women’s work — the fact that he made it DC women’s work was because he realized that this is a place where there’s so many good writers. People think all the good writers are in New York or LA, but it’s not true.

Right now, it’s very comforting to have, to be involved in. It’s a big honor for me.

AP: Whose work in Grace in Darkness are you excited to see and why?

LKP: I’m excited to read all the stories and to get to know the writing of some DC area women writers with whom I am not yet acquainted.

AP: What other Washington women writers do you follow and hope to see in the Grace and Gravity series?

LKP: There are a number of excellent women writers in the area: Leslie Pietrzyk, Mary Kay Zuravleff, Margaret Meyers, Paula Whyman, Carol Parkhurst Rosser, Susan Muaddi Darraj, Rosalia Scalia, Rose Solari, Susan Coll, Cynthia Atkins, Lauren Francis-Sharma, Robyn Goodman, Faye Moskowitz, Cecilia Capuzzi Simon, Lara McLaughlin, the late Ann McLaughlin, Grace Cavalieri, and of course, Melissa Scholes Young, to name just a few. Most of them have been published by Richard Peabody in the "Grace and Gravity" series or in Gargoyle, his literary journal, and many have had one or more novels published.