In the first of our feature interviews, we profile The Australian Women’s Weekly author of the month, Lisa Michaels, about her book Grand Ambition (Hodder headline $34.95).
Q. You are the mother of twin boys, how old are they and do twins run in the family? A. They are the result of fertility drugs and they are 10 months old. My husband’s sister has twins, also from taking fertility drugs, so when people say ‘do they run in the family?’ We say ‘no, they run in the pharmacy’.
Q. How far into the pregnancy did you know you were having twins? A.Really early on. My husband’s a doctor. We were totally bowled over and when he said ‘there’s two there,’ I just started laughing inappropriately. I think it was the shock. Then he immediately began waving the wand around madly to see if there was another one.
Q. Grand Ambition is about an adventure gone wrong, but I understand you’ve had some risky experiences, getting lost in India and in the Grand Canyon, which is the setting for your book? A. I’m not a particularly intrepid sort, I just think the things that happened to me were the result of youthful folly. I really had the idea when I was young that I was supposed to do things that I frightened me. I really pushed myself, beyond my limits and a lot of time it was ‘great!’ and I felt stronger as a result of it. Then I kept following that path and I ended up getting into some terrible scrapes because of it. I think I finally decided that now, if I am terrified of something then that’s a pretty good idea that it’s inadvisable (laughing).
Q. Were you working on an idea for the book when you went hiking into the Grand Canyon with your husband? A. No! I was heading off on a hiking trip to the bottom of the Canyon with my husband in December. We thought it was a great idea because it is the same elevation as Phoenix, Arizona which is scorching hot desert, so we thought it would be a warm place to hike in December. The day before we left we stopped off at a gift shop on the rim (of the Canyon) and I read in this history book the story of Glen and Bessie Hyde and I was very taken with it. And there was a photograph of them in this chapter which I’ve used in the frontispiece of my book. They were so striking, stylish in that 1920’s, aviatrix, cool kind of way. I was intrigued with what had happened to them and I might have forgotten it, but then when we went down into the Canyon and a horrible storm blew up and we had this adventure, it was really bad. We made it out alright, but I suddenly started thinking about this story in a new light. Because I was really interested in what went on between my husband and I on that trip. Who got strong and who got weak. And all the dynamics that we had established between us had been set up in safe, homey circumstances and they went out the window in this life and death situation. When you are pushed in a situation like this you find out things about yourself that you never knew. That you never would have otherwise found out. I would never have said that I would be the one to be so certain about what we ought to do. I think that really it is true about women having a good visual memory, an eye for detail. So when we were trying to hike out on the trail I was the one who said ‘I’m certain it is that rock, I remember it for sure’ we went around the right of it, it had that funny ochre colour, I know we’re on the right track.’ Whereas my husband was more trying to look at a map which was basically useless, because the trail was covered with snow. Anyway we got to the rim and I thought ‘God, I’d love to write a novel about those people.’ But at that point I was a poet and I just thought I didn’t have the staying power to write a novel. It’s one thing to scribble a poem on a napkin and then oops! You’re done for the day. To write fiction you really have to plonk yourself into the chair and almost get sores on your bottom. I didn’t know if I had the stamina for fiction. So I ended up writing a memoir about growing up as a child of the sixties, and that was easier because it was material that was close to me and the people were real and the plot was there and it just poured out of me. Then I felt more confident I could write a book.
Q. Did the fact that the Hyde’s story was a real one, encourage you as well? A. It really appealed to me that it was based on a true story. I love the shape of real, particular, human lives – the way they surprise you, there’s always something totally unexpected about the things someone did so when I went about researching it. There was fairly scant amount of information about them. Anything I knew to be true I didn’t change. I read about the writer William Styron saying that historical novelists do best with thin rations.’ And that’s really what I had in this case because I had the outlines of the story and a teeny bit about who they were but none of their inner lives.. .it was like I had a jig-saw puzzle with a few of the pieces and I needed to make this whole picture that was going to match up with the known.
Q. It was a strange coincidence that you read about this dreadful misadventure and to have one yourself – and that you just happened to be a writer? Do you feel like it was all destined to happen? A. Yes, odd isn’t it? Also, I had studied poetry in the (San Francisco) Bay area and Bessie had studied art in the Bay area. She was my window into the story and in a way I hoped that I wasn’t being presumptuous, I felt that I was telling the story that she didn’t get a chance to tell.
Q. Bessie was an unusual woman for her time? A. Yes, I really admired her. I just thought she was someone who was trying to push the limits to what was possible for her gender. In every way, not only the physical but all the moral decisions that she made up to the point that she met Glen, travelling cross country by train on her own in 1927 and enrolling in arts school when the career options for women were to become a headmistress or school teacher or a housewife. I found these news clippings about them when they were visiting – the Hydes made the newspapers in San Francisco – and on the back of them were ads for corsets which were maternity abdominal binders. Can you imagine wearing a corset when you’re pregnant? I thought, ‘God the irony of here she was, doing the thing that strapping men would have been terrified to do at a time when nobody would really even take women seriously.’ And I read a bit about Leanne Morell Lindberg and how she went on some amazing adventures trying out this North Pole route to the Orient and the reporter asks her how she’s going to arrange the lunch boxes!!!!!!!! Bessie was an amazing woman and I would hope that if by some strange alchemy she were to read the story that she would feel that at least if it wasn’t exactly the truth, it did her justice.
Q. Was there a gravestone or any kind of memorial erected after the couple perished? A. No, nothing, they never found their bodies and nobody knows what happened to them and all that part about finding their boat with all their belongings intact was true, including Bessie’s diary. The pieces in the book from her diary are actual entries. That was a real document that I found gathering dust in the archives.
Q. They were a pretty brave couple? A. Even getting as far as they did was an enormous accomplishment, but you know if you shoot for some amazing goal and miss it by inches you just fall into obscurity and people say you were foolish. If you make it you are a hero. That was the gamble they were taking and I think a lot of people thought they were crazy. But look at the life Lindbergh had. After making it across the Atlantic, he became independently wealthy and had all these options and I think it was the classical American dream story. Wanting to pull off this feat that would vault them into this whole other life.
Q. Were there any descendants of the Hydes, or relatives who came out of the woodwork after the book was published? A. I have found about Glen’s sister’s son, his nephew, who is still alive. There were very few living relatives. So I came to a lot of dead ends. And I tried to find track down living relatives and I couldn’t find them. After the book came out I made contact with Glen’s nephew and he was really happy. There were a lot of crazy, wild rumours that grew up about them, they were subject to Grand Canyon lore and one of the wild speculative stories was that Glen had been a big bully who had twisted Bessie’s arm into going because as the first woman who’d run the rapids, she was the claim to fame and when she didn’t want to continue, he forced her back on the boat. Finally, she got fed up and killed him and hiked out and went into hiding. It was really painful for the family because according to all the reports that I could find Glen was an incredibly gentle, kind human being who loved his wife. And his nephew was just so sorrowful about those rumours. It is so much more interesting to me that they were madly in love, and each had their own reasons for making the trip. It’s the way a marriage is…you’re not necessarily bent on the same goal but you have these complimentary ambitions together.
Q. So how did you decide what really happened to the Hydes? A. It was part sleuthing, part guess-work. I went to this library (Huntington) in Los Angeles and looked up the archives of an amateur historian and there were the photographs from the camera they found in their boat! So I really studied those photographs. Whenever they were on land they were wearing these knee-high lace-ups. Whenever they were on the boat they were wearing slipper like tennis shoes, sort of like wrestling shoes. And because the knee-high lace-ups were still on the boat when it was eventually found, that said to me that they didn’t get separated from the boat while they were trying to hike out. Also, in the archives there was a lot about the rapids just downstream from their last known stopping point. Bessie kept track in her diary of every single rapid they ran – I think she was actually making notes as they were running them. The day the diary breaks off there are notes up to a certain point of this major side canyon that they had passed. Very experienced river runners then speculated by working out what was downstream between where they were last known to have stopped and where there boat was found. And there are some rapids in there that people think ‘okay, well this one and that one might have been a problem. This one was trickier than it looks, it looks like it’s not big, but there’s rocks here.’ I looked into that stuff and I looked at the pictures and I also thought, that’s the way accidents happen, they happen very quickly and without warning. And I wanted that sense of how they were so close to the end, it’s like heartbreaking – they had come 400 and some odd miles and they had literally 12 miles to go before they would have been out of the white water. They were probably nearing the end and getting hasty, they slipped up. I wanted that sense of the way it totally catches you off guard because that’s the way accidents happen, suddenly and without warning.
Q. Any theories as to why their bodies were never found? A. The Grand Canyon was almost totally uninhabited at that point so there weren’t very many people to see a body floating by and because the Colorado at that time was a free running river without a dam, it was thick with silt. That’s why they call the Colorado a river that doesn’t give up its dead because the clothes get filled and it weighs you down and you sink. A lot of the people who drowned on the river who were a part of the pioneer expeditions, were never found.
Q. Your description of the exhaustive search for the couple by Glen’s father is heartbreaking … did this take place in reality? A. Yes and I have to say if I was ever lost in the Gran Canyon, that is the man that I would want looking for me. He wouldn’t stop searching. I really admired him and now having children of my own, I have a little bit of a glimmer of how you just couldn’t rest. To think that you didn’t look hard enough and that they were waiting for you to go to that last, enth degree, you wouldn’t be able to sleep at night if you gave up too easily. I think he was obsessed. I think that he adored his son and that they had an unusually close relationship. And I don’t think there could be anything more painful than losing a child. It’s not the natural order of things you’re meant to go before them. He was an old man and he couldn’t, let it go.
Q. I’m told the book looks like being made into a movie? A .Yes, there are a couple of offers at the moment and I’m trying to figure out where to go with it.
Q. Do you think you were meant to go on that trip? A. Yes. And of course, when I think about it, the fact that I discovered the Hyde’s story relates back to being female…usually, it’s women who do the leg work for holidays, buying maps and the books etc. I know with my husband, I’m always the one who does the reading before we go somewhere. I think books come out of that weird alchemy between subjects and themes that were preoccupations of mine before I came to the story. Where’s the line between risks that you take that makes you stretch as a person and risks that get you to a terrible place that you ought never have gone? It’s so hard to know. I think a lot of it depends on the ending. All the misadventures that end with people safe and well become great stories to dine out on and they say something about your resourcefulness. But there is this natural process as you get older where you grow more and more cautious. I look back at the things I did when I was younger and I literally get goose bumps. What was I thinking? How could I have done that? That could so easily have gone the other way. I could have lost my life and I was fortunate. But I think that is the nature of youth and you have to tip your hat to that because I think we’re all the beneficiaries of some of these wild adventurers and in a sense, the brave/crazy things that people have done over the years. Like Lindbergh, he really did pave the way for modern aviation. Someone had to be the path breaker. I don’t want to be that person that any more, but I really admire people who do.
Q. You suffered from hypothermia and your husband got frost-bite when you were lost in the Grand Canyon – were than any long term health problems afterwards? A. His big toes are pointed now. He still has them but they are just a little narrower (laughing). I recovered fairly quickly. He got me some warm water and put me in front of the fire. I was like vomiting and fainting. I think I was dehydrated and hypothermic. But it was a quick recovery. But God you know, it’s just amazing, I can still remember the feeling of slipping into that warm bed that my sister-in-law made for us that first night back in civilisation and the meal they fed us and the hot shower. You suddenly feel that your life has returned to you and it was so sweet, like for a week you walk around in this incredibly heightened state of consciousness of the beauty of life and the simple gifts, like a glass of water that doesn’t have silt in it. Part of what the Hydes were going after was that edge that makes you feel so alive and that fades after a while and you’re back to your humdrum life. And then you have to go do it again.
Q. Your book is a true blend of fiction and fact? A. I felt like so many of these weird experiences that I had, ended up serving me in writing the story, things I have lived through. Fiction is really very seductive in a way because you use your experiences in print form, but then there’s that wonderful feeling that you’re going on this flight of fancy… this person who you hope is so particular, that they start to seem real. But the book is not really autobiographical, I had already written my autobiography and dealt quite squarely with my own material. In some ways I think that really freed me up to go into the imaginary life of a person and that was really a pleasure to put together piece by piece.
Q. How long have you been married? A. Since 1995, but we have been together for 15 years, gone on many different adventures, many different incarnations, from wild hippy college student through to our present life. He’s a great guy, Mauricio.
Q. The names of your sons? A. Ethan and Joshua.
Q. Another book planned? A. I have a two book contract. I am in the very early stages of my next book which is another novel…purely fiction. The jumping off point was something I read about, how they’re coming up now with the software that can quite realistically reproduce a person’s voice. This triggers this whole stream of thought for me. And a whole load of stuff for me because writing a memoir you run into all this stuff, about memory and authenticity and the voice. I was really interested with Grand Ambition, finding, once it was out, how interested readers are in finding out what parts are real and what parts are made up. So I thought this was a wonderful jumping off point for a novel about voice and memory and a bit of intrigue perhaps.
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