Scarborough, Maine, 1970
Taken by the author’s mother from the west window of his childhood home
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August: I read “Anyone Can Have a Good Time” as an exploration not only of what a place ends up meaning over time but also how returning to a place can reveal the changes in meaning you associate with it, how there’s an inherent mix of grief and hope because you’re having to let go of what you’ve known, but you’re also hoping it’s in good hands in the future.
So, I was wondering if you could talk about what specific grief or hope you felt the speaker in your piece had for his childhood home.
Douglas: To say “grief” on its own doesn’t feel complete for the piece. I think there’s at least one point I verbally backtrack and say, “That’s a lot of negativity. Let’s ease off the negative remembrances or associations with my mother and in my home,” but it doesn’t really go far from that—an almost-romanticism of the landscape and the structure. But there are no real positive memories shared, you know? I think maybe that was unconscious, but it also wasn’t accidentally there. I have a very hard time thinking positively about my childhood and about the place where I grew up, so making that homecoming in the last part of the essay was kind of scary.
I didn’t really know what to expect. I had been gone for so long and had changed so much, and there was really nothing left in that part of the world that I had any connection to except for the landscape and the house itself. I had no friends left; there’s no family left. So, I really didn’t know what sort of experience I would have. I was absolutely prepared for it to be terrible and to have a really horrible experience. I think there’s a mention that I may or may not have taken a Klonopin before getting to the house.
August: (laughing) Yeah, it’s in there.
Douglas: But what’s in question is the time of taking that Klonopin. I was definitely self-medicating in order to stay some measure of calm while taking this venture. Honestly, it wasn’t until later that I could reflect on the relief of meeting these new inhabitants of the land and the house.
When I received the information that the Amish had bought the land, I felt safer going there. But there was no way of knowing how it would go, and I had no expectation for a positive experience. At the time, the feeling of relief was totally foreign to me, but later, I realized it was relief.
It was talking to people—my friends especially, who knew this adventure to my homeland was a pretty heavy thing for me to do—that helped me realize the relief I felt. Multiple people were surprised I was recalling the experience in such positive tones, and I think it was my sister-in-law who actually said, “It sounds like you’re relieved that it went the way it did.” So, it took that: someone who really had no connection at all to the landscape or to the people involved in the story to point out what I was really feeling.
August: It’s true: your speaker does mention, I think, that he didn’t expect to be welcomed inside the house or anything. I don’t necessarily want to conflate you and your speaker, but it does seem like you have quite a few shared experiences. Maybe, for you, the piece is just completely nonfiction. Memoir?
Douglas: It is nonfiction! There’s no fictional element to it. It was actually really hard; I don’t typically write nonfiction. I stopped writing nonfiction in the early aughts after the whole fiasco with A Million Little Pieces, a book that was presented as nonfiction about someone’s prison experience. I never read the book, but it was an Oprah’s Book Club selection, and everyone was going crazy for it. And then it was revealed that it was fake! Very little of it had any toehold in reality.
And for several years after that, there was a real draconian approach to nonfiction where, if you didn’t have a written transcript of something, you really shouldn’t be quoting it, and you should refer to it as a paraphrase, and it just became a really uncomfortable place for me. At that point, I was writing nonfiction about my childhood and fragmentary memories, and I was trying to sort out what had actually happened in these random bits of experience I could recall that were unattached to anything else. There were no transcripts.
August: And having to prove that to someone would be nearly impossible.
Douglas: Yeah, and especially as time went on, some of the people died. And there was no way I could contact them. So, I thought, I can’t write nonfiction anymore, and that’s when I began writing fiction more seriously.
Later, when I started trying to write nonfiction, I just hated my own voice. In my own nonfiction, it was hard for me to find a way to talk about my own experience in a voice that didn’t aggravate or bore me, which is why I include the date at the end of the piece, to let readers know this was finished in 2016. And I think there’s a reason why it’s getting published five years after it was written. There are elements of “Anyone Can Have a Good Time” that I started writing in 2006, and it was so hard to tell these stories in a way that didn’t make me bored or aggravated.
August: Does this piece feel done to you now? Complete?
Douglas: It’s actually an extract from the longer novella-length essay that goes into a bit more detail as to the abuse that is referenced early on in the essay and the divorce and custody suit between my mother and father. This is the most concise, excisable portion from that pretty experimental, much longer essay. It’s structured in an unusual way, with fragments of transcripts and reconstructed conversations; it’s also very conscious of the fallibility of memory and the contradictions between what I remembered, what my parents remembered, what my siblings remembered, and what I was willing to talk about.
August: You start the excerpt itself with a fragment of memory: the photograph. You’re questioning actively whether the pistol in the photo is a toy or not, and you start to convince yourself it is, but there’s quite a bit going on with that specific symbol. I’m just thinking generally about the sorts of memory fragments you include, like later on when you’re talking about the Andrew Wyeth painting.
Douglas: In that respect, the essay isn’t complete because it’s part of a larger thing. Also, it’s impossible to write nonfiction in a way that’s like: “And now it’s the end.” Especially if you’re writing about your own life because your life continues.
Having that encounter with Jake and Savilla in my childhood home, and the way that conversation went—especially Jake asking me where the garden should go—as I was saying it to him, I realized it would be the end of whatever this story is. It’s a very natural ending, and I’m lucky to have had that moment and recognized it. It’s not often life gives you those natural, literary moments.
August: Natural is a good word for it.
Let’s talk about some landmarks you mention in the piece, many of which aren’t proper nouns, not places that would mean much to anyone else. I’m thinking of things like the spot in the house where the weasel dodged the gunshot, or the greenhouse that wasn’t quite the best greenhouse because the builder got a little lazy or wasn’t a very good planner.
I’m wondering what makes something feel like a landmark to you.
Douglas: I think a lot of it is the familiarity, the repetition of seeing or passing something over and over again. But it’s also that level of observation, of recognizing what the thing is. Growing up, our farm was over a hundred and forty acres, and almost none of it was being cultivated as a farm. There was a portion where we let a neighbor farmer graze his cows because he didn’t have water on his property, and we thought that was fine. It wasn’t even a trade; we just let him do it. And there was another farmer who would cultivate one of our fields near the house.
But for the most part, it was just wild: woods, rolling woods, weird clearings, meadows. When we weren’t in school, we were just wandering around doing things outside. In that sense, the landscape became as much a companion to me as my brother, who was the only other companion I would have on these adventurous after-school wanderings.
I guess it’s the proximity and repetition of particular place and the acknowledgement of it that makes it a landmark. You know, finding a rock pile in the middle of an overgrown meadow and deciding we’d build a fort out of it, claiming it as our own. Then, in that rock pile, finding a gigantic piece of ledge that no one could move, a rock so big we could smash other rocks against it. That became King Smashy.
So, then it goes beyond being just a landmark and becomes a character with a name. I think for me, so much of it was that loneliness; there was this aching solitude for so much of my childhood that a tree I would go to multiple times a week wasn’t just a tree, it was a place, a destination. And because I would go there to read a book or get high, it became a comfort, a sanctuary. Then it became more than a landmark or a character—I’m engaging with this space. It’s having an impact on me.
August: You talk a lot about the gardens and about horticulture, and you use a lot of different terms. Even someone who’s deeply familiar with an area probably wouldn’t know the scientific name for a plant. I’m wondering if you have specific experience working as a horticulturist.
Douglas: I do! For the first six years after I moved back to Maine, I worked at a landscape nursery. When I entered horticulture, I couldn’t tell you the difference between a larch and a liatris. I was totally plant illiterate. The reason I went into it was because I needed a job, and following the Buddhist idea of right livelihood[1], of doing the least harm in the world, it seemed like growing and selling plants fit that. It’s still an industry: they’re using chemical fertilizers and diesel tractors. It’s not a perfectly clean job. But its overall mission, to me, felt noble.
I’ve always, since I was a little kid, loved having access to information that other people don’t—whether it’s obscure or arcane, knowledge that feels like a secret. In the case of horticulture, it’s like knowing the secret name of a plant. Every plant has multiple common names, but it only has one scientific name. To know that, over time, felt like a sort of intimacy.
Sometimes, you can figure out why a plant is called what it is. The fake Latin of the botanical language reveals the essence of the plant: what its leaf shape is, or its color, or the texture of its leaves. That really appealed to me, and I latched onto it. Since then, I’ve worked in landscaping, and I’m currently the harvest foreman for an apple orchard. So, in some ways, that horticultural knowledge has become more specific to apples and to cultivated crops. Recently, my partner and I have spent much of our free time and expendable cash building and expanding on the gardens around our house. It’s wonderful; I love it so much. Last year, during the pandemic when I was by myself a lot, I would spend hours not doing anything—not planting or getting my hands in the dirt—just wandering among the gardens, looking at the plants. In a sense, having a silent dialogue with them, having a relationship with something that’s not human, not animal.
I think that ties directly into the question you asked before about what a landmark is, what makes something a landmark. In these gardens, we created a territory, and the things in the garden have become characters for me and my partner. When we’re referring to different plants in our garden, we refer to them as if we’re talking about our friends or neighbors. And when something happens to one of the plants, there’s a sense of excitement or mourning.
August: So, I’ve got, above me, a lovely pothos[2], and he had spider mites last week, and I was terrified! I went right to Tractor Supply and got some neem oil and put it on a paper towel, and as I rubbed each leaf, it felt like I was bathing him, like I had a baby and was bathing him with a cloth.
Douglas: Last year, a shrub we planted in our yard had scale. It’s a small magnolia[3], at that point maybe only five feet tall, and I would go out every day and look for scale. There are chemical applications and systemic insecticides, but really, the most immediate, effective, and gratifying thing is to just squish the scale. To pop these weird, blistery insects clinging to the bark. I did that every day for almost two months, and I got rid of it. And the scale didn’t come back this year, so I think I actually did the job I was supposed to, but that level of dedication to a plant isn’t something you see very often.
I’m glad it’s something you shared, could identify with—the need to take care of this living thing that, in a way, completely depends on you.
August: I really like the “silent dialogue” you mentioned. It feels like the conversation you have with Jake and Savilla in your piece is informative for them—you’re sharing what specifically you’re familiar with, and they have questions about why their house is the way it is, and you’re answering them—but more than that, you’re walking around, having a sort of conversation with yourself, and with your past self, realizing how the place has changed. Like, when you saw that there was trash on the ground, it seemed like you were really disappointed. You wrote, “Why with intention make shitty something so nice?”
Douglas: Yeah, there was this big chunk of broken Styrofoam frozen in a snowbank. Why would you do that?
There’s definitely a conversation happening beyond the obvious conversation with Jake and Savilla. When we’re coming down the road, my partner, Genevieve, sees the windmill and gets really excited, like, “There’s a windmill here!” I think: Oh, yeah. It was a fairly new addition to the property, something my mother had installed a year or two before she died, and it was something she had wanted and talked about for a long time. But I didn’t even think to mention it.
I was taking it for granted, I guess. It was such an integral part of my memory of the farm in its later years. And then everything else: seeing these plants I had put in, seeing the ones that survived and the ones that hadn’t. It was like seeing old friends, or maybe just acquaintances, people you knew in high school. I hadn’t really thought about them, but there they were, and it was like, “Oh! It’s actually good to see you! I may not have been thinking about you at all in the time we were apart, but now that we’re back together, even if it’s only for a few minutes, I’m very happy to see you. I’m glad you’re still here.”
August: At some point near the end of the story, you say, “This place is no longer mine. But it’s safe.” Could talk about whose house you feel it is now?
Douglas: In meeting Jake and Savilla and spending a surprising amount of time with them–we were there for a couple hours–I saw they were taking care of it. And not just that they want to grow on the land, they’re taking care of the building itself. There was a nurturing spirit between them that they radiated and invited us into. That’s the safety I was thinking about.
Also, it wasn’t just them. They were part of a community. They didn’t actually own the house; the Amish community owned the house. Whether they were there or not, there would always be someone watching out for it, and not just the house but the land too, making sure it’s healthy. Whether they’re using the fields to grow food or just letting it go fallow for a while, they’re being stewards of the place. That felt correct. That seemed like what my mother always wanted but maybe wasn’t always able to have in her life: space that was safe and nurturing and sustainable.
I described the farm as an isolated outpost on a hill, and it very much was that. The nearest neighbor was a quarter mile away, but that house burned down, and the next-nearest house was a half mile away. So, we were very isolated, geographically speaking.
Also, my mother was very hermetic, so the house was insular, and we were isolated from everything. Not only were Jake and Savilla welcoming, they were part of a community. They weren’t just these two people in a very old house at the end of the road; they were part of something bigger, which was very different from my experience living in that house.
August: You talk about the ghost of your mother who, at some point, was haunting you or the house itself, and there’s this motif of her wanting to lie down “like a fox in tall grass” and die. You’re self-aware about how romantically you see this, how much you want for her to have the easiest passing she possibly can. And then, in some sense, that hope is taken away by the hospital in a pretty tragic scenario.
Douglas: Right, and like I said earlier, I finished the essay in 2016, but that detail remains true: I still, several times a week, have dreams about my mother. At this point, in the dreams, we’re well past the knowledge that she’s dead. It’s known in our dream-relationship that she’s dead, I’m dreaming, we’re doing something, probably at the farm, often very banal, domestic stuff.
It’s weird because, when I’m awake, I’m not aware of thinking about her or where I grew up. I don’t think I’m thinking about it. But clearly, she’s still in my mind. She’s been dead for thirteen years, and I’m still visiting with her in my dreams a couple times a week. I say in the essay that I think we have a better relationship now than we ever did, which seems like such a shitty thing to say. But it’s true. In the longer version of this essay, I dig into that a lot more, how complicated my relationship with my mother was. That was part of the craft of making something small out of something much bigger: giving enough information without having to unspool the entire lifelong ball of it.
August: What was it like for your partner, Genevieve, to be with you during your trip back? Did you feel her presence?
Douglas: She was very present in a quiet, supportive way. You know, you can only fit so much into any story, so her presence–especially in the conversations with Jake and Savilla—was small in the essay, but she was engaging, sometimes more than I was. She had questions too. She was entering the space for the first time, only having heard stories about it, so she wanted to understand why things were the way they were.
I accepted the invitation to give the reading at my former high school, but if Genevieve hadn’t wanted to go with me, I wouldn’t have visited the farm; I would have driven straight to the school and back. I was really scared. Threats had been made against my life by my stepfather, and I didn’t know if his kin were living in the house and eager to make good on that threat. I didn’t know what sort of psychic wound might be reopened by entering the space, and I wasn’t interested in risking it on my own.
That’s all part of the story, that the visit was completely facilitated by Genevieve. Her interest was necessary for me to make the trip and, by extension, for me to write this essay. I feel super fortunate and mostly undeserving of the partnership we’ve been able to build over all these years.
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[1] For more on the Buddhist idea of right livelihood, consider listening to a brief explanation here.
[2] This plant goes by many names (money plant, devil’s ivy), and though it’s often called a “pothos,” it’s not actually a member of the Pothos genus. Its Latin name is Epipremnum aureum.
[3] The plant Douglas is referring to here is probably Magnolia sterrata, sometimes called star magnolia.