Cally Fiedorek is a NYC-based writer who has been awarded a Pushcart Prize and an Emerging Writer Fellowship from the Center for Fiction. Her debut novel Atta Boy follows a young man facing a quarter-life crisis who lands a job as a night doorman in a prestigious Park Avenue apartment building, where he becomes entangled with the wealthy family with hidden secrets.
We asked the author to answer our recurring “A Life of Books” questionnaire so readers can get to know her and her reading habits better.
Is there a book or series that, when you think back, helped define your childhood?
I’ll be in the minority here in saying I was not a big reader as a child. I was a pop culture junkie—music videos, sitcoms and movies were the imaginative fodder, a fact which strikes me now as either pitiable or perfectly alright. I remember reading a few of those novelizations of the movie Clueless (An American Betty in Paris, anyone?) and Goosebumps, of course, but, for whatever reason, the printed page didn’t get its claws in me until late adolescence.
If anything stands out in my memory, it was Washington Irving’s short stories, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip van Winkle.” I sort of liked the idea of those stories more than the stories themselves, but that’s more than enough to make you want to be a writer—the aura that surrounds certain works. Irving’s style is far from timeless—he’s no Poe—but he’s a fascinating writer, a self-assigned mythmaker, who combined the big-city swagger of a burgeoning Manhattan with Northern European legend into a wholly invented American folklore.
Knowing his stories took place, however improbably, in the greater New York area felt impossibly cool to me at the time, the first brush with the vast glamor of the past. It’s probably not uncommon, also, that the horror/supernatural genre provides an entryway into fiction for impressionable minds. My writing now could not be less horror-inflected, but I feel like the generic constructs of horror are the best and purest around, somehow.
Would you want any children in your life (yours or relatives’) to read those too? Or, what’s your philosophy on what children read?
I’ve got three kids, only one of whom is reading age yet, and her reading habits put mine at that age (almost nine) to shame. When she gets going, she devours books, but is also respectably picky about what she allows herself to get absorbed in. I’m pretty liberal letting her be exposed to PG-13 content, and have no particular filters. . . . First and foremost is to not make reading a chore for kids, and let them follow their own rhythms of discovery.
I discovered some of my favorite writers in high school. What writers did you discover then? Either ones that were assigned for class or ones you found on your own.
I took a class on James Baldwin my senior year that was pretty earth-shaking. On my own watch, I read some Franzen, Roth, and DeLillo, cutting my teeth on what I perceived to be “grown-up” literary fiction. Some of these books strike me as overly mannered now, but some of them, like American Pastoral and Underworld, are eternal favorites.
Are there any books that you read while writing your debut that helped shape the direction you took your own book?
I try not to read too much fiction while I’m writing. I tend to go deep into “input” mode, then fierce “output” mode. But yes, the voice and sensibility in Atta Boy has a lot of referents . . . I was greatly influenced by Richard Price’s early novels, Don Winslow’s The Force, and most of Bellow’s work. In scratching my way into the secondary narrator Marley’s voice, I took some cues from David Mitchell’s wonderful coming-of-age novel Black Swan Green.
What is a book you’ve read that you thought, Damn, I wish that was mine?
Ironweed by William Kennedy—such a perfectly headlong novel, lyrical and pure. In it, he seems to have found the common denominator between Joyce and the American vernacular.
What have you been reading lately that you can recommend to Debutiful readers?
I’m assuming a lot of you are writers, too. In general, I encourage writers to read more literary biographies and memoirs. When I don’t feel like clogging the airwaves with someone else’s style, but lack the intellectual rigor to read about, say, the building of the Panama Canal, I read a literary biography. . . . Sometimes fiction feels too, well, fictitious, but I want something fiction-adjacent. The last couple years I’ve read biographies of Roth, Bellow, Woolf, and Ellison, and—this is not really a literary biography, but a memoir of a writer/thinker’s formative years—Fierce Attachments by Vivian Gornick. Philip Larkin’s collected letters, too, were pretty entertaining.
And, finally, I have to ask… I’m sorry. What’s next? But wait! Only use three words.
Up a notch.