INTERVIEWER Was Run River your first novel? It seems so finished for a first that I thought you might have shelved earlier ones. DIDION I’ve put away nonfiction things, but I’ve never put away a novel. I might throw out forty pages and write forty new ones, but it’s all part of the same novel. I wrote the first half ofRun River at night over a period of years. I was working at Vogue during the day, and at night I would work on these scenes for a novel. In no particular sequence. When I finished a scene I would tape the pages together and pin the long strips of pages on the wall of my apartment. Maybe I wouldn’t touch it for a month or two, then I’d pick a scene off the wall and rewrite it. When I had about a hundred and fifty pages done I showed them to twelve publishers, all of whom passed. The thirteenth, Ivan Obolensky, gave me an advance, and with that thousand dollars or whatever it was I took a two-month leave of absence and wrote the last half of the book. That’s why the last half is better than the first half. I kept trying to run the first half through again, but it was intractable. It was set. I’d worked on it for too many years in too many moods. Not that the last half is perfect. It’s smoother, it moves faster, but there are a great many unresolved problems. I didn’t know how to do anything at all. I had wanted Run River to be very complicated chronologically, to somehow have the past and present operating simultaneously, but I wasn’t accomplished enough to do that with any clarity. Everybody who read it said it wasn’t working. So I straightened it out. Present time to flashback to present time. Very straight. I had no option, because I didn’t know how to do it the other way. I just wasn’t good enough.
