Two Awards In One Day For 'Battleborn' Author Claire Vaye Watkins
On how they would pass the hours driving to the grocery store and back through the Nevada desert
"My mom especially was a terrific BS-er. She told tons of stories, especially because where we lived was so remote, was so far away. We [had] to drive — when I was really young, before southern Nevada kind of exploded in population — we had to drive for maybe two-and-a-half hours to go to the grocery store. Really we had to drive ... to Las Vegas and back to get groceries or hardware or really anything you needed, so my mom would often, she would talk the entire trip, and what she would tell us were stories about what we were seeing. She was sort of an amateur geologist and natural historian, and she would tell us all about how a certain mountain range was formed or how everything we were seeing was once under the ocean ... and so there were her stories.
"And then there were also — my mom and my dad and then later my stepdad, they were in recovery, they were recovering alcoholics — and so AA was a big part of our lives, and on these trips we would either be talking to each other and telling stories or listening to these tapes, these AA tapes, these speaker tapes where people tell their stories about how they hit rock bottom and how they got sober and sort of what they've learned, and you can imagine those are pretty gritty stories."
On her father, Paul Watkins, and his 1979 memoir My Life with Charles Manson
"For me, having not really known my dad at all — he died when I was so young — that I had never really had access to an entire dimension to him. ... I'd never really had access to his flaws or his mistakes. You know, no one really says to a kid, 'Your dad was a decent man, but he did some shady stuff. He lured young girls to the Manson family, where they were tremendously exploited.' That wasn't a narrative that was available to me from my family members, and rightfully so. I don't resent them that. But the book and the Manson materials gave me this whole other dimension to him, and it made him more real than he'd ever been."
On fitting the prospecting history of the West into her stories
"You can't really write a book about ... the West without the gold rush, because without the gold rush you wouldn't have had the silver rush, and without the silver rush we would probably just still have a Nevada-shaped hole in our country, because Nevada would be of no interest to anyone, likely. Maybe we would start blowing up nuclear weapons in it eventually, but it would have taken a lot longer. ... In a way, we haven't really gotten over the gold rush, which was a lie even when it was happening, and that kind of instability of history is something that has always really fascinated me. A lot of the characters are, you know, kind of internalizing this John Wayne masculinity, this mythic, rugged individual, and really suffering for it."
On writing the book in the wake of her mother's death and leaving the West for the first time
“ I don't want to romanticize the experiences of people who are living in rural communities or poor communities — which Pahrump is — or the desert. Our dominant cultural narrative totally devalues all three of those things: rural, poor and desert.