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Alison Jean Lester
ExpatWomen's Interview with Alison
ExpatWomen: Alison, congratulations on the publication of your very first book, Locked Out: Stories Far From Home. What strikes me the most is the intriguing title. Can tell us more about the title – how you came up with it and what it means for you?
Alison:
As with many short story collections, the title comes from one of the stories. In this case, it’s the first story in the book. Many people assume that the title means that I feel people who live far from home are left out in the rain or excluded from things, but that’s not it at all. While this is of course sometimes the case, people find themselves locked out of situations in their home countries as well. In this story, the woman locks herself out of her apartment in Tokyo in her bathing suit and shorts, but she also suspects her husband of having an affair with his secretary, so there is the element of being emotionally locked out of her marriage as well.
I really liked the idea of naming the book after the last story, Really Trying to Get Somewhere, but it wasn’t nearly as snappy!
ExpatWomen: Your book is a collection of ten, diverse, short-stories. One story talks about an American woman in Tokyo, who feels isolated from both her husband (who’s more focussed on his sexy assistant) and new location’s culture. Another story talks about an American boy and his German immigrant neighbor. And there’s even one about a recently-widowed Australian woman recovering the bones of her late husband who drowned at an Asian resort. How did you come up with the ideas for these stories – and are they really fictional? |
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Alison: I’ve never been a widow or a 14-year-old boy or a dying Japanese woman. So not all of the book is me! That said, a lot of what I put down was based on feelings I had about people and the things they said and did, or I created people in order to express a feeling. I met an Australian woman at Club Med in Bintan who was on her first holiday alone in 20 years, after leaving her abusive husband. Her courage touched me so much that I created a story around her. Maybe I killed her husband because I was angry at him! But a man had drowned at Club Med the week before, so I had it in mind. The American boy who is introduced to classical music by a German neighbor is based on stories my father told me about his early life. The story about the woman with cancer was inspired by my grief over losing my best Japanese friend only a month after arriving in Singapore. I never went to her house, I never met her parents, but she had told me enough about them for me to be able to create for myself a picture of her dying days.
I think that short story writers probably have a lot of ideas bubbling all the time, and it’s a question of waiting for a strong enough emotion to come along to pull one of these ideas down onto the page. |
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ExpatWomen: Alison, you’re an American based in Singapore. Can you please share with us why you moved to Singapore, why you’ve stayed in Singapore and if you have any future plans to return to the US? |
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Alison: I moved to Singapore in 1999 after 8 years in Tokyo when my husband was invited to work here. It was a very wrenching move, as I loved Tokyo. But Singapore has worked its way under my skin, and although my kids’ dad and I are now divorced, we see no reason not to stay. Not long after moving here I established a communication training business. After many years of hard work, trial and error, and good fun, the business is going well. The kids are in a great school. We have a lovely new dog (the first of my life, so I’m sure he’ll start showing up in stories). The weather’s fantastic. It isn’t broken, so there’s no need to fix it.
I have no plans to return to the US, but it could happen. I’ll want to go back if my parents’ health starts to look like it’s weakening. That’s the only painful thing about being away for me. I can take the States or leave them (well, I did leave them). But not my parents…even though I left them too. |
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ExpatWomen: What have been your greatest challenges and your greatest rewards, as an expat in Singapore? |
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Alison: The greatest challenge has honestly been figuring out how best to encourage my clients to be more communicative, more open, more trusting of themselves, more creative. I want to cry sometimes when I work with people who don’t trust their own brains, and this is most people I meet, since such behavior often feels like a government policy and is therefore, at least to me, a national tragedy.
The greatest reward is everything else. I count my blessings daily, no joke.
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ExpatWomen: Are there any more books on the horizon? |
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Alison: Thanks for asking! Yes! In fact, when you contacted me I was in a small resort town in the south of France called Cassis, a beautiful place to think and write, swim and walk. I gave myself nearly a week there, and made a good start. It’s a novel this time. I just hope I can keep up the momentum when I get back to work. No, I can. I can. |
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ExpatWomen: Finally, Alison… maybe your writing is in your genes… can you please share with us your family’s writing connection – and their connection to Charles Dickens? |
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Alison: I’m not related to Charles Dickens, but rather to one of his illustrators, Hablot Knight Browne, or ‘Phiz.’ He’s my great-great-great grandfather, on my mother’s side. My mother was the first of us to publish a book, a history of Pan Am Airlines in the voices of the cabin crew. It is called Fasten Your Seatbelts: History and Heroism in the Pan Am Cabin. Then my father, a psychologist and jazz musician, published a biography of the virtuoso jazz piano player, Art Tatum, called Too Marvelous for Words. Then my mother, after 8 years of work, came out with a biography of Phiz. Locked Out was next. And my brother, formerly an editor at The Atlantic magazine, is now working on a really interesting book on the first map to name the New World America. We love words. |
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ExpatWomen: Thank you very much Alison. We wish you amazing success with your new book! |
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Alison: Thank you very much. Very much. |
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