(relaxing music) - Welcome to "Maine Book Club."

I'm your host, Bill Nemitz.

And, today, we are speaking with author Ron Currie about, this is a great title, "The Savage and Noble Death of Babs Dionne."

And that it was.

(laughs) Ron, Welcome.

- Thank you.

I'm glad to be here.

- I'm gonna preface this by sharing with our audience what I shared with you the other day, is the first five plus years of my professional career as a journalist here in Maine were spent working with the Morning Sentinel in Waterville.

Your hometown.

The setting for this book.

So I have to tell you, folks.

When I read this book, I looked at it with the critical eye of a journalist who worked on these streets for several years, trying to catch this guy in a mistake.

And I did not find one.

I mean, every geographic reference was perfect.

I always knew right where I was, which is not surprising since you grew up on those streets.

Correct?

- I did.

I grew up specifically in the south end off of Water Street, which, of course, back then, even in the late '70s into the '80s, was very much a Franco-American neighborhood.

And I sort of, that aspect of the culture, the language certainly is gone.

The culture is largely gone.

The church is basically a paperweight now, whereas it was the gathering place for the community.

So I had to transpose the world that I grew up in onto a contemporary setting.

The book said in 2016.

- Right.

And the last vestiges of that, really, in many ways.

- Yeah.

You know, I think I said to you the other day, when we talked, that my generation of Franco-Americans really straddled the line between when that world was still very much alive, and vibrant, and palpable, and when it was completely gone.

It all happened over the course of that one generation.

And so, you know, part of the impetus to write this book for me was to demonstrate to myself that I didn't imagine that, you know?

- Yeah.

That it's not your childhood memory fantasy kind of thing.

- Or it's not a story that somebody told me.

- [Bill] Yeah.

- You know what I mean?

If I wanted confirmation that I didn't make that up, that that world existed, I could get it.

But there's an essential truth about how it felt that really can only be accessed through, this is the paradox of fiction writing, is that there are things that are true that the facts don't serve the truth of the thing.

That you have to sort of make up a story about it.

And that was the case here.

- So what was the truth of Waterville's Little Canada, as we call it in the book?

What was it about that community that set it apart, really, from the rest of the city of Waterville?

- It's a good question.

I mean, I think the answer was different, depending on the time.

I think what set it apart in the 1920s was different from what set it apart, by degrees, from what set it apart in the 1950s when my father was growing up, which was different from what set it apart in the 1970s days when I was growing up.

I think, for me, it was the sense of belonging and not belonging to two separate worlds all at once.

You know, I understood that there was something about, particularly about the older people in my family, my parents a little bit, certainly my grandparents' generation, was wildly different from the families, the sort of cultural practices, the religious practices certainly, of all the people I went to school with.

But I didn't have the historical context with which to understand why or how.

- A lot of it, I would imagine, was driven by economics.

In terms of employment.

The mills.

Whether they were prosperous or, later on, shut down.

- [Ron] Certainly.

- And the scars that left on that community in particular.

- Yeah, what's the buzzy term?

The term du jour is generational trauma, right?

Generational poverty.

The idea that these things are passed on across generations.

And I think, to an extent, that they are.

But, yeah.

I mean, look.

When Francos first came to Maine, to New England, you know, they were entering a world that was, they were French-speaking Catholics coming to a world that was Protestant and Anglo.

It's not difficult to surmise how they were gonna be treated for, you know, the next 100 years.

And that treatment did and does have a legacy.

- Yeah.

Well, the book starts with that.

It actually starts way up in Quebec and kind of traces the migration.

- Yeah.

- I noticed, at the beginning of the book, you dedicate the book to a long line of women, your ancestors, with their dates of birth and death on them.

And women in general, you know, play a very, very strong role in this story.

Why did you decide to dedicate the book to them?

- My sense of it- - [Bill] Goes back to your great great grandmother, I believe?

- Yeah, great, great, great.

- [Bill] Great, great, great?

Yeah.

- My sense of Franco-American community was that it was very much matriarchal.

The women certainly raised the kids.

But I think they also took care of just about everything that required taken care of.

The men just weren't present.

They were either at work, they were at the bar, or they were in their graves.

And the women had to take care of everything.

And, as such, it was a defacto matriarchy from my perspective as a kid.

And that experience of being raised by a matriarchy, you know, this story had to be about Franco women and the sort of steeliness that they had to possess in order to usher their families through a world that was, at times, openly hostile to them.

- Have a favorite quote from this book?

Wanna know if anyone else is thinking as much about a plot twist as you are?

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Now, back to the book.

Now, these women in this story, this little clutch of, led by Babs, of course, along with her minions, as you put it in the book, they're visiting, which might seem casual to the casual observer.

But, in fact, it's the business of the community being conducted.

In any other culture, or neighborhood, if you will, it would've just been that.

It would've been women gossiping over coffee.

But we know, early on, with Rita's banishment, and because Tommy was stealing the drugs and all that, that these women are not only the shapers of the community, but they're the government.

They're the police.

Did you see that kind of thing growing up?

I mean, not necessarily this dramatic.

But where an edict would come out from one of these visits.

And then that's the way it's gonna be.

- Not like that.

But I think the idea that these women are the sort of governing institution of the neighborhood came from a very palpable sense that I had as a kid.

So there was a line recently that I read about the current state of things, in which it's described as, "The law does not constrain those it protects and does not protect those it constraints."

Even as a kid, I had that sense that whatever the rules were, they didn't apply to us in terms of protection.

And so, in my mind, and certainly in this story, Babs is reasoning, for running drugs, running rackets, engaging in corrupt practices with municipal government and the police, and, to a degree, the newspaper, her reasoning for that, the way she sleeps at night is by, her conviction is that you don't play by the rules of a rigged game.

And the game was always rigged against them.

So why would she be a good worker, and pay her taxes, and stay on the right side of the law that doesn't protect her or her people?

- A big strand in the story is police corruption.

I mean, it's rampant in this story.

Talk to me about that in terms of citywide.

When I worked there as a reporter, I worked on a few cases in which there were, shall we say, strong overtones of police corruption, if not in the commission of crimes.

- Even at that late date, you know, in the '80s.

- Oh, yeah.

And it's not always the commission of crimes.

Like, they weren't going into stores and grabbing stuff like Scott or Sasha did in the family store there.

But covering things up.

Looking out for themselves and only themselves.

And that kind of thing.

I'm curious.

As you wrote that, I was thinking, what if I found this guy and anybody in Waterville PD read this book?

I don't wanna get pulled over in Waterville.

But was it your belief, growing up, that the police, to some extent at least, couldn't be trusted?

- Sure.

Sure.

In the same way that I think poor people in any community don't trust the police because, for a variety of reasons.

But principally because they are seen by the police as, by default, they're problematic in some way, right?

They're problem to be dealt with.

They're not part of the public to be protected.

And so, in that regard, yes.

The corruption thing.

You know, I've said this in other interviews and I think I mentioned it to you.

So the scene at the beginning of the book where Babs is working at her uncle's corner store.

And the cops come in.

And they just take what they want.

And they don't pay for it.

That was based in reality.

- [Bill] That used to happen?

- So the cops, the beat cops in Waterville in the '50s, there's a person in my family who told me about this, they used to all have keyrings that had all the keys to businesses in town.

And the ostensible reason for that was that they were supposed to be- - Check on the property.

- Check on the property, right?

But, of course, what were they doing?

They were taking whatever they wanted.

And that was just the cost of doing business.

It was an open secret.

And so my aunt, even as a child, knew that this uncle of hers, who was a cop on the Waterville PD, whenever she got a gift from him, she always knew it was stolen.

Whatever it was.

- Probably the store from which it came.

- Right.

And it, you know, that, again, that was just how things were done.

And so I took that, and the keyring, and the power it represents, right, and use that in the story.

- Right down to that very brutal scene early in the book where Babs, as a young girl, is raped by Sasha, which she called him.

That was his French name, which he changed to Scott.

- [Ron] Right.

- She has the presence of mind, after he's bled out in front of her, to grab the keys.

And I assume she kept them.

- Oh, yeah.

- Right?

I mean, she had the key to the mill.

She had, you know- - That's how she lets herself into the mill.

- [Bill] Yeah.

Yeah.

- 40 years later.

- So there was power in that.

- And a power, going back to the point I made a moment ago, a power that was inaccessible to her through legal means.

- [Bill] Right.

- Right?

- Right, exactly.

She is a, some might call her a vengeful woman.

And that this was the whole narrative, which, by the way, we'll talk about this, plays out in a week, was based on that trauma that she suffered as a girl.

And that she was hell-bent on getting back at them for what happened to her and for what happened to her and her neighbors and everyone.

But is that all she was?

- An avenging angel?

- [Bill] Yeah.

- No, certainly not.

I mean, I think the principal feature of Babs's personality, to my mind, is that of somebody who does the wrong things for the right reasons.

- End justify the means?

- To an extent.

- If you care about justification.

- To an extent.

But, you know, when you're talking about a novel, you're not, if you're writing a good novel.

There are plenty of bad novels that are morally prescriptive, right?

They're here to teach you a lesson about how something should be or is.

- [Bill] We pause now for the lesson.

(Bill and Ron laughing) - But, right.

In this case, I'm not interested in being morally prescriptive.

Those stories don't interest me either, as a reader or as a writer.

What I'm interested in is raising the moral question.

The moral quandary, right?

So with a character like Babs, she does terrible things in the name of love, for example.

And it's an interesting and compelling reading experience for me to encounter a character who does awful things for the sake of something that we all consider uniformly and invariably good.

Love.

Right?

- Like her love for her grandson.

- She loves people to death.

Quite literally, in some instances.

And, you know, where do we orient ourselves, as individuals, to that immutable fact of being human?

That sometimes love can crush people.

Sometimes, love can destroy people.

That's the stuff of good stories.

- Yeah, yeah.

Thanks to OceanView at Falmouth, Islandport Press, and Coffee By Design for their generous support of the club.

Without organizations like these, shows like this would not be possible.

Let's talk about Lori for a minute.

And her background in terms of her military experience in Afghanistan is an interesting twist in that, you know, she comes from a place that is, in many ways, steeped in trauma, goes to a place where she's traumatized, and then brings all that back to her.

As an author, how did you, and having spent some time in Afghanistan and Iraq myself, I was, again, taken by very accurate descriptions that you had of what it's like to be in an AMRAP or whatever it might be.

And how did you research that?

How did you get so familiar?

I assume that you weren't in the military yourself?

- No, no.

I've been interested in the military.

I wanted to join the military when I was younger.

I wanted to go to the Air Force Academy.

Through various machinations, including the fact that I don't think my father was too keen on it after two combat tours in Vietnam, I ended up not.

But I've always been familiar with the culture and the lingo.

And as far as researching how things were in Afghanistan, I think you need to get details right.

But war is war, right?

And Lori says it herself.

Speaking to what you were saying about.

Coming from a place where there's deep trauma, going to a place where there's deep trauma, and sort of putting that stuff in her rucksack- - [Bill] Watching the two collide.

- And bringing it home.

She says it to Babs.

You know, the only thing that she'd learned in Afghanistan was violence always begets violence.

And that people in Afghanistan had been fighting each other for thousands of years.

And it never ends because you have to make a choice to stop, which is really, really hard to do when somebody's just smacked you in the face, as it were.

- Let's talk about the Afghanistan experience, and by extension, others where these, you would say it's supernatural situations, in which she finds herself in the presence of, and, often, in conversation with people who are past.

And I wouldn't go so far as to say that this is supernatural or unreal because in the context of the story, that young girl who died in Afghanistan is very much sitting in the seat next to her.

- [Ron] Right.

- As is her father.

And I believe her sister.

Does she make an appearance, I believe?

- She see her at one point, yeah.

- Yeah.

So what made you decide to introduce that?

Because some people would say, "Oh, that's science fiction," you know.

Or not science fiction.

But it's supernatural.

- And that's fine.

- [Bill] Yeah.

- You know, I recognize that there's some people for whom a realist narrative can't, I mean, it's to their detriment and it's their loss.

But the idea that a realist narrative that you're supposed to take seriously and believe it's actually happening can encompass things like ghosts, for example.

The reason it's in the book is twofold.

One, it's dramatized grief.

Grief is not inherently dramatic at all, right?

It's entirely internal.

And there's no way to, you can express it, but that's not inherently dramatic either.

That's just talking, right?

And I wouldn't be at all surprised if the first hominid who experienced, cave-dwelling hominid who experienced what we call grief was like, also came up with the concept of ghosts.

Because that's what grief feels like to me.

It feels like being haunted, right?

Those people, they talk to you.

- Is it being haunted or is it visiting the dead?

- Either way.

You know, either way, it feels as though there's a presence, right?

And, at times, you wanna escape that presence and you can't.

That's grief.

- [Bill] Yeah.

- And so there's that part of it.

But then there's the other part of it, which is, have you ever read Gabriel Garcia Marquez's stuff?

- No.

- Garcia Marquez.

He was actually a newspaper man.

It's where he got his start.

But he wrote about the brand of Catholicism that's practiced in Latin America, which has a really strong pagan element to it.

And I recognize that pagan element of Catholicism in the Catholicism that we practice as Franco-Americans.

Like, sure.

Jesus, and the cross, and God, and, you know, the Old and New Testament.

All that stuff.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But, also, we wanna bark at the moon and dance around a fire.

Like, you know what I mean?

(Bill laughing) And so, to me, the otherworldly or supernatural elements in the story, whether it's the ghost or the fox that Lori encounters- - I was gonna ask you about the fox, yeah.

- That was all part and parcel of the brand Catholicism and the larger Franco culture.

There was just an unspoken recognition that life got really blurry and weird at the edges of our ability to perceive.

- Yeah.

- You know?

- Yeah, the fox.

Well, the reason it caught my eye, number one, is it happened on North Pond Road in Winslow.

And I used to live on that road.

So that caught my eye.

I said, oh, that's how I used to drive home from work.

When Lori is, you think she's going out there to kill herself, but, essentially, is interrupted by this fox.

And then the fox reappears at the end of the story when Babs and Rita are about to, literally, go out in a blaze of glory.

- Yep.

- And a fox appears outside before the bad guys show up.

Why that?

And why then?

What does the fox represent?

- Insofar as I have a satisfying answer for that question, I revere animals.

Canids in particular.

And I feel like, as human beings, we stand to learn so much from them, from animals, if we can slough off our self-importance for 10 seconds.

You know, our self-regard.

- Sure.

The world's all about us.

- Right.

And, also, there's nothing that a lower animal could teach us about anything.

And so I think I'm compelled, as a novelist, to put my characters in extreme situations where that self-importance and self-regard has been stripped away.

- [Bill] I see.

Yeah.

- And then they're confronted with the presence of an animal, like this fox, who's preternaturally calm.

Almost uncanny.

- Even amidst chaos.

- Right.

- Yeah.

- And then Lori, certainly in that moment, is ready to receive whatever transmission is coming from this fox.

And she sits down on the road.

And they sit there, contemplating each other for a while.

And something really profound passes between them.

That, to me, is, you know, I just, I think animals have a ton to teach us.

And we're learning more and more all the time about that.

- We don't have too much time here.

But I want to touch on one other very important theme in the story.

And that is one of contrition.

Of being sorry and forgiveness.

And you have this great scene with Father Clement, the old Father Clement, where he finally, after all these decades, gets Babs to come into the confessional while literally the world is burning around them.

And it ends on a very humorous note because she says, "It's been 48 years."

And he says, "I don't think I have time for this confession."

But then, later on, a short time later, when she's huddled in her home with Rita, and as I said, the evil forces are closing in, she does finally say she's sorry.

Why then?

Because she knew the end was near and she, an insurance policy to heaven?

Or was it something more powerful than that?

- I think something more powerful than that, certainly.

Babs isn't afraid of God.

She isn't afraid of eternal punishment.

- She's been witnessing it all her life, yeah.

- Yeah.

And, you know, I think she feels like she can endure anything that she's earned, whether in this world or the next.

- [Bill] Yeah.

Yet, she's sorry.

- She is sorry.

And I think she, for whatever reason, has come to understand that her judgment is fallible and that she made decisions that hurt people in ways that wasn't necessary.

Rita in particular.

But, of course, Rita is keeping her own secret.

- Exactly.

To the grave.

- [Ron] Right.

- Yeah.

- And so that, in and of itself, so Babs's decision to confess, and to ask forgiveness from Rita, and Rita's decision not to confess or ask forgiveness, they're both acts of kindness simultaneously.

They're the opposite action.

- [Bill] Good point, yeah.

- But they're both- - I thought Rita was going to confess.

But then she switched to the day that Babs was abducted.

- And she wants to.

- Yeah, yeah.

- She wants to confess to Babs.

But she holds it in because she knows it would be so hurtful to her best friend.

- One final question.

And that is, I noticed, early on, when you were talking about the line of ancestry, essentially, that there was a Joshua Currey in the prelude.

- With an E-Y.

Yes.

- Yeah, no connection?

- No.

Except that I wanted him to be Scottish.

- Right.

- But you talked about how, this very eloquent passage about how our ancestors talk to us.

And my final question is, did you feel your Franco ancestors talking to you or watching over your shoulder?

- Yeah, telling me every last thing I was getting wrong.

(Bill laughing) Absolutely.

They never shut up.

- But you felt their presence.

- Yeah, I think so.

- Yeah.

- I think so.

And, you know, I didn't need to write this for my own sake, I don't think, ultimately.

- [Bill] Okay.

It wasn't a purge or anything like that.

- No.

It was more, certainly, a desire for the fact of Francohood, which is, I think most Americans are aware that something vaguely French is going on in Louisiana.

But they don't know how or why.

- [Bill] Yeah, right.

- [Ron] The fact of Francohood, particularly in New England, I didn't want it to go completely unremarked upon in American letters.

- Disappear.

- You know?

- Yeah.

- Just that.

- I wish we had more time.

- Yeah, me too.

- This has been fascinating.

And any book about Waterville, I'm gonna read.

Because it's always been a community that is very near and dear to my heart.

I think you pulled back some covers on it to show people, who thought they knew what was going on there, what really was, so.

- [Ron] Sure.

Yeah.

- Thank you for that.

- Thank you, Bill.

- And it's been a pleasure.

And we'll look forward to future work.

- Okay, thanks a lot.

- Thanks.

(relaxing music)