Her father was a meth dealer, so Lawrence author writes from experience

The blowback started in June, not long after advance copies of Bryn Greenwood’s new novel started showing up in the mailboxes of booksellers and reviewers around the country.

Some who fired off disapproving emails, tweets and Facebook messages had read “All the Ugly and Wonderful Things” and, for the most part, Greenwood says, she had no real quarrel with them. Others, including a woman identifying herself as a fellow writer, lashed out after merely hearing about the book and its central relationship between a young girl damaged by a dysfunctional home life and a rough, motorcycle-riding mechanic and drug-ring henchman who is far too many years older. Their romance turns physical when she is 13.

“I think maybe that shocked me the most, the fact that someone who was a writer and someone I imagined would be familiar with the experience of people judging your work unread would be willing to do the same thing,” Greenwood says.

The Lawrence author largely stayed out of the fray but found herself compelled at one point to weigh in on Twitter. “If you only read books that make you feel safe and comfortable,” she cautioned, “what’s the point of reading?”

“All the Ugly and Wonderful Things,” her third published novel, offers neither comfort nor convention. Heroine Wavonna “Wavy” Quinn is quiet and untrusting, scarred by her upbringing on a methamphetamine-making compound but possessing some of the same resilience, strong will and sense of responsibility that defined 17-year-old Ree Dolly in Daniel Woodrell’s Ozarks-set “Winter’s Bone” (though Wavy is years younger through most of the book). Her dad is the meth lord. Her mother is a wasted, traumatized addict.

Wavy’s salvation is Jesse Joe Kellen, overweight, greasy and marked with tattoos but shy and sensitive enough to don the only dress shirt he owns when he puts flowers on the grave of his mother. Yes, he’s 12  1/2 years older, an especially squirm-inducing detail while Wavy is still in grade school. But what good can be found in their world, they find in each other.

To a degree, Greenwood wrote what she knows. Her own father was a large-scale meth maker and distributor who wound up spending seven years in prison. Growing up in Hugoton, Kan., in the southwest corner of the state, she says she — like Wavy — gravitated to much older men.

Greenwood, 45, who holds a master’s in creative writing from Kansas State University, recently discussed “All the Ugly and Wonderful Things,” its provocative storyline and the pushback that started with her search for an agent (she had 122 rejections). Excerpts are edited for length.

Q: Did you anticipate people’s discomfort with the book and Wavy and Kellen’s relationship?

A: Having lived a certain portion of that lifestyle, I knew that people could be extremely judgmental. So I knew there was going to be some of that. … Part of that is because the nature of the topic lends itself to really black-and-white thinking. It makes people comfortable to say “this is absolutely a bad thing” without knowing anything more than the premise.

Q: You had trouble finding an agent?

A: What’s funny to me is that 122 agents were, like, “No, I don’t think I can sell this.” But the end result (after finally securing one) was that several editors were, like, “Yes, absolutely, I’d like to buy that book.” … And for a respectable sum of money.

Q: What did you want readers to take away from the book?

A: One thing is that people acknowledge there are a lot of different variations on the American experience.

We see the same ones over and over and over again in books and in movies and television, that sort of safe, middle- or upper middle-class, frequently urban lifestyle. And the reality is there are plenty of people in America who are not living that life.

You can disapprove all you want, but know that you’re disapproving of actual human beings and the way they’re getting along in their lives.

The other takeaway is much bigger. I want people to think: OK, what does it mean for people to consent? What does it mean for children to be capable of consent? Whenever people say “age of consent,” what they mean 99.9 percent of the time is sex.

But children have a lot more in their lives than sex. We do things like force feeding and spanking kids, a lot of physical things that we don’t allow them to refuse. Like we don’t actually respect their consent (or lack of it). … In the relationship that upsets so many people, Wavy’s consent is being respected.

Q: You don’t specify a setting. Is it Kansas?

A: In my mind, it takes place in southeast Kansas. Lots of communities there have been afflicted with meth. I just didn’t want to call out any one community as an actual location.

A weirder reason is Kansas laws concerning the age of consent and age of marriage. Until 2006, Kansas did not have a minimum age for marriage. If you had your parents’ permission and there was a judge willing to sign off on it — and let’s be honest, in small towns there are always judges — you could get married at any age.

I realized with the time frame of my book (which opens in 1975) that if I named the location as Kansas and went by the actual laws at the time, Wavy and Kellen would have been married long before much of the stuff in the story happened. That was the one solution he could think of that would get her away from her parents.

Q: How do you look back on your early life? Were you happy growing up?

A: I have really mixed feelings. My parents divorced before I was 2 primarily because my dad was a wild child and my mother was not. She’s a teetotaler. She doesn’t even let us drink beer in the house at Thanksgiving; you have to go out in the garage. …

I lived with her a lot. I spent a lot of time with my father’s parents, who were good Kansas people. But I also spent summers with my father, and his world was really crazy. It was a mixed bag. I was a weird kid.

Q: Can you define “crazy”?

A: You can imagine the kinds of things that go into having a massive drug operation. He had a private plane and pilot, and there was always money except when there wasn’t. The money is like a faucet that’s turned on full blast for 10 minutes and then it’s turned off. And you wait for the next time the faucet is turned on.

When you have that kind of business, you have just hordes of hangers-on, an endless rotation of people going through your existence because they want to use you or they want to benefit from you or they’re just there for the drugs. So yeah, his life was a little crazy.

Q: So your life could have followed that route.

A: Well, yeah, except that he went to prison when I was 14. It closed that (option) off, which was good. My mother was very intent on us doing what she didn’t do, going on and graduating from college.

Q: You write from the point of view of 16 different characters in the book, changing with each chapter. Why that technique?

A: My first writing professor when I was at K-State, Ben Nyberg, has a methodology that he used to use in his short fiction classes … where he asks you to tell an important story about a time when you had an encounter with someone that radically altered your view of the world. And then you come to class and he says, “Now, I want you to turn it around and write it from the perspective of the other person.”

Some people just can’t. They had this huge, epic argument with their dad, and they cannot put themselves in their dad’s shoes. I kind of got into it and, from there on, that’s been my obsession with the world … figuring out how everybody’s perspective is different. … I often end up writing multiple novels to produce a single novel.

Q: When did you decide you wanted to be a writer?

A: Almost the moment I started reading — actually before that. Before I learned to read, books were this incredible, powerful mystery and I was like, “I have to figure this out.”

And once I learned to read, it was, “Yes, this is the most brilliant thing ever!” I wrote my first story before I actually knew how to write. My sister took dictation for me, wrote it down. I think I was about 4.

Q: You juggle writing several books at the same time. How does that work?

A: Sometimes, I’ll write on different projects on the same day. But more often, I’ll spend a week working on one until I hit a deadlock or I’m frustrated. And then I’ll work on a different one. … It’s really kind of a compulsion.

I gave up writing for two years once. I had a job that was super-stressful and took up all my time, and I gave up writing. As soon as I left that job, I went out and bought a pen and a notebook and wrote a novel.

Q: What’s your next book?

A: I’m working on a project right now that’s about futuristic circus sideshows … my theory about circus sideshows in the 21st century. It’s about conjoined triplets and a mermaid and a major league baseball player.

I’m also working on a young adult novel about a small town where, because of budgetary cuts due to some difficult decisions by the governor, they’ve decided to save the high school by getting rid of their police force. And they’re going to take all the surveillance cameras in town and livestream them on public access TV. …

My theory is there are surely towns in this state that are already in desperate straits. They’re looking at their city budgets and trying to figure out what they can conceivably cut and continue to function.

This story was originally published October 28, 2016 at 12:17 PM with the headline "Her father was a meth dealer, so Lawrence author writes from experience."