The book's secrets are the true heart of the matter -- like the secrets we keep in life in order, we think, to better manage it. They're so important that in the advanced reader's copy, Greer's editor, Frances Coady, included a note that is a "plea" not to "reveal its secrets to those readers coming after you."
Four years in the making, this book was delayed by the success of "Max Tivoli," which became a national bestseller and a "Today" show book club choice. While promoting it, Greer didn't carve out time to write. "So I got kind of lost," he said. Immersion -- several writers' colonies (MacDowell, Yaddo among them) and a new "no excuses" writing schedule -- got him back on track. (As he prepares to tour on this book, he's keeping to a strict schedule. "I had to get a little place to write because my boyfriend works at home and is on the phone constantly. It makes it difficult to concentrate.")
Immersing himself in 1950s San Francisco, particularly the Sunset, was a little more complicated, Greer explained. Except for vintage landmarks -- the zoo, the ocean, the old Play Land with its penny attractions and the "Limbo" ride -- "the Sunset is a bland district," he said. "It was a real handicap for me, in a way, because [Pearlie] couldn't run into a lot of exciting things."
But the Sunset then became an almost physical presence haunting the book. "I had the ocean. I had chiming trolleys. I had fog. And I thought, 'I have enough.' "
Just off Noriega Street, Greer found a wedge of a parking space on one of the adjacent avenues lined with row after row of typical-to-the neighborhood structures: boxlike houses, standing snugly side by side like good soldiers. "Now, where would Pearlie and Holland have lived?" Greer muttered. While some homes have been done up in recent years to look more distinctive -- turned into postmodern Victorians with busy rickrack or fronted with New Orleans-style iron lace -- the structures that most caught Greer's eye were those that looked like Easter eggs: the pastel pinks, greens, yellows nested together.
Greer's novel almost required the mood of this quiet, relatively nondescript San Francisco neighborhood -- the fog and drifting sand, the disconnectedness. The Sunset, Greer pointed out, "was a part of the city no one really built on until the war was over. Then, the hills were flattened, soil was laid down over the sand. . . . It felt outside of everything." And it was.
