Reading Guide for HICK by Andrea Portes
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About the Book
Hick is a part picaresque, part coming of age story, most inspired by Dorothy Allison’s Bastard out of Carolina. As characterized by the author, Andrea Portes, it’s like she took any number of genres, including The Wizard of Oz and Paper Moon, threw them against the wall, and saw how they slid down and landed.
Specifically, Hick lives in the remarkable wit and voice of 13 year old Luli McMullen. She lives with her alcoholic, neglectful parents Tammy and Nick in a ramshackle farmhouse on a country road across from a cemetery, a few miles outside of Lincoln Nebraska. Their “office,” however, is a roadhouse called the Alibi with a bartender who Luli calls Uncle Ray because he sees that she gets home at night when her parents get too out of control to function. One particularly bad night at the Alibi, Uncle Ray molests her as he drops her off. The morning after, Tammy leaves the house with a strange man, “a peeled worm,” and Nick drives off in a rage, apparently for good. So Luli gathers her belongings such as they are, including a Smith and Wesson .45, steals $400 Tammy has hidden under the kitchen sink, and runs away from home to find herself a sugar daddy, in Las Vegas.
Luli is picked up right away by an obsessive “scuzz bucket” (author’s description) with a violent streak named Eddie Kreezer and is rescued shortly thereafter by an unlikely good witch Glenda – a fading grifter who takes Luli on the road with her, headed to Las Vegas by way of Jackson, Wyoming. Along the way they run a con on an elderly man at a convenience store who inconveniently collapses on Luli, apparently from a heart attack; and deliver a six foot stuffed rabbit who has been riding in the front passenger seat of Glenda’s car the whole time to a mute Hispanic youth who becomes smitten by Luli.
In Jackson Eddie turns up, and things start going from pretty bad to worse right away. But Luli is a survivor, and with a large measure of help from a mountain man Libertarian with an aging German Shepherd named Karl, she lives to tell the tale, learning along the way that the frontier Huck Finn lit out for has pretty much disappeared and been replaced with strip malls and suburban sprawl. She also learns what all abused kids learn early on: There is no hiding place. You’re out there alone. Which is a rotten state of affairs. But -- whether we have a good family or a bad one, the only place we can find any of the things that all children rightfully expect or long for – shelter, safety, comfort -- is within ourselves. And when really bad things happen, we can choose to be a victim, or to be a survivor.
About the Author
Andrea Portes lived for part of her childhood in a ramshackle farmhouse just like Luli’s, outside of Lincoln, Nebraska. Unlike Luli, however, she was blessed with a loving single mom who later went back to graduate school and became a counseling psychologist. Portes went to Bryn Mawr on full scholarship and graduated with honors. She took the MFA from UC San Diego in Theatre and Film and has worked as a script reader for Paramount Pictures. She now lives in Echo Park, CA, and is a nightlife columnist for several websites. Hick is her first novel.
Interview with the Author
In Hick, the narrator Luli lives in a beat up farmhouse outside of Lincoln, Nebraska. Did you live in such a place as a child and was it also bulldozed for a Blockbuster Mall?
Yes, exactly. We used to live in a farmhouse on the outskirts of Lincoln, towards Palmyra, in a farmhouse across from the cemetery with a barn, exactly as described in the book, and we got kicked off so they could bulldoze it all over and build a Blockbuster Mall.
In the acknowledgments to Hick you thank your brother for his support, saying that most people had written you off as a glorified degenerate. Why would people have thought that of you?
(laughs) Because basically in the time since I graduated from college I think that my coterie of “ne’er-do-wells” could possibly make me look like a glorified degenerate. I lived in Philadelphia for a year and then San Diego to go to graduate school. But then I lived in Echo Park with my group in a house we called “Rancho Malcontento,” because we had a very funny little western style sign above our door that said Rancho Contento, and I don’t really think my family knew what I was up to. The very last paragraph of Hick was actually written while a birthday party was going on with all sorts of interesting “types” around. And there I was in the room in the middle of the party, finishing up this novel.
What is this group you talk about? Is this a group of friends from college?
Some of them, but most are friends from LA, and people coming in and out that other people might have heard of [musicians, independent filmmakers, actors], but I don’t feel comfortable saying . . .
Is it sort of like your own Laurel Canyon?
l actually lived for about a year in Laurel Canyon, and Laurel Canyon is nothing like Echo Park. Laurel Canyon is sort of like Diet Coke and Echo Park is more like Jim Beam! People in Echo Park don’t quite have their acts together, in a kind of wonderful way
You also thank a person named Brad Kluck. In the novel Luli ends up with the awful Eddie at Beaumont Kluck’s Cabin Retreat. Was this a tribute to your real friend?
Yeah, that’s definitely a tribute to my friend Brad Kluck. He’s an amazing character, kind of the mascot of Echo Park: from Reno, 6’4”, a cowboy kind of figure, much loved. And he’s my best friend, so Beaumont is definitely based on him.
What about his cabin? That is so eccentric as to seem like it must be a real place. Is it?
No, I wish it was, but the fact is Beaumont is a Libertarian and that’s a typical Libertarian cabin, in a place where lots of Libertarians live -- Paradise Valley.
You thank your mom for giving you “one of those so-called hearts,” and tell her that if it hadn’t been for her, you’d “have taken your rightful place as the 2nd female serial killer of all time.” Needless to say I find that very intriguing. Can you explain what you meant by that?
It’s funny, because now my mom thinks that everyone who meets her is gonna think she’s some kind of drunken floozy. But the fact of the matter is that my real mom is very sweet and loving and caring and unfortunately when we were growing up we had a rough childhood. We moved around all the time, always in a new school, always in a new place, and if it weren’t for my mom, I think I probably would have been a horrible vicious person, or even worse. . . . I didn’t realize that not everyone had a mom like that until I went to college and saw what else was going on with everybody else. Some people’s moms were just out to lunch, or some of them were dinner party moms. But I basically hit the jackpot when it came to mothers.
Luli meets the young man Clement at the Motel 6 and has one of her epiphanies -- realizing that it doesn’t matter if you’re rich or poor, you can still have a screwed up parent, or set of parents, or family situation.
That is true and that is something that obviously came to me because when I first was encountering people who came from very wealthy backgrounds, I assumed that everything would be perfect, and then as you go along, you find out that people have trauma, that people have weird things happen to them, that people are abused in strange ways, that some of them are molested. And there’s a reason why some of those people who you would think would be so happy end up junkies or alcoholics or whatever. It’s never perfect.
How did this novel start for you?:
Well it’s funny, it just kind of started talking to me and at me endlessly, ceaselessly, and I had this dumb, blank book that someone had given me as a present, someone who I didn’t know really well and one day I just started writing in it. I guess you would say it was Luli’s voice. But it just wouldn’t shut up, so finally I just threw up my hands and said, “OK! I’ll put you down, whoever you are.” And so that book got filled up. There was more, so I went and bought a black and white composition book and filled that one up, and then I had to buy another which as I recall was a maroon one which literally fell apart at the seams. So there’s the 3 books there and all 240 something pages are hand written on those 3 books.
Do you feel like you are a medium for this voice coming through you?
I feel like when the best writing is happening, it doesn’t feel like you are making something. It just feels like you are channeling, someone’s just talking to you and you’re just writing it down and you can’t write it fast enough. That’s how you know you are on a roll. I don’t want to sound sort of weird and mystical, but I do find something strange happens in the morning, right when I wake up, or at night sometimes, or even when I am going about my day. These voices, these paragraphs, these passages, sometimes an entire chapter just comes out talking, just comes in my head, and I have to grab something, and start writing. And so I have the weirdest collection -- I’ve the got the backs of receipts with passages, I’ve got the back of bar napkins with passages, it just happens that way. It can be frustrating though because sometimes you don’t wanna be hearing voices. I mean it does make you feel like you’re about 2 clicks down from just being some crazy lady living in a house with 20 cats. But the full kind of creative hearing voices side of me is one where I have to shut myself away and become that crazy person who doesn’t ever look in the mirror or doesn’t care what she’d eating.
Your graduate degree is in theatre and film studies. How do you think that has affected the writing of a novel?
I think first of all that reading all of Sam Shepherd’s plays had a huge effect. In Fool for Love there’s a character called Eddie that is essentially the starting point for my Eddie, and there’s a scene in Curse of the Starving Class that’s very similar to a scene in Hick -- someone coming around who’s going to buy the farm. And some people have said that Luli reminds them of Emma in that play. But the other huge influence is film. I see things in a very sort of cinematic manner, such as that huge, sweeping long shot of the landscape in Giant. It’s very beautiful and grand, but it’s also very empty, like the spaces in people’s lives that Luli is so aware of.
Where does all that dark stuff come from, along with all the humor?
I think I sort of came into the universe with a dark sort of being. My older brother used to call me Dark Toddler. But you know, life had no problem confirming that way of being. We had some hard times when I was growing up. I would characterize the humor as good old American Humor, in the Mark Twain kind of tradition. Midwestern humor, the humor of my grandfather who flew in WWII. The kind of humor that you have when you’re confronted with things that if you weren’t humorous about, you’d just fall down and die.
How would you describe this novel to someone?
Well I would definitely say it’s picaresque, coming of age, but it’s got a lot of Addie Pray in it too [novel made into movie Paper Moon], and was definitely inspired by Dorothy Allison’s Bastard out of Carolina. That sense of being abandoned, and the sense of the season of death in everything. There’s the one backdrop of suburban sprawl, with the old west getting taken over, and then the other one is this giant landscape which is part of Americana, with the Wizard of Oz and that magical big, bright world, with the good witch Glenda in it. The novel is full of things that come to Luli they way they do to most kids, especially kids whose real parents are the movies and TV -- Elvis Presley the dreamboat, and the Marlboro Man – “Oh! I’m looking for my cowboy, my Marlboro Man.” The novel is, in a way, a love song to the West and to that part of the country. To the old West, not the suburban sprawl west but the wide open spaces and all the mystery in that landscape. I still have so much love for that.
What are some of the themes in Hick?
There are many different themes in the book. One of them is the way that the old west, the wild west, what we think of as America, is getting turned into a strip mall. Then there is being a teen age girl and discovering, playing around, being precocious and getting into trouble when it comes to sexuality. And that comes from Luli’s having no supervision, just being a kind of orphan, orphaned in this case by her parents’ alcoholism and total and absolute neglect. And then there’s the way you can look at the world if you come from that. A lot of times people think why me why me why is this happening to me and they just spiral down. But at the end of the day you can get back up, and that’s what you’ve got to do.
How do you explain Luli’s compassion toward her parents, who are pretty much irredeemable by most people’s standards?
I think she really loves them the way a child loves their parents, which is by seeking their approval. I think that children love them no matter what, no matter how horrible they are. And I think that even though Nick is whatever you want to call him, he is what he is, she still is in love with him, he’s still her dad, her Elvis style cowboy dreamboat of a Dad. And her mom? She just wants her mom to love her. I think she feels a tremendous amount of guilt. She knows that the mother is looking at her like, you ruined my life. I think that when she sees her mother, she feels so bad that her mom didn’t have a better life, because she chose to marry her dad, the wrong man, and have her.
What about the figure of Luli as a child of neglect and abuse?
I know a lot of people both male and female who have had horrible things, inappropriate things happen at stages of their lives where they shouldn’t have been happening. Those kinds of things have a lot of different effects. In some ways they make you more strangely sexualized early, and then in other ways they make you want to just erase yourself. Luli’s coping mechanisms are going out of body, throwing herself on the other side of the room. Also, when she first realizes in the beginning that she has these bubbles on her body and that her shape gives her power, I think she feels like, “Ok, I can do something with this.” I also think she has real feelings. She does see Eddie as this Marlboro Man cowboy figure and she needs him for her leading man, so this gets her into a situation where she ends up being hurt.
Well she’s drawn like a bird to a snake to exactly that which is going to lead her right into a car crash, as she describes this part of herself.
I think that’s also a result of what she’s used to. If Luli were confronted with a perfectly normal nice person, she wouldn’t know what to do. She would find it completely confusing. What is normal in her life is upheaval, feeling alienated, with everything being very destructive. So if someone or some situation were to come up that was perfectly normal and nice, I think she would be out of there. Because I don’t think she would know how to handle it.
Also, a very big thing about Luli is that when things like this happen to people, sometimes they turn into victims, and sometimes they turn into survivors. Luli definitely turns into a survivor.
I think that’s a huge issue with me. I know that a lot of people have tragedies happen to them, but then there’s always at a certain point the question of how you deal with it. Do you define yourself by what has been done to you, or do you define yourself by what you do? At a certain point, you have to see that the way out of the abyss is to move forward. To accept that these things happened and to move forward, knowing that these things actually do make you stronger.
Have you thought about Luli 5 or 10 years down the road, and if you have, what would you predict or hope for her?
I know that she will be okay. I know that she will probably be doing very well, actually, because she’s a survivor and going through everything that she’s gone through at that young age, and having the strength that she has, makes her essentially stronger than a whole of those other kids who she is going to be going to school with at Beaumont’s mother’s school. She just has a survival instinct that a lot of other people lack.
And she’s going to go from being an observer to being a creator. Did you notice that about her?
Yes, I think she always was a creator. She just didn’t, couldn’t act on that with all of the drama and all of the destructive dysfunctional things going on around her. But from her character, her intellectual curiosity, the way she looks at the world, she always was a creator. It’s just that now, in the environment she is going to go to, she’s going to be able to make something. I see her as someone who is not going to let things that happened to her define her. She doesn’t see herself as what’s done to her. She sees herself as what she does. Maybe that’s naïve, maybe ten years from now I’ll be writing a different kind of novel with a different kind of character. But that courage in the face of fear and adversity is what I admire.
-- Interview conducted by Kay Callison
Questions for Discussion
1. How did you react, over all, to this novel? To the characters? To what happens to Luli?
2. Did you find the events of the novel and Luli’s reaction to them believable? If so why? If not, why not? If someone were to say to you that this novel “lives in the voice of Luli,” what do you think they might mean by that?
3. Did you find the book funny? If so, how would you describe the humor in it? If not, why not?
4. How would you describe the tone of the novel?
5. What are some of the themes you can identify in the novel? What elements of the novel lead you to identify those themes?
6. How does the setting of the novel interact or contribute to the themes of the novel and the way you read it?
7. How would you describe Luli to someone? Why?
8. Describe the other characters in the novel, including the minor ones, like Luli’s school teacher. How if at all do they help move the plot and expose the thematic issues in the novel? How do they contribute to the development of other characters in the novel, especially Luli?
9. How realistic or well rounded did you find the characters in the novel? Are there parts of the story that make you feel sympathetic towards Tammy and Nick? If so, what are they? What do they add to the over all richness, or not, of the narrative.
10. How would you describe the author’s apparent point of view about why people act the way they do in this world? Do you agree with her, or find it convincing? If so, why? If not, why not?
11. How do you interpret the ending, or the resolution of the novel? What are your feelings about Luli and her future? What led you to your conclusions?
Recommended Reading
The Phantom Limbs of the Rollow Sisters by Timothy Schaffert
The Singing and Dancing Daughters of God by Timothy Schaffert
Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
Fool for Love by Sam Shepherd
The Curse of the Starving Classes by Jane Smiley
Bastard out of Carolina by Dorothy Allen
Addie Pray by Joe David Brown