Tiffanie Talks (About Life, L.A., and Literature)

Alice Ollstein
Special to the Mirror

   After reading the novel God-Shaped Hole and loving it, I jumped at the chance to learn more about Tiffanie DeBartolo, a spunky young writer who’s just arrived on the literary scene. She chatted with me from her home in Colorado about everything from her childhood fantasies of being a writer, to why she hates Los Angeles, to how much she is like the main character of God-Shaped Hole, to advice for people who want to be writers. She was outspoken and honest, interesting and thoughtful, and a writer whom I admire very much.
   When Tiffanie was about twelve, she started having fantasies about being a writer. “I dreamed about having my own apartment in New York, writing stories and wearing black turtlenecks.” She describes herself as being “bitten by the bug” at an early age, but not believing that writing was a job one could actually earn a living at. When she read Catcher in the Rye and The Fountainhead in high school, she was so affected that she wanted to impart the feelings that the authors gave her onto others, “Sort of give back a little, if you know what I mean,” she explained.
   After getting a degree in philosophy from UC Berkeley, DeBartolo moved to Los Angeles and began writing screenplays, but she was unhappy with life in the entertainment industry. “What I hated about it was being around all that phony hoopla, and all those phony people,” DeBartolo said. She told me how she felt trapped writing screenplays. For one thing, when writing a screenplay, you are confined to a strict format, where you have to communicate everything by dialogue. She wanted to have more freedom in her writing. “When you sit down to write a novel, you’re free to do whatever you want. You can go anywhere, see anything, and you can be inside people’s heads,” DeBartolo mused. She also spoke about the market for screenplay writing, and the pressure to appeal to everyone. She said that in writing a novel, one could appeal to a more select group of people, and still have a career.
   I asked DeBartolo, now 30, if there was an experience that pushed to her to move away from Los Angeles and start writing novels. She said: “It was a general feeling that I wasn’t going to get very far unless I compromised, and I wasn’t willing to compromise. But I think the last straw was when I’d just started writing God-Shaped Hole, and I was offered the job of writing this script, the story of which was just ridiculous and stupid. For a while I tried to convince myself that it wasn’t so stupid, but when I realized that there was no way I could write the script and still be able to look at myself in the mirror, that’s when I just said, ‘I’ve got to get out of here!’ and I moved four months later!” She now lives most of the year in Boulder, Colorado, and the rest in New York City for “a little bit of the urban life.” She describes her locations of choice as “a sort of yin and yang thing,” but she enjoys the nice quiet of Colorado as a writing environment.
   The inspiration for God-Shaped Hole was not what I expected at all. Grief-stricken over the death of Jeff Buckley, a singer and musician whose words inspired her, she wrote the novel for him. “Kurt Vonnegut said: write for one person, so I was writing for Jeff,” DeBartolo told me.
   DeBartolo based the character Jacob Grace on Jeff Buckley, as a tribute to him. “Grace” was the name of Jeff’s only CD. Having acquired the CD, I found countless ties from his lyrics to her book.”
   The protagonist in her novel, Trixie Jordan, is so realistic and well developed that I wondered how autobiographical she might be. DeBartolo told me that she liked to think of herself as Trixie with better parents. She reflected on their similarities: “She and I have a lot in common personality-wise. We’ve had similar experiences, and we view the world in a similar way. And If I had seen a personal ad like she saw in The Weekly, I would have answered it. Like her, normally I wouldn’t even dream of answering a personal ad, but if I saw those words, I’d think there was a Jacob out there for me.” She said that her family sees a lot of her in Trixie, and that, like Trixie, the only things that make her feel okay in the world are writing, reading, music and love. “Everything else sort of leaves me empty.”
   The lifestyle of a writer works well for DeBartolo. I asked if she found it lonely, and she quipped: “That’s one of the reasons I was attracted to it! I’m sort of a loner, and I like to sit alone in front of my computer and be in my imaginary world eight hours a day. I don’t have to talk to anybody but my imaginary friends that I can play with all day long. I know a lot of writers who complain about it being lonely, but I actually prefer to be anti-social most of the time.” DeBartolo told me that she finds it impossible to write non-fiction, and even confesses to elaborating on the truth in her diary.
   As someone who envisions a writing career in my future, I was curious to know DeBartolo’s advice for aspiring writers. She told me, in a serious voice, that it takes a lot of time and dedication. Her number one piece of advice is to write every day, even if it’s only for ten minutes. “It’s like any talent,” she says, “you have to keep it in shape, and exercise it, make sure you don’t get out of shape. So my biggest advice is to write every day, and read a lot too, because the best writers in the world are good readers.”
   After a brief and unsatisfying flirtation with screenwriting in Hollywood, Tiffanie DeBartolo has found her true calling in literature. But then again, she knew it was destined from the start: “If I couldn’t be a rock star I was going to be a writer... and I had no musical talent.”
   Alice Ollstein will begin Santa Monica High School in the fall. Her review of God-Shaped Hole appeared here last week, and can be found in the Mirror archives at www.smmirror.com.