Not all that long ago, a girl named Zippy came . . . well, pretty much zipping into our consciousness. Racing around town on her bike, usually headed toward the local drug store for her almost daily lemon phosphate drink, Zippy seemed alternately bemused by and oblivious to her fellow denizens of Mooreland, Indiana—and they pretty much returned the compliment. It made for a tale of childhood that was sweet yet unsentimental and with an insightfulness about life and family that almost crept up on you, just when you thought you were merely being entertained. 

Now Zippy is back, and we're happy to have her. Author Haven Kimmel returns to her childhood self with the audio edition of her first memoir A Girl Named Zippy, and its sequel focusing on her mother, She Got Up Off the Couch. HighBridge asked a few questions of Haven shortly after she wrapped up recording on Couch.

Q: A Girl Named Zippy came out a few years ago. What was it like going back and revisiting this story? 

Haven: Oh, it was nice. A lot of my old friends were there, and lost animals. Since I only recently finished the sequel I was surprised to find how much the narrative voice had changed. Zippy covers the years from my birth to about age eight or nine; She Got Up Off the Couch goes from there to thirteen. Organically the sequel feels like a more grown-up book, but just barely. It made me wonder if it's possible to actually write my way into adulthood—if I write the next few years and the next, will I eventually become mature? That would be a bonus. 

Q: Since it’s a memoir, it’s not surprising that you chose to read your own work, but not every memoirist does. What were the reasons behind your choice? 

Haven: Some books are plot driven, some are character driven. Zippy is a book that relies entirely on voice, and because it's a memoir that voice is my own. As I was writing the first draft I would call my mother and ask her if she sounded like herself, if I sounded like myself at whatever age I was dealing with, and she always thought I did. To have someone else read it would have worked against the book, I think. 

Q: Zippy was your first audiobook reading, and you’ve now also just completed Couch. How was the experience? 

Haven: It was much harder physically than I'd expected. The sensitivity of the microphone is so extreme that it picks up the death of old cells and random aspirations. I had no idea my stomach makes so much noise, for instance. It was shocking. One afternoon a peculiar sound was being picked up—it sounded like a hail storm—and while I was afraid it was actually coming from some part of my body I couldn't imagine where. It turned out to be originating from an open can of sparkling water quite distant from the microphone. The engineer was hearing the carbonation. That's just wrong, I think.

I had a wonderful time reading both books, and my producer, Paula [Parker], and engineer, Dick, really should be given little statuettes for their patience. It was only after I'd finished recording Zippy that I woke up in the night and realized that all the things I said and did, mistakes I made, barnyard animal noises, etcetera, had been recorded and would be heard by anonymous editors. I feared for them and continue to pray for their forgiveness. 

Q: You mention in the beginning of A Girl Named Zippy that your sister was highly skeptical that anyone (except a desperate hospital patient) would be interested in Mooreland, Indiana. But then the book went on to become a national bestseller. What do you think accounts for its appeal? 

Haven: I honestly don't know. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that we are by nature nostalgic creatures. The specificity of Zippy (and I had thought it might be too specific to be really interesting to other people) tends to take people back to their own childhoods, their own hometowns. Many people have told me, too, that they love the genre of memoir but couldn't bear another tale of victimhood/ sexual abuse/ child-prostitution. American readers are far more sophisticated than they're given credit for, especially the members of book groups, and I think a great many readers felt my philosophy or posture, if you will, from the beginning of the book. I don't recall or report my life experiences as things that happened to me; they are simply things that happened. It's a story I'm telling, and I can tell it any way I want. That I chose to tell it comically was such a relief to readers, I think. 

Q: Your follow up She Got Up Off the Couch  focuses more on your mother. 

Haven: I never wanted to write a sequel. I was dead set against a sequel. Zippy was its own universe, a finished thing. Then, as I say in the Preface to Couch, I was asked repeatedly at readings what became of the people in Zippy. We'd go through my family and friends and then someone would inevitably ask, "What about your mom? Did she ever get up off the couch?" And I realized that her story was one of such heroism (it's also hysterically funny), the result of her actions was so poignant, that I owed it to her to write it. Couch is still about that little Zippy girl, for certain, but the drama that played out sometimes off stage, sometimes at the periphery, and often right in front of me, is what propels it.

November 2005