Melissa Fay Greene's 'Biking': A fun ride
Four kids would probably seem like plenty to most people, but for Melissa Fay Greene they were the starter set. Greene's charming memoir, "No Biking in the House Without a Helmet" (Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26), recounts her adventures as she and her husband added to their biological family five adopted children: one Romany boy from a Bulgarian orphanage and four Ethiopians who had lost their parents to AIDS. It wasn't always easy, she acknowledges during a visit to New York from her home in Atlanta, but creating this new family was a joyful, transformative experience.
You're known for serious nonfiction like "Praying for Sheetrock," based on reporting and research. What prompted this very personal memoir?
I felt very sheepish about it. I always say to writing students, "Don't write memoirs. Learn something about the world; feel curious about lives outside your own." But writers are storytellers, and you go where the good stories are. It didn't escape my attention that we had all kinds of amazing stories piling up underfoot in our family. Parenting the first four was marvelous and surprising, full of hilarity and tears, and the five other children brought these incredible stories with them.
Your longtime readers may be surprised by how funny the book is. Was that a surprise to you?
No, that was totally natural: I'd been reining it in for 20 years! Releasing that side of myself was a relief, and there were all these funny and wonderful stories about the culture clash going on as my younger children adapted to America. For the Ethiopian kids, the shock was softened because Atlanta has an Ethiopian population of close to 20,000; they weren't the only ones who had bridged this amazing divide, leaving an African world of poverty and coming to a very diverse American world of freedom and plenty.
Your biological children encouraged the adoptions, but were there moments when they felt jealous or neglected?
My very hardest time was Lily being so thrown by Jesse's arrival. She was 7, she'd been my spoiled baby, and then she was displaced. She was so sad and confused, and that was really, really hard. Now, from the perspective of Lily being 18, she's fabulous, and she ended up being the linchpin of the family. She went from being the youngest of four biological white children to being the oldest of six kids at home, and the only one of the biological kids. She was the entree for the others into America; she was their first guide: "This is cool, and this is not cool. This is tasty, that's not tasty."
Now that your youngest is 13, are you finally able to look forward to an empty nest?
Not always, but there are times. . . . We've got five kids at home, and sometimes on a Saturday night there are 20 teenagers sleeping over. Sometimes I think it would be nice to wake up on Sunday morning and have the house look like it did when we went to bed!
