'I'M INTERESTED IN people and what happens to them,' says Jessica Hagedorn, sitting at a table at the trendy restaurant Pastis in Manhattan's meatpacking district. 'That's what engages me - human motivation. What draws some people into the forest and others out of it?'
It's an apt question to ask on the paperback release of her third novel, Dream Jungle (Penguin). Using the jungle of Hagedorn's native Philippines as the backdrop, the novel centres on the 'theme of cultural mythmaking,' she says.
The myths spring from two real events that were seminal for the Philippines. In 1971, a wealthy Filipino claimed to have found a lost tribe in the Mindanao rainforest. A few years later, Hollywood came to the Philippine jungle to shoot the Vietnam war movie Apocalypse Now. As in Hagedorn's two earlier novels, the non-linear plot of Dream Jungle grows out of her offbeat characters' experiences.
'Everyone put their own spin on it,' Hagedorn says of the tribe. 'As for the movie, it's about who's controlling the images we're going to see. We have the making of a big Hollywood movie a couple of years after the war has ended in a country that looks like that country, but isn't. A movie can provide a very distorted view of the world.'
Both the tribe and the movie, she says, raise issues of 'cultural authenticity' - which she explores in her first and second novels, respectively, Dogeaters (1990), nominated for a National Book Award, and The Gangster of Love (1996).
'I was fascinated by our need to have these things in our lives, our need as people to believe in myths,' says Hagedorn, 55, a petite, animated woman, who is a mother and a teacher.