Lauren Bufferd

FictionHistorical FictionDebut Fiction

Kimberly Elkins

Interview by Lauren Bufferd

At the age of 2, Laura Bridgman lost four of her five senses to illness. Several years later, she was taken to the Perkins Institute in Boston where, under the tutelage and guidance of Samuel Ridley Howe she not only learned how to communicate, but became one of the 19th century’s most notable women. Yet few people know about her today. Kimberly Elkins’ stunning debut, What Is Visible, promises to change all that.

Laura Bridgman was once a celebrity but now few people know about her. How did you find out about her and what made you want to tell her story?
I first read about Laura in a review of her two biographies in the New Yorker in 2001. I couldn’t believe that I’d never heard of her, and both the story of her life and the accompanying photograph of her—delicate and emaciated, but sitting ramrod straight with her head held high as she read from an enormous, raised-letter book—touched me in a more profound way than I’d ever felt about another person. As someone who has struggled on and off with debilitating depression—now off for several years, knock wood—my whole being resonated with the depth of her isolation and helplessness even as she tried valiantly to connect with others. That night, I stayed up until dawn writing the story which eventually begot the novel, and which was published shortly thereafter in The Atlantic. But I wanted to know more, to put together the pieces of the puzzle to explain why she’d been virtually erased from history.

Laura Bridgman reading
Laura Bridgman reading, circa 1888

 

What kind of research did you do?
I spent two years immersing myself in the letters, journals and historical press coverage of Laura and my three other narrators: Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, the founder of Perkins; Julia Ward Howe, his famous wife, a poet, abolitionist and suffragist; and Sarah Wight, Laura’s last beloved teacher. Besides the archives at Perkins School for the Blind, I was fortunate to get fellowships at the Houghton Library at Harvard, the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe, the Massachusetts and Maine Historical Societies and the American Antiquarian Society, the last of which was most useful in simply acclimating myself to the 19th-century sensibility. I learned quickly that it was better to read from the period than about the period.

"[W]hen Dr. Howe abruptly ended her education, she was learning French and Latin. Imagine how far she would’ve come if she’d continued to be taught!"

What did you learn about Bridgman that surprised you the most?
Laura never ceased to be surprising! One thing that particularly amazed me was that when Dr. Howe abruptly ended her education, she was learning French and Latin. Imagine how far she would’ve come if she’d continued to be taught! On the negative side, I was kind of floored that Laura was violent toward her teachers and other students up through her late teens, slapping and pinching them, pulling their hair. And she even once bit the famous Senator Charles Sumner, who was probably her least favorite person in the world, due to his roughness with her and his intensely close relationship with her mentor, Dr. Howe.

The title is an interesting one given that Laura lacks the sense of sight. Where you wondering what is visible to her or about her? Or both?
The line most literally refers to the narrative itself: at the end of “telling” her story to the young Helen Keller—a literary device, obviously—Laura says that she will not be able to read what she has written, and prays that “what is invisible to man may be visible to God.” The idea of what is visible, or on the surface, versus what is invisible, or below the surface, and what it means to be wholly visible to others—emotionally, physically, intellectually, spiritually—never ceases to fascinate. To me, the phrase is all-encompassing, not just about Laura’s handicap, but about the ways in which we all perceive and misperceive the world, what we witness of all the vagaries of human existence, and even the idea of God, who is always described as all-seeing.

"The idea of what is visible, or on the surface, versus what is invisible, or below the surface, and what it means to be wholly visible to others—emotionally, physically, intellectually, spiritually—never ceases to fascinate."

Laura’s is not the only point-of-view in the novel. Samuel Gridley Howe, his wife Julia Ward Howe, and Laura’s teacher each tell a part of the story. Why did you want to include their narratives?
Well, originally, I didn’t. I wanted the novel to be a tour de force of only Laura’s voice, excited as I was by the challenge of writing a character who can express herself to the reader through only one sense. But as I wrote, I realized that this would make the book too hermetic, too claustrophobic, for both me and for the reader. Then I planned on writing the book as a triptych of three very different 19th-century women—Laura, Julia and Sarah—coming together to provide a nuanced portrait of what it meant to be a woman in society at that time. But then I realized it was more important to give Laura the most possible context—how did those closest to her see her? And Dr. Howe definitely wanted to be heard, opinionated fellow that he was! It became clear that it was just as important to be able to view Laura from the outside as from the inside to provide a full picture. And the more I researched the lives of the others, the more I became enthralled with their individual narratives, and with finding a way to weave them all tightly together, while still keeping Laura at the center of the book.

You make some interesting choices regarding Bridgman’s sexuality. Can you talk about why you decided to explore that and how you came to the conclusions that you did?
With the striking exception of Dr. Howe, with whom she was in love in her own unique way as a mentor and father figure, Laura could not abide most men, a fact which was remarked on by all her teachers and even Howe himself. She greatly enjoyed the company of most women, however, especially touching them, which grew to be such a problem at Perkins that Howe was forced to lay down an edict that Laura never be allowed into the other girls’ beds, at a time when sharing beds with the same sex was considered commonplace. As far as documented history goes, it doesn’t appear that Laura ever really had a romantic relationship—she was so uninformed about that part of life that even as a late teenager she thought she could marry her brother—but as a novelist friend of mine said, “If you’re going to write her whole life, you’ve got to give her something.” And so I gave her Kate, the young but very worldly Irish cook. As for the sadomasochistic overtones of their relationship, that came as a complete surprise to me when I was writing their love scenes, but then it made complete sense: If you have only the sense of touch, you would want to push that one sense as far as it could go.

"If you have only the sense of touch, you would want to push that one sense as far as it could go."

It was Laura Bridgman who taught Annie Sullivan how to finger spell and Sullivan was the well-known teacher of Helen Keller. Why do you think so many people know about Helen Keller and not about Laura Bridgman?
While Helen Keller openly admitted that she set out to be “the best damn poster child the world had ever seen,” Laura never ceased to be her own unique, difficult and very funny person, even at the height of her fame when she was considered the world’s second most famous woman, second only to Queen Victoria. The last straw came when Laura publicly contradicted the Unitarian mores of the New England elite and the Institute, pushing Howe to excoriate her in the press, claiming that he’d suddenly realized his prodigy was “small-brained” and “subject to derangement.”

And though she had been an exhibitable child, Laura’s anorexia due to her lack of taste and smell made her appear even more peculiar. It took Perkins decades to find the “second Laura Bridgman,” and Helen Keller was chosen solely on the basis of a photograph. Helen also got blue glass eyes to make her more presentable, a secret which was kept from the public for her entire life.

But most of all, it was the cruel dismissal of her dear Sarah Wight, Laura’s last teacher, when she was 20, that forever stunted Laura’s potential and celebrity. Without Sarah, there was no one to interpret the world for her. Helen Keller had the precious gift of Annie Sullivan for most of her life, and she continued to blossom under her care and tutelage. And yet it was Sullivan herself who said that she had “always believed Laura Bridgman to be intellectually superior to Helen Keller.”

It’s difficult to read this book and not become acutely aware of one’s sensory abilities! Do you feel like your ideas about sense perceptions changed from writing about Laura Bridgman?
Well, I didn’t do any type of sensory deprivation or anything like that to inhabit her character. I can’t really explain it in any totally rational way, but as soon as I saw her photograph, I knew what it was like to be her. Call it psychic, call it deep emotional resonance, call it artistic arrogance, call it wildly improbable kismet, but it was honestly not difficult for me to imagine being without four of my five senses. I do think I am naturally a more touch-centered person than most, however, and perhaps that made a difference.

You’ve written plays and screenplays, as well as nonfiction articles and essays. Why did you choose a novel for the story of Laura Bridgman? What was different about the experience than other projects?
I knew instantly that I wanted to be inside her head, under her skin, and therefore writing her in the first person wouldn’t have worked for other forms. What made this different from all other projects was my immediate identification with Laura. I’ve always been interested in disability studies; the screenplay I had optioned was about a comedian with Tourettes Syndrome, so this was definitely in my wheelhouse, as they say. I also adapted the original story, “What Is Visible,” as a one-act play, and think that the book would make for a terrifically moving film.

What are you working on next?
I’m currently working on two major projects: A historical novel about two real-life sisters who were famous mediums as children in 19th-century America and who later became the founders of the wildly popular Spiritualism movement; and a memoir that explodes the difference between what actually happened and what could have happened instead, sandwiching the “truth” between the best- and worst-case scenarios of certain dramatic, and even violent, moments from my life. I think everyone would like the chance to go back and rewrite, revise, take the other road, etc., so I’m letting myself go there, in a variation on the classic memoir. The reader won’t know which story in each instance is the true one. And I continue to work on short fiction.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of What Is Visible.

Author photo by Sarah Shatz.

At the age of 2, Laura Bridgman lost four of her five senses to illness. Several years later, she was taken to the Perkins Institute in Boston where, under the tutelage and guidance of Samuel Ridley Howe she not only learned how to communicate, but became one of the 19th century’s most notable women. Yet few people know about her today. Kimberly Elkins’ stunning debut, What Is Visible, promises to change all that.

FictionHistorical Fiction

Amy Bloom

Interview by Lauren Bufferd

Readers of Amy Bloom’s riotous new novel, Lucky Us, might want to pack a few snacks and buckle their seatbelts for this highly entertaining ride, which kicks off when half-sisters Eva and Iris hightail it from small-town Ohio to pursue their dreams in Hollywood.

Bloom herself has always loved a good road trip. “My first road trip was the day after I graduated from high school,” she says during a phone interview in which it is clear that her own warmth and humor is the source for much of the wit found in her fiction. “I went with two girlfriends, we borrowed a car from someone’s overly indulgent father, and we drove from Long Island to Vancouver, down the West Coast and back again. And it was great. I always have a positive feeling when I see people getting into a car with a bag of chips. I even told my daughters all they needed to hit the road was 50 bucks and a couple of Tampax.”

I told my daughters all they needed to hit the road was 50 bucks and a couple of Tampax.

At its wildly beating heart, Lucky Us is a novel of rebirth and reinvention told with the kind of candor that Bloom—the author of two previous novels and three short-story collections—is known for. At the age of 12, Eva is abandoned by her mother at her father and half-sister Iris’ house. The teenagers don’t have much in common, except their shared parent, Edgar—and even he isn’t quite who they thought he was. Bloom was intrigued by the idea of writing about sisters.

“I had never written about sisters before. And though I think there are, as always for any writer, lots of sources, I happen to have a sister, and she is six years older than me. We both say we paid almost no attention to each other until she was going off to college. I was crawling around on the floor while she was riding her bike. So the idea of what it is to get to know a sister later, when you don’t have all that shared history, interested me.”

The charismatic Iris shows early talent as a performer, winning every local and regional speech competition, and Eva becomes her loyal sidekick, dresser and confidante. After the girls catch their father trying to steal Iris’ winnings, they hop a Greyhound bus to Hollywood, where Iris hopes to break into the movies. A scandal ensues and the girls are soon back on the road to New York, but this time, via station wagon, with their father in tow. Their friend Francisco, a hair and make-up artist to the stars, finds them jobs as domestics for the Torellis, a wealthy family on Long Island.

But that’s only the beginning of the girls’ madcap adventures: Later in the novel, an orphan is abducted; a friend is accused of being a German spy; and Eva takes a job as a fortune-teller at a local beauty parlor. At times, the book feels almost like a series of outtakes from some screwball comedy—but these are scenes that would have never made it past the censors, like the lushly described party at the home of Hollywood’s most decadent lesbians, or the sisters conspiring to kidnap a little boy from the local Jewish orphanage for Iris’ childless lover. But Bloom’s command of her characters keeps the novel from spilling over into satire just as her judiciously chosen details keep the plot moving forward.

Though she was born in the 1950s, Bloom is as tuned in to the spirit of the 1940s as she was to the 1920s in her award-winning novel Away. Lucky Us gives her a way to look at how life at home provided new opportunities for change and reinvention, especially for women and African Americans.

“Part of what happened when this country went to war are things that would have been unthinkable 10 years earlier,” Bloom explains. “Women not only going to work, but doing difficult physical labor and being in challenging leadership positions—things that the dominant culture had fought against since its founding. Now, it’s true the war ended and we sent those women packing, the war ended and the level of integration between African Americans and the dominant white culture dripped dramatically, but my own sense is that once you open the door, you cannot completely and forever close it again.”

Each chapter of Lucky Us is headed by a song title from the 1940s, drawn from jazz, blues and pop. These evocative headings are both a distillation of the chapter content and reminder of the rich diversity of the times, while also working as representations of some of the decade’s most profound social changes. “This was a time when music was everywhere, and though there were cultural divides, most popular music was heard by everyone. The high school girl, her science teacher, the principal, the custodian and the guy who delivered school supplies all listened to the same music,” Bloom says, adding with a laugh, “I had such a wonderful time choosing these. Can’t carry a tune, but I sure do like to listen.”

Bloom published a complete playlist of the songs on her website, but says, “If you know the songs, that’s a little plus for you, but even if you don’t, the titles are so evocative they still bring something fresh.”

Most of the novel is told from Eva’s wry perspective, but Lucky Us includes letters, both sent and unsent, from the sisters, their father and Gus, who works with them in Long Island, but through a series of unfortunate events, winds up in a German prison camp. The letters move the plot forward, but more importantly, they give the reader an additional glimpse at the inner thoughts of the characters as well as their joys, frustrations and hidden desires.

“I love the epistolary form. There is something very moving to me about letters. The wish to communicate—which is sometimes successful and sometimes not—something happens in the presence of that intention.”

Bloom’s short stories are known for their wise assurance that the very complexity of human expression—conversational, emotional and even sexual—is not only acceptable but also cause for celebration. In addition to the humor and fast-paced high jinks, Lucky Us contains a similar wisdom as it investigates how we engage with our families, both the ones we are born into and the ones we create.

Bloom, who is now the distinguished University Writer-in-Residence at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, also has a master’s in social work and worked as a psychotherapist. She credits her training for giving her empathy for her characters’ deeply human foibles.

“I learned to not interrupt,” she says, “to pay attention to what was said and how, and what was said before and what was said after. I learned to make as few assumptions as possible. To recognize that people are, in their nature, complex. So that training was really useful, especially the listening part. I don’t think you can be a good writer and a bad listener.”

I don’t think you can be a good writer and a bad listener.

About halfway through the novel, Edgar remembers that his mother once told him, “It’s good to be smart, it’s better to be lucky.” But Lucky Us reminds us that not all luck is good luck. As Bloom puts it, “Luck is a roll of the dice and we are all subject to it. So, better to be lucky than smart? Sure. But better to be lucky and smart, so you have a plan when the dice go against you, which they will—sometimes.”

Her playful novel reminds us that life can only be what we make of it and that the biggest setbacks often result in the most gratifying results. Her readers are all the luckier for it.

 

Author photo by Deborah Feingold

This article was originally published in the August 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Readers of Amy Bloom’s riotous new novel, Lucky Us, might want to pack a few snacks and buckle their seatbelts for this highly entertaining ride, which kicks off when half-sisters Eva and Iris hightail it from small-town Ohio to pursue their dreams in Hollywood.
FictionDebut Fiction

Caitlin Moran

Interview by Lauren Bufferd

Feminist, columnist, activist, humorist, memoirist—Caitlin Moran is a woman of many descriptors. She can now add "novelist" to that list thanks to How to Build a Girl. Something of a roman à clef, this hilarious, poignant and no-holds-barred coming-of-age tale stars a girl from a council estate in the Midlands who, like Moran herself, became a rock critic at a young age. We asked Moran a few questions about writing, class, feminism, celebrity interviews and, of course, her new book.

How to Build a Girl shares some common themes with your memoir, How to Be a Woman. What are the differences when approaching similar material for fiction?
Well obviously the thrill was that I could make things up. Sticking to the truth, and my own experiences, for How to Be a Woman was often quite frustrating. Now I get to use all the weird, mad adolescent experiences my friends have, then ramp them up for comic effect. You get to exaggerate. I love exaggerating. I would say I am definitely the best exaggerator IN THE UNIVERSE.

"I love exaggerating. I would say I am definitely the best exaggerator IN THE UNIVERSE."

On a related note, you were also a music critic at a fairly early age. How does Johanna’s experience as a pop critic compare to yours?
Well, although Johanna is, like me, a fat working-class teenage rock critic from the West Midlands, she's based on the journalist Julie Burchill, who started working at the NME in the punk era when she was just 17. She was a hip young gunslinger—often more famous than the bands she interviewed, the centre of the storm. A bit of a legend. When I was a teenage rock critic, however, I used to hide in the corner of the office of Melody Maker whispering "I like Crowded House. I wish I had a friend." It was much more fun to write about a girl like Julie Burchill than a girl like me. I kind of stole her life a bit. She inspired me.

Can we expect more books about Johanna Morrigan?

Yes! This is the first of a trilogy about all those characters. The next is called How to Be Famous, and then How to Change the World. I love Johanna and her drinking buddy John Kite so much. I kind of want to hang out with them and have sex with them. This is part of the essential patheticness of being an author—we invent these people, then fall in love with them. You adore them. But, of course, they're just a part of you, from your brain. Does that make you an egotistic mental? Probably. So that’s why we drink a lot, as well.

"This is part of the essential patheticness of being an author—we invent these people, then fall in love with them. Does that make you an egotistic mental? Probably."

The relationship with John Kite is such an important one for Johanna. Is he based on anyone?
I was so annoyed with all the usual rock stars you see invented in books, and films—all in black leather and sunglasses, skinny, whining, spoiled, a bit thick. That's not like all the great working-class boys in bands I used to interview in the early 1990s—Teenage Fanclub, the Boo Radleys and now Elbow. Clever, self-taught, whimsical hilarious boys who you could while away the afternoon in the pub with, smoking and drinking and shooting the breeze about anything. So I made John Kite out of all those lovely boys. He's basically Richard Burton, in a fur coat, singing the songs of American Music Club. I know exactly how all his songs sound.

American readers may be less aware of the class and financial issues that are so key to the plot of How to Build a Girl. What can you tell our readers that would help them understand what is at stake for Johanna and the Morrigan family?

Class is a HUGE issue in the U.K. Let me put it like this: I'm a columnist for The Times, I write a sitcom for Channel 4, I'm making a film of How to Be a Woman and I publish books and novels. In my dealings with all the people, across all these different media and cultural companies, I've met precisely ONE OTHER person who was raised on welfare. In the last 20 YEARS. And yet, 60% of our country claims some form of benefit or other.

"Working class/poor people just don't get to tell their stories in this country. I am one of the very few lucky ones."

So, as you see, working class/poor people just don't get to tell their stories in this country. They don't have access to the media. I am one of the very few lucky ones. And so all our films and TV shows and book end up being what the world's continuing impression of Britain is: depictions of lovely middle-class/upper-class life, all picnic and brittle dinner-party chat and public schoolboys in the rain and balls and chintzy dresses and old maids on bicycles and vicars drinking tea.

And that's all fine, but I love the working classes: We do it differently. The power and energy and inventiveness and joy and euphoria and hedonism and anger and sideways thinking that powered the revolution, then the 1960s, then Britpop.

What's working class culture? The Beatles, Joe Orton, Anthony Hopkins, Michael Caine, Tracey Emin, Danny Boyle, Irvine Welsh, Roxy Music, Alexander McQueen, The Sex Pistols, The Who, The Fall, Julie Walters, Steve McQueen, Shane Meadows, Pulp, Slade, Black Sabbath, Amy Winehouse, Richard Burton . . . oh I'm turning myself on. I need to stop.

Music is such a key part of this book. If you were creating a soundtrack for it, what songs and performers would you include?
All the guys in there, man—it's the story of music in the early 1990s. Sonic Youth, Stone Roses, Happy Mondays, Jane's Addiction, Pixies, New Order, Cure, Hole, American Music Club, Levitation, Suede, Manic Street Preachers, Primal Scream, Teenage Fanclub, Massive Attack, Blur, Mazzy Star, PJ Harvey, Ride, Lush, Cocteau Twins, My Bloody Valentine, U2's big dark reinvention—it was such an exciting time.

Every week there seemed to be some new fabulous blast of colour being fired up into the sky—every week the music press would make you feel desperate to get some new album, or single, or go down the front of a gig and get your head blown up.

I was so obsessed with Pavement I got my friend Julie—who could drive, and who only liked New Kids on the Block—to drive me all the way from Wolverhampton to Derby to see Pavement live, by lying to her, and telling her they sounded like New Kids on the Block. Amazingly, she didn't punch me in the tits when a band who sounded like The Fall, exploding, came on stage. She actually got quite into them. It was a time of wonder.

You have two daughters. Have your ideas about feminism changed at all after having children?
Yes—I realised how URGENT feminism is. That there could easily be another two or three GENERATIONS of girls before we even get something as basic as pay equality—it's not predicted to come about until 2070, despite it being ILLEGAL to pay women less than men. If any other law was being broken as frequently as the Equal Pay Act, there'd be an outcry. Instead, we just ignore it. IT'S ILLEGAL HELLO HELLO IS THIS MICROPHONE ON? 

"If any other law was being broken as frequently as the Equal Pay Act, there'd be an outcry. Instead, we just ignore it. IT'S ILLEGAL HELLO HELLO IS THIS MICROPHONE ON?" 

You were a judge of the Bailey Prize, which is Britain’s top prize for women in fiction. What was that experience like?
Exhilarating. To judge in a year where there were books as astonishing and truly genius as The Goldfinch and Eimear McBride's a Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing is a total joy. Tartt runs with Dickens' legacy, McBride with Joyce's, and they both fashion something new and euphoric and freeing and utterly beautiful.

Who have been some of your best interviews?
Going to a sex club with Lady Gaga; getting pissed with Benedict Cumberbatch and me going "Do Sherlock!" and him just . . . doing some Sherlock. Asking Keith Richards if he wears a wig, and him making me pull his hair to prove it was real. Courtney Love describing what it was like the first time she fucked Kurt Cobain. Turning up late to interview the Prime Minister in a shitty minicab that looked like the kind of thing terrorists would use as a suicide vehicle. Challenging Jeff Buckley to make himself look ugly (he stuck jellybeans on his teeth and gurned. He still looked astonishingly handsome.).

What is your idea of a perfect night out with women friends?
Oh I don't like to go out. I like to get no more than six people over to my house, and we sit on the patio smoking fags, drinking gin from mugs and launching into impassioned manifestoes about what we would do if we managed Madonna (make her “go hag”! Age! Go grey and angry! Or get her back out with the gays again!) Around the piano by 10 p.m. for a sing-song—all killer no filler: Queen, Jesus Christ Superstar, Beatles, Kate Bush—and then overly sexual disco-dancing in the kitchen to Rihanna from 11.30 p.m. onwards. Crisps at 1 a.m.

 

RELATED CONTENT: Read our review of How to Build a Girl.

 

Feminist, columnist, activist, humorist, memoirist—Caitlin Moran is a woman of many descriptors. She can now add "novelist" to that list: How to Build a Girl goes on sale this week. Something of a roman à clef, this hilarious, poignant and no-holds-barred coming-of-age tale stars a girl from a council estate in the Midlands who, like Moran herself, became a rock critic at a young age. We asked Moran a few questions about her fiction debut.

FictionLiterary Fiction

Marlon James

Interview by Lauren Bufferd

In 1976, two days before the Smile Jamaica concert to promote political unity, armed gunmen walked into reggae star Bob Marley’s house at 56 Hope Road in Kingston and began shooting in what was a failed assassination attempt. In prize-winning author Marlon James’ groundbreaking new novel A Brief History of Seven Killings, the attack becomes a centerpiece of a blistering commentary on Jamaican society in the 1970s and its inextricable links both to Cold War politics and to the drug wars of the 1980s.

I was in elementary school when both Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were shot, yet I think of those events as seminal to my childhood. Likewise, you were 6 when Marley was shot. Do you remember the assassination attempt at all?
I do remember it as a kind of seminal event. When I first heard he had been shot, I remember thinking, he’s in Jamaica? Because by then Bob Marley was the guy who did things in foreign lands, not here. He wasn't on the charts, or on TV, so he wasn’t a part of daily popular culture. But you could hear it in the tone of adults around you that a line had been crossed. Also this: a sense that if this man, beloved by both political sides could be attacked, then we were all sitting ducks. The event did take the sense of security from everyone, even Jamaicans who never had to think about that before. If neither money nor celebrity could protect him, what was going to happen to us?

What kind of research did you do for this novel?
Tons. Over the four years it took to write this novel I had four researchers helping me. There were so many things, people, events, etc to learn about. The Cold War. The history of the CIA. Third world politics. I went through back issues of High Times, Ramparts, Playboy, Penthouse (for research!) and Rolling Stone. Bob Marley books. Rolling Stones tour books. Artillery specs. 1970s slang. 1980s Police blotters. 1990s crack house investigations. Manuals on how to disappear and build a new identity. Source materials. Interviews with actual drug users so as to distinguish between a heroin and a cocaine high. At one point I worried that had the FBI subpoenaed my laptop, I would have had some serious explaining to do.

Papa Lo and Josey Wales are extremely aggressive and violent characters. Yet they are also described with much empathy. What is it like to create characters like these?
I like difficult characters. As a writer they are the only people I want to spend any time with. Especially in those moments I find them despicable. Which is not to say it was easy at all. It’s never easy writing about brutality and violence, nor should it be. But I was also careful, I think, not to explain it all away with pop psychology. These are just not good men. But they are still complex and contradictory. Sometimes depth means not good and bad, but bad with shades of worse. Either way you have to make your characters three dimensional, regardless of who they are and what they do.

Your previous novel took place in the 18th century, vs. the 20th-century setting of the new book. What are the differences in writing a historical novel when the history is within living memory?
Not much. Both needed considerable research. The problem with writing about an event that you were a part of is that your experience is still only one person’s point of view. Other viewpoints, other perspectives become crucial. Especially if it turns out that the event was something that you have no firsthand knowledge of. And given that I was 6 in 1976, that’s pretty much everything.

"The problem with writing about an event that you were a part of is that your experience is still only one person’s point of view."

A Brief History is very honest about the sexism and homophobia in Jamaican culture. How has Jamaican society changed in this regard?
I would love to say that this has changed, but you’re only one YouTube video or one newspaper editorial away from being reminded that not only have things not changed, but in some ways they are worse.

This story is told by so many different characters—gang leaders, agents, reporters, politicians, girlfriends—yet we never hear from Marley. Why is his perspective not included in the novel?
Even before his death, Bob Marley’s presence in Jamaican life was symbolic. One argument was that this was exactly what made him dangerous, that he now represented an ideal for independence, self-assertion, even nationhood. It was very important that I kept that in the novel, that even on a day-to-day level, Marley was a symbol, almost an allegory. In that sense he had to disappear. Also, we’re talking Bob Marley. He could have easily stolen the show in a book that not really about him.

Music is so obviously key to this novel—if you were making a soundtrack for it, what songs and performers would you include?
There’s a playlist on Spotify! But the book is told in real time, over three decades and actually spans four. It skips countries as well. Crucial to the soundtrack would be what Jamaicans were listening to—not what was on the radio, or on the foreign charts. So let’s start with deep roots reggae without the “rock” sheen: Dennis Brown, Mighty Diamonds, and The Congos. But you would have to go even more “street,” closer to what the characters in my novel were listening to: Big Youth, Dillinger, Michigan & Smiley, U-Roy, I-Roy, Sister Nancy, the beginnings of dancehall. The novel then skips to New York for the beginning of hip-hop, so Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five, and Run DMC, but also Cybertron and Man Parrish. Some early dance (M/A/R/R/S), some beat fusion (Eric B & Rakim’s Paid in Full remix), Neneh Cherry’s Buffalo Stance and then a return to Jamaica in time for Dancehall/hip-hop to top the charts: Super Cat, Buju Banton, Lady Saw and Capleton.

What other Caribbean writers do you think American readers should be reading?
Oonya Kempadoo, Pauline Melville, Kei Miller, Sharon Millar, Roland Watson Grant, Simone Schwarz-Bart, Louis Simpson, Patricia Duncker,

Marley’s music continues to motivate disenfranchised people around the world. What do you think it is about his music and life that still inspires people?
I think people hear a simplicity in the message of freedom, self-determination and triumph after struggle. Simple enough and universal enough that girls in Kabul can form rock bands inspired by him. That said, it’s also because of these things that people miss just how sly and inventive he was. “Kinky Reggae” is as libidinous as any Stones song about sex. “We and Them” nailed class hypocrisy years before rich kids started to buy the Legend album. But most of us are here for the message and the grooves, and next to Marvin Gaye, Marley was the only artist who figured out how to make hard messages go down sweet.

A Brief History is so intense and so brutal—what did you do to relax while you were writing it?
I read Jo Nesbo.

 

RELATED CONTENT: Read our review of A Brief History of Seven Killings.

A version of this article was originally published in the October 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

In 1976, two days before the Smile Jamaica concert to promote political unity, armed gunmen walked into reggae star Bob Marley’s house at 56 Hope Road in Kingston and began shooting in what was a failed assassination attempt. In prize-winning author Marlon James’ groundbreaking new novel A Brief History of Seven Killings, the attack becomes a centerpiece of a blistering commentary on Jamaican society in the 1970s and its inextricable links both to Cold War politics and to the drug wars of the 1980s.

FictionLiterary Fiction

Rebecca Makkai

Interview by Lauren Bufferd

Rebecca Makkai’s second novel, The Hundred-Year House, is an appealing mix of archival mystery, ghost story and historical novel. Told in reverse chronology, it unfolds as a kind of bookish scavenger hunt set in a former artist’s colony, uncovering clues and putting pieces of the fictional puzzle in place. I was able to catch up with her at Nashville’s Southern Festival of Books, where I attended a panel that featured Makkai, Maggie Shipstead and Bret Anthony Johnston discussing the nature of time in their novels. Afterward, Makkai and I settled in for a coffee at Frothy Monkey, a cozy spot down the street from the Festival and a perfect place to discuss books.

How is the book tour going so far?
The book came out in July, so the proper book tour happened over the summer—I was going to bookstores in July and August. This fall I’ve been going to festivals and conferences—it’s really extended the touring time. I’ve been doing about one event a week, either going to a festival, visiting a college creative writing program or being in conversation with another writer at a bookstore. I don’t know if this true, but they say if sharks stop moving, they die. I kind of feel like that. But I love traveling and seeing new cities and meeting new people. Especially other writers.

The fun thing about something like the Southern Festival of Books is that you get to meet other writers that you might just be Facebook friends with and you already have lots of talk about, plus seeing old friends of course.

The Hundred-Year House takes place in three very distinct times. What kind of research did you do?
The year 1999 I remembered very well. That’s the year I graduated from college and I had very specific cultural markers for it. What I did for the 1920s and 1950s was I bought a lot of magazines off of eBay. I was reading novels, listening to music and watching films from those periods too, but magazines really show you what people are talking about, worrying about, what was on their minds. I also got Sears catalogs for those eras, which was an amazing reference, not so much for ambience but for details, especially what things were called. For examples, sofas were called davenports.

Laurelfield, the estate in the book, is both a private home and an artist’s colony. Is it based on a real location?
I knew I wanted to write about a house that had been an artist’s colony before I actually ever stayed in one. But I was tremendously inspired by staying at Yaddo. I could have imagined what that life was like but I never would have got the vibe or the details right. I also learned a lot about how visual artists worked, which was important to the book. The dedication in my book is for, but not about, Yaddo and Ragdale.

Laurelfield is its own place, but its history is very much inspired by Yaddo, which has been an artists colony since the 1920s. But the physical aspects of Laurelfield are very much like Ragdale. Early on in the research I realized I needed to map out the floor plan of both the house and coach house in Laurelfield. In fact I had to do both floors of both houses three times—for every era. So I had six huge pieces of paper and I drew it all out. Very badly.

I love the idea that it is sometimes only luck that ensures that a document or manuscript makes it into the archival record. Have you ever thought about writing a biography yourself?
No, never. But the one thing I am working on which is nonfiction is about my father’s parents, who had really interesting lives in Hungary. My grandmother was a novelist and wrote about 40 books. My grandfather was a politician and a member of parliament and was both on the right and the wrong side of things politically. I am fascinated by them. I wrote a piece about them for Harper's last summer, and some aspects of their stories, partly fictionalized and partly not, are used in my next short-story collection.

What are you working on now?
I am doing final revisions on a book of short stories called Music for Wartime, coming out in July 2015. It feels really good to be getting it out into the world.

I am also beginning to think about a novel that will be set in the art world against the backdrop of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s and a little bit of Paris in the 1920s, although I won’t be moving backwards in time again! More that there’s an older character in the book who remembers back to that time. I am doing a lot of thinking and brainstorming though, I haven’t written anything yet. But I’ll be at Yaddo this January and hope to get started then. 

Rebecca Makkai’s second novel, The Hundred-Year House, is an appealing mix of archival mystery, ghost story and historical novel. Told in reverse chronology, it unfolds as a kind of bookish scavenger hunt set in a former artist’s colony, uncovering clues and putting pieces of the fictional puzzle in place. I was able to catch up with Rebecca at Nashville’s Southern Festival of Books.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Kate Walbert

Interview by Lauren Bufferd

Kate Walbert has always been a keen transmitter of women’s voices, from conforming suburban wives in the 1950s or British suffragettes during World War I. Her new novel, The Sunken Cathedral, offers a complex chorus of female characters in contemporary Manhattan, a city  transformed by radical climate change, tragedy and new wealth. 

We asked Walbert a few questions about her luminous new novel—and her own relationship with New York City.

What was the initial inspiration for this book?
I lived in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York for many years, and after I moved uptown I missed it so much I guess I wanted to imagine my way back. I suppose I could have hopped on the subway . . .

What is the significance of the title?
The title refers to the Debussy prelude “La cathedrale engloutie,” sometimes translated as The Engulfed Cathedral and sometimes translated as The Sunken Cathedral. Debussy’s prelude was inspired by the medieval legend of the Lost City of Ys, a fabled city off the coast of Breton that—due to the devil and an evil daughter (naturally)—is destroyed by a tempest and sinks into the sea. The story goes that on especially calm days its cathedral bell can still be heard. In the book, a character peripherally inspired by my best friend’s mother, Jane, who for more than 20 years took daily painting classes at the National Academy, works on a painting she titles The Sunken Cathedral, as Jane once did. It was Jane, always the smartest person in the room, who later told me the legend behind the title, and the origin of the Debussy prelude.

I was in New York last month, after not being there for several years, and it was amazing to me how much of the city I remembered was gone. What is your New York, and is any of it left?
This is such a great question. I love the concept of “your New York,” because I think anyone who has spent any time here has one, or several. There’s something so personal about the experience of the City because of the chance interactions, weird juxtapositions, abrupt encounters that happen here—all of which are somehow both banal and profound. You bump into someone on the bus and it’s a story. You see something unfold on the street and it’s another story, and then all these stories accrue and become your New York. Maybe it’s because the City moves at warp speed and is constantly changing that you write your history in these small daily encounters—that’s where the humanity of the place comes through. I think New Yorkers are the friendliest people in the world. They have to be. It’s almost a miracle we all survive together. But that’s not really answering your question, is it?

My New York has a lot to do with where I’m living at the time and the stage of my life. For instance, for the first year of graduate school I lived in a rent-controlled studio on Grove Street in the West Village, one of those quintessential Woody Allen New York streets that smell of wood-burning fireplaces on cold winter nights. How I got to live there at all involves a shady philosophy professor at NYU and his scheme to make a little extra cash but that’s a different story (and a different New York). What I remember best is the wisteria that grew up the front of this place, a brownstone painted pink, and how, if I left my window open during a sunny day, the tendrils would snake into my studio and wrap around the closest thing they could find. So that’s one New York that’s mine. And then when my girls were very young, my New York was the various downtown playgrounds—seal park, circle park, Bleecker Street park, the beautiful park in Battery Park City with the granite slide straight from the Albany quarries—I can still rattle the names off like a mantra. I haven’t been to these playgrounds in years but if I were to walk by them today they would be filled with other mothers, fathers, nannies; maybe this is the point.

Many of your male characters are veterans or are serving in the army. Both Simone and Marie’s husbands served in WWII, and one of the footnotes explores, briefly, a moment in the life of a minor character’s great-uncle in Korea. What is your interest in the military experience?
I’m not a military brat but I should have been—my father, who served on the frontlines of Korea—was a chemistry professor at West Point when he and my mother married. She convinced him to leave the Army (he took a job with DuPont) but the Army always loomed large in our house. We went to Army – Navy football games. Dad taught us what it meant to eat a “straight meal,” explained the rituals of hazing at VPI, where he went to college, and generally extolled the military life. The one thing he kept to himself was the experience of his time in Korea. Growing up, I never knew his brothers, but I knew they were in WWII (one in the Infantry, at Omaha Beach, the other a bomber pilot over France), and that his beloved cousin, Charlie, who had lied about his age and enlisted at 16, was one of the last soldiers killed on Iwo Jima. All the family details around the military have always fascinated me—especially for the history left unsaid, the stories untold.

By the end of the novel, most of the characters have left New York, yet the city continues on. Do you think of the ending as pessimistic or optimistic?
I think so much of a reader’s experience of reading is what she brings of her own life into it, whether a city dweller or not—so that’s a difficult question to answer. The city does continue on and that’s ultimately hopeful—think of those mothers and fathers in the playgrounds. I ended with the church bells from the General Seminary in Chelsea, the ones that, when I was there, marked the passing of the hours and other things, such as the anniversaries of 9/11, the moment of that morning when the planes hit the towers. It only occurred to me after finishing the book that the experience of hearing church bells ring, marking occasions both happy and sad, is universal and somehow outside of time and place.

Why did you choose to use to put vital information about your characters in footnotes? How do you think separating out parts of the text impacts story?
I believe there’s an increasingly fractured way of being in the world, our lives barreling forward on many parallel tracks, our focus constantly interrupted, redirected. This is what I came to understand the footnotes to be: the things we don’t say, the history, the regret, the stories that are submerged (to keep the water metaphor) and yet constant. Vital information, yes, but not necessarily of the kind the characters would put forth easily, or readily if they had more time. I’ve come to understand that the footnotes carry what is left unsaid but always present.

A lot of your work is about the restrictions that were or are put on women. Do you think aging releases us from some of those limitations?
And leads us to others, she said, laughingly.

Perhaps. But I guess I would also say that in our culture if age releases us, it may do so for the wrong reasons—we move (or are shoved) out of the sphere, the whirlpool of everything. We are suddenly invisible. I could say this gives us a greater freedom to do whatever we’d like, as if we’d suddenly gone underground and can get away with murder, but that doesn’t feel entirely right. Yes, it’s great progress that Joan Didion is the new face of Celine, but let me get back to you about this question in a few more years.

Your novels take place in Japan, England and the United States, and span periods from the 19th century to the current day. Is there a time or place you haven’t covered yet in which you are interested?
I never start out knowing where my books are going to go—I don’t write from an outline, or with any clear plot or story in mind. I follow the voice, the sentences that seem to carry a certain pressure, a particularity that suggests secrets, complications that may prove interesting to explore. It’s the voice that dictates—that gives the clues to the setting and the situation. For instance, A Short History of Women begins “Mum starved herself for suffrage, grandmother claiming it was just like Mum to take a cause too far.” When writing those “mums” I knew I had to be in England, and clearly in the early 20th century, but I hadn’t planned on any of it and so had to feel my way along from there. Who was this speaker? Who was her mother? Her grandmother? Why suffrage? Why England? In other words, it’s anyone’s guess where the voice might take me next.

Who are some of your favorite writers? For inspiration? For curling up and reading?
There are so many writers to admire. In the past five years, Jane Gardam’s Old Filth trilogy has been my constant recommendation—and I find the work of Hilary Mantel enormously inspiring for the clarity of the point of view and the way in which she constructs these amazingly idiosyncratic sentences that seem to speak directly from the characters’ hearts, not just the brilliant and wildly popular Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, but others as well—The Giant, O’Brien one of my particular favorites.

What are you working on next?
I’m completing a collection of short stories, most of which are set in New York City (but not necessarily Chelsea!).

RELATED CONTENT: Read our review of The Sunken Cathedral.

 

 

We asked award-winning novelist Kate Walbert a few questions about her luminous new novel—and her own relationship with New York City.
FictionHistorical Fiction

Darryl Pinckney

Interview by Lauren Bufferd

Jed Goodfinch is young, gay, black and trying to make a go of it in West Berlin in the 1980s in Darryl Pinckney’s second novel, Black Deutschland. The book is a provocative exploration of city, sexuality and self, written with the intellectual verve and dry wit that Pinckney is known for.

Your previous novel, High Cotton, was published more than 20 years ago. I don’t want to say what took you so long, but . . . what made you want to tell this story now?
When the Times asked Frank Conroy why it took him nearly 40 years to publish a second book, the filmmaker Jay Anania told him to say that he’d been out doing errands.

Your narrator, Jed, refers to Christopher Isherwood and his fictionalized account of being a British expat in The Berlin Stories. There is so much Isherwood wasn’t able to say when that book was published in 1937. Do you think there are still taboo subjects in fiction?
Christopher and His Kind, Isherwood’s memoir of his years in the early 1930s in Germany, came out in 1977. As a concordance to The Berlin Stories, he goes through everything he couldn’t say back then or where he feels he copped out and gets furious that he was not able to be open. That was my window those boys had been whistling up to, though I pretended that they were signaling girlfriends!

Although Isherwood was what we would now call a sexual tourist, an upper-class gentleman who trawled among working-class youth in need, he was brave enough in his way, and he really did fall in love with the boy he could not get out of Nazi Germany. In The Berlin Stories, Sally Bowles is not the narrator’s beard, or even a hetero fling. Isherwood finds a way for the women in Herr Issyvoo’s life to pronounce him unsatisfactory as boyfriend material, leaving him uncompromised and free to be the observer. It’s hard for me to think people who read the story, “On Ruegen Island,” could not figure out what is going on in it, even in 1937. Are there still taboo subjects? We want to say no, but of course there are and some for good reason, so it seems to me.

Where is the title Black Deutschland from?
Years ago I had a plan to write about black American soldiers stationed in West Germany. And in the early 1980s there were a couple of gay films about blacks on the West Berlin scene. And for years now black Germans have been making themselves more visible as a group. Black Deutschland went from being a title I had for nonfiction to the title of a novel. I saw recently that a documentary from a few years ago has the same title. Fortunately, titles cannot be copyrighted.

Jed experiences several key historical events, such as the death of Harold Washington and the end of a divided Berlin. What are the challenges of integrating historical incidents into a work of fiction?
Victor Serge, a wonderful writer who believed in Communist revolution but not in Stalin, said that the truth of the novelist cannot be confounded with the truth of the historian or chronicler. Maybe so, but the best fiction becomes history, a way to imagine the past, much as narrative history can have the drama of fiction: character, motive, plot. A lot depends on how recent or long ago the history is, just as genre determines to what uses a given history will be put. There are novels with historical settings and novels about a specific historical event, certain Civil War novels—or look at the number of works taking off from the assassination of JFK. Where would we put Slaughterhouse Five? In American literature, E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime stands out for me as a defining moment in creating a world on the page inhabited by both fictional and historical characters.

Looking back over this year and in to the future, do you think there will be ever be fictional accounts about Ferguson, about the shootings in Colorado or the anti-Muslim backlash in the U.S?.
Is the appetite for stories built into language, and even those about what we know can take us to someplace we’ve not been before. Writers can come from anywhere; the challenge is to find a way to write. People do and will continue to do so and change the language yet again.

You’ve worked in theater, as a book reviewer and a longtime contributor to the New York Review of Books. Where do you see overlaps in the types of writing you do? Are there subjects that beg to be written about in a certain way?
Book reviewing can sometimes give the young writer the validation of seeing his or her name in print. From where do we get the belief that this life is possible? It’s harder to write about what you like than what you don’t. To grow up at The New York Review of Books, working for Robert Silvers and Barbara Epstein, was an education. And I appreciate the encouragement I was given in its pages to reflect on African-American literature. Fiction and criticism have the same source: a wish to add to the literature that you care about.

My experience in the theatre has been as an adapter, dramaturg and text machine for the director Robert Wilson, whose work fascinates me in its beauty. Because of Wilson, I was able to stay in Berlin. My first job with Wilson was to try and make Heiner Mueller, a distinguished East German playwright, sit down and produce the text Bob was expecting for The Forest, a piece they were doing with David Byrne. I failed, but in chasing Mueller from one cigar-filled bar to another I got an extraordinary seminar in German literature. I’d never before met anyone who hated Thomas Mann.

In your book Out There: Mavericks of Black Literature, you focused on three writers you thought were under-read or underappreciated.  Are there other writers—black or white, male or female, gay or straight—that you think deserve another look?
Elizabeth Hardwick once noted that Newton Arvin, a gay professor at Smith in the days of the closet, brought back Melville, while the equally closeted F.O. Matthiesson at Harvard ignited the Henry James revival. Somebody being found again is usually the first time around for most everyone in the audience. Quentin Bell’s biography of Virginia Woolf was my introduction to her work. But I wasn’t alone in my discovery of Bloomsbury. Its principled bohemianism spoke to multiple constituencies in the 1970s. Maybe Mrs. Woolf had never gone out of fashion. Jean Rhys was making a true comeback around the same time. Feminism brought her back. Similarly, many black writers were being republished. When I was a student, the past was giving up its treasures in mass editions. New translations, new literatures in translation. I am enthralled by reprint series—Library of America or New York Review Books, Modern Library or Penguin. Oxford paperbacks. The New Directions backlist fills me with emotion. There is so much out there, you have to assume that you are missing many great things. I am glad for most of what has returned, among them Nella Larsen, a Harlem Renaissance novelist I much admire.

Reputations come and go for different reasons. I was talking not long ago to two very brilliant young writers who were entirely clear that Norman Mailer is out, out. Maybe the ideal reader is in your future and you write for that, for the in/out, in/out. Sometimes you’re just out. Gore Vidal was always trying to promote Frederic Prokosch and not really succeeding.

You just edited James Baldwin’s later novels for a new Library of American edition. What did you learn about his work that you didn’t know before?
Baldwin’s late novels used to be in my mind as his failures and although I am still unconvinced by If Beale Street Could Talk, the other two are worth going back to, because Baldwin always manages to infuse his prose with the magnetism of his personality, no matter what else is going on.  

I read that you worked briefly for the American novelist Djuna Barnes. What was that like? 
In High Cotton, the narrator works briefly for Djuna Barnes, which was based on actual experience. I was Fran McCullough’s secretary at Harper & Row. She was the kind of editor who took care of her writers. So she hired me out to Miss Barnes as a handyman. Miss Barnes had lost none of her fire or style. But some writers you have to read when you’re young. I wouldn’t dare read Barnes again. Or Gertrude Stein.

You have lived in New York and in England with your partner, James Fenton.  Describe your ideal day in each place.
We are only in New York now, in Harlem, where James has managed to make an English cottage garden. My ideal day is to find that we have both woken up and are together and well enough. I am not being corny, and if I am I do not mind it.

RELATED CONTENT: Read our review of Black Deutschland.

Author photo by Beowulf Sheehan. 

Jed Goodfinch is young, gay, black and trying to make a go of it in West Berlin in the 1980s in Darryl Pinckney’s Black Deutschland.  The novel is a provocative exploration of city, sexuality and self, written with the intellectual verve and dry wit that Pinckney is known for.
FictionDebut Fiction

Idra Novey

Interview by Lauren Bufferd

Idra Novey’s Ways to Disappear is a clever literary mystery involving the disappearance of a Brazilian novelist and the American translator who travels to South America to find her. Novey is a prize-winning poet and translator, who has also taught writing to men and women in prison.

Your debut is full of the most vivid images: the author disappearing into an almond tree, a mutilated ear in the plastic sandwich bag. Is there a scene you began with, something that started the whole novel off?
Absolutely. I’d had the idea for some time of writing a novel about a translator in search of her author. But once the idea came to me of Beatriz disappearing into the almond tree with her book and cigar, everything else came much more quickly.

This book is really about the power of novels—writing them, reading them, translating them. Were you an avid reader as a child?
I read constantly as a child and also randomly. I’d pick up the medical magazines off my father’s desk and read those and also old newspapers in the garage. I read Anne of Green Gables and Flowers in the Attic and everything my friends in the neighborhood talked about, but I also loved reading odd things no one knew or ever asked me about. I didn’t understand most of the sentences in the medical magazines, but I liked trying to decipher them. I guess even then I was drawn to the mysteries of translation.

The story is part literary mystery, part romance but with a comic, almost surreal streak. How did you work to balance these different sensibilities in one novel?
I tried to just trust my instincts about what tone to use to get closest to the emotional truth of any given scene. I find moving between sensibilities as a writer is like moving between languages. Once you feel comfortable with that kind of movement, it feels natural. I speak mostly Spanish at home with my family, but sometimes what’s funny about something we’re discussing only makes sense in English and instinctively we all switch over. That often happens when I speak with the various Brazilian writers I’ve translated from Portuguese as well. Moving between sensibilities keeps things interesting.

How did you start working as a translator?
I was a Comparative Literature major in college and translated a poem for a class my sophomore year. The professor told me he thought the translation was good enough to send out to a literary journal, so I did and they took it. After that, I started publishing my own poems in journals, too. First in campus publications, and then elsewhere. The more I translated the more I changed and grew as a writer, which led me to seek out other writers to translate, and on it went.

There is an intimacy that develops between a writer and translator and we certainly see that in Emma’s response to the novelist’s disappearance. How does translating another person’s work change your experience of that writer?
That is such an insightful question and gets at one of the most fascinating aspects of being a translator. Every book I’ve translated has changed the way I think about writing, both my own and that of the authors I translate, but also about life in general. After a few hours translating Clarice Lispector, I asked myself more spiritual questions. After translating the Argentine writer Vizconde Lascano Tegui, who is very funny and absurd, I noticed more of the humor and absurdity of wherever I happened to go next.

You are a poet, a translator, an essayist and now a novelist. Do you see ways in which the different forms of writing intersect?
As with the back and forth between writing and translating, a similar syncretism happens when working in more than one genre. You end up bringing some poetry into your fiction. Or some narrative suspense into an essay. Or the reflective tone of an essay into a poem. It’s exciting to move between genres and see how they feed into each other.

How has being a translator specifically influenced your work as a poet?
What sounds beautiful to a reader’s ear is different in every language. What makes a sentence lyrical in English wouldn’t necessarily make for a beautiful sentence in Portuguese, for example. In translation you have to invent an equivalent music and inventing music is always good for a poet’s ear.

Who are some new South American writers that we should be looking for?
I’d recommend The Obscene Madame D by the Brazilian writer Hilda Hilst. It was only recently published in English for the first time so it’s new to readers here though Hilst died in 2004. Like the American writer Lucia Berlin, many celebrated women writers in Brazil like Hilst and Clarice Lispector didn’t get to see their work reach the international audience it’s finally reaching now.

Your book Exit, Civilian, as well as your work with Bard College’s Prison Initiative and with the PEN Prison Writing Committee, has focused on the incarcerated. What drew you to working with this population?
I’ve always sought out opportunities to teach outside academia. When I lived in Chile, I volunteered at a domestic violence center and organized an informal writing group there and I’ve taught poetry in various public schools in New York City. Nicole Wallack, who directs the University Writing Program at Columbia University, where I taught at one point, recommended me for the Bard Prison Initiative because she knew that kind of teaching was important to me.

You have lived in both North and South America. Describe your perfect writing day in any of the places where you’ve lived.
An ideal writing day would begin at dawn on Boipeba or some other Brazilian island that takes multiple boats to reach. Late in the day, after lunch by the ocean, I’d step out into Buenos Aires and roam through its glorious used bookstores or see a play and then magically transport myself to Brooklyn to meet a friend for Bikram yoga and dinner. But an early dinner, so I could get back in time to Boipeba to read in bed with the sound of the ocean outside.

 

Author photo by Donata Zannotti.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of How to Disappear.

Idra Novey’s Ways to Disappear is a clever literary mystery involving the disappearance of a Brazilian novelist and the American translator who travels to South America to find her. Novey is a prize-winning poet and translator, who has also taught writing to men and women in prison.
FictionHistorical Fiction

Jessie Burton

Interview by Lauren Bufferd

Jessie Burton’s second novel is set in the changing London of the 1960s and central Spain at the start of the Spanish Civil War. Like her bestselling debut, The Miniaturist, The Muse focuses on a work of art: in this case, a significant Spanish painting with a mysterious provenance that links the lives of three women over four decades. BookPage asked Burton about her love of research, her writing process and what historical fiction she admires.

What was your initial inspiration for The Muse?
I was inspired by so many things when I wrote this book—huge scopes, like war, and love, and art, and colonialism. Oddly, compared to The Miniaturist—which was anchored by a very solid, physical object—The Muse derives from multiple interests, and was driven more by experience than curiosity. I wanted to write about Spain, and about London in the 1960s, and about art. My approach to the historical research was the same, but my impulses to write this book were very different. I was chasing something different.

This is your second novel to revolve around a work of art. Is that where you start—imagining the painting or physical object?
No—it was different this time! The dolls’ house in The Miniaturist is a real object. As you say, the paintings in The Muse are imagined, and only emerged in my mind’s eye one the writing was underway, and I had started developing the characters and plot.

Why did you decide to make Odelle from Trinidad? What do you think her being a newcomer to London adds to the novel, and how did you approach writing from her perspective?
Trinidad had direct colonial links to London and England in those days. It still does have links, but now in a reconfigured form. I knew from the beginning Odelle wouldn’t be a white woman, but I didn’t make that choice so I could augment her character, or add to the novel in a tokenistic way. Nevertheless, as non-black woman myself, there was a lot of consideration that followed the knowledge that Odelle was going to drive the story.

I have long been interested in British behavior and policy in the West Indies from the time of slavery, and how this trickled down into the 20th century. Odelle’s life as a child of the Empire in the 1940s was a direct product of the legacy of slavery and colonialism. She would have been brought up to talk and think almost more Englishly than the English—and as a bright girl would have absorbed the message of “connectedness” that the British Isles had to the islands in the West Indies. She would also have subconsciously absorbed both the insidious, and more overt, messages of how whiteness equaled safety, power, wealth and authority. She would have been told how she was a family member of empire, and she would have also been told that she was an outsider. That must have had a profound, splitting effect on first arrival in England. Odelle is an “immigrant,” but she knows the English better than they know themselves, because she actually reads those Shakespeare plays and Tennyson poems, and had posters of Princess Margaret on her wall. She speaks the Queen’s English, she possesses all the signifiers of alleged Englishness except one thing: the colour of her skin.

For me, Odelle’s Trinidadian heritage assimilates into her womanhood, her falling in love, her fear of love, her ambition to write—it is not solely a racial prism through which I see her. I was striving for a woman who meets us at the axis of all these points. But obviously she is exposed to racism on a micro- and macro- level, in a way a white woman would never be. Does this fuel her ambition even more? I don’t think so. I think her secretly knowing she’s a great writer is fuelling her ambition. She resists thinking of herself as a generalized representative of her entire island. She is an artist. She is also a prim girl, desperate to rebel. She is Caribbean. She is a Londoner. She wants better make-up in the department stores. Her new boss, Marjorie Quick, sees all this in her, and I hope that I do too.

I read widely around the Caribbean experience in London and the UK, I read fiction and poetry written by Caribbean writers, and I also consulted a professor at the University of the West Indies, who is about the same age as Odelle would be now, to check I was accurate when Odelle uses her Trini dialect.

I checked out your Pinterest page for The Muse! It’s a wonderful way to share your visual inspiration. What other kinds of resources did you use?
Thanks! I used books, mainly. Trusty books. And films from the period, and radio documentaries. There’s an extensive bibliography in the back of the novel.

You have written two historical novels. What about the past appeals to you as a fictional subject?
I can’t answer that easily. I don’t really think of it as the “past,” as if it’s some dim and distant place that is severed from our present day. For me, it lives on. There are similarities and differences, and these points of reference are rich opportunities for me to explore universal themes of love, loss, triumph, grief . . . but also to understand how things have changed.

Why do you think Olive works so hard to conceal her talents?
For many reasons: because she enjoys the joke on her father, because she can paint without having to be accountable for the public product, because she’s frightened, because she hasn’t thought it through, because it keeps her close to Isaac, because it makes her feel powerful, because she can watch herself from the outside and the inside at exactly the same time.

Have you ever heard of this happening in real life?
Yes—it has happened in the history of art creation and marketeering that women’s work has been attributed to men. It happened to Judith Leyster in 17th-century Holland, it happened to Margaret Keane in 1950s and ’60s America. In the art markets, women’s work has historically always sold for less, with rare exceptions. Women painters are less prominent in art history, and less numerous. Women’s work has been destroyed by their menfolk (Alice Neel springs to mind, whose lover, Kenneth Doolittle, incinerated over 350 of her watercolors, paintings and drawings.) Women have often been disregarded as anything other than muses—unable to create works of “genius” themselves. We always are described as “women writers,” “women artists”—I’ve even been called a “lady novelist.” In 2016, this is still a held view in some quarters. It is a persistent and enraging state of affairs. It is complete rubbish. So yes, maybe I felt like turning the tables a little, and twisting the real reasons as to why Olive is ‘hiding’ behind Isaac. Olive doesn’t lack confidence in her talent, she just lacks confidence in the art market, which, when you think about it, makes her pretty savvy indeed.

What are some of your favorite historical novels?
Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies, the Regeneration trilogy.

How does your training as an actress influences your creation of characters?
I guess it must, because so many readers have told me now that they feel they know these people as if they were real, as if their dialogue was out of a play or a film. It’s not deliberate. It must just be part of where I’ve come from professionally. I always read my work out loud, several times, so in that sense it’s quite performative, my way of inhabiting these imaginary people, and putting flesh on their bones. But the best characters always keep a little bit of themselves secret, even to their creator. Perhaps that’s when the actor—or the reader—steps in and closes the gap.

Are you already thinking about a new novel? 
Maybe . . .
 

 Author photo © Hugh Stewart for Vogue 2015.

RELATED CONTENT: Read our review of The Muse.

Jessie Burton’s second novel is set in the changing London of the 1960s and central Spain at the start of the Spanish Civil War. Like her bestselling debut, The Miniaturist, The Muse focuses on a work of art: in this case, a significant Spanish painting with a mysterious provenance that links the lives of three women over four decades. BookPage asked Burton about her research, her writing process and the historical fiction she admires.
FictionDebut Fiction

Joanna Cannon

Interview by Lauren Bufferd

Part mystery, part coming-of-age novel, Joanna Cannon’s debut The Trouble with Goats and Sheep is set during an uncharacteristically hot British summer. When a local woman disappears from the tight-knit community of The Avenue, young Grace and Tilly embark on a quest to find out what happened to their missing neighbor. Cannon discusses how her work as a psychiatrist influences her writing, the nature of outsiders and remembering life in 1970s England.

You’ve had a really interesting career path. Can you tell us how you came to be a writer?  
I started writing a blog when I became a junior doctor, to empty my head of all the distressing things I saw on the wards. Obviously, I didn’t write about real patients, but I found it therapeutic to write about my reaction to the situations in which I found myself. The blog became very popular, and people began suggesting I write a novel. And so (very) secretly, I began writing the book that would eventually become The Trouble with Goats and Sheep.

The 1970s was a time when many of the societal changes that had occurred in the cities had begun to hit the suburbs. How do you see those changes manifest in Grace’s community?
One of the reasons I set Goats and Sheep in the 1970s was because of the changes in the structure of communities. Very much like today, it was a time when people were having to adjust their idea of community and their own preconceptions. This is reflected in The Avenue with Harold, for example, who wraps his racism in a Union Jack and calls it patriotism, and Grace’s father, who understands he has to change, but isn’t quite sure how to go about it.

Because Grace is the narrator, she seems to be the more dominant one in the relationship, but Tilly has the stronger, more assured sense of who she is. How do you think their relationship develops over the course of the book?
I think that’s definitely something for each reader to decide for themselves, but I did want to explore the dynamic between Grace and Tilly as the story progresses. It’s around that age we first start noticing the differences between ourselves and other children, and subconsciously modifying our behavior in order to be accepted. Grace is obviously desperate to be liked by the ‘cooler’ kids, whereas Tilly is more comfortable in her own skin.

Is the character of Walter Bishop based on a real person?
No, Walter (and all the other characters) are very much products of my imagination. Working in psychiatry, however, I do meet a lot of people (like Walter) who live on the periphery of a community, and are never really noticed until something goes wrong. I wrote Goats and Sheep because I wanted to give them a voice, and also to explore what it must feel like to be subjected to so much misunderstanding and prejudice.

Were you a big reader as a kid? Who are some of your favorite literary heroes or heroines from childhood?
I am an only child of an only child, and as a kid, some of my best friends lived within the pages of a book. I was very fortunate that my parents had the foresight to take me to my local library every week, where I would always renew Little Women and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, because I couldn’t bear the thought of the books going home with anyone else.

I read that you created a Spotify list of 1970s music to get you in the mood of the novel. What are some of the songs on it?
Oh my word, all sorts of ’70s gems! There’s a lot of Suzi Quatro on there, some UK glam rock, and (of course) Elvis. It wouldn’t be a ’70s playlist without a good dose of Elvis.

Grace and Tilly interview their neighbors about the whereabouts of God, eliciting a variety of ideas and personal concepts. Did writing this novel change your own point of view about religion?  
I think the concept of religion is such a personal one, and it means so many different things to so many different people. There is “traditional” religion in the book, of course, in the shape of the vicar and St. Anthony’s (and Mrs. Roper and Mrs. Forbes fighting over who loves Jesus more), but you can also find God (or love, or spirituality) in many different places (God is everywhere, as Grace often points out to the adults around her). I don’t think it changed my point of view, but it certainly made me explore the idea.

This novel has been optioned for television. Do you think you’ll be involved in the production at all? What would your dream cast be?
It would be wonderful to be involved, because it’s an area I know very little about and it would be so fascinating. I think for that reason, I’m more than happy to hand over the reins to someone else. It would be good to watch from the edge, though, and keep an eye on my characters. I’m very visual when I’m writing, and I tend to see things cinematographically, so it’s very exciting to see how someone else interprets my words. I’m not sure about a dream cast. I think, especially for Grace and Tilly, it would be good to have completely unknown actors, who don’t arrive with a history of other roles behind them.

Describe your perfect writing day.
My perfect writing day definitely starts with a very long dog walk to clear my head. I always get up around 3 a.m. (which is a hangover from medical school and working on the wards), and I walk my German Shepherd six miles through the fields and we watch the sun come up. I tend to write in the morning and early afternoon, so I think my perfect writing day would have to be one where there were few distractions. Maybe if Twitter crashed, it would help!

What are you working on now?
I’m currently working on Book Two. When I wrote Goats and Sheep, I never expected it to escape from my laptop, so it was truly just me and a blank sheet of paper. I had no idea people would be analyzing my words in newspapers and on the television, whereas now, I’ve had experience of that, and I’m aware of people out there, who will read my thoughts. I think you have to try to put that to one side, and tell the story you want to tell, in the way you want to tell it. It’s the best way to write: just you, a pen and paper and a story you believe in.

Author photograph by Philippa Edge.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of The Trouble with Goats and Sheep.

Part mystery, part coming-of-age novel, Joanna Cannon’s debut The Trouble with Goats and Sheep is set during an uncharacteristically hot British summer. When a local woman disappears from the tight-knit community of The Avenue, young Grace and Tilly embark on a quest to find out what happened to their missing neighbor. Cannon discusses how her work as a psychiatrist influences her writing, the nature of outsiders and remembering life in 1970s England.
FictionDebut Fiction

Imbolo Mbue

Interview by Lauren Bufferd

What does it mean to pursue the American dream in the 21st century? To find the answer, writer Imbolo Mbue traces the lives of two very different couples in the wake of the financial crisis of 2008 in her insightful debut. We asked her a few questions about her own experience moving to America from Cameroon, her love for New York City and who she’d like to see play her characters on screen.

Your own immigration story is almost as dramatic as the Jongas’. Can you tell us about it?
My immigration story has some parallels to the Jongas. Like them, I moved from Limbe, Cameroon, to the United States, though I came here at a younger age to attend college, unlike Jende and Neni who moved here as adults. I lived in Harlem for several years, so like them, I was also an African immigrant living in Harlem. That, however, is where much of our similarities end—most of their story, and the struggles they endured, was inspired by stories told to me by other immigrants.

You have been in the United States for more than 10 years. Do you get to visit Limbe? What do you miss about it?
I’ve been back to Limbe a couple of times to visit and even after all these years, I still miss it. I miss the utter simplicity of life there, and the delicious food and laid-back ambiance.

What made you decide to write a novel?
I was inspired to write this story after I saw chauffeurs and executives on a Manhattan street. Being that I had lost my job in the recession, I was curious about how the recession had affected New Yorkers from different walks of life, so I began writing a story about a fictional Lehman Brothers executive and his chauffeur, and the different ways in which their lives were impacted after Lehman Brothers collapsed. The more I wrote the story, the more obsessed I became with telling it.

Neni is such an incredible character. There is almost nothing she won’t do to make her dreams come true, and some of her actions are pretty shocking. How do you feel about Neni, and what inspired her character?
Thank you—she is indeed an incredible character. She believes in the accessibility of the American Dream, and she is convinced America can give her the life she could never have gotten in Limbe. Because she had limited opportunities to make something out of her life in Limbe, she is mindful of what a privilege it is to be living in New York City and attending college with aspirations of one day becoming a pharmacist. As a result, she will not let anything or anyone stand in the way of her dream, something I find admirable even if I do not entirely agree with how she goes about doing it. Still, I do empathize with her, because she was inspired by women I grew up around in Limbe, and immigrant women I’ve met in America—strong-willed women with limited power and resources who make tough choices because they believe they have to do what they need to do for themselves and their children.

There is so much about New York City in this novel—Jende considers Columbus Circle the center of the world since it is in the center of New York City, and Neni muses that “while there existed great towns and cities all over the world, there was a certain kind of pleasure, a certain type of adventurous and audacious childhood, that only New York City could offer a child.” What does New York City mean to you?
I love New York. It’s a pity that phrase has become a cliché but there really is no better way for me to express how I feel about my adopted hometown. As strange and chaotic a place as it can be sometimes, it was only when I moved to New York City that I finally felt at home in America. Maybe something about New York reminds me of Limbe. Or perhaps it’s because the city, in my opinion, welcomes anyone from anywhere. I’m not entirely sure. What I’m sure is that I have a great sense of belonging here, and as an immigrant, that means a lot.

The Edwards family has achieved the American dream, but it certainly hasn’t made them happy. Do you think observing the Edwardses made Jende and Neni see America and their dreams of success differently?
No, I don’t think so. The Jongas, Neni in particular, are so determined to achieve career and material success that not even seeing the price of holding unto it will deter them. The truth is that both the Edwards and Jongas are unhappy in their own ways, à la Tolstoy. One family is dreaming of achieving material success and the other family already has material success, but we can see the prices they each have to pay.

The themes of this novel are very timely. One character says of America that “we as a country have forgotten how to welcome all kinds of strangers to our home.” How do you see novels like yours fitting into the debate on immigration?
I think it’s a novel people on either side of the immigration debate can use to support their arguments. If you’re pro-immigration, there’s something in the novel to support your argument. If you’re anti-immigration, there’s something in there to support your argument, too. My goal was to tell the story completely and leave it up to the reader to interpret it in whichever way fits their worldviews.

I don’t want to give away the ending. But when you were writing, did you know what was going to happen to the Jongas?
Yes, from the very first draft, I knew how the story was going to end and I couldn’t change it even if I wanted to.

This book has been optioned for film—do you have any news on that project? A dream cast?
I don’t have any news but if someday the movie is made, I’d be very eager to see the scenes between Neni Jonga and Cindy Edwards—those two women are fire and ice and their relationship exposes a lot about class and power.

Who are some of your favorite African writers? Anyone new that we should be looking for?
I read Chigozie Obioma’s The Fishermen last year and deeply loved it. It took me back to my childhood in Limbe, and to me there’s nothing quite like a book that reminds me of what it was like being an African child growing up in Africa. I had a similar experience reading NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names, another novel I loved by a young African writer. I’m very much looking forward to both of their second novels.

Were you a big reader as a kid? What were some of your favorite books?
I was a voracious reader as a kid, though I barely read any children’s books. My favorite stories growing up were Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice and Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, even though thinking about it now, I have no idea how such books could deeply affect a young child.

What are you working on next?
I’m working on my reading list—too many wonderful books coming out and not enough time to read them, so I’m trying to read as fast as I can!

RELATED CONTENT: Read our review of Behold the Dreamers.

What does it mean to pursue the American dream in the 21st century? To find an answer, Imbolo Mbue traces the lives of two very different couples in the wake of the financial crisis of 2008 in her insightful debut. We asked her a few questions about her own experience moving to America from Cameroon, her love for New York City and who she’d like to see play her characters on screen.

FictionLiterary Fiction

Peter Ho Davies

Interview by Lauren Bufferd

In his electric second novel, Peter Ho Davies unravels the complicated relationship between the U.S. and China through four immigrants’ stories that span more than a century and a half.

Your previous novel, The Welsh Girl, was set in Wales and England during the Second World War. This book makes a leap to the United States and also with its timespan, which covers a century and a half. What interested you in exploring the Chinese in the United States?
Oddly enough, and despite the differences you rightly note, the initial impetus behind The Fortunes is very similar to the one behind The Welsh Girl. I’m half-Welsh on my father’s side, half-Chinese on my mother’s, and both books are driven in part by a desire to understand those different heritages. I’ve also now lived half my life in the U.S., after growing up in the U.K., so I was also drawn to the immigrant experience of Chinese Americans.

What kind of research did you do?
Lots of reading, of course, to try to get a handle on the historical materials, and lots of time in museums, but I also got to visit several important settings for the novel in person. I travelled the route of the Central Pacific across the Sierra Nevadas, both by train and car, to get a feel for the terrain. I was also able to go to China and see many of the same sights as a couple of my protagonists.

This novel tells four distinct stories in four very different voices. Yet there are similar themes and even things like jokes that show up in more than one segment. It works brilliantly. What made this form interesting to you and what were you hoping to accomplish with it?
I’m glad you liked it. In truth the form came as something of a revelation to me too as I worked on the book, evolving over the course of several years in response to the material. I think of it now as a kind of multi-generational novel about a community, Chinese Americans, whose history (from the “bachelor society” of the Gold Rush to the recent influx of baby girls adopted from China) is one of broken or discontinuous lines of descent. The characters in the four sections of The Fortunes aren’t related by blood, but they are bound to one another in some essential sense. The recurring themes, the jokes, the images, the echoes and “call backs” in the language are all there in place of those bloodlines, to suggest those affinities. My background as a short story writer, particularly in putting together a couple of collections of stories (and talking with my MFA students over the years about how to do that) was a touchstone too. Stories in a collection I’ve found are often in conversation with one another or linked in subtle ways.

The Welsh Girl also had some historical figures in it—Rudolph Hess, for one. What are the challenges of mixing real-life people with characters you’ve imagined?
That’s a great question, and the answer tends to vary depending on the historical figure involved—how well known or well documented they are primarily.

In the case of Hess, a notorious figure in the Third Reich, there’s a great deal of information known, but also a notable historical “gap” in regard to his motives and mental state after he crash-landed in Britain in 1941, and subsequently claimed amnesia for much of his time in Allied hands. That “gap” where the factual record is obscured or not agreed upon provides a space for fictional speculation which I explore in The Welsh Girl (though it’s a license I’d have been wary of taking in regard to any other figure in Hitler’s inner circle given the ethical stakes involved in fictionalizing such figures).

In The Fortunes, a principal character, Ah Ling, is a manservant to Charles Crocker, one of railroad barons who built the Transcontinental. Even though he fills a pivotal role—his example is supposed to have inspired Crocker to hire thousands of Chinese to work on the railroad—Ah Ling is only ever mentioned in passing. Essentially, history says such a man existed (though there’s the possibility that he’s an apocryphal figure, part of an anecdote made up by early hagiographers of Crocker), gives him a key moment on stage . . . and yet says nothing more about him, leaving him a kind of blank slate. I found myself fascinated with this mystery man—a figure who inspired an early wave of Chinese immigration—and what he might have thought about his role.

By contrast, The Fortunes also features the early Chinese-American movie star, Anna May Wong as a character, someone who’s much better documented. There are several fine biographies that I consulted, and a wealth of other material, not least a lot of interviews Anna May gave in her own lifetime. And yet, even in her case there’s some license to be had. Should we believe everything she said in interviews, say? These after all are celebrity interviews, often exercises in self-promotion, and not necessarily revealing of her true self. So again, there’s a possibility of a “gap,” a space into which fiction can flow.

Can you talk about the final segment, Pearl? By the end, I was sobbing. Without giving too much away, can you talk about John’s emotional relationship to his own identity and what the journey to adopt a child symbolizes for him?
It’s heartening to hear that. I confess I like to make readers laugh, but also to move them to tears, and I enjoy books and movies that do both (reflecting their mixture in life, of course). In fact, I suspect those responses often work in tandem. Laughter, after all, is often a release of tension, and frequently depends on surprise.

As for John . . . he’s a mixed-race writer, as am I, and so there’s a natural temptation, a kind of invitation even, for readers to think of him as an autobiographical character. I do share things with him—not so much the specific events that befall him (I’m the godfather to an adoptee, but my own son is not adopted), but certainly much of his angst about identity. The earlier figures in the book, Ah Ling, Anna May and others, are all in their own ways struggling with the burden of representation—they are examples, or models, or icons—and in that regard they all reflect a certain writerly anxiety of how we represent others in fiction. I figured with John I could come out from behind the curtain a little and fess up to the writerly version of that burden . . . even while John himself is only a very partial representation of myself. The upshot is that John is me and he’s not me, neither one nor the other, but both in a sense, just as my Anna May is partly the historical figure, partly a fiction built on her . . . all of which is analogous to the way I think about Chinese-American identity. The phrase implies a duality, an either/or—and I think a lot of so-called hyphenated Americans feel at some point a need to choose—but it’s the “bothness” than I’m interested in, and which I think is both richer and truer.

You currently live and teach in Michigan. Are there things that you are still getting used to about the United States? Things that you miss from Britain?
One of the early seeds of The Fortunes, and my interest in the Transcontinental Railroad, was a cross-country train trip I took from Boston to San Francisco, 20 years ago. That was a couple of years after I’d come to the U.S., and what struck me powerfully then—and has stayed with me— was the sheer continental scale of the country. It’s almost as if the very word “country” means something subtly different in the U.K. and the U.S. It was typical back then, say, for friends from home to ask me how I was finding America. But that train journey impressed on me how simply impossible it would be to try to speak about the U.S. as a whole when my experience was only of one region of it (the Northeast where I’d been living and working to that point). To have asked me about Texas, say, would have been akin to asking a Londoner about Berlin! I don’t mean to say there are no regional differences in Britain, of course—The Welsh Girl is very much about such differences—but the size of the country and its long history have tempered them, as have institutions like national newspapers and the BBC. And indeed, when I go home to the U.K. now it can feel a little claustrophobic at times—everyone reading the same paper, watching the same show—albeit I also like the way the nation “stops” for certain events—an England soccer game at the World Cup, say (woeful as the team has been of late).

Of course, the short answer to the question is that I’m still getting used to the idea of Donald Trump as the Republican nominee. And what I miss about Britain, post Brexit, is the sense of my own claim on Britishness as a non-white.

What kind of kid were you? A big reader or writer?
Both, and as a teen, at least, a big reader and writer primarily of sci-fi. This was back in the day when blockbusters like Star Wars were typically released several months later in the U.K. than the U.S., and we’d deal with our impatience by reading the novelization first! I might still be devouring movie-tie-ins if it weren’t for a great book of Paris Review-style interviews with science-fiction writers by Charles Platt (Dream-makers) which turned me on to some more challenging writers in the genre, including Kurt Vonnegut who turned out to be my “gateway drug” to literary fiction.

At the same time, the interviewees in Dream-makers made writers seem cool but also accessible. Many of them, Vonnegut included, had science or engineering backgrounds, and my father was an engineer. Back then, Martin Amis was probably the most famous young writer in Britain, but his dad was Kingsley Amis and being a writer seemed something you were born into, like the royal family. It was hard to imagine how to become one. But I could imagine becoming an engineer (indeed, I majored in Physics in college), and those writers allowed me to imagine taking the next step to becoming a writer.

As a creative writing professor, what is some of the advice that you give your students? What is the some of the best advice you’ve been given?
I love teaching and have been lucky to have wonderful students most everywhere I’ve taught. My MFA students at Michigan, in particular, are exceptional—so good and often at such a young age (I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have gotten in here when I was starting out!). They’re all very different as writers and people, as you’d expect in a field of individual expression, so it’s hard to offer generalized advice, but one thing I often talk about is patience, since it’s maybe the only thing, young, talented writers tend to lack . . . by virtue of their very youth and talent. Youth is a traditional “enemy” of patience, after all, but talent can be too since we expect talent to be an accelerant, expect it to make things come easily. I like to give them that Flaubert quote, “Talent is long patience,” a line that seemed cryptic to me when I first came across it at their age (it almost seems like a bad translation from the French) but which has come to make more and more sense to me.

Like many contemporary writers, a lot of the best advice I’ve been given myself comes from Charles Baxter. I’m a great admirer of his essays on writing, but I was also lucky enough to be his (very) junior colleague when I first started teaching at Michigan. I’m going to forget his exact words, but I can recall him—in that spirit of patience, I mentioned above—encouraging me not to publish something too soon, not to let it go until I’d done my best with it.

What are you working on next?
I’m always a little uneasy about talking about new work—it’s less out of superstition than the more practical consideration that whatever I’m working on tends to change so much over time before it appears (if ever). Still, it’s a perfectly natural question, and I hate to have nothing to say . . . so I confess to occasionally inventing projects just to have something to answer! When The Welsh Girl came out I used to claim to be writing a kids’ picture book called “A Child’s Christmas in Whales” featuring—naturally!—a lobster called Santa Claws. In the same spirit, I can confide that right now I’m at work on a zombie novel (first line: “The dead were getting quicker”). And holding out hope for my invitation from Marvel to pen a superhero comic (it’s high time for a new—Asian!—Captain Britain, I think).

Author photo by Dane Hillard Photography.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of The Fortunes.

In his electric second novel, Peter Ho Davies unravels the complicated relationship between the U.S. and China through four immigrants’ stories that span more than a century and a half.
FictionLiterary Fiction

Margot Livesey

Interview by Lauren Bufferd

Margot Livesey’s new book, Mercury, is a story of love and obsession—but not in the way you’d expect. Don, a Scottish optometrist living in suburban Boston, is too immersed in mourning his father’s recent death from Parkinson’s to notice that his wife Viv has utterly fallen for Mercury, a new horse at the riding stables she manages. Viv’s obsession with Mercury spins out of control, leading to an act of violence that nobody could have predicted. Mercury is Livesey at her best: a subtle investigation of a family coming apart, of secrets and separateness, of blindness and blinkered sight.

I think we all know someone who is besotted with horses. Are you that person? 
Between the ages of 9 and 14, yes. I rode the Highland ponies at the nearby farm as often as I could and read endless books about girls and gymkhanas. Nowadays I seldom ride but I do remain fascinated by the world of horses. Or should I say the worlds of horses. There’s a big difference between a professional riding stables, where most of the horses are being trained to compete, and the kind of stables Viv and her friend Claudia run.

What kind of research did you do for this book?
A friend let me accompany her to the stables where she rode. I would follow her around, observe her lessons, visit the horses and talk to the other riders and the people who worked in the barns. And then, being a writer, I also read omnivorously. Three books that were particularly helpful were Enid Bagnold’s National Velvet, Jane Smiley’s Horse Heaven and Seabiscuit by Laura Hillenbrand. Each gave me wonderful insights into horses and into the relations between horses and humans.

I also spent a good deal of time questioning my optometrist, talking to blind people and reading books about vision and blindness. I read several illuminating memoirs by men who had gone blind as adults; each recorded a long period of passionate denial when, although the author could see less and less, he was continuing to act like a sighted person—bicycling, going to films, carelessly crossing roads. Eventually each had to admit his failing vision and learn how to be blind.

Do you think there was a moment when Don could have intervened, before Viv’s feelings for Mercury went from interest to obsession?
I find that line between interest, which seems like a good thing, and obsession, which seems questionable, fascinating. I am not sure if Donald could have intervened—Mercury is a fantastic athlete, a fantastic opportunity—but that he is oblivious to Viv's unhappiness, to her feeling of being stuck, does help to propel her across that line.

I find that line between interest, which seems like a good thing, and obsession, which seems questionable, fascinating.

This is your first book to take place completely in the United States. Was that something you had planned to do?
Yes. I do spend a lot of time here and I did want to write a novel set here, to make use of the New England landscape. Although a version of the plot could take place in Britain, the actual details, to my mind, could only happen in the States.

As a novel, Mercury is very open-ended. Have you thought about what happens to the characters after the novel ends?
I have, and I hope the reader will too.

As a married person, I found this novel very unsettling. There is a mystery here, but it’s the mystery of ever really knowing another person. As a novelist, how do you decide what to show and what to keep secret?
I think my husband found the novel unsettling too. For me one of the questions that propels the novel is what happens in a long relationship when one person changes their opinions, their worldview if you will, and the other doesn’t. I was very interested in exploring how this change can become a kind of infidelity. As a novelist, I wanted to suggest how just keeping something secret can turn an innocent activity—spending more time training Mercury—into something more toxic. Both Viv and Donald are keeping secrets not just from each other but from themselves. I tried to hint at some of those secrets but also to allow the characters, like the people around us, a certain amount of mystery.

For me one of the questions that propels the novel is what happens in a long relationship when one person changes their opinions, their worldview, if you will, and the other doesn’t.

Viv had success as a hedge fund manager, and yet the incident with her previous horse was still motivating her decades later. Do you think we all have those kinds of losses that, unresolved, can direct our actions? 
I hesitate to make a general claim but I’ve gradually come to realize that the loss of my mother—she died when I was 2 and a half—has played a much larger role in my adult life than I realized. Many people, I suspect, have a sense of understanding some aspect of their own behavior, or motivation, only long after the fact.

Gun control is a very timely topic. Did your own feelings about firearm laws change at all as you were writing the book? 
No, in that I remain convinced that better gun control would save many lives. Yes, in that I did get to know people who oppose new legislation. For the most part there’s a huge gap between the two sides: people who support new laws and those who oppose them. Visiting gun shops, talking to gun owners, gave me new insight into that world and the pleasures of shooting for sport, and for food. While I met no one who openly supported assault weapons, several of the people I spoke to did seem to fear that any restrictions on guns would lead to a total ban.

What does it bring to the novel to have Viv tell her side of the story?
If we saw Viv only from the outside, from Donald’s point of view, we wouldn’t understand the depths of her feelings—how, despite friends, work, a husband and children, her life feels over until Mercury arrives. And how her fears for him, which seem to her completly justified, lead her to take first one step and then the next to protect him.

This was a very intense read and I’m sure equally demanding to write. What did you do for pleasure when it was over?
I visited my family in Scotland and went to France with my husband. We spent a lovely week in Sancerre, a medieval town in the Loire valley.

What are you working on next?
I am finishing a book of essays about the craft of writing and working on a new novel which is still at the very early stages.

 

RELATED CONTENT: Read our review of Mercury.

Margot Livesey’s new book, Mercury, is a story of love and obsession—but not in the way you’d expect.

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