A beast beautifully tamed
Review: Sue Leonard
Saturday, August 21, 2010
The Lacuna
Barbara Kingsolver
faber and faber; €10.99
Barbara Kingsolver talks to Sue Leonard about the struggle she had writing her prizewinner, The Lacuna
IN November 2007, Barbara Kingsolver discovered an inaccuracy on her Wikipedia page. It said that a new book by the author was due at the end of the month. Kingsolver almost had a nervous breakdown.
"I screamed and I cried and I lay on the floor," says the 55-year-old when we meet on her first visit to Dublin. "I thought, ‘now my readers are expecting a book and I can’t possibly write it’."
At the time, Kingsolver was five years into her sixth novel. But so complex was the structure, combining history and fiction, that she had no confidence of being able to complete the project.
"It was like fighting a seven-headed monster," she says. "I’d started with the idea of exploring Senator Joe McCarthy’s witch-hunts, and where America’s fear of communism came from; but I wanted to layer in celebrities and gossip and how the written word defines the person, and I also wanted to write about Trotsky; oh, and Mexico. All these ideas kept coming in. Usually I can keep them under control and say, ‘that’s for another novel’, but in this case everything seemed to work together."
To make matters worse, Kingsolver had decided to construct the book largely through journal entries and she wanted her hero, Harrison Shepherd, to report events without ever using the first person pronoun. So he was the invisible ‘eye’ rather than ‘I.’ That proved almost impossible.
But why would the American make life so difficult for herself? Surely her publishers and her public would settle for less? After all, her fourth book, The Poisonwood Bible, became an Oprah Winfrey choice and sold four million copies.
"I wanted to write something I’d never written before," she says. "In fact, I wanted to do something no writer had done before. That’s what gets me to my desk in the morning; it’s the challenge and the risk of it. And for the character, Harrison Shepherd, doing it that way made perfect sense."
Brought up between the US and Mexico, the fictitious Harrison’s mother makes it clear that he was a mistake, and his existence a mere nuisance.
"She makes it clear that her life would be better if he wasn’t there. What would that feel like as a child? It made sense to me, that he wouldn’t feel comfortable using the first person until remarkable things start happening to him."
Harrison becomes a cook for Mexican artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo before typing up reports for the exiled Bolshevik leader Lev Trotsky. Kingsolver takes care to keep all the facts about her real characters accurate. It makes for a fascinating trawl through the past.
It wasn’t until November 2008 that the strands of this sixth novel finally gelled.
"I thought of my title, The Lacuna, and I had my eureka moment. That word brought everything together. From then on I knew the novel was going to work."
Originally from a farming community in Kentucky, Kingsolver originally decided to study the piano. She still plays, when she wants the words in her head to cease for a while; but she soon changed her mind and studied biology instead. "I’ve always written," she says. "I’ve written journals since I was a child. Writing things down has always made things real for me, but I never thought I could be a writer." Starting as a scientific writer, she turned to journalism before starting on her first novel. "And now I can’t imagine myself without a pen and a notebook."
Her plots and ideas might cause her problems, but there’s one thing Kingsolver is always in charge of – her characters.
"They are always there at my service," she says. "I begin with a theme and a plot, then I think of a character to serve my plot. I knew early on the sort of person Harrison Shepherd was. I figured he’d be a writer and would be persecuted by the anti-communist witch-hunt, then I gave him the past that he needed. You take a character and do things to them, so they will be damaged in just the right way."
So her characters never run away with the plot in the way other writers describe?
"I find that nonsense" she says with a laugh. "I am God! I remember opening The Colour Purple for the first time and Alice Walker writes ‘I thank all these characters for showing up.’ And, well, I’m glad they go to her house. I invent absolutely everything about mine."
While she’s grateful to have readers and happy for the recognition, Kingsolver never wanted to be famous. She’s happiest at home on the farm she shares with her husband, Steve Hopp, and their daughter, Lily, in the mountains of southern Appalachia. Keen on eating local food, in 2007, Barbara co-wrote a book called Animal Vegetable Miracle, with her environmentalist husband and Camille, 23, her daughter from her first marriage.
It’s no surprise that The Lacuna has been universally praised. It’s a sumptuous read, complex but enthralling, and shows the reader an unfamiliar world. It seems certain to follow The Poisonwood Bible into becoming a book club favourite. It’s literary, but eminently readable. Yet Kingsolver swears she was amazed when it beat a strong shortlist to win the Orange Prize. "I was happy to fly to London to congratulate the other five authors on the short list. I never expected to be taking the prize back home. I can remember the first word I ever read. I was three years old and my father was reading the newspaper. It had his attention in a way I was envious of... I remember looking at the page and puzzling over it. I saw a word and said the letters. O-r-a-n-g-e. I remember the word, ‘orange’ popped out. So I suppose it’s only right that 50 odd years later I should be getting a prize for that."
© Sue Leonard 2010
Monday, August 23, 2010
Friday, August 13, 2010
Emma Donaghue.
Emma Donoghue
Interviewed by Sue Leonard
Published in The Examiner, 29th July 2010.
Emma Donoghue is perturbed. A journalist has just described her new novel Room as ‘creepy.’ And though the subject matter – inspired by the Josef Fritzl case is certainly unsavoury, I found Emma’s sensitive take on it profoundly affecting, and ultimately uplifting.
The novel opens on Jack’s fifth birthday. He’s excited. Jack lives with Ma in a room measuring eleven feet square. Life revolves around TV, and the stories and games his mother constantly invents. He thinks TV isn’t ‘real,’ and he doesn’t know life exists outside. It’s an extraordinary tale of a mother’s love for her son, told with unsentimental reality.
“I heard about the Fritzl case in April 2008,” says Emma, “and shortly afterwards I was driving along in a hyper state, because I hate driving, when I suddenly thought, imagine if you told a story like that from the child’s point of view? That would save you from either being over sentimental, or sexually gratuitous. A child could tell it as, this is my strange world. The book came fully grown into my head.”
Was she worried that by choosing that subject, she’d be accused of being both prurient and of trading on people’s pain?
“The pre-publicity made me wince a little; it hinted that by choosing this subject I was craftily aiming to make a lot of money; but I knew when people read the book, and realised my approach was unlike true crime or voyeuristic thriller style, they would relax into it.”
Emma dedicates the book to her two children, Finn, 7, and Una, 3. Finn was five at the time of writing, and his voice lends authenticity, but was it painful, as a mother, writing about enforced captivity?
“It seems callous to say it, but painful things are meat and drink to us writers. We use pain to provoke a response in our readers, so when we think of something agonising for our characters we mostly say, ‘Ah ha!’
“Writing ‘Room,’ it was almost as if I were their captor. I was the one deciding, will I give them TV? Will I give them vitamin pills, and exactly how many square feet will I give them? I was dolling out their pleasures and their pains, and increasing the pressures on them, but it did not upset me because I knew that, all the time, I was giving Jack the unbreakable love of a really good mother.”
The research though, proved horrendous.
“I was having to read up about children brutally treated within the secrecy of a home; children found by social works too late. There’s a lot I wish I hadn’t read because I can’t get it out of my head. I like awake at night sometimes thinking about it.”
Emma wrote ‘Room’ in France. She’d gone there with her partner Chris Roulston, writing the book in six months while the children were respectively, in school and childcare.
Emma and her family live in London Ontario, but she’s from Dublin, and her first coming of age lesbian novels caused a stir here in the early nineties. Her third novel, the historical Slammerkin was a huge success in Ireland as elsewhere, but since then she’s become better known in the States and Canada. So she’s pleased that Room is bringing her back into our consciousness.
Half way through ‘Room,’ the pace changes. Ma and Jack plan an elaborate escape from their captor, but Jack finds ‘outside’ confusing.
“Any childhood goes from cosy, in a confined space to the exciting world of the teenagers, but for most of us that happens gradually. Jack goes from being a baby to a five year old overnight. He has a sensory overload, and he doesn’t know the laws of perspective. He misses the security of ‘Room.’
It’s worse still for Ma, released to her flawed family, and at the mercy of the media. They’re freaked out that Ma is still breastfeeding Jack – it is that that most shocks people. A crass, insensitive TV interviewer pushes Ma towards the edge. That scene reads with great authenticity, and there’s a reason for that.
Last time I met Emma, back in 2004, she’d just endured a gruelling radio interview. Tom McGurk had vilified her because she had a son with her lesbian partner.
“He went for me, and went on for twenty minutes,” she says, admitting it did cause her trauma. “That was one of my ‘have to get out of Ireland’ moments. It had been many years since I’d encountered that kind of attitude, and I’d never encountered it so malevolently.
“Friends in Ireland have to fly to Denmark or Newcastle to make a baby happen, and the one who is not giving birth has no rights, and even the new civil partnership doesn’t change that. By living in Canada I can forget I am lesbian for weeks on end. I’m just getting on with my life. You don’t have the constant reminder that you are a minority.
The author adores her visits to Ireland, though. She loves spending time with her mother, a mum of eight, who, she says, was the main inspiration for Ma.
“I wanted Ma to be the ideal mother, but not in a bland way. Under those terrible circumstances she has to make tough choices, but she does the best possible job, even though at times she has to annoy and upset Jack.
“Often, when I was writing the book I felt like a bad, bad mother. I was mulling over what a good mother would do now, what games would she invent, then my own kids would come home and I’d be irritated with them because I wanted to be writing. I ended up feeling admiration for other parents, and more and more ashamed of my own parenting.”
There’s a buzz of expectation around this new book. Early reviewers have praised Emma for producing a work of art, and for her dazzling language. They’ve stated that, after reading it, the world will look different; and they’re right. It is a book that can change your thinking. I recommend it, wholeheartedly.
Room by Emma Donoghue is published by Picador at 13.99 euro.
Since I spoke to Emma, she has been longlisted for the Man Booker Prize.
© Sue Leonard 2010
Interviewed by Sue Leonard
Published in The Examiner, 29th July 2010.
Emma Donoghue is perturbed. A journalist has just described her new novel Room as ‘creepy.’ And though the subject matter – inspired by the Josef Fritzl case is certainly unsavoury, I found Emma’s sensitive take on it profoundly affecting, and ultimately uplifting.
The novel opens on Jack’s fifth birthday. He’s excited. Jack lives with Ma in a room measuring eleven feet square. Life revolves around TV, and the stories and games his mother constantly invents. He thinks TV isn’t ‘real,’ and he doesn’t know life exists outside. It’s an extraordinary tale of a mother’s love for her son, told with unsentimental reality.
“I heard about the Fritzl case in April 2008,” says Emma, “and shortly afterwards I was driving along in a hyper state, because I hate driving, when I suddenly thought, imagine if you told a story like that from the child’s point of view? That would save you from either being over sentimental, or sexually gratuitous. A child could tell it as, this is my strange world. The book came fully grown into my head.”
Was she worried that by choosing that subject, she’d be accused of being both prurient and of trading on people’s pain?
“The pre-publicity made me wince a little; it hinted that by choosing this subject I was craftily aiming to make a lot of money; but I knew when people read the book, and realised my approach was unlike true crime or voyeuristic thriller style, they would relax into it.”
Emma dedicates the book to her two children, Finn, 7, and Una, 3. Finn was five at the time of writing, and his voice lends authenticity, but was it painful, as a mother, writing about enforced captivity?
“It seems callous to say it, but painful things are meat and drink to us writers. We use pain to provoke a response in our readers, so when we think of something agonising for our characters we mostly say, ‘Ah ha!’
“Writing ‘Room,’ it was almost as if I were their captor. I was the one deciding, will I give them TV? Will I give them vitamin pills, and exactly how many square feet will I give them? I was dolling out their pleasures and their pains, and increasing the pressures on them, but it did not upset me because I knew that, all the time, I was giving Jack the unbreakable love of a really good mother.”
The research though, proved horrendous.
“I was having to read up about children brutally treated within the secrecy of a home; children found by social works too late. There’s a lot I wish I hadn’t read because I can’t get it out of my head. I like awake at night sometimes thinking about it.”
Emma wrote ‘Room’ in France. She’d gone there with her partner Chris Roulston, writing the book in six months while the children were respectively, in school and childcare.
Emma and her family live in London Ontario, but she’s from Dublin, and her first coming of age lesbian novels caused a stir here in the early nineties. Her third novel, the historical Slammerkin was a huge success in Ireland as elsewhere, but since then she’s become better known in the States and Canada. So she’s pleased that Room is bringing her back into our consciousness.
Half way through ‘Room,’ the pace changes. Ma and Jack plan an elaborate escape from their captor, but Jack finds ‘outside’ confusing.
“Any childhood goes from cosy, in a confined space to the exciting world of the teenagers, but for most of us that happens gradually. Jack goes from being a baby to a five year old overnight. He has a sensory overload, and he doesn’t know the laws of perspective. He misses the security of ‘Room.’
It’s worse still for Ma, released to her flawed family, and at the mercy of the media. They’re freaked out that Ma is still breastfeeding Jack – it is that that most shocks people. A crass, insensitive TV interviewer pushes Ma towards the edge. That scene reads with great authenticity, and there’s a reason for that.
Last time I met Emma, back in 2004, she’d just endured a gruelling radio interview. Tom McGurk had vilified her because she had a son with her lesbian partner.
“He went for me, and went on for twenty minutes,” she says, admitting it did cause her trauma. “That was one of my ‘have to get out of Ireland’ moments. It had been many years since I’d encountered that kind of attitude, and I’d never encountered it so malevolently.
“Friends in Ireland have to fly to Denmark or Newcastle to make a baby happen, and the one who is not giving birth has no rights, and even the new civil partnership doesn’t change that. By living in Canada I can forget I am lesbian for weeks on end. I’m just getting on with my life. You don’t have the constant reminder that you are a minority.
The author adores her visits to Ireland, though. She loves spending time with her mother, a mum of eight, who, she says, was the main inspiration for Ma.
“I wanted Ma to be the ideal mother, but not in a bland way. Under those terrible circumstances she has to make tough choices, but she does the best possible job, even though at times she has to annoy and upset Jack.
“Often, when I was writing the book I felt like a bad, bad mother. I was mulling over what a good mother would do now, what games would she invent, then my own kids would come home and I’d be irritated with them because I wanted to be writing. I ended up feeling admiration for other parents, and more and more ashamed of my own parenting.”
There’s a buzz of expectation around this new book. Early reviewers have praised Emma for producing a work of art, and for her dazzling language. They’ve stated that, after reading it, the world will look different; and they’re right. It is a book that can change your thinking. I recommend it, wholeheartedly.
Room by Emma Donoghue is published by Picador at 13.99 euro.
Since I spoke to Emma, she has been longlisted for the Man Booker Prize.
© Sue Leonard 2010
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