Barbara, welcome to Waterstones, welcome to London!
Thank you.
I t's rude in a way to bring an author in to talk about their book and to start
off talking about the physical object rather than what's inside it but we have
to talk about this book.
It's not at all rude, I would spend my whole alloted time as an infomercial
queen with this book, look at this! This sprayed edge
knocked me out. So the wallpaper wraps around. We have of
course a beautiful jacket image with my name on it.
Look at these end papers with the wallpaper peeling off the
walls. The motif of the falling down house. I'm delighted.
This is not only the most beautiful of my books I've ever seen
this is the most beautiful book I've ever seen. So...
Am I done?
Hey, job done, who wouldn't want the most
beautiful book that's ever been made? But it's about a family dealing with the
aftermath of tragedy and of course them falling apart in ways that their
house is also falling apart around them.
Right and it's about the times we're in.
That was my starting point I wanted to look at how people behave
when it feels like it's the end of the world as we know it. And so this family
Willa's family is a microcosm for you know sort of my country, your country.
Their familiar shelter is failing at just really every level: economic, social,
political, environmental. All of the things that they expected to have
as a middle-class family that has worked hard, simply aren't there.
As you say it's a middle-class family isn't it and there is something particular about the
idea that you work hard, you buy your house, you have your two point four
children and that life is supposed to get better.
This is the myth that we've
all bought into without even thinking about it and
the 'better' there is defined in material terms. So it's really, without saying so,
we've all been operating on the assumption that there will always be
more. So the young generation coming up in this novel and in this world has a
different understanding. They've known all along there will not always be more
fish in the sea. I wanted to write about what's universal in human nature.
Because that's what you know we're supposed to do as novelists. So how
interesting would it be if I could think of another time in history when people
were required, really just had to accept a whole new set of rules, new way of
thinking about the world. And so create a set of characters from that
time and from this time and put them in the same place and have this house
crumbling around them. What's happening in both cases then and now is a profound
insecurity in the face of sort of tackling new challenges and a great
great desire to cling to the earlier way of thinking. Whether it's scientific,
whether it's a passage into a more scientific way of thinking or
whether it's a passage into perhaps a more generous way of organizing an
economy. It's the old mythologies that most
people want to hang on to.
You've mentioned there the economy and as a
British reader of this book there is a section where Willa's dealing with her
father-in-law, is very ill, and getting health care in America appears
to be a sort of Kafka-like nightmare of bureaucracy and different forms of
funding, all that sort of stuff. And of course with the NHS in this country we almost
don't even think about it but reading that, I found that really horrific
reading and very upsetting actually the idea that you would go to hospital and
just not be able to get what you need. It's a real problem isn't it, in America?
Absolutely and that scene is an exact transcription of many, many
experiences that I've had as a person of, you know, of resources. Let alone people
who don't have you know either the emotional or the financial wherewithal
to fight through it. I've been turned away from the doctor's office
many times. I myself took care of a dying relative in her home. I was the one
who had to figure out how to give morphine to you know a person who can no
longer swallow. As I watch discussions of you know of the NHS and privatization
going on here I just think everyone should come over to the US and then go
back and vote. Because it's really survival of the fittest over there.
With this book you wonder how bad can it get?
How bad is the chaos going to get before it gets better?
There's a great image or a great phrase used by Tig, Willa's daughter, where she
says that after the storm sometimes it's when everything has been knocked down
that you can actually clearly see the sky and it's about making progress.
Is that the optimism in this book, that things have to get bad in order for them
to get better?
Well the optimism in this book is the
reader's to invent really because that's, I mean literary fiction doesn't tell you
how to feel or how to think. It asks you how you feel. But certainly the
central conflict of this book in all of its timelines and all
of its characters, is that they're dealing with that double-edged nature of
sheltered, being sheltered. It can mean safe and sound or it can mean unworldly.
Too naive, too inexperienced to really know what's what's coming up. Too afraid
you know to step out. So that's the dialectic isn't it and that is the
moment we're in and I I personally believe and keep saying to
my friends and relations and countrymen: no good change comes from a
place of comfort. So it's in times of crisis that we discover what we're worth
and it's in times when you know the nineteenth-century characters talk about
trying to you know keep themselves in a pumpkin shell you know to hunker down
and hang on to the old ways. When the old mythologies absolutely fail
us that's when we have to invent new ones. What I thought about and what
became more clear to me as I wrote this novel is that it's kind of a love
letter to Millennials. I'm lucky to have two millennial daughters and many, many
people in my life who are in their 20s who have really come up in a different
world, without the illusion that there will always be more, without the illusion
that growth and consumption are you know the answer to every problem. Young
people who are very resourceful, sort of surprisingly resilient and it has
become clear to me that tomorrow's problems will not be solved by
yesterday's people, they'll be solved by tomorrow's people. So I think that if you
are game for that you will find that even though this is a book
about people whose lives are kind of falling down around their ears it's not
gonna leave you in despair.
Absolutely not, you mentioned there... I mean we're
talking about a book which is decaying, you know in terms of its look and
for much of the story you know things are falling apart but that family has
to go through so much. But you know that Tig for example, the daughter, she
understands a bit more about how the world works even than her mother does at
times. And of course the baby that this family is effectively bringing up
together it's that baby's future, isn't it. And
it's for them to work together to make a better one. But I did feel at the end
that there was a sense of optimism because I felt that they would work out
how to make it work eventually. I just hope that the rest of us do.
Well that's the experience of a novel isn't it? That even if you aren't
necessarily that kind of hopeful person, you get to be somebody else for
the duration of a novel. So you can try on the brain of Willa, of Nick, of
Tig, you know, of Thatcher Greenwood in the 19th century and of his
neighbour Mary Treat who's you know an exceptional person who just kind of
doesn't even care what people think. You get to try out all those
mentalities and when you're finished you might find that there's
some of them that you like and that have expanded your own sense of yourself
and the possibilities.
There are many possibilities thrown out by this book
and, as I said, it's not just beautiful on the outside I think there's something
very beautiful on the inside of it as well so Barbara, thank you so much, it was
really great to speak to you about it.
You too, thanks.