Interview with Simon & Schuster UK
What was your favourite childhood book?
It’s difficult to narrow it down to one. I have always been an avid reader. When I was eight years old I realized what an author was—it was a sort of epiphany—and from then on, when I found I book that I liked, I read the author’s entire body of work (I still like to do this, actually). In this manner I read most of the contents of my local childrens’ library. I loved Edward Eager, E. Nesbit, Beverly Cleary, Laura Ingalls Wilder and the Narnia books. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle was also a great favourite.
Which book has made you laugh?
Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut
Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh
Naked; Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim by David Sedaris
The Spellman Files by Lisa Lutz
Which book has made you cry?
The Great Gatsby.
Which book are you reading at the moment?
I’m always reading a few at once; right now I’m in the middle of The Spies of Warsaw by Alan Furst; Revenge of the Spellmans by Lisa Lutz; Mazes and Labyrinths by W. H. Matthews and the Memoirs of the Duc de Saint-Simon.
Which classic have you always meant to read and never got round to it?
Moby-Dick. There are more but it would be too embarrassing to list them.
What are your top five books or authors?
I’ve been influenced by so many books and authors that I can’t imagine a list of only five. Instead, I’m going to offer a partial list of living authors whose work I always enjoy reading.
Kate Atkinson
Ethan Canin
Michael Chabon
Michael Cunningham
Elizabeth George
Jonathan Franzen
John Irving
Philip Kerr
David Liss
Lisa Lutz
Ian McEwan
Linda Watanabe McFerrin
Iain Pears
Tom Perrotta
David Sedaris
Rose Tremain
Ayelet Waldman
Is there a particular book or author that inspired you to be a writer?
I think it was the Little House books by Laura Ingalls Wilder. I know that I was reading them at the time I knew I wanted to be a writer—nine or ten years old.
What is your favourite time of day to write?
Morning, after I’ve had coffee but before the distractions of the day start to intrude on my imaginative life.
And favourite place?
My bed. But I usually wait until my husband has left for work before climbing back in.
Longhand or word processor?
Both. I write outlines and first drafts of scenes with a pen, in a notebook. It can’t really be called longhand, because my handwriting is atrocious—so bad that at times I can’t read it. But I very quickly type up my rough first drafts, print them out and add them to my growing manuscript. All subsequent revisions are made by working with hard copy and computer. I need to have a hard copy at hand—it’s too difficult to get a sense of a novel just by scrolling through it on a monitor.
Which book have you found yourself unable to finish?
The Brothers Karamazov. I have tried numerous times, in part because a learned Russian friend once told me that it was the definitive Russian novel. It’s odd, because I’ve been thoroughly engrossed by Dostoyevsky’s other novels, have read most of Tolstoy and in general have a deep interest in Russian literature, as I’ve spent a considerable amount of time in Moscow (for an American, at any rate), but The Brothers Karamazov defeats me every time. I want to care about what happens to Dmitri, Ivan and Alyosha, but after 200 pages of The Brothers Karamazov, what I want even more is to shoot myself in the head.
Other than writing, what other jobs or professions have you undertaken or considered?
Writing is the only profession I have ever seriously considered, although there are days when being a writer makes me wish that I’d gone to medical school and become a doctor instead. I have had some strange writing jobs, the most unusual being a stint in Moscow in 1991 working for Mosfilm, the Russian film studio. At that time it was still the Soviet Union, Moscow was suffering from one of its worst-ever food shortages, and Gorbachev was about to be toppled from power.
I was hired to create a film catalogue, which meant writing synopses of what were considered the 100 best films in the extensive Mosfilm film library, which included such classics as Potemkin, Andrei Rublov and Solaris. When it was first proposed to me, it seemed like a relatively easy job. Certainly I spent much more time watching films, drinking tea, smoking cigarettes and talking with my Russian colleagues than I did actually writing.
But it was not without great obstacles; to begin with, there was very little to eat in Moscow. I did not speak Russian and only one of Mosfilm’s 2500 other employees spoke English. My interpreter, Maxim, was fresh out of the linguistic university and rather overawed to be working at Eastern Europe’s largest film studio. But in spite of his youth and inexperience, he was a lovely companion and almost continuously at my side. This was especially important because the films weren’t subtitled. We watched them in a screening room while listening to Max’s simultaneous English translation, a rather tough job if you happen to be the interpreter. It’s a great way to learn Russian, though.
But the biggest obstacle was the films themselves. Russian films are not known for their light-hearted quality, and in the years following glasnost, Russian filmmakers only wanted to make films about subjects that had until recently been taboo: Russian gangsters, Russian prostitutes, Russian gulags and Stalin. Of the 100 films that I watched, the breakdown was approximately this:
Gangsters: 12
Prostitutes: 15
Gulags: 17
Stalin: 56
Unfortunately, the apparent glut of films about Stalin hadn’t slowed their production. More than one Russian actor had a career playing no one but Stalin. Occasionally we would see one of them, a frightening spectre in full costume and make-up, wandering around the labyrinthine Mosfilm halls.
Along with the lack of food, the ready availability of Russian vodka and Georgian brandy, this steady diet of mortally depressing Russian films about punishments and crimes, particularly Stalin’s, put me into a state as near to comatose as it’s possible to be in without actually being in a hospital bed. And yet every morning I faithfully showed up at the studio and waited with Max at the screening room door while studio workers stacked up large silver cans of film for us to watch.
Until the fateful day when we were scheduled to screen the four-hour adaptation of The Brothers Karamazov.
I knew it was going to present a tremendous personal challenge, but in some ways I was really looking forward to it, because I figured that if I could watch The Brothers Karamazov, I would never again have to attempt to read it. But we ran into trouble before the end of the second reel. Max couldn’t translate the film.
There were too many words, he said. And they weren’t normal words. They were deep, philosophical, tinged with religious concepts. Also, the brothers kept stepping on each other’s lines. There was no way for him to keep pace.
Well, I reasoned, not being able to watch the film shouldn’t impede my ability to write the synopsis. I had been in Moscow a few months by that time and this deduction seemed perfectly logical. After all, everyone except me already knew the story of The Brothers Karamazov. “So, Max,” I said, putting pen to paper, “there are three brothers. What happens?”
“What do you mean, what happens?”
“You know, the story?”
“Many things happen. Many, many things.” He shook his head sorrowfully and turned up his palms.
Too many words, too many things. The Brothers Karamazov had defeated me once again. We called it a day, and I went back to my hotel for some starvation-induced slumber.
What are you working on at the moment?
My third novel, which is set in seventeenth-century France.
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