Transcript of the interview of American writer Siri Hustvedt by Christine Marcandier

On April 29th 2011, American writer was interviewed by Christine Marcandier, somewhere in a Paris Café.

· Christine MARCANDIER: How was this book born? Is it a fact, an atmosphere, a need?

· Siri HUSTVEDT: I often think, after I finish a book: how does that start? And it’s not always so easy to know. But while I was writing The Shaking Woman, I was thinking of the next novel and I knew, after I finished The Sorrows of an American, that I was going to write as a woman. I knew that for sure because I had spent ten years writing as a man. So I spent six years writing as Leo and four as Erik. Then I thought Oh!God ! I want to go back to women and I think you always react against to what you’ve done before. I thought it would be interesting, if there’s really no men. There are obviously men in the book, but they’re dreams, memories, e-mails. You know, they are out of the picture, so that seems like a good idea, and I think too because of the tone of my earlier novels, I wanted to write a comedy, a comedy like in a classic sense. Terrible things can happen along the way, but there’ssomething positive. So these things are rolling around in my mind. And then, you know, my husband and I have been married for thirty years, not quite but we’ve been together for thirty years, just recently we celebrated our anniversary. And so we have had a lot of friends over the years, so there are about two or three stories that we know personally were out of the blue, I mean out of the blue. The man has left. And from the woman I knew there was no conversation. That happens all the time. These were sudden abrupt departures, and, of course, you think to yourself: what would I do? This is a good premise, not really to tell the story, but after. So that was the premise. Of course there are many famous stories, like the guy goes out for cigarettes and never comes back. I know someone personally who had that happened. She was married and had one child and there was no warning. The guy went out to do an errand and he called up two or three days and said ‘I’m not coming back’. So these things happen in a way. And it’s stunning. So that was my premise. And then I started writing the first paragraph in my head, and this voice of this woman began to appear. “Some time after he said the word pause, I went mad and landed in the hospital. He did not say I don’t ever want to see you again or It’s over, but after thirty years of marriage pause was enough to turn me into a lunatic whose thoughts burst, ricocheted, and careened into one another like popcorn kernels in a micro wave bag”. This deeply amused me. And once you get the tone, it kind of blew out of me, this book. And I had so much fun writing it. My husband heard me laughing. Of course it’s not all funny. It’s quite serious and deeply ironic and there are very sad parts in the book now, but I had so much fun writing it. My mother is now eighty-nine years old and she lives in a place very similar to that place in the book. And over the years now, my father has been dead since two thousand and four, in that place there are mostly women, the men are dead. And, some of those women, who are identical to my mother. You know I didn’t take a particular person and put her, but the feeling of these friendships and these old women bound together, doing things, having coffee, tea, wine, going to the theatre and to the concert. They were really inspirations to me. And also the fact that a lot of my mother’s friends, they die, that’s part of life in a place like that.

· CM: There is a connection between the main character, Mia, and your previous book, The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves. It was the story of a scientific and philosophical investigation,and the connection between illness and creation. You worked on that in this book, too?

· SH: In a way, yes. What happens is that everything starts to bleed. In other words I have been deeply immersed in neuroscience for about at least ten years. And so to make Mia’s husband, Boris, a neuroscientist was just perfect! I have been hanging out with these mostly men, there are definitely women working in neuroscience too, and again I didn’t steal, I have a real working knowledge of the field. It was fun to do that and I got to make some jokes about contemporary neuro things as well. And the other part of the experience and making my character real, I taught writing for two and a half years in a psychiatric hospital. So every week I was filling time with psychiatric patients in a hospital. I don’t think I would have given her a brief psychiatric disorder if I hadn’t felt so close to those people who were in and out of the hospital. And of course I don’t give in psychiatric disorder when it doesn’t have to come back. I think you can say nervous breakdown.

· CM: It’s a novel at the frontier between a novel and an essay. It mixes different kinds of speeches and there is a real polyphony. And I guess everything can inspire, your novel is a mix of such…

· SH: Yes a novel is a grape bag and,in terms of form, I had a lot of fun. You’re absolutely right, it’s a kind of arena for play, with different kinds of discourses, so you have let’s face it this very banal story. Of course a lot of great novels have been made out of banal stories, Madame Bovary or Anna Karenina. It is very ordinary material and it’s all about how it’s told. But a part of this book is also about the play and the possibilities of the imagination, so Mia is in a very bad shape. She is all right elsewhere. And I think I was doing that, getting a lot of pleasure out of this voice, that is variously sincere, ironic and angry.

· CM: Because of this pause, Mia is also a breakup, she has a feeling to be denied, scrutinised in her identity. Is it, in other words, a way to reveal yourself?

· SH: I think so. I think there are two parts. One is that she began to realize that she made other attachments, besides her mother. She goes fond to her mother. She knows that she loves her mother. That’s kind of given in the story, but she finds herself pulled into the life of these rather silly and sad old girls, and the neighbour, in attachments that begin to form themselves. And those attachments are embellished by her imagination. Lola is a little girl. And Mia, she is always embellishing whatever comes away with a lot of imaginative and intellectual material. And I think Mr. Nobody is born out of intellectual loneliness. He is a kind of inner character who becomes externalised. And he is really mean in the beginning. He is horrible. He is like the persecutory voice. And then he develops this friendship, but it’s very much an intellectual friendship, because she is lonely for ideas. And out there in the middle of the minister there are so many people she can talk to.

· CM: But she reveals herself to this world because she writes a diary. And you analyze the way women write novels or poetry or diaries, and you have this sentence, funny and also serious sentence about a man asking to sign the book for his wife “I don’t read fiction but my wife does”…

· SH: It’s quite serious actually, and just before you came, I was thinking, there’s a woman, she was actually a professor of mine at Columbia when I was a graduate student, someone I admired very much and, through a website in the States, she asked me some questions. We could have become friends, after years, it’s very nice. And she was asking me these questions about a feminist novel and how you feel about that. And I was opposing an answer. First of all I think it is a feminist comedy, number one, and number two I think what’s fascinating is how these kinds of prejudices are for example, when those guys come to me and say ‘I don’t read fiction but my wife does, would you sign to her?’, it’s not meant unkindly, cruel or malicious. That happens to women too. Men are frightened and intimidated, they want a lashback.That’s not what happening here. What’s happening is the expression of a deeply unconscious prejudice that is appearing here. And once, after hearing that about a hundred times, I’ve been interviewed by a man on the radio in the United States, about a book, I think it was The Sorrows of an American, and he must have read the book or part of it because he was asking me questions, and afterwards he takes the book and he says ‘I don’t usually read fiction but my wife does, would you sign the book to her?’And I said to him: ‘ Could you explain to me what you are talking about?’.‘Are you telling me that – I made a long list Dante, Shakespeare, Flaubert, Dostoeievski, the Brontes, Beckett – all of this is of no interest to you? You don’t read it, because you don’t feel that it’s necessary? He looked shocked, of course, completely shocked and he had no answer because I trapped him. What they mean is not that they think it’s not worth, or that Shakespeare or Flaubert is not important. What they are saying is that they don’t read fiction written by women. There is something compromising about the very idea of a man reading a book written by a woman. As Mia says, if they do there is something to do with comfort, reading that there’s a man’s name on the outside. Because who knows what would happen if you read a book by one man? Serious literate people it’s not necessary. I know a lot of male writers are deeply rooted in literature and who read books written by everybody, but the prejudice remains and it is something that is rarely spoken about.

· CM: About that, it’s always written everywhere you are ‘Paul Auster’s wife’, so there is no identity for yourself.

· SH: I think, let’s put it this way, it’s much more often done to women than it is done to men, this kind of coupling. Uncouple me from my husband turns out to be a much bigger thing to me than uncouple him from me. And that is because of cultural ideas. And I have to say also that this book, this particular book, part out of me at a particular moment in my life, where it’s no longer possible for me to be naïve about these things. Because I am fifty-six years old, I’ve been at this for a long time, and you realize that the whole idea of male authorship simply carries more weight in the culture. You just run up against it.

· CM: There are some elements in the novel that are quite disturbing for someone who knows your biography. I mean Brooklyn, Minnesota. You mentioned The Music of Chance (Paul Auster).

· SH: Did I mention The Music of Chance? Oh yes, I do, I did.

· CM: Is your character an extension of yourself?

· SH: Mia is really different from me. I have the feeling that the character who must closely embody my personality is a seventy-year-old Jewish guy, Leo Hertzberg (What I Loved). That’s funny, right? In terms of sensitivity and sensibility, he was the guy who embodies me most fully. Of course we all change, we move, we are dynamic beings all of us. But Mia came to me really as a kind of strange voice. I was possessed by this caustic and ironic being. I am very happy to be possessed by her. And of course we have to be part of this voice that is in me somewhere. It can feel alien, but it’s coming from somewhere. And as I always say my books are a search for some emotional truth. Well it never happened to me, I never had a breakdown, I never went to a psychiatric institution, my husband never left me. What I am looking for is some sort of emotional truth. Something that feels it’s true. And I can always keep writing as long as I have that feeling of truth. So, of course, somewhere, I am Mia and I forget about the fact that people go Oh! My god it’s Minnesota and she’s an old mother and her daughter is an actress, is this real life? Even friends of mine said ‘Siri is everything OK?’. And of course I forget that. Of course the spaces I use in The Sorrows of an American are in my mind, my own house where Erika walks up and down the stairs, Miranda is living in our garden. I kept seeing it, and the scene where the old lady was in a rented house put me in my mind. Those spaces are all real and they were definitely inspirations, and when I finished the book, I read my daughter Sophie the part when Daisy arrives, and I said ‘Sophie I’m going to read this whole passage to you, and I think you’ll recognize some inspirations’, and I think Daisy was inspired by Sophie, because she is like a little storm, a little tornado who appears. So there are definitely omens that I took and, at the same time, it’s fiction. I mean I was actually exploiting us and the emails too. It partakes the ‘what if others say’, for example The Shaking Woman who is in my own voice. It’s much more kind of moderate, rational, balanced much more calm. I have a much more balanced discourse, that’s who I am, because that’s who I am. Being Mia was a lot of fun, a little unhinged.

· CM: You wrote in A Plea for Eros: “writing fiction is like remembering what never happened”. Is it a definition of fiction for you? Especially of your novels?

· SH: Yes, in fact I gave a paper just a couple of weeks ago, a series of neuroscience lectures at the New York Neuroscientific Institute and what it is about is emotion as understood in psychoanalysis, neuroscience and the making of literature, and I begin with that. I said that in 1995, I was younger. I said that ’writing fiction was like remembering what never happened’. And I say, OK let’s put some pressure on this, I still believe this and I said: is there any real reason to believe this and, one hour later, I explained that memory and imagination are linked and they have been linked in philosophy for a long time. But even in neuroscience the idea that episodic memory which is often highly fictionalised, unconsciously fictionalised, the way dreams condense things and can change geographies. This happens in memory and imagination, I think, is really the same faculty. It’s just that when you’re writing a fiction, you can spin out whatever you want. You don’t have any loyalty to the facts, whatever they might be, no documentary reality, no link to reality has to be bound to. And this exactly what happens. And one of the reasons I use real spaces is that it is like memory for me, I use the low side of actual places in my life and I populate them with fictional characters. Fictional stories have to have an emotional truth. And one of the things I asked in that paper was why one story and not another? I mean it’s what you’re saying. You know fictions are not free. Theoretically you can say anything, I mean you can make up anything, it doesn’t matter, but you don’t because there’s some kind of unconscious restriction of what’s true and what’s not true, of what’s real and what’s not real for you. And that’s what you’re answering, there’s some kind of unconscious of what the Russians foremost call the fabula, the booms of the story. You can write a different way, there is a lot of unconscious, you’re just dreaming, but how do you know when you go around? I mean, writing articles too, that’s not quite right. That’s not what I mean and how do we know what we mean? Well we’re answering something that’s below the threshold of language, and I think that’s an emotional reality that we are always answering, and that emotional reality is created from the outside too. Everything we’ve read, the way our mothers lived, our whole life story is in there and most of it is unconscious.

· CM: I guess one of the subjects of your novels is also the identity and an ungrammatical word play with Mia and Iam.

· SH: I wonder how they did that inFrench. They left in English?

· CM: Yes I think so.

· SH: I really do love words and wordplay and one of the reasons I thought it would be great to have a heroine,whose name is Mia, is because it’s me in English and the ‘me/I’, and in my first novel, I did with Iris, which is my actual name backwards. And this thing with Mia and I am with which you can reverse their names, it is somehow the core of the narrative, it’s fun.

· CM: And her sister is named Bea.

· SH: Yes Beatrice, but I like that name too because you have the sisters, they like each other very much. I have nice sisters, three sisters and first thing in the book I thought maybe there would be three girls. And then I realized that one sister was enough. Because what I wanted was the sibling, the identification with the other.

· CM: And Boris has a brother.

· SH: Yes, there is a kind of mirroring, and the deranged and sad stuff, it’s part of Boris’ story. I mean,why he has problems, why he is cut off.

· CM: And you illustrated the book. I guess it’s the first time.

· SH: Yes.

· CM: And could you tell us why?

· SH: I had that idea for the first time. I mean I draw, this is very much my cartoon style, I draw a little more seriously too, but I had this feeling that I wanted to punctuate, but visually not illustrate it, because they are not really illustrations. And to be honest I didn’t really know what I was doing. And later I realized that it was visual punctuation of the drama, of the book. And then she comes out. She is speaking to the other self. When I think of that little naked woman. The book is like the internal narrator, another self, in dialogue, an imaginary self. And then at the end she’s flying outside the book. There is a kind of liberation in the book, some kind of regression. It pleased me to do it. And I think now: what was I doing? They sort of come at these beats, which comes as little visual moments, again not illustrations but punctuation.

· CM: You mentioned the 9/11 events in an extremely short sentence. And Mia couldn’t avoid thinking about these two towers in the city.

· SH: It’s probably not hugely symbolic as that. It’s funny because it’s funny those architectural hearings. I think it’s the Eiffel Tower, it’s not the World Trade Center obviously. An interesting thing about New York city, New York residents probably in general, but setting a book out of the 9/11 like that, especially when it has anything to do with New York city, it’s almost always going to appear. I mean I am working now on another novel. Multiple narrators. But it is set before and it ends after. It has to be there. These characters are living in New York City, so it can’t be out of the story. In this book it’s easier. That little mention is also bound to be a form of loss. This book begins as a crash. It’s a kind of psychotic breakdown. Is she really crazy? I mean she is deluded. She hears voices. She’s completely paranoid. She is totally demolished. And the story of the book has some kind of free building to others and towards imagination.

· CM: And you can’t write something without mentioning 9/11?

· SH: Not as it is set after. I feel there’s something for New Yorkers in particular. It was a catastrophic event. And because of the fact that everybody in New York knows somebody – I did not personally know somebody who died – who knows somebody, who knows somebody. And everybody in the city felt very close to that. To the death of someone. And I think it has a lasting effect and does become part of your text. And for Americans it is precisely dealing with trauma. Various kinds of trouble, trauma. But also the trauma of seeing people dying, people jumping.

· CM: And in A Plea for Eros, you wrote about seeing the events…

· SH: Yes on TV and from the window.That’s very strange.

· CM: You said that you’re working on your next novel.

· SH: Yes it’s a novel. I can tell you the title. It’s Monsters at Home. It’s darker. But I am having a lot of fun with it. There are many women talking. It’s around a main character who’s a woman. I have never worked in that form before.