All in good time
Women — and men — adore her books for their intricate plots and emotional pull. Now 65, she’s appearing at the West Cork Literary Festival tonight.
She’s talking to me on the phone from New York as she prepares for her trip. “I’m really excited to be returning to Ireland,” she says. “I love Ireland and Irish writers, and I’ve never been to Bantry before.”
Her books have become almost a brand, a genre in themselves, yet with each, she explores different ground. There is no ‘typical’ Anita Shreve.
“That can be a problem, or it has been regarded as one. If you have an idea of what a person will produce, it can confuse them.
“None of my books are alike, but they have the same basic chord underneath. It’s the settings, the tones of the speakers and the history that is different. It’s because I’ve always written what I wanted to write, and do not write to please an audience.”
Life hasn’t always been easy for Shreve. She’s now happily married to the man she met as a teenager. But she went through two marriages and two divorces before she found that happiness. Does such emotional turmoil help a writer like her?
“I’m not sure about the emotional turmoil, but for me, writing comes out of deprivation. The creative impulse comes from reading books and wanting to imitate them, but the deep well from which I draw — that was necessary to stay alive.”
So writing, for her, is therapy?
“Oh, 100% yes. Without question. I did not have a terrible childhood, but it was solitary. And I think, out of that, I had a need to create. It’s central. There was no way I would not have ended up doing this.
“There is a likely scenario that I could have done this and not made a living, in which case I would not have continued to do it, and for many years I scraped by, and that was enough. That was all I cared about.”
It took a while, though, to write that first novel, and Shreve was 43 when it was published. Firstly, she became a teacher. Then she started out writing short stories for literary journals, switching to journalism to make a living. “I was one of those journalists trying to find my way back to doing this. I knew I was better as a fiction writer, but could not make money. So I got to the place where I’d saved a little money and could make this happen.”
She worked in Kenya for a time — and she used the setting for The Last Time They Met and the more recent A Change in Altitude. Is there much of herself in her characters?
“My stock answer is ‘no.’ But it’s hard to say. I share a sensibility with some of them, the male as well as the female. In A Change Of Altitude, many of the observations were my observations. I did climb Mount Kenya. I did reach the top and I was the only one. But I was so slow, to everyone’s annoyance.”
Shreve has now published 15 novels. The latest, Rescue, centres on a paramedic and single father, who has to put right mistakes from his past. It’s a great read, but for the West Cork festival, she’s talking about The Weight of Water, published in 1997.
Her fifth book, it told two, intertwined stories. The first was based on a real life dual murder from the 1800s, and the second is about a poet, Thomas, and his difficult marriage. A superb, emotionally charged read, it was shortlisted for the Orange Prize, and was made into a movie starring Elizabeth Hurley and Sean Penn. Why has she chosen to revisit this book?
“I wanted to because I think it will have some resonance in Ireland. I think Irish people relate to a novel in which the landscape is a character; it seems from my reading of Irish writers that landscape is always important. Also, there is that merging of history and the contemporary, and I think that Ireland is never far from its history.”
Shreve has two children, and two stepchildren. They’re adults now, but when they were small, they were barely aware that their mother wrote.
“They’d see me in my bathrobe when they left, and when they came home, I’d be standing there, waiting for them.
“I still write in my bathrobe, I don’t want anything to interfere between the bed and the desk. Having a shower, getting dressed and doing my hair, that would be a huge interference.
“I can write anywhere, provided there is no music, and no barking dogs. A lot of the day is spent thinking about the book. Even when I’m not aware of it, the process is going on. It’s like replenishment. And there’s a certain need for silence. The process is close to day dreaming, but you are bringing a certain consciousness to bear. You are driving the car, and you realise you have missed your exit because you are rewriting the dialogue from a discussion you had the night before to suit your narrative.”
Before her talk tonight, Shreve will take part in Ireland’s first ever Writer Idol. She’s on a panel with agent Marianne Gunn O’Connor, and publishing director Suzanne Baboneau. Aspiring writers have submitted writing, anonymous samples of which will be read aloud by Kate Thompson. When the panel have heard enough, they raise a hand. “It’s a process we’ve tried at festivals in America,” says Shreve. “It’s great fun and instructive. It’s an exercise on how to hook the reader immediately, and not to fall into any of the traps. It’s a teaching exercise, because we then discuss why the hand went up.”
Shreve feels it will encourage writers to concentrate on every sentence; something she feels gets forgotten. “I worry about blogs,” she says. “I worry that a great fiction writer may be writing for an audience rather than themselves. They should be alone in a room where nobody will see their writing for a year. It’s such a different process.”
Shreve spends half her time on the writing of a book working on the first 50 pages. “In the early days, when I sent a book off to the publishers, I’d spend all weekend sweating bullets. If I hadn’t heard back by Tuesday I’d be sick. Now, I’ve learned it’s the only time I’m in the clear. From the moment I send the book off, until I hear back, I don’t have to think about the next book. I can relax. So now I hand it in and say, ‘Take your time. Take weeks!’”
* Anita Shreve is at the Marine Hotel, Bantry, today. See www.westcorkmusic.ie/literaryfestival
