Q: How did you come to write this novel? LF: It started out as a short story, which is, in fact, the first chapter of the novel. I knew I wanted to write this story, and I wrote it quite quickly, in a day and a half--almost without changing a word. It seemed to me at the time, I had written the story I wanted to write. After it appeared in Harper's, there was an enormous response from readers. People asked me what happened to Agnes. I started to wonder myself what happened to her and decided to go on with the novel.
Q: The voice of the narrator is somewhere between spoken and written language. Where did the "sound" of that voice come from?
LF: I don't know. All I know is that I found my way into the story when I lit upon Agnes's voice, which somehow found me. It was the voice--the character in that voice--that led me into the story, and then into the novel. Once I had the voice, which seemed extremely natural to me, I was off and running. For the first time ever I found myself talking as I wrote, yapping away, actually talking and writing at the same time. A friend who was in my house at the time said he'd heard me talking in a strange voice, not the voice I use on the telephone. I didn't enlighten him, but that's what he was hearing. And that voice stayed with me. There were big breaks while I was writing the novel, a death in the family, travel abroad. I worried that I wouldn't be able to get back into the story, but it wasn't a problem. The minute I sat down to write, there was Agnes again.
Q: It is said that all the characters created by an author are aspects of that author. What part or parts of Agnes speak for you?
LF: I don't think you can create a character successfully unless you are able to inhabit that character. "Madame Bovary, c'est moi," said Flaubert. I do agree that all characters are an aspect of one's self. One has to be the character in order to create her, and the other way around. For me, Agnes is a sort of alter ego. Her decisiveness, for instance, is truly a shadow aspect of my indecisiveness. I am tormented by choice; I dither and then take a wild leap. She makes choices and runs with them. I loved writing that sort of woman. I also loved writing a woman so uncompromising and clear-sighted, so low on guilt. I am also deficient in guilt, something with which I feel blessed. Then, there is her restlessness, a quality I understand completely. Perhaps it comes from my own yearning to have my exit clear and my return open. Agnes is an extreme version of this. She doesn't settle, cannot settle. She has urticaria of the spirit, as if she had itching powder in her blood.
Q: How do people react to Agnes?
LF: Strongly, and I am delighted. She has invited rather extreme responses. To some people she reads as ruthless and selfish, to others as refreshingly honest. There is a fury with the world in her. It goes hand in hand with her passion. Agnes seems, also, to be able to find words and phrases for what some of us don't really want to acknowledge--or if we're lucky, haven't experienced. To read about a character so unflinchingly at home with her own desires and impulses can be both uplifting and unsettling, I suppose.
Q: Where do you start the process of deciding about such things as character, pacing, atmosphere?
LF: The closest I can come to explaining artistic choice is to say that it's a matter of ear. Not only in terms of how the writing sounds--the voice of the fiction--but in terms of how the whole work is balanced: the arc, the fit, the shape. These are, if you will, the unconscious choices. Then there are conscious choices to make, often coming in with the second draft. If you are lucky, you manage to write a first draft without having to invoke such choices. Once the first draft is written, a good editor, one who has both a large and a small view of the editing, can offer help: fix this at the end, that doesn't fit, or you are copping out here, or you are giving your character a choice that doesn't really answer unspoken questions there. If you think this way as you create, as you write the first draft, you are not hearing properly. You cannot hear your fiction and think about your choices at the same time.
Q: Can you explain the origin of the purse around Agnes's neck?
LF: No, not really. Agnes arrived at the beginning with that purse around her neck. And once it was there it seemed so right. I imagine visually, which is odd because I am not a very visual person. But unless I can see what I am writing, I cannot be sure-footed in the fiction. Once the purse was there, very few people questioned it. Henry Green has a phrase for this: he calls it "the significant irrelevance." I love that phrase. There are things in the fiction that belong but are not necessarily needed.
Q: How do you go about using your personal history in your fiction?
LF: I find that there are certain characters in my life who lend themselves to fiction. Some people are rich for fiction and others are not useful. This does not necessarily weigh up against their importance in my own life. All the people in my life are like a flock of characters, possibilities to choose from. I might use only certain aspects of an individual--a manner of walking, for instance, a voice, or a way of seeing into the heart of things. I then create a character who, whether recognizable or not, has a life that the real-life person never had. The strange thing is, often the fiction is far more real to people than their memory of what actually happened. For example, the fictional parents in Home Ground are loosely based on my own parents. Like my parents, those in the novel were actors. But unlike my parents, they owned their own theater. This suited the fiction. Several years after the book was published my mother turned to my father one evening and said rather ruefully, "Pity we had to sell the theater."
Q: In an essay about your childhood you wrote that you remembered a desire for a special future of your own: "something far away, in the real world, different from what lay ahead for the other girls I knew."
LF: This was a driving passion of my childhood. I don't think, though, that this kind of dream was peculiar to me. I believe many woman artists have had those kinds of dreams, many women achievers, in fact. In Writing a Woman's Life, Carolyn Heilbrun describes this phase as "marked by a profound sense of vocation, with no idea of what that vocation is." I was the last child in a family of girls. By the time I was born, my parents were middle-aged and had given up on having a son. I was enormously lucky in this, I think. They encouraged the idea of a special future for me. They were stage parents, literally and figuratively. I was bold and daring, quite unbearable in many ways, but they were enchanted by this. I adored pleasing them, and still do, even though one has died and the other no longer recognizes me.
Q: Does Agnes relate to an actual person?
LF: There was just a suggestion of a character, a brush stroke in a story once told to me by my mother. A small vignette. Not the character of Agnes, but a person in the job of housekeeper who was having an affair with her employer.
Q: Though you have lived in America more than half your life, you set much of your fiction in South Africa? Why?
LF: I believe that I had to leave home in order to write about it more effectively. Being away gave me the kind of outsider perspective that I've always needed. I am an outsider kind of writer. One might maintain that all writers are outsiders, which, in a sense, they are. In my case, South Africa is the territory of my imagination, or at least it has been. After thirty years in America, I still feel like a visitor. My first novel, Heart Change, was set in America, but lots of people said it sounded "placed" here. Perhaps this is because I'm in America but not of it.
Q: Did putting the main action of The Mirror earlier in this century have anything to do with the political situation in South Africa?
LF: It had nothing at all to do with politics. It had to do with the possibilities inherent in that time and that situation. In those days South Africa was full of immigrants making their way like Agnes. The country was very open to that kind of opportunity. Her easy rise to financial independence would be much less possible in today's complicated world. Now she'd need an MBA to accomplish what she did then.
Q: Some say that Agnes thinks and acts like a man and that she has "a problem with commitment." Do you have any comment about that?
LF: Like a man? No. Agnes thinks and acts like a strong, impassioned woman. Her ambition is not a male ambition--it is too vague and changeable and emotionally based. As to commitment, if she were a woman who had an easy time with commitment, there'd have been no novel. The only commitment she is forced to keep is that with her daughter. It leads to a lot of her wrangling and ultimately to a kind of acceptance. The interesting thing is that when she really falls in love and takes on a commitment, it is with her own grandchild. And that is a surprise to her.
Q: The war between men and women has been a theme in your writing. Has Agnes won the war?
LF: If she has, she's done so by refusing to take part. I don't think she'd agree that she's won the war. She started out thinking she wanted a husband, a house, and servants of her own. Well, she had them, but she still she wanted to move on. Some of the women I have written about are in battles because they are stuck. I think that's what brings on the war.
Q: What is it about Agnes that men love?
LF: Apart from the fact that she is beautiful, she is passionate and has a strong sense of herself. Men want to colonize her independence and her happiness for themselves. Many men run to colonize such a woman. Others, I suppose, run for the exit. The astounding thing is that male readers, also, are falling in love with this woman. It is hilarious to me. If a man were to spend one day alone with her, she would probably cook his goose.
Q: This book has been termed a feminist novel. Is this a good description?
LF: People attach the word feminist to anything that involves a strong woman doing what she wants. Or to a woman angry with what she doesn't want. My understanding of feminism is that it's more complex than that. I never think of myself or my characters as "feminist." In fact, I can't stand the term. Any novel that sets out to be feminist or any other -ist, I wouldn't want to read. As far as I'm concerned, if people want to call this novel feminist, if it causes them to buy it and read it, well and good. But that's not what I would have intended. I'd like a broader concept than "feminist" for this novel or for any novel I would want to read or to write.
Q: Is Sarah in The Mirror the same character as Sarah in Home Ground? Do you plan to bring back any other characters?
LF: There are very few readers who have picked that up. Yes, Sarah is the same character in both novels, at different times in her life. I love that character. I use her over and over in different forms. In fact, I love the idea of a cast of characters that are mine, a world I can enter in any novel or story.
Q: What is it about writing fiction that keeps you working at it?
LF: I keep wanting to get it right. In a sense, writing fiction keeps me sane. It makes sense of my life, order out of mess. Fiction is orderly, and life is a mess. When I am writing something and I get it right, I find that I have laid a ghost--whether it's a ghost of my own past or a ghost of an idea. Once I've got it right, I can move on. On the other hand, when I've got it wrong, I am eternally fiddling. In any case, I am forever fiddling, one way or another. Writing is a restless process.
Q: You say you don't like to talk about work in progress. Why?
LF: It's not that I don't want to talk, because I am a great talker, but I find it very hard to go back to the written story once I have told or talked about it. Once you tell a story, it assumes a shape that is hard to undo if you want to write it. The spoken story relies more on the moment; it takes its form from the give and take with the audience, whereas a written story conforms to far more rigid requirements, in terms of shaping. When I am writing something that has not yet gelled, it is particularly difficult to talk about it. As I was saying before, so much of what one does in writing fiction is not consciously done. To explain it as you are going along is risky. To analyze it afterward is harmless, because the fiction exists, it is on the page. But if you examine it as you are going along you can sink it.
Q: Was the unusual design part of your initial vision of the book?
LF: What I had in mind as I was writing the novel was a small-in-the-hand book, about the size of Duras's The Lover. Then a friend suggested old photographs. My editor was thrilled with the idea, and the art department did the rest. The oddest thing is that the photograph on the jacket, one I did not supply, looks very much like my grandmother when she was young. It's quite eerie the way these things happen.
© Copyright 2012 by Lynne Freed. Reprinted with permission by Ballantine Books. All rights reserved.
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