a little in common

Scotland native Margot Livesey is the author of five novels: Banishing Verona, Eva Moves the Furniture, The Missing World, Criminals, and Homework. Among her first published works of fiction were short stories that are in the collection Learning by Heart. She also coauthored Writing about Literature: An Anthology for Reading and Writing.

The recipient of many writing awards and fellowships, Livesey's credentials are enviable. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, the Massachusetts Artists’ Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Canada Council for the Arts. Since 1996 she has been a Writer-in-Residence at Emerson College and since 1990 she has been a Visiting Professor at the Warren Wilson MFA Program. She previously was a visiting professor at Brandeis University, at Boston University, at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and at Williams College, an assistant professor at Carnegie-Mellon University, a Writer-in-Residence at Cleveland State University, and a lecturer at Tufts University. She has also taught writing at the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, Bennington Summer Workshop, the Napa Valley Conference, the Sewanee Writers' Conference, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.

Her essays and short stories have been published in The Atlantic Monthly, Five Points, AWP Chronicle, The New Yorker, Story magazine, and The Kenyon Review as well as many other magazines and anthologies. She frequently writes book reviews for the New York Times Book Review and the Boston Globe.

Livesey grew up in Scotland on the edge of the Highlands. She and her husband divide their time between the U.S. and Britain.

Banishing Verona, her most recent and fifth novel, tells the story of Zeke Cafarelli and Verona MacIntyre, who share a passionate one-night affair in London. Zeke is a handyman who has Asperger’s Syndrome and a host of related symptoms. Verona is seven months pregnant, a confident, quick-tempered, moderately successful radio show host. After their evening of intimacy, Verona leaves for Boston and Zeke feels he has no choice but to pursue her.

In Livesey’s captivating fourth novel, Eva Moves the Furniture, Eva McEwen is visited by two other-worldly companions. The reader is never sure if the companions are there to protect or harm her. “This is a novel that enters the reader’s life in much the same way that the companions come to Eva,” wrote Valerie Martin in her New York Times review. “It looks harmless enough, like a child’s fantasy, inhabiting a fairy tale in which powerful, otherworldly forces are at work, but reader beware.” Eva Moves the Furniture was a finalist for the L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award, a New York Times Notable Book, and an Atlantic Monthly Best Book of the Year.

Sherry Ellis met with Livesey at her dining room table on the second floor of her three-story townhouse in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Sherry Ellis: When Banishing Verona begins, Zeke, the protagonist, is changing light bulbs. Unbeknownst to him his life is about to change as well. In this novel, electrical surges and electricity itself are motifs that carry the novel forward. How did you develop this powerful symbol?

Margot Livesey: Zeke was a character whom I’d long wanted to write about. He was hovering in the margins of several other novels, never making it onto the page. But specifically, about electricity, I had this image of a man working in an empty house, in particular Zeke working there and light bulb after light bulb popping into darkness. I don’t know if you remember Nabokov’s story “Signs and Symbols.” It’s about this elderly couple whose only son is in an institution because he thinks everything in the world—the wallpaper, the clouds, the trees—is sending him messages. The parents go to visit him, and they too keep reading everything as a sign, including a series of phone calls which turn out to be wrong numbers, until, perhaps, the last one. It’s a very short and beautiful story about the way we both over- and under-interpret the world. So in Zeke’s case he largely forgets about the light bulbs but maybe readers will think that they did mean something, that they heralded the approach of this electrically magical person, Verona.

SE: On the surface, lovers Zeke and Verona have very little in common. Zeke is a man who can’t lie; limited by Asperger’s Syndrome, he is an open book. Verona is a woman who rarely tells the truth and whose attitudes and beliefs often take the form of questions. Yet these characters share behaviors and problems in common; for example: difficulties with their families, a propensity for making lists when they are trying to solve problems. How did you develop the relationship between them?

ML: I think it’s just right that you ask about developing them in relationship to each other, because that’s such an important aspect of how character works in fiction. It is very rare in fiction for a character to really operate in isolation. And Zeke and Verona, although they had very different childhoods, did grow up on the page together.

Besides having a long-standing desire to write about Zeke, I wanted to write about a woman who was stronger, more definite, and more forceful than my other female characters had been. I felt I’d written, for one reason or another about a number of troubled women: Molly, in Criminals, who ends up hanging onto a baby because she believes her affection gives her a right to motherhood, and Hazel in The Missing World who is kept semi-captive by her boyfriend after she loses part of her memory in an accident. But it doesn’t fit with the way I see women in the world that my women characters should be too fragile. I very much wanted to write about a woman who, at least at some level, is more in charge of her life and who, even if she makes mistakes, makes them in a more forceful way.

It has been my good fortune over the years to be interviewed on a number of radio shows and I’ve been very struck by these people who do ten or twelve hours a week of live radio. They can chat until the cows come home. They know a little about a great deal and they’re great at thinking on their feet. So, trying to invent a more forceful woman who would appeal to Zeke, I decided to make Verona a radio show host. He relishes her capacity for both listening and telling stories and he also finds it very appealing that she’s pregnant; he can have a baby that won’t be genetically connected to him, that won’t be in danger of inheriting his faults.

As for Verona, she finds Zeke very beautiful, and she also appreciates his lack of guile. The end of the novel, which I obviously don’t want to give away, plays very much to that side of his character.

SE: Just a moment ago I described Verona as a liar. However, there’s a moment early on in Banishing Verona when Verona is helping Zeke sand a wall and she’s “surprised to find herself longing to tell the truth.” Just as the little extra bumps and grit are sanded away, she, Verona, wants to speak the truth. Do you recall how you developed this metaphor?

ML: In the early nineties I had the good fortune to teach at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop with the wonderful writer Deborah Eisenberg and I remember her saying to me at one point that part of the trouble with writing fiction is that so much of life takes place around a table, and as a result so many conversations in fiction are conducted over meals. So I thought one of the ways I could allow Zeke and Verona to become closer was to follow Aristotle’s dictum and give the characters an action to do together other than simply eating, although they do that too.

I have a decrepit house in London, and over the years I’ve watched numerous people work on it. Elderly British houses are basically held up by wallpaper, and when you take it down you never know what will happen. That seemed a wonderful metaphor for the surprises of intimacy and the way in which when we reveal ourselves to another person we don’t quite know what will come of those revelations. Even when we do manage to tell the truth, the truth may not be heard. So there is something about the way Zeke and Verona gradually make the room bare and perfect that becomes an image for their romance.
And this also connects with how Zeke imagines his brain, as a house with all these different rooms that he has to take care of, and he’s always rushing from one to the other.

SE: When Zeke travels to Boston he is surprised by the appearance of hydrants. You write, “He was outside a bookshop when he spotted a metal effigy like the ones he had spotted from the taxi the day before. He bent down to examine the silver body and faded orange helmet with its snout and two stocky arms; even on closer inspection it seemed to have no obvious use.” At the same time that this scene reinforces Zeke’s foreignness in America it also emphasizes Zeke’s lack of understanding, his need for concreteness. Do you think it is important for writers to provide their characters with repeated circumstances that reinforce their traits?

ML: I knew from very early on that I wanted to bring Zeke to America, and I hoped that bringing him here would offer particular opportunities for reexamining his difficulty with reading the world, how hard it is for him to figure out everyday things that most of us take for granted. Partly, too, this was an opportunity to remark on some of the surprising differences between America and Britain. As many people have commented the seemingly common language does mask considerable differences in the culture. As I’ve spent much of the past twenty years here I had to think myself into the head not just of someone with Asperger’s but of someone arriving in Boston for the first time.

As for whether it’s important to see a character acting out their traits in different circumstances, I do think this is one of the things that give a novel depth. Think of Jane Eyre, for instance. First she is selected by Rochester in spite of her looks, and then by St. John Rivers, the cold missionary cousin, because of them; one of the things that is repellent to Jane and to the reader is that St. John doesn’t overlook her plainness. Throughout the novel we keep being told Jane is plain and we get to see how that plainness works in different ways. We see how it affects her life as a schoolgirl, as a governess, as a woman, as a refugee.

SE: In Eva Moves the Furniture you make the otherworldly “companions” seem real, through scenes and character descriptions. The narrator says, “The older ghost appears first on a day that she is preparing to make currant pie with her aunt. A woman was peering through the branches. Everything about her shone as if she had been dipped in silver. Her hair was white as the swans I saw when David took me fishing, and she wore a white dress with little blue checks.” How did you imagine the ghosts so clearly?

ML: Perhaps you know I began Eva Moves the Furniture in 1987. It was a novel that went through many drafts that were substantially different from each other. One of the biggest challenges was figuring out my rules for the apparitions. How were the companions going to be presented? I wasn’t sure even about the simplest things. For example, were they going to change their clothes? It would be too weird in Scotland in winter not to have a raincoat or coat. So, it took me a while to find out if they should leave a room by the door or walk through walls to demonstrate their powers.

Finally, everybody kept telling me to, I reread Turn of the Screw but it took me quite a while to figure out what James was showing me: namely that all the people in the novel are real, even the ghosts. They’re not just vague beings in white sheets being scary. When I finally got my head around that, it was very helpful, and the companions began to come alive. I began to think of them as just like characters, but with different characteristics.

SE: When Eva was a child her father constantly talked to her about her mother. Eva says, “In my imagination the gravestone became a door. It swung open and there was Barbara, going about her daily business, polishing brasses, wearing her spectacles. She was nearby but inaccessible—rather like Aunt Violet, who lived in Edinburgh.” What were the challenges and importance of making this deceased mother so real, such a strong presence, and so central to the story?

ML: Another of the challenges for me with Eva Moves the Furniture was the information I had about my mother’s relationship with the supernatural which was unfortunately limited to a very small number of anecdotes. So rather than thinking like a fiction writer and asking what kind of person would have a relationship with the supernatural, I had the character and this very surprising characteristic but no sense of how the two went together. Readers of early drafts kept asking why Eva sought the companions, and “because she’s my mother” wasn’t a viable answer. I had to start thinking about what kind of person has this sort of inner life? The role of Eva’s own dead mother seemed one way of making her relationship with the companions more plausible.

During some of the years I was writing the book my goddaughter, who lives in a seventeenth-century house outside of Oxford in England, had five ghosts living in her house. Year after year she drew me pictures of them and they all looked the same. And then when she was eight or nine, and started to have more friends and activities, they disappeared. I thought one way to make Eva’s situation more convincing was to make her somewhat lonely and isolated, so the companions could get a stronger hold on her. I was also struck by the way adults make silly little jokes to children when they talk about imaginary things and how confusing that could be if a child took it literally. So, for instance, I made Eva’s aunt ask if the companion likes two spoons of sugar in her tea, or one.

SE: Eva has very ambivalent feelings about her relationship with her ethereal companions. She feels a weight in having them in her life and yet she appreciates that they are gentle to her when she is sick. She wishes someone else saw them; she likes that they advise and protect her. She dislikes that they keep her from intimacy. From a literary standpoint, why did you make her relationship with them so complicated and what opportunities did these complexities provide you as a writer?

ML: This too was something I was slow to come to terms with. In the early versions of the novel, the relationship between Eva and the companions was a simple friendship and the interactions struck the same note over and over. But when I reread it, I felt bored. It wasn’t interesting to have them so straight-forward in their desires. One of the things I often say to my students is that one way to make your story better is by thinking about it from the non-point-of-view character. I don’t mean writing from their point of view but if, say, it’s a mother-daughter story, told from the point of view of the mother, just go through the story thinking of the point of view of the daughter. What is her motivation for her side of the story? What is she thinking and feeling? I realized I needed to do this myself with the companions. Once I figured out their motivation, after only a decade or so, I realized how to write the book, where the ending was going, how relationships play out.

The question about the companions, whether they’re real or not, isn’t finally an important question. What is important is the revelation that Eva has chosen them as much as they have chosen her. Of course, she doesn’t feel she’s had a choice, which I think is true to the way we often feel about the more important aspects of our lives: they don’t feel chosen.

SE: Can you describe the challenges of writing a novel that was very much about your mother?

ML: The challenges were huge. When I started writing the novel I’d just read a wonderful biography of W. H. Auden and another of Katherine Mansfield. I was impressed by how much was known about these people. And so my initial thought when I turned my attention to my mother, whom I had not previously devoted much thought to, was oh, I’ll be able to find out lots about her. What I soon came to realize was that it’s very hard to find out about a person who didn’t leave written evidence and who wasn’t famous. Perhaps if I had run advertisements in newspapers and been more aggressive, I would have been able to find out more, but as it was, after considerable effort, I still had only a handful of stories. My idea of writing a novel that would reflect her life as she actually lived it was foiled. If I had been writing a novel in a normal way, at this point I might have said this is not a good subject for me, but because of my strong attachment to the material, the fact that I couldn’t find out anything about my mother made me want to write about her even more. Her life had vanished and this was a chance to have her back in the world in some way.

But I couldn’t presume that my mother would be important to other people, that readers would say “Oh, I have to stop everything to read about Margot’s dead mother.” It was finding a way to get around my personal attachment to the material, and make that attachment publicly interesting and relevant that was my biggest obstacle.

SE: How did you go about doing that?

ML: One significant step was compressing the life so it didn’t feel sunk in daily tedium. Another was finding an angle from which to write about the massive event which was the Second World War. And a third was figuring out what story I was trying to tell. When I realized what the revelation at the end of the book was going to be, then I knew how to go back and organize the novel, so that when you got to the ending it would seem satisfying and somewhat inevitable.

SE: On page seven you lay out the story and scope of this novel. Do you think it is important for writers to guide their readers early on, to map out the journey they’re about to begin?

ML: This was a very late decision, one of two in the novel. The other was to tell the novel in the first person. Because of the plot, this was not the most natural voice to choose. I also had to overcome considerable resistance to writing in the voice of my mother; it seemed a kind of heresy. But once I had the novel in the first person I still wondered if this really implausible story could work. I decided to tell the reader up front: this is very far-fetched. Either the reader could stop reading or suspend their disbelief and continue. In earlier versions of the novel I’d kept the existence of the companions and their nature but that really didn’t work. People thought they were reading a conventional, realistic novel and when they found out that some of the characters weren’t real in the way they imagined, they were cross. So I decided to lay everything out at the start and to tell the story both backward and forward, which I think increases the effect that this is a memoir, that all the events really happened, and Eva is just picking and choosing the order in which to tell them.

SE: You’ve said that the title of a novel is your “first ambassador.” Can you describe what you mean, and perhaps share what you hoped to achieve with the title Banishing Verona?

ML: It seems very important to me to give a gentle signal to the reader of what kind of world they’re about to enter. I think the role of the good ambassador is to smooth the path of the person who is coming and so I think the title is the ambassador of the book. For me titles usually come early and easy, or late and hard. Whenever I’m really stuck with one I think of what the father of a friend told me: a good title is the title of a good book. If I can just write, say, three hundred good pages then the title doesn’t matter so much.

In the case of Banishing Verona, the title was very late. I had various other working titles, including The Third Chance. My editor was actually the one who picked the phrase “banishing Verona” out of the novel and suggested it. I liked the lyricism and the mystery. I also liked the Shakespearian overtones. Verona is called after the Italian city where Romeo and Juliet lived and loved and came to not so great end, so that too appealed to me. I hoped it would seem an invitation rather than a prediction of what would happen.

SE: As a writer how do you strive to keep readers turning the page?

ML: Oh I do strive, very much so. Like most writers I admire, I’m working with the three great elements of fiction, namely plot, character and language. I hope to write sentences that are inviting and exciting, but not too intrusive. As a young writer I received many rejections that said “this is beautifully written but...” It took me a while to understand what was good writing in the service of the novel.

As for character and plot, I grew up reading the great Victorian novels but it never occurred to me that they were literary. I didn’t think when I read, for example, Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights or Great Expectations that these were great books. I thought they were thrilling and interesting and more vivid than my own life. They made me keep wanting to read; I thought of the characters as neighbors and friends, and what happened to them next was desperately important. Those books remain among my most important role models and their perfect marriage of character and plot is part of what I aspire to as a writer.

SE: How much do you know when you begin?

ML: It varies a lot from book to book. I wrote my novel Criminals at a time when there were a lot of articles in the paper about the struggles between biological and adoptive and natural parents. I was very fascinated by those struggles and by how hard it was to figure out one’s own reactions in these complex situations. When I had the idea for Criminals, about writing about someone who finds a baby at the bus station, I simultaneously knew that I was heading towards a judgment of Solomon where two mothers would struggle over a baby. So I had a beginning and end. But there were many wrong turns on the journey.

I think I usually do have a destination. I knew in Banishing Verona that the novel would begin in and end in an empty room. What would happen in between those empty rooms I was less certain about. I wish I were one of those writers like Henry James who could rehearse these things in notebooks, and then write them out beautifully as he does, but I’ve never quite managed that.

SE: Is there anything you’ve written that you’ve regretted?

ML: Interesting question. I think there are things I regret publishing, because if I hadn’t published them I could have come back to them and written a better version.

SE: Norman Mailer once said, “Being a real writer means being able to do the work on a bad day.” Do you agree?

ML: I think writing fiction has become my job in the world. I was very reluctant for that to be the case. It took me a long time not to think it would be better to work for something more obviously useful, like Amnesty International. But I’ve come to the conclusion that this is what I can do. And the way in which I’m useful in the world other than donating money to worthwhile causes, has to do with writing novels and helping other writers. There is a lot of stubbornness in being a writer, a lot of just showing up at your desk, persisting in the face of one’s own mediocrity.

SE: I understand that Alice Sebold was one of your former students in Los Angeles. First of all, how does it feel to have a student of yours go on to become so famous, and secondly, have any of your other students gone on to receive such public acclaim?

ML: It’s an amazing feeling, yes. She was actually my student at University of California at Irvine. And I have had quite a number of students publish wonderful novels. Alice Sebold’s husband Glen David Gold published a beautiful book, Carter Beats the Devil—that came out a year or two before The Lovely Bones and got wonderful reviews and a lot of acclaim. Locally, Lan Samantha Chang is one of my former students, and I love her work. It’s been thrilling to see her publish Hunger and more recently the splendid Inheritance; I think she is an amazingly gifted writer. Another very gifted student who published recently is John Dalton. His novel, Heaven Lake, is about a young American man who goes as a missionary to Taiwan and ends up making an epic journey to mainland China. Whitney Terrell published a terrific novel called The Huntsman; Elizabeth Stuckey French published a really good collection of short stories; Susan Powell published a wonderful novel called The Grass Dancer. I’m probably forgetting quite a few.

SE: Are these books you helped them work on?

ML: I was involved to some degree in many of the first books. Obviously, by the time she wrote Inheritance, Samantha Chang was long past needing me.

My father was a teacher and by the time I was conscious of his profession, he was in his fifties, and not a very good one. I always vowed that I wouldn’t enter a classroom as a teacher. When I did at the age of about thirty, I discovered I really liked it. I like being in the company of young writers, and the energy they bring to their work. I like the challenge of helping them discover what their material is and how to shape it. I feel lucky.

SE: Do you have any suggestions for new writers about how they can focus on their writing or improve their craft?

ML: Well, we do live in a rather overcrowded and hurried age. So, it is important, at some point, to be able to answer the question why should someone read this, and to be able to do so as articulately as possible. The answer can’t be, as it was in the early stages of Eva Moves the Furniture, because this is my mother. We have to be able to make a persuasive case about what we’re offering that isn‘t being offered in another story or book. I think this comes relatively late in the creative process for most writers, but I do think it is an important stage in that process.

And I think it is important to write in a way that doesn’t squander the reader’s attention. Years ago Richard Ford told me that he read all his work aloud. Since then I’ve tried to do this myself. It is often absolute torture but I do find it an invaluable tool for detecting those places where I’m rambling on, wasting the reader’s time. If a sentence isn’t interesting to me, or I can’t read it without wincing, then that’s a pretty clear sign to me that there’s a problem. When I first started writing novels, I thought, oh, there’s so much space in the novel, I can put in nearly anything. It took me a long time to understand what the Anglo-Irish novelist Elizabeth Bowen meant when she said the biggest sin in a novel is irrelevance. Now I really feel that, if pressed, I should be able to justify every sentence.

I think most young writers aren’t sufficiently ruthless. When they reread their work they think, as I did, oh, this isn’t very interesting to me but that’s because I wrote it; if I were reading it for the very first time it would be brilliant. We actually do know when our work is tedious, or repetitive, but we are often slow to admit it.

I guess I think the way we get around this myopia, other than by reading aloud, is to get good readers for our work. Early on my first readers were people whom I knew as friends and what really helped me to progress as a writer was finding readers who knew me as a writer first and who didn’t bring too many expectations, didn’t fill in the gaps in the generous way that my friends did.

SE: Are you superstitious about talking about a work in process?

ML: If I were working on something I might be able to answer that question. I have to confess since I finished the galleys of Banishing Verona in July [2004] I haven’t written anything other than a book review and a postcard, and a few comments on my students’ work. I’m really looking forward to the Christmas holidays so I can sit down and write.

Sherry Ellis is at work on The Goode Books, a novel, and a collection of author interviews. Her anthology of writing exercises tentatively titled WRITE NOW! is forthcoming from Tarcher Books in September 2006. Her work has appeared in Agni, Barcelona Review, Bloomsbury Review, Provincetown Arts, Post Road, the Writer’s Chronicle, and Glimmer Train.