‘The place you left is busy changing just as you’re changing’: Claire Messud photographed at her home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Photograph: Rick Friedman
Claire Messud: 'To be a writer is to stand at the side'
The novelist and Harvard academic on her mother’s dementia, getting in touch with her teenage self, and how she reacts to bad reviews
Alex Preston
Saturday 7 November 2020
Claire Messud is the author of seven novels, including the Booker-longlisted The Emperor’s Children and The Burning Girl. She was born in Connecticut, the daughter of an Algerian pied-noir father and a Canadian mother. She studied at Cambridge University, where she met her husband, the author and critic James Wood. They now live in Massachusetts, where Messud teaches at Harvard, with two teenage children and two beagles. Her latest book, Kant’s Little Prussian Head and Other Reasons Why I Write, a collection of essays and reviews from the past 20 years, was published last month.
What inspired the title of this collection?
The title comes from Thomas Bernhard writing about how Kant is reduced to his “little East Prussian head” but also to a single sentence, a mere philosophical hue. It’s about the fact that we can’t really take in everything we read in a book. When you think about what you remember of a book a month later or a year later, it’s a distillation – sometimes you remember an image or a scene or a moment in the plot, or an idea in an essay. You don’t actively remember the entire experience, at least not consciously. My father used to say that culture is what’s left when you’ve forgotten everything.
Your mother is an important figure in your personal essays – her struggle with dementia overlaps with your ideas about memory…
In the early days of brain surgery – and you know that you’re awake for brain surgery – they realised when they started poking at the patients’ cerebellums that everything is in there. If they poke a certain spot the patient says: “I’m on a boat on a lake with my parents. I’m nine. This is what the air smells like.” My mother had a particular type of dementia, Lewy bodies. Somebody explained it to me as: “Alzheimer’s locks the filing cabinet of the mind, while Lewy bodies turns the cabinet over on to the floor.” So it’s all there but mixed up. So where it overlaps with the idea of what we retain from our reading is that it’s all there. It comes back to Proust and his madeleine – you don’t know what moment will bring back experiences or memories, whether they’re things you’ve lived or things you’ve read.
To what extent does your background – you describe yourself as a mongrel – both help and hinder your writing?
It’s a thing I’ve long pondered. In some ways, to be a writer is to stand at the side, to be the observer, to be liminal. Wittgenstein said that all philosophy is neurosis. If you’re not neurotic then you don’t even have to write anything down, you’re just busy living. Alice Munro, whose work I adore, is incredibly rooted in place: she lives a short distance from where she went to school. I cling to Salman Rushdie’s Imaginary Homelands essay. Even if you only move a hundred miles from where you grew up, you can never go back. The place you left is busy changing just as you’re changing.
There’s an essay here, Teenage Girls, about your daughter and her friends, that feels like it might have been the source material for your novel The Burning Girl…
I was prompted to write that novel when I did because I had a teenage daughter, but also because I was driving my daughter and her friends around so much. There’s that funny thing where you’re invisible to them, as if you were the Russian chauffeur – they don’t think you understand what they’re saying. If you’re lucky, they behave as they would if you weren’t there.
I had wanted to try to write a fictional version of the experience I had when I was young. Lorrie Moore wrote in a review of a book about teenagers that adolescence is a howling dog; eventually it’s buried, but it’s buried alive. I found that as I was living my daughter’s teenage years as a parent, it was bringing back all of this unprocessed, howling stuff in me.
You write regular reviews for the New York Review of Books. What happens when you run into someone you’ve given a bad review to?
I remember years ago in London introducing two people at a party without realising that one had reviewed the other. The review had not been generous and the writer who had been reviewed looked at the reviewer and said: “Well, I didn’t expect you to be fat.”
Now, I know as a writer that there are two kinds of reviews: there are reviews that are nice or are not nice, and there are reviews that are engaged with what you’re trying to do as a writer and those that aren’t. Anything that seeks to engage with what I’m doing, I’m grateful for. I might feel wounded or sad if the reviewer doesn’t feel I did what I set out to do, but as long as they’re trying to understand what I set out to do then that feels like a gift. So, for example, the number of US reviews of The Burning Girl that began “This is a YA novel.” And it could be a nice review or a not nice review, but I’d think: “Meh. That’s a waste of paper.” And so that’s what I try to do myself as a reviewer: trying not to ask the question “Do I like it?” but “What is it? And what is it trying to do?”
What books are on your bedside table?
Too many to mention them all. Jacques Attali’s L’Année des Dupes Alger 1943; Map: Collected and Last Poems, by Wislawa Szymborska, Maaza Mengiste’s The Shadow King, which is quite wonderful.
How do you organise your books?
Once upon a time, alphabetically. Now, though, it’s sheer guesswork as to where a book is. If I need it, the chances are it will be buried three books deep.
What do you read for sheer pleasure?
During lockdown we’ve been reading Tolstoy. The novelist Yiyun Li has been running a War and Peace book group online, and we read Anna Karenina to one another over the dinner table, me, James and the kids.
Which book would you give to a 12-year-old?
Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier.
No comments:
Post a Comment