| TBR: |
Thanks so much for doing this today. I know you're busy but we just want to add a little to our conversation from last year, when The River King came out. So I'd like to ask you a few questions, first specifically about Blue Diary. Ethan Ford finds himself paying for a crime he committed long ago, when he was "someone else." How did you decide upon this theme of reinvention for Blue Diary? |
| AH: |
I think that that idea of reinvention originally sprang from the fairy tale of Bluebeard and the idea of someone reinventing themselves or turning out to be not what you think they are. I was reading different versions of that fairy tale and talking about it with other women, feeling that it was a really resonant fairy tale for a lot of people. The original fairy tale was about the youngest sister going into a room in the castle and finding all the bodies of the wives that came before her — she is confronted with truth, thinking about how often we think we know people and we really don't. |
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| TBR: |
Do you think in real life it is possible to learn something new about the person you've shared your life with after a long period together, when you think you might have heard everything about their past? Protagonist Jorie certainly learns some new stuff about Ethan, her husband. |
| AH: |
I think it happens more than we know and I think it happens at different levels. I think having an affair and being found out is one level, but he's led a life and [everyone] finds out that there were maybe two lives going on at one time. I think secrets often come out. I spoke to a friend who is a therapist and I asked her if there were people who came to her and admitted to doing horrible things and she said, "More than you know." |
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| TBR: |
Blue Diary is about dangerous secrets, passionate love, gossip, unconditional love. Before you mentioned Bluebeard, I was going to say that Blue Diary felt like a fairy tale to me — actually, a lot of your work does . . . |
| AH: |
Good! (laughs) |
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| TBR: |
That is something that you are trying to get into your work? The atmosphere of very intense emotional events that draws us into some very intricate plots? |
| AH: |
Absolutely! I feel like those are the stories I was first interested in as a reader, maybe even as a listener before I was a reader. I always felt and still feel that fairy tales have an emotional truth that is so deep that there are few things that really rival [them]. I also like the whole idea of fairy tales and folk tales being a woman's domain, considered a lesser domain at the time they were told. After I wrote the book and had given it its title, it was interesting to discover that in France, fairy tales were called "cahiers bleu", which means 'blue notebooks.' |
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| TBR: |
Oh my god! That's amazing! |
| AH: |
Isn't it? They were written on cheap blue notebooks bought by poor women. I'm interested in folk tales in the way that medicine and magic in women's stories are all kind of combined. |
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| TBR: |
Speaking of magic, I always associated nature with magic in your books. It's such a vital character in your work. Do you see yourself as an heir to the tradition of some well-known New England writers, like Thoreau or Dickinson, who also used nature as an inspiring force in their own work? |
| AH: |
No, I've never really thought about it that way. I do agree with you about nature being almost a character. And I think in a way it's a family trait. When I was growing up, my grandmother and my mother were always talking about the weather — it would add an emotional dimension to things. They would call and say, "Is it raining there?" And I have to say that one of my brothers became a meteorologist. |
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| TBR: |
No way! My mother would be in her glory if one of us had ended up on The Weather Channel! |
| AH: |
Isn't it funny because it affects you so intensely! |
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| TBR: |
It's such a driving force in your everyday life, helping you make plans, what to do when . . . |
| AH: |
Yes! |
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| TBR: |
I also wanted to ask you about children in your stories. Children are always suffering heart-wrenching, soul-altering pain in your stories, whether because of their parents' actions or their own. In Blue Diary, Collie is having a hard time with his father's secret and Rosarie experiencing first love — everyone is having an emotional roller-coaster ride that takes them to a different existence by the end of the story. |
| AH: |
What you're saying is true — it's almost shorthand for the process of growing up. |
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| TBR: |
Is that why you always have kids going through such difficult experiences? |
| AH: |
I think growing up is difficult and it's a process that I'm always interested in, with kids and adults, they are often on two different universes. The adults don't know what's happening on the kids' universe and the kids don't know what's happening on the adults' universe. I also have the feeling that twelve or thirteen-year-old kids have such vision when they are looking at things and can see the truth of such situations better than adults can. |
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| TBR: |
Your books never concentrate on current events. The people could be living in any day, any year, any modern era. Why do you never make concessions to pop culture and include references about it in your work? Do you see your stories as timeless? |
| AH: |
I'm so glad you're saying this because, as a reader, I like that feeling when I'm reading . . . |
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| TBR: |
That sense that you won't open up this book in the future and say, Oh this was 1999 because it mentions blahblahblah . . . |
| AH: |
Exactly! It could happen today, yesterday, twelve years from now. |
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| TBR: |
Local Girls, The River King and now Blue Diary are all books which revolve around small, closely knit communities. It makes me think about my grandmother talking about growing up in Quincy [Massachusetts] or the way you so uncannily captured the essence of Martha's Vineyard in Illumination Night, a place I'm very familiar with but where you had never been before you wrote the book! That's uncanny! My family was very impressed that you were able to really hook into the essence of the island... |
| AH: |
Thank you! I did go there later, but I hadn't been there before I wrote the book. Sometimes I feel like the imagined can feel more real than the real? |
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| TBR: |
Sure. That speaks well of your ability to hook into these timeless ideas and that overrides the specifics of a place or a time. |
| AH: |
That's how I feel when I read a fairy tale — it could be happening right now. |
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| TBR: |
It definitely makes for a very visceral reading experience. But all these small towns that you place your characters in — do you think they still exist somewhere? Do you think of places specific to your memories, places where you experienced the good and the bad of a small community like Monroe in Blue Diary? |
| AH: |
Any institution becomes a community — whether it's a high school or a boarding school or a publishing company or a small town where everybody knows certain things about people. It becomes . . . everyone is interrelated and I think it's interesting to see how people react when they are thrown together. And I think there are still small towns that are like this. |
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| TBR: |
What authors do you find yourself reading at this stage in your career? |
| AH: |
I don't really read as much as I used to. A lot of what I was looking for as an escape I find in writing. And the other thing is that I don't want to get into someone else's language when I'm working. |
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| TBR: |
What part does being a mom play in terms of your life as a writer? Does the rest of your life enhance your work, detract from it, or do these things barely factor in career-wise? |
| AH: |
t does affect your writing greatly, which I think you'll find out — you learn to write much faster! And you can write under any circumstance . . . |
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| TBR: |
get fifteen-minute intervals . . . that's the best I can do. |
| AH: |
Mothers always find ways to fit in the work — but then when you're working, you feel that you should be spending time with your children and then when you're with your children, you're thinking about working. It's complicated but I think one thing that happened for me was that I became much more efficient. People could be screaming, the TV could be blaring, dogs could be barking and I could still work. |
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| TBR: |
In essays you had written about when you were ill. . . and we're hoping that you're doing well now . . . |
| AH: |
Thank you. Yes, I am. |
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| TBR: |
It certainly seemed from those pieces that no matter what was going on, you always found the time to do your work. You were compelled to do it . . . |
| AH: |
It was a great escape for me and it was a way to take a break from what was going on in my own world, to go into another world. |
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| TBR: |
Have you found throughout your career that your writing process changes then, with the circumstances, or are you a good morning person or . . . |
| AH: |
I think it changes during different periods of my life. I always get up at 5 AM and worked before the kids got up. I make myself work every day. And I have had periods of blocks where I had to get back into it and then when I was ill, it was easier to do work than most other things. I could lie on my office floor — I could go back and forth from my desk to the floor and I didn't have to deal with people and it was much easier [than anything else]. |
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| TBR: |
Blue Diary contains a subplot about a woman who has cancer and begins treatment just as she happens to fall in love with an old schoolmate who has carried a flame for her all these years. Did your own illness prompt the inclusion of such a story line? |
| AH: |
I think it must have. I talked to my oncologist about it and I said I didn't just want to be writing about cancer. And I tried to get rid of [that character] but I couldn't do that — she kept coming back. In Local Girls, the main character had breast cancer. My doctor said well, in the next one you'll find that it's a friend, then it would be the grandmother . . . and I said, in my next book, it IS the grandmother! |
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| TBR: |
You were one step ahead! |
| AH: |
(laughs) Right! Part of the healing process for me was what would I want to read if I was newly diagnosed — I would want to read a story of possibility and one of those possibilities was to have this woman be a romantic heroine. |
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| TBR: |
And it balances the Jorie-Ethan story, the couple that got together early and thought they had figured it out and really hadn't and then this other couple that found it out later. |
| AH: |
Absolutely! And in the middle of all that, an unlikely thing, love. |
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| TBR: |
But that's so truthful — you always fall in love when you least expect it. |
| AH: |
That's true. |
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| TBR: |
What great epic stories have most inspired your tales of impossible, earth shattering love — aside from Wuthering Heights, which you have spoken about before? |
| AH: |
I feel more influenced in my own work by dreams than I do by other writers' works in a way. Or by popular culture, movies — what else is there to write about than love and loss? |
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| TBR: |
That's interesting that you're a movie fan because your books seem very cinematic to me. But the film of Practical Magic didn't live up to the novel. Were you pleased with the adaptation? |
| AH: |
I've been a screenwriter for twenty-five years. Every one of my books have been optioned for movies and I have written a few of those screenplays. There were three writers on Practical Magic and I think it's great to have a movie about women's friendships and there are four great actresses in it and it has a strong following. I don't think that it's the book . . . |
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| TBR: |
I think those of us who like the book were hoping for it to become a better movie. It wasn't what you expected and I know it's hard . . . |
| AH: |
Studios only make twelve movies a year but buy hundreds of scripts so you never know what's going to go through. The River King — a British director I admire is working on it. It depends . . . |
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| TBR: |
What are you working on now? |
| AH: |
I wrote a children's book called Aquamarine that came out in the spring about a mermaid and this is a chapter book, an older book, so I have another one coming out in the spring. I'm slowly working on a new novel. |
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| TBR: |
Do you like going from one project to another or when you're working on a particular thing, do you like to . . . |
| AH: |
. . . stick with that project. I can't really work on more than one thing at a time. |
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| TBR: |
You're so prolific . . . |
| AH: |
Thanks! You know the funny thing is that I feel like I work so much less than my friends who have real jobs. |
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| TBR: |
That can't be true — you write a book a year, and children's books, and screenplays. That's a hefty workload! |
| AH: |
I don't know — I always quit at three when my kids come home from school so I feel pretty spoiled. |
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| TBR: |
But writers are always in the midst of their work — they can't leave it at the office. You worked while you were sick even and while taking care of other people in your family! |
| AH: |
Well, thank you. I think it comes down to obsession — there are good ones and bad ones, like bad love affairs. Or you could end up with fourteen novels! |
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| TBR: |
I guess that's a good place to stop. Thank you. |
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