On May 14, 2024, at the Toronto Reference Library, I spoke to Claire Messud about her new novel, This Strange Eventful History. To prepare, I watched some of her interviews. I wondered what kinds of questions she asked when she was interviewing and how she handled questions when she was being interviewed. Did she say very little, become shy, and need to be drawn out, or could she carry a question and hold it and build on it? I discovered that she was game for anything, and whatever question was given her, she made the interviewer look good even when they weren’t. What you see here in print doesn’t quite capture the feeling of the night we spoke. You can’t see or hear the crowd, you don’t know when or if we are looking at each other, you can’t hear how my voice shakes because I am feeling admiration and awe—and hoping with all my might that I sound intelligent. I want readers to see the way she carries the interview, how deeply generous, warm, kind, and poignant she is, and how grateful I am for it. She was, to me, formidable.
Souvankham Thammavongsa: I wonder if we might start by speaking about the novel’s beginnings for you as a writer. I read that bits and pieces of it were inspired by a document your grandfather recorded for you and your sister. I’m particularly interested in what you did with that document in order to arrive at a work like this, because I too had a document my father kept when we were living in a refugee camp, and when I was a teenager, I saw him throw it out in a garbage can. He didn’t know at the time, but I took it from the garbage and kept it for many years and wrote a poetry book about it. So I’m really curious as to what you do with your emotional attachment to the document itself and how you move from that document into making a novel.
Claire Messud: What a wonderful question. How to answer it? What he put together is very long, fifteen hundred pages. It’s not all handwriting; it also includes photographs and telegrams and letters and train-ticket stubs and all kinds of stuff. He spent, I think, five or six years in the 1970s writing it. And because he was very orderly, it’s neatly assembled, with the page numbers and dates labelled in the margins, so you know this bit was written on May 12, 1973, and that bit was written on May 16. It’s such a substantial document. It covers the years 1928, when my grandparents married, to 1946, just after the end of the war. I read little bits and pieces long ago. He had some of it typed up. But the vast majority of it I didn’t read until 2017, when I had a leave from teaching. I sat down and read the whole thing from beginning to end. Already then I knew I wanted to write something related to or inspired by family history, but I didn’t know what shape it might take. The memoir is full of wonderful stories, some of it, you know, gossip, about friends or about experiences. He was the French naval attaché in Beirut before the war. My grandparents were devout Catholics, but apparently they were invited to a lot of wife-swapping dinners. Who knew? It was pretty lively in Beirut in the thirties, I guess. So you learned all sorts of stuff you didn’t expect to know. What do you do with it? And how?
He wrote his memoir, obviously, in French, and my mother was from Toronto, Anglophone Canadian. My parents spoke English together, and we grew up speaking English in the household. But we learned French, my sister and I. I went to a French school here in Toronto for a time. Funnily enough, the French I know is my grandfather’s French. If I’m reading Proust, I have to look some words up, but reading my grandfather’s French, I don’t have to look anything up: The words just fit in my head. The syntax seems completely normal to me. It was this extraordinary thing that even though he wrote the memoir when we were children, he was writing it to us as adults. At one point he notes, “It’ll probably be thirty years before you read this.” For me it was like my grandfather, who died in 1998, was in the room the whole time I was reading it. That was a wonderful experience. But then the question, What does that have to do with anything I might write? For one thing, it became clear to me that I was interested in a bigger arc, much bigger than the time he had written about. Time was part of the story for me, the passage of time and how time changes things. So then, in a way, that document became a starting point. There are probably a few pages I imagined as scenes, and then I embarked from there.
Advertisement
He titled his memoir Everything We Believed In. And I was interested in time because I realized that everything they believed in was quite different from the things I was brought up to believe in. He, in fact, includes in the document a letter he wrote for his children—my father, my aunt—to be opened in the event of my grandparents’ deaths, if they were to die in the war. And what he wrote to them—this is in the early forties, when they were children—he wrote, “What is important for you to know is that we are Mediterranean, we are Latin, we are Catholic, we are French, in that order.” And I am a North American nonpractising Protestant. So everything we believed in is sort of a long way off. I realized that was also true of the world I was brought up in and the world my kids had come into: Somewhere along the line and quite suddenly, the world I had been brought up to believe was coming was very different from their world. After the war, which was so terrible, people were wilfully optimistic and wanting to rebuild the world in a hopeful way. Obviously, with massive problems—we wouldn’t be where we are now without that—but it was a world that believed, and certainly my parents brought me up to believe, that borders would recede, that hybridization and cosmopolitanism and internationalism were the way of the future. I think for a long time we could trust that was happening, but the last eight, ten years, it has been harder. The world my kids have grown up into (they’re twenty and twenty-two) is maybe as far from what I believed growing up as my grandparents’ world is from mine.
Thammavongsa: In the novel, there are many voices that span across time. There are children’s voices, teenagers’ voices, adult voices, and elderly voices. And they’re all from within the same family. You do this marvellous thing with voice, where you can hear a character’s age in the way they sound on the page. You make their voices so vivid. It was such a joy and a marvel to be in the presence of a voice that can hold stacks of voices.
I was thrilled as a writer to encounter a moment where an important speech isn’t heard or seen on the page, but in its place stands the question “What did he say? What did he say?” What Gaston says in the speech is enough to have his daughter-in-law, Barbara, say to her husband, François, “Why didn’t you tell me? I can’t believe you never told me. If you had told me, I would never have married you.” I thought, Wow, that’s power. And I wonder if you could talk about that, the decision not to write it out or explain what Gaston said there.
Messud: There is a sort of family secret that emerges eventually. It’s a little complicated because for Gaston it’s not a secret, but for others in the family it’s something they don’t talk about. When I am teaching undergraduates, which I do a lot of the time, I always say to them that there’s a distinction E. M. Forster makes between plot and story—which is not quite as I would think of it if I were to hear those two words. He speaks of the story as the events in chronological order and the plot as the making of meaning out of those events. The way he describes it, the story is “The king died. The queen died.” The plot is “The king died. The queen died of grief.” So plot’s the motivation. It’s the reason for something happening. But one of the ways that, as writers, we make meaning is by telling things not in order. It’s by the arrangement of the events we tell. The example I give to my students is Germany. The first thing, maybe not for younger people now, but the first thing I knew about Germany was World War II. And everything else was filtered through that knowledge. But imagine if the first thing you knew was Goethe or Beethoven or many kinds of sausage: if you knew different things and only later knew about the war. As it is, you learn about Goethe and you think, Well, already world domination was on their minds in 1800. One of the things I wanted in this novel was for the reader to have one experience that might alter as certain other things change. And part of it, for me, is trying to convey how differently, over time, people understand the same things.
Thammavongsa: There’s a moment in the novel where Barbara’s children say to her “Leave him, leave him! It’s not too late to start over!” But she doesn’t. And I’ve always thought that leaving someone could sometimes be an act of true love because you release yourself and the other person. Two unhappy people could actually become four happy people! But then reading your novel, I wondered if maybe wanting to leave and not doing so is an act of true love. You have this want to leave and this choice to leave, but you’re not going to choose it. Is that something you were thinking of ?
Messud: I guess I am a great believer in the overdeterminedness of everything, and love and hate can be in the same room at the same time, in the same moment even. Yes, I absolutely think that both things can be acts of love and acts of the opposite of love or of not-love at the same time. There’s a quote from an Anthony Powell novel that I use as an epigraph for an earlier novel of mine: “It is not what happens to people that is significant, but what they think happens to them.” I believe that what we think happens or what we think has happened can change too. So yes, all things are possible. I hope it’s love too.
Thammavongsa: There’s lots that is said about home: home that is literal, physical, like the brick, the wall, the structure, but also the city, the geographical location, and the flesh itself. I’m thinking of the last word in the novel, which has to do with language, and I wonder if you think that language is also a kind of home.
Messud: Absolutely. I feel you should speak about this too. It’s such an interesting question, living across cultures, in multiple languages. And questions of what home is, how language is a home for people, and how that might change.
The novel tells the story of a family, but it seems to me so much a story of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, people moving, migrating, changing, not ending up where they started. There’s an essay by Salman Rushdie, now an old essay from the eighties, called “Imaginary Homelands,” where he writes about how as soon as you leave home, the home that you have is imaginary, and you can’t go back to that place because in time it changes, and the place you go back to is not the place you remember. I think for many of us that’s the case. I have to say, I hadn’t been to Toronto since before the pandemic, and it’s looking really different to me. And that’s not that long. So home then becomes something else, and home becomes people, and home becomes language too.
As I mentioned earlier, my father grew up speaking French. My parents met speaking English. And my aunt—this is in the novel, and much of the novel is fiction—was very religious, my parents were not, and she wanted my father to have the last rites, and he didn’t want them, but then he acceded because he wanted to please his sister. And he said to me, “Is there someone who could do it in French?” Because for him, the Catholic faith only had meaning in French, and it didn’t have meaning in English. That’s a moment of language being home. But it’s also true that his life with us was a life in English, and we were his home too.
Thammavongsa: I speak Lao, but like a two-yearold. And when I speak it, I can only speak it to my parents because they allow me the vocabulary of a two-year-old, whereas with other people, I don’t seem articulate or to know what I’m talking about because I sound like a two-year-old in that language. But with my family I know that they’re family because I’m allowed to sound like that.
Now, I don’t want to give anything away, of course, since I love surprises. I wonder, do you plan surprises or are they a surprise to you as well while you are making them up?
Messud: That’s a really tough question. I don’t know. Do you? Do you plan surprises?
Thammavongsa: No. Otherwise I feel like a reader can see it. So it has to be a surprise to me.
Messud: To you.
Thammavongsa: Yes.
Messud: I sometimes feel as though writing fiction is like visiting a town for which you have some sort of a map, but the difference between looking at a map and being in the town is quite significant. Not Google Maps, not Google Earth. You have an old-fashioned map, and you might see on the map that there’s a little square, but then you round the corner and it’s like, Oh, that’s the square, and there’s that fountain in the middle, and look at that. You couldn’t have foreseen it, but it also then seems inevitable. That’s always part of the joy of writing fiction. Because if you knew how it was going to be, why would you bother?
I always felt that about essays in college. If you’ve done all the notes, couldn’t you just give the professor the notes? Because the paper is just kind of a bore. But the fiction, you’re making it up or it’s coming to you. Whatever that experience is.
Thammavongsa: I’m thinking of what you said earlier about plot and story. And I’m thinking about . . . we don’t think it’s a story to just walk across the street to go to the corner store, but then what if we reveal that the person who did that is two years old? That little introduction, that little twist, changes what is considered ordinary. And I think an ability to work with the ordinary is the trick, to be able to deal with the ordinary.
Messud: I’m reminded of a writer friend speaking about how we think of certain things as bad dialogue—but there’s no bad dialogue necessarily. With dialogue, again the teaching thing, I’m always saying to students you don’t have to say, “Hi.” “Hi.” “How you doing?” “Good. You?” Cut that. Just cut to the chase. But of course, this writer friend was saying that if you’re conveying some terrible awkwardness between people who wouldn’t normally live in this banal register, and you put in “Hi, how you doing?” “Good. You?” when actually they’re estranged siblings who haven’t spoken for ten years, it’s like crossing the street and going to the store and it being a two-year-old. Almost anything can be meaningful. The most ordinary things can be meaningful.
Thammavongsa: And to get us to discover the surprise, we have to want to read the sentences about walking to the store. Which brings me to my own personal love of your novel. I don’t have a large family, and when I was reading your novel I was laughing and thinking: This is why I don’t. I’m so glad I don’t! The cooking of the meals, the entertaining, the guests, people coming in and out, revolving doors, just the noise! But then when I finished the novel, I began to weep because I realized how alone I was now, not having family. And having spent four hundred pages with a family, I felt like you gave me family, and I’m just so grateful.
Messud: Thank you. I’m going to get a little misty. What a beautiful thing to say. I’ve not written about my family. I’ve not written autobiographically before. I was saying to you earlier, this isn’t literally my family, it’s a fictional family. It’s sort of like papier mâché. There’s a form, and then you put a lot of gluey newspaper around it, and it becomes something else.
Young people are always asking, I want to write about my family; can I do that? Should I do that? And it’s a tough one. If those family members aren’t alive, you think, Can I do that? In this case, for me, it was entirely an act of love. I couldn’t have written this book earlier because twenty or thirty years ago I would have tried, and these people would have been only my family to me. The frustration I felt at my father, who was an alcoholic, or the disappointment I felt at my mother’s inability to stand up for herself, those things would have coloured, would have shaped, the novel. Instead, I felt, reading what my grandfather wrote and then letters between my parents from before I was born, that they were people just like me, trying and full of love and hope and disappointment, and all I felt for them was so much love. Chekhov is a writer that, when I read him, I feel that love for all his characters. That’s the spirit in which I wrote this book. Not like nobody is bad tempered and nobody has faults and everybody is shiny and happy, but with a sense of “It’s all okay. It’s all okay. All shall be well.”
SOUVANKHAM THAMMAVONGSA has interviewed Kazuo Ishiguro, Ocean Vuong, Sheila Heti, and others.