Anita Shreve

Anita Shreve – a model interviewee

Despite the fierce winter weather, Elsbeth Lindner discovers the bestselling author is as immaculate as her writing . . .

It was one of the coldest days of winter, as I made my way across town to New York’s Upper West side, to a discreet time-share building in the shadow of the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, for my rendezvous with Anita Shreve. I was hoping she would forgive my hat hair, but with a temperature – factoring in wind chill – of minus 8 Centigrade, wearing my Nepalese rainbow bonnet with woollen plaits (but no pompoms) was essential. The photographs I had seen of the author suggested a woman of striking beauty and poise, for whom hat hair would never be an issue. And indeed the tall blonde waiting for me in the stylish lobby – Barcelona chairs and backlit mica walls – did have the compelling looks of a model, as well as the good breeding not to comment either on my headgear or its effect. Wearing jeans herself, a black sweater and a gauzy long scarf, the writer was clearly in informal mode and chatted sympathetically about the accursed climate.
 
It struck me that this low-profile club, with its cool Japanese flower arrangements and discerning modern art, was an appropriate setting for a writer whose purity of narrative line, of metaphor and expression are as distinctive and characteristic as Anita Shreve’s. Later, when we were settled in clubby leather armchairs in the library, next to a log fire burning in a vast flat black marble fireplace, I asked her about that immaculate line. She seemed surprised for a second, then pleased. ‘I appreciate clarity in writing: simplicity, stark Anglo-Saxon words. It’s a process of wanting a sentence to be as strong as possible. I’d rather have a sentence be arresting than – ’
 
She broke off here, and I pressed her to finish the sentence. ‘Than – ?’

‘– not,’ she answered eventually, with a grin.

Within Limits
Was this the same Anita Shreve whom Marianne Macdonald had interviewed for the Daily Telegraph and found resistant, even passive-aggressive? The woman I met was relaxed, amused and animated, although not without her boundaries. But then after twelve novels, innumerable publicity tours and as many interviews under her belt as there were yellow cabs cruising outside on Broadway, it was easy to understand why.

And then Shreve is a more private writer than many. She has no website and there is surprisingly little material about her available on the web. While she admits to dark patches in her life, she will only share a limited amount of information about them. Her existence now is good, she asserts convincingly: ‘If you knew me in my regular life you would not say that sadness is a theme of mine, but it’s in my world view and in my literary view, certainly.’ And she admits she had a rough time in her twenties and thirties. She talks of ‘instability, depression and angst’, leaving her ‘troubled’, with ‘a deep personal well of sorrow’ on which to draw, in her work. Did this, then, account for the melancholy that permeates her books? ‘There is a flavour of pain,’ she admits and said that it came from her childhood, although simultaneously claimed it was a happy enough one. Her parents were children of the Depression, and her father worked as a pilot for Delta Airlines. The family lived in Dedham, Massachusetts and Shreve had two sisters and a ‘cool life’. But she gravitated to the privacy of books early on and talks of herself as a solitary teenager with an unfashionable appetite for long walks alone.
 
Writing is a means of helping drain the pain of that deep well. ‘There’s an element of expiation,’ she says. ‘Your write out your fears. I am writing right out of my daydreams.’

Progression
Privately and solo, Shreve derives a huge amount of pleasure from ‘the tremendous freedom to make it all up’. Having read English at Tufts University and gone on to teach, she quit her job at the age of 28, admitting to ‘a panicky feeling that I really needed to start writing short stories’. Success followed relatively swiftly and she won the prestigious O Henry Award. But at that stage writing fiction wasn’t going to generate enough income to support her and, during a trip to Kenya, she fell into a job working for an odd-sounding English language magazine called Viva, which printed recipes alongside interviews with local politicians. After three years in Africa it was time to come back to New York where Shreve found a job at Us Magazine, until she became pregnant and took up the freelance life.
 
She expanded two of her freelance non-fiction features for The New York Times into books, Remaking Motherhood, about working mothers, and Women Together, Women Alone, about the consciousness-raising movement in America. I was intrigued by this reference to the feminist era. The subject matter of the non-fiction books certainly suggested significant female empathy, and the fiction, taken as a body, is powerfully woman-centred. ‘I think the novels are male-empathetic, too,’ Shreve commented. ‘But I was a feminist right from the get-go.’
 
Her first novel, Eden Close – written from a sympathetic male point of view – was written in secret, in the mornings, during the same period that Shreve was writing her non-fiction in the afternoons. ‘It was an experiment. I didn’t tell anybody I was doing it. And I didn’t show it to anyone until it was done. And then my agent sold it for a modest amount of money, but it was enough to allow me to turn the corner.’ That pattern – of keeping it all to herself until the new work is ready to be seen – continues to this day.

The Set-Up
The pleasure of invention, the licence to create are still as potent for Shreve today as they were back in the clandestine hours of Eden Close. ‘But the thing that is amazing to me is that you would think, after having done something twelve or thirteen times, it would get easier, and it does not,’ she declares. ‘Every single book is like reinventing the wheel.’
 
Shreve admits that – so far – she has not found herself short of ideas. She is the kind of writer who often has a plot or two simmering on the back burner, while she is at work on the current novel. The first fifty pages of a new book are the test, and if she cannot pitch them to her own satisfaction, she cannot proceed. Those opening chapters might be revised twenty or thirty times before she allows herself to move ahead. But then, once she has the language and the characters, and all the questions are answered, she can progress, revising as she goes: ‘I don’t go forward until what I have is perfect. I wouldn’t go to page 201 until the other 200 pages were exactly where I wanted them.’
 
She is no more a perfectionist in these matters than many another writer, but what surprised me was her expressed enjoyment of what some other authors often find a disquieting or intrusive business: the process of copy-editing. Shreve finds it fun. But then accuracy is critical for a novelist who is all about the texture of detail. ‘I am wedded to reality,’ she admits. The layering of the real is crucial to her and represents a foundation on which she can build an edifice so reliable that it will hold up the reader’s belief and trust when asked to make an extraordinary leap of the imagination. She projected herself into what she imagines might be a reader’s way of thinking, ‘This character is so real and this kitchen is so real that if this character decides to leave her husband and marry this other guy I better believe that she would do that.’

Touchy-Feely 
Buildings, recipes, period detail, the visual minutiae of a room are all essential to Shreve when composing the seamless narratives which have made her a bestseller. She not only prides herself on getting it right, and revels in immersion in period detail when writing historical material, but looks on the tangible aspects, especially the homes in which her characters dwell, as key parts of the story. ‘Seeing the room is as important as hearing the dialogue,’ she reveals. And Shreve’s buildings are as fully described as some of her characters, a fact which certainly applies to the subtly luxurious inn which forms the setting for her latest novel, A Wedding in December. ‘You cannot imagine the story taking place in a different building,’ she says. ‘Well, I can’t.’

Time and Fate
At heart, A Wedding in December – the setting of which is the reunion of a group of school friends over one celebratory weekend – is an exploration of marriages and long-term emotional commitments, which is a theme this writer has attacked in most of her books. Shreve herself has been married three times and has two children. A quirk of romance has coloured her own history, in that her current husband John was a childhood sweetheart whom she first met at the age of thirteen. He reappeared in her life over thirty years later, writing to her out of the blue after seeing her picture in the paper. Again, she chooses not to speak in detail about this part of her life, which involves five children of various parents. But the idea of long-lasting commitment made at an early age is another constant in her fiction, even occurring, curiously, in Eden’s Rock, which predates her reunion with John.
 
The novels contain many shrewd observations about marriage, the gratifications it brings and the passions it can contain, as well as the infinite paradox of never fully knowing the other person: ‘No two marriages are alike. More than that, I’m convinced that no marriage is like it was just the day before’ (The Weight of Water); ‘The marriage came and went…like radio reception’ (The Pilot’s Wife). It’s a subject that still fascinates Shreve and she reckons her understanding of it ‘has evolved as I’ve learnt more and understood more, and is still evolving.’ I wondered, then, about any possible conflict between her interest in women whose lives are defined by marriage and her long-held belief in feminism. She denied it robustly. ‘Oh no, not at all. I think for feminism to be even remotely successful it has to exist within the context of family and marriage, because if you don’t deal with that then you omit a huge population. I think feminism is really part of every aspect of a person’s life – it shapes your view, how you see other people and the decisions they are making. I hardly know anybody who – even if they wouldn’t call themselves that – doesn’t in actual fact function as one.’

Pigeon Holes
Anita Shreve’s politics, personal or otherwise, are far from visible in her silk-smooth fiction. Readers familiar with her work are more likely to categorise the books as strongly romantic and yet this is a label she rejects, largely because of its category associations. Loving to write period material and language as she does, she nevertheless refuses to think of herself as a historical novelist either. ‘To me, the definition of historical fiction is seeking to illuminate an event or a character who is real, in history. In other words the fiction is in the service of history, whereas what I am doing is using history in the service of fiction.’ Nor does she think of her novels as women’s fiction, which she regards as a dismissive and limiting term. It also does disservice to the fact that she often pays as much attention to her male protagonists as to her female.
 
What, then, is Shreve’s genre? One answer is literary. ‘My English editor once characterised my books as “life deeply felt”.’ The description surprised her but she was more than happy to own it.

What They Share
On several occasions during our conversation Anita Shreve made it clear that she sees her books as individually very different, and yet it might seem to some readers that the factors that unite them are at least as strong as those that render them individually distinct. A Wedding in December is rich in classic Shreve elements, from the near-photographic rendering of its events and the role of seashore episodes to the long-held passions involving several of its characters. One, Nora, is a widower; another has had a long-standing affair with a married man; two more are getting married having been separated for decades; yet another, Harrison, is a happy enough husband yet has never really indulged the true love of his life. I asked the author which of these, in her view, has the best marriage or chance of happiness. She dwelt briefly on Nora and Harrison, whose great passion is never permitted to come into being, but finally settled on Innes and Hazel, two characters in the novel-within-the-novel, who, having suffered a huge amount of pain, are granted a degree of happiness.
 
Shreve’s characters often pay a huge price, which brings us back to the well of unspoken suffering invisible at the centre of this soft-spoken, articulate woman – and which may well be the key to the bittersweet appeal of her work.

Blue Skies
But what remains to be achieved by a writer who has sold a reported 1.8 million copies of a single one of her books (The Pilot’s Wife, an Oprah pick), who is vastly popular, and writing as well as she ever has? The answer is: more of the same, with challenges. ‘I just want to keep doing what I’m doing, going to the desk. But I also want to set a challenge each time – a different structure, a different language, a different combination, a different story. Without the challenge, it’s not really worth writing.’
 
Fulfilled as she clearly is as a partner and a mother, it’s hard to imagine this author living any kind of contented existence without the freedom permitted by the writing of fiction. Prizes would be nice, she concedes – she was a runner-up for the Orange in 1998, with The Weight of Water, one of her own favourite works – but just being allowed to keep doing it matters more. Shreve is savvy enough to know that publishing is a fickle business and expresses concern that she may not always be offered the wide open vistas of self-chosen direction she currently enjoys. But for the rest of us, it is hard to worry about the day dawning when this scrupulous storyteller, with her secret wellspring and her piercing devotion to matters of the heart, will no longer be in fashion, or displayed face-out on bookshop shelves at airports or front-of-store. It just doesn’t seem likely.
 
Her name links back to Chaucer – the reeve of the shire – and she can trace her New England roots to Thomas Shreve who arrived in Connecticut in 1640, a mere twenty years after the Mayflower. Anita Shreve has every appearance of staying power.

Interview courtesy of New Books magazine