{"id":3816,"date":"2010-08-19T10:19:11","date_gmt":"2010-08-19T14:19:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=3816"},"modified":"2018-12-03T11:26:41","modified_gmt":"2018-12-03T16:26:41","slug":"vendela-vida","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2010\/08\/19\/vendela-vida\/","title":{"rendered":"Vendela Vida"},"content":{"rendered":"

Vendela Vida\u2019s new novel, <\/em>The Lovers<\/a>, follows a middle-aged Vermont woman, recently widowed, as she vacations in the unfamiliar territory of Turkey in an attempt to re-examine her life. Among these new surroundings, her initial numbness about her bereavement gives way to doubt over whether her marriage was even happy, and she has to face up to a pain she never anticipated. Vendela Vida recently answered my questions over lunch during her book tour\u2019s stop-over in New York City.<\/em><\/p>\n

What drew you to set this novel in Turkey?<\/strong><\/p>\n

It was completely an accident. I went there for a month in June of 2005 when I was trying to finish my second novel, Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name<\/em>, and wanted to be far away from the Arctic Circle in winter\u2014the setting of that novel\u2014and free from the day-to-day distractions of my life in San Francisco. I found a rental house by typing \u201cTurkey,\u201d \u201crental,\u201d \u201ccheap,\u201d and \u201cbeach\u201d into a search engine. I had no intention of setting a novel there, but a year later, this house and this town I stayed in kept appearing in my mind. I couldn\u2019t get rid of the idea of writing about Turkey, so I did.<\/p>\n

Did the house you stayed in have any of the unusual contents of the vacation house in the book?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Yes. I usually don\u2019t like to take details from life, but, in this case, I couldn\u2019t resist. The owners left out things that people typically wouldn\u2019t leave out\u2014sex swings, pornographic photos of the wife, books on sexual positions. My husband and I would leave the house to swim, or eat, or explore, and when we returned we would want to be in a neutral, uncomplicated place to relax and absorb everything new we\u2019d seen and experienced beyond the walls of the house, but we were continually affronted by some new and intimate discovery about the owners\u2019 lives. I wanted to put Yvonne, the protagonist of The Lovers<\/em>, in a discomfiting situation like that.<\/p>\n

\"\"Lionel Shriver has said she writes partly as catharsis-in-advance. So she wrote about death to experience bereavement. Was this a motive for you in exploring the character of Yvonne?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I write a lot from a place of fear. My friend, the writer Amanda Davis, who was killed in a plane crash in 2003, said that every day you should write about something that scares you. I was finishing this book just after the birth of my second child and the notion that this newborn could one day be estranged and the source of pain for me was also something I feared\u2014and so I made Yvonne\u2019s relationship with her daughter an especially fraught and challenging one. Even the vague idea of my husband dying is something that devastates me. So I was tapping into that fear when creating Yvonne, who\u2019s fifty-three and a widow, and trying to imagine what it would be like to lose someone after spending half your life with them.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Yet at the same time as Yvonne is living out her worst fears, she\u2019s also looking back and questioning whether this marriage that she\u2019s lost was really so precious.<\/strong><\/p>\n

When I first started the novel, I thought, \u201cI\u2019m going to write about a woman with a happy marriage. There are so many novels about unhappy marriages.\u201d But the more I wrote the more I thought, \u201cActually, maybe theirs wasn\u2019t necessarily a joyful union.\u201d As Tolstoy said, \u201cHappy families are all alike\u2026\u201d It became much more intriguing to me to write about a more nuanced and fundamentally cracked marriage.<\/p>\n

How did you develop her character?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I talked to widows. I walked around Burlington, Vermont, and took pictures of the house I thought Yvonne would have lived in. I visited the high school where I imagined she would have taught, and I interviewed women about menopause\u2014I did much more research that never made it into the book.<\/p>\n

I approached her character differently than I approached Clarissa, the protagonist and narrator of my last book, Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name<\/em>. Some readers described Clarissa as \u201cunlikable.\u201d I remember just feeling stabbed by that. I was upset by the way readers were reading, as though they were evaluating the character based on whether or not they\u2019d want to be her friend. I think the reason you read books is to be with characters you maybe wouldn\u2019t want to hang out with in your real life. This is all a long way of saying that I knew from the start I wanted to direct a lot of tenderness toward Yvonne. This didn\u2019t mean she couldn\u2019t have a sense or humor or make terrible decisions, of course.<\/p>\n

Why do you think people had a problem with Clarissa as unlikable?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Because she\u2019s a little cruel at times\u2014but, I thought, with good reason given what she\u2019s going through (she\u2019s just buried the man who raised her, and that night found out he wasn\u2019t her father after all, her fiance\u2019s lied to her, etc.). And she\u2019s very capable of delivering a caustic barb when she wants to\u2014which, again, I thought was appropriate given her feelings of anger and confusion. I\u2019ve been intending to write and essay for years about \u201cunlikable\u201d characters in fiction, and why I feel they\u2019re much more forgivable when they\u2019re male.<\/p>\n

How much does having to empathise with your characters affect you on a daily basis? Is there an excuse you can make to friends and family of, \u201cOh, I\u2019m sorry I\u2019m not better company. Yvonne was really miserable today\u201d?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I have to say that The Lovers<\/em> took everything out of me (which is, I suppose, how you know you\u2019re done with a book\u2014when you feel you have nothing left to give it). I was finishing it in the months right after my son was born, and I was so sleep-deprived and emotionally exhausted from trying to be cheerful for him and for my daughter, and then, while they were sleeping, slipping into the dark mood of the novel. Did I have to make excuses to my friends? No, because I wasn\u2019t even seeing anybody.<\/p>\n

What were your influences for this book?<\/strong><\/p>\n

A short-story writer named Sait Faik, who\u2019s kind of the Chekhov of Turkey. I also re-read The Sheltering Sky<\/em>, The Stranger<\/em> and A Passage to India<\/em>. And Duras\u2019 The Lover<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Do you have influences who are always there?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Joan Didion, J.M. Coetzee, and James Salter are three authors whose styles I find intoxicating. I study their sentences when I\u2019m starting a book, or when I\u2019m lost in the process of writing one. They\u2019re so brilliant at removing the extra words. That\u2019s something I strive to do in my novels\u2014to be as economical and sparse as possible, and to allow each sentence to carry its full weight.<\/p>\n

You\u2019ve worked on a screenplay with your husband, Dave Eggers. What\u2019s it like to be in a couple with someone who\u2019s as passionate as you are about writing?<\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s always hard for me to answer a question about what it\u2019s like to be married to another writer, because I\u2019ve never been married before. I mean that quite seriously. The nice thing about being with another writer is you don\u2019t have to justify working. You can say, \u201cYou know, I don\u2019t think I can go to so-and-so\u2019s house for brunch this Sunday because I really want to work,\u201d and they\u2019ll understand. Actually, I don\u2019t know why I\u2019m giving a brunch example. I can\u2019t remember the last time anyone invited us to brunch, or the last time I ate it.<\/p>\n

You were once an intern at The Paris Review<\/em>. Did that experience help you as a writer?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Enormously. It made writing\u2014and publishing\u2014seem very glamorous (and every subsequent job I had seem extra punishing). I would go to George Plimpton\u2019s beautiful apartment on East 72nd street and sit looking out the window at the river, and read manuscripts. It felt very sophisticated to my 21-year-old self. Reading the slush pile also really gave me a sense of what people were writing at the time.<\/p>\n

I would also take one back-issue home with me each night, read it, and return it the next day. I think that\u2019s when I first fell in love with the long-interview format, and that\u2019s why we have the long-form interviews in The Believer<\/em>. Those interviews were amazing\u2014just reading all this advice from accomplished writers was really important to me. It\u2019s what made me decide, \u201cOkay, I\u2019m really going to go for this\u201d\u2014even though the rest of the world was constantly telling me how hard it was to be a writer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Vendela Vida\u2019s new novel, The Lovers, follows a middle-aged Vermont woman, recently widowed, as she vacations in the unfamiliar territory of Turkey in an attempt to re-examine her life. Among these new surroundings, her initial numbness about her bereavement gives way to doubt over whether her marriage was even happy, and she has to face […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":41,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[907],"tags":[666,71,657,121,658,654,655,157],"class_list":["post-3816","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-at-work","tag-dave-eggers","tag-fiction","tag-marriage","tag-novelist","tag-the-believer","tag-the-lovers","tag-vendela-vida","tag-writers"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nVendela Vida by Patrick Loughran<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"August 19, 2010 \u2013 Vendela Vida\u2019s new novel, The Lovers, follows a middle-aged Vermont woman, recently widowed, as she vacations in the unfamiliar territory of Turkey in an\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, 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