The question is "Was 'Truth and Beauty' a
hard book to write?" No, "Truth and Beauty" was the easiest book I ever wrote, will ever write, so helpful, such a good idea. After Lucy died, she had
been dead for about three weeks and I wrote that book just as a way of saying
if I can make my grief my job everybody respects my job, you know I'm
working. So I made my grief my job. I got a cookie
sheet, I put my computer on it, I went to bed,
and I stayed in bed. I wrote the book in about four months.
I had all of Lucy's letters, her music, her pictures, in the bed I stayed in bed and it was really like
the four months shipper. I stayed as long as I needed
to stay, I wrote it all down. I put it someplace. I don't know how people carry their
grief. I don't have any idea how you guys do it because
honestly something happens to me, I write it down and it's like I put a
leaf in a book and I press it there. I keep it there because I can't carry it because when I was finished with that
book, I had put the pain in the book and I was really left with the joy and what a great thing that is. My memories are very, very positive and happy and I'm
happy when I think of Lucy. I'm not sad. There's my friend, Steve Almond, writes for "The New York Times," wrote a
great book about writing and there's one page that just has this line--
"What should you write about?" And the answer was "Anything you cannot
get rid of by other means." -Oh that's lovely.
-I know. The question was "What moment prompted me to write "Signature of All Things?" This one didn't have one aha sort of revelatory moment. This
was a very slow building thing. I mean essentially it started because I got very passionate about my garden and I knew that I wanted to write about
plants and I knew I also wanted to write my monu-freakin-mental, epic, nineteenth
century novel of ideas that also had adventure on the
high seas and I couldn't quite figure out how to
make that gardening novel into that. You know that the old adage
there's only two stories that have ever been told: that you go on a trip or a stranger comes to
town right and those are the only narratives that there are and women's stories generally have
always been a stranger comes to town because they
don't leave. You know Odysseus gets his big adventure.
Penelope gets big weaving and unweaving scene again and again and again and so to be true to women's
reality, the first half of the book is devoted to
that idea of what can a woman make of her contained life that is
magnificent. So Alma goes nowhere and strangers come
in and then I was like "Oh, I'm puttin' her a boat!" She's going to French Polynesia. Ahoy! And there's my post-menopausal character
on a ship for the rest of her life and then she
gets to be, as they say in "Breaking Bad," the one who knocks. I've been telling people that the
the motto of "The Signature of All Things" at the lesson is that disappointment does
not kill women because one of the great themes of all novels is that women cannot endure
disappointment or betrayal or... -And they must be punished for their mistakes.
-They must be mercilessly punished. -Mercilessly punished.
-Particularly for sensual errors. -Especially by Wallace Stegnor.
-Or bad judgement and they must be either rescued or ruined as you've said and I don't know a
single woman I admire who's ever been either one of
those things and we may have that some time dreamt or feared that either of those things would
occur but most likely didn't. The women that I know who are wise and remarkable and powerful, who I
admire, didn't get that way by stuff working out. They got that way by stuff not
working out and then using the amazing superpower of women, which is to take disappointment
and with alchemy, turn it into wisdom. And then look back on their lives
and say "I didn't necessarily get everything that
I wanted but I got amazing things that I didn't
expect and I've lived with dignity and I'm
really glad I did that journey and it's been interesting." And
that's the story that I wanna tell.
