Elizabeth Hand and Alex Michaelides: National Book Festival 2021

[Music] sponsored by the james madison council and the national endowment for the arts hi everyone and welcome to the 2021 library of congress national book festival i'm petra mayer i'm an editor with impr books and i'm here today with liz hand and alex michaelities to talk about their books um respectively the book of lamps and banners and the maidens to learn more about them you can actually check them out at loc.gov bookfest before i want excuse me before we begin i want to let you know that we're going to save the last 10 minutes of this half hour event to respond to audience questions so please do start submitting them now um but actually i'm gonna kick off this fantastic event with the theme question for this year's festival uh our theme is open a book open the world um certainly for me opening a book opened an entire world to me when my dad weirdly gave me 1984 in 1984 when i was nine but that just opened a whole world to me and now here i am so i want to ask you guys uh how have books opened the world for you um jump in whoever wants to liz go ahead oh well i think especially in the last year and a half going on two years when uh our chances to travel and see people have been limited for me books have been a lifesaver just in terms of being able to be somewhere other than my own head and my own house and my own backyard and i think that's an extension of what books do for us um most of us who are book lovers uh readers and writers since childhood you know it exposes us to another place another world another person who is not us sometimes another another species another being um to give richard powers the understory where uh trees are our characters and novels where uh place or setting can be almost a character in it so um for me it's just it's been really crucial for for surviving and keeping my sanity during the pandemic yeah i totally agree with that um and you know um and also about childhood i think specifically i uh i grew up in cyprus which is a small island in the mediterranean and i just had um you know i grew up before the internet but i grew up in a house full of books and my mum was a really avid reader and all the books were kind of there before i was born and i think without that i think i would have grown up really quite you know small-minded because as it was i i read about all these different countries different cultures you know um all these different kinds of stories and i think it just expanded my mind um in a really brilliant way it's always so important to read and read widely when you're young i think yeah i think reading when one is young is so crucial i mean i saw i have two kids who are both adults now but um seeing them and myself and and uh watching other children i know grow up into adults i think what happens with childhood reading because as a kid your exposure to the world is necessarily limited because you're a child your experience is limited and you may not be well traveled you may not know the world outside of your house or neighborhood but i think we are able to inhabit books in a way that we're not able to inhabit even the best movies or tv shows and by doing that when you're a child it sort of opens up this sense of um you know the kind of corny sense of wonder that you hear about a lot but um i think we take that with us when we go out and encounter the real world the the sense of wonder that we have reading books as kids whether it's you know tolkien or anne of green gables or you know uh el conanzberg or what you know whatever young people are reading today i think we get turned on to that in a way that we're able to take that out and and carry it with us when we are older and we do finally go out in the world on our own i warned you guys ahead of time that we were likely to get interrupted by one of my cats and here's godfrey he's very literary wanted to come say hi do you have a question i love that point about sort of visiting other worlds because especially if you're a baby geek like me you're learning about world building through sci-fi and fantasy just opening up complete different worlds that was just such a turning point in my life um but i want to bring it back to your books both of which open the door to worlds that are a little dark i gotta say um assuming our audience hasn't been lucky enough to read them could you each tell me just a little bit about what's going on in your most recent books the maidens is a psychological thriller and you know it kind of has similar themes to my first book silent patient which is sort of a greek tragedy and psychology and murder um and it's about a kind of mysterious and charismatic um greek tragedy professor who's suspected of murdering his students at cambridge university um who are all members of a secret society called the maidens and um our heroine is a uh a troubled kind of group psychotherapist called mariana who becomes obsessed with proving the professor's guilt even of the risk of endangering her own life so kind of dark academia so yes kind of kind of dark i would say this well i love dark my own taste as a reader and and as a writer both tend to skew dark and um [Music] and i love dark academia as a as a genre you know like like your books and the secret history i love books like that um but with uh the book of lamps and banners which is the fourth in a continuing series of noir novels psychological thrillers with a very damaged uh proto-punk uh protagonist named cass neri the books were starred that book was started um i can't remember what year but uh brexit came down uh shortly afterwards when i was immersed in it and it's set in london which is a place where i before the pandemic where i would live for part of the year because my um partner is a uk citizen and is based there so i had to basically stop and reevaluate and ultimately rewrite the book to incorporate brexit and then when the 2016 election came um and seeing the rise of of white nationalists in uh about the uk and the us i had to sit down and rewrite the book again and sort of incorporate that into the backdrop and and a little bit more into the foreground as the book goes on so i think there was no way to avoid going dark skewing dark with that sort of material i think we were living in you know and maybe still are in a dark time it's a question isn't it when we are living in such a dark time as to why people enjoy reading dark stuff on top of it um you know i don't know the answer to that but i do think about that earlier in the green room we were talking about romance novels which i like to read because they are a form of pleasant escapism when the world is dark but you know maybe also there are people that like to be reassured that things are dark all over or they like to see how other people deal with darkness sometimes in in upsetting stories we're working out the ways that we can deal with the darkness around us i think and unlike real life at the end of um the books there is a resolution so maybe that's it you know yeah and and it imposes a sort of order uh on a narrative which we don't necessarily have in our own lives um there is a resolution and even getting even if you know it's a um talking about romance novels earlier if even if it's not a happy ending it you know it is an ending of sorts it it you have a sense that somebody has been able to take this kind of chaotic material and have it make sense in a way that i think the real world does not at least for me always makes sense yeah yeah i totally agree personally i have to say that's what drives me nuts about a lot of what's commonly called literary fiction although you know that we can argue about the differences between literary and genre and whether that's just a term that's useful in the bookstore but like some stories that i read are very interior and very open-ended and they like to end ambiguously and i look at those stories and i think that happens in the real world i don't need it here um i the other thing that came up while we were in the green room was that um liz you said you had read out were reading alex's book and that made me really excited because as i was reading um i read a couple of the cast near books and as i was reading maidens i i was sensing kind of these commonalities between the main characters they're both women who are a little bit unreliable narrators definitely damaged a little bit prone to maybe seeing the supernatural um so i wanted to ask how these characters came to each of you liz you go first well um cass neary's has a lot of autobiographical elements uh in her um i'm not as you know i am not as screwed up as she is certainly not now but i was lucky in a way i guess that i was able to draw on a lot of the sort of darker material and experiences of my own life and and um use it in a way that was um not exactly cathartic but but useful i don't i don't believe in writing as therapy but i think that most writers or many writers anyway take elements from their own lives and use them in their fiction and so that's what i did with cass so i sort of feel with her that i'm able to channel a lot of my own um dark energy she's sort of a secret sharer although she has much more of an interesting life than i do yeah and for me in my case it's very similar actually she is probably a bit more um messed up than i am um at least now and um she is a psychotherapist and she's also um you know functions as a detective in a novel because she's trying to solve a murder um a series of murders um but um she's also a woman who's grieving whose husband died a year ago and she is really struggling to deal with that despite her skills as being a you know a therapist um and you know it's kind of weird it's it's kind of murky process inspiration you never really know where things come from um and i just had this image um the very first image of marianna was in her house in london going through her husband's belongings and finding a pair of green um green sneakers and that just stages me and it ended up being the first chapter in the novel and she grew from there but she she grew very much from just a you know like an image of someone it's it's an interesting um process i think it's a really striking um depiction of grief too it's it's a really beautifully written opening chapter and you wouldn't think you know somebody were to tell you that this is the opening to a psychological novel here's this woman this very interior scene when she's going through when she finds the green shoes and it i thought it was really a tour de force it was a very very interesting um very compelling scene and very very interesting too do you feel thank you do you feel you tell me i'm curious to because i i did find it was a really sad experience having living with a character like that for two and a half years three years do you find that with your writing as well sad is in a bit mournful i suppose yeah with me i don't um i don't know but uh maybe because marianna is grieving that your experience of writing would leave you with sadness with me when i'm writing the cast books it just is um i do definitely feel impacted by it it's a very you know she's in a very dark place and she's a lot more desperate and despairing than i am um not that i'm you know a pollyanna but uh so i find it very difficult to be inside that person's head and it's a first-person narrative too which i think you know it is something that uh can be very um challenging it's kind of like acting in a way i think you know i think of actors we're talking earlier about macbeth what's it like to play lady macbeth night after night um and i think inhabiting these characters like like yours um or mine or others uh i think it definitely does have an impact on us it certainly does on me and you that's why that's why as you said there is an element of catharsis i think at the end of finishing it you know there definitely was for me i think i was working through something while i was writing the book and then when i finished it i felt a lot lighter interesting liz what you say about cass because it struck me that she's grieving too but she's not grieving a person she's grieving the loss of of the scene that she came from and the life that she thinks she could have had because she's always talking about how she screws things up she has an opportunity and she screws it up and i feel like she's mourning a life that she could have had but maybe doesn't even want if that makes sense yeah no i i think that's really a really excellent way of describing her you know i've said in the past that she's sort of she when i was saying talking about her being a secret sharer i've always pictured her as me if you know my break lines had been cut when i was 21 years old um because she underwent some of the similar uh difficult experiences that i did but i came back from it and writing those books i thought about a lot about all right what would it have been like if i had not come back from that and if i had not had the life i have if i hadn't been fortunate enough to have you know a supportive family and end up having a career doing something that i love um and so to have her be so thwarted um at such an a young age even though it was mostly her own self-sabotage but um but she i always i think of her she sort of almost comes out of suspended animation as the first book begins because after 20 odd years of not doing you know working in the stock room at the strand she picks up her camera again and she basically and she leaves new york city and heads out into the world and it's a very different world than the one even though she's not literally been in suspended animation but she's she's an analog person in in a digital age you know she's she's tied to her vinyl record she's tied to her um film camera as opposed to a digital camera and i think a lot you know i i feel a sort of um melancholy about the loss of that world too i think a lot of people my age do i mean she's very literally an analog person there are a bunch of scenes is it in the book of lamps and banners where she's talking about how she hates digital photography yeah yeah um so the fact that she's a photographer um i found so interesting in terms of the storytelling because one thing that i like to ask writers is how is how does being a writer change the way that you move through and you see the world are you always looking at it in terms of story and then cass of course is also a visual storyteller which is a whole different language like so there are like multiple nested layers of storytelling um has has living with that character changed the way you perceive the world and that's a question for both of you really yeah alex why don't you feel that first um has it i well you know it made me look very closely at a specific sort of moment in time and um it's all set in cambridge you know when i was a student there 20 years ago and so i um decided to go back and research it and while i was writing the novel i i spent some several trips um for like you know a few days at a time um in cambridge in a hotel and i would take a little notebook and i thought the best way for me to rediscover the city was to walk through the novel from chapter to chapter doing everything that mariana was meant to be doing at the time she was meant to be doing it um and what happened was really odd so i'd be sitting in a public you know at 9 30 thinking it was going to be an atmospheric note taking and i would be writing about the smells and the sounds and i did all of that but what also happened was that i started to um be haunted in the way that mariana was haunted by her past i started to be haunted by myself at 18 and friends that i'd lost and lovers that i'd lost and places that i saw myself like a ghost you know sitting on a wall um and it kind of really became a very internal experience and i then managed to put all of that into the character and into the novel so i think it's a really um you know it does it forces you to look outward but also inward as well i think when you're writing a book that's so interesting what you say about about walking and retracing her steps and then having uh the experience of writing it down and seeing it and tapping into your own um your own experiences like i a lot of my work um those books but others as well are very much inspired by walking through landscapes um especially unfamiliar landscapes in particular when i'm ever back when you know one could travel uh if i would be someplace that i had not been before i would find it would always just um put me very much on edge even if it was a place that was very beautiful i i would almost feel something almost threatening about it maybe even especially if it was in a place that was very beautiful uh and and i would find myself always kind of looking and maybe this is because this is just the way i think and what i write but looking around and thinking like where would be a good place to hide a body here or where would be a good place in this landscape for a protagonist to be walking along and see a body or or come across as a crime scene but there's something about the kinetic action of of walking um somewhere and sometimes in a place where i've been before like dc um and like you said that was such such a beautiful evocation of like seeing you know the ghost of yourself there um i think i think that's a powerful tool for writing just the actual kinetic moment movement you're totally right it's i do it every day i write and then i go and walk for like an hour and then it's usually doing during the walk that the good ideas come but you have to show up at the desk first and then you know something about the the freedom um of the movement or something or just distracting yourself from thinking i don't know how it works but it always works yeah it does there's something kind of magical about it i think i i did the exact same thing i tell my students i teach at an mfa program and also at writer's workshops and i i tell them all the time that really the best thing you can do for your writing is to go out and take a long walk whether it's to break you know a writer's block or quote-unquote writer's block or whether it's just to you know uh break up a scene you know if you're moving between scenes or characters or point of view i i just think it's one of the greatest things that one can do i have about eight million more questions but i want to ask you but we are actually out of time for us it's time to move over to the questions from our audience um uh and i'm going to take a really long walk after this and you know that was good but i want to start with a question i'm looking over here at my screen so pardon me a question from uh robert in the audience that i thought was really interesting um he asks everyone has different fears and psychological triggers that affect us differently how do you know which psychological targets to hit when you're starting a new book um wow i can't really i need like 10 minutes to even think about it yeah you did it for me that's a great question robert um yeah yeah i don't know i i guess a lot of that just i'll be interested alex and what you think um a lot of it i guess just has to do with perhaps developing your character and their voice um and finding out learning what would trigger them which is not necessarily what would trigger me um but yeah that's that's a question that could really almost be an entire um seminar in itself yeah alex yeah i mean definitely you want to you know it's in in a sense writing a genre piece it's it's helped because you know they have to be there has to be feelings of suspense and you know fear and anxiety and all this kind of stuff but i live with all of that anyway on a daily basis so it's more about just finding a way to as you said kind of tell the story through the eyes of the character and then that i think brings you a lot of your material you know things that you want to hit when you're writing it sorry i didn't mean to start with such a difficult question this one maybe is a little bit more easy this is from beatrice who asks who are some of your favorite authors who write in the same dark genre style that you do what are you reading right now and with me it's ruth rendell i'm obsessed with it i grew up obsessed with the christie and now i feel that i've kind of graduated to ruth rendell because she's just um you know earlier also we were talking about literary novels versus genre novels and it's um she is a brilliant literary writer who should have won the book prize but because she wrote crime she was completely ignored in that sense um and um there's i'm learning everything from her she's just incredible it's so um it's dark it's brilliant it's dry it's funny it's surprising it's heartfelt but it's also a genre piece and so it's kind of teaching me i think what i would like to aspire to be to kind of make these novels as good as i can and not just like you know fast quick kind of take take away reads um if that makes sense oh yeah i love ruth rundle too she's brilliant she's definitely one of my my very favorite writers and i've always learned new things from her you know her her and barbara vine yeah i love bobby moyne massively she's writing as her which is incredible yeah yeah but um but ruth randall daphne de moyer uh who i think doesn't always get um the credits she's due as being kind of an iconoclastic writer um kate atkinson and tana french who i think are are really um wonderful i love kate atkinson's books because they don't you know they don't really follow um the traditional conventions of a thriller or a procedural they go completely off on these weird tangents and things but i just i find them really really fascinating um so yeah but there's many others now that's one of those questions that i can never after i you know i always think of the other answers after we go i love du maurier as well i mean she's such a she she's incredible because there's so much atmosphere and so much romance and yet at the same time you're in a really capable suspense writer's hands and so there's so much to her to learn from as well i feel like i'm getting lots of great book recommendations from this conversation too because honestly i haven't read a lot of thrillers this is this is a new experience for me all the way around so i'm gonna go read some ruth randall right now um we have one more question um and i feel like this maybe is also a a good place for some book recommendations this is from kevin uh he says if one is a beginner writer interested in psychological thrillers how would you suggest we go about learning to write which is pretty broad but i always tell people to read if they want to learn how to write so maybe some more book recommendations before i wrote the southern patient i read on patricia highsmith's um book on how to write suspense fiction like five times in a row and i took so much from that you know like even basic things like she says there must be a sense of unease constantly and then she says the threat of violence must never be far away and you shouldn't have too many pages without something kind of weird and creepy happening even stuff like that i didn't know and i was like okay that's good i can do that i can do that so i recommend you read that book um how to write suspense fiction patricia hi smith is incredible yeah i i too had read that book when i was starting out writing psychological thrillers and yeah it's very useful i i have to say i am not a big one for how-to books with writing um i i even though i teach writing creative writing i i have i don't know that writing can really be taught but i think you know i think it can be learned and encouraged and i think the way we we do that is by reading so i would say any of the writers that we mentioned in this conversation if you want to write psychological thrillers would be a great place to start um uh who except for you alex i think are all have all been women writers um but they write a crime women it's a really interesting thing i think it's true though yeah i think women may perhaps be more um experienced with uh we're more more familiar with the experience of of feeling threatened than men are and i think because of that that may give us um you know a certain edge in writing stories like that but i would say just read read widely i think people you know you can't you really can't read too much um and immerse yourself in the works of a writer who you know is withstood the test of time somebody like ruth randall or demaulier but but also new writers you know tana french she she does really really interesting things uh in her work and has you know some flickers of the um supernatural in it which i always think is really interesting to find in um into quote-unquote realistic fiction straight fiction we're almost out of time um but i just want to wind up with uh asking both of you um what's next if it's not too soon to ask this is what you're writing i'm in the throes of finishing um the final revision on a thriller supernatural psychological thorough thriller uh that will be out next year called hokuloa road which is set um in hawaii and so it's very different for me because it's it's got a setting that's not cold it's not cold and dark so um so that's different and and i found it kind of unsettling sounds great coming from maine scary stuff is scarier when it's in the bright cheerful sunshine i think yeah yeah i think that's true um i'm sitting i'm writing a thriller set on a greek island um so that's an experience for me to walk up and down excuse for me to walk up and down the beach and pretend that i'm working um that i am in case my editor is watching i am actually working we won't tell on you you're working okay thanks um so yeah we are basically out of time um thank you so much liz hand and alex michaelities um for sharing your time and your work with us so generously and thanks to the audience for all of your great questions um and you can keep enjoying events at the national book festival if you go to loc.gov bookfest um i'm petra with npr books and thank you all again for joining us thank you petra and alex thanks for having us it was really lovely it's really been a great conversation wonderful honestly and i'm gonna go definitely thank you [Music] you

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Length: 30min 46sec (1846 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 21 2021