 Let's get started right now. Greetings, everybody. Welcome to the Rogers State Library, and our special guest, Amanda Sood. If you haven't been here before, you should know that this library was built and opened in 2008, I believe. And it is now 28,000 square feet, as opposed to the 6,200 that we grew out of. It was founded in 1877, and of course it's had a number of different iterations over that time. We're just delighted with what we have here, and we're happy that all of you could be here to share the evening. So with that, I'll turn it over to Adam Graver, who will introduce our speaker. He doesn't know the other way. He'll have to bear with me for a few minutes as a little bit of background and point to introduce Claire is. So the reason we are here this evening, I work at Roger Williams University, and we have the Talking Library series at Roger Williams University, which we run usually three talks per semester. We've partnered with Roger's three to do at least two talks here as well. This coincides with our Bermont Fellowship. The Bermont Fellowship was a fellowship that we as an alum endowed for students to apply through blind submissions and have a master class with a distinguished visiting writer. This student happened to have been a philosophy major who took some writing classes who believed there were others like him, and he wanted it to be open to the whole university, not just for writing students. So we had six students who were chosen to work with Claire. Kathy Quinn and the Quinn Foundation generously opened up the home, and they have their workshop at the home up there yesterday for about four hours, I think. And as part of that is a public talk, which again is co-sponsored through the University Library, Roger's Free, and the Jane Lodell Endowment, which is part of Roger's Free, to promote discussion of books and literature. What else can I say? Oh, where's Maggie? So we have a student back there. One of the things that we do through the library and through the Creative Writing Department, which is very important to us as our students, we have a group of students that work very hard on freedom of expression issues, and particularly with writers and or academics that are in prison internationally for what they've written about. And Maggie is here representing some of the students that are working on the case of an Iranian scholar who was a chemistry professor who was in prison for being asked to write about the nuclear deal in Iran, and once he wrote about the nuclear deal in Iran, was put in jail for what he wrote about the nuclear deal in Iran. So Maggie has information on it for afterward of petitions you can sign to help women with scholars at risk in particular. And the other thing I will just say is, you know, this, we, in the spring, this is fall, no, this is spring, in the fall, I don't think that way. I think in months and months. But next spring we'll have Don Tripp will be speaking at this joint series about her new book, Georgia, which is a novel of Georgia O'Keefe, and the Burma, the speaker I have for the Burma Fellowship next fall, so basically about this time next year. We're seeing sort of hard news. Next spring. You said next fall, but I think you mean next spring. Next spring. April. Yes. We'll be Rick Moody. So Rick Moody will be our Burma Fellow, our visiting fellow for next spring. So that's a little bit of the history and a little bit of the future. But last summer, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the International Journal of Literature, Politics and Culture, an exhibit at the Tang Art Museum at Skidmore College paired visual artworks with excerpts of various written pieces from the journal's pages from over its years. The name of the exhibit and its subsequent catalog was Afflict the Comfortable. The title took its name from an often used definition of one of the rules of art, meaning it serves either to comfort the afflicted or afflict the comfortable. Now while that typically references the dynamic between those in power versus those who are victimized by the power structure, it also can be and has been applied to a more personal, introspective level as well. When I think of Clermasud's work, particularly of her latest novel, The Woman Upstairs, my first thought lands on the notion of afflicting the comfortable. And by that I mean that through her protagonist, Nora Helridge, Clermasud is not afraid to challenge our perception of cultural acceptability. In fact, she is bold enough to give us a character who breaks our conventions of polite gentility of comfort, a role that Nora herself has played with some level of success. Meanwhile, her true sense of self, one that often contradicts the accepted norm, remains hidden in private. Only by the time we reach the end of the novel do we realize that all along, Nora has been making an argument a polemic for eventually, through the storyline of the novel, becoming at peace with an attitude and worldview that is contrary to the conventional sense of etiquette that the culture has judged. Is Clermasud's novel afflicting the comfortable because she is suggesting something outside of the norm, needling at some of our deepest fears or secret less thans? And now, my own contradiction. If through her book, Claire is calling out some of our deepest fears and less thans, then is she in a way also providing comfort? Just as Nora ultimately wants to be seen for who she is, as opposed to feeling invisible or forgotten, doesn't the novel that brings out what we think our own secret flaws or quirks actually provide comfort by making us feel a little less alone? Last week, I sat in this very room with at least 25 women from ages 18 and up as they discussed the women upstairs. And while opinions and interpretations and analyses vary, one underlying trait was shared by most. Compassion. Like Nora or don't like her, root for her or feel frustrated by her. It is difficult not to feel compassion for her. And that, I suspect, is something to take comfort in. Please welcome Claire Missy. Give her a round of applause. Thank you. What a beautiful introduction. Thank you. What a gift to be so generously read. Thank you, Adam. And thank you all for being here. I'm leaving it this is though I needed to, but I don't because I have a thing here. So there's nothing there. But it's wonderful to be here. And I've just had the most marvelous visit. And the seminar yesterday with such tremendous young writers was really a gift. And it's great to be with you all this evening. I also went to Newport for the first time in my life today with sort of, you know, you hear about it your whole life and I don't live very far away. I thought I didn't need to see it because I could imagine what it was like. But that wasn't true. That wasn't true. Bristol is also very beautiful. A more livable scale, I believe. So I thought this evening to read a little from the woman upstairs. I hesitated because it's now been a little while. And I've been working on something else and I had the moment of thinking, should I read to you from the thing I'm working on? And then I thought, no, I'm not brave enough. So I'm not. So I'm reading you from Nora's story. And then if anybody has questions, I think we'll have time for that afterwards. So a little background. Nora Eldridge, the narrator of this novel is a school teacher, elementary school teacher in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The... I feel she gets a little... She's had something of... Well, insofar as she has any public life, she's had something of a bad rap because people say she's angry. To which I have several responses. One of them, aren't we all? At some point or other, isn't everybody angry sometime? But I would say that there are events that you hear about at the end of the novel that have transpired fairly recently when she's ranting at the beginning of the novel. But for most of the novels, she's not angry. The rant came to me like a voice in my ear, and I wrote it down, and then I had to figure out who was ranting. So that's how I met Nora Eldridge, was she had to go. And I thought I would start by reading just the first couple of pages. With apologies for the swear words. How angry am I? You don't want to know. Nobody wants to know about that. I'm a good girl, I'm a nice girl, I'm a straight A, straight Laced, good daughter, good career girl, and I never stole anybody's boyfriend, and I never ran out on a girlfriend, and I put up with my parents' shit and my brother's shit, and I'm not a girl anyhow. I'm over 40 fucking years old, and I'm good at my job, after four years of holding her hand while she was dying. And I speak to my father every day on the telephone, every day, mind you, and what kind of weather do you have on your side of the river, because here it's pretty gray and a bit muggy too. It was supposed to say great artist on my tombstone, but if I died right now it would say, such a good teacher-daughter friend instead, and what I really want to shout and want in big letters on that grave too is fuck you all. Don't all women feel the same? The only difference is how much we know we feel it, how in touch we are with our fury. All furies except the ones who are too damn foolish, and my worry now is that we're brainwashing them from the cradle. And in the end, even the ones who are smart will be too damn foolish. What do I mean? I mean the second graders at Appleton Elementary, sometimes the first graders even, and by the time they get to my classroom, to the third grade, they're well and truly gone. They're full of Lady Gaga and Katy Perry and French manicures and cute outfits, and they care how their hair looks in the third grade. They care more about their hair or their shoes than about galaxies or caterpillars or hieroglyphics. How did all that revolutionary talk of the 70s land us in a place where being female means playing dumb and looking good? Even worse on your tune stone than beautiful daughter is looked good. Everyone used to know that, but we're lost in a world of appearances now. That's why I'm so angry really, not because of all the chores and all the making nice and all the duty of being a woman or rather of being me because maybe these are the burdens of being human. Really, I'm angry because I've tried so hard to get out of the hall of mirrors, this sham and pretend of the world or of my world on the east coast of the United States of America in the first decade of the 21st century. And behind every mirror is another fucking mirror, and down every corridor is another corridor. And the Fun House isn't fun anymore and it isn't even funny, but there doesn't seem to be a door marked exit. At the fair each summer when I was a kid, we visited the Fun House with its creepy grinning plaster face two stories high. You walked in through its mouth between its giant teeth along its hot pink tongue. Just from that face you should have known. It was supposed to be a lark, but it was terrifying. The floors buckled or they lurched from side to side and the walls were crooked and the rooms were painted to confuse perspective. Lights flashed, horns blared in the narrow vibrating hallways lined with fattening mirrors sometimes the ceiling fell or the floor rose or both happened at once and I thought I'd be squashed like a bug. The Fun House was scarier by far than the haunted house, not least because I was supposed to enjoy it. I just wanted to find the way out. But the doors marked exit led only to further crazy rooms to endless moving corridors. There was one route through the Fun House relentless to the very end. I've finally come to understand that life itself is the Fun House. All you want is that door marked exit the escape to a place where real life will be and you can never find it. No, let me correct that. In recent years there was a door there were doors and I took them and I believed in them and I believed for a stretch that I'd managed to get out into reality and God the bliss and terror of that the intensity of that it felt so different until I suddenly realized I'd been stuck in the Fun House all along. I'd been tricked. The door marked exit hadn't been an exit at all. I'm not crazy angry, yes crazy, no. My name is Nora Marie Eldridge and I'm 42 years old which is a lot more like middle age than 40 or even 41. Neither old nor young, I'm neither fat nor thin tall nor short, blonde nor brunette, neither pretty nor plain. Quite nice looking in some moments I think is the consensus rather like the heroines of Harlequin romances read in quantity in my youth. I'm neither married nor divorced but single. What they used to call a spinster but don't anymore because it implies that you're dried up and none of us wants to be that. Until last summer I taught third grade at Appleton Elementary School in Cambridge, Massachusetts and maybe I'll go back and do it again. I just don't know. Maybe instead I'll set the world on fire. I just might. Be advised that in spite of my foul mouth I don't swear in front of the children except once or twice when a rogue shit has emerged but only Soto Voce is only an extremist. If you're thinking how can such an angry person possibly teach young children, let me assure you that every one of us is capable of rage and that some of us are prone to it but that in order to be a good teacher you must have a modicum of self control which I do. I have more than a modicum. I was brought up that way. Second, I'm not an underground woman harboring resentment for my miseries against the whole world or rather it's not that I'm not in some sense an underground woman, aren't we all who have to cede and swerve and step acknowledged and unadmired and unthanked? Numerous in our 20s and 30s we're positively legion in our 40s and 50s but the world should understand if the world gave a shit that women like us are not underground. No Ralph Ellison basement full of light bulbs for us. No Dostoev skin metaphorical subterra. We're always upstairs. We're not the mad women in the attic. They get lots of play one way or another. We're the quiet woman at the end of the third floor hallway whose trash is always tidy, who smiles brightly in the stairwell with a cheerful greeting and who from behind close doors never makes a sound. In our lives of quiet desperation the woman upstairs is who we are with or without a goddamn tabby or a pesky lullabying Labrador and not a soul registers that we are furious. We're completely invisible. I thought it wasn't true or not true of me but I've learned I am no different at all. The question now is how to work it, how to use that ability to make it burn. So so that sort of is the beginning and the end sort of. I mean that's where it will end. I mean that's how she's feeling at the end. She the story is mostly about a year in her life when the family comes to Cambridge there's a little boy in her class and she meets his parents first she's in the classroom his name is Reza and she meets his parents Surina and Scander who have come from Paris but the mother is Italian and the father is Lebanese and they're there on a fellowship the husband has a fellowship and it turns out that Surina is an artist and this matters because what Nora just wanted to do when she grew up was be an artist and she makes art in her spare time in her spare room she says in the novel I wanted two things I wanted to make art and have children and I do have children but they go home at the end of the day and I do make art but it's you know I make it in the spare room at the weekend but Surina comes to town and offers to share a studio with her and there begins for Nora a sort of charmed and wonderful in which all sorts of things that seemed impossible suddenly seem possible and then it gets complicated we were talking today in class one of the things that I wanted to write about was specifically Nora's but a person's interior life so much of what matters that's something that always interests me it is true I think in any book the epigraph to the last book The Emperor's Children is from Antipole and it's not what happens it's what we think happens that matters and it seems to me that our our experiences are so ultimately private you know I was telling somebody the other day in college I had a I briefly had a boyfriend who I liked very much and there was an evening I didn't I didn't love him or anything but I liked him very much it was an evening where we had a long conversation until two in the morning and then I called him the next day and I said should we go to that movie after all and he said but we broke up last night and I said did we I didn't realize it just hadn't occurred to me that there was always talking about you're so European I was like what are you talking about but it didn't you say I'm breaking up with you anyway but there are many examples of that where you know where each of us has a different experience and so much of what matters most doesn't break the surface and I mentioned this I guess yesterday but but I'll mention another one too I don't know how many of you remember in Anna Karenina when Levin's brother comes to stay the judge comes to stay and then Kitty's friend is she called Farfara who's essentially a governess is visiting also and they have a sort of flirtation and everybody thinks that he's going to propose and they're going to get married and in fact they both think that and then they go off they go off to pick mushrooms in the forest and with great expectation everybody's sure this is the day this is the moment and then they have some banal exchange about the mushrooms like do you know what kind this one is and she answers I think it's the such and so and then the moment passes and they both know the moment has passed and they both know he will never ask and that they will never get married and then they go back and join everybody else and life goes on and it's this almost this sort of crescendo and diminuendo of music that never breaks the surface nobody ever said anything and nobody really knows why but there's also in the other example that I was citing yesterday is in Chekhov's Lady with the Little Dog which some of you may know where Gurov is a middle aged man who's married with a family and has had a number of affairs and he goes to Yalta the lady with the little dog who's never had an affair before but she's also married and then they part company and he goes back to Moscow but he can't stop thinking about her and eventually they resume the affair but there's a moment where he's taking his child to school and he thinks to himself how can it be that the thing that is most important to me in my whole life nobody else knows about and then he has a second thought which is this is true for everyone and and I think that is something that I'm always, well not always how would you get anything done but I'm intermittently and often aware of is how little we know and I wanted to tell a story of what it was like inside Nora's head all the things that don't break the surface all the things she doesn't say except to the reader of the book but now I will read a little bit of her history about her childhood and then we can chat if you'd like from the beginning then but briefly I was born into an ordinary family in a town an hour up the coast from Boston called Manchester by the sea the 60s were barely a ripple there at the end of the Boston commuter line it must have been our perfect beach called Singing Beach on account of its fine pale musical sand but perhaps also because it is so widely and so long lauded that afforded me my delusions of grandeur it makes sense that if you stand almost daily in the middle of a perfect crescent of shore with a vista open to eternity you'll conceive of possibility differently from someone raised in a wooded valley or among the canyons of a big city I feel like you guys have that advantage here or maybe more likely they came from my mother fierce and strange and doomed I had a mother and a father a big brother eight years bigger than me though so we hardly seemed to the same family by the time I was nine he was gone and a tortoise shell cat zipper and a mangy runty mutt from the shelter named Sputnik who looked like a wig of rags on sticks his legs were so scrawny we marveled they didn't snap my father worked in insurance in Boston he took the train each morning the 752 and he proceeded very respectively but apparently not very successfully because my parents never seemed to have money to spare my mother stayed at home and smoked cigarettes and hatched schemes for while she tested cook book recipes for a publisher she was paid for it and for months she fed us elaborate three and four course meals that involved eggy sauces and frequently as I recall Marcella wine briefly and humiliatingly for me she fancies herself a clothes designer and spent several months at the sewing machine in the spare room in a swoon of tobacco smoke her output was at once unusual and not unusual enough she made paisley paisley jersey mini-dresses for girls of my size not at first glance dissimilar to those off the rack but then you'd see she'd cut portholes around the midriff and edged them with rickrack so that a girl's white tummy would peer through or that she'd made the sleeve so they attached not with seams but with a flurry of ribbons a circle of multi-colored bows that would look bedraggled after a single washing cheerfully impractical she ran up at least two dozen outfits of various designs the summer I was nine and then took a booth from which to sit at the fair in a neighboring town my mother unlike my father instilled in me the sense that unpredictability was essential not to be like your neighbor that is everything she would say and because of this because of the bright flame of her it took me a long time to realize that she too was cautious and bourgeois frightened of the unknown and so uncertain of herself that she could hardly bear to make a mark how else could she have stayed resolutely wedded to the ordinary to my father to the carefully ordained changing routines of Manchester by the sea and it explains much about me too about the limits of my experience about the fact that the person I am in my head is so far from the person I am in the world nobody would know me from my own description of myself which is why when called upon merely I grant to provide an account I tailor it I adapt I try to provide an outline that can in some way correlate to the outline that people understand me to have that I suppose I actually have at this point but who I am in my head very few people really get to see that almost none it's the most precious gift I can give to bring her out of hiding maybe I've learned it's a mistake to reveal her at all so from our ordinary family in our ordinary house a center entrance colonial with its potted geraniums on the stone porch and its charmingly untended you hedges nibbling at the windows I made my way out into the ordinary world to the local elementary school the local middle school the local high school I was popular enough universally liked by the girls even liked when noticed by the boys though not in a romantic way I was funny haha not peculiar it was a modest currency like pennies pedestrian somewhat laborious but a currency nonetheless I was funny in public most often at my own expense education was different then and I was good at it and so I skipped grade 9 went straight from 8 to 10 which was socially a little tough at first and my fate as a disastrous math student I never learned the quadratic formula and other important tips from 9th grade math just like I missed the early dating essays and the classes and how to navigate a school dance at the time though I wasn't embarrassed about any of this not embarrassed to be thrown sink or swim into the second year of high school without so much as a map to the cafeteria or a primer on how cliques were lined up or even a list of the names of my new classmates all of whom knew one another and some of whom knew me as their little sister's friend no I was proud because I knew my parents were proud because it was an elevation and a revelation of the fact that I was special I long suspected it and now I knew for sure I was destined when you're a girl you never let on that you're proud or that you know you're better at history or biology or French than the girl who sits beside you in his 18 months older instead you gush about how good she is at putting on nail polish or at talking to boys and you roll your eyes at the vaunted difficulty of the world and say oh my god it's going to be such a disaster I am so scared and you put yourself down whenever you can so that people won't feel threatened by you so they'll like you because you wouldn't want them to know that in your heart you are proud and maybe even haughty and are driven by thoughts the revelation of which would show everyone how deeply not nice you are you learn a whole other polite way of speaking to the people who mustn't see you clearly and you know you get told by others that they think you're really sweet and good at history biology French and I'm good at this too it doesn't ever occur to you as you fashion your mask so carefully that it will grow into your skin and graft itself come to seem irremovable when you look at the boy Josh who skipped the grade alongside you and you see him wiping his nose upon his sleeve and note his physical scrawniness his chins bloom of acne next to the other 10th grade boys with broader chests and clear square jaws when you observe that he still 9th grade friends all of them boys in black t-shirts with glitter decals across the breast that say kiss or AC DC all of them with pimply chins and wet lips and hair as Lancas seaweed you cannot see any triumph in him at all he seems clearly to have lost to be lost to be a loser because anybody knows that in the challenge you were given when you skipped a grade social success modest social success to be sure but still was half the battle when Frederick Abiti invites you to join her birthday party a sale on her father's boat with six other girls two of whom are from the most popular set you feel pity for Josh who will never taste such nectar but wait nobody ever pointed out that Josh in his obliviousness was utterly happy he'd already taught himself the quadratic formula he would not be stymied in any area of academic advancement in fact he would go on to MIT and eventually become a neuro biologist with a lab largely funded by the NIH and a vast budget at his disposal he would marry a perfectly attractive if rather knock need woman and spawn several knock need bespectacled nerds replicas of himself it will all work out more than fine for him and he will never for a second suspect that it could have been otherwise he will not know there was a social test he will not know that he failed it no a sale on Frederick Abiti's father's boat was an honor that he dreamed not of and his yen for society such as it was was perfectly satisfied by his old clan now a year behind him he could no more have fashioned a mask than flown to the moon and so he remained who he was forever more femininity as masquerade indeed thank you and I'm happy to try to answer try any questions anybody might have yes sir your heroine reminds me of one of your early books that was two shorter stories together with somebody that lived downstairs and a woman who took care of somebody who went to Cuba and all kinds of outrageous art they were not they were two stories one was about the woman the housekeeper and the other was about the person in London right there was something about the housekeeper especially breaking out of what the expectations and social expectations were so I really like this I mean I see a similar feeling to it even though they're apart by what by 15 years in the writing yeah yeah probably close yeah certainly 10 now 12 yeah yeah a lot a lot apart I mean I like that same sort of feeling because it's not it enables I guess the reader to think through his or her expectations and how we fight those and kind of break out of it you know or I just like heroes like that they're kind of ordinary and yet they're not you know they're not like super heroes there's something really well thanks I mean thank you I think each you know each of us but so many moments makes choices the consequences of which we don't we we can't ever know we can't there was a lovely with my brain where was it about the lives that you know that was a poem about the lives that might have been and I can't remember where I was reading but I think that sense of of the you know I thought through Laura a series of choices that led her to this place and you know she's a school teacher it's something that she loves to do and feels she loves the kids but it's also true that it satisfies some other sense of a sort of should a sense that she should be doing good for other people that she shouldn't be living entirely for herself that I think in her case you know people sometimes say well is she just a bad artist why isn't she an artist that she doesn't have talent and I feel so there's so many in my mind at least in the case of Nora there's so many issues in play partly temperament partly circumstance partly familial background and so on and part of it is this is just a sort of unquestioned set of preconceptions among them the idea that you know you can't that just sitting in your I remember I used to love reading in bed more than anything and there was I mean I still do like I read most happily this way and there was one I used to wake up early on the weekends and lie in bed reading and there was one day my mother I sort of finally came down at 11 o'clock in the morning and my mind said oh you woke up and I said no I've been awake for hours and my mother lost her rag and she said you may not have been tiptoeing around the house and you could have been out of bed four hours and all of a sudden I was you know ever thereafter I felt guilty about lying in bed reading because because I was supposed to sort of show myself and you know empty the dishwasher or something so I think in that sense everybody you know each of us makes decisions to make the space that we can within the framework that we were given I don't know yes ma'am well I think that's I don't have the answer I think I wanted to raise the question yeah I think so I think so I mean I think I think for each I I remember being at a talk about years ago Naomi Wolfe gave if you see who she is a feminist of my generation and she's a very great sort of motivational speaker very inspiring and it was this is at the Edinburgh Festival in the UK I was living there at the time and she said we all had amazing dreams as kids didn't we what did you want to be and like somebody would go out with them I wanted to be an astronaut I wanted to be and she said I thought that many people get to be astronauts like they dismantle the space program I guess Naomi gets to be an astronaut but I think there's the voices of our culture are very contradictory and paradoxical and I think on the one hand there's some idea that we should which is a very sort of specific 20th century late capitalist North American and European idea that we should realize ourselves that we need somehow to be true to there is some authentic self to which we must be true I think in many cultures that's not a they're just saying how can we get some dinner they're not really they don't have the luxury of asking what is my authentic self but we're also given a whole we're also given a whole lot of other often unquestioned preconceptions about what is right what is good what is appropriate what is moral and so on and I think to try to it is like trying to square a circle to answer to both of those very different voices I don't know that one trumps one should trump the other I mean I think there's individual circumstances where obviously one should trump the other should I continue reading my novel or save the drowning child I feel like well it seems kind of a no brainer but I think but I think there are there are times where it's really open to question and even in something like leaving a marriage there are circumstances where is that is that going to be a realization of self is that the authentic gesture or would ultimately the authentic gesture be depends on the situation but might it in some situations be to stay and work harder at it I don't know you know why didn't she develop her artistic side I mean she was single she had no responsibilities she taught school but school's great you know it's like I don't know I think there's some school teachers some school teachers are the rest of school teachers in the she hasn't been teaching for that long and you may not remember that her mother died not that long and that she spent her she spent much of her thirties taking care of her is it four or is it two and a half four? but certainly here's the thing that four years from 42 sure but of course she had some time I'm not trying to make a defense like oh my god she had no time but I think have you done everything you wanted to do because I know I haven't tidied my TV room in six months having woken up like every Friday morning thinking and when I get home today I gotta tidy that up I mean I think there are a lot of things but also when I had children in my 30s at 34 and 37 and before I had kids I was young it was great I was young and I would teach class and at the end of class the students would say should we go for a drink and you know you'd hang out and have a good time and then I you know I had a baby and I was busy and then I had another baby and I was busy and for a while I wasn't teaching and then I went back to teaching and I didn't really feel that I was that different but there was a moment at the end of the class when the students said well night and I realized oh I'm not young anymore and I think that's something that's happened for her is some sense that she was deferring possibility and then suddenly it doesn't feel possible which doesn't mean it isn't possible right it's not what happens it's what you think happens that matters and the thing about the year with Serena is that suddenly it all feels possible again but it's attached misguidedly her therapist might say if she had one it's attached to those people so that when they go she thinks possibility is leaving with them which is again I think a lot of us at various times invest other people whether in our families or elsewhere with more power when I met my mother-in-law for the first time having heard what a terrifying creature she was and how much my husband to be feared her judgment and then this woman appeared who was like five foot two and seemed perfectly sweet I was totally mystified I was like really that's the scary person but to him she remained terrifying always so I think what you invest people with power that they don't objectively necessarily have and then you think things are possible or not possible because of the stories in your head there are people who are amazingly unblocked and fill a day with a thousand things it's incredible but not many people are unblocked most of us are blocked somehow I think I got a question she greatly affected by taking care of her mother through her long illness and I'm not quite sure whether she resented that or that gave her feeling of purpose where was her father doing the illness she never mentioned whether he took any part in helping out with the mother but he didn't resent that she was the one who was doing it and what was the feeling is it not possible to both be find it gives you a sense of purpose and somewhat to resent it isn't it possible for both of those things to be true and her that I think you can feel this is the most important thing I should save that drowning child I'm going to get up and say that drowning child but I was at a really good place in my book and I'm kind of bummed that I have to leave it I think it's possible to feel both things and certainly in my mind her father was present and certainly part of taking care of her mom but it's a big job I don't know if any of you saw that film Amour that got so much attention by Hanukkah is that his name, is that who made it but it's about an aging couple where the woman gets quite ill and the husband she stays home and the husband is taking care of her and all the reviews said amazing but it's so harsh, it's so dark and I had just come through taking care of my parents through their final illnesses and I thought no, no, no, no this is way makes it look way too easy but that she's going to have to have pardon me a diaper change like numerous times a day here and that doesn't seem to feature in the film is he doing that, is he lifting her up and it didn't come into it I think there's plenty when somebody is elderly and not well or is a baby, I mean either way when somebody needs really full on care there's enough to go around for dad and daughter both yeah yes ma'am I am one of those teachers I was made very uncomfortable by the steps that she took with great Reza I mean baby sitting for him they're practically moving into their house she doesn't move into their house it seemed like their lives were so intertwined it was like almost like they were a family and I found that so big he really excuse me out any school district they would be like sure but it is something that happens I was talking about this earlier with Adam routinely when our kids were small we didn't ever but the kindergarten, nursery and kindergarten teachers routinely babies out with the kids by third grade it doesn't happen much anymore but routinely not for our kids oh that explains it I'm sorry in the real world I'm sorry I mean it was absolutely I was like I mean I really right I understand that you didn't believe it well it's good to know you don't love them enough to take care of them yes ma'am well I think it seemed unlikely that she would lose them well I think people do things accidentally on purpose you know the oh I broke it accidentally I'm so sorry these things happen and I think in my mind what it would mean to her for the gifts to be meaningful is so it means so much for her that they'd be meaningful that if they're not meaningful if they're just things that were in the house that he was getting rid of then she can't bear it so it's actually better for her not to know then it becomes something she can imagine rather than something that she has to become somebody from the back so obviously she ought to know what would be the back well just it's like the thing was she resentful to take care of her mother or pleased to do it both things can be true I think a lot of the time we have ambivalent feelings and on the one hand it's unbearable I mean there's a really interesting book that I read last summer by an author with an Irish name it's not going to help you it's all in your head I think and she's a neurologist and it's about actually this complicated notion of holistic disease so she treats a number of people who have seizures there's no question they have seizures but you may well have organic causes for the seizures she treats those patients also but they can trace through your brain waves whether your brain is actually having a forced into a seizure or whether there's no change in the brain waves and she's looking at patients who have no change in the brain waves they're experiencing seizures but you cannot find an organic cause for it and in those cases she follows sometimes she finds an answer and sometimes she doesn't but there are often people who are there's a trigger of some trauma that they actually cannot acknowledge or confront that they may not even know they may not even have a conscious memory of the trauma or something like that I'm not a scientist so but yes I mean I think that's sort of what she's saying but I have to say that there are that our brains are very complicated and there are things that we cannot allow ourselves to know that some part of our brain is protecting us from knowing and might protect us in very dramatic ways well to my soul but not 59 so they never found out what I'm a cause of mind oh dear I'm sorry I'm used to I don't know what causes mind whether it's a lack of sleep or whatever so I'm a I'm used to them but I've been on medication all my life does the medication help? yes it does see that's another thing is that if there isn't an organic cause the medication doesn't help it doesn't help in its focus yeah so yeah she never seemed to give herself credit for being a good teacher I couldn't figure that out because I was a teacher then a guidance counselor and the one thing she never seemed to say I'm really good as a teacher I don't think she says she's very good at much though I don't think she spends time thinking she's good at much though well you're right about that and I couldn't figure that out I guess that was her way she knows what she gets but she does know what she gets yeah but she doesn't think that's a great thing which is a tremendous thing and she never really felt that was something that she was accomplishing I guess you want to be an artist you're saying it's a good girl thing it's a good girl thing I'm sorry to the teachers it's a good girl thing to be a teacher that was what a girl was supposed to do then those are one of the professions she's a good girl and she was the good girl but also the same girl because if she did her art and set it out she was putting herself completely in front of people and that's a hard thing to do but she did say that she's a good teacher and that she gets kids and those people who end up being principals act like they get kids but they don't really get kids and they want to be a teacher like herself you seem to she does have that excuse me yes you get to writing that you do as opposed to non-fiction making a choice or a story to be more about you putting yourself out there and choosing your character to be picked up as a writer how did you develop this side I think it was almost it was a choice I made so early that it wasn't even conscious I was that annoying kid who from the moment I realized that the stories that I got read at bedtime were made up I thought you can do that that's the thing you can do I want to do that so I remember I worked briefly I've done a lot of freelance journalism over the years but I worked briefly at a newspaper in London and I it seemed like you could you know there are all those journalists like James Fry is that his name who we were talking about earlier there are a whole lot of them who just make junk up I was listening on NPR just the other day there's a whole series of it was an article in Science Magazine about surveys done door to door about people's opinions about LGBT and then they were just made up and in fact he made up incredible little anecdotes about the people he'd supposedly interviewed when he hadn't really interviewed anybody and I have to say that makes total sense to me it's why I shouldn't be a journalist because I feel like you need some data make it up why not, it's so much more interesting make it up so it seems just a matter of ethics that I have to stick to the fiction side yes ma'am I think both things are perhaps true I feel like she's maybe is she gay? I don't know but I feel like she certainly feels in its intensity more than a more than friendship but she sort of feels that about the husband too so she's certainly bisexual I feel like I don't know what a young woman told me she was pansexual I was like what does that mean? I don't know what all the choices are certainly let's say she's bisexual and that kind of rustle going what is that? let's discuss pansexuality next two hours we'll be here for some time but I think it is also true that the thing that I'm love friendship is desire it isn't sexual desire but it's desire you rarely when you meet somebody and you think I want to be friends with her and it's rarely because you think they're dull, hideous stupid and mean it's because there's something that you find attractive and possibly enviable that you think she knows so much about art history or a great dancer or whatever it is and so there is that element too that she is in love with their life their whole life seems to her enviable I think it's so interesting what seems glamorous to her that's part of it doesn't make them good people yes ma'am it always has to be some version of the latter because you can't imagine what you can't imagine what you can imagine is limited by who you are so there are things I can't imagine there are novels that Joyce Carol Oates has written that she has an imagination that can go places my imagination cannot she wrote that novel about the serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer I feel like I couldn't imagine I don't think I could imagine myself there I couldn't put my mind into his head I don't think I could do that each of us has a different and the parameters of what we can imagine are some combination of temperament and experience so in that sense you know but I I think it isn't I'm trying to think if there's anything in any of my books that's strictly autobiographical I feel like places I often sometimes places are imaginary but sometimes places are actual little bits I was saying to the students earlier there's a character called Didi who's a friend of Nora's who was based in my mind on the friend of a friend of mine who I didn't really know very well and only know a little bit better now but I projected all sorts of things I had a whole sense of this is what this person is like and I felt free to her name is not Didi I felt free to kind of she has a different job she's different in lots of ways but I felt free to kind of imagine her but you know I had a the writer Colin Toy Bean once said you can make up the story or you can make up the people but you can't make up both which I find I spend a lot of time thinking is that true is that true maybe it's true I don't know I don't know but I think what he was saying is you have to be grounded somewhere and maybe that's true you know it is that magpie thing it's little different pieces I mean partly the interior life thing I wanted to write about partly women and art I wanted to write about partly partly partly the idea that you know people I was saying this to the class earlier that we sometimes take we pin a complex story on little evidence that what it is to live inside your head is to have a lot more freedom to and the example I was giving is you know you might at university have an interaction with somebody and think oh he definitely fancies me yeah yeah he said like he's waiting for me to come to the party you know and then you come home and tell your roommate what happened and she says no that doesn't mean he likes you at all right I mean that there's some way in which we can sometimes on the strength of very few very little very little concrete evidence we can make a whole story in our heads so I wanted to write about that so there were lots of different elements going to the studio to meet Nora that day when she wasn't there that first time I don't know what do you think I don't think so cause I'm a she thought it might be Serena but Serena would have had the key to get in that's right but she thought but he thought that Serena would be there he messed up cause he thought Serena would be there he didn't come there on purpose the first time I mean he didn't come on purpose to see Nora the first time as I recall yes I am do you remember the striking stance when that happened what you were doing or trying to do that was there some process you go through what that happens to you or did it just happen um well I was I wrote it down so it must have been at a time when I was pretending to write um more than that I can't you know I can't remember whether it sort of came in between other throwoutable eminently ditchable efforts or whether it was on its own but certainly I think I mean I would say that it was interesting I wrote this book largely when my parents were dying and um and I was interested to discover that in the time when he wrote notes from underground uh Dostoevsky lost his brother and his wife in the six months in which he wrote that he lost his brother and his wife to tuberculosis um and he was very close to his brother and they published a magazine together and I feel as though there was some way I mean I have a terrible memory anyway but partly there's a whole you know some long stretches of my life that are somewhat blurry and my attention was on other things and I can tell you a lot about the hospital rooms but I can't tell you about much else um but I think that the intensity of the emotion is transferred emotion from other things I think and it sort of kept me even though she was fairly you know uh emotional it kept me saying to write about her oh that answers the question oh well my hope, thank you, my hope it's interesting because I feel people have much have quite strong reactions to her often and I was saying to Adam that before the book had even come out there was a sort of publishers thing where there were booksellers and people from the publishing house and a woman came out to me and said Nora is me, that is me um I'm so glad you wrote this book thank you and then sort of 15 minutes later there was a woman who came up and said why did you write this book, this one is so gasly she's awful, she's such a minor who would who would ever read this I mean I'm a feminist I don't want to read this and I certainly don't want to give it to my daughter to read she said and I felt like saying um excuse me you should meet that lady you guys need to talk but I didn't, I didn't blow the cover of lady number one but but my hope would be my hope would be that it's not about what you think about her I would, my hope would be that um that you believe in her even if you hate her or she drives you nuts that would be my hope so I'll let her do the other books for sale here Maggie's back there with the petitions there's food, drinks thank you all for coming