Diane Setterfield's The Thirteenth Tale was one of the most buzzed-about books of 2006. We sat down with this breakout author for an extended interview.
1. The Thirteenth Tale is your first novel, and there's so much enthusiasm for it that it's been chosen as an International Book of the Month. What do you think of that?
To tell the truth, when I first got the e-mail I didn't really understand what it was all about. This is my first book, and I am a novice in the book world. 'International book of the month,' I thought, 'that's nice.' Then I carried on reading my other e-mails and forgot about it. Ten minutes later the phone rang. It was my agent. 'Brilliant news!' she exclaimed. 'How fantastic! International book of the month!' That's when the penny dropped and I realized how important it is.
2. In just a few sentences, please tell us what The Thirteenth Tale is about.
You know authors tend to go for the marathon 400 pages, so to say anything in a few sentences is difficult! But I'll try and rise to the challenge. When I started out, I thought my novel was about truth and lies, openness and secrecy. Gradually, in the lengthy writing of draft one, it came to seem to be about the love of reading and passion for books. Once it was finished and I finally reread it, I thought it was about love and abandonment. It is about all these things and about families: how we need them, how we make ourselves out of them. It is about personal stories and family stories and how the two intertwine.
3. Why did you choose to not specifically say when The Thirteenth Tale takes place?
There were two reasons for this. The first, rather prosaic I admit, is that having spent more than a decade working on academic research, I was keen to avoid 'fact checking'. To produce a research you spend longer checking your sources than writing and I was tired of that meticulous style of work. I was curious to see what I was capable of producing if I switched off the part of my mind that checks facts and drew on a different area entirely. So in order to mark a complete change from my previous modes of working I chose to write a book that would be wholly a product of the imagination. Had I set the novel in a clearly recognisable period I would have had to make sure that every reference to cultural habits, domestic items, technology and so on was historically accurate, but by leaving the era vague I could afford to skip the bookwork.
The second reason is harder to explain but more important. I was certain from the earliest days of writing The Thirteenth Tale that it should inhabit an imaginary space poised between the real and the fictional. I wanted to give it a very deliberately 'bookish' tone, and to place it at one remove (at least one) from the reality of contemporary, everyday life. I was remembering the books I read as a child, my intense longing to inhabit that other world, where everything seemed more colourful, more vivid, more complete than the world I lived in. It seemed to me that one way of achieving that end was to deliberately blur the chronology. If you can't pinpoint when in history a fiction is supposed to have taken place, you are more likely (I hope) to position it imaginatively in that 'storybook' world.
4. The Thirteenth Tale is drawing comparisons to classics such as Rebecca and Jane Eyre. Was this intentional on your part?
Not at all. I didn't want to write a book that was like anyone else's book, only to write the best book I could. In my teens I was a big fan of nineteenth century English novels, reading and loving all the books Margaret so adores. Nonetheless the presence of so many of these books in The Thirteenth Tale took me by surprise initially. Looking back now I can see the reason for it. For more than ten years I had been reading intensively in French for my job, and much as I relished this I was aware that I had very little time for reading in English for pleasure. Once I had abandoned my academic career I began to make up for lost time by reading English novels of all kinds, and as I did this I began to feel all my old reading stirring in me again. Little by little these old loves found their way to the edge of my writing mind and soon into the writing itself.
I think the comparisons have come about because of the mood of my novel. My heroine Margaret reads the Brontes, Wilkie Collins, other c19th writers, and because she is such an avid reader her inner world has taken on the tone, the colour, the mood of the books she so loves. It stands to reason then, that when she comes to recount the story of Vida Winter, she presents it in a way that recalls the narratives she has absorbed. It is in keeping with Margaret's character that her narrative should reflect her reading.
5. What is it about Margaret Lea that makes Vida Winter choose her as the person to write her autobiography?
Margaret is a little known part-time biographer who writes largely for her own pleasure. Her private aim is to shed a little light into the world of the dead, to rescue from obscurity people who have no-one else to remember them. She is an unlikely candidate to write the life history of England's most famous living author. But she has written an essay on the Landier brothers (I made up this name but I was thinking of the Goncourt brothers, who wrote their diaries and novels in tandem - which was even more extraordinary in nineteenth century Paris than it would be today). After reading the essay Miss Winter summons Margaret to write her biography because she mistakenly believes Margaret to be an expert on siblings. Divided between her fear of telling the truth and her desire to do so, she chooses as her witness a woman who she thinks will catch her out if her fear should get the better of her and lead her to lie. What she doesn't realise is that Margaret's essay, far from being a demonstration of expertise, is in fact an effort to discover what it is that she herself lacks. Miss Winter begins to sense early on that she has got Margaret wrong, hence her curiosity about Margaret's story.
6. Why is it important that Margaret be a conjoined twin survivor?
I never decided that Margaret should be a conjoined twin survivor. I had a sense of her in the early stages as an intense and excessively reserved woman with a shadow in her heart, and it took me a long time to discover what that shadow was. At one point I remember toying with the idea of giving her a brother, but I knew very quickly that this was wrong. So she had to be an only child. Yet the idea of a sibling didn't quite go away. Then I remembered a young man I once met who had told me about being a bereaved twin, and this seemed to illuminate the curious half-life that Margaret was leading. Why conjoined? I don't know. All I can say is, it seemed to come from her, not from me. As it turned out, I think it is important that she is conjoined, but I would rather not explain too fully why because understanding why is one of the journeys the reader takes during the book, and I don't want to short-circuit this pleasure.
7. The Angelfield family is so riveting in a dysfunctional way - why did you choose to tell their story this way?
This question presupposes a notion of choice that does not really match with my experience of writing. I did not begin with a story but with a couple of characters. They appeared to me as distinct voices (in Margaret's case a distinct and curious reticence) that I needed to explain to myself. What would make a person turn out like this? was the question I constantly asked myself. What must have happened in the past to make this person as she is today? Little by little the characters revealed themselves to me, in a process that really felt more akin to discovery than invention, and like a detective I began to construct past events from the evidence of the present. Since it was the characters that guided me to the story, you could turn the question round then, and ask, why did you choose to write about such dysfunctional characters? But I suppose the only answer to that is that it is dysfunction that makes a story: obstacles, secrets, silences, losses, betrayals, disappointmentsb&
8. Margaret's mother is distant and her father does his best to make up for it. As a child, Vida was basically left to fend for herself. What does the concept of the absent parent say about the women Margaret and Vida became?
Another knotty question! Goodness, you are making me think hard! I suppose it relates to questions of identity. I have always been fascinated by the period of our lives that predates memory. Those years which form us, but which we have no recollection of. I never cease to be astonished that I was once someone I do not know. Have you noticed how often children are fascinated by the stories of their own birth? They love being told about themselves in the time before they can remember. So the story of our beginnings is one we learn from others. It is a partial, biased story of course, and one that we remember only selectively, but all the same, at least we have a story. (How far we embroider it later is up to us.) But children who for whatever reason are separated from their parents are deprived of the story of their beginning. And without a beginning, how can one build a middle? Margaret and Miss Winter both have broken stories because of the absence or distance of the parents. Aurelius too is motherless. He, like Margaret and Miss Winter, is emotionally stuck in his childhood. All of them need to mend their stories before they can properly enter their futures. (This last is just by way of a note: mothers are not the only important people. Margaret has a father and though he cannot fill the gap left by the mother he does his best and that matters. John-the-dig and the Missus are parent substitutes in many ways. And Mrs Love who takes in Aurelius the foundling is authentically a mother to him. Look at his love of cooking that he gets from her. Genetic mothers aren't the only mothers.)
9. Is there any chance Margaret will continue her "literary career" in another book?
I always intended that The Thirteenth Tale would be a single novel and it seems to me that in it Margaret has completed the journey that she needed to make. All the while I was writing the novel I used to see the world through Margaret's mind, imagine things the way she would imagine them, think her thoughts. But once I had finished it (and this is how I knew I had finished it) she left me. For years I was haunted by her and now she is gone. So no, there will be no more Margaret books.
10. If you could sit down and hear the life story of any writer, living or dead, who would it be, and why?
Oh dear, how to answer this one? It has to be said that many writers' lives are no more interesting (no less interesting, either) than anyone else's. And it's worth remembering too that everyone, even the most apparently ordinary person, has an extraordinary story. So I would probably be just as satisfied if the person next to me on the bus told me their life story.
Where writers excel is in their writing, and I do from time to time read the autobiographies of my favourite writers. Recently I loved reading Hilary Mantel's beautifully moving memoir Giving up the Ghost, and I am about to start Carson McCullers' Illumination and Night Glare.
