MARGOT LIVESEY TALKS ABOUT BLITHE SPIRITS AND BLIND LOVE

THE BOOKFORUM INTERVIEW

Margot Livesey deceives her readers. The Scottish-born author's five novels and one story collection have often promised a benevolent world of blossoming love affairs, with guardian angels watching over the bereft and devoted friends and family nursing the sick back to health. Those who offer seemingly safe havens, however, eventually reveal their moral ambiguity. In Homework(1990), a kindhearted divorced man rescues an Edinburgh newcomer from romantic loneliness only to have his affection undermined by his inability to acknowledge the increasingly destructive acts of his disturbed nine-year-old daughter. In Criminals (1996), a stuttering London banker goes to Scotland to care for his mentally ill sister, who has just separated from her husband. He arrives at her home with a baby he found abandoned at the Perth bus depot and a plan to call the authorities. Instead, he becomes an accomplice to a kidnapping, as his good intentions are foiled by his sister's unrelenting campaign to keep the child, which she perceives as her ticket to happiness. In The Missing World (2000), an insurance adjuster gets a second chance with an ex-girlfriend when she develops amnesia after being hit by a car. His commitment to her convalescence puts her at his mercy, and he succeeds in convincing her that their relationship never ended. All three of these books were written while Livesey struggled to finish her most personal novel, Eva Moves the Furniture (2001). Dedicated to her mother, who died when the author was two and a half and was said to have communed with ghosts, the novel tells the story of a motherless girl who is befriended by a pair of ethereal "companions."

Livesey's most recent novel, Banishing Verona, is a story of love at first sight between two unlikely partners: Verona, a pregnant radio personality, and Zeke, a housepainter with Asperger's syndrome. The two separate after sharing an intimate evening together, and though they are virtually strangers and both caught in family crises-a deceitful brother on the run from moneylenders and an adulterous mother threatening to flee a sick husband-they try to find their way back to each other.

Livesey, a Boston resident, met me for coffee in the Gramercy Park section of Manhattan on a rainy September afternoon. An award-winning writer and esteemed critic, she teaches at Emerson College. Generous and unflinching, Livesey shared her theories about love and betrayal, the limits of family bonds, and the ambiguous nature of morality. She described how she conceived of a love story involving someone with Asperger's-a person who, by definition, misunderstands body language but rarely takes the meaning of a word for granted, and who is compelled by his very nature to tell the truth. -KERA BOLONIK

BOOKFORUM: Love is unpredictable, and doesn't yield to convenience or conform to expectation. In Banishing Verona, a pregnant woman on the run from two money collectors falls in love on sight with an angelic-looking contractor with Asperger's syndrome. What are your thoughts about the nature of love?

MARGOT LIVESEY: Like many British children of my generation, I grew up assiduously reading Shakespeare, and was always struck by how quickly things happened in his plays. Cordelia won't say the right thing-she's out. You make a speech at the Forum and you're immediately assassinated. Some of the way I handle the initial meeting between Zeke and Verona is influenced by that. I'm fascinated and perplexed by the idea of love at first sight and this presumption that we have some intimate connection with people about whom we know nothing. They might be the platonic other half we're always searching for. At the same time, how do we set that notion in relation to the many mistakes we make about understanding other people, and understanding ourselves?

BF: Verona and Zeke meet and part ways with little more than a sense of each other. She doesn't realize Zeke has this disorder, and he doesn't even learn Verona's name. Yet they become instantaneously infatuated.

ML: In several respects, Verona is meant to be the opposite of an obvious femme fatale. She's older, striking but not strikingly good-looking, and largely pregnant. She's also a great talker and a great listener. I've always been impressed by how seductive stories can be and how seductive it can be when we actually feel someone is listening to us-it's extremely compelling. Zeke has, in various ways, made his world quite limited. He goes to work and sees few people. He's modest in his social activities. Most of the people with whom he interacts already have him pigeonholed. All Verona sees is that he's one of the most gorgeous men she's ever laid eyes on, and she goes from that premise.

BF: Zeke is separated from Verona-we see him not so much pining for her, but rather, waiting for her return because she promised she would.

ML: One of Zeke's great attributes is that he gives language a new life by believing in it so fully. Verona is much more casual and much less scrupulous about language. Because Zeke takes the word and the world literally, he assumes she will be back. It's only when he starts to pursue her that he begins to realize he doesn't know who she is and she isn't who she says she is. He comes up with these preposterous plans to try to find her. When I put myself in Zeke's situation, I was confounded by imagining what steps could be taken to find someone, how perplexing that would be.

BF: Did you set out to write a novel about someone with Asperger's?

ML: After I finished writing The Missing World, I really wanted to write about our difficulties in reading the world, and knowledge and self-knowledge. I wanted to write about someone similar to a friend's son who has Asperger's syndrome. I also wanted to write a love story, but realized it was extremely welltrodden territory. I decided on these characters, that they would meet and fall in love instantly and improbably, and then be separated for many hundreds of pages. I wrote the opening chapter quite quickly and very much in the slightly off-balance world that I saw Zeke as inhabiting. Then I returned to Eva Moves the Furniture for two years, and published it. Even during that short break, people had become much more conscious about Asperger's syndrome because of things like Mark Haddon's book The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time.

BF: What research did you do to learn about Asperger's syndrome?

ML: Aside from going to the library, I found people to talk to. Some of them knew they had Asperger's syndrome, and some, I helpfully decided, had Asperger's [laughs]. We were not using that terminology-they just knew they were helping me create a strange character. Because the diagnosis is relatively recent (it only entered the DSM-IV in 1994), I was particularly interested in talking to people who felt different as a child and had trouble fitting in. Zeke doesn't exactly fit any one of those people. He exhibits a cluster of characteristics along the Asperger's-autism spectrum, and also has certain gifts, as did almost everybody that I talked to.

One thing that was hard about Banishing Verona was my fully inhabiting Zeke, all the time, without that being laborious for the reader. In a conventional novel, you say things like "She smiled." But I was trying to write a novel where sentences like "She smiled" were not going to be in the character's vocabulary. What he would be saying is, "Her lips parted. The corners turned up. Her eyes widened. Was she smiling?" How was I going to capture that without the reader just sinking beneath a mass of description? Being faithful to Zeke's way of seeing the world was complicated for me. Another fascinating thing I learned about Asperger's is that it's very hard to lie, for a number of reasons. To have a truth teller in your novel is a wonderful gift, and a wonderful liability.

BF: It is certainly a liability where Zeke's mother is concerned. She gets frustrated with his honesty when he betrays her extramarital affair to his father. And Zeke's not the only one with a shameful family secret: Verona has her deceitful brother, Henry. In your earlier novels, like Criminals, Ewan discovers the extent of his sister's insanity when he brings home an abandoned baby. Stephen, from Homework, realizes the sinister nature of his own daughter. Are you mistrustful of family bonds?

ML: As someone who grew up with a difficult father and stepmother, I made my own family in various ways. I certainly don't take family for granted as a reliable force in one's life. The questions of what parents owe to children and what children owe to parents seem one of the many things that have become increasingly complicated in the last century. In the new novel, I propose two extraordinarily different people come together around a third person whose father comes from a sperm bank. That's not exactly my blueprint for a family, but bonds of affection are very important to me, more important maybe than blood, because at this point I have no living relatives. I have to feel that there are other important connections.

BF: Henry not only puts Verona in harm's way, but steals her inheritance. Still, she protects him, as does Henry's best friend, Toby, who is in love with him.

ML: We give our lovers, family members, and friends a tremendous number of second chances in some cases. I'm interested in the point at which we cross from hopefulness about those people to the realization that they don't have our best interests at heart.

BF: Is it worse to be betrayed by a blood relative than a lover?

ML: For better or worse, in romantic love we sort of have a tradition of bad behavior. There seems something more potent about a betrayal by a family memberwhen your only son fails to step forward in the way you want, or you suddenly realize that your brother would not save you from that burning museum. Without my exactly knowing why, it's an idea that plays an important role in my psyche.

BF: As does malevolence and intent, it seems. There are people who are genuinely evil in your fiction-like Henry, or Jonathan Littleton from The Missing World, a man who takes advantage of his ex-girlfriend's amnesia, and Kenneth, the blackmailer in Criminals. Then there are people who slip into bad situations, � la Patricia Highsmith, or whose actions are misconstrued as criminal or mean-spirited.

ML: I'm intrigued with-it sounds naivehow people change. In Criminals, Mollie has always claimed not to want children, and then suddenly that feeling rushes over her, that what she wants most is a child. Her brother, Ewan, and other people around her are slow to catch on to this huge change in feeling. Zeke reflects my perplexity with how you deal with massive changes in the people close to you, when a person at one point says, "I am 'A,' " and then a few years later says, "I am not 'A.' " How does your affection and knowledge of the person accommodate these changes?

BF: Banishing Verona is the first novel you've published since Eva Moves the Furniture-your most personal novel, and one that took fourteen years to write. Is the genesis of Eva Moves the Furniture what moved you to become a writer?

ML: I think I wanted to write anyway, and I had already published a collection of stories when I first had the idea for Eva Moves the Furniture. I grew up at this boy's private school where my father was a teacher. There was this other familyalso teachers-with whom I spent a great deal of time. One of those teachers told me this story about my mother and her relationship with the supernatural, and said he was sure that I had inherited her gifts, but that my life was too busy, too urban, and too American to experience them. I was so struck by that that I really went off the next day and started working on this novel about my mother. For many years, I couldn't find a way to make it work. I found it terribly difficult to find a way to write about the supernatural and about this figure that was going to embody my mother, even though she was, in many ways, so different.

BF: How did the two female spirits guarding over Eva appear to you over the years as you were writing Eva Moves the Furniture?

ML: I began, rather naively, by conceiving of the companions conventionally, as guardian angels. As I wrote and rewrote the novel, it became clear to me that they were concerned for Eva, but they also had their own agenda-they need her as much as she needs them. They are, at times, somewhat capricious, especially the girl, who is worried that Eva will tell someone about her. If Eva starts to talk about them they'll disappear, because other people will say, "You're just making this up." They're very careful guardians of this secret. Part of what was central to the exploration of the novel was the way in which having a gift like this, or having a great talent perhaps, does isolate you from other people, makes you somewhat different. That must also be some matter I'm unconsciously pursuing through my work, these people who are a bit different.

BF: Did you feel you were different as a child?

ML: I certainly felt different from my peers, because of living with these elderly parents and this missing woman-my mother passed away when I was very young. I didn't-alas!-have companions, but I'm still hoping they'll show up. They're just a little slow to arrive [laughs].

BF: What did your family friends mean when they told you your mother had a casual relationship with the supernatural?

ML: I knew about a poltergeist when I was quite young, but I didn't know she had "companions" until I was older. One of the things that fascinated me was how matter-of-fact she was about this other dimension of her life. She did not see it as extraordinary: I'm having a cup of coffee and, "Oh, there is an invisible person sitting opposite me." Or, "Someone's hurling a chair across the room." They were all on the same ontological plane for her. That was part of what I was trying to capture in the novel. No one wants to be grouped with crazy people who think Elvis is back at Graceland. At the same time, we do have these experiences that are not easily explained by rationality and science, whether it's a moment of telepathy, some very peculiar coincidence, or an instance where we feel the presence of someone who's dead.

BF: When we're feeling bereft, we may even try to will that sort of thing to happen.

ML: All of us over a certain age have a longing to be reconciled with someone we've lost, whether we've lost them through death or distance or anger. Eva Moves the Furniture was published on September 11, 2001, which was remarkable in so many ways. Publishing the novel at that time meant that I did get to talk to a tremendous number of people about how we think about death and the people we've lost. My mother was born immediately after one terrible war, and grew up during another. That the book should be published at this third terribly difficult moment-well, there was a kind of awful symmetry about it.

BF: Did you start writing in college?

ML: No, actually not until after I left university. I went traveling for a year with my boyfriend at the time, who was writing a book on philosophy. After exploring churches, markets, and ruins, I started writing my own book. Since I didn't have a subject and wasn't going to write the history of the Etruscan vase, I ended up writing a novel. I came up with the most scintillating topic I could imagine: divorce. During my whole childhood, I only knew one person other than King Edward VIII who married a divorc�e. It was an appallingly bad book. When I reread the novel, I realized how far short it fell of the many wonderful novels I'd been reading while I was writing it. That's when I really got interested in writing: I thought, There's something here I'd like to get better at. I started writing short stories-partly to get better, and partly because I could fit them in between waitrcssing at lunchtime and dinnertime.

BF: When did you come to the US?

ML: In the early '80s. I started teaching at Tufts University in 1983-composition and creative writing. Once I started doing that, it was much harder to go back to spending a great deal of time in Britain, which I'd always expected I would do. Teaching creative writing wasn't being done in Britain at that time.

BF: Did you publish your first collection of stories here?

ML: Actually, in Canada. There was a wonderful editor at Penguin Books who was publishing a series of short fiction. I wrote her a little letter saying, "You don't know me but I've written some stories and would you like to publish them?" When I look back on it, I just think it was a completely endearing letter in its absolute naivete about these matters. I taught at Tufts for three years, and then published my collection of stories and taught at quite a number of places: Carnegie Mellon, Iowa Writers' Workshop, Williams College, UC-Irvinc. And then I decided to stay in one place, Boston, where I'd had a rentcontrolled flat all along. Of course, as soon as I made that decision, rent control was abolished. I've been teaching at Emerson College for the past five or six years.

BF: What are you reading now?

ML: A wonderful novel by Maritta Wolff called Sudden Ruin, which Scribner is publishing this spring. She apparently published four or five books up until the '60s, to really strong reviews and considerable success, and then, in the early '70s, she got disgusted with the publishing industry and put this novel in her refrigerator, where it remained for the last thirty years. After she died in 2002., someone dusted off the novel, and now it's being published. It is exhilarating to read, beautifully written. It is set in that moment where middle-class women were just beginning to feel that dissatisfaction that being wives and mothers was not enough, but had no real sense of where they could go with that dissatisfaction. It's a counterpoint to The Golden Notebook, another great novel. Doris Lessing is one of my great heroines.