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an INTERVIEW
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tête-à-tête
Sharon Klein
interviews Lori Lansens, author of The Girls
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Both your first novel, Rush
Home Road, and now The Girls
are set in and around the Chatham area. What does this
area mean to you?
I was born and raised in Chatham, Ontario. My mother and father still
live in the house where I grew up and when I visit them, I feel like
I'm really going home. I appreciate the uniqueness of the area and I'm
fascinated by its history-as a final destination on the Underground
Railroad, as a port for the rum runners during prohibition, as a
battleground during the war of 1812. I suppose I'm drawn to the place
as a setting for my stories because I spent my youth imagining I was a
writer, gathering notes and making imprints on my senses.
Tell me about the genesis
of The Girls. I heard you were actually
writing another book for about one year before you scrapped
it and started to write The Girls.
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I was writing a story called "The Wives." It was set
in rural Ontario and it was about a man with multiple
wives. But after Rush Home Road was
launched, and after my second baby was born, I felt
like a very different person, and what had interested
me about "The Wives," the passion I'd had for the main
character, began to wane. I'd started to have fuzzy
visions of Rose and Ruby, these twin sisters born joined
at the head. After doing some unrelated research about
unusual people, and after seeing several pairs of conjoined
twins in the news, the fuzzy visions began to crystallize.
(One set of twins, the Bijani girls, sought surgical
separation in 2003 and died on the operating table.
Like Rose and Ruby, they were joined at the skull. They
spoke of how they longed to look into each other's eyes,
which I found poetic.) With two very small children,
whose dependence on me was absolute and who I was either
nursing or carrying or sleeping beside, I became intrigued
by the notion of intimacy and attachment. Obviously
being a mother is not the same thing as being a conjoined
twin, but it was a jumping-off place. Even while I was
working on "The Wives," The Girls were
knocking on my door. When I began to hear their voices,
first Rose and then Ruby, I knew what I had to do. With
more relief than grief, I said goodbye to "The Wives."
Your female characters in
Rush Home Road and The Girls
are such strong, formidable women. They are survivors.
Yet, they are marginalized. Tell me about that.
I'm telling the kinds of stories that I like to read
in fiction, or to hear told in life, about extraordinary
people in extraordinary circumstances. Addy Shadd [from
Rush Home Road] and Rose and Ruby Darlen
climb the same mountains that ordinary women climb,
but because they're marginalized their journeys are
more difficult, their struggles more profound, and their
victories ultimately sweeter.
The story of The
Girls is told in the first person, by two narrators
with very distinct voices. Was that always your intention?
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When I first began to write, it was Rose's voice that I heard clearly,
because like me she's wanted to be a writer all her life. I never
imagined Ruby caring that much about what her sister was writing. But
as Rose began to describe her sister, Ruby's portrait became more
detailed, and one day she just sort of shouted, "MY TURN!"
Authors have mined their own life or their own experiences in their
fiction but it would be hard to accuse you of that! The main
character in Rush Home Road was an old black woman and in The Girls,
the main characters are conjoined twins. Where do your ideas come
from? Where did you get this sensibility?
Authors are naturally asked where their ideas come from, but I've
never thought of my stories, Rush Home Road or The Girls, or any of
the screenplays I've written, as having come from ideas. The stories
come from the characters, and though it sounds a little flaky, I think
the characters exist in some other world, one I imagine above me,
rather than below, and the strong ones knock on my door, demanding
that I tell their stories. I have a strange sense that I'm channelling
these characters, and while I think I'm manipulating their stories,
they're fully in charge of me.
Interestingly, the people very close to me see a great deal of my
character in the women I've written about, though of course they seem
worlds apart from me.
Was it harder to write The Girls? What lessons/experiences did you
learn from your first book?
I was expecting my first child when I wrote Rush Home Road. It was not
unusual for me to write for 8 hours a day. And I often wrote 7 days a
week. I wrote the last line of Addy Shadd's story days before I
delivered my son. I had all the time in the world and the story was
flowing. It was my first attempt at a novel, after many years writing
for the screen, and I had no idea how it would be received. I tried
not to think about the fact that I might be wasting more than a year
of my life on a work that might simply be dismissed.
I gave birth to my second child just weeks after Rush Home Road was
launched. So I had two very small children when I wrote The Girls. The
difficulty came in managing my time, and like all working moms,
feeling pulled in different directions. I've never had a problem with
feeling stuck or blocked (I like to joke that my muse is the on switch
of my computer), but my writing days were much shorter for this book,
and there were times when I was clicking on my computer that I ached
for my children, and times when I was with my children that I was
impatient to get back to my keyboard to edit the chapter I'd just
finished.
What are you writing now?
Camping lists, grocery lists, birthday party invitations for my
3-year-old. I'm taking a short break before I begin my next novel.
Two new characters have recently introduced themselves to me. Fuzzy
snap shots. Whispered voices.
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