Ask the Author: Lily King
Answered Questions (11)
Lily King
Oh how happy that makes me that you started a book club because of it! Yes, it does feel like a bit of a bug I've caught. I have a few more ideas for sometime in the future. But right now I'm working on something contemporary. It's much harder than Euphoria and I'm daunted by the challenge. But I think that's probably a good way to feel. Thanks so much for writing. Can I recommend Old Filth to your club? I love that book so.
Lily King
Hi and thanks so much! I very much departed from fact with the ending and I did that because I felt the story demanded it. I felt it was part of Fen's character, part of the result of all the frustration and rage and impotence (of all kinds!) he was feeling at that point. People have asked me what I didn't give Nell the ending Mead had, and the truth is, if you research what went on and the letters she wrote back home, she was very very lucky to have come back alive. She wrote that she and Bateson were convinced the whole time that her husband was going to kill them both.
Lily King
HI Ben--
Thanks! Yes, you said it, the claustrophobia very much attracted me. I love a tight pressure-cooker situation in a novel. Usually I write about families because families can be so claustrophobic and tense to the point of breaking. So I thought I was having this huge departure only to realize I was just creating another pressure-cooker.
Thanks! Yes, you said it, the claustrophobia very much attracted me. I love a tight pressure-cooker situation in a novel. Usually I write about families because families can be so claustrophobic and tense to the point of breaking. So I thought I was having this huge departure only to realize I was just creating another pressure-cooker.
Lily King
Hi Narci—Thanks so much. I haven't read Under the Wild and Starry Sky, but I will have to! I can't imagine doing that either. I am a terrible coward in comparison. I got the idea from Jane Howard's biography of Margaret Mead which I sort of read by accident in 2005. I got to the part when she was 31 in PNG with her second husband and fell in love with another man and they had this wild love triangle and I thought, wow that would make a good novel. But I really didn't think I would write that novel. I didn't think I could. But I started reading more about Mead and Bateson and found it all so compelling that I had to try. But, as I have said above, it turned very much into a work of fiction, because that is what I am trained in. That's what comes naturally to me.
Lily King
Hi Lorna—Thanks so much! I'm grateful. I don't want to spoil the ending for people who haven't read it, but I will say that I had a completely different idea for the ending when I thought Nell was our narrator. Once I realized Bankson was telling the story, things began to change. As I said in my last answer, I really had to feel my way through. I didn't always know what would happen until I got there and felt what felt right. It's strange in that way. And as I just said, I really didn't know about the events in the last chapter until after I had handed it in.
Lily King
Hi Ivy---At first I thought the story would begin and end in 1933, actually from the end of 1932 to the end of April '33. But when I realized Bankson was the narrator that changed. and then it changed again toward the end when I realized from what great distance he was writing. I got the idea for the last chapter after I handed it in to my agent. The novel kept changing as I was writing it--nothing happened like I thought it would when I started out. I really love that, but it's so hard to trust it as it's happening. You just kind of have to hold on for the ride.
Lily King
Hey Carly!!! Such a good question. I learned you can't read about someone in a biography and feel like you know them or know how they speak or think. You just don't. I had to make them all up just like I make up other characters. And at first I did feel constricted, until I gave myself the freedom to let them do or say anything they wanted, until I just left all history behind and let the story go where it wanted to go.
Lily King
Margaret Mead was passionate about her work. In her biography by Jane Howard, her first husband says that after their wedding, when they got the hotel room, she told him she had a head-splitting amount of work to do and shut the bedroom door. Her work infused every part of her life. And her life infused her work. She said in a New Yorker profile: "The whole world is my field. It's all anthropology." And she really lived that way. I was interested in someone like that. I am not like that. I compartmentalize more, I think. When I'm with my kids I'm with my kids. I'm not thinking about my novel all that much. So I was interested in someone who just lived it and breathed it (and of course in the field that's what you're doing) and feeling so thrilled by it all. The irony is that I was not feeling any of that thrill while I was writing this book! It was hard and I was scared of failure most of the time.
Lily King
I had already written several drafts before State of Wonder, and it was in edits when The Signature of All Things came out. Of course my first reaction was fear that these authors, two of my favorites, would think I'd stolen from them! I was in shock that they both had chosen such tropical and scientific settings too! But then I was just so happy to read them and enjoy them, and feel relieved at how very different all three books are. I think my greatest pole star for this novel was Old Filth by Jane Gardam. She gave me the courage to tell the story from Bankson's point of view. I love that book and have read it at least 3 times and recommend it to anyone who will listen.
Lily King
Hi Laura!!!!
I have been in Boston a few times this past summer and fall, and i think the next time I am there will be at the Maynard Library in April. April 11 maybe. I'll get it on my website lilykingbooks.com soon! thanks for asking and hope to see you then!!!
I have been in Boston a few times this past summer and fall, and i think the next time I am there will be at the Maynard Library in April. April 11 maybe. I'll get it on my website lilykingbooks.com soon! thanks for asking and hope to see you then!!!
Lily King
Hi Sara! Great question! When I first got the idea and started researching, I thought I would tell, as best I could from pretty limited sources, the story of what happened with Margaret Mead, her second husband Reo Fortune, and the British anthropologist Gregory Bateson in 1933 in what was then called the Territory of New Guinea. But the by the end of the first page of the first draft of the book, I remembered I was a novelist, not a biographer or a historian and I had no interest in sticking to the facts. My only allegiance is to my characters and the story as it unfolds. And my characters very quickly became my own; they were not Mead or Fortune or Bateson. How could they be? I had never met them and only knew a limited amount of things about them. But to create fictional characters you have to know everything--or you have to give yourself the freedom to know whatever you need at any given moment to know. So I borrowed from my real-life inspirations, but I made up much, much more. I had to make up the rules as I went—I didn't know any books that had this model but I wasn't thinking about models or anything like that. I was just trying to write a book I would like to read. That's all I can ever do. That's what I stay loyal to. I have heard from Mead and Bateson's daughter, Mary Catherine Bateson, a gifted writer and anthropologist, and she has been wonderful and supportive. She is fully aware that I was not trying to capture the personalities or story of her parents. Sorry, long answer!
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