PERILS OF SUCCESS
Author’s rise, fall and return
The Muse
Jessie Burton HarperCollins Canada
She was the literary sucLONDON cess story of the year.
But within months her triumph had plunged her into despair.
When Jessie Burton looks back on 2014, she sees it as a year of extremes, and it’s still tough for her to remember how it ended. Her debut novel, The Miniaturist, a cunningly constructed tale set in 17th century Amsterdam, had surged to the top of the international bestseller lists. Sales — in 34 countries — quickly reached the million mark. A Spice Girl tweeted that she had loved the book. Film director Martin Scorsese revealed he had it on his Kindle. Vogue magazine asked Burton to pose for a portrait.
At 31, Burton, once a struggling actress, was suddenly a celebrity. So how well was she dealing with success?
“I clearly didn’t deal with it very well.” Burton’s voice is crisp and forthright. She doesn’t mince words. She knows now that by the end of 2014, she was teetering on the edge of depression. “And I probably fell into it,” she says.
Her new novel, The Muse, is now out in Canada from HarperCollins, following an enthusiastically received launching a few weeks ago in Britain. A mysterious painting is the springboard for a suspenseful narrative that shifts between the Swinging London of the 1960s and the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s.
Burton has reason to be happy this summer. Yet, less than two years ago, she was wondering whether The Muse would ever happen. That’s because, in her words, she felt “like the contents of a pepper grinder” when she set out to write it.
By the end of 2014, the euphoria of success had disintegrated into a devastating anxiety and fear.
“I just felt very frightened and grey,” she tells Postmedia by phone from her South London home. “I felt massively fragmented. My identity as I’d known it for 32 years had sort of been atomized, and I would spend 2015 trying to put it back together.”
By Boxing Day 2014, she couldn’t even find the energy to get dressed. She would lie on the sofa, watching old episodes of Pride and Prejudice on television, and sustaining herself with warmed-over sausage rolls. “I shuffled a path between kitchen and sofa,” she wrote in an often emotional blog she put online earlier this year. “I felt so alone and so ridiculous that I might feel like this, with all the bounty that had come my way.” She was mourning the loss of her real self.
That blog was a merciless selfexamination of the toll exacted by success: “I was overwhelmed, and this was making me stressed, and this was making my anxiety slip into depression.
“I just hated myself. I was like Jekyll and Hyde, and I couldn’t tell which was the real me.”
The arrival of 2015 brought little relief. “I felt bleak and stagnant. ‘I can’t write. I can’t do this,’ was my salutation to the pathetic January sun of 2015.”
But she persisted with the task of creating a new novel, even though there are sections of The Muse she can’t even remember writing.
Today, Burton can view that period with greater equanimity.
“Yes, there were moments when I thought I couldn’t get to where I wanted to go with this book,” she says. But she argues that her nearcollapse was due to “a slight case of mental exhaustion.”
She subjected herself to more than 200 interviews after The Miniaturist caught fire — a memory that still leaves her speechless. But Burton clearly doesn’t want to dramatize her situation — emphasizing instead that persevering with this intimidating second novel offered some kind of lifeline.
There’s a tantalizing puzzle at the core of The Muse. It has to do with a mysterious painting whose chance arrival at a London art institute in 1967 has unexpected reverberations.
It clearly dismays Marjorie Quick, the establishment’s eccentric co-director, who behaves as though she’s seen a ghost. The painting harbours secrets that tantalize Marjorie’s protégé, Odelle Bastien, a key figure in the narrative. She’s a young black Trinidadian, who aspires to be a writer and who has been instrumental in bringing the work to the gallery’s attention. She’s haunted by the mystery of its origins.
What emerges is a story of concealment and deceit as Burton introduces a second time line — Spain caught up in the turbulence of 1936 and the plight of Olive Schloss, a gifted young Viennese woman whose ambitions to become a painter are frustrated by her misogynistic father, an art dealer who doesn’t believe in female artists.
“I had an idea to set a book in ’60s London,” says Burton, who admits to a fascination for the era of Carnaby Street. “I also wanted to write about an artist.” And she had this urge to write about Spain.
The Spanish Civil War of the 1930s and the Franco dictatorship that followed fascinate her, as does the later transition to democracy.
“Where this came from, I don’t really know. Maybe after The Miniaturist I simply wanted to drag myself into the 20th century.”
The mysteriousness of the creative process permeates both books — and it has also impinged on Burton’s own life.
“Where does the artist position himself or herself in relation to her art — once it becomes mass-produced or commodified or a product that other people re-interpret? That was an over-arching preoccupation for me.”
These imperatives are even more pronounced since her experience with the downside of success.
“I’ve had the privilege of quite a moral lesson about what I value and what’s important to me,” she says. “The most important thing really is the work and having the facility to write. It’s a very odd phenomenon that something so essentially solitary and isolating can suddenly land you in the spotlight.”