FROM ONE STAGE TO A NEW CAREER
Violinist’s moment of panic led to novelist’s bestsellerdom
If we want to pinpoint the pivotal moment in novelist Sara Gruen’s journey to international bestsellerdom, perhaps we should look back to the night when she stood trembling with fear on a performance platform at Ottawa’s Carleton University.
It was the early 1990s, more than a decade before her breakthrough success with Water For Elephants, her novel about a travelling circus during the U.S. Great Depression of the 1930s. Back then Gruen was working toward a performance degree in violin — until panic intervened.
“I had a disastrous end-of-year performance,” she says. “Basically, I had stage fright and ran offstage with my violin tucked under my arm.”
The next morning she switched her studies to English literature — an action that effectively fuelled her larger ambition to write.
Gruen’s latest novel is At The Water’s Edge, from Doubleday. Among other things, it involves a search for Scotland’s legendary Loch Ness Monster. But she’s fully aware anything she writes now will be measured against the hugely popular Water For Elephants.
“I got struck by lightning,” she says, looking back nine years to the furor over that novel and the $5-million publication deal it triggered for her next two books. “I don’t expect it to happen again, but I’m delighted to be able to continue to write novels.”
And wanting to write, of course, has always driven her. So why was she studying music at Carleton after completing high school in London, Ont.?
“I’d always studied violin and my parents were both musicologists,” she says. There seemed to be a certain inevitability in taking a music degree at the time. But the night she fled the stage seemed like a wake-up call for someone who had attempted her first novel at 11 before moving on to “scads of terrible, angsty teenage poetry.”
Vancouver-born, but with dual Canadian-U.S. citizenship, Gruen is on the phone from her South Carolina home, dogs barking in the background. Animals have played prominent roles in her novels — horses in her first two books, an entire menagerie in Water For Elephants, bonobo apes in the 2010 Ape House. So, not surprisingly, she and her family have a lot of four-footed companions.
“We have three dogs and five cats, two horses and a goat — and now I’m in a room with my budgies.”
The weather is warm in South Carolina, which prompts her to talk about Canada’s punishing winters and her memories of Ottawa.
“I learned to skate on the Rideau Canal,” she says cheerfully. “But because it was the canal, I never learned how to steer or stop. My method of stopping was to run into an edge.”
She spent 10 years in Canada’s capital, and after graduating from Carleton, she was soon writing professionally — as an award-winning technical writer for Corel and later Cognos before being poached away by Chicago’s SPSS Inc. She arrived in the Windy City with two young children from her first marriage — “and fell in love again, immediately and very hard, got married again, and had a third baby.”
When SPSS started downsizing, she saw that as a further incentive to fulfil her true dreams — which led to Water For Elephants and a success she had never imagined.
Her latest, At The Water’s Edge, takes place in Scotland in the dying months of the Second World War — its focal point a crisis in the troubled life of Maddie, a young woman with a limited appreciation of her own self-worth. Furthermore, animals are no longer front and centre — although there is a friendly pub dog. “I didn’t set out to be known as the ‘animal’ author,” Gruen says, “and I did want to spread my wings.”
She’s interested in other things here — class, culture shock, the influence of landscape on human behaviour and — above all — personal relationships. And she takes a harsh look at the kind of male entitlement that can lead to abuse, both physical and psychological, of women.
The introverted and friendless Madeline Hyde finds herself in Scotland because her feckless alcoholic husband, Ellis, and his best friend, Hank, are searching for the Loch Ness Monster. These males represent the kind of upper-class Manhattan privilege that encourages them to think they can remain indifferent to the realities of war even when in a place under threat from German bombing raids. Their obsession with tracking down a mythical creature stems from their mindless belief that it will restore Ellis to the favour of his disillusioned family.
“She doesn’t even know what love is,” Gruen says. “No one’s ever loved her. Her mother was a sociopathic narcissist who risked Maddie’s health by starving her as young teen. She thinks she’s unintelligent and has doubts about her sanity.”
Maddie’s growing self-awareness and the realization that true love is a possibility in her unhappy life give the novel its narrative spine.
At The Water’s Edge seeks to evoke a particular Scottish culture as it existed in 1945. Gruen thinks the seeds were planted when, as a 12-year-old girl, she visited the ruins of Urquhart Castle overlooking Loch Ness.
“I sat there with my camera,” she remembers. “I was so sure at 12 that I was going to see the monster.” She didn’t, but the memory of the place lingered.
She denies any lofty aspirations with this novel.
“It’s a story,” she says simply. “I hope people come away from it feeling satisfied and fulfilled. I want to move people in a positive way.”
She doesn’t even know what love is. No one’s ever loved her. Her mother was a sociopathic narcissist who risked Maddie’s health by starving her as a young teen.