KAREN JOY FOWLER
The best-selling US author is back with a novel based around an infamous historic figure
What is the historic framework behind your new novel?
My book takes place mostly in the years just before, during, and after the American Civil War. It focuses on a particular family, the Booths. This was a large family, 10 children, six surviving to adulthood. The patriarch was an enormously successful Shakespearean actor; three of his sons followed him on to the stage. Although the family was already famous as a theatrical dynasty, they are remembered today mostly because of the ninth son, John Wilkes Booth who, in 1865, only days after the war’s end, walked into Ford’s Theatre and murdered President Abraham Lincoln.
What piqued your interest about that period? I was initially more interested in the family than in the period. But as I wrote the book, more and more of the leftover business of the war seemed to be resurfacing in US politics in unabashed and visible ways. It’s not possible to read about those years and not see the unsettling parallels. Whenever black people exercise actual political power in the US, moves are immediately taken to quash that.
Is there a book that made you love writing? The book with the largest impact on me as a writer must be The Once and Future King by T.H. White. When I began to take my writing seriously I began to hear a lot of rules about what you could and couldn’t do as a writer. In almost every case T.H. White had already broken that rule to perfection. The Once and Future King persuaded me that I could do anything I wanted in my stories. I only had to make my transgressions delightful.
A book that had a pivotal impact? My mother read Charlotte’s Web to me and I read it to my own children who’ve read it in turn to theirs.
A book you wish you had read but haven’t got to? Steinbeck’s East of Eden. I live in Steinbeck country. I’m a fan of The Grapes of Wrath. I really should have gotten to this one.
The book you are most proud to have written?
We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves. It says the things I most want to say.
What book do you re-read?
I re-read Once and Future King often. All six of Jane Austen’s major works, The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien), I Capture the Castle (Dodie Smith), Brat Farrar (Josephine Tey), Illywhacker (Peter Carey), Holes (Louis Sachar).
What books are by your bed? This is Your Brain on Music (Daniel J. Levitin), Metazoa (Peter GodfreySmith), The Quiet Americans (Scott Anderson), One Two Three (Laurie Frankel), Blood and Sugar (Laura Shepherd-Robinson), The Five Wounds (Kirstin Valdez Quade), and The Wolves of Willoughby Chase (Joan Aiken).
What are you writing now?
I’m having trouble finding the next project. I’m old enough and slow enough that the next might be my last. Knowing that is putting more weight on the decision than the decision can bear.
Booth by Karen Joy Fowler: Allen & Unwin, $33