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Author Karen Joy Fowler talks to us about her latest novel Booth and the fictional characters who inspired her growing up.
Karen Joy Fowler is the New York Times bestselling author of The Jane Austen Book Club and Sister Noon. Her debut novel, Sarah Canary, was listed for the Irish Times International Fiction Prize as well as the Bay Area Book Reviewers Prize, and was a New York Times Notable Book.
Fowler’s short story collection, Black Glass won the World Fantasy Award in 1999, and her collection What I Didn’t See won the World Fantasy Award in 2011. Her novel We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, won the 2014 PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction and was short-listed for the 2014 Man Booker Prize.
Her latest novel Booth will be published by Serpent's Tail on 17 March. You can also find Karen's books on our catalogue.
Such a good question! It makes me wonder at what age I even began to have heroes. I suspect that the first ones were fictional – Anne Shirley from Anne of Green Gables for her endurance, Bilbo Baggins from The Hobbit for his courage, Fern from Charlotte’s Web for her compassion. My heroes become real people when I was a teenager and the American civil rights movement was in full swing. Then I saw actual courage and unimaginable sacrifice right there on my tv.
I wrote as a child. My first book, a series of short stories all with animal protagonists, was written when I was five. But I didn’t start thinking of being a writer, of making that into a career, until I turned thirty.
Because the psychological experiment that Rosemary is part of is all about language, because Rosemary is quite competitive with her chimp sister, I decided she would have a large and unusual vocabulary. I pictured her as someone who as a child talked a lot, (easy for me to imagine since I have a daughter and a granddaughter who talk a lot,) but would stop talking once her sister left her life. Rosemary’s voice was one of the chief pleasures of writing the book. As a writer you are frequently cautioned not to use a 100 dollar word when a 5 dollar word will do. It was great fun to write a character who would always go for the 100 dollar word.
That is the question! In my own country we are moving in the wrong direction. There is so much petty meanness now, a level that I don’t remember from other times. (There is a lot of meanness that is not so petty, too, but that’s always been there). There is a deepening sense that people who don’t agree with you are not simply fellow citizens with whom you disagree, but mortal enemies who have to be stopped at whatever cost.
A friend of mine who lives in a rural area tells me that whatever I might think about their politics, if I met these people, I would find that they are all so nice. And I believe her; I believe I would like them a lot. But after all, I look like them – they would initially see me as like themselves. So, to my mind, that’s not the test of niceness.
There are so many reasons to fear the impacts of climate change, but this is a large one, that limited resources do not bring out the best in us. And as to the plague – from my reading it looks as if every plague in the past has made some substantial portion of the public lose their minds. There was no reason to think we would be the first not to do so.
Booth is a family saga taking place mostly around the years of the American civil war. The Booths were a theatrical dynasty, acting father, three acting sons, who had one kind of fame prior to 1865 and a different kind of fame after. 1865 is the year one of the younger brothers assassinated President Abraham Lincoln. The book is about what it was like to be John Wilkes Booth’s brother or sister both before and after this dreadful act.
With the exception of Rosalie, there is a great deal of material to draw on. Edwin and Asia both left us many many letters and Asia wrote three books about the family. The assassin in the mix has meant that attention has never ceased to be paid to this family.
But yes, very little remains to help us know Rosalie. I read Stanley Kimmel’s book, but there was so much in it that I knew to be untrue that I had little faith in the rest of it. I had a wonderful manuscript, still unpublished I believe, written by the woman who bought the Booth house many years later and containing the neighborhood gossip about the family. There is a little more about Rosalie in that. But mostly I had to make her up. I knew the things that happened to her – those events are real – but who she was and what she thought and even what exactly her medical issues were, as they were apparently debilitating up to a point – all that remains hidden from me.
I am having trouble finding my next project. Open to suggestions. Although I would maybe like a break from doing something historical.
Wow! It is difficult to narrow our shared human experience to a single piece of work. But given our current climate crisis, I think everyone should be reading Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry For the Future. There are things we could be doing, but we lack the necessary global unity to do them. That has to change.
As a writer? This comes from Jack Kerouac, but somewhat paraphrased to suit my purposes: when you get stuck, don’t think about words. Imagine it better and keep going.
Or in life? This comes from my mother: what matters most is kindness.
I watch a lot of television. So much! I’m less embarrassed by it than I once was, because so much of television is now so good. I used to watch it even when it wasn’t though. Who knows how many more books I might have written if I didn’t?