Internationally bestselling author Tracy Chevalier talks to us about her latest novel 'The Glassmaker' and her time spent watching glassmakers at work on Murano to research for the story.
Tracy Chevalier is the author of eleven novels, including A Single Thread, Remarkable Creatures and Girl with a Pearl Earring, an international bestseller that has sold over five million copies and been made into a film, a play and an opera. Born in Washington DC, she moved to the United Kingdom in 1986. Tracy's latest novel is The Glassmaker which has already become a firm favourite with Suffolk readers. You can find The Glassmaker and Tracy's other books on the Suffolk Libraries catalogue.
Libraries were a big part of my childhood! Every week I visited the public library near us (in Washington DC) and checked out a stack of books – often including one the children’s librarian, Mrs Carney, set aside specially for me. I would read the books and the next week when I returned them Mrs Carney and I would discuss the one she had chosen for me. It was like a two-person reading group, and I am ever grateful to her for her attention and encouragement. It made me the reader and writer I am today.
I was an editor in publishing (reference books for libraries!) for several years, writing short stories on the side. Eventually I stopped and did an MA in creative writing at UEA, where I began writing my first novel, The Virgin Blue. I kept writing and freelance editing, and managed to get an agent and a publisher for that book. Then I wrote Girl with a Pearl Earring, and its success meant I could write full-time. I am aware that my journey was relatively easy. I think if I hadn’t had the idea to write about a Vermeer painting, my writing life would have been much harder. Maybe it helped a little that I was older – The Virgin Blue was published when I was 34, Pearl Earring at 36. A bit of time and experience is a useful thing.
Again I was lucky. I didn’t have the attention all at once – it got spread out over time, so I didn’t get that sudden injection of attention that can make you into an egomaniacal monster! The initial UK publication of Pearl Earring was actually quite quiet. It was published in August (terrible month for publication!), got one excellent review in The Guardian by Deborah Moggach, and then went to ground. It was only when it was published several months later in the USA that interest began to grow.
What I’m so delighted by is that the novel became successful through word of mouth rather than from a marketing campaign. People read it and told their friends about it; that’s how it took off, and indeed how it still sells. It means the love and respect for it is genuine, and in a way that has made the success and attention I’ve had more genuine too. Maybe that’s why I’m not a monster! Also, no matter how successful a book is, I’m still faced with the blank page at the beginning of each day, and that is hard and humbling. Writing is hard and humbling, no matter how many books you’ve written.
The Glassmaker is set on Murano, an island off Venice where glass has been made for a thousand years. It follows the fortunes of the Rossos, a small glassmaking family, over the course of 500 years. Glassmaking has been mainly a male profession, and the heroine Orsola Rosso has to conceal her own work making glass beads to help the family. Unusually, the family and their neighbours and friends age at a different rate from the rest of the world, so we are able to skim over 500 years of Venetian history, and follow one woman’s life from childhood to older woman.
I had to learn a lot about a lot. Venetian history – 500 years of it! – was complicated enough. But it was the glassmaking that really took time and energy. I spent a lot of time watching glassmakers at work on Murano, asking questions, and also trying it out myself – both glassblowing in London, and beadmaking on Murano and in London. I find it much easier to describe what my characters are doing if I have done it myself. Also, it gives me ideas. So, for instance, one beadmaker told me to experiment with controlling runny honey between two chopsticks, as that would help me control molten glass. I used that detail in the book, replacing chopsticks with sticks. I would never have thought of it otherwise!
I researched and wrote the plague section between lockdowns but when movements were still restricted. I had a surreal research day at the British Library, reading about the Venetian plague of 1575 while wearing a mask and sitting two metres apart from other readers. Very strange. I think that may be why that section is so moving for readers now (people often mention it to me) – we lived through something like it, though of course we had it much easier than the Venetians. There was little medication and no vaccines then, and no one knew how the plague was transmitted. A quarter of the population died.
Early on I knew I wanted to cover a long span of Venice’s history, from the height of its wealth and power to its descent into a tourist destination. I also wanted to follow one family, and one woman, rather than kill them off and have readers be forced to care about their descendants. I was pondering how to do this before I’d even started writing when I suddenly thought, ‘Well, they just won’t die!’ And that was that! I liken it to a stone skipping across the water – we and the characters touch down in different centuries, barely changed, while the rest of the world (‘terraferma’) moves at a normal rate. Venice is a timeless place, so it’s not as crazy as it sounds. I think readers quickly adjust, as the rest of the book is really down to earth and grounded in reality.
I wanted the next book to be a little more focussed (and easier!). I am writing a novel about a murder that took place in Northumberland in 1826 and has never been solved. I’m not sure I’m going to solve it, but I’m writing about its effect on the surrounding community.
Yes! I’ve had a good run. First, two books on the Booker shortlist. The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden is an intense novel about an oddball Dutch woman who uncovers the history of the house she lives in through her relationship with her brother’s girlfriend. It’s gripping and sexy and heart-squeezing. Next, Orbital by Samantha Harvey, which I’m surprised I’m recommending because it has little plot and I usually crave plot. It’s about a day in the life of six astronauts orbiting Earth in the International Space Station, and what they see below them. It’s basically a love song to our gorgeous planet. It made me cry, and that doesn’t happen that often.
Another book that made me cry is A Day in the Life of Abed Salama by Nathan Thrall. It’s a non-fiction account of the death of a Palestinian boy in a bus accident: how it happened, why it happened, and how it affected many people directly and indirectly. It’s a careful examination of what life is like for Palestinians in the West Bank, and was written by a Jewish journalist before the events of October 7th and the subsequent war. Whatever your politics and sympathies, this book educates you on the complicated realities of that region.
I write by hand, at least initially. I prefer the organic connection between hand and brain, rather than a keyboard. Not completely: at the end of the day I type what I’ve written into the computer. But that initial writing needs to be with pen and ink.
