Last night at Boswell Book Company in Milwaukee, I
attended a reading by Nicole Krauss, author of the novel Great House, which was
recently nominated for the National Book Award. I read her bestselling novel
The History of Love a few years ago and adored it, so I was eager to get my
hands on her latest book, which I began reading over the weekend. After giving
the audience some background on Great House and reading a short excerpt from it,
she took questions from the group and offered three surprising insights into
her writing process:
1. She does not believe in inspiration. Krauss says that she
doesn’t know what inspiration is or where her writing will take her, even
though readers say that her novels seem as if they must have been thoughtfully
planned out before she began writing them. When the editors of The Best
American Short Stories 2008 asked her to write a paragraph about the origin of
her short story “From the Desk of Daniel Varsky” (which later became the first
chapter of Great House), she struggled with the assignment at first. Then she
looked up at her own monstrous desk, similar to the one in her fiction, and
realized that the answer was staring her in the face.
2. She does not do research for her novels. Krauss follows
her obsessions. When she was pregnant with her first child, she became
fascinated by Chile’s dark history under Pinochet. She read every book
and saw every documentary about this period, and only years later wrote the
story featuring a Chilean poet named Daniel Varsky—a story that she did not set
out to write when she first immersed herself in Chile’s past.
3. To tackle the subject of motherhood, she wrote about the
absence of motherhood. Krauss dedicated Great House to her two sons and says
she would not have written it without them, because her horror and fascination
with Chile’s history stemmed from a mother’s fear of losing a child. The novel
begins with the character of Nadia explaining how she came to have Daniel
Varsky’s desk in her possession. Nadia is a divorced novelist who opts for a
life of writing rather than a life as a wife and mother. Krauss also mentioned
that another character in the book gives up a child. But, Krauss said, the novel
is in part about the burden of inheritance.
Funny story: Krauss began by saying she hoped that we had
come to the right reading. At her reading the previous evening, a young woman
who wanted her book signed said she just loved the movie that was based on
Krauss’ book. “What movie?” Krauss asked, because none of her three novels have
been adapted for film yet. “The Nanny Diaries,” the woman said. That book is
co-written by Nicola Kraus.
—Sarah
C. Lange, associate editor