Who's Afraid of Claire Messud? - The New York Times

Whos Afraid of Claire Messud?
- The New York Times 11/5/17, 9:22 PM
Whos Afraid of Claire Messud?

The novelists characters have been called difficult
women. She would say they are simply women with
desires.
By RUTH FRANKLIN AUG. 10, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/10/magazine/whos-afraid-of-claire-messud.html?_r=5&login=email&auth=login-email Page 1 of 17
Whos Afraid of Claire Messud? - The New York Times 11/5/17, 9:22 PM
Claire Messud Irina Rozovsky for The New York Times
The woman had a nervous breakdown in her 20s, and after that she never married.
Her father had been in the French Navy, and her childhood was spent in motion:
Beirut, Salonika, Algiers. Her brother went to America on a Fulbright, got a degree
from Harvard and another in Geneva and traveled the world with his wife and
children. She stayed mostly at home in Toulon, caring for her parents into their old
age. Occasionally she hinted at a mysterious inner life whose secrets she would not
divulge.
Looking through some bookcases one day, her niece the novelist Claire Messud
came upon an old diary. Like the servant girl in Flauberts story A Simple
Heart, the elderly aunt once had a secret love. For 10 years, in her 30s and early 40s,
she was infatuated with her best friends brother, a married man who lived with his
family in South America. They saw each other perhaps twice a year, when he visited
France, and only in public, at dinner parties or with his sister. From these encounters,
she convinced herself that they shared a passionate romance.
It existed only in her head, Messud said, leaning forward in her armchair on an
unseasonably cool and wet morning in early June. The rain had foiled our plan to go
for a walk in the woods, so we were drinking coffee in the den of her house in
Cambridge, Mass., not far from Harvard, where she teaches fiction writing. The
book-filled room was warmly lit and cozy, the couch lined with blankets to protect it
from the family dogs. As she often does when telling a story, Messud slipped into the
voice of the character she was inhabiting: Dont deny me my love story. You think
Im a lonely spinster who takes care of my parents, but I have had my passions.
Its a story that could have risen from Messuds own pages. In a career spanning
more than two decades, she has specialized in creating unusual female characters
with ferocious, imaginative inner lives. The Burning Girl, her fifth novel,
published by W.W. Norton & Company this month, has its germ in another story
about a secret: A girl Messud knew as a child in Australia, brought up without
knowing the identity of her father, sought him out and confronted him, with
cataclysmic results.
At the heart of the novel is a less sensational yet still unconventional story: that of
two girls learning to make their way in the world, told with all the complication and
unruliness of life, and also with an unspoken argument about what it means to tell a
story like this. As children we experience the raw brute force of our feelings, but in
the formative adolescent years, Messud told me, we learn how to be a person
what it is to be a daughter, what it is to be a friend, what home means, what love
means. We learn these things by observing other people, but also from the stories
that we hear: the books we read, the films we watch, the myths our culture teaches
us. Yet the narratives for girls tend to be dire, she said, with violence at the
forefront. With The Burning Girl, she hoped to write what she calls a childrens
book for grown-ups, a book that acknowledges the inarticulable, even irrational
power of emotion an animal thing beyond understanding. It treats the
interaction between two best friends with the detail and fervor usually reserved for
romantic love.
This brief, almost fable-like novel is a departure for

Her work quietly Messud. After publishing a string of well-received but
seethes at the not commercially successful books, she had a breakout
idea that a hit with The Emperors Children (2006), a darkly
comic saga about bright young media types making their
woman needs to way in Manhattan in the months before and after Sept.
be likable or 11. Her last novel, The Woman Upstairs (2013),
that a man opens with a soliloquy of rage declaimed by a middle-
aged teacher named Nora who develops a friendship
should be the with an artist that turns into a disorienting obsession.
judge of her How angry am I? You dont want to know, she blasts.
likability. What shes most angry about, it turns out, are her own
unfulfilled dreams of artistic genius, and the social
strictures that pressure her to swallow them and behave herself. As a woman
upstairs a play on the 19th-century trope of the madwoman in the attic, often
interpreted as a symbol of patriarchal repression she has become the quiet
woman at the end of the third-floor hallway ... completely invisible, whom you
barely notice, except to nod to. It was supposed to say Great Artist on my
tombstone, but if I died right now it would say such a good teacher/daughter/friend
instead; and what I really want to shout, and want in big letters on that grave, too, is
[EXPLETIVE] YOU ALL, Nora says.
Dont underestimate the woman upstairs, the novel warns. Its a warning that could
apply also to Messud, who at 50 is soft-spoken to the point of whispering, with a
highlighted brown bob and an unassuming demeanor that only hints at the
remarkable intelligence, wit and depth of her writing. Though The Woman
Upstairs and The Emperors Children were of a rare breed literary novels that
made the best-seller list Messuds books have tended to attract less critical
attention than others with that distinction, like those of Jonathan Franzen, Jennifer
Egan, Donna Tartt or Colson Whitehead. The reason for this, perhaps, is her
preoccupation with precisely the stories that tend to be most invisible those of
unorthodox women and their relationships with one another, as daughters, sisters,
best friends. Long before the recent success of Elena Ferrantes Neapolitan tetralogy,
which tells of the complex, often vexed, lifelong friendship between two women,
Messud was narrating these stories with an unusual intensity and quietly making a
case for womens interiority as a subject worthy of the most serious examination. As
Nora puts it, the question is how to work it, how to use that invisibility, to make it
burn.
My mother assures me that it happens to everyone, sooner or later, for reasons

more or less identifiable; everyone loses a best friend at some point, says Julia
Robinson in The Burning Girl. Always inseparable, she and Cassie Burns spend
much of the summer before seventh grade alone in the woods together, secretly
exploring an abandoned womens asylum a physical reminder of stories untold
and repressed. When they start school again, something changes. All those years
wed been friends, since forever, wed used the same words and perhaps meant
different things ... and wed never known it. As if Id been holding an apple and
thinking it was a tennis ball, all this time. Cassie starts dressing differently, hiding
her new clothes in her locker so that her mother wont see them. She takes up with a
new group of friends, including the boy Julia has a crush on. Their relationship
dwindles to text-message exchanges. But when Cassie goes missing, Julia is uniquely
able to tap into their shared history to intuit where she might have gone.
For Messud, the unraveling of a friendship happened around the same age, not long
after her family moved to Toronto after five years in Sydney, Australia. Im not
talking to you, a close friend told her one day. Why? Messud asked. You know
why, the girl replied.
It was the weirdest gaslighting experience, Messud says now. Four decades later,
she still remembers the girls name. Then she saw it happen, in almost the same way,
to her daughter, Livia. The family had spent a year in Berlin, where Messud was a
fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study and her husband, the New Yorker critic
James Wood, was at the American Academy. At a speaking event earlier this
summer, Messud recalled that when they went back to Cambridge, Livia expected to
pick up where she left off with her best friend since nursery school. Messud walked
her to school and left her on the playground, approaching a closed circle of giggling
girls, while she took her son, Lucian, two years younger, to his classroom. When I
came back five minutes later, Livia was still standing outside the circle. They hadnt
opened up to let her in.
The ending of a friendship, Messud believes, is a nearly universal rite of passage.

Theres this moment, she said, when kids realize that they have power and that
they can use it. Slipping into another voice again, she compares it to having a
Harry Potter wand. Oh, look, I vanished the jug! Oh, look, I broke someones
heart! By depicting such a rift as a normal part of growing up, Messud offers an
alternative to the shame attached to it. It would just be like, Oh, its time for that
now. I got my period, I got spots, and then this. O.K. Lets keep going.
Losing a friend may have been particularly difficult for Messud, whose childhood
was unusually unrooted. Her French father and Canadian mother were living briefly
in Connecticut when she was born, making her the only American in the family. (Her
sister, less than two years older, was born in France.) Moving across the world twice
from Connecticut to Sydney, then Sydney to Toronto left her in a continual
state of culture shock. Her all-girls elementary school in Sydney required a formal
uniform, complete with a crested gray blazer, socks with garters and a hat: straw for
summer, felt for winter. If you did a cartwheel and you werent wearing the uniform
underwear, you were taken in to be rapped over the knuckles, she remembered. At
her new school in Toronto, if a teacher was absent, kids would pull down the blinds
and turn off the lights and play spin the bottle. Her mother wouldnt let her wear
pants to school, so, like Cassie, she kept a second outfit in her locker to change into.
Not entirely French, Canadian or American, Messud grew up feeling like some not-
quite-adequate combination of the three. Youre only ever understood in parts, she
said. Im a different person in French. Im a different person in New York. Im a
different person in Canada. Her conversation is sprinkled with French expressions,
impeccably pronounced. When reaching for a literary example, shes as likely to call
upon Proust as Chekhov. Still, as a child, her French wasnt good enough for her
Toulon relatives; her grandfather corrected her letters in red ink and returned them to
her.
But she didnt feel American either. At Milton Academy outside Boston, where she
attended high school, the preppy New England culture summers in Nantucket,
clothes from Lilly Pulitzer, the upper-class social ritual known as cotillion was
utterly foreign to her. She learned how to appear to fit, but she still felt like an
outsider. It doesnt go very deep, she said.
Back at home, her mother had experienced a setback. While the family was living in
Australia, Margaret Messud decided to go to law school. At the same time, unhappy
and isolated in Sydney, she pressed her husband to apply for a transfer to Canada, so
she could be closer to her family. It came through just as she was finishing her last
semester of coursework and she was told at the time that none of it would be
accepted in Canada. Undeterred, she began again in Toronto. But her husbands new
job required him to commute to New York for the entire workweek; he came home
only on weekends, time she needed for her studies. That became very difficult and
untenable, and finally my father said: You have to choose the law school or the
family, Messud said.
Margaret chose the family. She and her husband moved together to Connecticut,
sending their daughters to boarding school to spare them any further uprooting. She
became, Messud said, the lady who volunteered at the library. She gardened; she
had a vast collection of cookbooks; she kept house immaculately. The only sign of
her disappointment was her reaction to any mention of law school. Her mouth
would be a totally thin line, and she would leave the room. Years later, suffering
from dementia, she uttered a sentence her daughter would immortalize, in slightly
different form, in The Woman Upstairs: Theres so much of life to get through
after you realize that none of your dreams will come true.
I did not have a sense that it was all going to be fine,

There should be Messud said, brushing a stray piece of hair from her
no shame in forehead. Her eyebrows, which seem to rise higher and
anger. There furrow more deeply than most peoples, were in

furrowed mode. We were talking about the second wave
should be no of feminism: what it meant to our mothers, and to
shame in love. ourselves, when we were growing up. My own mother,
There should be 14 years younger than Messuds, did graduate from law
school, as one of only a handful of women in her class.
no shame in She raised me to believe that things would be different
wanting things. for my generation, and I believed it. But when I had my
first child, I told Messud, I was surprised and chagrined
by the social pressure to put motherhood at the center of my identity.
Messud, too, confessed dismay at the encroachment of day-to-day demands on

intellectual life. Sometimes I think about all the hours spent making lunches, carting
kids from one place to another, being up in the middle of the night taking
temperatures, she said. She gestured up at her bookshelf. People who havent had
to do that have, say, read every last book up there from cover to cover and probably
remember it. There are trade-offs. But more life is more life. And if youre in the
business of life Her voice trailed off.
I had a sense that the costs were high, she said later. And I had a sense that I
didnt want that to be my fate. I had a sense that Id better not learn to cook, which I
never did. And I had a sense that you have to be ruthless in some way. She writes in
longhand, using a felt-tip pen and a Rhodia notebook, a practice that gives her
maximum flexibility: the fewer requirements, the better. And she chose her partner
someone who was raised with the expectation that fathers share in child care and
housework, and who, as she puts it, would do never less than 50 percent with
what she calls very careful subconscious Darwinian selection.
Claire Messud and James Wood in 1988. Photograph from Claire Messud
The gray-shingled Victorian where Messud and Wood live with their children brings
to mind Julias description of her familys house in The Burning Girl: not fancy,
just old. The dining table jostles for space with the sideboard an immense
mahogany desk with lions heads for drawer pulls. Like much of the furniture and
rugs, its an inheritance from Messuds parents, who acquired it in Australia and
shipped it across the world. Picture New South Wales in 1820, she said. Whoa!
Somebody carried that on a ship across the ocean to get it there in order to try to
recreate some version of English life, some semblance of something that was familiar
to them, and laid out upon it roasts and boiled vegetables in a land with brown snakes
and tarantulas and macaws and cockatoos. It was a novel in miniature.
Dinner was roast chicken with aioli, gnocchi with pesto, salad and sorbet, all
prepared by Wood. (Messud did the clearing up afterward.) He was in his last year of
undergraduate study at Jesus College, Cambridge, when Messud, just out of Yale,
arrived on a postgraduate program. A mutual friend told him to make her feel
welcome. When he knocked on her door and introduced himself, Messud
announced that the next day was her 21st birthday.
So he disappeared and brought back a bottle of wine and another American,

Messud said, laughing. They talk with the candid banter of a long-married couple
one offers a detail, the other jumps in to correct or elaborate upon it.
I have no idea where I got the other American from, Wood said. Balding, with
narrow features, he speaks with a perfectly calibrated British accent. Messud has
picked up some of his inflections pronouncing literary as LIT-tree as well
as the British tendency toward humorous understatement.
She lived upstairs.
They debated the details for a moment, then Wood continued. We had a small party.
So thats how we met. And in a couple weeks we were going out. He looked
sheepish and pleased. Pretty quick.
He had a great shock of hair, Messud recalled the next morning, when I asked
what drew her to Wood. He had a pair of pants that he wore all the time that had a
huge ink stain in the back pocket because a pen had exploded there. He loved
poetry, she said with a dreamy look. He loved Robert Lowell, and Randall Jarrell,
and Bellow, she continued softly. He loved all these American writers, and I think
he thought, Oh, Im meeting an American. She laughed. I wasnt really the
emissary that he perhaps imagined.
In 1989, after her two years at Cambridge ended, Messud decided to pursue an
M.F.A. at Syracuse, which she realized almost at once was a mistake. All the other
students were older already married and sometimes getting divorced and
obsessed with American writers she hadnt read yet: Charles Baxter, Leonard
Michaels, Ann Beattie. Her literary taste ran more to the experimental women her
mother, an avid reader, had raised her on: Katherine Mansfield, Djuna Barnes,
Elizabeth Bowen, Jean Rhys. I made no sense to them, she said. Her apartment
was in a dangerous part of town she called rapist heaven, surrounded by parking
lots and highway overpasses. With no way to get to the supermarket she asked a
fellow student with a car if he would drive her there occasionally, and he refused
she bought her food at a 7-Eleven. Her solace was writing long letters to Wood, who
was working as a freelance journalist in London, and listening to music on her
cassette player. I was a little bit sad, she says now. Messud wrote half of her first
novel a story about two unmarried sisters and their elderly mother then
dropped out to join Wood in London. They were married in 1992.
When the World Was Steady, the novel she began at Syracuse, appeared in the
United States in 1995, followed by The Last Life (1999), the story of a pied-noir
family who run a hotel on the French Riviera, and The Hunters (2001), a pair of
novellas. Each book was respectfully but not rapturously received. A writer for The
Independent loved Messuds style in her debut One is made to feel every sadistic
raindrop, taste every rubbery fried egg but found the characters dull. Several
critics assumed, incorrectly, that The Last Life was autobiographical, one going so
far as to call it a faux-memoir. Writing about The Hunters, a reviewer for The
Guardian suggested that the impatient reader should avoid Messud at all costs a
backhanded compliment to her intricate style.
Messud frowned when asked if she ever tried to make her work more commercial. I
reckon you dont write to please other people, she said, slowly and deliberately.
Thats what your integrity is. Her voice was husky; we had been talking all
morning, as the dogs pattered in and out. There are bell bottoms and miniskirts, and
there are pencil skirts and stiletto heels, she said. Fashions come and go in literature,
too. You can write something thats a perfect work of art, but if its a pencil skirt
that falls in a miniskirt moment, God help you. You just have to make your pencil
skirt and be you.
Tooling around Cambridge in her cream-colored Mini, Messud insisted on

acknowledging her own good fortune supportive spouse, healthy children, stable
finances. But it was clear that she also feels regret for the sacrifices of her mothers
generation, as well as a fierce pride in having managed to get her work done while
remaining present in her childrens lives. She wrote The Emperors Children after
the arrival of Livia, who was born in the summer of 2001. Before, you had a room
and silence and hours, she said. Now you have a short space of time that somehow
has to be divided between writing and thinking. Because when that times over,
theres no time to think! She joked about being able to write anywhere nobody
makes any demands, right? Where nobody wants me to drive them anywhere, give
them money, wash their clothes. She is currently in the midst of a home renovation
that will give her an office with a door that closes a luxury she has never had. In
the meantime, she usually works at the dining table or in the den, using a lap desk
bought years ago from the Levenger catalog. You get the pad, you get the pen, you
get the [expletive] on with it, she said.
At moments like these, she sounds like Nora in The Woman Upstairs. If Messud is
angry about something, its the social constructs that work against womens ambition
and desire, rendering them invisible or even snuffing them out. Women arent
supposed to want stuff, she said. Theyre not supposed to have high emotions.
Recently she went to a party where all the women were skinny and all the men were
overweight. For the men, its perfectly acceptable to be a person of appetites, she
said. Youre in midlife, youre at the peak of your professional moment. Again,
she slipped into character. Pour me a glass of wine and give me a steak! The
women, by contrast, were nibbling crackers and drinking seltzer. There should be
no shame in appetite, she said, her voice rising. There should be no shame in
anger. There should be no shame in love. There should be no shame in wanting
things.
The books that Messud is most drawn to are those articulating anger and desire:
Dostoyevskys Notes From the Underground, Philip Roths Sabbaths Theater,
just about anything by the bilious Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard. Rage at life
and rage for life are very closely linked. To be angry, you have to give a [expletive],
she said in an interview with Publishers Weekly several years ago. Yet all these
books, as Messud was quick to observe, are by and about men. If its unseemly and
possibly dangerous for a man to be angry, she said, its totally unacceptable for a
woman to be angry.
The literary taboo on women with unseemly emotions is just part of a problem
female writers and readers have long been articulating: a male-dominated literary
canon offering a restricted vision of womens possibilities. Nearly 90 years ago, in
A Room of Ones Own, Virginia Woolf lamented that women in fiction, almost
without exception, were shown in relation to men: And how small a part of a
womans life is that. Even when women were shown in relation to one another,
Woolf wrote, the depiction was invariably too simple, with too much left out,
unattempted.
The incredible success of Elena Ferrantes Neapolitan novels, which have been
greeted by her fans with the kind of rush-to-the-bookstore avidity usually reserved
for writers like J.K. Rowling, speaks to a hunger among readers who continue to
crave depictions of women as real, as flawed, as people who cant be constrained by
a predetermined narrative. We were starved for this as a literary subject, and we
didnt even know it, says the novelist Elliott Holt, who studied with Messud at the
Kenyon Review Writers Workshop in 2003. Ferrantes novels explore the lifelong
relationship between Elena and Lila, two women who grew up in a Naples slum and
followed divergent trajectories, whose friendship is complex in just the way Woolf
might have wanted. Theyre notable not just because they portray the friendship
between two women in detail, but because they do so on an epic scale, in a four-book
series that amounts to more than 1,600 pages in English translation. The women are
alternately supportive and competitive, particularly when their individual ambitions
place them in each others way. Their relationship isnt primarily nurturing or
caretaking; its fierce and untrammeled. Theyre more than capable of evoking the
full range of emotions.
Ferrantes work has reopened a conversation around a fiction of complicated women,

but Messud has been quietly answering Woolfs call for years. The relationships she
focuses on are almost exclusively between women, depicted intimately and intensely:
Danielle and Marina, the uncomfortably competitive best friends in The Emperors
Children; Nora and Sirena, the glamorous artist with whom she becomes obsessed,
in The Woman Upstairs. Her protagonists, unusually for women in fiction, tend
not to be wives or mothers. More often theyre figures who might be considered
unpalatable, unattractive or indeed angry. Her work quietly seethes at the idea
that a woman needs to be likable or that a man should be the judge of her
likability. More than that, it offers a space for women to be, as she puts it,
appetitive: to love inappropriately, to be ambitious, to simply want more.
It also offers a way out for women whose lives are circumscribed. Sometimes,
Messud believes, they manage to find ways to get what they want. Nora does it in
The Woman Upstairs, inserting herself into the life of the family she adores.
Cassie does it in The Burning Girl, creating a father figure based on the slightest
clues an old photograph, an address found on the web. Messud speaks with
admiration of Woods mother, a schoolteacher who came from a perfectly nice
middle-class family in Essex. At an early age, she heard about Eton College, the
upper-crust English boarding school, and decided that one day she would send her
sons there. When the time came, she sold the pictures off her wall, sold the silver out
of her drawers, double-mortgaged her house and took a weekend job. Both of her
sons went to Eton. Incredible force of will, Messud said. Almost magical.
On a shelf in the den, tucked between a selection of Martin Luthers writings and a
British anthology of fairy tales, Messud keeps a book of stories by Eleanor Farjeon
that she loved as a child. Her favorite, Elsie Piddock Skips in Her Sleep I
cannot read it without crying, she warned as she began to recount the story from
memory is about a little girl in a rural part of England who can skip rope longer
than anyone else and never get tired. Just look at little Elsie Piddock skipping as
never so! the other children cry. Word of her talents makes its way to the fairies,
who are themselves very gifted at skipping rope. Their skipping master invites her to
join them on the top of Mount Caburn every month for a year, at the new moon, for
lessons. When the year is up, the fairy skipping master gives her a magic skipping
rope. As long as you are little enough to skip with this rope, you shall skip as I have
taught you, he tells her.
Elsie grows up and gives up skipping. Nobody remembers her special gift. She
becomes a woman upstairs: elderly, alone, invisible. Then a rich man buys an estate
near her village and closes off the footpaths, denying the villagers their traditional
rights of way. He even threatens to block them from the top of Mount Caburn, where
the children still gather at each new moon for a skipping contest. Elsie learns about
the trouble from a girl she finds crying in the woods. In a voice that might have
been the voice of a withered leaf, it was so light and dry, she says the villagers must
make the rich man promise to let everyone who ever skipped on Mount Caburn skip
once more, by turns, at the new moon. When the last skipper skips the last skip, he
may lay his first brick, Elsie says. The man, thinking it is a joke, agrees.
As Messud got to this part of the story, her eyes filled with tears. They all take
turns, from the youngest to the oldest, she said. The youngest skip a long time, and
then the mamas cant really skip much, and its almost all over. Finally Elsie
appears, so bent and fragile that she looks like a little girl. Shes shrunk to her child
size so she can use her magic rope, Messud explained, her voice breaking. Elsie
Piddock! the crowd whispers. I thought Elsie Piddock was just a tale! a little girl
says to her mother. The rich man has never heard of her. One more bump for an old
womans bones! he jeers. Skip, Elsie Piddock, and show us what youre worth.
Elsie skips all night long and through the next day. When I skip my last skip, you
shall lay your first brick, she reminds the rich man.
Messud wiped her eyes and whispered: Shes still skipping.

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Whos Afraid of Claire Messud?

- The New York Times 11/5/17, 9:22 PM

Whos Afraid of Claire Messud?

Claire Messud Irina Rozovsky for The New York Times

This brief, almost fable-like novel is a departure for

My mother assures me that it happens to everyone, sooner or later, for reasons

The ending of a friendship, Messud believes, is a nearly universal rite of passage.

I did not have a sense that it was all going to be fine,

anger. There furrow more deeply than most peoples, were in

Messud, too, confessed dismay at the encroachment of day-to-day demands on

So he disappeared and brought back a bottle of wine and another American,

She lived upstairs.

Tooling around Cambridge in her cream-colored Mini, Messud insisted on

Ferrantes work has reopened a conversation around a fiction of complicated women,

Messud wiped her eyes and whispered: Shes still skipping.

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