Sheila Kohler was born in Johannesburg, South Africa. She is the author of a memoir, Once We Were Sisters and fourteen works of fiction including the novels Dreaming for Freud, Becoming Jane Eyre, and Cracks, which was nominated for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and made into a film starring Eva Green. Her work has been featured in the New York Times and O Magazine and included in the Best American Short Stories. She has twice won an O. Henry Prize, as well as an Open Fiction Award, a Willa Cather Prize, and a Smart Family Foundation Prize. She teaches at Princeton University and lives in New York City.
Her latest novel is Open Secrets, in which the lies between a husband and wife are revealed, unraveling their family in a story that moves between the French Riviera, Switzerland, and Amagansett. When Michel, a Swiss banker, discovers his wife Alice's betrayal he turns for help to a Russian client who leads him into unknown territory, endangering not only his own life but that of Alice, and above all, his fourteen-year-old daughter, Pamela. Their charmed life—a beautiful house on the French Riviera, elegant vacations, and boarding school in Switzerland for Pamela—is not all that it seems. As the repercussions of Michel's illicit deals move closer in around them, Alice finds herself in Amagansett with her artist sister who is having a crisis of her own, while the danger circles around Pamela. Open Secrets is a suspenseful novel about relationships, family, love and the inescapable consequences of one's own actions.
Sheila stops by In Reference to Murder to take some Author R&R about researching and writing the book:
On research and writing
All fiction attempts to portray life in a believable way whether it is science fiction, magic realism, or historical fiction. The reader needs to suspend disbelief to be interested by the story. This verisimilitude often comes with the authority of the voice. There are writers who manage to make us believe even the most extraordinary of events and others whose voice does not ring true. I have often had students who protest that something really happened but on the page render this event unbelievable. How, then, to make something believable?
When I was writing my first historical novel, The Children of Pithiviers, much of which takes place in Vichy France in the early 40's, I had some advice from my fellow countryman and Nobel prize winner: John Coetzee. He told me, "Don't stay too close to the facts." Certainly it is a more difficult task to blatantly alter historical facts. Research gives us the necessary confidence and the sort of precise detail that enables us to create a believable world, a world which rings true on the page. Even Don Quixote in his maddest moments renders his imaginary knights with marvelously real detail.
With my latest book, Open Secrets, I spoke to bankers, I read accounts of banks and banking systems in various parts of the world; I had also first hand dealings with Swiss banks through my sister whose money was stolen from a joint account in a Swiss bank with a numbered account by her husband, yet in the writing of the book, I found it necessary to take some distance from all of these "facts." I had to shut up the books and let the story come to me on the page through the characters who may have originated to some extent in my life but took on a life of their own. The story one is telling has its own truth which we need to discover in the process of writing it, or so it seems to me.
You can learn more about Sheila Kohler and Open Secrets via her website and follow her on Facebook and Twitter. She also has a live online Q&A with Sheridan Hay via the Center for Fiction in New York coming up on July 14. Open Secrets is available this week via all major book retailers.
No comments:
Post a Comment