Carol Shields Interview (page: 3 / 6) Pulitzer Prize for Fiction	Print Interview

What about yourself as a reader? When you were growing up, what books meant a lot to you?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Carol Shields: My life as a reader is very tightly bound up with my life as a writer. Sometimes I just can't pull them apart at all. And unlike some writers, who don't read while they're in the act of writing, I'm always reading. I always have to have print coming in to me. I read all over the place as a child, and I don't think I read a lot of the books I should have read. I don't know why my mother didn't get better books for us. I missed Alice in Wonderland, for example. She read The Bobbsey Twins to us, sort of trash stuff, but I loved them. And I should say I loved Dick and Jane too, especially Jane with her nice, clean white socks. I thought she was such a nice little girl. I didn't quite believe, perhaps, in the perfection of her life, but it wasn't that far from my own life. And Dick, what a wonderful big brother he was. So those books were, you know, I read a lot into them I think. One of the first books, when I was allowed into the adult section of the library -- and I had to be careful because the librarian knew my mother, so it wasn't as easy as you might think -- was a book called A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. I read it at 13. It was a sensational book in those days. Well after that, I never went back to the kids' section. I was reading adult novels. I remember what a surprise it was to come upon Willa Cather, and I think I just came upon her without knowing who she was and what she represented. But I thought, "Good heavens! This is a woman's voice," and it's a strong voice, and I remember being surprised. And I did read Jane Austen as a teenager. I read those books as love stories and not much else. That was all they were to me then. Now I've become a Jane Austen scholar, and it was only in my 50s that I realized how funny those books were. I had no appreciation of that. But I always try to get back to the way I read as a teenager, because it's the most extraordinary thing that you are actually bound to the books that you read, in the same way teenagers I think are bound to the music they listen to. Somehow you never quite get that back again in all of that pure force.

There's a passion in reading at that age.

Carol Shields: I remember one of my daughters finishing Jane Eyre. She must have been 16. And she had just finished it, and she came breathlessly and said to me, "Are there any more books like this?" and I had to say, "No, there's no other book like that."

What about these days? What do you like to read?

Carol Shields: I read some nonfiction now, oddly enough, but I do read a lot of fiction. Some of the British writers have been very important to me: Iris Murdoch, Muriel Spark, A.S. Byatt, V.S. Naipaul. Even though he's a terrible misogynist, I still think he's a wonderful writer. Martin Amis, for style. I love John Updike, and I always feel I've kind of grown old along with John Updike, not that he knows this. I love his work. There's an American, Jane Hamilton, I think is an interesting writer. By the way, she went to the same high school I did. There's a writer called Laurie Moore that I like very much, and I like her because there aren't a lot of women who write in a -- and she's not a comic writer at all. I don't want to say that, but she has a comic sense. It's rather a dark sense, but I think she's quite an extraordinary writer. I like Anne Tyler. I've just read her latest book and reviewed it, and I think she's often not treated as seriously as I think she should be.

You've mentioned Updike in other interviews, that you're attracted to the fact that he writes about domestic life. He once said that he felt like he was getting away with murder when his first book was published. I guess nobody's perfect

Carol Shields: You know, nobody is. I suppose out of every hour each of us suffers a moment of losing it all, of sort of knowing who we are and what we can do, what we're allowed to do.

What about self-doubts? Did you ever feel frustrated enough to want to just stop?

Carol Shields: No. I think I never did. I mean, some of my books have not been as well received as others. Of course, a creative life doesn't work quite as simply as some people think, where you always are topping yourself with each book and then you, at the end, you write the masterpiece. It doesn't. Often you write the masterpiece somewhere, you know, at the beginning or in the middle or somewhere else, and the books are all over the place because they are coming out of where you are at that time in your life. So I suppose there are times when you are happier with your writing than with other times where you seem to be reaching further, maybe repeating yourself. All writers worry about those kinds of things.

You've said that when you first switched to a computer you began to write too much. Can you talk about that?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Carol Shields: Yes. I switched to a computer rather later than most writers, in the late '80s, and I was in the middle of a book called The Republic of Love, and the first section, the first half is quite economically written. The second half, where I had got my beautiful little Macintosh was suddenly bloated, and anyone who has gone into a word processor knows how easy this is. This happens. You just throw in another clause, and while you're at it, why not another paragraph or another page. So I had a very tactful editor in New York, and she actually took out from the second half of the book 125 pages, which is a lot. And I had never had, I had never been edited in that way before, but it was absolutely necessary.

You weren't offended by that?

Carol Shields: Oh, no. I think writers should never stop demanding rigorous editing, and I was -- and she did it beautifully, with such tact. She just closed off the little sections she took out, so I didn't have to do it. I think it would have been very hard for me to do it, but it was absolutely necessary, major surgery.

Have there been some difficult times that really did make you question yourself along the way?

Carol Shields: Sure, there have been difficult times.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. When my first two novels -- even the first four novels -- were published, they were reviewed very much as "women's books," "domestic novels," as though we don't all have a domestic life. I think the secret is out, we all do. I think probably they were marginalized somewhat. Now, did I mind? Probably not a great deal. I always had a sense of where things really -- where important centers were located. I suppose I also realized this is the only kind of novel that I can write. I wrote a novel called Swann in 1987, which is very much a departure from those first four novels in every way, in form, style, in a kind of a -- with a post-modern ornamentation. I was very fearful about the reception of that novel, that some people would say, "Why doesn't she write the way she used to write?" At the same time, I had an exhilarating sense that the novel could be opened up, that it was a much more expansive, elastic form than I had previously thought, and that I could do anything with this novel. I could even have, as my final section of that novel, a film script. Now I have to say my publishers were -- they tried very hard to dissuade me from these more eccentric parts of the novel. But for some reason, and maybe this is because it was a fifth novel, I felt I could insist on doing it the way I wanted to do it. But I was frightened.

[ Key to Success ] Courage

When it was published, how did you feel about it? Did you feel you had made the right decisions?

Carol Shields: Absolutely, yes. I made the right decision there.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I felt inordinately brave at that time in my life; I have no idea why. But I guess I felt I could set my own limits. People are always talking about "the novel is dead," and I think what they're really saying is the old novel form, as we once knew it, is dead, and we have to make these new forms or we have to usurp those older forms. And Swann is a kind of usurping of the detective novel, sort of bringing a torque to those old forms that we grew up with, the way we used to diagram it on the blackboard, that line of ascending action and then you would have the climax, and the denouement. There was one day when I was drawing that diagram on the blackboard, and it looked to me like nothing more than a bad coat hanger, and it was no more use to me anymore. And I abandoned that as a structure for the novels that I wanted to write.

[ Key to Success ] Vision

It took a lot of guts to do that.

Carol Shields: Well, sort of stupid guts. I wasn't quite sure of where I was going, but I knew that that wasn't going to be the kind of novel that I could write again.

Carol Shields Interview, Page: 1   2   3   4   5   6