Q&A with Corinne Demas

 

 

 

 

Corinne Demas is the author of the new novel Daughters. Her many other books include the novel The Road Towards Home. She is a professor emerita at Mount Holyoke College, and she lives in Massachusetts. 

 

Q: What inspired you to write Daughters, and how did you create your characters Delia and Meredith and their family?

 

A: When I thought about the post-novel future of the two central characters, Cassandra and Noah, in my previous novel, The Road Towards Home, I pictured them buying an old farm after they were married. An imagined homestead took shape in my mind, inspired by real places I’d seen.

 

What I discovered, though, was instead of Noah and Cassandra belonging there, a whole new cast of characters began to take residence, and a new story developed from them: Delia, a Suzuki violin teacher on the cusp of retirement; her husband Bob, a retired radiologist; and Delia’s daughter Meredith, who returns back home with her 7-year-old daughter, Eloise, in tow. 

 

Q: The novel is set at a farm in New England--how important is setting to you in your writing?

 

A: The setting of Daughters, with a 200-year-old house and barn, is a character itself in the story and provides a bond between my main characters, Delia and Meredith.

 

“Both house and barn were too old, too big, too run down, and there were too many acres to keep track of,” but even so, Delia “surrendered to its charms” and is determined not to abandon it for something “more age-appropriate.” 

 

Meredith, who was a teenager when her mother and stepfather bought the property, “hadn’t expected to fall in love with the farm, but she had.”  She realizes that “Places can save people. As well as people can. The farm had saved her as a teenager. It could save her now.”

 

Q: How would you describe the dynamic between Delia and Meredith?

 

A: Delia and Meredith clearly love--and need! -- each other, but their relationship is fraught.

 

When Meredith moves back home, old misunderstandings surface, and old patterns from the past reassert themselves, even though Meredith is an adult now. Both of them struggle to figure out their shifting roles of mother and child and how to communicate with each other. 

 

The friction between them is particularly intense because Meredith is trying to parent her own daughter, Eloise, under her mother’s roof. 

 

Although Delia remembers her conflicts with her own mother, she desperately wants to help Meredith and can’t stop herself from interfering.  She realizes that “She’d always felt she knew what was best for her children. She’d confused that with loving them.”  

 

The question now is how can Delia and Meredith manage to live in the same house?

 

Q: What about the dynamic between Eloise and her mother and grandmother?

 

A: Eloise is probably my favorite character in Daughters. As I worked on this novel I found it was tremendously useful to harness her perspective to illuminate the actions of all the other characters.

 

Eloise is the crucial catalyst in the story, and she also provides some humor. She is refreshingly honest and candid, in the way that only children are. She is acutely sensitive to the adults around her and picks up their cues. She knows when “her mother was crying but saying she wasn’t,” and she witnesses the tension between her mother and her grandmother.

 

Her goal is to create a loving, functioning family for herself, and she even takes on the challenge of winning the affection of Bob, Delia’s husband and Meredith’s stepfather.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: I’m still so emotionally involved with the characters in Daughters and would love to write more about their lives. I want to watch Eloise get older, and I want witness Meredith’s relationship with Wylie mature.

 

But I’ve also begun to work on a novel about a different family: four children who are pulled apart as adults when their eccentric mother dies and they jointly inherit the family’s old summer house.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: Thank you so much, Deborah, for interviewing me once again!   

 

I love talking with readers and had great fun being a guest author for book groups that were discussing The Road Towards Home. I’m looking forward to connecting with book groups that read Daughters, either through Zoom meetings or email Q&A’s. (Contact me through my website: www.CorinneDemas.com.)  

 

A discussion guide is available on the Daughters website page, and I’m hoping readers will send me suggestions for lively discussion questions to add.

 

Music plays an important role in Daughters. There’s a link on my website with a playlist, so readers can listen to all the music mentioned, including the Bach sonata that Delia found solace in when her marriage was foundering, the Suzuki music that her students play at their end-of-the-year recital, the gavotte that Meredith played when she was young, the waltz the piano tuner plays, and the violin concerto at the close of the novel.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Corinne Demas.