Q&A with Janet Burroway

 

Photo by Maia Rosenfeld

 

 

Janet Burroway is the author of the new novel Simone in Pieces. Her other books include Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft. She is a distinguished professor emerita at Florida State University at Tallahassee. 

 

Q: What inspired you to write Simone in Pieces, and how did you create your character Simone Lerrante?

 

A: Longer ago than I like to admit, I decided to write an academic short story satire. It was funny and sour, the narrator a very old acerbic assistant professor who has seen it all.

 

And then the story took a hard turn into her memory of war and grief. I knew it was right; I had been satirizing her as well as the ones she observed, and there was real pain to explore. I realized I had to know her whole story, and when I did, my husband said, “That’s your next novel.”

 

But there were craft books to update, a family tragedy to undergo, a memoir and another novel to write--and Simone’s life, of which I knew the outline and the early days, came to me very gradually, in many voices over many years.

 

Q: How did you research the book, and what did you learn that especially surprised you?

 

A: Early on in this process, I was spending a summer in England, and one day I hopped a train to Liege, Belgium, a city I had only seen once. I knew the Flemish-speaking part of Belgium well, but I spoke French, not Flemish, so Simone was to speak French.

 

I walked the city in her shoes, chose her school and her birthplace and the apartment she and her parents had lived in. I experienced the market, the river walk, the pubs and the antique stores. Many of those images made their way into the book.

 

There was also different kind of “research” than any I have done before: I have been married to two men who were immigrants to America after WWII, one Belgian and one Hungarian. From them I absorbed much about the immigrant experience and the family lore.

 

But what I learned in such a way as to feel it personally came largely from my two mothers-in-law, both of whom were generous with their memories and struggles, the parts of exile from which it is difficult or impossible to recover, the parts that are passed on to children.

 

Q: The writer Rosellen Brown said of the book, “If there were such a thing as a cubist novel, Simone in Pieces would define the genre.” What do you think of that description?

 

A: I like it! I know what she means: the portrait of Simone is not given head-on as in a conventional novel. She feels that she “has no self,” so she only gradually gives her own point of view to the reader.

 

Most of what we know comes from the voices of people she encounters, and whom she may affect, or who may affect her, in ways that the other never knows. So her eyes may be set askew to her nose, so to speak; you construct her in your mind from the pieces/voices.

 

Q: How was the novel’s title chosen, and what does it signify for you?

 

A: This novel went through many names, all still, really, relevant: Montage, And Be One Traveller, Indian Dancer, for a long time Simone in Transit…

 

My excellent editor Dennis Lloyd at Wisconsin Press suggested Simone in Pieces because it both suggests the way the story is constructed and the task that Simone has in creating a self from too few pieces.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: A memoir from my grandparents in 1915 to my grandchildren in the 2020s. It’s called As Far As I Can Tell. I have had an eventful life, and it will be too long to publish!

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: It interests me very much that while the big publishing companies in New York and Boston—the Big Five as they are now known—have over the course of my life been taken over by for-profit corporations, a wealth of literary fiction is still being written and has now found its footing in university and indie presses and in independent bookstores.

 

A “canon” is probably now impossible. Too much is being written in every genre by people of every age, nationality, hue and gender. It may be that the art form of our lives is film, but film does not exist without writing, and writing is being kept alive and well by those of us scribbling away without spending or making millions, or even very much.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb