Pamela Erens is the author of the new novel Eleven Hours. She also has written the novels The Virgins and The Understory. Her work has appeared in a variety of publications, including The New York Times and Vogue.
Q: How did you come up with
the idea for Eleven Hours, and for your characters Lore and Franckline?
A: I was reading Tinkers, the
novel by Paul Harding. I remember I was in a hotel room in Boston. Tinkers
opens with an elderly man in bed at home, close to death, hallucinating. We see
things in part through his point of view.
Later passages of this slim
novel take us to other places and times, including ones the man couldn’t have
witnessed, but in some essential way the entire book takes place in the man's
head while he is dying.
I suddenly thought: What if I
wrote a book that took place entirely over the course of one labor and
delivery?
The character of Lore was
there from the start. I always saw her, for some reason, as a physically large
person. In early attempts, she had a mother who had abandoned her. And she had
a husband who was with her in the hospital.
Over time I realized it would
be a more interesting and urgent story if Lore was alone. Maybe the mother who
abandoned her was a hint, early on, that abandonment was central to Lore’s
story. So in the final version, she is by herself, but the relationship with
her mother is completely different.
Once I took the husband out,
took out any companion to Lore, her labor nurse necessarily had to have a
bigger role. Someone had to being helping Lore through this. So Franckline
began to emerge.
I had given birth to my first
child in a New York City hospital, and a lot of the nurses there were from the
Caribbean. So Lore’s nurse would be Caribbean.
The town I live in has a
large Haitian population, and my husband and I are close to a Haitian family
here. So I had more knowledge of and interest in Haitian culture than in the
culture of any of the other islands, and Franckline became Haitian-born. Sometimes
these decisions are just very happenstance and pragmatic.
Q: What kind of research did
you do to write the novel?
A: Because of Franckline, I
did a lot of research on Haiti, where I’ve never been, and I also did research
on labor wards and childbirth-related medical procedures as well. I went
through childbirth twice but there was of course plenty I didn’t know.
Q: Were there particular
challenges involved in writing a novel that takes place over the course of
11 hours?
A: Absolutely. The clock was
tricky. I had to be very aware of exactly what time it was in every scene, even
though the narrative rarely pins this down precisely.
I was alert to the
possibility that the reader would feel that too much or too little time seemed
to have gone by for X or Y to be happening, that it felt too early for this or
too late for that.
The clock had to feel right
at all times, and making that happen is a matter of sleight-of-hand. Sometimes
I have two hours passing in a paragraph, sometimes a few minutes take up many
pages.
The other challenge, given
how short the book is, was to make sure it feels as if enough happens. So that
readers leave with the sensation of having in fact read a novel, not an
elongated short story or a slice of life.
Q: Did you know how the book
would end before you started writing, or did you make many changes as you went
along?
A: I did know how the book
would end. I didn’t know all the details, but I had the general plan. I usually
do write toward an ending I have in mind.
Q: What are you working on
now?
A: I’m working on a new
novel. It’s very much in the beginning stages. I have the idea, and I have some
pages written, but I also (what’s new?) have some conceptual problems to solve,
some characters to figure out.
I also have some ideas
sketched out for essays I’d like to write, all of them circling around a
connecting theme.
Q: Anything else we should
know?
A: That I’d like to see more
authors, women and men both, writing about childbirth! There’s insanely little
out there. I know; I've looked into it. I’ve written about this absence, in fact, and tried to speculate about why it’s so.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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