Danielle Teller is the author of the new novel All the Ever Afters, which tells the Cinderella story from the stepmother's perspective. She has written the nonfiction book Sacred Cows: The Truth About Divorce and Marriage, and has written columns for Quartz. She has a medical degree and has taught at Harvard University and the University of Pittsburgh. She lives in Palo Alto, California.
Q: How did you come up with the idea of
retelling Cinderella from her stepmother's perspective?
A: When I became a stepmother, I was surprised
by how difficult it was to get comfortable in that role. My stepkids and I had
to slowly build trust and affection over time.
At first, they chafed under my parental rules
and mourned the loss of freewheeling weekends with their dad. I felt as though
my stepchildren didn’t want me around except to fulfill their various physical
needs; I joked that I was a “ghost-servant.”
I worried that no matter what I did, my
stepchildren would never see me as a net positive in their lives, and that got
me thinking about the bad reputation of stepmothers in fairy tales.
What if those stories were inspired by real
people who weren’t evil but struggling in a fraught relationship with other
imperfect human beings? From that thought, the character of Agnes was born.
Q: What did you see as the right balance between
your version of Agnes's story and the traditional version told from Cinderella's
perspective?
A: The traditional fairy tale is morally
unambiguous. We know which characters to root for and which ones to revile, and
we can feel happily satisfied when Cinderella marries the prince and birds
pluck out the eyes of the ugly stepsisters. This simplicity is comforting and
fun, and, like many people, I treasure the versions of Cinderella I read as a
child.
At the beginning of All the Ever Afters, the
“evil” stepmother says that she will tell her own story and, “As for fables
about good and evil and songs about glass slippers, I shall leave those to the
minstrels.”
The implication is that the familiar fairy tale
was inspired by true events, and Agnes’s memoir describes those events with the
murky moral ambiguity of real life. The fairy tale and novel live side-by-side,
not in opposition; my writing was inspired by Cinderella, and in my fictional
universe, Cinderella was inspired by the lives of Agnes and her beautiful
stepdaughter.
Q: The book is set in medieval England. What
type of research did you do to write the novel, and did you learn anything that
especially surprised you?
A: I began by reading books about life in
medieval villages and castles, as well as an autobiography by Margery Kempe, a
14th-15th century English Christian mystic. The internet was extremely helpful;
I took virtual tours of medieval manors on YouTube and read blogs by fanatical
hobbyists who brew beer and cook food using strictly medieval methods.
What surprised me most was how little we know
about the daily lives of the lower classes; there are virtually no written
records other than legal disputes and the reckonings of tax assessors. Most of
what we know about the lives of impoverished children comes from the
examination of bones in graveyards.
Before I started my research, I worried about
getting historical details wrong; I was comforted to realize that it’s
guesswork even for historians!
Q: What do you think the book says about the
role of the "wicked stepmother" in fiction?
A: We read many stories from the perspectives of
stepchildren, and doubtless it can be frightening and problematic for an
unknown and often unwelcome adult to enter into a child’s life.
Power is not evenly distributed in the
stepparent-stepchild relationship, and our sympathies lean naturally toward the
weaker party. If we hear about a child’s miseries, our tendency is to vilify
the oppressor, not to wonder if there are mitigating circumstances, or if the
child might be misinterpreting events.
Yet there is another side to the story. There
are myriad reasons why a child may be unhappy with a parent or stepparent, and
not all of those add up to the adult being evil. All the Ever Afters is about
looking beyond simplistic explanations and trying to understand the human being
behind the evil stepmother trope.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: The novel I’m working on now is set in
Toronto during the massive failure of the electrical grid in the summer of
2003. The book was inspired by the poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, in
which the narrator despairs that he lacks the courage to change the course of
his comfortable life.
The “Prufrock” character in the novel is a woman
in her 60s who is preparing to celebrate her mother’s 90th birthday; her
daughter-in-law has just abandoned her husband to be with another woman.
The story traces the parallel and then diverging
paths of the two women’s lives until they each have an epiphany during the
blackout and come together again for the 90th birthday party.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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