Q&A with Mary Fleming

 

Photo by William Fleming

 

 

Mary Fleming is the author of the new novel Civilisation Française. Her other books include The Art of Regret. She lives in France.

 

Q : What inspired you to write Civilisation Française, and how did you create your characters Lily and Amenia?

 

A : As always with my fiction, I snatch bits of real life and run with them.

 

Lily’s story was inspired by an English woman I met who as a baby had been placed in a home with her two sisters for several years while the parents were posted abroad. In this woman’s case, she and her twin didn’t even know that the other girl was their older sister until their parents finally picked them up, but that seemed stranger than fiction, so I left out that element.

 

Amenia was inspired by a friend of mine in Paris who grew up on a farm in Montana, but I pushed her back in history, gave her a different story, as I wanted to write about someone who had experienced both wars of the 20th century.

 

I was also interested in flipping the Henry James or Edith Wharton paradigm on its head. Instead of wealthy American meets impoverished European, I wanted to portray a poor American marrying a well-to-do Frenchman. The ranch itself resembles a place I went to as a child in Wyoming.

 

Finally, the all-but-empty house on the place des Vosges was inspired by a real house on the square that was squatted around 2010. I set my story in the early 1980s because there was still a large chunk of the population who had lived through the War, but times were moving on. Since I arrived in France in 1981, I could plunder my memory bank for the details of the Paris I first experienced.

 

Q : How did you research the novel, and did you learn anything that especially surprised you?

 

A : I read a lot about World War II, particularly personal stories and even more particularly stories about Jews during the Occupation, to instruct my characterisation of Germaine. Also just lots of general Paris and French history—Lily is, after all, doing a course in la civilisation française.

 

I learned about squatters’ rights in France, though I already knew from a friend how difficult it is to evict people who are not paying rent.

 

There was an interesting coincidence in the real versus the imagined squat story. Amenia’s reasons for living on the place des Vosges were already written when I learned that the real owner was also a single woman, though she did not live in the house, who had also planned to renovate the space and turn it into apartments.

Q : The writer Laura Furman called the book "a haunting novel about the pull of time past and future, and the courage to live fully one’s life and death.” What do you think of that description?

 

A : Laura Furman’s description gets to the heart of the matter. One of my major themes is how we humans can never shed our past; we carry it on our backs like a turtle’s shell. If it has been problematic, sometimes we can come to terms with it, other times not.

 

In the case of Lily, the year in Paris pulls her forward, away from her unhappy childhood. She gains experience and discovers her passion, as well as learning more about herself—and others. She is young; hope is alive and kicking.

 

The opposite is true of Amenia. Her younger years were of fairy-tale dimensions. Swept off a hardscrabble ranch by a handsome, wealthy Frenchman, she spent the interwar years in a Paris that was the cultural capital of the world.

 

Then History with a capital H intervened and caused misfortunes that she could not overcome. The only option left to her is to choose her ending. I was trying to show both the extent of our free will and its limits.  

 

Q : Did you know how the novel would end before you started writing it, or did you make many changes along the way?

 

A : John Irving has said that he always starts his story with the last sentence. How I wish. I never know the end at the beginning and sometimes it takes a long time indeed to figure it out.

 

When I first started writing, that blank last page could really stress me out. Now I know that for me, the end is a culmination, rather than a starting point.

 

Along the way, I always make lots of changes. Revise, revise, revise. But if that mantra was good enough for Marcel Proust, it’s good enough for me.

 

Q : What are you working on now?

 

A : I’m working on a novel that traces a Paris family over the course of 30 years. The mother is American, the husband Anglo-French. They have three children, and the story is mostly seen through the eyes of the eldest, Alice, who struggles with her cultural identity but ultimately ends up back in Paris. Much of the action takes place in the years leading up to November 2015.

 

Part of my motivation for writing this novel is to show how Paris has changed. People who say the city is old and stuck in the past haven’t been to the vibrant ex-centric arrondissments. Unfortunately, the threat of terrorism also hangs over city life and sometimes strikes with desperately tragic consequences.

 

Every fortnight I continue to publish A Paris-Perche Diary, a chronicle of my French life between city and country punctuated with lots of photos. My dog Tasha is a frequent content provider.

 

Q : Anything else we should know?

 

A : Though this novel takes place 40 years ago, I hope it will strike a chord with today’s readers and people of all ages. It’s no easier in 2024 to be young and trying to stake out your place in the world than it was in 1982. And growing old will always be growing old; Paris will always be Paris.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Mary Fleming.