Q&A with Marianne C. Bohr

  

 

 

Marianne C. Bohr is the author of the new novel When Paris Whispers. Her other books include the memoir The Twenty. She lives in Park City, Utah. 

 

Q: What inspired you to write When Paris Whispers, and how did you create your character Catrine?

 

A: The book was actually conceived on a writing retreat with one of my editors, April Bosshard, and 10 other writers in 2019. My husband and I had just visited all the places in the book, including the Montparnasse Cemetery in Paris where I saw an old woman sitting on a bench, and a story began to percolate.

 

I continued writing into the pandemic in 2020, when so many of us were sitting still and thinking about the places that had shaped us.

 

Paris has been that place for me since my postgraduate year in the Loire Valley, and I found myself circling back to 1981 and a Paris just before all the modern technology arrived, still lit by its literary ghosts.

 

Catrine grew out of a simple question: what if a lonely young woman arriving in Paris could actually hear the voices of the writers she'd studied, who'd walked those same streets, and they became her spiritual guides?

 

It became a way for me to explore Catrine's displacement, grief, and self-discovery all at once, filtered through a device that let the city itself become a kind of character.

 

Q: The novel is set in Paris — how important is setting to you in your writing?

 

A: Enormously important. For me, setting isn't backdrop, it's close to being a co-author. I've always written with place established first and the story flows from that. My earlier travel memoirs were built entirely on that instinct, on paying close attention to where you are, including the tiniest details, and what it all does to you.

 

With When Paris Whispers, I wanted the city to feel earned rather than decorative—the loneliness of it as much as the beauty. Catrine changes because of where she lives and she and France both grow together.

 

Q: Did you need to do much research to write the novel, and if so, did you learn anything that especially surprised you?

 

A: Yes, I did do a fair amount of research, particularly around the literary history woven through the book and specific locations. I had to find the exact quotes Catrine hears and to get them to be ones that feel authentic to what she as going through.

 

And in doing that research, it surprised me just how much what writers and artists and designers had said even hundreds of years ago were still relevant to Catrine and her story.

 

I also had to look up tiny details: what a café actually looked like in 1981, did it even exist, when were certain public buildings built, how did the Métro feel and sound back then, and what streets met where. Recreating the France of 1981 often ended up mattering more to the texture of the book than any big historical research did.

 

Q: As someone who’s written fiction and nonfiction, do you have a preference?

 

A: I don't think I could choose because I absolutely love them both.

 

Nonfiction, especially memoir, demands a kind of honesty that's uncomfortable but clarifying. I'm accountable to what actually happened. But fiction gives me the freedom to chase an emotional truth without being bound to the facts, which is quite liberating.

 

I move between them depending on what stories make their way into my head, and I suspect I will always be toggling back and forth.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: For the first time, I'm actually working on two books at once. I'm editing a memoir about growing up the eldest of 11 children in a strict Mexican, Irish Catholic home, and eventually leaving the Church. I haven't decided on a title yet.

 

I'm also starting a new novel with the working title Borrowed Grace in Aix-en-Provence. It's about a middle-aged chambermaid at a luxury hotel who collects small objects and clothing left behind by guests and what she does with them. It's a quieter, more Flaubertian book than When Paris Whispers, and I'm enjoying the discipline of writing in a more spare style.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: Just that this book has been a long time coming. I hope readers caught between who they were and who they're becoming see something of themselves in Catrine, and I hope they can feel, on every single page, just how much I love France.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Marianne C. Bohr.