Your story in this week’s issue, “Dido’s Lament,” involves a chance encounter between two people who were once married but haven’t seen each other in years. As always, you’re so good at capturing character through small cultural signifiers—the fact that Lynette wears a bright-pink coat from a second-hand shop and is embarrassed by a department-store shopping bag, for instance. How much do you think can be conveyed through this kind of detail?
Almost everything. I suppose that’s the whole premise of a certain kind of fiction, really, of realist fiction—that we can get at the general through the particular. It’s the human skill we deploy—like Sherlock Holmes!—every time we meet someone: reading all sorts of detail, clothes and looks and expression and response, even without being wholly aware that we’re doing it. In ordinary human contact, we construct from those particulars the story of a life—necessarily incomplete, but full of rich suggestion. People are always interpreting one another. We never get our readings completely right (and, of course, that’s another element in this story, the inability of these two to read each other fully). But without that work of guessing and interpretation we would be wholly alone; we couldn’t begin to know one another. It would be dreadful to be entirely unreadable. (No one knows this better than a writer.)
This is where writing is a bit like anthropology, I suppose—using all the cultural layering of detail and nuance and perception to construct a world of significance. When I’m writing a story, its world is thin, unsatisfactory, untrue, until I start to find my way to those details, those “small cultural signifiers.” As these accumulate on the page, the life in the piece thickens, the details breed, and the story begins to stir.
Lynette and Toby seem so fundamentally different that it’s difficult to imagine a time when they “belonged to each other.” What was it that drew them together?
It’s easy to imagine what drew him to her. She’s beautiful, talented, rare. She must have seemed unattainable to shy Toby—and, ultimately, she was unattainable. I hope I’ve made that likelihood easy to imagine, in the story. I’ve given Lynette a lot of memories: how he used to watch her eyes to see what she thought of everything. No doubt her working-class and mixed-race background, her bad brothers, were exotic and romantic for him, too. Perhaps it’s harder to imagine the other way? But think what Toby might have had for a young Lynette, with her precarious confidence, the audacity of her bet on herself and her talent. He’d have seemed adept in that world of élite culture she aspired to. Also, he’d have offered his enormous belief in her, his devotion to her. She wanted to be taken care of—and she hated being taken care of. That’s a fairly familiar contradiction for women. All these years later, she still half-yearns for the security and solidity that now seem to be embodied in his comfortable home, his steadiness, his kindness, that warm stove. But she also knows, or believes she knows (in the last line of the story), that she needs to be free of being cared for, that it only exasperates and constrains her.
You mention in passing that Lynette’s grandfather was from Sierra Leone. Her father was a bus driver and her mother a nurse, while Toby’s parents were bohemian artists who chose to live in a dilapidated farmhouse. Should the characters’ backgrounds tell us something about the distinctions between them?
Toby would have belonged in a world that valued the kind of art Lynette wanted to make, as a singer of baroque opera. No doubt his family home in the country was a new world to her when she first went there. No doubt his artist-parents were a revelation. Just as Lynette’s family would have been a revelation to Toby. It’s that anthropology thing again—reading each other’s signs. They would both have fallen in love with what they didn’t recognize, the mystery of the other’s otherness. My hunch is that Lynette fell in love with Toby’s whole family, and mistook that at first for being in love with him. (Alice Munro writes wonderfully, over and over, about girls doing exactly that.)
For most of the story we experience events through Lynette’s eyes. At almost the very end, you briefly switch to Toby’s perspective, and we suddenly see things quite differently. Did you know from the start that you’d make that leap?
I knew I was going to have this switch of perspectives from the very beginning—it’s in my earliest notes for the story. It’s one of the things I can’t usually resist doing in writing, taking advantage of fiction’s capacity to do what in reality we can’t do, which is be inside two minds at once—or more than two. It’s such a rich resource of irony and complication, opening up the story, making it social. It isn’t unreal, to be able to do this. In reality, in any scene between people, there are at least two consciousnesses at play, obviously. But each of us is stuck inside one of them. In fiction, the writer is making everything up—there’s no reason not to allow yourself to slip in and out of any of the characters who seem available to imagination, if you want to. Chekhov does it even within the same paragraph sometimes in his stories.
The story without Toby’s view would have felt incomplete to me somehow, like one hand clapping. We’re so hungry to know whether he is as safe now, as recovered from the wound of their parting, as he appears. Lynette is trying to guess; we’re allowed to know. Fiction can offer a complete reading: that’s part of its mystery. Whereas in life we’re always struggling to transcend what’s partial.
There’s an element of symmetry, too. It would have been unbalanced, somehow, for us to have felt the wound in Lynette and not known that it was still throbbing there in Toby, too, buried deep, the way he buries that telltale carrier bag, the trace she leaves behind. The story is all about the wound of this divorce—even if in the end the divorce is also conceded to have been inevitable, necessary. The painful experience can’t simply be eradicated, even if they’ve both recovered, in their daily lives. They will forget this evening’s encounter, too; they will carry on and be O.K. Lynette’s sprained ankle will heal. Nonetheless, the wound of the divorce is real.
I think that it’s possible sometimes, or for some people, to leave damage behind, to forget it, shuck it off. This must depend, hugely, on the sensibility of the individuals. Other sensibilities, with more resilience and capacity for forgetting, might not have been imprinted with the same pain that both my characters seem to be marked by here. But I’m interested in them precisely because that pain has stayed with them.
For a lot of the evening—and most of their marriage—these two have experienced an uneven distribution of power and control. That tension drives them, and the story. Do you, as the author, feel more sympathy for one than the other? Is one happier than the other?
That’s a difficult question to answer. I don’t think I do feel more sympathy for one than the other. It’s obvious that Toby is nicer. But then, Lynette can’t help being what she is, she can’t help seeing what she sees, she can’t put her exasperation and her imperiousness away at will, or stop feeling them. She can’t put away her awareness of that imbalance of power between them. Actually, an imbalance of power in a relationship may deliver more satisfaction for the powerless one than for the power-holder. At least for as long as he was married to Lynette, Toby felt he knew what his life was for. Whereas it wasn’t really good for Lynette, was it, to see Toby constantly searching her face to find out what she liked, what she thought? (A century’s worth of fiction has been dedicated to sympathizing with women in their impulse to be free of that kind of scrupulous attentiveness, that smothering devotion.)
But, in a way, what a shame that they couldn’t make it work. In another life, they might have. I didn’t mean the reader to feel that the marriage was impossible. The story doesn’t come down on the side of the divorce, or against it. It happened, that’s all.
One of the questions that your portrait of Lynette raises is whether clinging to the idea of one’s freedom or one’s anti-materialistic artistic integrity into one’s late thirties is valid—or whether it becomes self-indulgent. What do you make of Lynette’s decisions in life? Were they worth what they’ve cost her?
I almost don’t know how to answer that. It’s the impossible question, isn’t it? And partly it’s sheer bad luck—the bad luck that her voice wasn’t a little bit better, that her career hasn’t taken off. If Lynette had become a significant singer, with a career around the world, we probably wouldn’t ask the same question about the sacrifices. I’ve always been very moved by that agonizing possibility, that you might dedicate yourself to an ideal of art, and imaginatively make it the center of all value in your life—and then turn out not to be good enough. I’m so sympathetic to that sick dismay Lynette feels when Toby asks about her music, and her impulse to conceal her failure from him—although she’s not deceiving herself one iota. There’s an awful flat self-knowledge in her, a cruel estimate of her own moderate talent.
Perhaps it’s that flatness in her own estimate, that flatness of her inner language, dismissing her own work, that makes me think she isn’t self-indulgent. Also, nobody else is suffering for her lack of stability and prosperity. There’s no man being asked to foot the bill, no children to suffer from her inattention or her selfishness.
But how wonderful it must be to sing Dido’s lament. To be good enough to do that. Perhaps that alone is worth anything. Perhaps she needed to be “free”—whatever freedom is—in order to be able to do just that. She may have chosen music, at first, as her way of becoming different, of appropriating cultural capital, leaving the world of her family behind. But no doubt the music itself now has a fundamental role in her life. She loves it. It feeds her, feeds the way she understands everything. So she hums Dido’s exquisite lament to herself, and it is oddly able to express what she feels—even though there’s a gap of centuries between the lament and her own losses, and a revolution in women’s freedom not to love, not to be defined by being loved. She isn’t in Dido’s classic situation, quite the opposite—and yet Dido’s lament still fits. That’s such an interesting truth.
Do Lynette and Toby have any doppelgängers in real life?
No, they don’t. I don’t know where they came from. I think the story began because I was thinking about divorce, a particular real-life divorce in the family—asking the unfathomable question “Is it worth it?” How can you accurately calculate the sum of happiness, the cost of leaving or of staying together? (In some cases, of course, the question isn’t at all unfathomable—a marriage can be rotten.) I sometimes think of divorce less as a deliberate choice than as an accident that happens. But that’s dangerous thinking. You can end up thinking that marriage, too, is an accident that happens.
