Claire Messud on her sense of home and keeping fiction away from autobiography
She spoke with Eleanor Wachtel in 2001 about her novel The Last Life
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Novelist Claire Messud has lived all around the world throughout her life, often drawing from real historical and familial events to write her bestselling fiction.
She was born in Connecticut to a Canadian mother and a French Algerian father, whose family settled in Algeria around 1850. A hundred years later, they relocated to France. Messud herself spent part of her childhood in Australia, where her father was working. She carries three passports: Canadian, American and French.
Her 1999 novel The Last Life was named a New York Times notable book and traces three generations of a French Algerian family who try to re-establish a life in the South of France. It's told from the perspective of a teenage girl, Sagesse who's 14 in 1989 when the story begins.
Messud's latest novel, This Strange Eventful History, follows another French Algerian family over seven decades.
In 2001, she discussed The Last Life with Eleanor Wachtel and explained why she chose to write about French Algerians.
Writing about Algeria
"I grew up all over and I have a pretty confused sense of home. I suppose my sense of home, insofar as I have one, is where my family is.
"I was interested in it because I suppose for me, growing up but not having a fixed sense of home, I was unaware of Algeria. But something I was always aware of — this feeling that unlike many other people who might travel the world, but when they said 'I'm going home,' they knew where they meant. I didn't really know. I didn't really have any sense.
"I think it's a fundamental sense of displacement that more and more people have as we all become transients in this global economy.
"But when I looked to what the sources of that might be, it seemed to me that that it was actually something that could be traced back into the generation before me and that it came from the fact that certainly my father's side of the family didn't have a sense of home, but they had had a sense of home and it was something they had lost.
I suppose my sense of home, insofar as I have one, is where my family is.- Claire Messud
"This experience of displacement and the way it passes from generation to generation was something I wanted to write about. And then also the Algerian events and experience that was something that I was just plain curious to explore. Because growing up in North America largely, it's not something you hear about. It's not something people are even really aware of. I think many people on this continent couldn't find Algeria on a map, let alone tell you that it had been occupied by the French for over 100 years.
"So it was actually sheer curiosity about that experience — in my family, people didn't really talk about it very much. I wanted to find out about it and write about it."
Keeping the novel fictional
"I very much didn't want to write an autobiographical book. I wanted to write a novel. And so I did a lot of research in the Library of Congress and I read a lot of books and a lot of testimonials and a lot of oral histories that have been compiled about the experience.
"I read some of the early fiction. There were novels about the colonial experience that were written at the turn of the century and at the beginning of the 20th century.
"In fact, my grandfather spent the first years of his retirement writing a family history for my sister and for me, of which I have read a part but I have not read all.
"It's an amazing document and it's very long. In the handwritten version — he then had it typed — but in the handwritten version that he put together he pasted all the telegrams and photographs and letters and all the original documents that sort of trace the history of our family. So it is an amazing thing."
The humiliation of adolescence
"I suppose I do look back at adolescence as a trial myself. When I was trying to project myself into the mind of my protagonist or into her adolescent experience, I became aware that what lives most strongly, certainly for me, is humiliation and embarrassment.
"And if I look back at my adolescent life and I remember a moment of great happiness, I remember it as if I remember it clearly, but as if it were detached from me. Whereas a moment of great shame I remember absolutely viscerally. And I find that I'm sitting in a room by myself blushing over something that I did or said or that happened to me when I was 10 or 12 or 14-years-old.
"So I do think that probably for me, in constructing her life and her character, that was something I was conscious of and that made its way into her experience, perhaps more powerfully than it might otherwise have done."
Claire Messud's comments have been edited for length and clarity.
