A "Very Merry" December, with Susan Furber
An in-depth interview with one of our 2023 novelists
Susan Furber is a member of a highly exclusive club: writers with two novels published by Valley Press, in her case The Essence of an Hour in 2021 and its sequel, We Were Very Merry, in May 2023. In terms of pure literary quality, they are among the finest works in our list; each sentence is a thing of beauty in its own right, and as character studies, they are second to none. In every sense, they are worthy of sitting alongside The Bell Jar on a shelf labelled “era-defining fiction about the experience of being young, female, intelligent and American”.
I’ve been meaning to interview Susan for this blog since it started, and finally had a chance late last month; you’ll find our discussion below. We really get into the finer points of crafting a novel, and among other gems, Susan shares a superb technique for writing authentic teenage dialogue. Hope you enjoy it!
How would you pitch your two Valley Press novels to a stranger in a lift (or, since you grew up in New York, an elevator)?
Set in the 1940s, The Essence of an Hour is a coming-of-age story about an ill-fated summer romance and examines issues relevant to today, such as sexual double standards and consent. We Were Very Merry continues Lillie Carrigan’s story into the 1950s, as her marriage unravels and she faces the demons of her past.
Is there a particular short passage from We Were Very Merry that you might share with them?
I would start with the prologue!
The first thing I ought to tell you is that I never loved him. Not in the way a wife is supposed to love her husband. I once thought I did, perhaps in the months before the wedding, when we first met at Balliol College. He was younger then, and I was innocent. Or what I mean to say is I was a virgin. He read books and was tall, and those seemed good reasons to fall in love with someone, at least to me.
I came to him a girl with a broken heart, trodden on too many times by death and grief. I wanted to forget the boy I’d loved, my mother, my childhood spent with Lara, and America too. I wanted to be a new girl. A happier one, a gentler one, the sort of girl who could approach life with an attitude not of carelessness but of caution. I didn’t want to be bruised again, or not so blindly.
He saw my bruises, and he loved me immediately, or so he said for many years. Now he says he does not love me, not as I am. He loved another girl, the girl he thought I was, and who I tried to be, but could not.
This morning my husband left me with a chaste kiss to the cheek while I sat at the kitchen table with a coffee and cigarette. There was no scene, no violence. I sat, and he left. And now I say I never loved him.
Each of our hearts has broken, has been breaking for the past five years. But to forget each other, to try to make sense of the role we each played in our marriage only to pack it all away, no, I cannot do that. Nor do I want to.
Were you a prolific reader and writer as a child, or was there a moment when you suddenly got into writing?
I learned to be a writer through reading vivaciously. My favourite books as a child were Anne of Green Gables and Little Women. I wanted to be a writer like Anne Shirley and Jo March, and read the authors they admired, such as Tennyson, Austen, and the Brontë sisters.
What is the influence of Edna O'Brien's Country Girls trilogy on your work?
At nineteen I read Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man followed by The Country Girls by Edna O’Brien. Until then I had not read a novel about growing up Catholic and the internal conflict of losing one’s faith. I had not known one could write about such things.
I was also drawn to the central friendship between Kate and Baba in The Country Girls, especially after they escape the convent and head to Dublin. It reminded me of my relationship with my childhood best friend – how we were both so desperate to be grown-up and lose our innocence, and how competitive we were with each other. We had a co-dependent and oftentimes toxic relationship based on both being outsiders in our small town, similar to Kate and Baba. So, I wanted to take the story I knew from my own childhood and write my version of The Country Girls. But the relationship between Lillie and Lara in my novels is purposefully different from that of Kate and Baba. In The Country Girls, Kate, the narrator, is the mild, observant one while Baba is the wild and mean one. Instead, I have the friend character, Lara, be the gentle and more innocent one while Lillie, the one who controls the narrative, is seemingly more ruthless.
When I first wrote Essence, I intended it as a standalone, but I kept imagining what would happen next, particularly in the relationship between Lillie and Lara. I decided I wanted to follow their relationship into their twenties, thirties and eventually forties, as O’Brien’s trilogy does. I don’t think there are enough books that chronicle the whole lives of women, that allow them to grow up and change.
Your novels form a duology, with precise attention to continuity, and with the narrator being an older version of the main character; how did you keep that together? How much of Lillie's later life story, as told in Merry, were you aware of when writing Essence? (i.e. the husband's character arc)
About a month after finishing the first draft of Essence, I wrote a short story detailing Lillie’s failed marriage to an American academic who she meets while living in Paris after the war. Unlike Essence, I don’t have a draft of that story saved anymore. But I remembered the first line (which is the first line of Merry), and I used the basic outline of what happens to adult Lillie to inform my rewriting of Essence.
There was one draft where I considered jumping back and forth between what is happening in her life at twenty-eight and her memories of when she was eighteen, but it didn’t seem to work. It lost the effect I wanted, and so there are only the vaguest mentions to her adult life in Essence.
But what did I know when writing Essence? I knew she had a bad marriage to an American academic. I knew he was the first man she ever slept with. I knew they met over drinking whiskey, but I reconceived this first meeting to happen at Balliol College rather than in a Paris Left Bank bar. But that’s about it. I thought the husband was a lout and sleeping around and ultimately more of a caricature. He surprised me when I came to write him in Merry.
I wrote the first full draft of Merry while Essence was going through the publishing process, so when I read the proofs of Essence, I fact-checked Merry against it to make sure the timelines accorded and that any subtle hints of Lillie’s life in Essence hold true in Merry.
How much more of Lillie's life story are you aware of now, that we aren't?
Some writers, such as Salinger, keep detailed notes and know everything about their characters – their favourite songs or what they received as a present on their fifth birthday. I know very little about my characters outside of what they reveal to me, and often for only a short period of time.
With Lillie, I know a few things that are coming for her. For instance, I know the conclusion of the trilogy, and I know what happens between Lara and her at the end. I’ve known that for a while, since before Essence was published. But I don’t know what gets her from the end of Merry to the conclusion of the third yet-unwritten novel. That I will need to find out as she shares her story with me. I know two scenes, and a few lines of Mallory’s. That’s all.
You wrote the first volume at 19 and the second at 28, which also matches Lillie's age in the primary narrative. Does this mean you will wait another 6-8 years before putting pen to paper on the third volume?
One thing that is special about the first two novels is that they are timestamps of the age I was when I first wrote them. For instance, with Merry I had no idea until I was twenty-eight how important the theme of motherhood would be in it. This was something that came out of conversations with friends at that particular time of my life.
I’ve always held that the third and final book of the trilogy needs to wait to be written until I am roughly the same age as Lillie in it, so when I am in my mid-forties, or about fifteen years from now. That said, I am starting to have thoughts about what will happen next, and I miss the characters a lot, so who knows… it might not be that long.
Despite the continuity, I personally don't think there's a right or wrong order to read the novels; so if a reader finds the themes of Merry more immediately interesting, a more tempting first purchase, they could start with that, then turn to Essence as a sort of prequel. Would you agree?
When writing Merry, I kept in mind one of my favourite novels, The Weather in the Streets by Rosamond Lehmann. It’s a sequel to Invitation to the Waltz, and while it mentions a few events and characters from the first book, it isn’t necessary to read the first book to comprehend the second novel’s story. I read Invitation to the Waltz after and found it even more poignant because I knew what would happen to Olivia Curtis in her twenties. I aimed to make the same true for Merry, so that readers could come to the books in any order.
The titles of your two novels are lines from poems by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Edna St. Vincent Millay, respectively – who I know are inspirational figures both for Lillie and yourself. But why those quotes in particular? (i.e. what is the significance, for people who've not read the books yet)
Sam Keenaghan, who was my first editor at Valley Press, found the F. Scott Fitzgerald quote. My original title was terrible, so I said to Sam, maybe it should be a literary quote like Good Morning, Midnight or Tender is the Night. She liked this idea and suggested it be something from Fitzgerald as Lillie mentions him several times and holds him in such reverence. I loved this idea, and the quote Sam found encapsulated a sense of ephemerality so important to the themes of the first book: the loss of innocence, first love, etc.
With the second book, I had considered having another Fitzgerald quote (and then the third book would need to be a Fitzgerald quote too). The obvious contender was The Beginning and End of Everything, which comes from a letter of Fitzgerald’s where he is writing about his love for Zelda. Now that thematically linked nicely to the second novel, but it didn’t feel quite right – it was too hyperbolic and more in line with how an eighteen-year-old Lillie would speak rather than a twenty-eight-year-old Lillie.
So, I read through a lot of poetry books, namely Emily Dickinson, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Sara Teasdale (the latter was a favourite of Sylvia Plath’s).
We Were Very Merry comes from the poem ‘Recuerdo’ by Edna St. Vincent Millay, which means ‘memory’ in Spanish. I find it to be a bittersweet poem about distorted memories, and I love the question the title poses – were Lillie and John, her husband, ever happy together? Has Lillie ever experienced sustained happiness with anyone? It’s also a poem about crossings, and this is a novel about crossings – the literal crossings between America and England, and England and France, of course, but also the crossing between girlhood and womanhood, and the dialogue between the two selves.
In what ways are you similar to Lillie, character-wise? (and biography-wise, e.g. living in France) In what ways are you different, besides the decade you grew up?
Lillie is my literary doppelganger. We both come from small, conservative towns in upstate New York, attended the University of Oxford, lived in Paris for a short time, and love Modernist writers. But we are also quite different, both in our biographies as well as how we see the world. Lillie’s voice – her language choices, her verbal ticks – are not mine. She is bolder than I am and at times incredibly cruel to those she loves most. These are not all positive qualities, but they feel true to life, and as an author, it is what draws me back to write Lillie and her voice.
What do you think has changed in small-town American culture since the era your novels are set, and what hasn't? Do you find writing about the past a useful way of discreetly commenting on the present, rather like sci-fi writers do with the future?
I think that’s a great way of putting it. I believe we have a false sense of comfort about the progress that has been made in achieving women’s rights and equality in the US. We read stories from the past and reassure ourselves that such things could not happen now. But then some things still feel disturbingly relevant. We realize our rights are not guaranteed, and the advances we believed we had made, that we were promised, can be reversed. Something happens in both Essence and in Merry that I thought was more of a historical comment when I wrote it. Sadly, this is no longer the case.
One of the many things I admire about your writing is the dialogue, both internal and external. It feels very authentic and very appropriate to the setting. How have you achieved that? What kind of research did you do?
While redrafting the first novel and before writing the second, I read many novels written between 1930 to 1960, mostly by women authors, and this gave me a better understanding of how people spoke and how women thought about sex. It was incredibly more modern than I had assumed.
As a writer, I get to know my characters through what they say. When I write a first draft, I like to have only the slightest of outlines; that way I can see how characters interact with one another, and how they verbally respond. I then take this natural chemistry and redraft and redraft, learning more about who the characters are as people, trying to understand why they may have said certain things.
Essence was trickier to write in terms of verbal tone than Merry, mainly because Lillie has two voices in it: herself at eighteen and the narrator’s voice at twenty-eight. When I wrote the first draft, there was little difference between the two voices, and this is one of the things I had to work hardest at in redrafts, trying to locate who Lillie is in each moment, and which voice dominates. I turned to my teenage diaries, which I kept faithfully from the age of twelve until twenty, and I took passages from my own teenage voice, reimagining them for Lillie. This helped me to maintain an authenticity because I do think one’s use of language, one’s sense of urgency and inclination for the melodramatic all change as one ages, and I may have lost that specific voice otherwise.
You work with writers in your day job, and have now been through the publishing process multiple times as both writer and publisher. What are some (or one) of the major misconceptions about publishing that you see on a day-to-day basis, that you could clear up for our readers?
I mainly work with academic and business book writers, rarely ever fiction, but what I primarily do as an editor is help authors to understand what the publishing landscape looks like. Most people only see the big publishing successes, whether it be the books on front tables in bookstores or the few titles a year advertised on the Underground. They aren’t aware of how many hundreds of books are published per day.
I’m also not sure if people are aware of how many drafts it can take to finish a book for publication. Some authors write slowly and edit meticulously as they go, so they do not require major rewrites on subsequent drafts; others, such as me, write quickly and haphazardly. For me, the real writing takes place in about the third or fourth draft, and after that I start to lose track of how many drafts I do. I never feel a novel is finished because it never feels perfect – I never fully achieve the vision I had for it. But I know it’s done when I’ve gotten as close I can to that vision. Even then there is much work to be done by an editor. Often authors I work with will ask for a simple proofread, meaning they want someone to give it a quick look over for comma usage, misspellings, etc. – they are not prepared for a full structural or line edit first!
By way of an ending, is there a question you’d like to ask me, about publishing or anything else?
In your initial email to me in April 2020, you commented on how Essence was "not a book I would typically buy for myself, as you might imagine”. When writing the first book, I had a predominantly female audience in mind, but I have had such wonderful feedback on both books from male readers too. As a male reader, what do you think appeals about both of these stories?
I would first say that the protagonist's gender has rarely been a factor in my personal reading or commissioning; I find it quite easy to hop out of my male mindset and into an alternative. However, I don’t read (or commission) many books about the interior life of teenagers; that whole time of life has never held much interest for me, even when I was a teenager myself!
What really appeals to me about Susan’s books is the sense of authenticity. One of my biggest turn-offs with fiction is the opposite, where it seems to have little connection to the real world or any lived experience; I have a thirst to learn more about my fellow human beings (of any age), which not every novel can quench. In this case, while reading, I really believe Lillie exists and went through all those things, and that I have been party to her thoughts as she did, which is a remarkable effect to have achieved. For historical fiction, if you could reasonably pass it off as a genuine memoir from the era, the author is obviously doing something right.
Many thanks to Susan for taking part in this blog, and to you for reading this far – and seeing out the year with me. Whether you are celebrating, enjoying some time off work, or neither of the above, I hope you have a happy and peaceful end to 2023, and I look forward to seeing you all in 2024.