past year; we look ahead with an open mind, an open heart and welcoming arms to
that next moment, that next chapter, that next book in 2017
The New Year approaches, we look back to examine, appreciate and to let go of this past year; we look ahead with an open mind, an open heart and welcoming arms to that next moment, that next chapter, that next book in 2017 Happy 2017!
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Photo: Hell-raiser: Margaret Mead holds a tzantza (shrunken head) she brought back from
her 1933 expedition to New Guinea Photo: Keystone France In an interview with Humanities Tennessee, Lily King was asked “What were the aspects of their lives in the field that surprised you most?” Her answer: “I was truly surprised by their colonial attitudes. Mead and Fortune had 250 porters carrying their stuff up the Torricelli Mountains in 1931 – at least a four-day climb. They would arrange fora cook boy, a shoot boy, a houseboy right off. Just those acts alone would affect your reception and role in the village, would skew your results even before you asked your first question. What I also found interesting was how emotional it all was. As a novelist I deal in emotions, but I think of scientists as being able to cut off extremes of feeling when necessary to get the job done. But the five months those three spent together on the Sepik River were driven by emotion.” In an interview with GUERNICA / A Magazine of Global Arts & Politics, Lily King was asked the question – “What is something you loved learning but could not include in the book?” Her answer: “There are certain tribes in the middle Sepik that eat raw bat. A certain kind of raw bat is a delicacy. I wanted to have a ceremony where they would eat raw bat. And then there’s another one where these butterflies come flying over the river, and they catch them and eatthem all up. Fried butterfly.” “I read this scene in Mead’s memoir. She writes about how they (Mead, her husband, Reo Fortune, and Bateson) went swimming and how Bateson just stripped down, assuming they were going skinny dipping. Fortune was horrified. He got angry at Bateson for taking liberties in front of his wife. I put that in the novel and my agent said, “There’s just one scene that doesn’t work for me. I don’t think the character would do this,” and it was that scene. But I kept it in because I thought, this really happened! Then my editor read it and said this scene doesn’t work. “ What aspects of the book work for you or do not work? Come share your thoughts and join the discussion on January 5. Photo: Margaret Mead and Gregory Batemen typing up field notes in Papua New Guinea. 1938. Library of Congress.
On January 5 we discuss Lily King’s book Euphoria, based loosely on the life of Margaret Mead. The book is based on research because (according to the author): “I needed to know things, but I didn’t need to know everything because it would weigh me down….the whole time I was doing the research, I needed to have a creative channel open so that details would trigger fictional details, and I could build on what I was reading. Now, when people ask me if (something) is true, I don’t know.” (From a June 2014 interview by Greta Rybus for The Boston Globe) Lily King found that by writing dialogue and getting into the character’s heads, the novelist in her took flight and the book took her on a different journey. The book is inspired by and based on the intersection of these 3 anthropologists in New Guinea; where the author asks the question “What if?” Lily King tells us: “I thought I would try to tell the story of these 5 months in her life. But as soon as I stopped researching and starting writing, I understood that I had to tell my own story, that I couldn’t write a real novel with those kinds of constraints, and that the personalities of the characters had to come from my imagination. As a result, they made very different choices than their real-life inspirations and moved further and further away from the true story that sparked the idea…..It took me a long time to accept that Bankson was the narrator of this novel, that this was really his story. I knew it when I wrote Chapter 2 in his point of view, but I wrote several more drafts that told the story from several perspectives, until I finally gave up and gave in.” (Chapter16.org – Humanities Tennessee, June 2015) “Mead writes that when she first meets Bateson, they talked for thirty-six hours about their work, and she fell madly in love with him. I loved that. In books, you know, people fall in love and you don’t always know why. I love this idea of trying to create that intellectual eroticism. That was what I was working toward all along.” (GUERNICA / a magazine of global arts & politics interview, March 2015) Intellectual eroticism? Come join the discussion on January 5th! Sending many Christmas Blessings to our Morning Book Discussion Group and Book Lovers everywhere. May we take the time to savor our blessings and to extend those blessings to others this season. May we continue to explore, share and discuss books that inspire, enlighten & stimulate our minds. Merry Christmas! Lily King grew up with an older brother and sister; she was the youngest, 8 years difference. King was eleven years old when her parents divorced. Her father remarried a woman with 3 children; 5 years later they divorced and he remarried a woman with 4 children. King’s mother re-married a man with 7 children. Thus, King spent her time going back and forth between the 2 families; her extended family now included 16 brothers, sisters, stepbrothers, and stepsisters. In mixing these family systems she learned to adjust to the language, the mores and the taboos of each family “or tribe” – often switching her behavior to adapt. “I had one family that used a lot of yelling and screaming, and that was very normal. Another side of my family, nobody would raise their voice at all. One family would eat all together, and in another family, you’re on your own. Even though they were all in my hometown, they had different cultures, different ideas of what was acceptable behavior. When you’re in a situation like that early on, you really become an observer. You watch and see how it’s done. When you have people who get angry quickly, you have to learn the rules to avoid being in that situation. Maybe that has something to do with my interest in writing about anthropologists. That’s a life I would love to lead.” (From an interview for Guernica / A Magazine of Art & Politics, March 2015) King has a graduate degree in creative writing; her first post graduate job was teaching English in a bilingual school in Valencia, Spain. Lily King has lived in Paris for 2 years, Spain for 2 years and Italy for 1 year. She has traveled all over Europe, China, Peru, and Mexico. She loves languages, and loves learning languages and would like to learn German someday. Lily King always writes her novels with pencil in a spiral notebook from Staples.
“Everything looks too polished on a computer when you start writing, and I can’t really see it. I feel like the words are much more naked in pencil, on a notebook. I definitely feel that my brain works differently, and words come out differently, if I have a pencil in my hand, rather than if I have a keyboard. I don’t know why that is. But my sentences are longer. I tend to add more in the margins. I tend to elongate the sentences as I’m writing and editing, and there is just something about the feeling of writing longhand that I really love. It also signals to me, when I pick up a pencil, that this is a rough draft. This is not going anywhere, and no one’s going to see it. You have permission to make all the mistakes you want. It signals freedom to me, and it signals mistakes. Then when I put it on the computer, a different part of my brain kicks in and I really evaluate every single word and sentence and make decisions.” (Guernica / A Magazine of Art & Politics, March 2015) Did Lily King create an alternate believable world for you as the reader? Come join the discussion on January 5. New Guinea Island lies in the southwest Pacific, north of Australia. It is the second largest island in the world after Greenland, within the Southern Hemisphere. The island is divided among two countries: Papua New Guinea to the east, and Indonesia to the west. Countries ranging from the Netherlands to Portugal and Britain have fought over the oil, copper and gold deposits since the 16th century. Anthropologists were also drawn to the tribes that have existed here for 40,000 plus years. “The island is presently populated by almost a thousand different tribal groups and a near-equivalent number of separate languages, which makes New Guinea the most linguistically diverse area in the world. Ethnologue's 14th edition lists 826 languages of Papua New Guinea.” (Wikipedia.org) Lily King writes “Anthropology at that time was in transition, moving from the study of men dead and gone to the study of living people, and slowly letting go of the rigid belief that the natural and inevitable culmination of every society is the Western model.” Margaret Mead’s father was a professor of finance and her mother, a sociologist who studied Italian immigrants. Mead married 3x: her “student marriage,” her middle marriage to New Zealander & Anthropologist Reo Fortune, and lastly, to British Anthropologist Gregory Bateson. The marriage to Bateman was her longest lasting marriage (1936-1950), they had one daughter (her pediatrician was Benjamin Spock), who also became an anthropologist. Mead and her second husband, Reo Fortune, were in the Admiralty Islands in the late 1920s. From 1931-1933 they were located up the Sepik River, in the northeastern edge of the territory under Australian rule. It was the end of 1932, when Margaret Mead, Reo Fortune (husband) and Gregory Bateson (future husband) came together. Upon meeting, there was a connection and an invitation from Bateson for the couple to remain in the area instead of continuing on to Australia. Bateson found a tribe for them to study and eventually a love triangle developed. Mead was 31, and the gentlemen in their late 20s. Lily King's inspiration for her book Euphoria came from reading a biography about Margaret Mead by Jane Howard. The book was purchased in a book store that was closing and King "felt like I had to buy m something." The chapter that served as inspiration for Euphoria was titled "The Closest I've Ever Come to Madness." Mead’s book Coming of Age in Samoa (1928) brought her recognition and launched her as the world’s most famous anthropologist, her striking accounts of adolescent sexuality were attention getting. Her next book Growing Up in New Guinea (1930) and Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935), were instrumental in moving the feminist movement forward in America. In an interview, when asked why Mead was so important, King stated: "It seemed that her interest in anthropology was to promote social change in America. And that's a very political thing for an anthropologist to be doing; you are suppose to be objective. So much of what she was writing , attitudes towards women, childrearing, the family...she thought the small claustrophobic narrow minded American family was extremely oppressive and dangerous to the rearing of children." In Euphoria, Lily King gives us a sense of what Margaret Mead was like as an individual. Did King pull off this fictional re-imagining of Margaret Mead? Come join the discussion on January 5th... Our next discussion book (January 5) is Euphoria by Lily King. The author’s previous 3 novels were contemporary fiction, Euphoria is her first novel of historical fiction. Let’s look at some ingredients that went into the making of this novel. From an interview (blog.sarahlaurence.com), the author addresses why she switched to historical fiction: “Nine years ago, when I was just starting my third novel, Father of the Rain, I found Jane Howard’s 1984 biography of Margaret Mead in a used bookstore and I got to this chapter all about this fieldtrip to Papua New Guinea she made with her husband 1933 where she met and fell in love with another anthropologist, Gregory Bateson, with whom she connected both emotionally and intellectually, and they had this really intense love triangle for five months. I couldn’t help thinking that scenario would make an interesting novel. So that got me reading Mead’s memoir, her academic work, and her letters. But for a long time I didn’t think I could actually write that novel…… It was just so far out of my comfort zone on every level. These people would not live in houses but in the jungle of a country I’d never been to. It would take place in 1933 and the three main characters would be scientists. Plus it was historical and I don’t usually read historical fiction. “ Why did the author change Margaret Mead’s name to Nell Stone? “Nell is not Margaret Mead. I got the idea by reading a biography of her and I Definitely borrow many details from her life and the lives of her husband Reo Fortune and Gregory Bateson, but in the end of the first chapter, as the characters took shape, I felt handcuffed by history and I had to break away from it. Once I changed their names, my characters were free to be different people. They became my characters. I didn’t land on their names immediately. Nell was originally Polly, but she wasn’t a Polly. Andrew Bankson started our as Geoff. Characters grow into their names.” From left Gregory Bateson, Margaret Mead & Reo Fortune arrive in Sydney, Australia, from New Guinea in December 1933
Why was the book not narrated in Nell’s voice? “Initially, I tried to write it exclusively from her point of view, then from all three of their perspectives. But Bankson’s voice was the one that really felt right. Once I got his voice I realized it was his story. And that really changed all my ideas for what would happen in the end. But I did need her perspective, so I included her journal entries, which were initially letters from her to Helen, her lover of many years.” Also: The author was “an English major and never took an anthropology class. The only experience I have had in the jungle was when I went up the Amazon in Peru with my new boyfriend (now my husband)….I had to be an armchair traveler for this novel. I read everything I could find about the region and anthropology, ethnography and fieldwork.” Awards and Honors for Euphoria: Amazon's Best Books of the Month (June 2014) Kirkus Prize for Fiction (2014) New York Times Notable Book of the Year (2014) New England Book Award (Fiction, 2014) Maine Reader's Choice Award (Finalist, 2015) Book Discussion of Euphoria: January 5, 2017 Are you ready for the approaching frigid temperatures? Need a good book to cuddle up with?
Not only do we exchange ideas during our discussion times - we are a resource to each other for book recommendations. Here are some suggestions from our membership:
Next book discussion: January 5th, Euphoria by Lily King: Based on events in Margaret Mead's life - competing egos and desires in the relationships between 3 anthropologists in New Guinea - this historical fiction probes the question: What if? From an interview with author Sue Monk Kidd:
"I'd written my other two novels in first person. I love the interiority of it, how intimate it feels, nevertheless, I started off my telling myself I would write Handful from a third person perspective, which seemed a little more removed. I think the word I'm looking for here is safer. I hadn't written more than two pages, however, when Handful began talking in the first person. My need to inhabit her more fully kept breaking in. Finally, I just gave up and let her talk. While writing this novel, I read an interview with author Alice Walker, who, in speaking of her mother, said, "She was all over my heart, so why shouldn't she be in literature?" I felt that way about Handful." And from another interview: "I think you have to love your characters, and I just loved her. she started talking and talking and talking. I could not keep up with her. There was this unleashing of a character's voice. I came of age in the '60s....I remember so much of that whole Civil Rights time - it was the background I lived in. It made a mark on me. Their voices stayed with me - the musicality, and some of their expressions." The discussion of The Invention of Wings takes place Thursday, December 8th. Come share your thoughts, enjoy a cup of coffee, a sweet treat and perhaps a discussion to make you think............. Words are powerful. There are twenty six letters in the alphabet -- they represent 26 tools to create an endless number of words, sentences, paragraphs and books. Sue Monk Kidd in an interview (Naples Daily News, June 1, 2015) had this to say: "I think that writing can be a spiritual practice. To write is also to pray...It's about a having a conversation with our soul. It takes us out of loneliness and into solitude. To be alone with ourselves in the best sense of the word....." "We are all creative people no matter what kind of work we are doing...We need to give room to let our imagination play. We have to give it space to let it browse around." "Our words matter, our language matters....(writing) is a radical act of trust....I have a very sensitive response to injustice. I feel some obligation, almost redemptive, to write about it." And from a January 2014 BookPage interview Taking Flight on the Wings of History: "Historical accuracy mattered a great deal to me, I used it as scaffolding. I followed the truth as close as I could possibly could, but I also invented a lot to bring them alive on the page. I went to their house in Charleston, I walked up and down the streets I thought they'd have walked. When I saw the stairway leading up to the upper floors, I could picture Sarah walking down. I could picture Handful sitting on one of the steps." Come join the discussion this Thursday at 10 AM in the Community Meeting Room at the Clarkston Independence District Library. "The Invention of Wings" by Sue Monk Kidd. |
AuthorMy name is Melinda Grix -Adult Services Librarian at the Clarkston Independence District Library - facilitating our Morning Book Discussions since 2007. You will find me in the library on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Archives
November 2018
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