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!