Michael Redhill

Transcription

[applause] Micheal Redhill: Good evening everyone and welcome to Luminato's Gala Reading. I can't tell you how thrilled I am that we're all in this space together and it is packed to the rafters for this reading. Before I bring up our first of four readers I want to thank our sponsors and our supporters. Our partner in creativity is L'Oreal. Our major government partner is the Government of Ontario and our major partner also is the Government of Canada. MR: Now we're sailing into our final weekend at Luminato. There's still a great deal to see. Feng Yi Ting I believe begins tonight, the Opera directed by Atom Egoyan. We have also Mark Morris' L'Allegro in its North American premier beginning tomorrow night and going through the weekend. Both shows are must sees. The Daisy Theatre continues to sell out at the Berkeley Street Theatre and is full of obscene puppets who will abuse you in-person if you go. And on Saturday the cosmos willing, we're gonna have 60 authors at Trinity Bellwoods Park reading at our first ever literary picnic, which will also feature one-on-one discussions with authors sitting on picnic blankets whose bums will hopefully will not be soaking wet at the time. MR: So there's more information at luminatofestival.com. You also probably saw this on the way in, one of our authors tonight is in this issue of Light News. Light News is Luminato Festival's first daily newspaper. We publish it everyday of the festival. It is killing us, but it is beautiful and it is written by the artists of the festival. So I hope if you don't have a copy that you pick one up, the remaining three issues will be available at the festival hub, as well as at all of our venues until Sunday. We have three issues left, please do pick it up. MR: So I would like to tell you how our evening is going to work tonight. We have four authors with us this evening. We have Claire Messud, Lisa Moore, Miranda Hill, and Sheila Heti. It's going to be a wonderful evening. The order of the reading is going to be Lisa Moore first up, whose... Among her novels are, February and the very recently published, Caught. Lisa has told me she is eventually going to publish a novel with more then one word in the title. Sheila Heti will follow. Sheila has written a number of books, "The Middle Stories," "Tick-more," and her most recent book which is called, "How Should a Person Be." MR: Our third reader will be Miranda Hill whose first collection of short stories, "Sleeping Funny," was published to wide acclaim this fall. Miranda is also the founder of Bookmark Canada which places historical-type plaques up around in different parts of Toronto and different parts of the country where you can read quotes from novels and poems and... In the place where where these things occurred. And last up tonight will be Claire Messud the author of "The Emperors Children" and the new novel "The Women Upstairs" and I think that this is going to be a very enjoyable evening. I hope that you will enjoy listening to our authors. Can we please welcome up first, Lisa Moore. Lisa Moore: Good afternoon everyone. Thank you so much for being here. So, "Caught" is the story of a drug smuggling caper, loosely based on a bunch of drug smuggling capers that happened in the '70s in Newfoundland. And my main character, David Slaney is 25 years old, he tried to import the biggest amount of pot in 1974 in Canadian history. He got caught and went to jail for four years. Now he's broken out of jail, he's hitchhiking across the country to Vancouver to meet his buddy and he is going to try it again. [laugher] LM: But he's... When he got caught he was madly in love with a girlfriend and he remained in love with her the whole time he was in jail. And he gets out and he... She's never answered his letters and she discovers... He discovers that she is married in his in... She's gotten married. So although he's supposed to be racing across the country he stops to go find her. And she has a little girl and he is bringing her a doll. And this section is called, "You are the one that I want." LM: Slaney gave the porter his ticket. Found his seat and set the doll up in the empty one next to him. He nudged the pink box a little so the doll's eyes dropped shut. Then he felt Montreal tug itself. The clack of rail ties, slow, wrenching slide of smoke stacks and concrete and sun-struck facades, a smooth emulsion streaming behind, he thought of her. Or she was just there. He was full of her. She was ultra-present, right there with him, near him, inside him. Jennifer brayed like a donkey when something was funny, an honest-to-God, donkey. She crossed her legs to stop from peeing in her pants and begged him to shut up, holding up one hand, the laughter rocking her whole body, and it was animal and mannish. She felt ashamed about being on welfare. Her family had money. She had grown up with a terrible woman, but there was no trace of snobbery in her, except for the shame she felt cashing the welfare check. She had a tab at the convenience store and she would go in and get smokes and bags of chips and wait, holding up the line, while the women behind the counter wrote it all down. They conferred in quiet tones. They were like people in church when this transaction occurred; solemn and reverent about the vertiginous debt. LM: She smoked on the the fire escape sometimes to watch the sun go down. If he had to pick a moment, it was her shoulders bent over the sewing machine with the smoke going in the ashtray. Everything dropped away after she cooked a meal and was having her evening smoke. She was five-foot-seven and bony and boyish. There was hardly anything to her. Her hair was long and thick and she coloured it a honey blond and her eyes were big and arresting. They narrowed and looked to the side when she had a problem to solve. When she was hurt or afraid she broke into a slow smile. She made him butter her toast. "Do things for me." That was the way she felt about him; "Do things for me." She burnt everything she cooked. She had tried university and flunked out, but she was full of patience for the child. The kid made her dopey with love. She had a way of being undiluted and present with Crystal. Everything she was, she handed over to the kid. Men fell in love with her, and he watched her let them down easy. He watched as she gently, firmly destroyed several different men, and he was to remain unsuspecting about his own fate, until she said, "How do I put this?" [chuckle] LM: She was funny. She did that thing of wrapping her arms around herself and turning her back on you, making kissing noises. And you could watch her hands groping her own shoulder blades and waist with full passion. It was raunchy; a raunchy parody. And she'd glance over her shoulder and ask if he was jealous. She mimed a glass box, and the look on her face, she faked a fear of being trapped in the glass; walls of glass that was pretty convincing. Once he'd come home and she was in the over-sized corduroy armchair with lumps of stuffing and exposed springs, and she was crying over a book. The whole room was dark, except for this light they had; a pole with five different lamps, each bubbled glass shade a different colour; orange, blue, red, pink. He couldn't remember what book, but he remembered her blinking him into existence. Looking up from the book and blinking her wet eyelashes, touching the corner of her eyes with the side of her hand, and the blue light on her cheek blinking until she was out of the sad book and present with him in the whole of an apartment they shared. And it occurred to him that he only really felt like someone, like a whole being when she called him to account. She was please and thank-you and outrageously selfish except for the child. "Could you put butter on that?" Not even looking up from the book, ordering him around. She was the only person he knew who ate real butter. LM: Slaney got off the train in Ottawa, and he went into the airy station; all glass and girders and pigeons, and he looked up Fred Decker in the phonebook, the guy she'd married and found the address. She was going to ask him to wait. He was going to ask her to wait for him, until he came back from the trip. LM: Slaney caught her hand just before it struck his face. That was in the hall, when she opened the front door. Crystal said, "Who is it mommy?" She was all changed, Jennifer's little girl. She was so tall, the serious eyes and the pout. He squatted, and held out the box with the doll. She hid her face, digging her forehead into her mother's thighs. "I'm a friend of your mother's," Slaney said. "Go ahead, honey," Jennifer said. Crystal had stepped out and taken the box in her hands and yelled suddenly, "Guess what? I got another one!" Jennifer let him in the apartment because of the neighbours. "I don't need them mentioning this all up and down the whole building," she said. There were two children having a tea party in the living room with Crystal. They were trying to get the new doll out of the cardboard box. Slaney and Jennifer stood in the middle of the room, because siting down didn't seem the right thing to do. She had her hand pressed to the side of her face. She was looking at the floor, and she was rigid as stone. He told her he wanted to give her things, to build a life. "Don't pin that on me," she said. "Don't you dare." He told her he was sorry. "Did you get my letters?" he said. "Yes, I got them." LM: "And you didn't answer?" "Social services came by," she said. "They had questions David about was I a fit mother with a drug smuggler hanging around. They interviewed Crystal without my permission, took her down to the department for the afternoon, imagine what that was like". She said, she could have lost Crystal to foster care, had he thought about that? Then she told him she wanted him to leave. "We could have been a family," she said. He asked her to forgive him. "Are you kidding me?" She said. "Why did you come here I'm married now David. I have a husband that means something, not a guy who is going to take off on me, not a guy who would abandon. A man, David, a good man who's honest with me." "Do you love him?" "Yes." "Do you love him?" "Yes." "Do you love him?" "Yes." "Do you Jennifer? Do you love him?" "I don't love him, no." "We are meant to be together, Jennifer," Slaney said. "You know it". She spoke slowly then almost stuttering a quiet deliberate tone that didn't belong to her. "If you walk away from this David, I will pack a bag. We can leave I mean it. Tell me you'll walk away from that racket and I will go with you now, no looking back. Crystal and I will take a few things and get the hell out of here, if you walk away from it. Do you hear me? Say the word. David, just say the word, we'll come with you right now. Start a new life together." LM: He took her hand away from her face and led her down the hall away from the children. He tried a door but it was a bedroom and he tried another and it was the bathroom. And the last room was the laundry room and he took her in there and he shut the door and he lifted her up on to the washer, which was going and they were on each other and he was inside her and the washer was rattling and rocking and it was not sexy. It was fast and they were both crying right through it and it changed him the way no other sex had every changed him and she said, "don't get caught that's all." She was smoothing his hair out of his eyes, "don't get caught," she whispered. Then she was tugging up her jeans and pulling her ponytail tight with a vicious hug and she was crying a little and wiping her eyes. He said, he wouldn't get caught again and he was coming back for her. He didn't care about the husband. He only cared about her and Crystal and he'd be back. She said, "How do I put this David?" Thank you. Sheila Heti: Hi, my name is Sheila Heti. I printed out a bunch of different things that I could read today. I wanted to read something that I haven't published. And we're all wearing black dresses [chuckle] so I thought that I would ready this, which talks about why anyone would wear a black dress. I'm working on some different things right now but one of them is a collaboration it's a book project called, "Women in Clothes." And my main collaborators are Heidi Julavits who's a fiction writer and Leanne Shapton who's a fiction writer and a designer. So basically what we've been doing is getting women to fill out surveys about their relationship to style and writing our own diaries, thinking about these sorts of questions and this is a piece of writing in that category. I wrote it two weeks ago, Saturday, June, 8th. SH: I was asked if I wanted to go hang out with Rodarte, his sisters for a couple of days in Santa Cruz California to write about them. They are fashion designers. The next day I was walking with my best friend Margo and I loved so much what she was wearing and I thought, "Why should I go to Santa Cruz to talk to them when my best friend right here dresses in such an interesting way?" The next day she told me that the way she's been buying clothes lately is she goes into Goodwill and then buys 10 things for a dollar and brings them all to the studio. She wears them while painting and the thing she really likes she takes homes and wears in real life. My boyfriend talked about his interest in clothes and my burgeoning interest as a hobby and said that the important thing about a hobby is that it allows you to relate to people you wouldn't normally relate to. It gives you something to say that everyone you share that hobby with and that's important to have something to say to anyone you might encounter in the world. I had never thought about an interesting clothes as a hobby or that this was the important functions of a hobby. Part of the reason I want to do this book is because I want to begin thinking about evaluating the physical tangible world for a long time than most important things had for me things you cannot see talent, character, the soul. Objects had no power over me. SH: I didn't pay attention to them. They had no hold on me. Part of doing this book was a way to think about the world of things. The world that exists not just in our imaginations but that everyone can see. I went to a private a school for a number of years where everyone had to wear the same thing, a navy blue tunic with a white collared buttoned-down shirt beneath it and a navy blue tie, navy blue socks and black leather shoes. It was fascinating to me that some girls managed to look cool and stylish in this simple outfit and to convey their confidence and hotness while others like me weren't able to wear belts and socks in such a way that conveyed anything special or at least not anything interesting about who we were. I always wondered what this difference meant. I didn't know the word style then but in retrospect some girls just had style and it came through in the length of their hair. How they held their bodies, how they wore their belt. I'm still amazed when a woman has style. I don't feel I do and I don't know what I'm doing or not doing to make this so. SH: There is a writer friend of mine who recently started making and selling clothes. But long before that when we were in university together, I always thought she was a beautiful woman who dressed amazingly, and I kind of envied her clothes and her look; a little hippie, very feminine, slim against her body but never too revealing, a little rock & roll. I told her that I was going on a book tour and I felt I had nothing to wear and she promised to bring over a bunch of her clothes for me to take with me as I travelled. I was so excited. She dropped off the bag on the stoop and I immediately brought it up and tried on everything; long blouses, beautiful skirts, leather pants. Nothing looked right. I could see how all these clothes would bring out her beauty, but it all looked ridiculous on me. As I was trying these things on I was also going into the next room so my boyfriend could see. He just kept frowning. [laughter] SH: Finally, as a test, I put on one of my own dresses and went and stood in front of him. "That's the best one yet," he said. [laughter] SH: I realized then that there's no sense in trying to copy another girl's style. However amazing it may appear on her, it has nothing to do with you. I wouldn't want her arty boyfriend, either. [chuckle] Her arty, sensitive boyfriend would suit me as little as her arty, sensitive clothes. I find it strange that I don't feel I have style in how I dress because all I think about when I write is my style, and I do feel I have a style of writing. How come this doesn't translate to clothes? Perhaps because I understand words and sentences from a lot time thinking about them and working with them and paying attention to how other writers use them, I'm able to manipulate them to make them say what I want them to mean. I've hardly tried this with clothes. So, it's not that I don't have style, but I don't know my materials. Maybe women who have clothing style know their materials. They have felt and tried on and looked at and thought about dresses, pants, blouses, shoes. Everyone has style I think, but not everyone has facility with the materials, just as a writer has great facility with words and a painter has great facility with paints. SH: When I have not been exercising or eating well, which is all the time or when I've been smoking or drinking too much, it doesn't matter what I put on. Nothing feels right. Nothing feels good. At these times I try to shower more, to wash away whatever grime I feel my body has in it, or on it, but after I've towelled myself off, I'm no better off than when I began. Margo, whose painting studio I'm working in as I'm writing this, I noticed that she paints close up, then she stands back. Sometimes she goes across the room and sits down on her chair to look at what she's just done. I suppose it could be the same way with outfits; One looks at things up close in detail, then stands back to see the whole thing. It's not that I think this stuff is so important, but for those who think it is important or for those who'd like it to be important, this book will exist as part of that. SH: Part of what this book is about for me is about how do people make choices. For me, the most difficult thing in my life is making a decision. Most of the time when I make a decision, I feel I've made the wrong decision. I feel if I can look at how women make decisions about relatively simple and relatively inconsequential things like clothing... Of course clothing is not simple and inconsequential, but simple and inconsequential enough... Then I can use it to think about how to make the bigger decisions in my life, or feel comfortable with the decisions I've made. 21:21 SH: Of course the choices one makes reflects one's style, the kind of life one wants to have, the values one has that must be expressed in that life, which make one comfortable and stimulated or seem important to you, what seems worth spending your time on. Margo did my tarot cards the other day and she said that in order to make the smaller decisions, I need to focus on the biggest thing, my life and if I can think about what I want my life to be, then the smaller decisions will fall into place. That makes sense. I think the way I dress has been the way I've conducted my life, focusing always on the smaller decisions, like should I get this shirt, rather than to see the big picture. If I can think about what I want my life to be as a whole, then I'll be able to decide whether to take on some journalistic assignment or not. If I can think about what I want to dress like, see it first in my mind then it'd be easier to make the smaller decisions. If one just focuses on the smaller choices and never makes the bigger choices, of course it will all seem motley, nothing will quite hang together. How could you ever call yourself content? SH: A person expresses their values in what they wear. What are my values? [laughter] SH: Or, going forward, what do I want my values to be? Economy, beauty, elegance, comfort? But think about your life first. Make the decisions about your life first. Then think about your clothing. Or would it be easier to do it the other way around? When I was in Istanbul, Aleph and I came up with a game. We would ask each other questions, knowing what the other person's answer revealed. For instance, if I asked her, "What's your favourite movie?" What I was thinking in my head was? "Your answer will tell me what the plot of your next book should be." Or, she might say, "What is your favourite landscape," thinking in her head, "That is what her future will be." We would ask the other person three questions and then after those questions were asked and answered, we would tell the other person their fortune. At one point, Aleph asked me, "What's your favourite article of clothing?" I said, "A simple dress." I was visualizing a black dress, sleeveless, that I could wear everyday at once elegant and not fancy with no belt or embellishment, feeling good on, a sturdy material, form fitting but not tight. [laughter] SH: She said, "That is your life in Toronto." [laughter] That made sense to me. It meant that everything I have is here. I come to Toronto, well I live in Toronto, but I was not there when I was thinking about this. I can come to Toronto and slip it on. My friends are here. My family's here. My home is here. My pets are here. My boyfriend is here. Everything is here. It is simple and it hangs together like a simple black dress. I suppose this is what I want my life to be, a simple black dress. And how I want to dress and for there to be nothing in my life that is not bound up in that dress. For my whole life to be made of one material, easy to slip on and off. Not a life in parts or pieces, but one piece of fabric, easy, simple, familiar and knowable. For a long time in my life, I didn't think I could have what I wanted, my life was in pieces. I had a different boyfriend every few years, I kept changing apartments, I would begin projects and discard them, nothing felt right. Lately, I've been feeling that I can have what I want, or at least I can risk trying to build the life I want, because I'm strong enough to endure it if it falls apart. SH: Before, fearing it would fall apart, I didn't even really try. I couldn't make decisions, but to make a decision wouldn't have even mattered because I held on to nothing. Now that I'm at a point in my life where I can risk trying, or where I value myself in my life enough to try, I'm suddenly curious about everything in the world, including this question about how I wanna dress from now on. Life is long and life is short, my body probably won't change that much, or it hasn't. I used to think it was a tragedy that I couldn't be every person, have every person's experience, but now it seems like a tragedy not to have my own. SH: Started very simply, very slowly. One choice follows the next, everything should feel right. I guess that is my fantasy about dressing. That through dressing in my style I can make everything feel right, and my life will reflect who I am. But does one have a hidden style and find it? Or does one make it up? My boyfriend and I are renting an apartment in a neighbourhood I've lived in for 10 years, just blocks from two of my best friends. His mother offered to lend us a whole house she owns in another part of town, I went to see it an hour away on the streetcar. And I felt very different from myself being there, very old, alienated, apart from my life and depressed, I thought, "I wanna go home now." And I took the streetcar back to my apartment in my neighbourhood. SH: There are things I don't like about my neighbourhood, but I think it's a part of who I am now. There are also things I don't like about myself, but they're part of who I am now. Maybe at a certain point one isn't always starting over, discarding and erecting a whole new self, one wants to keep things constant and built. And maybe it's true that these things that are seemingly superficial, like neighbourhood one said, are actually a deep and real part of who one is. Change that, it changes who you are. I felt, in that other part of the city, like this other Sheila I did not know. Part of me was curious to live out this self, to discover her. But a greater part of me was relieved to realize I had no obligation to. That I didn't have to, that no one was creeping up behind me to rip away the life I have. Meaning that I should get rid of it before it's ripped away, so I don't have to suffer when it inevitably falls apart. My life can conceivably be my life forever, perhaps this is the feeling of love. Thanks. Miranda Hill: I almost had to get pinched to come up here, 'cause I was like, "Wow! Oh, wait! It's my turn." This is lovely company to be keeping, thank you for having me. Thank you, Michael for inviting me. I have this book called, "Sleeping Funny" and it's nine stories, and they're all completely different and there is no linking, coordinating theme. In fact, a number of people have told me it sounds like a different person wrote each one of them, but that's okay. And today I'm going to read two sections to you from the first story, which is called, "The Variance" and it takes place in a neighbourhood that is quite set in its ways, it has a structure. And that structure is disturbed when a new neighbour comes to town, I thought this would be good to read because of the theme of Claire's book coming up after this. MH: So, this is how the story begins. The lice moved through the neighbourhood with the precision of a military campaign. An infrared map of Glenmount Crescent would have shown a pattern so complete that even the houses that were spared seemed part of the strategy. By Monday of the second week, a third of the students at Forest Glen Elementary School were away, along with two teachers and even the well-coiffed lady from the front office who never touched anything that had been handled by a student without dispensing a squirt of anti-bacterial gel. MH: By Wednesday, the Johnstone, Clark-Mayer, Banerjee-Blum and Stein houses all had children affected, and the nannies were spending their days laundering and combing, while the mothers went to work with their smooth hair pulled into tight ponytails over sharp collars. Imogene Clark had three children and had tried all the treatments, beginning with the most benign, a Vaseline-smeared head wrapped in scarves, so that Owen and Oliver and Matilda looked at first like small cancer victims or a tumbling troupe gone awry, the dress-up box having been pilfered for one child after another. By that afternoon though, they had come to resemble dishevelled mummies, running around the house in greasy tatters, and Joy-Anne, the nanny, had stripped them of their ruined costumes and called Imogene at the university, where she was provost. Imogene sent a message back through her secretary, saying she'd bring home some tea tree oil. MH: The oil made the children's scalps tingle and got in Oliver's eyes when he rubbed them, so that that night when he laid his head on his once-again laundered sheets he also had chamomile tea bags dripping onto his pillow, Imogene having remembered that chamomile was meant to soothe something eye-related and not recalling that it was sties her own mother had used it for. When the lice showed no signs of surrender after four days of treatment and with Joy-Anne tired of being asked again and again if there weren't some remedy from Jamaica she could recall, Imogene marched to the pharmacist and got the hard stuff. At the counter, she met Leslie Banerjee who was asking for tea tree oil. MH: When Leslie saw Imogene, she blushed and stammered an apology as if the lice were an indication of her own moral failure and Imogene told her to just skip right to the chemicals and maybe they would all be done with it. Standing on Imogene's lawn with Imogene, Leslie and Adelaide three evenings later, monitoring the children's turns on the tree swing, Kate Johnston held that the lice epidemic was worse than the attack of pin worms from when the children had all been in training pants and they'd gathered in that cesspool of a play group three mornings a week. The pin worms had moved back and forth between the children with a disheartening regularity as if it were a game of hot potato, until one day they petered out altogether. MH: No one really knew why, but the pin worm problems had certainly been a factor when Brian Johnston told his wife that what he'd really wanted was a girl and couldn't they try just one more time. And Kate had looked at Caleb and Campbell, scratching in their footed jammies and said, "Not on her life." Yes, lice were worse. Leslie Banerjee was sure of it. There was the bedding stripped and washed and bleached each day, then into the dryer for a sterile spin. But, there were also missed classes and the missed days of work when Edna, the nanny had contracted them herself and had to stay home to do her own treatment and sterilize her apartment, and Leslie had not known what to say to her fellow partners at Gordon, Banerjee & Yates. And two of them said, "Oh, you're on Glenmount, aren't you. My sister's daughter teaches at Forest Glen, but on the side she's studying entomology." [laughter] MH: Of course it wasn't just Glenmount, it was also streets like Park, and Collingwood and Cedar Grove where the houses were that much smaller, the gardens closer, and some families without nannies and regular cleaners. Places Leslie Banerjee reasoned where the phone calls made to employers were perhaps not so tortured as those some others on Glenmount were making to law offices and head surgeons and deans of departments, places where sometimes no one had to make any cause at all. The mothers simply giving up their days to hours of washing, scalp scrubbing and fine combing for nits. "What about the chicken pox?" asked Adelaide Stein who was always late with a contribution until the conversation was almost over. The chicken pox was terrible and there were all those scars. Imogene said that "The chicken pox were all so different." MH: There was a sense of legitimacy with chicken pox. Chicken pox was something you wanted the children to get to build up their immunity unless of course you were one of those mothers who felt that your child shouldn't ever be sick and you went out and got the vaccine. "Well, there was a question of secondary infection," said Leslie, "And secondary infections could be deadly." A lot of pediatricians nowadays were highly recommending, in fact, practically insisting that parents choose the vaccine that acted like it was child abuse not to. "Doctors think they know," said Imogene, with a force meant to leave everyone thinking, but trying not to think about Kate being a plastic surgeon and Imogene's own husband Paul's position as Head of Emergency Services at the University Hospital. MH: Now, that the lice had made their way through the neighbourhood and down most of the street, there might have been an air of cleansing about it. After the chemicals had been applied to each of the children in turn, after it had been applied once and sometimes twice and after the children had been subjected to the humiliating and excruciatingly boring head check before being permitted reentry to school, the lice decamped from Glenmount Crescent appearing not to leave a trace. It was fall and other things should have been on the adults' minds. Parent-teacher interviews and increased homework or lack of homework and whether the older girls should be allowed to wear those jeans so tight that there were zippers on the sides as well as in the front. MH: The leaves were turning on the oaks, and maples and beaches. The crab apples falling into the streets and attracting the wasps before garden services or intrepid fathers scrape them from the pavement. Seeing the neighbours on Glenmount Crescent would be in a position to shake their heads and give a small clip laugh about, 'the epidemic' whenever someone brought it up almost accidentally as a reference point for the other things that happened that fall. Like Owen Clark-Mayer's broken arm or Charles Stein's eye surgery or that business with the Banerjee-Blums. Indeed, maybe it all would have been different if they had just gone back into their stone and brick and stucco houses, walked out of that late September evening and into their granite countered kitchens to the smell of the housekeeper's cooking. MH: Moved away from under the old beach with the tree swing in front of the Clark-Mayer house and if Adelaide hadn't at that very moment said, "I wonder where it all started." Then turned and looked up and across the Crescent almost to the place where it bent and beheld... (unclear) standing in her garden, her maze of frizzy white-blond hair flowing out like meringue from under a red kerchief and said, "Can you imagine pulling the lice combs through that? You know, if I had hair like that I don't think I could comb it at all." And each of the women watched the words form into a cloud before them that might just have been the first frozen breath of the season. MH: So, as you can see the four characters and there's a new neighbour and the four characters are quite certain that their new neighbour is a little... A fly, an annoying fly, but slowly though we never hear from the new neighbour, their lives change as a result of her presence in their neighbourhood. And now I will just read you a small section from Adelaide. Adelaide has a child who is just that kid. Okay, so we all know that kid and he eats erasers in his room and... When... She's worried about the chemicals going on his head and having a problem with brain... With learning later and his father says, "Well, if he gets into Mensa that's a good thing." Maybe it will change things perhaps. So she's all about her son and unfortunately her son isn't kinda coming through. MH: Adelaide had been matching children to the preprinted envelopes all morning. Tucking the invitations to next week's parent-teacher night inside and listening to the crisp "pfft" of the papers as they were... As if they were final breaths of individual oracles. On every page was printed, "Please come to discuss" and a handwritten comment followed, "Simon, continuing his excellent progress in science with additional exploration at home." "Cameron's kindness to his fellow students and teachers." " Owen developing his leadership qualities in the classroom as well as on the playing field." It was a veritable parade of the attributes and accomplishments of the children at Forest Glen except of course for Charles. MH: Before tackling the stack left to her on the extra desk in the Forest Glen office, Adelaide had waited until the school's official secretary answered the phone and then she surreptitiously eased Charles's note from the middle of the pile. "Please come to discuss. Charles practising his times table. Remembering all clothing for gym days. Checking agenda for assignments." Rote and bland as if like Charles himself the teachers could think of nothing to say. Now 40 or a 100 papers in Adelaide's fingers no longer throbbed of paper cuts. She had worked her breathing back to a shallow rhythm returned her heart to a slow and regular pace. After reading the name at the top of each page, Adelaide immediately flipped the page over without reading further so that she was staring only at it's blank white back. The relief was profound. The predictability of the action inducing a comforting catatonia. The bell rang for the children to come in for recess and the hall filled with the sound of shuffling feet and voices, then Owen and Simon, their cheeks rosy, their fall jackets askew, entered the office. They were followed by a couple of boys that Adelaide barely knew, then finally by Romero, whose Michel's son, the new neighbour, blood gushing from his nose. But not finally, because behind them all came Charles looking as if he was an understudy struggling to remember his lines. MH: "Goodness," the secretary said with a shutter. "I'll get the ice. Could you... " She handed Adelaide a box of Kleenex and rushed off in the direction of the staff room. The boys arranged themselves in the row of chairs as if they had bought tickets, all except Romero whose nose was staining his jacket and making a puddle under him, and Charles who just stood inside the doorway, his expression unreadable. "Simon, get up," Adelaide said. "Romero needs that chair." She gathered Romero by the shoulder and got him to put his head between his knees and hold a clump of Kleenex to his nose. MH: The door to the inner office opened and Mrs. Trask, the principal, stepped in to the reception area. She stood for a moment, a general surveying the sorry state of her troops. "Mr. Clark-Mayer", she said with with a weary tone of one assigned to an outpost that would never see real combat, "Could you enlighten me?" "He got hit by a ball," Owen said. "I kicked it," Simon said. Clearly there are points to be won for participation. "But we were all playing," Owen said. "Well, all of us except Romero; he was only watching." A phone was ringing but Adelaide didn't move to answer it. While she had been here sizing up her son's failure, he'd been on the field with the other boys. Charles playing soccer! Adelaide stood frozen as she was shooed aside by the secretary who pressed an ice pack up against Romero's nose, removing the wad of bloody Kleenex with a hand encased in the latex glove. MH: "I'll call his mother," she said. "Alright", said Mrs. Trask. "Back to class the rest of you." The boys stood and walked through the door. Their voices picking up one by one in the empty hallway as they crossed the office threshold. Charles trawled at the end and as he turned the corner, Adelaide readied herself to strain for his particular timbre, to hear it blend into the course of secrets and retellings, the real story revealing itself being remade into legend, even as the boys pushed and shoved their way back into class but then, "Charlie," Mrs. Trask called him back. "What exactly were you doing when all this happened?" Charles stood slowly to face her. "The teacher outside said to come. He said, 'You too.'" "Charlie, you weren't playing soccer." Mrs. Trask wasn't asking questions anymore, just stating facts for the record. "No", said Charles and Adelaide saw Romero looked up at him as if noticing him there for the first time. "We've been told to come to the office, Charlie, do you think your mother is happy to see you here?" Charles shrugged. "Go back to your class," Mrs. Trask said, and Charles looked for a moment as if he didn't know where or what that was, before he exited in silence. MH: Mrs. Trask turned to Adelaide and gave a little smile. "Straightforward case of mistaken identity." She said, "Oh, if you wouldn't mind, Mrs Stein, would you sit with Romero until his mother gets here?" Adelaide sat down in the plastic chairs. She watched the secretary pick up the envelopes Adelaide had stuffed and then seal each of them shut. Thank you. [applause] Claire Messud: Thank you. What a huge privilege to be with these guys. Thank you Michael for having me and thank you for coming. Is that the right set? Okay. [background conversation] CM: I'm gonna read from the beginning and then a couple of short passages from this novel, 'The Woman Upstairs.' The narrator is a woman named Nora Eldridge. She is an elementary school teacher in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She's in her early 40s when she tells this story and it's largely about events that happened in her late 30s. But it's told retrospectively. So, I'm going to read just right from the beginning and I don't think you need to know anything more than that. CM: How angry am I? You don't wanna know. Nobody wants to know about that. I'm a good girl, I'm a nice girl, I'm a straight A, strait-laced, good daughter, good career girl, and I never stole anybody's boyfriend and I never ran out on a girlfriend, and I put up with my parents' shit and my brother's shit, and I'm not a girl anyhow, I'm over 40 fucking years old, and I'm good at my job and I'm great with kids and I held my mother's hand when she died, after four years of holding her hand while she was dying, and I speak to my father every day on the telephone... Every day, mind you, "And what kind of weather do you have on your side of the river, because here it's pretty gray and a little muggy too". It was supposed to say, "Great Artist" on my tombstone, but if I died right now it would say, "such a good teacher, daughter, friend" instead; and what I really want to shout, and want in big letters on that grave, too, is, "Fuck you all." CM: Don't all women feel the same? The only difference is how much we know we feel it, how in touch we are with our fury. We're all furious, except the ones who are too damned foolish, and my worry now is that we're brainwashing them from the cradle, and in the end even the ones who are smart will be too damned foolish. What do I mean? I mean the second graders at Appleton Elementary, sometimes the first graders even, and by the time they get to my classroom, to the third grade, they're well and truly gone. They're full of Lady Gaga and Katy Perry and French manicures and cute outfits and they care how their hair looks. In the third grade! They care more about their hair or their shoes than about galaxies or caterpillars or hieroglyphics. How did all that revolutionary talk of the '70s land us in a place where being female means playing dumb and looking good? Even worse on your tombstone than, "dutiful daughter" is looked good; everyone used to know that. But we're lost in a world of appearances now. CM: That's why I'm so angry, really, not because of all the chores and all the making nice and all the duty of being a woman or rather, of being me, because maybe these are the burdens of being human. Really I'm angry because I've tried so hard to get out of the hall of mirrors, this sham and pretend of the world, or of my world, on the East Coast of the United States of America in the first decade of the 21 century. And behind every mirror is another fucking mirror, and down every corridor is another corridor, and the Fun House isn't fun anymore and it isn't even funny, but there doesn't seem to be a door marked, "Exit." CM: At the fair each summer when I was a kid, we visited the Fun House, with its creepy grinning plaster face, two stories high. You walked in through its mouth, between its giant teeth, along its hot-pink tongue. Just from that face, you should've known. It was supposed to be a lark, but it was terrifying. The floors buckled or they lurched from side-to-side, and the walls were crooked, and the rooms were painted to confuse perspective, lights flashed, horns blared, in the narrow, vibrating hallways lined with fattening mirrors and elongating mirrors and inside-out, upside-down mirrors. Sometimes the ceiling fell or the floor rose, or both happened at once and I thought I'd be squashed like a bug. The Fun House was scarier by far than the Haunted House, not least 'cause I was supposed to enjoy it. I just wanted to find the way out. But the doors marked 'Exit' led only to further crazy rooms, to endless moving corridors. There was one route through the Fun House, relentless to the very end. CM: I've finally come to understand that life itself is the Fun House. All you want is that door marked 'Exit', the escape to a place where real life will be; and you can never find it. No, Let me correct that. In recent years, there was a door, there were doors, and I took them and I believed in them, and I believed for a stretch that I'd managed to get out into reality and God, the bliss and terror of that, the intensity of that: It felt so different until I suddenly realized I'd been stuck in the Fun House all along. I'd been tricked. The door marked 'Exit' hadn't been an exit at all. I'm not crazy, angry yes, crazy, no. My name is Nora Mari Eldridge and I'm 42 years old, which is a lot more like middle age than 40 or even 41. Neither old nor young, I'm neither fat nor thin, nor tall nor short, neither blond nor brunette, neither pretty nor plain. Quite nice looking in some moments I think is the consensus rather like the heroines of Harley Quinn romances read in quantity in my youth. [Laugher] CM: I'm neither married nor divorced, but single what they used to call a spinster, but don't anymore because it implies that you're dried up and none of us wants to be that. [laughter] CM: Until last summer I taught third grade at Appleton Elementary School in Cambridge, Massachusetts and maybe I'll go back and do it again. I just don't know. Maybe instead I'll set the world on fire, I just might. Be advised that in spite of my foul mouth, I don't swear in front of the children, except once or twice when a rogue shit has emerged but only sotto voce and only in extremists. If you're thinking, "How can such an angry person possibly teach young children?" Let me assure you, that every one of us is capable of rage, and that some of us are prone to it, but that in order to be a good teacher you must have a modicum of self-control which I do. I have more than a modicum. I was brought up that way. Second, I'm not an underground woman harbouring resentment from my miseries against the whole world. Or rather, it's not that I'm not in some sense an underground woman. Aren't we all? Who have to cede and swerve and step aside unacknowledged, and unadmired, and unthanked. Numerous in our 20s and 30s, we're positively legion in our 40s and 50s, but, the world should understand if the world gave a shit, that women like us are not underground. No Ralph Ellison basement full of light bulbs for us; no Dostoyevskian metaphorical subterra. We're always upstairs. CM: We're not the madwomen in the attic; they get lots of play one way or another. We are the quiet woman at the end of the third floor hallway, whose trash is always tidy, who smiles brightly in the stairwell at the cheerful greeting, and who from behind closed doors never makes a sound. In our lives of quiet desperation, the woman upstairs is who are, with or without a goddamn tabby or a pesky lolloping Labrador, and not a soul registers that we are furious. We're completely invisible. I thought it wasn't true, or not true of me, but I've learned I'm no different at all. The question now is, how to work it? How to use that invisibility, to make it burn? CM: So she's a little grumpy. [laughter] [applause] CM: Aren't we all some days? [chuckle] So, the other two bits are sort of little history bits, I guess, that I'm gonna read. CM: If you'd asked me, upon my graduation from high school, where I'd be at 40 and surely someone must have asked. There must be a feature tucked away in the long-lost yearbook laying out our plans for later life, I would have painted a blissful picture of the smocked artist at work in her airy studio, the children, several of them, aged perhaps five, seven and nine frolicking in the sun-dappled garden, doubtless with a dog or two, large ones. I wouldn't have been able to describe for you the source of income for this vision, nor any father to account for the children; men seemed, at that juncture, incidental to the stuff of life. Nor did the children require a nanny of any kind, they played miraculously well, without bickering, without ever the desire to interrupt the artist, until she was ready. And then, the obligatory and delightful picnic beneath the trees. [chuckle] CM: No money, no man, no help but in the picture there were those necessary things: The light, the work, the garden and, crucially, the children. If you'd asked me then to winnow the fantasy, to excise all that was expendable, I would've taken out the picnic, and the dogs, and the garden, and under duress, the studio. A kitchen table could suffice, for the art, if need be, or an attic, or a garage. But the art and the children, they were not negotiable. I'm not exactly not an artist, and I don't exactly not have children. [chuckle] I've just contrived to arrange things very poorly, or very well, depending how you look at it. I leave the kids when school gets out; I make my art. I don't have to use the kitchen table because I have a whole second bedroom with two windows no less for that purpose, evenings and weekends. It's not much but it's better than nothing. And in the serener year, when I had my airy studio to share, when I couldn't wait to get there, my veins fizzing at the prospect, it was perfect. CM: I always thought I'd get farther. I'd like to blame the world for what I've failed to do, but the failure, the failure that sometimes washes over me as anger, makes me so angry I could spit, is all mine, in the end. What made my obstacles insurmountable, what consigned me to mediocrity, is me, just me. I thought for so long, forever that I was strong enough or I misunderstood what strength was. I thought I could get to greatness, to my greatness, by plugging on, cleaning up each mess as it came, the way you're taught to eat your greens before you have dessert. But it turns out that's a rule for girls and sissies, because the mountain of greens is of Everest proportions, and the bowl of ice cream at the far end of the table is melting a little more with each passing second. There will be ants on it soon. And then they'll come and clear it away altogether. The hubris of it, thinking I could be a decent human being and a valuable member of family and society, and still create, absurd. How strong did I think I was? CM: No, obviously what strength was all along was the ability to say, "fuck off" to the lot of it, to turn your back on all the suffering and contemplate, unmolested, your own desires above all. Men have generations of practise at this. Men have figured out how to spawn children and leave them to others to raise, how to placate their mothers with a mere phone call from afar, how to insist, as calmly as if insisting that the sun is in the sky, as if any other possibility were madness, that their work, of all things, is what must and must first be done. Such a strength has, in its youthful vision, no dogs or gardens or picnics, no children, no sky. It's focused only on one thing, whether it's on money, or on power, or on a paintbrush and a canvas. It's a failure of vision, in fact, anyone with half a brain can see that. It's myopia. But that's what it takes. You need to see everything else everyone else as expendable, as less than yourself. I'm like the children: My motivations and my reasons aren't always clear. But if I can just explain, all will be elucidated; and maybe that elucidation alone will prove my greatness, however small. To tell what I know, and how it feels, if I can. You might see yourself, if I do. CM: So, then she's gonna tell you a little bit about her life. Well, her childhood. CM: So, from our ordinary family in our ordinary house, a centre-entrance colonial, with its pot... This is just outside Boston... With its potted geraniums on the stone porch and its charmingly untended yew hedges nibbling at the windows, I made my way out into the ordinary world, to the local elementary school, the local middle school, the local high school. I was popular enough, universally liked by the girls, even liked when noticed, by the boys, though not in a romantic way. I was funny, ha-ha, not peculiar. [chuckle] It was a modest currency, like pennies, pedestrian, somewhat laborious, but a currency nonetheless. I was funny, in public, most often at my own expense. CM: Education was different then, and I was good at it, and so I skipped grade nine, went straight from eight to 10, which was socially a little tough at first and sealed my fate as a disastrous Math student, I never learned the quadratic formula, and other important tips from ninth-grade Math; just like I missed the early dating essays and the classes in how to navigate a school dance. At the time, though, I wasn't embarrassed about any of this, not embarrassed to be thrown, sink or swim, into the second year of high school, without so much as a map to the cafeteria or a primer on how cliques were lined up, or even a list of the names of my new classmates, all of whom knew one another, and some of whom knew me as their little sister's friend. No, I was proud, because I knew my parents were proud, because it was an elevation, and a revelation of the fact that I was special. I'd long suspected it, and now I knew for sure: I was destined. [laughter] CM: When you're a girl, you never let on that you are proud, or that you know you're better at history, or biology, or French, than the girl who sits beside you and is 18 months older. Instead you gush about how good she is at putting on nail polish or at talking to boys and you roll your eyes at the vaunted difficulty of the History, Biology, and French test and say, "Oh my God, it's going to be such a disaster! I'm so scared!" And you put yourself down whenever you can so that people won't feel threatened by you, so they'll like you, because you wouldn't want them to know that in your heart, you are proud, and maybe even haughty, and are riven by thoughts the revelation of which would show everyone how deeply not nice you are. You learn a whole other polite way of speaking to the people who mustn't see you clearly, and you know you get told by others that they think you're really sweet, and you feel a thrill of triumph, "Yes, I'm good at History, Biology, French, and I'm good at this, too." It doesn't ever occur to you, as you fashion your mask so carefully, that it will grow into your skin and graft itself, come to seem irremovable. [laughter] CM: When you look at the boy, Josh, who skipped the grade alongside you, and you see him wiping his nose up on his sleeve, and note his physical scrawniness, his chin's bloom of acne, next to the other 10-grade boys with broader chests, and clear square jaws, when you observe that he still takes his lunch with his old ninth-grade friends all of them boys in black T-shirts with glitter decals across the breast that say KISS or AC/DC, all of them with pimply chins and wet lips and hair as lank as seaweed you cannot see any triumph in him at all. He seems clearly to have lost, to be lost, to be a loser. Because anybody knows that in the challenge you were given when you skipped a grade, social success... Modest social success, to be sure, but still was half the battle. When Frederica Beattie invites you to join her birthday party, a sail on her father's boat with six other girls, two of whom are from the most popular set you feel pity for Josh, who will never taste such nectar. CM: But wait. Nobody ever pointed out that Josh, in his obliviousness, was utterly happy. He had already taught himself the quadratic formula; he would not be stymied in any area of academic advancement. In fact, he would go on to MIT and eventually become a neurobiologist with a lab largely funded by the NIH and a vast budget at his disposal... [laughter] CM: He would marry a perfectly attractive, if rather knock-kneed woman and spawn several knock-kneed, bespectacled nerds, replicas of himself. It will all work out more than fine for him, and he will never for a second suspect that it could have been otherwise. He will not know there was a social test; he will not know that he failed it. [laughter] CM: No, a sail on Frederica Beattie's fathers boat was an honour that he dream not of. And his yen for society such as it was, was perfectly satisfied by his old clan now a year behind him. He could no more have fashioned a mask than flown to the moon. And so he remained who he was forever more. Femininity is masquerade indeed. Thank you. [applause]