Article: All He Ever Wanted began...

All He Ever Wanted began with an image of a room -- a calm and peaceful room of bleached quiet. In this room were white hydrangeas, pale linen curtains knotted just below the sills, faded French floral studies stuck onto the walls with hat pins, and, in the center, a white chandelier hanging from the ceiling. The conceit of the chandelier, which was oversized for the room, was of a bouquet of white iron flowers, the rust poking through in patches, lending the blossoms a tinge of ruin. Through this thicket of flowers -- some daisies, some roses with sharp-edged petals -- the six sconces of the fixture spread out with open arms. All about the chandelier, hanging from the stems and leaves and vines of the sconces, were dozens of crystals.

So clear and immediate was this vision that my working title for the novel that spooled out from it was originally called "The White Chandelier." I saw, in this room, a woman sitting at a table. She was sewing, and then after that, she made tea. Then she read for a bit. And then she wrote a letter. No one knew about the room, and she had gone to great pains to achieve it. Indeed, one could say she had bartered away her life to have it. Why was it so important to her?

And from there, the novel began to take on a life of its own, creating a universe that answered this question and many others. I thought about writing the novel from the woman's point of view, but I chose instead to write it from the point of view of the man who loved her, who was, in fact, obsessed with her, and would have done anything for her short of letting her have her independence and this room. And why was that?

Voila! I had a plot.

I enjoyed creating the slightly fussy and pedantic voice of Nicholas Van Tassel, immersing myself in the era in which the novel takes place (1899-1933), and pondering the deep moral questions both Nicholas and his wife, Etna, have to answer. I hope you will have as much pleasure reading this book as I did writing it.

Copyright © Anita Shreve, 2006