Author Interview: A brief conversation with Anita...
A brief conversation with Anita Shreve
The character Thomas Janes also appears in one of your earlier novels, You've written about love affairs before. In what ways is the story in The novel moves backward in time, with Linda and Thomas fifty-two years old at the beginning and seventeen at the end. Did you write the novel in this reverse order? I don't set out with an agenda when I write. I let the characters evolve. Sometimes it's similar to seeing a ravaged face on a street. You wonder what came before to create what you see.
Many readers are surprised by the novel's ending. Part of I spend the majority of my writing life imagining other people's lives. Writing itself is about experiencing the unlived life in many senses.
Well, it's kind of a prequel and a sequel. The idea for
The story is about two people who have a lifelong passion for each other even though they only meet three times in their lives-when they're fifty-two, when they're twenty-six, and when they're seventeen. You might say the book is about moments of no return. It's about missed and retrieved opportunities, about time and memory.
Yes, I wrote it backwards. It was challenging because I had to keep the thread of suspense alive even though the reader starts at the end and moves toward the beginning. I had to plant clues along the way so that when the reader got to the end of the book somehow it would all make sense.
Well, you should feel at the end of the book-really, on the last page-that the whole story is sort of turned on its ear.
Well, the story is not autobiographical. But, yes, I lived in Africa for three years in the late 1 970s. It was the only time in my life that I kept journals. And when I had the idea for this book, I went up to the attic and after a few days I unearthed these old journals. They were incredibly valuable. They lent an impressionistic immediacy to the book that I might not otherwise have been able to tap into.