Author Interview: Q: The Archivist, your acclaimed...

Q: The Archivist, your acclaimed debut novel about a librarian and a mysterious trove of letters of T. S. Eliot, and Thirty-Three Swoons, your latest, both center on characters whose lives have been so deeply affected by past relationships that they have in some sense disconnected themselves from the present. Do you think this difficulty in relinquishing the past holds us all back, in one way or another?
A: Yes, and seldom predictably. In my fiction I've explored particular kinds of "backward looking," along with the consequences of becoming too tightly enmeshed in the past. I'm interested, too, in the costs of either safeguarding or overlooking family secrets-a theme in both my novels. Families, even happy ones, are full of undisclosed, privileged, or distorted information that, when discovered, can temporarily or even permanently halt the discoverer in her or his tracks.

Q: Thirty-Three Swoons is a very unusual and intriguing title. To what does it refer?
A: It refers to an evening's dramatic entertainment devised by a Russian theater director, Vsevolod Meyerhold-a central figure in my story. He loved the plays and stories of Anton Chekhov, as I do. Meyerhold staged "Thirty-Three Swoons," his set of three one-acts by Chekhov, in a single evening. While developing his production, he'd noticed that many of Chekhov's characters kept fainting; in fact, Meyerhold counted up 33 separate incidents of people passing out! Hence his title, which I've borrowed.

Q: So who is Vsevolod Meyerhold, and how did this real-life figure become a character in Thirty-Three Swoons?
A: In the mid-1990s, I lived for eighteen months in Moscow. There, I came across Meyerhold's name on numerous occasions; there's even a theater in his name. I read a few biographies and became entranced by this astonishing figure-a director and set designer who transformed Russian theater. Meyerhold's radical stagecraft and directorial practice made his theater one of the weirdest and liveliest in the West-and he was (and remains) a big influence on directors. Recently I attended a forum on international theater at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), and directors from around the world invoked Meyerhold's name repeatedly and reverently.

Q: Dreams play an important role in Thirty-Three Swoons. Why did you decide to have Meyerhold's double appear to Camilla, one of the book's two narrators, in dreams?
A: I was playing around. First, I knew that Meyerhold himself had made use of a double (named Dr. Dapertutto), whom he'd lifted from a short story by ETA Hoffmann, the famous creator of spooky fantasy tales. Meyerhold used Dapertutto as an alias while running an improv studio-rather against the wishes of his boss!-in St. Petersburg. So I decided (in an additional act of borrowing) to take Meyerhold's double and employ him for my own purposes. It felt right to me that "my" Dapertutto, having lost his partner, Meyerhold, after the director's execution in 1940, would do whatever he could to transmit something of his dead collaborator's energies to a willing (if unwitting!) recipient. And the best way for this transmission to occur was via dreams. Dreams are vivid and inexplicable and affecting-which is exactly what Dapertutto needed them to be. They're also very much like scents: they evanesce quickly.

Q: Jordan Archer, Camilla's father, is a perfumeur, and a variety of fragrances emanate from the pages of Thirty-Three Swoons. The ability to describe scents, a difficult task, seems to come very naturally to you. Where did your love of perfume originate? Did your descriptions require a lot of research?
A: I'm not much for research in general-and for this story, all I really had to do was visit the perfume counters of several luxury department stores and sniff away! Actually, I've always loved perfume, ever since my art teacher in fifth grade, a Frenchwoman, arrived in our classroom one day wearing L'Air du Temps. She left an invisible scent-trail in her wake; I've never forgotten it. And my mother, like so many women of her generation, often wore Chanel No. 5-another olfactory marvel. When I was sixteen, I took care of a dying man, a neighbor, for the summer. He had worked as a perfume maker, and he talked with me a bit about his career-enough for me to be forever fascinated. When I started my novel, I looked briefly at a couple of books on perfume manufacturing so I'd get the basic details right. But I knew that inhaling too much technical stuff would defuse my own powers of description.

Q: You teach creative writing at Bennington College and Boston University. Can you share anything about your writing process, perhaps something you tell your students to inspire them?
A: Students are often told, "Write what you know." Of course that's one good way of going about it-but it's also important to try writing what you don't know, to see what you might find out: what you might never have guessed, or even thought about. This I think is where the real pleasures of both writing and reading lie: stumbling around gladly on terra incognita.