Patricia Duncker is (at the risk of sounding all soppy and name-dropping like lumpy custard) lovely. She is rather forceful, aristocratic and wears big blanket throws, so she might be intimidating and bark a bit, but she is very pleasant.
I've seen her talk a couple of times on her own writing and there was a lot on masks (donning them, and becoming them) - her novel James Miranda Barrie was rather about how there is no distinction between the 'real' self and the social self, just layers of masking (it's about an ambiguously sexed - real historical - person who lived as a bloke and was an amazing military surgeon). Standard postmodern identity stuff.
Also, she spoke on writing as a kind of letter of love between oneself and the perfect, hallucinated reader. Hallucinating Foucault being partly about that (for those that haven't, the [fictional] author-hero writes a novel in response to each of Foucault's books, and they talk back and forth this way, each knowing that they have a perfect reader - I think, it's been a while).
She also mentioned that Foucault started when she sat on the side of a French grave and asked the inhabitant to tell her his story. He responded 'Fuck off!'. James Miranda Barrie must have involved a formidable amount of historical research, so she probably likes that. She has been researching her latest novel by going into the desert.
Michelle Roberts was obsessed with nuns and food, but may have worked through that by now. (And moved - where? Monks and booze?). Try wearing a lot of black and a white headband to the interview. And rubbing melted chocolate all over your face.
So in summary, say you're working on a historical novel about the masks that lesbian nuns wear when they're writing cookbooks for their perfect reader. |
