Your story “Coda” is about a middle-aged woman, Diane, who goes to live with her ninety-two-year-old mother, Margot, during the COVID pandemic. You have also spent some time with your elderly mother during the pandemic. Presumably the similarity ends there?
That’s an almost unanswerable question. It opens up the whole relation between invented fictions and “real life,” which is so opaque, so shrouded in shadow. And that is also what this story is about, in a way—the blurred lines between our dreaming and our reality. But the simple answer to your question is yes, absolutely, the similarity ends there. I was, indeed, in our cottage near my mother for the year of lockdown, but I was with my husband, and there were four of us in our “support bubble”—my aunt, Mum’s sister, was also part of our strange, constrained lockdown life. I’m sure that I have a Diane in me (dour, brooding, solitary, a bit broken), but she’s not to the fore at present! My mother was only married once—to my dad, for sixty-four years, until he died in 2019—and she shares nothing of Margot’s rather exotic life, or her Liverpudlian background. Her style’s quite different from Margot’s, too, more boho-arty, less cocktail-set.
Margot has lived a flamboyant and glamorous life, with three husbands, and many exotic homes. Her life has been, in a way, a performance, and she is unlikely to feel, as Diane does, that she hasn’t “had drama or joy or passion: those things were real, and other people had them, but not me!” Did Diane choose a different kind of life on purpose, as a kind of rebellion against her mother?
I don’t think she chose it. Does anyone ever “choose their life on purpose”? And if you were choosing, I’m not sure you’d choose Diane’s; it’s rather limited and thwarted. Isn’t it more true that when we’re born into a family—as well as into a place and a culture and an era in history, in which certain possibilities are or are not open—the potential of our personality flows into the shapes that are available, around whoever is already taking up the space? Being the plain, clever daughter of a woman who lives by her looks and her sparkle, her charm—well, only certain spaces were left open for Diane, and she has filled them out. Though she isn’t a victim, and the story isn’t written against Margot. Margot made something, too—and rather magnificently—out of what was possible for her.
But that account of the making of a self sounds fatalistic and narrow, and I don’t see it that way at all. I find the way that Diane has filled out her life—which looks so meagre on the outside—every bit as interesting as how Margot has filled out hers. How full of feeling and imagination Diane is, how clearly she sees. Margot, it’s true, is the star (although, when she was in films, she couldn’t act). But, without Diane, there’s no story: no recognition, of how it all adds up, of what it is. On the other hand, Diane pays for her insight; she really pays. Her anguish, at having missed out on passion, is the truth at the heart of it all. Yet I didn’t want this story to be depressing. I knew I needed to find a happy ending for it, in order to say what I wanted to say about life and imagination.
Diane is at a transitional point in her life. Her marriage has ended, she doesn’t want to impose on her son and his wife, and she welcomes this time outside of time, when her primary duty is her mother. But she is also alert for something more. Why do you think she becomes so fascinated by the aide who works with the man next door?
I’m sure that part of the answer is: because there’s nothing else to do. It fills up the hours—she says that herself. I don’t mean that in a throwaway sense, dismissing what she feels, what she invents. What I’m trying to capture in the story is the way that, however constrained and reduced the apparent, outward scope of our lives, the inner life can flower, swell, invent things, to fill up that squeezed space. Perhaps, even, the more squeezed the life, the more brilliant and expansive the invention—perhaps, up to a point. There’s something slightly unhinged about Diane’s obsession with Teresa in this story; on the other hand, she knows perfectly well that it’s unhinged. And what she invents doesn’t hurt anybody; it makes her happy.
It almost doesn’t matter what Teresa is really like—or, at least, what she’s really like is another story, a different one. Diane needs to have something of her own, apart from her mother or her son. Her need meshes with the few details of Teresa’s life that she gleans from watching her. This isn’t a relationship; it’s wholly one-sided, a projection of fantasy. But I do think that it’s nourishing, nonetheless. It nourishes Diane. Her fascination with Teresa is a projection of her own dreams, her self—and yet it’s not wholly solipsistic. It’s essential to her dreams that Teresa is real, actual, the particular physical person she is, and doing the work she does, and that she’s a certain type of person. (It’s a type Margot disapproves of—even before Diane finds out about the thing with Dickie, she thinks that Margot would find Teresa “coarse.”) The dream is a reaching out into the real.
All falling in love has an element of this kind of projection of a dream onto the real other person. And the projection is bound to overshoot the reality of the other, be bigger than that person can actually be.
Diane is reading “Madame Bovary,” and some of the passionate intensity of the book becomes superimposed onto Teresa. Why did you choose that novel, specifically?
It wasn’t a very deliberate choice. At least, I didn’t think carefully about it; I just knew that that was what she was reading. For years, in fact, I’ve had in my head a quite different story that I wanted to write, based on something factual I read (I’ve forgotten where, perhaps in Czeslaw Milosz’s “Native Realm”), about a girl during the war, waiting with her mother to cross, in great peril, from Russian-held territory to Nazi-occupied Poland. While they wait in a town mostly reduced to rubble, the teen-age girl reads “Madame Bovary.” I thought of this story so long ago that I can’t remember if I made up the “Madame Bovary” detail or not. But I can’t write that story—it’s not in my scope, it’s too big for me. So perhaps that’s why the “Madame Bovary” detail, and the whole irony of the flow between reading and living, transposed itself to the almost parodically less dramatic scenario of a middle-aged woman waiting out lockdown.
