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Sleep Before Evening

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Monday, 20 August 2007
An Interview with Magdalena Ball Sleep Before Evening Lauren Smith: What inspired you to write this book? Maggie Ball: I think with all first novels, there's a grab-bag of almost inchoate experiences, sensations, and notions which are fermenting and floating around for a long time, so that the book is a kind of culmination of years of wanting to write a novel. But the specific point at which I started working on Sleep as a cohesive structure I had been reviewing quite a number of writing books, and was particularly charged to pull the short stories and ideas together by Dan Poynter's The Self Publishing Manual -- which talked about the process of constructing a book before writing it. I like to really test drive the books I review, so I actually did exactly what he suggested -- got a loose-leaf binder and created a pretty cover with my working title (which was "Broken Words" at the time) and my name nice and bold. Then I did a back cover with fake glowing blurbs (from people like Rushdie, Barnes, and Carey -- laugh) and even a pretend bar code, and began creating chapters with rough descriptions in each of what happened. The funny thing was that once I did that, I started to yearn to create it, and with a clear and workable structure before me, I started writing. I gave Dan's book a positive review (it was a good book which I continue to recommend), but had no idea at the time that the binder would keep growing and growing (I did eventually ditch it, but that visualization was very powerful for me) until it really was a novel. Lauren Smith: Where did you get your inspiration for writing this? Where did this story come from? Maggie Ball: In terms of the content of the book and its theme, I was specifically inspired by a wonderful philosophy book titled Reason and Persons by Derek Parfit. In it, Parfit raises some fascinating questions about the nature of human identity which stimulated rather a lot of conversation in my house. The whole book was built around these questions, coupled with the idea of teenager's coming of age; an artists acceptance of her gifts. I guess you could say it's a kind of female Generation X version of Portrait of the Artist-- a book that was very influential to me as a teen. I also put it in a lot of the poetry that I loved as a teen -- Plath, Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Coleridge. The drugs and pain came later, as I began finding obstacles for my character as her preconceptions fell apart along with the words she'd always had to label herself and her world. I suppose the idea of trial by drugs came fairly naturally to me as my aunt and my mother both struggled (briefly in my mother's case, but no less intensely for that, and for a long time in my aunt's) with heroin addiction. My aunt, who was a writer, had written a very powerful book about it (Take the Long Way Home, by Susan Gordon Lydon) and that helped me get under the skin of a junkie, although Marianne's addiction was much more like my mother's than my aunt's. I didn't intend it at all, but I think my mother's experiences were a definite subconscious factor for me when I was writing. Lauren Smith: Do you think that teens are less equipped today to handle what life throws at them than they were say, 10 or 20 years ago? Or do you think they have more demands placed on them than ever before? Maggie Ball: Well, the book was actually set in 1982, so in terms of what was around then, it's probably not worse. In many ways teens are probably more cluey and possibly more mature about the long term effects of things like drug (alcohol/cigarette) use than they were in the period in which I was writing. Certainly drug education is much more advanced, and between the Internet and television, there is a huge amount of information, both official and anecdotal that teens can and are tapping into. On the other hand, there are plenty of new drugs that weren't around -- drugs like Ice or ecstasy which have their own unique problems. And from what I hear Heroin is still as much of a problem as ever, so perhaps things are comparable. There is better education but yes, more pressure to do more, achieve more, less government supp ort, and kids being exposed very early to adult issues, adult pressures. As a parent, I like to think/hope that there are reasons why one child might say yes and another no when faced with what might be that inevitable point in the teen years when something is offered -- perhaps it's a kind of confidence, or a sense of what lies beyond the moment and the possible impact that your choices might have. And if, collectively, kids' confidence is being eroded by a sense of financial or existential doom, or a lack of excitement about the future, then perhaps its easier to say yes. Lauren Smith: What made you decide to write about something as dark as drug addiction? Maggie Ball: Interestingly, I never intended to write about drugs. The story began purely as a character study -- the inner development of my character from someone struggling with self-image to a full fledged artist with the ability to "speak" in her own way. So the notion of art as a form of recovery emerged slowly and organically rather than something I plotted. But as I worked and reworked the book, I needed to push my character further downwards -- to make the story dramatic, and to help break down the safe world my character came from. I guess, from my own background (fortunately peripherally) I did have quite a lot of instinctive knowledge about the lure of drugs and their impact and it felt natural to do it this way. Again, my mother's experiences weren't paramount in my mind when I was writing, and I didn't even recognize what I was doing until my mother read the finished book and mentioned how deeply I'd captured her own drug experiences (and she was a similar age to Marianne when she went through it). It was like a shock of recognition for me. I was so worried she'd think I'd modeled the mother on her that I didn't even realize it was the protagonist that had most of my mother in her. That said, of course it's a fiction, and much of the darkness was due simply to my mentor and publisher coaching me to go further; to make it darker; to push my character harder. So I kept going until I felt I couldn't go any further. It wasn't always easy though to play around in such a dark area. Much of the writing was painful, but then I think it always is to be honest. Writing fiction is full of author blood! Lauren Smith: How much research went into this book? Maggie Ball: A lot. I've never been the kind of writer who could conjure up imaginary worlds (would that I could!) or simply imagine things. I need to be starting at something or listening to it to write about it, so I spent an awful lot (too much to keep track of -- I tend to work constantly in between a million other things) of time reading books, searching on the internet, pulling out and plotting walks on maps, watching films (I even had to watch a bunch of American teen films to get the dialogue right -- it's been so long since I've been in the US that all my dialogue was antipodean!) downloading pictures, visiting forums -- at every step in the novel, particularly during the many rewrites, I would have to immerse myself in as safe a way as possible in the time and place that my protagonist was in to get that verisimilitude. I grew up where the story is set, but I've been out a long time so I had to virtually go back. I don't even want to think of the hours spent finding out tiny tidbits of information. Lauren Smith: A lot of the reviews and comments on your book have said it's a parent "must read" - was that your intention when you wrote it? Maggie Ball: I'm glad you asked that question! I was surprised by those reviews, yes, and also a few others that suggested that the book be used by school counselors and on the High School curriculum (I won't let my own 10 year read it -- he's an excellent reader but I would say 16+ -- it isn't always pretty). Sleep was primarily intended as a literary fiction, with the sole aim of being an interesting story; a fictive dream. The protagonist does go through a drug addiction and recovery process, but that isn't what the book is about. There are so many different thematic images – the nature of identity, music, art, the whole parent/child relationship – drugs are only a relatively small part of the book. Probably the thematic climax occurs with a single statement as Marianne is at her piano, fairly late on when she says "Wittgenstein was wrong." But I've had so many positive responses to the book from people who have actually gone through or even who are going through an addiction, that I would be a fool to ignore it. Because drugs aren't entirely the point of an addiction either. They're only the symptom. Until you can get at the underlying hole – the underlying hunger which drives an addict to continue to seek the wrong kind of food – you can't deal successfully with the addiction—any addiction. So my protagonist's hunger – the hunger that leads her to find sustenance (which eventually turns sour) in drugs, is the same hunger that ultimate becomes her solution – the hunger for meaning. In Marianne's case, it's an art based, secular meaning which centers on her piano, her mother's art, and an awareness of her own inner strength, uniqueness and power. That's the message in the book, and I suppose, the message which the recovery community is finding powerful. It's a wonderful, gratifying feeling to know that the book has been able to go there, and have a positive impact in that sense. Moving with and connecting to a reader is all an author ever strives for, so if people think that there's an edifying message or if they connect with the book on that level, that's great. Lauren Smith: What do you hope your book accomplishes? Maggie Ball: You know the only thing a serious writer really wants from their work is to imagine a reader -- even one reader, with a tear rolling down their face as they read the book. That's my goal! But the title comes from Walter Pater's phenomenal book of art criticism The Renaissance which was written in 1873, and maybe never surpassed. I quote it at the front of the book "Not to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in those about us, and in the very brilliancy of their gifts some tragic dividing on their ways, is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening." The book is about going for the pulsations (and I jokingly even name the band in the book The Pulsations), or again, as Pater so beautifully put it: "our one chance lies in expanding that interval, in getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time..." I agree. Those pulsations are my answer to the questions that gave rise to this book. I hope that the reader feels Marianne's awakening, and maybe, just for a moment, feels a brief pulsation of their own. That's what I'm aiming for.
Last Updated ( Friday, 02 November 2007 )