Podcast #32: Jane Smiley on Living with Characters
The New York Public Library Podcast brings you the best of the Library's author talks, live events, and other bookish curiosities. In our most recent episode, author Jane Smiley visited NYPL for Books at Noon, where she discussed the origins of her trilogy The Last Hundred Years, the hard part about living with characters for one hundred years of their lives, and her middle school reading tastes.
Jane Smiley has suggested there are Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel, but she's written fourteen of her own. The Pulitzer Prize winner has also written two short story collections, five works of nonfiction, and five YA books. Even for so prolific a writer, anovel is a huge undertaking. So how did Smiley find inspiration to write a trilogy? According to the author, it began with a title:
"I was with a friend of mine named David Francis who's a writer from Australia and LA, and I said, 'So David I want to write a trilogy called The Last Hundred Years.' And he turned and looked at me and he said, 'Don't tell anyone that title because they'll steal it.' And I said, 'Oh, that's a good review!' And so that's how I got started."
The trilogy, as the name suggests, follows several characters through one hundred years of American history. According to Smiley, the characters became almost like family members:
"The first hard part was to get 'em born and the last hard part was to kill 'em off, and you know, I should've known that was coming. But, I enjoyed living with them. It was sort of like living with your own family. You have beefs with various things that they do. And you want them to do other things. But they're often their own and you really have to follow them and record them, but in some ways, they're making up their own minds about things."
One of Smiley's many other books is a tome on Charles Dickens. Her love affair with the author wasn't instantaneous, however:
"In seventh grade we were assigned Oliver Twist. I thought it was awful and I didn't understand why they wouldn't give him a second serving of porridge. In eighth grade, we read Great Expectations. I thought that was awful, awful too. In ninth grade, they assigned this even longer book called David Copperfield, and I put it off for two weeks, and finally, because I always did my homework on Saturday morning, I started reading it, and I read it in two days, and I thought it was wonderful. And so, I felt a lot of fondness for Dickens when I was young. The other book that I really loved when I was young was Giants in the Earth which you wouldn't have read unless you're from Minnesota."