I am grateful to Father Joel Daniels at St. Thomas Church, Fifth Avenue; to David Ford for facilitating the visit; to the librarians at the Avery Library, Columbia; to the Arts Council for a grant to work with Jill Dawson at Gold Dust. Thanks to Dorian for giving up his bedroom when I come to New York, and to Henry Holman for his booklore and friendship.
Special thanks are due to Nick Barraclough and Tony Goryn for all the Wednesdays, and to those people whose generous encouragement, sometimes just given in passing, nevertheless made an enormous difference to me, including John Shuttleworth, the late Jeremy Maule, Veronica Horwell, Geraldine Higgins, Dino Valaoritis and Robert Warner.
I want to express my gratitude also to my warm and wise agent Eleanor Jackson, and to Julia Kenny, for all their hard work and impressive results, and thanks to Jonathan Sissons for letting me write in his attic and bringing tea and biscuits to me at regular intervals. Warm thanks to Emilia Pisani, my editor at Simon & Schuster, who is not only insightful and incisive but whose exclamation marks at the funny bits have cheered me up any number of times.
Finally my deep thanks to Andrew Zurcher, whose close reading of all texts continues to be of inestimable value; thanks and love always to my mother, Jean McLauchlan, my sister, Fiona McLauchlan-Hyde, and some more love to those daughters again.
ALLERY READERS GROUP GUIDE
* * *
The
Bookstore
DEBORAH MEYLER
A CONVERSATION WITH DEBORAH MEYLER
According to your author biography, you worked in a bookstore in New York City for six years. How did that experience inform The Bookstore?
The whole book is infused with that experience, especially with the sense of place, with New York. Unfortunately, I have a terrible memory, so I have to make things up—or, as some people phrase it, write fiction.
I think so many of us let events and funny moments slip through our memories into oblivion, like jewels into the dirt. I always mean to keep a journal and never do. My solace is that perhaps the memories really do merge over time to make something else, something new.
I worked in two independent bookstores in New York, one on Broadway and one on 57th Street, but it was really the shop on Broadway that captured my heart, as you can perhaps see from the book. I can remember only two phone numbers without difficulty: my own from childhood, and the number of that store.
As an Englishwoman living in New York, readers might assume that you experienced some of Esme’s sense of being the stranger in a strange land. Is this accurate? Does Esme share any other characteristics with you?
I think when people first come to New York they often experience a very strong sense of recognition, because we’ve all seen the movies and the TV shows and the photographs. We look for the landmarks and the clichés that we expect, and there they all are. There is the Chrysler Building, glinting, and there are all the yellow cabs surfing the green lights. We all feel as if it is our city. But that recognition proves—not untrustworthy, exactly, but to some extent a mistake. It is a different culture, and there are rules that you have to learn; you are, at first, a stranger. It takes time to adjust to the reality rather than the image.
For my own part, I was homesick and uneasy at the beginning. My Englishness didn’t seem to work in New York. I found it hard at first; perhaps I was obscurely annoyed with myself for choosing somewhere so obvious, so iconic, so much of a cliché if a person were thinking of reinventing herself. I resisted it. But it is hard to imagine, now, like looking at someone you love and trying to remember how you felt about them before the love came.
Perhaps one of my favorite quotations, from Robert MacNeil, sums up what happens very well. He says: “There is a moment when all that is manifestly ugly, noisy and expensive can suddenly appear beautiful, civilized and desirable. The moment New York plays that trick of vision on you, it’s impossible to go back through the looking-glass again. The city has made you a New Yorker.”
As for shared characteristics: I have to admit that I gave Esme some characteristics that I wanted myself. For example, I made her tidy. If I can’t be tidy, I can at least invent someone who is. I enjoyed making her want to clean things in moments of stress. And I think fundamentally I share a sense of gratitude with Esme, or she shares it with me. I wanted to imbue her with that. You can’t be truly miserable if you’re grateful for something.
Now that you have returned to your native country, do you miss anything about New York? Do you ever return or plan to return?
I miss the beauty of it. It is unbelievably beautiful, exciting, full of great abstract fields of color. I miss the surging energy of it, which you can mistake for your own energy. I miss the cheese danishes. I miss how ridiculously intense the seasons are in New York, where it rains harder and snows more and the sun shines more brightly. The light really does feel different from English light—it is sharper, more lucid. Esme and I feel much the same on that point. I love walking in New York, and I hate walking anywhere else. I miss the intimacy of New York, the huddle of it, the expansiveness of it—how long have you got?
I do try to come back once a year, and I would love to be able to afford to live here part of the year. And retiring here seems like a good idea to me. Retiring to New York—you know, to get away from it all.
In today’s economy, many small, independent bookstores are closing their doors, yet some endure, as The Owl does in the story. How do you see the bookstore format evolving in the future?
I take heart from the fact that radios are still around, decades after the internet juggernauted into our lives. I think bookshops will last in some form or other, too. There might even be a resurgence of them. I know this is largely wishful thinking. However, my children, who like other children spend a lot of time on the computer, still like to switch off from all of that and find a corner, and read a real book. And so do I. I read some things electronically, but the feeling of being unassailable by the outside world when we are reading real books is a powerful one. The sentimental or fashionable nostalgia for “vintage” things and experiences is one thing, but there is also a new push, an appetite, to carve out spaces free from digital, electronic, radio-fuelled connectivity. Sometimes people need to be quiet. I think that the best way for that might still be to read a real old-fashioned book, but that we are only just beginning to realize that, too late for some bookshops. But others will pop up.
You include candid sex scenes in the story. Were there any particular challenges to writing these?
I am not sure they are tremendously candid compared to some things that are out there. The bar is pretty high, in a low sort of way, these days. But I did read the first couple of chapters aloud to my mother when I was writing it. She sat quietly on the sofa when I had finished reading it, and she said, “Do you have an electric toothbrush?” I said that I didn’t. She said, “Well, I think if it gets published, you’d better get one.”
I suppose there is some residual timidity that I bring to writing sex scenes. I try to overcome it. It would be easy if it were anonymous, of course, but if you attach your name to your writing you also attach your being, in some sense or other—or at least, I have. That might be a rookie’s mistake, although I think it is something we can hardly help.
In your book the van Leuven family members treat Esme rudely and with remarkable disdain. Did you base any of these characters on real people? Are the van Leuvens symbolic of American privilege in particular or are they more universal?
They are most definitely more universal than that. If anything, I feel that they see themselves as having a slightly European aura—as if there is a little-known bloodline connecting them to old-world princes.
The van Leuvens are based on a jumble of observations I’ve made over the years, beginning with university, I suppose. I met one of the main sources for Olivia in Cambridge recently, where I live, and I was so pleased; it’s like being an ornithologist and finding a golden eagle in your back garden.
You have
a relatively new presence on online forums such as Facebook and Twitter. How do you hope these vehicles will influence contact and communication with fans of your book?
The thing about The Owl is that it is a place where people come to talk and get to know one another, and when Twitter and Facebook work well that’s what is really happening there as well. And the wonder of the internet, of course, is that it can happen between people who are thousands of miles apart, who don’t have the privilege of sauntering down to a local bookstore or coffee shop. These forums are an escape or a pleasure for so many people, including me. We were often more lonely before.
I wish, though, there was a way within online communities to be more accountable to one another. It is often shocking, what people believe is acceptable to say to someone else on the internet. In a real life meeting, we mingle and have to look at each other face to face, so it is very unlikely that we would say the kind of irate and unmeasured and insensitive things that often get said online.
One of the things Esme really learns at The Owl is how other people should respect her and she them. All of the conflicts in this book arise in situations where people haven’t listened to each other yet, haven’t encountered one another thoughtfully or decently. In some ways this book is a narrative about growing up to an ethical and emotional maturity, coming to peace with others because you’re at peace with yourself. The book isn’t that different from Facebook; it’s a fantasy place where people present images of themselves and encounter versions of others, and yet behind the versions we have of ourselves and each other, we are all real. We have to look beyond the cover.
What inspires you to write?
The inability to sing. Really.
It is so easy to read great books; we can never exhaust the supply of them. And it is such a blessing to know that they are there, waiting for you on the shelf, but I think in the end, after years of happiness with these books, you don’t want forever to be the recipient of someone else’s gift. You just want to have a go yourself.
You left the ending of The Bookstore somewhat open. Do you have plans to include any of the characters or setting in new projects?
I did leave The Bookstore somewhat open, but that was more to do with the fact that it seemed absurd to me to put any kind of full stop on Esme’s life at that point. It’s funny, though—after finishing it I felt glum for weeks, as if my friends had gone on holiday without me. I really missed my characters. So, who knows?
This is your debut novel. How did the actual writing experience compare with your expectations?
I didn’t have any expectations, particularly. I felt before I started to write that I hadn’t lived up to my promise, or at least to the promise that other people had seen in me. I was tremendously fortunate to go to Oxford—it was the usual thing of being the first in my family to go to university—and that education was paid for by the state, the tax-payer. I hadn’t done much with it. I was standing back and hoping that my daughters would have rich and fulfilling careers, as my mother had stood back, as her mother had stood back. So when there was a new government scheme to fund some nursery time for children, I put the children in nursery for three hours a day and wrote for two of those hours, each day, every day. While I was writing, I was entirely absorbed and happy. I meant to write something learned and deep, and instead I kept writing things that made me laugh. So I suppose I began writing because I felt I had to, and I kept writing because I loved to.
I resist sitting down to write. I have to sneak up on it unexpectedly. I think that is because I am always worried that the pleasure or the ability will not be there next time. But when I do, I wonder why I delayed—I feel so happy and absorbed when I am doing it. It’s like carving a sculpture—the idea is there before you pick up your tools, as the angel is in the marble, but the idea has no real being until you form it with words, and then shape it, planing it here, polishing it there. There are few greater pleasures than this one, I think. It is crafting the sentence that I particularly like, making something out of nothing. Also, it’s in the rigorous formulation of words on paper that you can find out about yourself. As E. M. Forster says, “How can I know what I think till I see what I write?”
DEBORAH MEYLER graduated from Oxford University before moving to New York City, where for six years she worked in a bookshop. She currently lives with her family in Cambridge, England.
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Gallery Books
A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2013 by Deborah Meyler All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Gallery Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.
First Gallery Books trade paperback edition August 2013
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Designed by Jaime Putorti
Author photo © Phil Meyler
Cover photograph © Laura Blost/Trevillion Images Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
ISBN 978-1-4767-1424-0
ISBN 978-1-4767-1425-7 (ebook)
CONTENTS
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Acknowledgments
A Conversation with Deborah Meyler
About Deborah Meyler
The Bookstore Page 34
