Today we’re delighted to welcome author Sarah Pleydell to our blog. We’ll be discussing her beautifully written novel, Cologne, described as “wise and subtle…..as provocative as it is riveting.” Sarah has graciously shared a lot of information, so let’s get started:
Her Mentor Center: This is a work of fiction, but there are elements of autobiography/yourself in the story, correct?
Sarah: I started writing this novel while I was finishing my MFA thesis. I was ready to write a second book and was learning firsthand the task of writing a fully realized novel. I did a quick brainstorm and decided on the main themes and characters, perfecting the raw material that is based on my memories from my childhood. I have lived in America for 30 years, but spent my early childhood in Britain. The fact that I spent only a limited time there early in my life cemented my experience and made my memories all the more vivid. I lived in London during the time period the book is set in, and came to the US when I was 26. So I really understand that feeling of being the outsider, a migrant. I have a bicultural identity – when I go to England I feel like an American, when I’m here I feel like a Brit.
I have many very distinct images of my childhood that I put in the novel, but it is not an autobiographical story. It was such a joy to me to remember everything, as the images and places came to me. I did used to go to the gardens Café they go to, with the beautiful cakes and the glass cases. Also, the images from the beginning of two sisters playing WWII games in their bedroom came from experiences I had as a child with my brother and sister. From those kinds of isolated images and situations came these characters, but the characters are not my sister and I. However, I did build a wall down the middle of the bedroom and made her climb over the wardrobe because she wasn’t allowed on my side of the room. I did do that. I was the older sister, so I do identify with the Caroline – when you create a fictional character, you still often find lots of elements of your own self and your experiences. I have some experience acting, and it is much the same, when you must become a character and identify as strongly with the character as you can – then at some point you break off one way and the character breaks off in another.
Her Mentor Center: The setting is London, but the title is Cologne; what particular interest does Cologne hold for you?
Sarah: The idea to place Renate’s home in Cologne was not contrived. I write in the Library of Congress and I just open myself – true symbols come to you, and then you understand them later. The idea of Cologne came to me, and then later I realized the perfection of the double entendre of the name; the smell of the burning city that sort of lingers as a strange perfume, permeating everything and impacting everybody. That war generation’s traumas that come through and attack and violate the girls – the unresolved traumas of the parents that then violate the children – come down like cologne.
It was an interesting time. The British had won the war so everything was supposed to be hunky dory; it was supposed to be a triumphant time. Yet, they didn’t talk about it very much, and rather suppressed their memories of the war. They had not dealt with the trauma of the time, and their children suffered for it. In this family, for example, the mother is so suppressed she’s almost completely absent, while the children run wild. Memories of war linger for a very long time, like cologne, sort of an exotic haze of memory. It was supposedly Britain’s finest hour – we could have surrendered, but we refused to – however, we could not feel exhilarated by our “win.” Thousands of people were killed night after night after night – we sacrificed thousands of people, because we did not surrender. There were other fallouts as well, that not many people knew until later – such as the fact that there were a lot of Nazi sympathizers in Britain. In the story, we see that in Jack a bit, whereas Helen merely understands that for the Germans it is a lot more complicated than just “bad” and good.”
Her Mentor Center: The story presents a unique opportunity to view post-WWII events from the German perspective (e.g. Renate’s thought of “If we’re the normal ones, why are we the ones who lost the war?”). What would you like for the reader to understand about this perspective?
Sarah: Renate is very defiant, and you can see that she finds these people more damaged and strange than she is, but she’s also forced to confront the past in a way she does not want to. Helen keeps bringing it up, and she wants to move forward into the future – she wanted to go to America. And in the end, she goes home instead. Her relationship play with Jack was like playing with a more masculine, assertive part of herself that she usually keeps buried. She plays with wearing Helen’s clothes, the gown that her brother gave to Helen, but she puts it all away to return home – because it all goes so wrong. She plays with fire and gets burned. And by the end she’s got things straight, but what did she have to give up? Those parts of her she played with, and her dream of going to America.
Her Mentor Center: Another dominant issue is that of sisterly competition and differences – between three different sets of sisters! How is this related to your own experience?
Sarah: As I see it, sisters divide up characteristics – one usually falls into one category and the other naturally take the other. Maggie is kind of the wild, inarticulate but creative one, while Caro is very verbal. However, they do a bit of a switch throughout the book. At the end, Maggie has become the dominant and practical one, and she’s no longer the creative one. Caro is attempting to recapture her power by writing the book – as we discover at the end – but she loses her power and falls apart throughout the story. She’s the one who is more visibly destroyed. Maggie allies with the mother, and therefore avoids the kind of trauma Caro endures – her abuse is more overt and sustained throughout, and she is able to grow and deal with it.
This tradeoff of characteristics is the typical theme with sisters. Helen was wild during the war, while Eva was timid and afraid. We hear the stories of Helen making Eva jump in fountains and picking on Americans, yet now Helen is less expressive, fragile and brittle and haunted. We still see her creativity with her reading and piano playing, but now Eva is the eccentric wild one with wild picnics and poems and songs, seeming very extravagant. I really wanted to capture Helen’s more romantic nature in Germany, which is surprising to the girls because they have always known their mother as the quiet, practice woman she is now.
Sisters not only divide up characteristics between themselves, but these qualities are sort of mobile, and move between them at different times. When Maggie and Caro are up in the hothouse, they are much more equal, they are each whole unto themselves – but this only lasts a moment. It is as if they are up in the sky, and that is only place where this can happen. As they come down to the ground they start attacking each other again.
Her Mentor Center: The theme of childhood sexual abuse is clear, but never explicitly alluded to. What was the goal for the reader’s takeaway from this?
Sarah: A child cannot really configure sexual abuse, but rather remembers it in strange sensory details and disconnection. They cannot really contain the betrayal, it is just too big. Many children remember it as being a few very odd horrific associative images – you just remember the PTSD images that never leave you alone. I wanted to encapsulate the child’s experience, sensation-wise. What happens between Renate and Jack is much more specific and erotic. But with Caro we really feel the sense of the corrupted world, increasingly menacing and claustrophobic. There was clearly something emotionally incestuous with her father from the beginning, and what goes with that – a damaged, corrupt world intruding more and more – is physically embodied by the fact that she’s locked in the house, and feels as though the world is closing in on her.
Her Mentor Center: You have a very distinct writing style. Were you trained to write this way? Or does your brain work in lyrical fashion?
Sarah: When I was completing my MFA, I was encouraged to write in my own voice and style. I dedicate the book to my teachers, as they have all encouraged me to find my own voice – I was lucky: I wasn’t told how to write, I was given space to discover how to write.
Her Mentor Center: Who are you favorite authors? Whose writing do you most seek to emulate?
Sarah: I had a very strong education and background in English literature. Toni Morrison and Cynthia Ozick were some of my favorites, with their very strong lyrical and expressive voice. I loved them, and they certainly had a very strong influence on me. I really relish language and playing with language. Story and plot has always been the thing that has been hardest for me – language and character development come easier.
Her Mentor Center: Now readers you have a chance to ask Sarah some of your own questions. Are you an aspiring writer, wanting tips about how to take the first steps? Use the comment section below to ask Sarah about the writing process, her experiences, or more about the book itself.
I like when you talk about finding your own writing voice. As girls, a lot of us are told what to do. How did you feel free enough, growing up, not to listen to those messages and discover for yourself.
That’s a good question. I had a very special English teacher who always encouraged my originality, what was unique about my imagination, my metaphors and images, my way of seeing and living in this world.
However, I do believe I have an essentially female voice because it derives from my felt experience of the world ,and ,growing up in the fifties, sixties and seventies, women were still seen and treated differently from men. Many things that happened to me and my interactions with the world were shaped by my gender. The essential thing about my first teacher was she saw me as a person first and that allowed my authentic self to speak through the feminine lens slotted over my vision. I have never lost that. When I write I sense her presence as the other half of a conversation, not as a dictator or someone to please.
I have 2 older sisters and I know what you mean by us dividing up characteristics between us. The first is super smart, the middle very outgoing, so I became the athletic one. We all have similarities but I’m still waiting to develop some of the finer qualities they have. In “Cologne”, the sisters’ personalities (for lack of a better term) change over time – has that been your experience in real life too?
You address the process of self disclosure in the interview, Sarah. I’m trying to get articles published in women’s magazines and wonder how much of myself is too much? I’m interested in your thoughts.
yes, yes, yes. What I know about writing is that so much of it —non-fiction or fiction– is born from the self, and how much we veil the personal “1″ depends on our own comfort level. It’s a hard one for me too. During the interview I felt an almost moral obligation to speak out as myself in order to reach out to survivors of abuse, who as I know all too well, are afraid and yes ashamed to identify themselves as such. That’s what writing about “me’ can do, it allows the writer to offer her/himself as a mirror in which others can discover their own secrets and mysteries. But it is always a struggle, always a tussle.
Yes. My sister and I have often talked about the division of skills and attributes that were assigned us as children and have encouraged one another to develop “that missing half”. I was always the artistic, flighty one, and my sister became “the doctor”. She has learnt to appreciate the artistry and intuition in her doctoring, and I have developed an awareness of my own practicality, linear thinking and common sense. We recognize that in another life we could have easily switched roles. Yet we also deeply appreciate the gifts of character we have in common that derived from our shared experiences growing up and, yes, from our parents. That gratitude– and grace –grows stronger with age.
I haven’t read your book yet but you allude to childhood sexual abuse and PTSD in the interview. I am a victim of both. I am afraid to read real stories but do you think fiction would be a good place to start exploring these traumas?
In terms of writing about abuse, I have to say it took me fifteen years, maybe more, to get from my first instance of writing about my experience to resolving it into a novel that I felt gave it meaning and context and yes integrity. I recoil from stories of abuse that tell and describe such an absolute moment of betrayal from the point of view of an outside observer instead of through the broken lens of the child living it. I have a hard time reading those stories because they almost feel voyeuristic. But that said I found Toni Morrison’s “the Bluest Eye” empowering as well as “Bastard out of Carolina” by Dorothy Allison, because in these novels suffering was embraced in such tenderness, compassion and yes transcendently beautiful writing.
You started this book a long time ago, which may give writers hope about finishing and publishing at some point. What has been the hardest as well as your favorite part of this whole process?
Great question Bev,
The hardest part was thinking i was done when I actually wasn’t. (This happened about fifteen times. Seriously!) I am a very impatient person and writing this novel has been my greatest teacher. Now it does feel complete. I also had a great editor, Molly Tinsley, and she has helped me see that this final letting go was the real deal.
Just to add to what I just wrote, PTSD and sexual abuse are profoundly interwoven, as Judith Herman articulates so well in Trauma and Recovery. It creates stinging, reiterative memories that have a mind and a life of their own and spawn pervasive despair and depression. I’m sorry to be so bleak. But therapy really helps; in fact I feel it is essential; it was for me. Sure writing and reading are therapies too but having that person hold your heart break in theirs can release it from yours.
Thank you so much, Sarah. You shared yourself so openly and we appreciate your thoughtful and candid responses.
What a wonderful Virtual Book Tour last week with Sarah Pleydell, author of “Cologne.” Candid and personal, Sarah’s answers revealed her eloquent prose and personal journey, both of which informed her novel. If interested, you can learn more about the Sarah and purchase “Cologne” at http://www.fuzepublishing.com.