Interview with NATALIE JENNER - author of 'Every Time We Say Good-bye'
‘Every time We Say Goodbye’ out May 14th, 2024
See my review here!
Publishers: Allison & Busby & St. Martin’s Press
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INTERVIEW
Please share what inspired you to write Every Time We Say Goodbye.
In the spring of 2021, I was rewatching Day For Night, an old Francois Truffaut film, and ended up down a Wikipedia rabbit hole, where I learned that Rome’s famous Cinecitta studios had been used as refugee camps during and after the Second World War and that some refugees might even have been extras during filming there of the famous Hollywood movie Quo Vadis. This lit a creative spark in me, and I decided (helped by lack of travel in 2021 due to the pandemic!) to set my next book in Rome, my favourite city.
Can you tell us about character Vivien Lowry and her journey since The Bloomsbury Girls novel where she appeared. Why did you choose her as the main figure for Every Time We Say Goodbye? How has she changed since our first introduction to her?
Vivien, the secretly aspiring, hugely talented, and very angry “shopgirl” from Bloomsbury Girls, was a favourite character for many of my early readers. Her unexplored back story included a soldier fiance who went missing in action in North Africa in 1942. In thinking about a way to write about her again, I discovered that many of the Allied soldiers captured in Libya and elsewhere had been shipped to POW camps in Italy, and their situation often not discovered until they returned home upon liberation. So it felt serendipitous that her story could continue, and be emotionally excavated, with Italy as the background. In the five years since we last met Vivien, she has had two plays produced in the West End, and her playwrighting career is not going well, so she is even more dispirited perhaps than before—but she also has developed supportive connections and confidence in her craft, which enable her to pursue a scriptwriting job in…you guessed it…Rome!
Which scene in Every Time We Say Goodbye played havoc most with your heart while writing it and why?
To be honest, I rarely get emotional as I write because I write in a very intuitive, unplanned state, which means I only realize what is happening or about to happen as I write it. So the emotions catch up with me later, upon rereading. I can say that I always tear up when writing the final chapter of any of my books, because the joy of creation is over, as is my time with my characters.
What themes or views in Every Time We Say Goodbye are shared with Jane Austen?
That’s an interesting question for me, as this is the rare book of mine that does not clearly reference her. That said, I am a big believer in the power of community and working together, and lifting each other up in difficult times. I hope the reader of this newest book will see that, although these characters are not saving a famous author’s cottage or trying to take over a bookshop for their own enterprise, they are working to help each other emotionally confront the trauma of the war, and find a way to healthfully and productively move forward.
Finding closure after the death of loved ones can be hard. Pick at least one character in Every Time We Say Goodbye that attempts to do this and how?
Tabitha Knight, the adopted Jewish refugee daughter of Frances Knight (from The Jane Austen Society), has no knowledge of what happened to her mother after she and her infant brother were separated from her in Europe early in the war—no idea if she is still alive, no physical mementoes of any kind. Her attempt to find closure involves doing all she can to discover what happened to her mother, as horrific as it might be, and despite now living far away in England with a new and loving family. This creates a huge internal emotional conflict for Tabitha as Frances’s daughter, which causes her to essentially run away to Italy with some newfound information she is keeping to herself. The transformation of her journey to closure from at first a purely interior activity, to an active one, and then ultimately to a beautifully communal one, is part of the theme of the novel.
Although financial security is important, Jane Austen believed mutual attraction in marriage is more important than money or position. How do you use this view in your new novel?
Attraction is an interesting phenomenon, in that it is usually, although not always, instantaneous and can sometimes be misread (I am thinking here most famously of Darcy and Elizabeth in Pride and Prejudice!). As a playwright who receives a beneficial job opportunity in the film world, Vivien comes up against several attractive men, which enabled me to explore the limits to attraction based on wealth or power or sex, and the more nuanced chemistry that happens between two people when they are able to connect emotionally and genuinely.
Describe the cinematic world of the 1950s (and which actors, actresses and writers appear in your novel).
Moviemaking in the 1950s was becoming increasingly international, due in part to changes in financing, collaboration, consumerism, culture and politics stemming from the war. With the Hollywood blacklist underway, many Americans in the film industry sought work abroad, and Rome became an epicentre for their efforts. Each of the three actors who appear in my book are included for a very specific reason: Sophia Loren as an example of the power of the Catholic Church on matters of marriage and divorce (she was involved with the married Carlo Ponti at the time), Ava Gardner as an example of a free spirit making the most of all 1950s la dolce vita Rome has to offer while coping with intrusive paparazzi, and Gina Lollobrigida due to her real-life marriage to a Yugoslavian war refugee and doctor who had worked in the camp at Cinecitta. Through these three famous women, I was able to inject some glamour into my tale while advancing different themes, and am so grateful to their fascinating and brave lives as a starting point for my fiction.
Please explain this line in your novel: ‘Nothing could be created from the emptiness of scorn—to create, there had to be hope.’
Scorn is such a negative emotion, based on the disrespect and contempt of others. When one looks at other people through such a lens, there is no ability to build up—the negativity of the emotion is bent on taking down. Conversely, a hopeful state while creating allows one to explore ideas from different angles, which increases the chance of fostering a new idea or viewpoint. Scorn has no interest in changing how it regards anything, so there is little one can “make” from it, I believe.
What was your greatest book research adventure in 2023 and where did it take you?
As my husband has a terminal and rare form of lung disease called IPF, which is fortunately progressing slower than expected due to experimental drugs, travel for us has been greatly changed by the pandemic. I have always loved to travel, and have a wealth of memories to draw on, as well as my research training as a former lawyer. So I am very lucky to be able to conjure up beautiful and fascinating settings in my mind, and currently I am spending a lot of time in both Boston and Portsmouth as I work on my fourth book!
Could you provide a glimpse of your new novel, currently titled Austen at Sea?
Austen at Sea is the tale of two daughters of a Massachusetts supreme court justice who start a correspondence with Jane Austen's last surviving sibling, a ninety-one-year-old retired admiral, and travel by mail packet steamship to meet him in the summer of 1865 just as the civil war has ended. In their absence, their widowed father's colleagues on the bench start a judicial reading circle dedicated to Austen as a means of distracting him. Louisa May Alcott also makes an appearance in the plot, leading the other women on board ship in a charity performance of vignettes from A Tale of Two Cities. A literary treasure hunt soon ensues, culminating in climactic court cases on both sides of the Atlantic involving a piece of Austen history and a multitude of characters including theatre impresarios, street waifs, newspapermen, suffragists, gypsy fortune tellers, and many more (my quasi-tribute to Dickens). These is also a very loose connection to my first novel, The Jane Austen Society, which has made the entire writing experience especially gratifying and “full circle” for me as a writer!
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