Interview with Mary Doria Russell
Writer Talks About Inspiration & Researching Dreamers of the Day
Award winning, best selling, Pulitzer nominated author Mary Doria Russell talks about her latest book, Dreamers of the Day.
What got you interested in this particular time in history?
In 2001, when Osama bin Ladin took credit for the attacks on 9/11, he said that they were, in part, "to avenge the catastrophe of 80 years ago." Nobody paid much attention to that, even though everyone was shocked by the attacks and kept asking, "Why do they hate us so much?"
So I started looking into the history of the Middle East, and there it was: the 1921 Cairo Peace Conference -- the catastrophe of 80 years ago, which is a live issue in the Middle East even if we in the West don't remember it at all. That became the backdrop for Dreamers of the Day.
Have you always held such a low opinion of Churchill or did it develop through your research?
As for Churchill: my jaundiced view of the great man goes back to my time working in Australia as a paleoanthropologist when I picked up the Aussies' skepticism about Churchill. The Anzac troops of Australia and New Zealand were slaughtered wholesale at Gallipoli, largely because a decisions made by Churchill (this was the basis of the early Mel Gibson movie Gallipoli). That was only the first of several horrifyingly bad strategic ideas he put into play as a politician who thought he was a military genius.
Then, writing A Thread of Grace, I learned that Churchill's interference with military decisions also led to the grindingly bloody and brutal 20-month Italian campaign. All that could have been avoided by sending British 8th and American 5th armies into Italy across the north, from Genoa to Venice. That would have bottled up 400,000 German troops in the peninsula instead of fighting them yard by yard, all the way up the mountains from Sicily to the Alps. The whole war might have ended sooner.
And there is also a direct historical line between Churchill's ill-considered decisions at the Cairo Conference and the fact that my nephew is a Marine platoon Commander serving in Al Anbar Province at this very moment. It will take centuries, I'm afraid, to unwind the mistakes made in 1921, and I lay that legacy at Churchill's feet.
So I'm not a fan.
A Thread of Grace was about fictional characters based on real people, while your next two books are about actual historical figures. How is that different in terms of plotting and writing dialog? Or is it?
By the time I start writing dialog for real people, I have studied them and their families and their lives so thoroughly, I know them better than I know my own family members! After a while, I can write for them as though I were hearing them speak.
I let the historical characters write as much of their dialog as possible. I put very few words into the mouths of the characters in Dreamers of the Day, and when I did they were relatively trivial social chitchat lines, for example. I worked from published collections of letters and big piles of biographies and historical records.
For wholly fictional characters, there is more latitude, but they still have to have their own integrity. They need to have parents and childhoods and experiences and education. They have jobs and relatives and bad habits and interests and political leanings and habits. I learn what I need to know to understand all that. I live with these "people" for years at a time, and they inhabit my mind night and day. After a while, I feel like I'm taking dictation instead of writing dialog.
Interview April 2008 by Susan Cramer & Mary Doria Russell
