Annie Vanderbilt: The Secret Papers of Madame Olivetti
Book Club Books

Book Club Books: Interview with Annie Vanderbilt

The descriptions, metaphors and analogies really bring the reader into the book. Is it difficult to write that way about fictional places and people?

All the places I have visited or lived and all the people I have known or even seen in passing slot into my memory. When I then create a fictional stone farmhouse on the Côte d’Azur or Justine Lafond, Lily's imperious and yet lovable mother-in-law, I access the slots of memory, mix the contents in my imagination, and serve up a new reality. This is not difficult. It is, in fact, a key element in the excitement of writing fiction and is at the root of the creative process for me: the visual upwelling of ideas and images—whole landscapes, specific settings, individuals, and events spill onto the paper, mostly in control but sometimes not. The difficulty is keeping control through careful structuring of plot, theme, character development and interactions, and the crafting of each sentence so it has cadence and sings, keeps the reader moving along, wanting more, and from time to time thinking aha! I've felt that way. I've known someone like that. Or, I'd like to be Lily Crisp in southern France with only a cat and a typewriter for company.

Book Club Books: Interview with Annie Vanderbilt

Book Club Books: Interview with Annie Vanderbilt

"I've always thought that what you're doing, even if it is a mistake, is your life. It's not something you slide in and out of." This is a powerful quote. What was your inspiration behind this statement?

I often hear people say, I am going to start my life tomorrow. But in 1983 I fell off a cliff while hiking in the canyon country of southeastern Utah with my husband and there was no tomorrow when I could start again. I shattered my right ankle and spent a night in the desert alone, in great pain, thinking I might not make it through until morning and rescue. One of the thoughts that kept me alive that night was this is my life. It changed in an instant but this pain, this uncertainty of rescue or survival is what I have. I can't escape it or turn back the clock or put it off until tomorrow because living each moment of the present is what is going to get me through. This experience has translated in the ensuing thirty years into an acceptance of the good and the bad times, the triumphs and mistakes, as the colors in my weave, not all of them lovely to look upon but part of the whole-cloth nature of my life.

Book Club Books: Interview with Annie Vanderbilt

Book Club Books: Interview with Annie Vanderbilt

Lily keeps her emotions inside until she bursts and even then, her tears don't flow freely. How do you handle your emotions? Are you a cleaner like Lily?

Lily and I share many qualities: a sense of humor about life, its vagaries, and ourselves; an appreciation of good food, chocolate, and the sensual side of living; and cleaning as an outlet for inner turmoil. Yes, I clean with a vengeance when emotions need venting. But I also let my emotions out through talking to my husband or sister or friends. Unlike Lily, I do not wall in feelings so that when the containment cell finally bursts I might be inclined to jam a fingernail scissors into my shoulder and draw blood without shedding a tear. Lily is finally able to verbalize her successes and failures by pounding them out on Madame Olivetti, her trusty typewriter, and by telling her story, in English, to Yves, the empathetic handyman who only speaks French. For Lily these "safe" ways of processing her history allow her at last to release her emotions so she can let the tears flow, over martinis with her friend Adèle. I don’t require a typewriter, a French handyman, or martinis to handle my emotions openly and honestly—or to cry—but Lily's modus operandi has a certain allure...

Book Club Books: Interview with Annie Vanderbilt

Book Club Books: Interview with Annie Vanderbilt

La Pierre Rouge sounds so beautiful and relaxing. Do you have a sanctuary like this?

In my thirties I spent three months living in an old stone farmhouse on the Cõte d’Azur. I was writing my first novel (the only copy of which went up in the blaze when our house in Idaho burned to the ground) on a portable Olivetti typewriter. That farmhouse, the model for La Pierre Rouge, was as beautiful and enchanted as Lily's French refuge. My own sanctuary is a sixteen by twenty-foot log cabin my husband and I built in the Sawtooth Valley north of Sun Valley, Idaho. I look west at the entire Sawtooth Mountain range and in all directions at sagebrush hills, an enormous sky, dazzling sunlight, and the drama of storm and lightning over the peaks. The only sounds are small birds chirping, sandhill cranes clacking as they fly overhead, and ground squirrels squeaking in alarm. The silence is stunning, as is the simplicity of living in one room that is more window than wall. Our cabin has no red couch, no black panties in the lavender, and no ghost hanging from the rafters as does Lily's La Pierre Rouge, but it is just as beautiful and inspirational a refuge.

Book Club Books: Interview with Annie Vanderbilt

Book Club Books: Interview with Annie Vanderbilt

"Love reminds me of a stolen season, a time you shouldn't have taken in the first place, but it was so damn sweet you couldn't help yourself. You couldn't resist it." Each character had such different views, how do you feel about love?

For me love is bedrock. My father used to quote Thornton Wilder in The Bridge of San Luis Rey: "There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning." This sums up the placement of love at the top of my list of life's essentials. Touching briefly again on my accident, that night of survival when I thought I might die, all that mattered was my husband, my family, my friends. Love, in a nutshell. Whether or not my first novel (later incinerated in the closet) was published—essential to my feelings of self-worth at the time—did not register; and I have never forgotten. One of the joys of writing Madame Olivetti was to explore the complexities of love and the characters (from Alonso the cat to the Belgian couple to sexually charismatic Victor to rock solid Paul) who embody a small selection of the many definitions of that great universal that makes the world tick.

Book Club Books: Interview with Annie Vanderbilt

Book Club Books: Interview with Annie Vanderbilt

I have to ask one last question: I believe that the old boxes of cornflakes are a symbol for Paul's family history. Am I correct? Is there anything more to the old cereal boxes?

The cereal boxes are indeed a symbol of Paul's family history, which Lily sweeps into the open in her frenzy of cleaning to expose the heart of both Giselle's story and Lily's own. In the armoire, alongside Gerard Lafond's musty boxes of cornflakes that no one dares throw out, are the stacks of letters and the photo albums that bring the past into collision with the present in a way that makes me smile as much when I reread those chapters today as when I wrote them. Sometimes tossing out history—and certainly the cereal boxes were slated for the rubbish—leaves one with no touchstones for the present or future. I am a purger, I run a lean ship, so I found it unsettling when Lily, a cleaner as I am, put those cereal boxes back in the armoire. But in so doing she honored her husband, the dark secrets of the Lafonds, the intrigues of the past, and the pulsing life stories of the dead: as brittle in their packaging and as resilient as the cornflakes.

Book Club Books: Interview with Annie Vanderbilt