An Interview with Margot Livesey
Faculty member Margot Livesey was recently interviewed for LitHub. Read an excerpt below:
SW: Across your work there’s also a great deal of lying about what’s been hidden—characters nesting lies within lies as if testing their consequences. In this novel, one of the lies is a forced one: the police tell the Lang children not to tell anyone about finding the injured boy. What interests you about lies and the people who tell them?
ML: As a child growing up in Scotland, my Sunday school teacher, Mr. Chisolm, taught me that telling a lie was a terrible sin which would, inevitably, be punished. As an adult, I discovered to my amazement that people could lie with impunity and nothing terrible happened. This did—and does—bewilder me (although, given the current regime, I should have got used to it).
At the same time, I believe there are essential lies, heroic lies. And I’m very interested in the relationship between secrets and lies. Keeping a secret, however innocent, often seems to require lying.
SW: Finding the boy in the field sets off something for all three Lang siblings—not a bomb but a flower, a desire to solve other mysteries in their lives. Duncan wants to find his birth mother; Matthew wants to find the boy’s assailant; Zoe is searching for someone who truly sees her. Why does proximity to misfortune and death bring such searching to your characters?
ML: I wanted to explore a central trope of detective fiction—the discovery of the body—from a different angle. In my version the boy recovers but each of the siblings is jolted into a new awareness. A few years ago, I reencountered an old schoolfriend. He described coming home from school one sunny afternoon and finding the body of a woman at the bottom of the garden. Those few moments changed his life, and his account of them made a deep impression on me. Perhaps not everyone would respond this way but my three characters do.
Read the interview in its entirety here: https://lithub.com/connected-at-the-roots-a-conversation-with-margot-livesey/
