The text is done and then the Candlewick design person and my editor work together to figure out who’s going to do the art and they work with her and I see the art as it comes in and I’ve never been so utterly gobstopped by it. All I could say was, “Yes, yes, yes.” As to what it does for the story, as I said, it’s like the prose becomes a launching pad. The story still exists without the art but it’s like this art lifts off into the stratosphere, using the text.
With the countess telling her tales to Marta, tales that become increasingly important to both of them, I kept thinking of that Joan Didion quotation about how we tell each other stories to survive. You know the one I mean?
Yes. There’s also a quote that makes me think of, which I think is Carl Jung and I won’t get it right but I’ll get the gist of it: Evil exists because people don’t get to tell their stories (“The reason for evil in the world is that people are not able to tell their stories.”). Yes, we’re telling stories to survive. Yes. For me, personally, that is so explicitly what was going on as I wrote this book. It was that moment of walking — it was March of 2020 and it was like, “I’m not going to get through this unless I have a fairy tale to write.” I’m telling this story to survive and that is true within the confines of the story as well. It’s true of the countess, it’s true of Marta, it’s true of Blitzkoff (the countess’ parrot).
And the idea is that storytelling is a way to show empathy?
Empathy and thinking. If you have those things, anything is possible if you’re willing to sit with somebody. We tell each other stories to feel seen. It’s like, “This is who I am,” and, as I write these stories, “This is who I can become.” That’s what books do for me, again and again. They show me I can change, that I can become a different person, that I can occupy the world in a different way.