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- [00:00]
A
Hello everybody. This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:07]
B
Four times that summer we brought back boatloads of refugees. The vicar organized us. They didn't mind I was a woman because I was able bodied. We traveled down from Teddington once a month to make the crossing and we had the use of Dick Henley's trawler and half a dozen meeting points along the Flemish coast. Underground runners all through Belgium setting up the rendezvous. This is GP Gottlieb, host for New Books and Literature, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. And today I'm talking to Janet Burrowway about her intriguing new novel, Simone in Pieces. Simone is nine years old when she finds herself alone on a trawler escaping from Belgium to England during World War II. The trauma wipes her memory and she cannot fill in the blanks of her life. Told from different perspectives and seeing Simone from varying angles, we follow her as she overcomes adversity and navigates life as a refugee. A student, a wife, an academic, a whole person. Hi Janet, thanks for joining me today.
- [02:16]
C
Hi Galit. Thank you.
- [02:19]
B
So what was the impetus for you to write this book, Simone in Pieces?
- [02:24]
C
You know, it started in a way that none of my books have, with a short story that was meant to be or was a satire of a department meeting in an English department. And I was having a great Time writing it with all these characters who had names that were kinds of critique, criticism. And all of a sudden it took a hard turn into grief and that. I love it when my character surprised me, but this was a big surprise. And so I realized that I had to understand that woman's whole story in order to finish the short story. So I worked it all out, what had happened to her and through one night and went in and waked my husband up at 5 o' clock in morning and said, I figured out this woman's whole life. And I told him about her. And he said, that's your next novel. But that was nearly 30 years ago. The novel has come to me in pieces, in different voices, and it's taken this long, really, to tell the story in all these voices.
- [03:48]
B
So the novel is a story of her life. But it's also about how, as you write, quote, America was feeling remorseful by then and took in 40,000 of the refugees. Can you say more about refugees?
- [04:03]
C
Yes. It was a kind of revelation to me, I suppose, when we began not wanting the border to be open. That is, this is a story about people who came to America at a time when America was welcoming them. There are really three refugees in the story, all of them from Europe. Simone from Belgium, and Leo and Anneke from Hungary. And I guess I felt that I had the right to write about refugees because I've been married to two of them, one from Egypt and one from Hungary. And of course, the characters are not. I mean, none of them are my husband, but one of them is the woman who's at the center of the book. One of them is. Two of them are refugees from the 1956 revolution in Budapest. And America was, in both of those instances, very welcoming. Very different time than now.
- [05:23]
B
Yeah. I can't remember another novel of equal intrigue that's told from so many different perspectives. You've mentioned how you. How you came a little bit to. How you made the decision to write the novel or when you were writing it, but what made you stick with it. This isn't how you've written your previous novels, I understand.
- [05:42]
C
No, it isn't. No, it isn't. I suppose it was not a question of sticking with it. I came back to it over and over again. I mean, in the. My husband said it's your next novel. It wasn't my next novel. I wrote another novel in the meantime and a memoir and several updatings of textbooks and that kind of thing. So I've done a lot in the meantime. But this Story I kept coming back to. There was something about the characters and the way that Simone is, has to put her life together in pieces and it happens with encounters with other people and that those are the experiences that help her to decide who she is.
- [06:33]
B
Let's go back to her being young. We learn about 9 year old, 10 year old Simone from Johnny Purdy, an American soldier from Missouri staying in the same house in Sussex. He thinks there are two kinds of people in the world, quote, those who will go home, home after the war and those who won't. It's a brilliant statement. Can you say more about what's going on with Simone back then?
- [06:57]
C
What is going on with her at that point? Yes. Okay, maybe I can. That chapter is told from Joni's point of view and I think what is going on with him? Let me start with that. I think going on with him at that moment, he's very attracted to her, but he's a clean Christian American boy and he's married and he has a new baby, which is very confusing to him. And he's never seen his, his baby. And the encounter with Simone is, is hard for him because he realizes that he's attracted to her. She clearly also is attracted to him, but she's at that point 14 years old. And what she mainly wants from him is this validation that he brings her cards from the early computer systems in the supply of American soldiers in England at that point. And, and what she wants is this validation that he sees that she's interested in learning English words and learning how to speak English. And so it matters to her that he considers her important.
- [08:32]
B
Nobody thinks of getting help for her, but she clearly needs it. She walks in her sleep, she's a loner. And the biggest thing, she has no memory of who she was before she was rescued. Why were, were there services for children of War available in England at that time?
- [08:51]
C
Well, the services that she's put with his family, I mean that's the only thing that we're. No, there's, there's certainly nothing in the way of mental health services for them.
- [09:03]
B
No, no, that was, that was a very moving part. She's 16 when she's moves. When she moves into an attic room to be hired help for the Moxims. And she's in charge of an 11 year old girl who adores her like a big sister. They act out plays together and Simone saves Darla from being alone with her somewhat dysfunctional parents. Can you say more about the situation?
- [09:29]
C
Well, I think there again it's Expected that a girl who's been taken care of by one British family will then earn her living. And so she has to. But she goes willingly to do this and likes, as you say, the camaraderie that she feels with Darla. And they love making up plays together and make them up out of movies that they also love to go see every chance they get. And I think for Simone, that relationship, which is a kind of beginning of a sexual awakening for her because she and Darla in their playlets pretend romance. That's very seductive. You know, it's that of itself that's seductive. And I think also teenage girls do have crushes on each other. I think there is, in fact, a.
- [10:35]
B
Whole.
- [10:39]
C
Slew of British novels about it, especially in the 19th century.
- [10:47]
B
You talk about the high school teacher. She's a little bit older than the rest of the kids, but he exposes her to poetry and talk about how it led to her profession.
- [10:58]
C
Well, she's absolutely bowled over by the brilliance of this teacher. And I think at that point, I don't know that she knows that she's going to be a teacher of English, but that's what her father was. And she probably is not, at this point, very aware of that either, though she does have some facts about her life, some that are written down that she was told to bring sewed in the hem of her skirt, and some that she just has fleeting memories of. Her father is the one she has fewest memories of. But she does know his profession, which in Belgium was called Now I'm going to forget the term pedagogical something or other. English has to be made okay to teach in the university. But the encounter with this, with, above all, with British poetry and with the fact that this teacher doesn't sound as if he's teaching to the students. He sounds as if when he reads these poems, they really matter to him. And then when he asks questions of the students, they're astonished. They expect to be told what the facts are around this poem. Instead of which he asks them what they think.
- [12:34]
B
Well, I was wondering if you were a teacher of that kind or if you had a teacher like that. It was pretty. I did.
- [12:42]
C
Okay, I did. In the seventh grade, Mr. Alsworth was a very affable kind of teacher. And he sounded as if he really was interested in what we say in class. And so I went at one point and told him that I had written poetry. And he asked to see it. And then he suggested that Thursday afternoons I could stay after school for an hour. And he would teach me the poetic feat. In those days, nobody suspected that this was not anything teaching, you know, it was so innocent. And he was wonderful. He taught me the poetic feat in such a way that 20 years later, I was lecturing on the poetic feat at the University of Sussex in England, using exactly what he had told me in the fourth, seventh grade.
- [13:49]
B
Okay, that kind of is a closing of a circle. I like it. Simone meets and falls in love with Martin Puig.
- [13:58]
C
Is that how you say his name? Puig Quig.
- [14:02]
B
Who tells her that quote. In purely evolutionary terms, the only function memory is prediction. I was blown away. I'm interested in memory. It's a just. How does Simone, who lacks a memory of anything that happened before she came to England, handle that?
- [14:23]
C
Not very well, I think. I think she. You know, what he means has to do with the triune brain, that what memory is for in people is to allow them to figure out what will happen next. So, for instance, if you crack an egg in a pan and it stinks, you say to yourself, that egg is bad. I'm going to take it back to the store this afternoon and they'll give me fresh eggs because I know they do that kind of thing. And next time I won't buy e from that store, I'll buy them someplace else. That kind of thing you figure out. In the meantime, emotionally, you go. You gag on the smell of the egg. So emotion is. Is that physical response to the phenomenon that you have and not the memory and the prediction. So what Simone needs is. Is the emotional connection with her own past. And it's not what he's talking about.
- [15:34]
B
What is Simone talking about when she says I'm a chopped and patched sort of person. And can you talk about her eidetic memory?
- [15:44]
C
Well, yes, both. I'll take eidetic memory first, which is all of us think in. Have our memories in snapshots. Sometimes they appear in short little scenes, but they're short little scenes, scenes nobody remembers in a movie, you know, a movie length of what happened to you. You put this image and that image and this image and that image together, and it makes a memory. And that's the way the book is written, to try to do that, of course, to put the pieces together. So there are all kinds of images of things that are made whole by putting pieces together, like cobblestones and mosaic and jigsaw puzzles. And putting memory together for her is like a jigsaw puzzle. She recognizes that snapshot nature of what she remembers. And you asked me about chopped and Patched sort of person, which is also that, you know, you asked me about some other kind of memory, and I've lost it. Can you.
- [17:00]
B
No, just. She says chopped and patched sort of person. And then I was asking, in the same paragraph, she talks about eidetic memory.
- [17:08]
C
Well, he gives her that word, eidetic.
- [17:10]
B
He gives it to her.
- [17:11]
C
Okay. Yeah, yeah. And then he's ashamed of having come up with a vocabulary word when she's clearly emotional. But for her, the chopped and patched sort of person, I think essentially means I'm trying to put myself together.
- [17:30]
B
Yeah. But aren't we all in some way? Yeah, I came away with that. It's sitting in my mind.
- [17:37]
C
I'm still feeling it, but it sits in mine as well when I think about the book, because I think that it is put together in snapshots and. And all of us do that. We put our own memory together with. Sorry. We put our own identity together with these short little memories of what we've done and who we are and especially who we've encountered and how that mattered to us.
- [18:06]
B
Yeah. So Simone crosses paths with Leo and becomes friends with his wife, Annika, who you've mentioned. What can you say about those relationships?
- [18:16]
C
Well, I think that later on, she says that she and Annika were thrown together and it was their circumstance that made them friends. And that's true. I think they're both, to begin with, refugees and a recent refugee. And then Simone is trying to have a baby, and Annika has one. Young women.
- [18:40]
B
Yeah. They're neighbors, too, right?
- [18:42]
C
They're neighbors. Yeah. Our husbands teach in the same.
- [18:46]
B
That's right. That's right. What's it like for Simone to teach in Jepson, Missouri? How did you come up with Jepson, Missouri? And what about the college reminds people of a theme park?
- [18:58]
C
I came up with Jepson as the name of this place because there was an old woman who taught when I first arrived at Florida State University, whose name was Jepson. And she was a fascinating woman, very unfairly treated by the university because she had been there since it was a women's school and had never been promoted at all and was very bitter about it with reason. But she had a house in Tallahassee under an enormous tree, almost threatening tree. And I saw that as something like the house that Simone lives in in Jepson, Missouri, with all these trees around. I don't think of them as threatening in the book, but. And I don't know why I came up with that word just now, but so when she and Annika get together, it's. Simone is feeling a little lost in this. In this place. And I'm sorry, this is not in Jepsen. We're not in Jepson yet. We're still in Binghamton, New York. There.
- [20:17]
B
Okay, so we've left Binghamton, and now we're in Jepsen.
- [20:20]
C
Oh, okay. All right.
- [20:21]
B
A little bit about, like, what's going on now in her life.
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C
And then. And now there isn't an Anika. Her. Her friend is. Is. Is an entirely different woman.
- [20:34]
B
But she makes a friend.
- [20:36]
C
She makes a friend in each place. She makes a friend who truly matters to her. Yes. Yeah.
- [20:42]
B
She never wanted lots of friends, but she wants one person who matters to her. So now it's the 1960s, and there's some campus unrest. Simone remembers. Here's a quote from you. Simone remembers what Virginia Woolf said, that women should do nothing at all about war. They should remain indifferent. Would you weigh in on that? I mean, here's a girl whose father was shot by Nazis. Yeah, okay, same.
- [21:10]
C
She doesn't remember that yet, but she.
- [21:13]
B
Learns it later on, though.
- [21:14]
C
Yeah.
- [21:16]
B
So is she remaining indifferent? Does she agree with that?
- [21:21]
C
I think she would like to, and I think she kind of uses it as an excuse for her unwillingness to get involved. She's afraid of war. She is not really herself. Very forceful, and she doesn't want to be involved, though she inevitably becomes involved because one of her students is threatened by the situation in the 60s. He's foreign student who's told that he has to lose his beard. He's Iraqi, and that's difficult for her. And she kind of falls back on the Virginia Woolf quotation.
- [22:13]
B
Well, I liked seeing it. It was a little sparkle there.
- [22:17]
C
Yeah, I like it, too. I mean, I think in some ways I toy with that notion, you know, and I can't do it. I have to get involved. But it seems to me that it's a fair way to look at war. Forget about it.
- [22:39]
B
It's a fair way if you don't want to change anything. But, yeah, them days are gone. Yep. You say this as I told you before we started recording. I really enjoyed this book. I have already told several girlfriends they have to read it. And that's the kind of thing we want, don't we, as authors? You want people to say, absolutely, absolutely.
- [23:00]
C
Readers. Readers. That's right.
- [23:05]
B
I listen to people who say that to me. So, Janet, what are you working on next?
- [23:11]
C
I'm trying to write a memoir, and I'm doing it piecemeal. My idea is that I will every day just splash down a memory and then see what happens and how I'll put it together eventually.
- [23:29]
B
Wow. Is there a unifying something or other that you're thinking, here's why I need to write a memoir?
- [23:36]
C
Yes. There are two things, really. One is from my childhood that my mother at the moment I am reading Bad Bad Girl by Gish Jen. It's absolutely wonderful. I highly recommend it. And her experience as a child was not unlike mine. I was never good enough or pretty enough for my mother. And, and that's one thing that has sparked it, wanting to write about that and how that has affected me throughout my life. And the other thing, I guess, is how that theme runs through my life. But I've had an extraordinarily happy, full, rich life, and I'm very happily married and happy to be 89 years old and still.
- [24:40]
B
Oh, my goodness.
- [24:41]
C
Amen. Wow.
- [24:44]
B
I did not guess that. Thank you so much for joining me today. Janet Berkway, it's just been a pleasure. And thank you for joining me again. This is G.P. gottlieb, author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery series and host for New Books in Literature, a podcast channel on New Books Network. Today I've been talking to Janet Buroway, author of Simone in Pieces. Hope you all have something remarkable to read today. And always happy reading.