Janet Burroway
Author Interview - Janet Burroway
Author of Simone in Pieces
Simone in Pieces follows seven decades of the life of World War II Belgian orphan Simone Lerrante. She lives as a child refugee in Sussex, England, her memory damaged by trauma; encounters her sexual awakening as a home help in middle England; and earns a place as a scholarship student at a provincial high school and then at Cambridge University. She crosses the pond to take up her studies in New York City and chooses a disastrous marriage that takes her, via Nevada and the West Coast, to Binghamton, New York, where she falls in love with a married man. There she frees herself from both husband and thwarted desire, only rashly to commit to a life in the academic backwaters of the Missouri Ozarks. There, in the most unlikely place and under the most unlikely circumstances, her past rounds on her, producing revelation and disorientation. Ultimately she reconnects with both Belgium and her past love, finds her autonomy through a neglected talent, and ends on the coast of Florida, looking eastward toward her past, which is also the inspiration of her future.
Author Interview - Janet Burroway
Author I draw inspiration from:
Jenny Erpenbeck, Visitation. She concentrates on the lives of individual people, but you are always aware of how the global situation confines or directs their lives. This novel works brilliantly through the years before and after WWII, through the changing owners and the transformations in a single piece of lake-front property.
Author Interview - Janet Burroway | Author I Draw Inspiration From
Favorite place to read a book:
In bed, the last one awake, the cat (also asleep) at my side.
Book character I’d like to be stuck in an elevator with:
Clarissa Dalloway (Mrs. Dalloway). We would both be internally a little panicky, but would both hide it, she in her petticoats and gabardine skirt, me in my black crepe leggings and my "Cat Ladies" t-shirt. We would figure out how to use the intercom, and we'd receive an estimate of a couple of hours to wait for rescue. I would slide down in one corner first, she a little after. We would both worry about having to pee, but we'd hide that, and hold it. We would introduce ourselves with a little awkwardness, but then we'd gradually bond over flowers, parties, books, care for immigrants, political sympathies of various kinds. We would grieve the cruelty of the world, but also acknowledge a slight unease at being middle-class, middle-aged (in my case, old) women. We'd be freed by a handsome fireman and agree that it was too bad we lived in different centuries; otherwise we'd have made a date for lunch.
Author Interview - Janet Burroway | Book Character I’d Like to be Stuck in an Elevator With
The moment I knew I wanted to become an author:
There was maybe not a moment. I was five when I wrote my first poem (my mother wrote it down, and I actually have a copy). But over the next twenty years I played at various delights in acting, dress design and writing. Eventually the writing took over more real estate in my head.
Hardback, paperback, ebook or audiobook:
I'm old enough that a hardback seems the standard of choice, but if one of my novels didn't warrant a paperback I was disappointed. Now a first edition paperback is the standard and hardbacks are hard to come by. I used to listen to books in the car. Now I'm too cautious to have my attention anywhere but on the road.
The last book I read:
In Love by Any Bloom. It is searing, the decision by her husband, when he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's, to take his own life; Bloom's heartbroken support of that decision, her research into Dignitas in Switzerland, the arduous and wrenching process of qualifying, the trip, the death, the aftermath.
Author Interview - Janet Burroway | The Last Book I Read
Pen & paper or computer:
I started composing on the typewriter in the 1950's because I worked on the student newspaper (The Mustang Roundup, North High, Phoenix) and because my loved brother wanted to be a reporter. For half a dozen books I typed and retyped, producing a submittable manuscript by making and correcting four copies (onion skin, carbon paper)--and so was hugely relieved when the computer appeared in the late eighties. Trouble is that the computer made me long-winded, and it took me a few more books to learn how rigorously to cut.
Book character I think I’d be best friends with:
I'm in the process of rereading George Eliot's Middlemarch, which I do at irregular intervals, so I have to say Dorothea Brooke. In her case, I think we would bond over a comparison of her world and mine, the similarities (difficulties of getting the rich to improve the lives of their workers, the struggle to balance work and love) and the differences (the level of comfort, the level of brutality in the 21st century). She would marvel at the ease of setting a novel from a computer manuscript to final book. And she would laugh with disbelief that it takes 18 or 24 months from ms to published book. (She finished Adam Bede on a Wednesday, sent it up to her publisher in Scotland on the overnight post, corrected proof on Friday, spent the weekend in Paris, and the book was published on the Monday.)
Author Interview - Janet Burroway | Book Character I’d be Best Friends With
If I weren’t an author, I’d be a:
I'd be a theatrical costume designer. I'd have to go back to school to study the centuries and their sartorial changes, but I would do that, and enjoy it. I had a short (ten year or so) taste of that life, and I liked the sketching, the fabrics, the pace, the interpretation of character in color and drape, the long hours with talented seamstresses all working toward a goal with a deadline. That career does not offer the solitude I value as a writer, but the camaraderie is of a solid, warm, sometimes delicious kind.
Favorite decade in fashion history:
1930's Deco every time.
Place I’d most like to travel:
Greece. I never got there. I planned to go twice, was thwarted twice. I imagine myself on a small island-hopping boat, diving into the sea between hikes among hills of white houses.
My signature drink:
A Margarita with a rim of chili spice in place of salt.
Favorite artist:
The artist Laurie Lipton draws only with pencil, though she says she thinks in color, and assigns a palette to shades of graphite. Her drawings are as intricate and expressive as her models, the Dutch Masters, and often even larger. From the beginning she has used American subjects with a subtext of manipulation just short of horror. Early drawings sought these undercurrents in ordinary middle-class life. Her recent, massive (whole-wall-sized) drawings of Boards of Directors, prisons and ICE agents bring the horror into contemporary life. In spite of the vastness of these drawings, every detail is fully achieved: every pebble in the gravel, every repetition in the wallpaper or the stained-glass window, every tooth in the phony smile. She is the only genius I am sure of in the contemporary world. (No, Tom Stoppard is another.)
Number one on my bucket list:
My memoir! My plan is that I flash down a memory a day (I can live to be a hundred and not run out), but there is always something in the way, some other paragraph or proof, a trip here, an obligation there. If I finally succeed it will be a hodge-podge, a rag-bag of memories, for my kids and grandkids to dip into or sort out into a much shorter book. It's to be called AS FAR AS I CAN TELL, a title so exactly what I want to say (especially about death, when everyone gives up their precious, infinitely intricate story and never gets to know "how it all turns out") that surely I must manage to fill the lanky outline.
Find more from the author:
www.janetburroway.com
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About Janet Burroway:
Janet Burroway
Janet Burroway is the author of poems, plays, essays, children’s books, a memoir and nine novels including The Buzzards; Raw Silk, Opening Nights, Cutting Stone (all Notable Books of NYTBR), and Simone in Pieces (Nov. 2025). Her Writing Fiction, the most widely used creative writing text in America, is now in a tenth edition, her four-genre text Imaginative Writing in its fifth. Her plays have been produced and read in Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and London. Her stories and poems appear in many literary magazines including Prairie Schooner, New Letters, Narrative Magazine and Five Points. She is Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor Emerita at the Florida State University and winner of the Florida Humanities Lifetime Achievement Award. www.janetburroway.com
