Virginia Pye
Author Interview - Virginia Pye
Author of MARRIAGE AND OTHER MONUMENTS
MARRIAGE AND OTHER MONUMENTS is set in Richmond during the tumultuous summer of 2020. It tells the story of two estranged sisters whose marriages implode against the backdrop of the social justice protests and the removal of Confederate monuments. The experience brings them closer, while their husbands conspire in a racial reckoning their ancestors would never have dreamed of. The story was inspired by the real/actual events of that summer and by what it takes to have a successful multi-decade marriage, built on a foundation of give and take that encourages evolution, as individuals and as a couple, even in challenging times.
Author Interview - Virginia Pye
Author I draw inspiration from:
Tessa Hadley comes to mind. I love her novels and also her wonderful short stories. But I'm choosing a different British woman author: Penelope Lively. I love her novels. She writes with humor and cleverness about regular people--couples and families facing common problems but each unique and artfully drawn. Her characters are such good souls who get themselves into such terrible messes. My favorite novel of hers is CONSEQUENCES. It's a slim novel that still manages to tell a very full and detailed love story over three generations of women against the backdrop of major events of the twentieth century. It's miraculous how she picks key moments, that are also everyday moments, that somehow convey whole lifetimes. And I love the settings! Who can't fall in love with a country cottage in the English landscape. I highly recommend Penelope Lively's many books!
Author Interview - Virginia Pye | Author I Draw Inspiration From
Favorite place to read a book:
In the early morning hours, as daylight is just filling the windows of my living room, I love to sit on the sofa with a captivating book, a cup of green tea, and my mini-poodle, Honey, curled up and fast asleep on my lap.
Book character I’d like to be stuck in an elevator with:
I'd love to be in an elevator with all of Elizabeth Strout's main characters--Olive Kitteridge and Lucky Barton and the rest, though, I have to admit, I wouldn't fit in at all with them. Same with the characters in Christopher Tilghman's four novels set on the Eastern Shore of Maryland over many generations. I'd love to be with Thomas and Beal in the Midi in France, but again, I'd stand out like a sore thumb.
But to be in an elevator with one character is even harder to imagine. Yet, what if I could somehow whisper into Madame Bovary's ear to help her avoid her fate? Maybe I could convince her to read books other than the silly romances that led her astray. Or, what if I could stand beside Anna Karenina and get through to her that her lover Vronsky is no good for her. Instead, I would speak of the more noble character of Levin and others. But it's no good. Neither of them would change. They are who they are and I'd have to get off at my floor, having changed nothing. Those indelible storylines are what they are forever.
Author Interview - Virginia Pye | Book Character I’d Like to be Stuck in an Elevator With
The moment I knew I wanted to become an author:
At age ten, as I stood beside my mother as she prepared dinner at the stove, I recited a poem I had written about the snow falling outside. The poem was pretty heavy-handed in its imagery. It was about how the snowflakes that had fallen on the poet's hand were melting now that she/I had come indoors. The "life" of the snowflake was compared in the poem to the life of a person. Short and sweet. It was a first metaphor and I loved it!
Hardback, paperback, ebook or audiobook:
I love to hold and admire hardbacks, but I love to read from paperbacks. They're easier on the hands and wrists, especially when reading in bed. I listen to audiobooks all the time as I'm doing household tasks or driving. For audiobooks, I try to choose books that are plot driven and not as focused on language. Ones that I'm swept along in what happens next. For novels that are more precise in their language and characterizations, I prefer to read from actual books.
The last book I read:
Evelyn Waugh's A HANDFUL OF DUST is absolutely brilliant, but that's no great surprise. The author of BRIDESHEAD REVISITED and other classics, he's a fantastic storyteller and creator of characters. In this one, he creates characters who have too much and are bored with their stature. Through truly terrible life choices they bit by bit loose everything. Where they land in the end is comical, yet tragic, like so much of Waugh's work.
Author Interview - Virginia Pye | The Last Book I Read
Pen & paper or computer:
I write at my desktop Mac in the mornings. When I'm at work on a novel or short story, I sometimes wake as early as four am and go to my desk because my mind is buzzing with the work. Lots of ideas come to me in my sleep--not fully formed, but more as a feeling of inspiration. If I get to my desk with that buzz, I can often have a great breakthrough, writing a scene or conceiving of some important moment in the story I'm writing.
Book character I think I’d be best friends with:
I find this question really hard, as I did the question about the elevator. I think I don't think of characters as people. I mean, as I read, I let my imagination be taken wherever the writer wants it to go. I don't hold back as a reader. But I also don't think of the characters as anything other than creations. It's probably because I create characters myself, so I'm always looks for the ingredients that have gone into the making of people on the page.
If I weren’t an author, I’d be a:
As dull as it sounds, I'd probably go back to teaching writing. Although...I'm also very much a people person and sometimes I think I wish I'd gone into, gulp!, politics. That is, politics on a local level and as it used to be practiced, with constituents and pols working together to improve a neighborhood or city. Then again, I could also see myself as a caregiver to the elderly. Or small children. I guess I could do a number of things!
Favorite decade in fashion history:
Turn of the twentieth century, before the flappers and after the high formalism of the Victoria era. Some women, like Virginia Wolfe, had started to wear pants. And I love those shoes she wore that look like men's wingtips. I never wear those now, though I could. They just seem to belong in another time and place.
Place I’d most like to travel:
My husband and I return to Italy often, exploring different regions. As Stanley Tucci proved, each part of Italy is different from anywhere else, with different food and landscape and customs. It's like going to an altogether different county, but since my husband has taught himself Italian, we manage well throughout.
My signature drink:
I love jasmine green tea with honey. And I love rose in warmer weather. But not together. One is more daytime and other for evening. You can guess which is which!
Favorite artist:
Oh dear, here's where I have another problem: my husband of forty years is a longtime contemporary art curator and for almost half a century we've visited museums wherever we go. I have seen SO MUCH ART! And I often known what I love when I see it, but honestly, I feel like every painting and sculpture is part of a larger conversation that are all mixed up in my mind with references to other works. I'm often blown away by a Rembrandt or a Matisse or a Kara Walker or William Kentridge.
Number one on my bucket list:
We're going to Australia soon for our daughter's wedding to an Australian man of Indian background, where we'll be part of a five day Indian wedding. I think that's pretty great, since we love these kids and enjoy his family. I can't wait to be welcomed into that foreign land by these lovely people!
Anything else you'd like to add:
I hope readers check out my latest novel, Marriage and Other Monuments, which was written from the heart. It's about marriage and how times of dramatic change can affect us all, even those not involved overtly. It's a love story to a smaller city, one not without problems, but filled with good people, like every place.
Find more from the author:
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About Virginia Pye:
Virginia Pye
Virginia Pye’s fifth book, Marriage and Other Monuments, is set in Richmond, Virginia in the summer of 2020. She is also the author of four previous award-winning books of fiction, including two post-colonial historical novels set in China, River of Dust and Dreams of the Red Phoenix, and the short story collection, Shelf Life of Happiness. Her most recent novel, The Literary Undoing of Victoria Swann is a love story to writers and readers set in Gilded Age Boston. Virginia’s essays have appeared in The New York Times, Literary Hub, Publisher’s Weekly, Writer’s Digest, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. A Tin House Summer Workshop scholar, teaching fellow at the Virginia Quarterly Review Conference, and a repeat fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, she has taught writing at New York University and the University of Pennsylvania, and, most recently, at Grub Street in Boston. Virginia is Fiction Editor of the literary journal Pangyrus, a Regular Contributor to Writer Unboxed, and she serves on the board of the Women’s National Book Association, Boston Chapter. To learn more about her, please visit: www.virginia@virginiapye.com
