Lily King

Lily King on Margaret Mead, the Inspiration for Her Novel Euphoria

We spoke to Lily King about Margaret Mead, the inspiration behind King’s acclaimed new novel, Euphoria.

BY MEGAN O'GRADY

June 13, 2014

In the June issue of Vogue, I wrote about **Lily King’**s compass-spinningly seductive fourth novel, Euphoria (Atlantic Monthly Press), inspired by Margaret Mead’s experiences in 1930s Papua New Guinea. The novel’s protagonist, Nell, whose brilliant, controversial book on sexuality and Samoan children has made her famous, is adrift and mourning a miscarriage when the book opens. She and her loose-cannon husband, Fen, are looking for a new subject of study when they happen upon a colleague and competitor—an affable Brit who reignites Nell’s intellectual curiosity and shares her haunted sense of loss. Joining forces, the trio encounters a river tribe with thrillingly unconventional gender roles; needless to say, it doesn’t take long for their delicate balance to be upset. King’s stunning feat of historical ventriloquism deviates from Mead’s story in several key aspects (to see how, you’ll have to read for yourself), but the novel’s version of the love triangle culminates in its own inevitable-feeling—and devastatingly romantic—outcome. From Norman Rush to Barbara Kingsolver, the misdeeds of Westerners have inspired their own vibrant literary subgenre; in King’s fresh addition, the work of novelist and anthropologist find resonant parallel: While immersing ourselves in the beauty and cruelty of others, we confront our own. I corresponded with King about Mead—and what continues to draw fiction writers to the intellectual hothouses of yesteryear.

Margaret Mead

What attracted you to Margaret Mead in the first place, and why did you decide to write about her relationships with Reo Fortune and Gregory Bateson?

I accidentally found myself reading a biography of Mead about nine years ago. I got to this part when she was working in Papua New Guinea with her second husband, Reo Fortune, and they met Bateson and the three of them had this crazy love triangle for five months, and of course I thought that would make a great novel. I never really believed I’d be the one to attempt it. But I wanted to know more about this time in her life, so I read her memoir and her book, Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies, about the tribes she studied during that time. I found myself taking notes and getting ideas, and when I was done with my last novel, Father of the Rain, I started in.

Each of the three anthropologists has different approaches to their work and the limitations of it: Nell is a meticulous and empathetic observer; Fen, who is talented with languages, is obsessed with breaking down barriers; and Bankson humbly questions whether one culture can, with any objectivity, understand the values that govern another. How would you compare the work of an anthropologist with that of a novelist?

I think they are almost the same thing. Both a novelist and an anthropologist ask the same thing: How do people live? Mead said in a New Yorker interview: “The whole world is my field.” A writer would say the exact same thing.

Marriage, of course, has its own culture and temperament—the unspoken understandings and shared history between two people. Mead is a towering figure, and it’s fascinating to see a more vulnerable side to her. Were there any surprises in your research? Do you have a favorite Margaret Mead quote?

There are so many great Mead quotes, but here’s a surprising one. It’s something she wrote to Fortune after their work in New Guinea was done and she was on a boat home to America without him. “I wish you hadn’t hit me where it would show that night over there. I wouldn’t have had to go away from you.” This line suggests that if he had hit her someplace where people couldn’t see it, she would have stayed. Our image of Mead is a tough, outspoken middle-aged activist, but she was once a young woman far from home who was, on more than one occasion, knocked around by her husband.

At one point, Bankson resonantly asks: “When only one person is the expert on a particular people, do we learn more about the people or the anthropologist when we read the analysis?” What made you decide to tell the story from his perspective—apart from the first chapter, and Nell’s journals and letters?

Once I wrote that second chapter in Bankson’s voice, I knew it was his story, not hers. It just felt more natural, more intimate. I could get so much closer to him, to his core. And once I realized it was his story, everything I thought was going to happen had to change.

What are you working on now?

I have exactly 1.5 pages of a new novel. It’s going to require a mountain of research. It feels like something impossible, just as Euphoria felt, which I’m hoping is a good thing.

VOGUE

‘Euphoria’ by Lily King / Review by Margot Livesey

‘Euphoria’ by Lily King

By Margot Livesey
June 7, 2014

In 1933, three anthropologists, Gregory Bateson from England, Reo Fortune from New Zealand, and Margaret Mead from America, converged on the Sepik River in what was then called the Territory of New Guinea. For those who want to know what really happened during those few months, Jane Howard’s 1984 biography, “Margaret Mead,” holds many of the answers. For those who want to read a tale of work, love, and passion of many kinds there is Lily King’s dazzling new novel, “Euphoria.”

“Euphoria” is the story of three anthropologists whose work has echoes of that done in New Guinea in 1933 by Margaret Mead (above), Gregory Bateson, and Reo Fortune.

King, the author of three earlier and much acclaimed works, does not say in her acknowledgements what aspect of Howard’s book particularly inspired her, but she does make clear her debt to that work and her many departures from it. Her anthropologists — Bankson, Fen, and Nell — owe much to their originals; Bankson’s biography is particularly close to Bateson’s. But in King’s expert hands the three soon become richly rendered characters, each with her or his own suspenseful narrative.That suspense is darkly present from the opening sentences. “As they were leaving the Mumbanyo, someone threw something at them. It bobbed a few yards from the stern of the canoe. A pale brown thing. ‘Another dead baby,’ Fen said. He had broken her glasses by then, so she didn’t know if he was joking.”

Relations between Nell and Fen, who’ve been married for almost two years, are already strained — what will he break next? — and in the following pages we learn that she has lesions on her legs, a cut on her hand, and a broken ankle. These injuries are observed by Bankson, who meets her that night at a Christmas party in Angoram. He is startled to discover that this small, frail woman with a thick plait down her back is the author of a famous book. Bankson is the narrator for much of “Euphoria,” but we also get Nell’s point of view, either in the third person or in poignant entries from her final notebook.

Each of these young anthropologists is, for reasons both similar and different, at their wit’s end. Nell and Fen have spent a year studying the boring Anapa and five months studying the murderous Mumbanyo — from whom they are fleeing as the novel opens; Nell has lost a baby of her own. Meanwhile Bankson has been studying the peaceful Kiona, feeling increasingly lonely, increasingly puzzled that the tribe eludes him, and increasingly like he’s failing his mother (who is funding his research, still hoping he’ll become a proper scientist, like his father). Shortly before the Christmas party, he tells us, he tried to drown himself in the river.

No wonder then that Bankson, already smitten with Nell, promises over their first dinner to find her and Fen a new tribe. The two had been planning to leave for Australia the next day, but “[t]hey agreed so quickly, and without even glancing at each other, that I wondered afterwards if they’d been playing me rather handily all along.” After rejecting the first few tribes he proposes, Nell and Fen set up home among the Tam who live on the shores of a beautiful lake. They are, to Bankson’s dismay, almost a day’s canoe trip away from his own tribe.

King is particularly brilliant at dramatizing Nell’s work among the women and children of the Tam. We see in vivid detail her persistence, her powers of observation, her humor, her intelligence, and her empathy as she interviews her subjects, plays with them, and enters into their lives. The title of the novel comes not from Bankson’s growing passion for Nell but from her description to him of that moment in studying a tribe when she thinks she understands them and everything makes sense. “[A]t that moment the place feels entirely yours. It’s the briefest, purest euphoria.”Bankson has never experienced this, but, by observing her methods, he comes closer and begins to study the Kiona with more success. Nell’s husband, however, is another matter. Handsome, charismatic, preternaturally gifted at languages, Fen feels tyrannized by his wife’s fame and by her discipline; she is, he complains, always working. Nell is observant enough to realize that, “Fen didn’t want to study the natives; he wanted to be a native. . . . His interest lay in experience, in doing.” But she fails to notice that, while he seems to be merely hanging out with the men, he is hatching a dangerous plan to redress the balance of power between himself and her.

It would be doing King and her many readers a disservice to describe how this plan plays out. Suffice to say that all the strands of the narrative — Nell’s passion for work, Bankson’s longing for her, Fen’s envy, the customs of the Tam and of the Mumbanyo — come together in a deeply satisfying way. “Euphoria” is an exhilarating novel.

Margot Livesey is a distinguished writer in residence at Emerson College. Her most recent novel is “The Flight of Gemma Hardy.”

BOSTON GLOBE

Lily King / Euphoria / Going Native

Euphoria by Lily King

Going Native

(This book was selected as one of The New York Times Book Review’s 10 Best Books of 2014.)

By Emily Eakin
June 6, 2014

As a public icon, Margaret Mead has grown fusty — more respected than read, scarred by potshots (remember the critic who tried to prove that she’d been duped by her Samoan informants?) and sidelined in anthropology by a new dispensation, fluent in evolutionary biology, that makes Mead’s “culture and personality” approach look quaint. It’s hard to conceive of the shock caused in 1928 by her depiction, in “Coming of Age in Samoa,” of sexual freedom as key to a happy adolescence, or of the scope of her influence, ­decades later, as an unflagging champion of progressive causes, from women’s rights to the legalization of marijuana. For most of us, Mead’s name no longer automatically conjures what one biographer termed “steamy things that happened in torrid, languid jungles.” But her life was rich with incident and, on one occasion at least, may have conformed to this description.

In “Euphoria,” the novelist Lily King has taken the known details of that occasion — a 1933 field trip to the Sepik River, in New Guinea, during which Mead and her second husband, Reo Fortune, briefly collaborated with the man who would become her third husband, the English anthropologist Gregory Bateson — and blended them into a story of her own devising. The result is as uncanny as it is transporting. “Euphoria” is a meticulously researched homage to Mead’s restless mind and a considered portrait of Western anthropology in its primitivist heyday. It’s also a taut, witty, fiercely intelligent tale of competing egos and desires in a landscape of exotic menace — a love triangle in extremis.

For King, whose three previous novels, all expertly crafted, rarely strayed far from late-20th-century, New England WASP culture, “Euphoria” represents a departure and arguably a breakthrough. The steam the book emits is as much intellectual as erotic (for Mead there seems hardly to have been a distinction), and King’s signal achievement may be to have created satisfying drama out of a quest for interpretive insight.

The threat of violence and death looms from Page 1, as a disgruntled Mumbanyo tribe member lobs what may or may not be a dead baby at Nell Stone, the ­controversial American author of the best-selling ethnography “The Children of Kirakira,” and her envious Australian husband, Fen, who are fleeing the tribe in a canoe. Nell’s glasses are broken (by Fen, in what, it’s implied, was a deliberate act), as is one of her ankles. Both husband and wife are filthy, dispirited and sick with malaria. Nell, who longs to be pregnant, has recently miscarried. “Maybe you noticed — there’s sort of a stench of failure about us,” she tells Andrew Bankson, the English anthropologist they run into upon arriving at the local government station, where a drunken Christmas party is underway.

Bankson, the novel’s narrator, isn’t doing too well himself. Like Bateson, his real-life inspiration, he’s tormented by the deaths of his older brothers, one blown up over Belgium in World War I, the other a suicide in Piccadilly Circus, and for two years has been living with a tribe on the Sepik River, less out of a passion for ­analyzing human social systems than to escape his overbearing mother. Stymied in his work and deeply depressed, he’s fresh from his own suicide attempt — in the river, his pockets full of stones, like Virginia Woolf. On seeing Nell and Fen, it’s all he can do not to fling himself at them: “My heart whapped in my throat and all I could think was how to keep them, how to keep them. I felt my loneliness bulge out of me like a goiter.”

The book is rife with such visceral imagery and pungent with the stink of disease, foul breath and unwashed bodies. Bankson, who falls hard for Nell, describes her — much as Bateson did Mead — in a letter to his mother, as “a sickly, pocket-sized creature with a face like a female Darwin”; in the bush, sentimentality is a luxury, like iodine and Band-Aids. Anyway, it’s Nell’s brain that excites him, her drive and discipline, her easy way with the natives, her scandalously impressionistic field notes, her poetry-laden talk, her naked curiosity, her freedom. “For so long I’d felt that what I’d been trained to do in academic writing was to press my nose to the ground, and here was Nell Stone with her head raised and swiveling in all directions. It was exhilarating and infuriating and I needed to see her again.”

“Euphoria” takes the form of unflinching retrospection, interspersed with ­entries from Nell’s journal, as Bankson recounts, decades later, his helpless love for her. King deploys this frame with ­admirable delicacy, casting a shadow of impending tragedy over the narrative and administering the occasional strategic dose of irony or nostalgia. Apart from an early chapter in which Bankson chronicles his painful family history — her only misstep, it comes off a bit pat — she wisely allows the proceedings to unfold mostly as they happen.

Bankson persuades Nell and Fen to take up residence with the Tam, a tribe seven hours upriver by motorized canoe from the one he’s studying. In the bush, this makes them neighbors, and Bankson can’t stay away, at one point falling so desperately ill that he ends up spending a week in their bed. King is brilliant on the moral contradictions that propelled anthropological encounters with remote tribes — a volatile mix of liberal high-mindedness, stoicism, hubris and greed. “If I didn’t believe they shared my humanity entirely, I wouldn’t be here,” Nell tells Bankson loftily. “I’m not interested in zoology.” Yet she and Fen make clear to him that after the loathsome Mumbanyo, who practiced infanticide with clinical indifference, they require a tribe with more savory amenities — a pretty beach and good art. When Bankson visits the couple after they’ve installed themselves among the Tam, he laughs out loud at the sight of their house, with its portico and blue-and-white cloth curtains — “this English tea shop encircled by pampas grass in the middle of the Territories.”

Inside the house, Nell and Fen’s collaboration is dissolving in rancor, along with their marriage. Bankson’s presence temporarily defuses the tension, enabling first an uneasy détente, and then, in an episode King has adapted from Mead’s life, a collective frenzy: Over the course of one sleepless night, the three converge on a framework for mapping the whole of human culture, in all its variations. “We believed we were in the throes of a big theory. We could see our grid in chalk on university blackboards. It felt like we were putting a messy disorganized unlabeled world in order.”

So intense is this communal labor, and the thrill of new apprehension, that the physical romance that follows is almost beside the point. In any case, neither the love affair nor the theory is meant to be. (Mead never formally published her theory, which she called “the squares,” later writing of this period that “it was the closest I’ve ever come to madness.” In the novel, “the Grid” is published to acclaim, but after it is embraced in perverted form by the Third Reich, Bankson has it suppressed.) In King’s exquisite book, desire — for knowledge, fame, another person — is only fleetingly rewarded, and gratification is inseparable from self-­deceit. As Nell observes about the ­moment, typically two months into fieldwork, when a culture suddenly begins to make sense, “It’s a delusion — you’ve only been there eight weeks — and it’s followed by the complete despair of ever understanding anything. But at that moment the place feels entirely yours. It’s the briefest, purest euphoria.”

By Lily King

261 pp. Atlantic Monthly Press. $25.

Emily Eakin, a former senior editor at The New Yorker, is writing a book about contemporary medical culture.

THE NEW YORK TIMES

Vogue / The 10 Best Books of 2014

The 10 Best Books of 2014

Megan O'Grady
DECEMBER 26, 2014 11:00 AM

Perhaps no novel this year was more feverishly anticipated—or more frequently stolen from my desk—than Elena Ferrante’s Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (Europa), the third installment of the enigmatic Italian author’s Neapolitan novels, which tell a single story with the possessive force of an origin myth. Now in their 30s, the two women at its center—a writer losing her way; a defiant former classmate drawn into a revolutionary movement—face the consequences of their limited choices, raising issues of ambition and identity, creativity and desire.

An immigrant story like no other, Akhil Sharma’s memoir-like second novel,Family Life (Norton), follows a family from India to America, where tragedy soon derails their dreams. Written in the kind of prose that gets under your skin and never really leaves, it’s also the story of how a writer is made.

Based on Margaret Mead’s experience in 1930s New Guinea, Lily King’s brainy and sensuous Euphoria (Atlantic) spins a love triangle in the bush. Wearing her research lightly, King reveals a startlingly vulnerable side to Mead, suggesting an elegant parallel between novelist and archeologist: In scrutinizing the lives of others, we discover ourselves.

Featuring his strongest female character since Atonement’s Briony, Ian McEwan’s The Children Act (Nan A. Talese) infuses a classic showdown between faith and reason with unexpected tenderness. Grounded in the story of a family court judge facing the decision of her career—one with unexpected repercussions for her personal life—McEwan’s thirteenth novel is taut, spellbinding, and unaccountably romantic.

The fiction debut of the year was Katy Simpson Smith’s The Story of Land and Sea (Harper), a feat of historical ventriloquism that movingly evokes the voices of two women on a North Carolina plantation during the American Revolution—one white, one black—for whom the fight for liberty and sovereignty take very different forms.

Softer than its preceding two volumes but still impossibly addictive, Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle, Book 3 (Archipelago), recalls the ordinary magic—girls, rock music, and the thrill of a new parka—of an otherwise austere Nordic boyhood.

Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation (Knopf) begins as a scrapbook of crackling insights into the effect of motherhood on the creative life, but soon deepens into something much richer and more complex as the narrator discovers her husband’s infidelity. A shattering rejoinder to smug mommy blogs, Offill’s portrait of marriage is as raw and honest as any in recent memory.

An unlikely connection between a young drifter and an elderly reverend sparks Marilynne Robinson’s third novel set in the Midwestern town of Gilead, Lila(FSG), which unfolds into a theological inquiry both tender and painful, capturing the comforts and the limits of faith and love.

Eight years old when the Islamic Revolution remade her world, former New York Times correspondent Nazila Fathi distills three decades of Iranian politics through a personal lens in her unputdownable memoir, The Lonely War (Basic Books).

In a year that saw a number of landmark biographies of the famous and infamous —A. N. Wilson’s Victoria: A Life, John Lahr’s Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh—it was Hermione Lee’s biography of an elusive English novelist who published her first book at 58 that kept surprising us. Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life (Knopf) captures the tribulations of The Blue Flower author, and the power of a voice forged lately, and brilliantly.

VOGUE