Beyond the Cruel Facts of Her Life Are Truths That Cut Deep

The 10 Best Books of 2021

Childhood/Youth/Dependency review / Memoirs of art and addiction

By Megan O’Grady
Published Jan. 26, 2021

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THE COPENHAGEN TRILOGY
Childhood, Youth, Dependency
By Tove Ditlevsen

“I know every person has their own truth,” Tove Ditlevsen writes in “Childhood,” the first volume of her beautiful and fearless memoirs. “Fortunately, things are set up so that you can keep quiet about the truths in your heart; but the cruel, gray facts are written in the school records and in the history of the world.”

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

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