Anne Marsella is an American writer who has been living in Paris for 22 years. Her first book, The Lost and Found and Other Stories, won the Elmer Holmes Bobst Award for Emerging Writers in 1994. Since then, she has written two other novels in English – and one directly in French! Anne was kind enough to answer a few questions for me in advance of her October 12 reading at the American Library of Paris.
Your writing is quite difficult to classify. It has fairy tale elements, as well as literary and chick-lit leanings. How would you describe your style or aesthetic – and how did it arrive to you? (Influence of certain writers? Conscious decision? Organic discovery?)
I see my writing in part as an ongoing conversation with the writers, and collective narratives (ie fairy stories) that precede me – those I love and admire in particular – and, to a lesser extent, current story-telling trends, such as chick-lit, a form I subvert in my novel Remedy. My writing process is largely organic, guided by both intuitive and conscious choices about language; mostly I want my characters and their language to surprise me — not just occasionally but most of the time. I put my pen to the service of sensibility and this switches the focus of the narrative from plot to a singularity of voice (or voices) and energy, which must drive the story forward.
Herman Melville writes in The Confidence Man: “The people in a fiction…must dress as nobody exactly dresses, talk as nobody exactly talks, act as nobody exactly acts. It is with fiction as with religion: it should present another world, and yet one to which we feel the tie.” This is by no means a prescription for the conventional novel but it is one I naturally adhere to and I always have a copy of the operatic Moby Dick on my writing desk. I need to have my literary ancestors near me even if their genius is nearly crushing. Though they don’t crush: their presence keeps me afloat.
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