By Joel Magalnick, Editor, JTNews
Anne Michaels is a private person. She doesn’t talk much about her own life, but lets her voice come through in her writing. The award-winning poet and novelist, whose book Fugitive Pieces sat for many weeks atop the New York Times bestseller list, spoke to a small audience at Benaroya Hall on May 19 as the last author to speak at the Nextbook Writers Series’ inaugural year.
Before her talk, she met with an intimate group of young adults over Asian food across the street at Wild Ginger. She spent a half hour taking questions from members of Hillel’s Jconnect group and speaking about her (and this group’s) writing, the characters in her novel – but not a whole lot about herself.
Fugitive Pieces is a story in two parts: the first, which makes up the bulk of the book, is about Jakob Beer, who witnesses his parents’ murder by the Nazis and manages to survive by digging himself into holes by day and running by night. Eventually, a Greek archaeologist rescues Jakob and takes him back to Greece, where the two hide through the end of the war before emigrating to Canada.
The second part is narrated in present time by Ben, a young man attempting to understand his own family’s history in the Holocaust through Jakob’s writings.
Jakob does not appear in that part of the novel because, Michaels said, “I hoped he would be missed. I thought it was important to have his absence.” Some of Michaels’ readers around the dinner table agreed that they had indeed missed Jakob.
Michaels said she spent five years thinking about and planning and researching the novel.
“I did lots of reading,” she said. “Hundreds and hundreds of books.”
Those books ranged from history to paleontology to meteorology, all of which fascinated her, she said, though she tried not to use that fascination as an agenda for her characters.
At the Nextbook event, Michaels said Jakob’s story began with an image she couldn’t get out of her head: a photo of people enjoying themselves while committing a horrific act.
Showing her private side, she didn’t let on about how the picture haunted her, however.
“Nobody knew what I was doing,” she said. “I didn’t talk about it with my friends.”
Michaels wondered aloud how this split-second in time could still be so vivid so many years after seeing it. Because of the subject matter, she said, “I asked myself, ‘Who am I to write about this?’” Then, answering herself, she asked, “who am I if I don’t?”
Though she didn’t describe the photograph in detail, its parallels to photos so recently in the news – those of the Iraqi prisoner tortured by American soldiers that have come to light in past months – resonated with members of the audience, some said afterward.
To Michaels, writing her story in the harsh language of that terrible act “would be kind of a lie,” because it would not justify the horror of that image. So she wrote from the other direction, “to that moment we actually want to turn away,” and generating a story to be read with a slowness by the reader.
It took Michaels another 10 years to write the novel once she completed her research, though she did publish two books of poetry in that time.
“You only have one chance at a book’s characters and subject matter in that context, and you really have to get it right in the beginning,” she said. “By not doing it right, you dishonor the characters, you dishonor the subject matter.”
As she was completing the book, she took her first trip to Greece, where much of the story is based. She said her visit didn’t change the story, but she used the experience to heighten the sense of place.
The result was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, also a winner of the Lannan Literary Fiction Award and the Guardian Fiction Award.
After reading and speaking about the book to the Nextbook audience, the Seattle Weekly’s Mark Fefer interviewed the soft-spoken Michaels onstage. Then the roomful of fans lined up afterward for autographs and in some cases long, hushed conversations before she disappeared into her next work of fiction.