Amazon Best Books of the Month, April 2010: Maggie O'Farrell has
a singular knack for sensing the magnetic fields that push and
pull people in love, and in The Hand That First Held Mine, she
summons those invisible forces to tell two stories. The first is
the spirited journey of Lexie Sinclair, a bright, tempestuous
woman who finds her way from rural Devon to the center of postwar
London's burgeoning art scene. Her force of personality makes her
a natural critic (she's a wonderful tour guide to Soho's Bohemian
circles), and she soon falls deeply in love. Fast forward fifty
years and you'll meet Ted and Elina: a contemporary London couple
who've just had their first child, both afflicted with a crisis
of memory--Elina can recall only bits and pieces of her life
before the baby, while Ted fights off memories he can't even
recognize. O'Farrell alternates these plots artfully, always
keeping the incorrigible Lexie in forward motion, while letting
Ted and Elina wade further back in time. Inevitably, the two
stories collide, and the result is a remarkably taut and
unsentimental whole that embraces the unpredictable, both in love
and in life. --Anne Bartholomew
A Q&A with Maggie O'Farrell
Q: What made you want to write this book?
A: A few years ago, I attended an exhibition of John Deakin's
photographs at the National Portrait Gallery in London. Many of
them were portraits of people in Soho in the 1950s: artists,
writers, actors, musicians. Soho is an area of London that is
famous for many things, but I hadn't known that, for a short time
after the Second World War, it had been the center of an artistic
movement. The bohemian, underground world that thrived there so
briefly and was captured so vividly by Deakin fascinated me. I
began to conceive a story about a girl, Lexie, who arrives there
from a very conventional home and makes a life for herself as a
journalist.
Q: There are two stories in the novel, aren't there?
A: The other story is set in the present and is about Elina, a
young Finnish painter who has just had her first child. With
Elina, I was interested in writing about new motherhood, those
very first few weeks with a newborn--the shock and the rawness
and the emotion and the exhaustion of it. It's something that's
been done a great deal in nonfiction, but I haven't read much
about it in fiction. Much of the novel is concerned with people
whose lives change in an instant; a decision or a chance meeting
or a journey occurs and suddenly your life veers off on a new
course. Having your first child is one of those times. As soon as
the newborn takes its first breath, life as you've known it is
gone and a new existence begins.
Q: Why did you decide to divide the novel into two time frames?
A: I liked the idea of these two women living in the same city,
fifty years apart. Lexie and Elina have no inkling of each
other's existence, but they hear each other's echoes through
time. And, as it turns out, they are linked in other ways--in
ways neither of them could ever have expected.
Q: As well as motherhood and the unexpectedness of life, there's
a great deal about love in the book as well, isn’t there?
A: Love in many forms powers the book: familial, platonic, and
also romantic. Lexie has many different men in her life. There's
Felix, the feckless yet famous TV news reporter, and Robert, the
rather more serious biographer. But the great love of her life is
Innes Kent, the man she follows to London, who takes her under
his wing and gives her her first job as a journalist.
Elina's relationship with her boyfriend Ted is challenged by the
arrival of their baby. Ted begins to recall things from his own
infancy, and these things don’t seem to fit. I was interested in
the way having children makes you remember and reassess your own
childhood, in micro-detail: things I'd never thought about or
remembered before would suddenly rear their head. And this made
me wonder what it would be like if the memories that resurfaced
were of places and people you didn't recognize, if your own life
suddenly seemed strange to you.
Q: Did you have to do a lot of research for the book?
A: The 1950s and 1960s are not that distant in time, and the
sixties in particular are very well documented in art, film,
photography, and literature. I read history books but also made
sure to submerge myself in novels of the period. You get
wonderful ins into the way people spoke then; it was quite
different from the way English is spoken in London now. The
cadences and vocabulary have completely changed. So I read Iris
Murdoch, Muriel Spark, Jean Rhys, Margaret Drabble, Margaret
Forster. Novels also give you tiny details you didn't even know
you needed--how a telephone worked in a house of bed-sitters, for
example. Where one bought peacock-blue stockings in 1957.
You have to be careful with research, though. There's a terrible
temptation, once you've done all this collecting of interesting
details, to shoehorn in as much of it as you can. You can
sometimes find yourself writing a sentence along the lines of
"She picked up the telephone, which was made of Bakelite, a
substance first developed in 1907 by a Belgian chemist..." At
which point you have to stop and try to forget everything you
know about early plastic manufacture. Most research you have to
throw out. But you still need to do it, to give yourself
confidence and scaffolding.
Q: London as a city has a strong presence in the book. Was this
deliberate?
A: I felt all the way through as if London were the third main
character in the novel, along with Lexie and Elina. Most of the
novel was written while I was living away from London, so I
suppose I was re-creating a city with which I have had a very
long relationship (a rather off-and-on one, to be honest).
Q: To what degree does your own life play into your fiction?
A: I don't write autobiographically. Fiction for me is an
escape, an alternative existence, so I wouldn't want to re-create
my life on the page. There are elements of my life that filter
into my books, but they are usually recast and redrawn and
reimagined to such a degree as to be unrecognizable to me or
anyone else. Lexie and Elina both arrive in London as adults, as
I did, and Lexie becomes a journalist, as I did. The scenes about
motherhood I couldn't, of course, have written without having
been a mother myself. The rest is made up.
Recommended Reading from Maggie O'Farrell
The Girls of Slender Means by Muriel Spark: My favorite Spark, I
think. A portrait of a women's boarding house in postwar London,
including the spinsters, the young dormitory girls, the elocution
teacher, the mercenary but beautiful Selina and the Schiaparelli
dress they all take turns to wear.
A Severed Head by Iris Murdoch: A devastating account of love and
marriage in 1950s London. Murdoch handles her six characters with
poise as their lives become ever more entangled.
Our Spoons Came from Woolworths by Barbara Comyns: The book I
have given most as a present. It's the mesmerizingly lively story
of a young artist who marries against the wishes of her family
and her ensuing struggle with poverty, motherhood and her awful,
self-centered husband. I make it sound gloomy but it's anything
but…
Dear George and Other Stories by Helen Simpson: I particularly
love the story "Heavy Weather" in this collection, which
documents a couple on holiday with a toddler and a baby. Nobody
but Simpson can write with such heartbreaking accuracy about life
with small children.
The Hours by Michael Cunningham: I read and re-read this book
while writing The Hand that First Held Mine. It is, quite simply,
perfect. How did he do it?
Any Human Heart by William Boyd: The whole of the 20th century is
laid out in the diaries of Logan stuart. A spectacular,
astonishing novel.
(Photo © Ben Gold)