Margot Livesey

Margot Livesey, this weekend's featured contributor at Writers Read, is the author of six novels--Homework, Criminals, The Missing World, Eva Moves the Furniture, Banishing Verona and The House on Fortune Street--and a collection of stories titled Learning By Heart.

From her 2005 interview at January Magazine:

Valerie Compton: Weeks after having read Banishing Verona for the first time, I am still completely in awe of Zeke as a character. He seems really alive and that's amazing, particularly because he apprehends the world so differently from other people. How difficult was it for you to create Zeke?

Margot Livesey: A son of a friend was diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome in the early 90s, and that was what first made me aware of this condition. In keeping her company, and in keeping him company, I began to learn about it intellectually, by reading about it -- and also to learn about it in a more internal way through his way of perceiving the world, and watching the things he was grappling with.

When I came to create Zeke, I certainly used the things I had learned intellectually, but more importantly, I just really tried to imagine myself going through the world from the point of view of someone who has Asperger's. And that meant thinking about all kinds of things that I normally do in writing, like all those shorthand phrases -- well, they're not shorthand -- but phrases like "she smiled." I thought, No, I have to think about that for a moment. Would he register all those things? I mean when most people say "she smiled," we actually summarize an enormous number of things to come up with that little phrase. And so it meant in some ways going very slowly through his parts of the novel to make sure that I wasn't rushing to oversimplify or rushing to summarize things that I thought he wouldn't. At the same time, it was also for me a balancing act, because I didn't want to keep belaboring this with the reader. You know, going through the novel, as the novel went on, I increasingly did use the conventional summary for facial expressions and for other aspects of...[read on]

Writers Read: Margot Livesey.

--Marshal Zeringue