Radiance, her first novel, is about an enigmatic Hiroshima survivor who comes to New York for surgery on her face and the complex relationship she has with her hosts.
From a Q & A with Lambert:
What inspired you to write Radiance? Is there a story about the writing of this book that begs to be told?Read the entire interview.I wrote most of Radiance over a five-year period, from 2001 to 2006 – but the first inspiration may have come years earlier, when I had the job of unpacking a collection of "Hiroshima Artifacts" for an exhibition in Vancouver in 1986. As I unpacked these "artifacts" one by one – a blackened pocket watch with a stopped minute hand, a piece of concrete printed with shadows – my skin began to feel itchy and hot, as though these objects still held a radioactive residue that could leach into me, taint me. This sensation must have stayed with me for years, drawing me towards my subject matter.
When I was pregnant with my daughter, Lucy, I travelled to Hiroshima to visit the Hiroshima Peace Museum. I hoped that a journey to Ground Zero would help me find my way deeper into my material. Paradoxically, what I saw at the museum – similar to the artifacts I had unpacked years earlier but magnified tenfold – was so terrible, so overwhelming, that I ended up putting my draft away for several years. It was only after September 11th that I again felt moved to write about this subject. The material that had felt too hard to write, now felt like material I was once again compelled to explore.
The Page 99 Test: Radiance.
--Marshal Zeringue