Claire Messud

Claire Messud's latest novel is The Woman Upstairs.

From the author's Q & A with Bovey Rao for The Harvard Crimson:

FM: Your most recent novel, The Woman Upstairs, draws on allusions to Henrik Ibsen’s, A Doll’s House. Which other works have influenced your writing?

CM: I think lots of different things. I always think that when you are writing fiction, it’s like being a magpie. You pick up little pieces from one place and fly off and pick up pieces from another place. There’s certainly references to Ibsen, but I didn’t reread Ibsen. I wasn’t trying to write some riff on Ibsen. […] Dostoyevky’s Notes from the Underground was on my mind. There were a lot of other things that I’m not thinking of right now, but it is always a funny combination. I think a lot of it is unconscious. A lot of it we are not aware of, until afterwards, and then you make up a story about what you were doing.

FM: Does The Woman Upstairs have a central message?

CM: I don’t know that I was trying to get a message across particularly... There were different things I was trying to explore, and one of them was...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue