Lea Carpenter

Lea Carpenter is the author of the novels Eleven Days (2013), Red, White, Blue (2018), and Ilium (2024).

She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Princeton and has an MBA from Harvard Business School, where she was valedictorian. Carpenter has written the screenplay for Mile 22, a film about CIA’s Special Activities Division, directed by Peter Berg and starring Mark Wahlberg and John Malkovich.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

Probably not enough, if I am honest. The story of the novel all started when I saw a series, or “cycle,” of paintings by Cy Twombly, one of my favorite artists, called Fifty Days at Iliam. Iliam, for Twombly, was with an “a” not a “u,” which makes it foreign, yet uncanny. The paintings are Twombly’s take on the Trojan War, which is a war that has hung around, or over, so much of what I have written, beginning with Eleven Days, my first novel. That title referred to the eleven-day period at the end of the Trojan war when Achilles agrees to stand down his army to allow Priam to properly bury his son, Hector, who was killed by Achilles to avenge the death of Achilles’s best friend, Patroclus. Cycles of violence: the idea that all conflicts are at risk of becoming “forever” (the word Dexter Filkins brilliantly affixed to the terror wars) is at the center of a lot of what I write and is certainly at the center of Ilium. Hopefully by the end of the novel, which I close with a quote from Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey, the reader will like the reference in the title. I have never been very good at titles though. It is hard to top the best ones. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Or The Thin Red Line. Everything I have ever titled is an attempt to get closer to that kind of feeling.

What's in a name?

A lot can be in a name, I think. If we are talking about titles think about Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Everything is there about, in that case, what Didion was trying to say about the sixties. If we are talking about character names, I just wrote a novel where my narrator/heroine does not have a name. Names are hard. Aaron Sorkin, I have heard, gives his characters names of NFL players in early drafts. There is a needle to be threaded with a name between “Johnny” and “Huckelberry,” isn’t there. You want to be new, unique, but you also do not want to sound ridiculous. My own name, Lea, is pronounced “Lee,” and that’s been an ongoing thing in my life. And yet I love my name as I was named after my godmother, my mother’s best friend, and a woman who had a critical impact on me. I love carrying her name and trying to live up to certain things she exemplified. She was fearless. She never suffered a fool, not one. My mother is like that, too. And my mother has a great name: Carroll.

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your new novel?

Not surprised at all. My teenage self was constantly imagining elaborate stories in which I was the heroine, usually being rescued or working on a rescue mission, which is preposterous as I grew up in a small very quiet town. I recently started watching Fauda, the television series, and have thought more than once that the show reminds me of my teenage hallucinations about what I could be, a kind of warrior on a complex mission where everything is at stake, but my hair is still perfect. Little did I know, then, that my father had had so many experiences that could have informed those inner monologues, and those dreams. I never asked him about his life before me. Children are narcissists in that way. Children look ahead. He died before I became a writer.

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

I once heard John Irving deliver a talk in which he said he always writes endings first, then starts at the beginning writing towards that moment. He talked about A Prayer for Owen Meany, and the scene where everyone is holding Owen in the air, and how he knew he would be writing towards that moment. In the novels, I have had a sense of the endings in each one, but I did not write them down until the end of the process. Endings, in theory, should be harder, as they will be what the reader is most likely to remember., at least if we trust neuroscience. I have always re-written my openings. With Ilium, I wrote an entirely new first chapter just before the pages were typeset. I need to have the reader glimpse the third person, which returns at the very end, so that the end felt less like an exotic add on than like a revelation, along the lines of oh I get it all now.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

As a writer you are all of your characters, I think. And yet, like my silly teenage self (or, my ambitious dreamer teenage self) I write about exotic people and places. Warriors, spies, diplomats, Navy SEALs, oligarchs. I have not been afraid to write into these kinds of people, and in this way, John le Carré was a true inspiration for Ilium, too. Le Carré knows the spy world is, above all, just a really fine metaphor for how we all live, only heightened. If you’re going to be betrayed, why not be betrayed by an arms dealer, or a princess? Ditto for falling in love. Falling in love with a prince is a story as old as time but that can end (as we all now know, and if you don’t know, watch The Crown) just as tragically as falling in love with an arms dealer. Richard Roper, in The Night Manager, is a sort of irresistible arms dealer. The finest villains are usually irresistible.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

My father, though he was very literary, so perhaps he does not count. He, and who he was, runs through all my work. I am inspired by visual art, too, painting in particular, which plays a central role in Ilium. I have learned a lot from television, a distinctly non-literary form, and one that can be a master class in plot and story architecture. And travel is always inspiring. I love writing about places I have either been or dream to see. I wrote a screenplay last year set in Niseko, Japan, mainly as I wanted an excuse to go there and see the Ice Village. So, people and places. People and places, and HBO.

--Marshal Zeringue