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Falling in Love with Alice Hoffman
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September 7th 2007 7:09 pm |
On February 14 at Symphony Space, Alice Hoffman will host a very special Selected Shorts. Falling In Love will showcase stories about chance and romance by Hoffman, Laurie Colwin, and Elizabeth Crane, read by Hope Davis, Patricia Kalember, and others. Hoffman's own work over 30 years-including Practical Magic and Here on Earth-has made her a beloved fiction writer. We recently sat down with her to ask her about love, fate, and the forces of nature.
Weather, and other natural forces greater than human, are prevalent throughout your work. In your recent work The Ice Queen, for example, lives are drastically altered by lightning. The narrator says, "I was in the wrong place at the wrong time, but don't all stories begin this way?" How would you describe the way fate and the supernatural affects people's lives?
I think we all try to control and understand our lives-but there's just so much we can do. I think weather is the ultimate force in our daily lives that we can't control-a force like Katrina is too great, too out of control-so how do we make sense of our lives and of what we can control and change within those boundaries? I think that Fate is just another way to say that some things are impossible to control: weather, illness, love, death.
Your plot in The Ice Queen is seamless. How do you plan your novels before writing and control the plots as they unfold? Do you know the endings before you start?
I plan my novels, but somewhere in the writing the characters and the plot take over and the initial plan changes. Sometimes I know the ending, or sometimes I think I know it, and it reverses or takes a turn I didn't expect. In The Ice Queen, I had no idea what in fact had happened to the main character's mother until she found out. I do a great deal of rewriting, so I'm delighted to hear the book appears to be seamless! The first draft usually comes to me in a rush; all the rest is work!
Skylight Confessions, published just last month, is also about fate. The lives of three generations of a family are changed one day when a man and a woman meet and marry, despite knowing they will bring each other grief. How does Skylight Confessions compare to the fairy-tale world of The Ice Queen?
I don't think the characters think they know they will bring each other grief-I think they are young and their lives are ahead of them, and they don't know what we know: love is complicated. The book is really about the way in which people haunt us, both the living and the dead. It's a ghost story and a love story. I think my books have common themes, but hopefully each creates a world of its own.
Permanent link: http://www.symphonyspace.org/articles/4
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