Burning Bright

With a career that extends more than two decades, Cambridge resident Claire Messud is no stranger to crafting expert fiction. Ahead of her appearance on Oct. 28 at the Boston Book Festival, the best-selling novelist chatted about female authors, creative Bostonians and her latest work, The Burning Girl—an intimate portrait of adolescent friendship.

What was the initial inspiration behind The Burning Girl? One was an experience from long ago—not my own experience but someone else’s that I knew—that had haunted me for a long time. So that has been in the back of my mind for many years. And then I think more immediately it was happening that [my] kids were going through the experiences of adolescence, and standing on the sidelines watching that brings back all your own memories as well as giving you new experiences.

You often dive deep into what it means to be a woman in your work. Are there any female writers who have influenced you? Hundreds! From Jane Austen to Virginia Woolf to Alice Munro to many people in between. I think when I was growing up, I read what my mother put in front of me. There wasn’t [young adult] then, and as a teenager I read a lot of books by 20th-century women writers.

Do you usually have an outline of where a novel is going to go when you begin writing? I always know where the story’s going to go, but discovery is really important to the process. So even though I have an outline, it’s always an adventure about finding new things as I go along. There’s a wonderful and now very famous [E.L.] Doctorow quote saying that writing is like driving on a country road at night and you know what your destination is but all you can see is what’s in the headlights. I’ve always felt that pretty well sums it up.

How has living in the Boston area influenced your work? There are so many amazing creative people, both writers and academics and the creative visual artists and musicians. So, it’s a really exciting and inspiring place to be. And there’s also the landscape and the communities. … Both my last novel and this novel are set in the Boston area—this one, about an hour north of here. So if I lived somewhere else, that wouldn’t be so.

THE IMPROPER’S 2017 FALL ARTS PREVIEW: DANCE | BOOKS | COMEDY | MUSIC | PERFORMING ARTS | VISUAL ART

Turn the Page

Curl up by the fire with these must-read titles released this fall from local authors.

Eileen Myles throws canine lovers a bone with Afterglow (A Dog Memoir), her heartfelt and witty investigation into the bond between pet and owner that’s based on her dog who she found in a street litter in 1990.

Skylar Kergil documented his transition to male as a teenager with weekly posts on YouTube, and he shares more of his story in Before I Had the Words.

A Dream Between Two Rivers: Stories of Liminality is an inventive short story collection from KL Pereira that details the lives of women, children and immigrants.

National Book Award winner M.T. Anderson sets up a future where aliens invade peacefully but their advancements lead to poverty for many, including the teenage protagonist in his newest young-adult novel, Landscape with Invisible Hand.

In Stumbling Blocks: Roman Poems, Karl Kirchwey uses the landscape of Rome as the setting and inspiration for his collection of poems set to be released on Oct. 15 that analyze the human experience.

THE IMPROPER’S 2017 FALL ARTS PREVIEW: DANCE | BOOKS | COMEDY | MUSIC | PERFORMING ARTS | VISUAL ART