“Writing a Novel Feels Remarkably Like Living”: A Q&A With Jacqueline Holland, Author of The God of Endings
Hardcover $29.99
The God of Endings
The God of Endings
Hardcover $29.99
Jacqueline Holland’s first novel, The God of Endings, is a sensational story we can’t stop raving about — perfect for fans of The Historian and The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue. With brilliant prose and a deep exploration of whether life is a gift or a curse, you’ll lose yourself in this suspenseful story that will linger in your heart for as long as Collette LeSange is alive. Keep reading for a Q&A with Jacqueline Holland about writing, art, and culture!
Jacqueline Holland’s first novel, The God of Endings, is a sensational story we can’t stop raving about — perfect for fans of The Historian and The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue. With brilliant prose and a deep exploration of whether life is a gift or a curse, you’ll lose yourself in this suspenseful story that will linger in your heart for as long as Collette LeSange is alive. Keep reading for a Q&A with Jacqueline Holland about writing, art, and culture!
Did your writing process/writing approach change between writing short fiction and The God of Endings?
My writing process for short fiction does feel very different from my process in writing the novel. It may seem funny to say, but I find the writing of short stories more difficult than the writing of novels.
Once, when I lived in Kansas City, I went to this delightful little toy and miniature museum, and they had this hall of miniature paintings — incredibly detailed, beautiful portraits and landscapes that were each probably no more than three inches tall by two inches wide. They had a video playing on loop that showed the artists painting these super tiny masterpieces using magnifying glasses and head-mounted lamps and brushes with nearly microscopic bristles on the end. The artists had to squint, and control every movement of their muscles, and even breathe carefully to avoid messing the whole thing up in a moment. Short stories, I think, are quite similar to those miniatures; they shrink and condense life and must do so in perfect detail and beauty, and the work of making them requires extraordinary focus and discipline. They are very unforgiving. There’s absolutely no room for flab or flaw, and even a single wrong word can be conspicuous. Short stories have to do so much, and also do it with perfect economy and sparkle.
Then there’s the novel. If short stories and film condense life, then the novel seems to be (at least for now) the art form that moves at the pace closest to the actual experience of living; sometimes it even slows and expands the pace of lived experience, which provides more room to wander around, digress, even make mistakes. When you’re dealing with so much (so many words, so many scenes, so many plots and themes), perfection really isn’t possible — have you ever read a novel that couldn’t have done something better? So instead of gritting your teeth and tensing your muscles, as you might with short fiction, you have to sort of relax into the novel, submit yourself to the thing in all its mess and complexity and unpredictability and just do the best you can. It’s impossible to know at the outset, what the novel will end up being ultimately. It’s going to evolve. It’s going to shed its skin and become another version of itself, and it’s a really beautiful thing learning to trust it and trust yourself in the writing of it. Writing short stories feels, at least to me, like performing some extraordinary feat of strength, like power-lifting or something, but writing a novel feels remarkably like living. Just as challenging to do well, but in very different ways and using very different muscles.
The God of Endings interweaves Slavic folklore, particularly through Czernobog along with German and French cultures. Do you have any personal connections to these cultures? What was your research process like to truly make these elements of the novel pop?
The premise of the novel — an immortal vampire wandering the world for centuries — gave me delicious freedom to take my protagonist anywhere and just about anywhen that I wanted. It also meant doing a ton of research. Fortunately, I love doing research. I’m very easily fascinated, and at various points I had to discipline myself to not spend too much time on it at the expense of writing, but it feels like its own reward that in the process of writing one novel I got to learn so much.
The opening section of the novel was inspired by my discovery of the New England Vampire Panic of the 1850s (1850s! That’s so recent!) when whole villages became convinced that tuberculosis deaths were the work of vampires, and people began digging up graves and desecrating the bodies in an effort to ward the demons off and stop the deaths. I found folklorist, Michael Bell’s book, Food for the Dead: On the Trail of New England’s Vampires to be an invaluable depiction of this extraordinary, fact-stranger-than-fiction episode from American history.
Because I’m a huge Francophile, my main character, Collette (also named at various points Anna and Anya) finds herself in France during World War II. For that section, I leaned on Caroline Moorehead’s beautiful book, Village of Secrets, which tells the story of an extraordinarily brave network of people who hid Jewish children away from the Nazis up in the French Alps. The book also gave me greater clarity on the French experience of the war. Chamonix Mont Blanc, where Collette lives during the war, was also fascinating to learn about. It’s this tiny mountain village, where a handful of residents took up arms, and skis, and their intimate knowledge of their mountain passes to protect themselves from both Italian and German battalions that were trying to move up the mountain and capture it. They whooped the Italians and Germans handily, and in really extraordinary, nail-biting fashion. It’s a story that I’m convinced must be made into a movie someday.
The Slavic section came together in a really interesting and organic way. I had this writer’s fantasy of Anna (a.k.a. Collette) going somewhere deep in the heart of the woods in Eastern Europe. I could see it, and I could see the characters, but little else was clear. Then I started working at a restaurant with a guy from Moldova. He was quite chatty and very interested in the lore and pagan history of his home country. As we stood around polishing wine glasses, he would tell me all kinds of things about the gods and religious customs of his country and about foraging for food in the countryside where he grew up. I took the leads he provided and then did my own research from there, and it all just ended up fitting perfectly into what I happened to be working on at the time. It felt really kind of miraculous and meant to be, as things often do when you’re writing a novel. My co-worker also spoke Russian, so if I had something I wanted to say in Russian, I could just ask him. He was quite an extraordinary resource!
Egypt is the only foreign culture from the novel that I really had a significant personal connection to. I spent some time in Egypt as an ESL teacher. I lived in Alexandria and became totally infatuated with it. Before going, I had read Lawrence Durrel’s Alexandria Quartet, which is still one of my favorite works of literature (and a great influence on that section of the novel), and while there, I read Naguib Mafouz and the poet Cavafy, both extraordinary literary artists. I knew from quite early on that I wanted to take Collette to Alexandria. Halla, a character from that section, was even inspired by a horrible experience I had there, when I saw a little girl run down by a speeding bicycle. The people on the street picked her up and carried her into a house, and I never knew what happened to that little girl, and I never stopped wondering and fearing. Like Collette, I’ve carried that little girl with me for years, grieving, wondering if she lived, and wondering if I could have done something more to help her (I did nothing; I was afraid to intrude and I still don’t know if that was right or wrong). I felt from that time, that I wanted to memorialize that little girl somehow, and, personally, I love how she ended up asserting herself in this book. To me, she became a very powerful character, and I think that has something to do with how powerless and vulnerable the real child was when I encountered her and how much I hated her powerlessness.
You often juxtapose the beauty of art against pain and devastation in your book. This feels really evident in Leo and is something Collette seems to recognize in him. How has art inspired you throughout your life, and do you think that much of art is born from difficult circumstances and as a response to pain?
What an extraordinary question! I think I could write a whole book in response.
Well, I think that one step back from the connection between pain and art, is the broader connection between beauty and ugliness, joy and sorrow, blessing and curse.
In painting, it is understood that you don’t create the experience of light by just plopping white paint down on a canvas. It will blend in with the canvas. It won’t register. In order to really see and appreciate light, you must contrast it with darkness. The darker the dark surrounding it, the brighter that splotch of white that sits in the middle will appear.
This principle, though we despise it and try to escape it (myself absolutely included), applies to life as well. We want all the good stuff, nothing but the good stuff all the time, and yet, were we to have nothing but good stuff, it would be just like that splotch of white paint on white canvas; meaningless, unaffecting, no longer even good. We too need the contrast. We need pain and suffering and want and hardship and ugliness in order to register and value appropriately the beauty, the goodness, the gifts. Like Collette, we get so incensed by the horrible injustice of misfortune and tragedy, but the terrible truth is, we could not have pleasure if we did not also have pain. We could not succeed if failure were not possible. We would take no pleasure in health or healing, if we knew nothing of disease.
That agonizing tension of being steeped in the darkness and longing painfully for the light is, I believe, the primary fount of all art. Longing, suffering, pining are antsy experiences; the hands and the mind need something to keep them occupied (something like paints or stringing words in a row), to channel the tension. The experience finally of the light after and amid so much darkness is what we call joy, and some art is produced by joy, but joy needs no craft to distract it. Joy lends itself more to mute wonder, or even singing and dancing, than it does to sitting at computers typing stories. Artists are almost always those among us with a special talent for longing, for suffering, and for fidgeting skillfully in the midst of it. They are deeply attuned to the pain of living, and they are always reaching out desperately for the goodness, the brightness, the light, and, like watchmen, when they catch even the tiniest glimmers, they point and cry out and draw the attention of the rest of us to that small bit of beauty we might have missed without them. Then they return, dutifully, to their watching and longing and suffering.
And, yes, all of that is absolutely true of me. Writing, for me, has always felt a little bit like twisting a knife in my own heart.
Because your book deftly explores the dynamic of life and death, what do you hope readers will take away after finishing it?
Oh goodness, if readers just have a plain old good time in the process of reading my book, I will be overjoyed. I believe strongly that reading should be pleasurable. In my hubris, I like to think that my novel is thoughtful and even philosophical, but it’s also a bloody, violent vampire novel, and I really hope that it’s fun and absorbing, perhaps even a little scary.
In all honesty though, I suppose my wildest hope would be that in sharing Collette’s experiences, readers would pause to examine their own views about life and joy and suffering. For much of the novel, Collette is paralyzed in a state of despair and hopelessness, and to be honest, I think it’s an increasingly prevalent state of mind, particularly in The West. Catastrophe seems to loom in every direction, and what’s it all for? What’s it worth, all the stress and strain and anxiety? All around me, I’m hearing life spoken of and treated increasingly as a burden; death regarded increasingly as a mercy. I feel it too. It’s a wolf ever at my own door, but I find it deeply alarming, and it alarms me how unalarming it feels. We’ve just sort of slouched into this disregard for living. At the beginning of the novel, Collette embodies this perspective, but by the end of the novel, she realizes that despair is a kind of cowardice, and that the hardest kind of courage to muster is hope — harder still love, for which hope is requisite. I wouldn’t mind it one bit if my novel caused readers to examine whatever hopelessness they might be harboring, or if it unleashed, in even just a few, a kind of obstinate refusal to despair.
As a bookseller, we simply must ask: what are you reading and recommending right now?
I’m a stuffy old retrophiliac. I can’t get enough of the past, so I tend to read about five old books for every one new one. Right now, I’m reading Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, Ursula Leguin’s Three Hainish novels, and Jaron Lanier’s Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters with Reality and Virtual Reality. One of my sons still lets me read to him, so he and I are also reading a beautifully illustrated edition of The Secret Garden. David Copperfield and Stephen King’s The Shining are up next in the queue.
What am I recommending? I just gave Paula McClain’s Love and Ruin to my sister-in-law, then was very pleased to learn that she set it aside to read McClain’s The Paris Wife first. I also recently recommended Ali Shaw’s The Girl with Glass Feet.