Poured Over: Jessie Burton on The House of Fortune

By Miwa Messer / September 1, 2022 at 6:00 am

“I think it is a conversation I’m having with my younger self, who loved the idea of time travel, who loved the idea that these people perhaps not so different from us, who quite quickly could imagine herself out of her body and into another world against all the laws of physics. And I know I’m not alone in that. I think so many people want to read for a moment in their day or week, of escape, but not mindless escape, but detailed, pleasurable, important escape…” Jessie Burton’s debut novel, The Miniaturist, is a stellar, entertaining work of historical fiction that sold a million copies in its first year and has been translated into 40 languages. Jessie returns to 17^th century Amsterdam with an unforgettable cast of characters (including a few familiar faces) in her latest, The House of Fortune. She joins us on the show to talk about writing and rewriting, story points and post-it notes, revisiting characters, her favorite authors and more with Poured Over’s host, Miwa Messer. And we end this episode with TBR Topoff book recommendations from Marc and Becky.

Featured Titles (Episode)

The House of Fortune by Jessie Burton

The Miniaturist by Jessie Burton

Brother of the More Famous Jack by Barbara Trapido

Featured Titles (TBR Topoff)

The Binding by Bridget Collins

The Distant Hours by Kate Morton

Poured Over is produced and hosted by Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang. New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays with occasional Saturdays here and on your favorite podcast app.

Full transcript of this episode:

I’m Miwa Messer, I’m the producer and host of Poured Over, and Jessie Burton is back. We’re very excited. She’s done, at this point, I think six novels for adults and two novels for middle grade and YA and I hope I have those numbers right but we’re gonna come back to that in a second. The Miniaturist pubbed in the UK and the US in 2014. It was the subject of a very hot auction. It did very, very well. It sold a million copies in its first year, it was a Discover Great New Writers Pick for Barnes and Noble, and it was also a Waterstones Book of the Year. Our sibling company. Jesse, it’s so great to see you because you have written a sequel to The Miniaturist, which I don’t think anyone knew you were really working on. So where did this come from? What’s going on? Hi, it’s great to see you.

Hello, it’s so nice to see you again, eight years on. Where did it come from? Well, I think when I finished The Miniaturist, when I sort of put the final full stop, and I, I, you know, sent it off, I thought that was it, it was just this hermetically sealed story. But I suppose looking back now I can see, I really did leave the door open, literally, figuratively speaking. And as the years have passed, I think I’ve come to accept that that universe of the Herengracht Canal, Amsterdam Golden Age, but particularly the person of Nella Brandt and her family occupy a very different place in my writer’s imagination, in my soul, in my mind. But there were other things I wanted to write and and I didn’t want to just be the Dutch Doll’s House woman. And I think like as early as 2016, so two years after it published, I was already writing a few scenes, but then I realized I was just pushing it too quickly. And perhaps those would just hang overseen some kind of exorcism that needed to be done. And, you know, I did do a lot of stuff for the Miniaturist talking about it for a long time. And I think I felt I needed some time away from Nella. Yeah, and that I was done with her. But then I realized I don’t think Nella was done with me, and I have to sort of just accept it and just like, open the floodgates and bring her back. And I think it’s just around 2017-18, I mentioned to my agent, I think I’m going to write another one, and it’s going to be a few years on. And then that’s when I sort of started sort of working out where am I going to meet these people again. And that’s how, that’s how I began it, I just sort of thought, where are they at? And how, how can I put them back in a plot in a context because I know them well as people. You know, these books are the kind of books where things happen, so to work out what was gonna happen.

And Thea the first time we meet her in The Miniaturist, obviously she’s a brand-new baby. And now Thea is eighteen-year-old, right? Yeah, yeah, she’s 18. And I do want to stress that House of Fortune can be read as a standalone, you don’t have to have read the Miniaturist. However, there’s some fun stuff if you have. I mean, I had a good time figuring out what was going on with tiny Thea now 18 year old Thea, but at the same time, really this book is, it’s 18 years later, and Nella is a different person. Let’s just be clear, you don’t have to have read The Miniaturist in order to enjoy what’s happening in House of Fortune. There are a couple of subplots that we’re going to stay away from, because we want to be really, really super spoiler free in this conversation, because it’s really fun to see what you put your characters through. But let’s start with Nella and her niece Thea because I mean, there’s an 18 year difference between them, but journeys not all that different.

No, no. And I think it’s very interesting to me to have written a new 18-year-old who is in many ways very different to her aunt, has had an incredibly different experience. She was born in Amsterdam. She has a black father and a white mother, deceased. So, her experience of literally you know, living on the streets of Amsterdam is very different to her aunt. But she has that similar rebelliousness and stubborn will that Nella exhibited when she was 18. But Nella has sort of undergone this slight amnesia, I think she can’t quite remember herself ever like this. Equally, Thea cannot imagine that any of them in her family know what it’s like to be 18 years old. So, there’s immediately I set up I suppose this antagonism between the two of them of you know, gross misunderstanding of where the other one is coming from, but also a quite painful love. I mean, Nella, a lot of what Nella does in this book is an attempt to protect her niece, but also I think Nella doesn’t realize what she’s doing. She’s exorcising her own demons upon her unwilling niece Thea, really imposing a future upon her that Nella had imposed upon her when she was 18. So, there is echoing and mirroring between, you know, Nella 18 and Thea 18, but also they are very different people. And particularly with their responses to The Miniaturists as a character and as a force in the book, it was very enjoyable, I don’t know is the word but to kind of bring Nella on in her life, 37 years old, both advanced through her years, but also in some strange way, stuck somewhere in the past, not just in her 18 year old pivotal year, but also as a little girl back in the countryside, and working out a path backwards. I remember saying to myself, this is a book that has to keep moving forwards, but it’s looking backwards at the same time. So it has this strange duality of motion, I guess, I seem to have this thing in all my novels, I have these vivacious 18, 16, 20 year old girls, and then an older woman, kind of going through her own thing, but also like in dialogue with her.

But that’s part of the fun of reading House of Fortune, too, is I had a couple of moments where I was yelling at Nella, and yes, I’m talking about yelling at fictional characters, and I will totally own it, like, judge away fine. And a couple of moments where I was yelling at Thea, and well, one, you did your job as a novelist because I was in there hard. But at the same time, you know, you do have to let things play out. My understanding is the draft, the book that’s out in the world is actually the third draft of what started writing and Nella didn’t actually appear until very late in the process.

Yeah, Nella was going to be a character but we weren’t going to be in her head. It wasn’t going to be interiority Nella, it was going to be all through the eyes of Thea and possibly Otto, and possibly Cornelia, the maid. And my agent did say, Oh, I do miss her. I didn’t write Nella back in just to satisfy my literary agent, but I think I realized what I was doing a bit, and that was perhaps keeping her at arm’s length because I feel very oddly aligned to Nella as a character as a person, myself, and having having created this character, 13 years ago, now, 2009, I first started writing her, who really did transform my own fortunes, my own life, for good and bad. At the time, I had such a complicated relationship with her. So, like, bringing her back in, it was a bit like meeting a friend you say you scream at fictional characters, or like I, you know, I wonder whether I’m going to like meeting them again, in my own mind. And, you know, whether we were gonna get on and you know, that sort of like, friends that been apart for a while, and there might have been a bit of a bumpy moment, and then you realize you still love each other. It was a bit like that. And as soon as I started Nella’s voice it was yeah, it was odd. It was just like slipping straight back into that stream of her. But, you know, and also the ghost I suppose, the ghost of Marian is there that Thea’s mother and the antagonist in Nella’s life, right? All her preoccupations, Nella seems to have embodied but because now we’re so concerned about appearances and maintaining surviving in this society, this golden society where appearances are everything.

They’re also broke.

They’re really broke.

They’re super broke, they have sold off the rugs they had, they’re down to the last painting and yeah, the last painting goes to. I mean, they are broke, and Nella is doing that thing that her first thought is, how do I help my kid because she thinks of Thea as her daughter. She really does. How do I help my kid survive? And that means marriage because where we are.

Yeah, exactly. And you know, compromise, compromise of, of morals or of heart, I sort of pictured the house that that where they live in, it’s like a stage set and almost like the flats are falling, opening, exposing them and all the props are being removed, and the clothes a bit, you know, that their toes are sort of thinning out. And her she’s being, it’s funny, actually, because speaking to readers, some people are very supportive of Nella and understand and sympathize and other people are quite, quite angry with me. They like them as they were expecting them to like Nella to be a positive person from the off and I’m like, come on, like, this is no spoiler, and as you say, it can be a standalone novel, which I’m very, I’ve made it very, I’ve done it very carefully so that a reader could enjoy this as its own book. But you know, Nella was married off at 18. And her life has been sort of preserved in aspects since then. And she’s angry, there’s rage there and it’s kind of manifesting itself in quite sort of obstructive and confrontational behavior with people that care about her the most, that she cares about most. So she’s just doggedly going for the suitors, one in particular Jacob, because she really thinks he will be the embodiment of future success and safety and security. Money is everything in this society. And Jacob represents money and safety in Nella’s eyes, but she’s definitely as I said earlier, she’s sort of slightly living vicariously and not seeing her niece for who she really is. And Thea has her own intentions, as you alluded to earlier.

She does. She does. Thea’s dad Otto, who worked with the family, the Brandt family previously, and he was previously enslaved in Suriname, and obviously does not talk about that experience. And Marin, Thea’s mother was his lover, and she dies in childbirth, obviously. So, their relationship was never front and center because it couldn’t be. But he’s also saying, hey, wait a minute, slow down. No, this is not what my kid wants.

Yeah, he he’s very, he’s very wary about this man, Jacob, and just very weary about that society in general. And what it not just represents, in a sort of theoretical way, but in an actual lived experience, what it will be like for Thea, and what this Jacobs intentions actually are. And Otto has to occupy this really strange limbo where he is, to all intents and purposes, an Amsterdammer. He was born from Suriname when he was 16. And has all the manners and the skills that, you know, an Amsterdam merchant has, but he sort of feels like the house itself that they’re living in that the end of the road is here, and we have to take a new direction. And what’s that going to be? And that’s why I noticed with the American version, there’s just a gigantic pineapple.

We are going to because I have a question about pineapple.

That’s the direction the neon pineapple.

I didn’t realize, and sure we’re talking about greenhouses, obviously. But I didn’t think you could grow pineapple or mango or kiwi or whatnot in Amsterdam, like in the Netherlands,

Well, neither did I Miwa, until I started looking into it.

Right so, we need to talk about research for a second because, yeah, you know, I figured family fortunes would be reversed. I mean, this is part of the fun of reading something like this, right. But yeah, at the same time, I was like, pineapple.

Yeah, I know.

How did you get there?

Well, I can’t quite remember exactly, but I do. One of the things I wanted to do that I knew would never enter the actual pages of the novel was looking into Otto’s experience in Suriname, and what that would have been like for him. So I knew, and even though it wasn’t written in the book, and obviously one of the main fruits that were grown there were pineapples and there was a woman who was sent by the Dutch East India Company. Maria Sibylla Merian, is quite well known. She painted these gorgeous paintings on behalf of the BOC in Suriname, of the flora and fauna. 53 years old, she sailed there on her own with her daughter and just set up and painted them all. And the pineapple is it just a particularly evocative fruit and it’s very symbolic of luxury and rarity, certainly in the northern hemisphere back in Europe. And it became this kind of status symbol for wealthy Dutch men and women who would employ botanists and engineers on their estates to build hot houses and stove houses, they were called, trying to work out ways to create, you know, tropical temperate temperatures, because it was the Dutch, there was a lot of record of it and a lot of annotation and archiving of it, because they had so much money at the time to kind of like, record what they were doing. So, I found all these diagrams of the stove houses and the success and failures that they went through, and it became a bit of a sort of race, a status race to see who could win it to get the best pineapples, the best mangoes as you say. I think oranges and lemons were a bit and you can see them cropping up in paintings and there’s one paint I can’t remember her name, this woman with her family or her family of children and the pineapple like, it was really funny, it’s like the fifth baby. It’s like, this is my favorite child, took a lot more work. So anyway, I just thought that’s if I want to make commentary which I did, on the effects of colonialism, of enslavement of transatlantic slavery, of the movement of bodies, of the enslavement of people and the invisible and visible results of such abuse. Um, the pineapple is a good place to do it in a in a novel that is essentially a family psychodrama. It’s not a book about the ills of societies, you know, of slavery. But I thought it’s an interesting one and everyone’s reactions to it because Nella is very against the idea that well, we can go into the pineapple business, what on earth you’re talking about, whereas Otto, who sort of feels he has that entrepreneurial spirit of his former employer Johannes. And also, it’s so complicated for him because of course, this is a fruit that has come from partly his land. I mean, he is originally from Dahomey in West Africa, but he grew up partly in Suriname. So it’s like, is it his turn to sort of engage in this beginnings of global capitalism for his own benefit? And also, I had a bit of fun with it, because with the pineapple, I could create this character, this botanist Caspar Whitson, who is this really, I would hope for the reader, well, I never want to dictate to them what they feel about any character. But for me, he was a very benign potential character to sort of bring goodness into this very stressful situation for this broke family who’s having issues with her teenage daughter,

and Cornelia gets off a very good joke about a pineapple too, she just sticks it on the shelf, and the pantry says, like, I’m not touching that. I don’t know what to do with it. Why do we even have it? It’s weird. I don’t understand.

Well you used to be able to hire them. You’d hire them for parties. Yeah. So she’s like, like, it’s not a potato. I don’t know what to do with it. It’s not a cod, it’s not a herring. What is it? It looks at, it looks painful, it’s spiky.

And that’s the thing though, you can’t separate the family’s money troubles from colonialism, or slavery. And the idea that somehow they would all be floating around having Thea’s coming of age and Otto’s figuring out what his story is, and Nella figuring out, I mean, we could argue that Nella is having a second coming of age that she’s finally hitting her stride and leaving her teenage self behind. It just took an extra 18 years.

Yeah, I think that’s hitting the nail on the head, I feel like although therapy was not invented in 1705, what Thea is, sorry, Nella is undergoing is somewhat of a self-analysis and kind of coming to terms, I read something recently, which is such a brilliant sentence is that life cannot be undone, but it can be reexamined. And I think that this is what Nella is coming to accept that there was some dubious decisions made, but she herself had agency and involvement in those decisions and in their consequences. And what is she going to do next? You know, and I and that the other part of this book is, there is greenery and potential new seeds being sown, and there’s a lot of imagery of the garden and of fresh land. And that’s also Nella I think,

Something’s gotta give. And it sounds like the house is going to give first because it’s a very expensive place to run. I mean, it really is not a simple thing. And the idea that Nella wouldn’t get a little cynical, I’m just going back to something where you said people were a little picky that and annoyed that she had gotten a little bristly and yeah, maybe not user friendly. And I’m just thinking, well, yeah, okay. And again, you know, she’s, let’s take The Miniaturist out out of it for a second. She’s a widow, with very few prospects living with people who are ostensibly her family, but outsiders don’t see as her family. She’s got a housekeeper, and Otto, a former employee who’s also black and Thea, who she considers her daughter who’s half black. And the world is looking at them going, what is? Who? How? I mean, Amsterdam society sounds claustrophobic and a little inbred. And they’re in the middle of it thinking, how do we make a living? And at one point, Otto loses his job, and he’s been paying for everything. I mean, yeah. And now we’re sort of stuck.

Yeah. And that that is exactly it. And that’s sort of the first third of the story is that that sense of desperation and when he loses his job, that’s when it really it gets really serious because there’s no income coming in. And the only place there’s any equity is the house, is the four wall or the four walls of the house on the Herengracht. Nella feels, but she’s felt an outsider for quite a long time. And then there’s this potential in with this character Clara Saragon, who is the sort of doyen of the social scene. She’s such a bitch, but she’s a powerful bitch. Oh, and also, we mustn’t forget Rebecca Bosman, the actress who’s a kind of a kind of good angel versus the bad Clara Saragon. But yeah, that they are in a very odd place in society. And you know, I sometimes feel like with the archive that I managed to get access to of Amsterdam’s history, for the first-time round was very white. And then this this time round, I felt very vindicated with including a much more diverse cast of characters. Because when I went back in July 2020, to Amsterdam, the archives had really, the archivist, I think it was a big project from the Rights Museum, they’ve done a lot of work in finding a much more varied society, to the extent that a black man called Christian did inherit a house on the Herengracht from his employer, nearly to the exact date that I had imagined it. So I felt I felt vindicated. But at the same time, I have to accept that as you say, they’re not, they’re not that kind of homogenized, quote, unquote, norm, and that society was quite claustrophobic. There were sort of as I think it’s either Otto says it or maybe it’s Nella, that, you know, there are five or six families and they just work it out for themselves, like the Vanderbilts, the Astor’s or whatever, I’m trying to give it to an American audience, I could give some British names, they’d all just be Purdue.

That’s exactly it. That’s exactly it, that power is determined by a select few. And if you do match their vision of people who deserve it, I mean, let’s face it, we’ve got Calvinists running the place thinking, you know, you have predestination, there’s all sorts of theological conversations we can have. We are going to kind of skip over a little bit, because I have a question for you, though, about research. I mean, obviously, you’ve gone into the archives, you’ve done all of that. But at some point, you have to let the research go and let the characters breathe. You can’t, otherwise you’re writing a history book. And that’s not what you’re trying to do.

No, no, no, I totally agree. And that’s always sort of been my main mantra is that this is a novel, and it’s about it’s a portrait of a family, in particular, three or four people. And the historical detail is essential for your own, I suppose sense of security when you’re writing it, but at the same time, you’ll never quite know the truth. It’s always about who decided to write that history at that point, that trickles down to us sitting and reading a library book in the 21st century.

Okay, so I alluded earlier to this being the third draft. So the the version of this book that’s out in the world is a third draft. That’s a lot of words and a lot of pages to throw away before you get to the thing that you’re willing to share with other people. So can we talk about your process? Because I don’t think this has happened with other books. I think this is the book where you were like, I gotta figure it out.

22:31

You’re right. Yeah, this is the first time this has happened. I really hope it’s the last. Yeah, I wrote a full draft in 2020, early 2020, and realized it was it was just wrong. And there was just so much, but then I sometimes think with these things, it is a process of elimination. And I had to go through it as painful as it was, in order to finally get to the book I wanted to write. Then the second draft was again, a complete start over, so I jettisoned about 200, by that point about 200,000 words. And then that winter of 2020, I handed to my editor, a new 100,000. And as soon as I handed it over, I realized everything that was wrong with it. It was almost like that moment of transaction was the moment of release and realization and it would never have happened if I’d hoarded it to myself. So I remember sending her this long email that 4000 words saying, oh, okay, look, I know what’s wrong, don’t even need to respond. I mean, bless her, she did. And she read it to my horror. And of course, she was kind about it. And but yeah, and then then that January, it was quite odd actually, that December the 31st, so I gave it to around like mid November, and then December, New Year’s Eve, I found out I was pregnant. And then I chopped the whole book away, I think they are related these two facts. And then in the January ,for 12 weeks, the period of a trimester of pregnancy, I rewrote the book from start to finish and finished it. I just knew what I had to do. And I delivered it. And then the next like the edited draft, not the kind of you know, full rewrite with the next trimester, and then I handed it in two weeks before giving birth. So it was quite odd. That’s never happened before either, with my writing experience. But yes to thrown away around a third of a million words I calculated, I have to be satisfied that they are the absolute best I can do with all my shortcomings and all my flaws as a human and as a as a writer. For me to feel completely as much as one ever can when you put work out into the world for me to feel insulated against the worst worries. And I feel like that with this book. I feel like it is the book it was supposed to be.

But you’re also balancing your characters actions, their interiority and the needs of the story. So it’s not like you can just sit there and be like, well so and so’s having a cup of coffee and a snack. It’s how do we get where we need to go?

25:03

Yeah, that’s quite technical, and it’s quite boring. I mean, prosaic, it’s not the sort of fun, you know, interior monologues, it’s very technical. And I always think, you know, I have a post it note next to me things that headlined things that have to happen. And it’s that sort of basic, and you have to work out moments of reveal or moments of withdrawal. And yeah, it’s a very difficult process writing a book, she says, stating literally the most obvious thing ever. But I think people sometimes who aren’t writers don’t understand how odd it is to have to a book is read out of time, you know, you are reading everything all at once. It’s a bit like the moment you stare at a painting, and everything’s there for you. And yes, you can investigate it or listen to music, the act of writing, what you want is stuck in the temporal world of minutes and hours and days, and you cannot write it all at once. And that is the marathon element of it. That is the patience and the endurance, and the bloody mindedness that that means why I think so few people who say they’re going to write a novel actually finish it, because it does take a lot out of you. And it takes a lot of sacrifice. Not that anyone makes us do it.

I love the idea that you’ve got story beats on a post it as you’re working,

yeah, yeah. And sometimes that doesn’t happen for me until around the third or fourth draft. So the first two might be quite exploratory experiences. And I have in the past I remember with The Muse I attempted, you know, I’d seen on Twitter or somewhere, you know, plans, people make plans, and they know what’s going to happen in each chapter. And then they’ve got the characters arc going through. And I remember at the end, at the end of writing The Muse about a year after I found an A3 piece of paper, and two of the main characters were called Adele and Marjorie, and all I had was just Adele’s name on one,post it and Marjorie’s on another, and the entireity of the paper was blank. But I had a novel, so excellent. Everybody works differently. And I do think there’s a lot of trial and error in mine and like testing things out that the problem comes when you might feel a bit stuck. And you’ve written 50, 60, thousand words, which aren’t right. But you know, it’s not, if I’ve got a flow going to be honest with you, 50,000, I could do in two weeks, like, that’s not so much problem. There’s always probably too many words. And then I’m just trying to like a sculptor, refine it, scrape it away until I find, you know, what has to happen. And some people are very good at plot, and some people are very good at character and description or dialogue. And I think plot, I know things that I like to happen, but it is sometimes hard to work out the beats. That’s why you have a good editor.

Well, I was about to say, Where does your editor come into this process? You have a UK editor and a US editor. How much is shifting between those two worlds for you?

This experience of The House of Fortune, my editor, he’s actually moved on now. I don’t think it was because of my book, made him leave publishing, I really hope not. It was some just very delicate readjustments this one was very, UK driven, I would say, but with a few little adjustments, certainly with my first novel that was a much more collaborative, transatlantic collaborative, three way conversation with a Canadian editor as well. And that was harder because there were more voices involved. But actually, I do feel I’m a writer who really relishes the conversations, I don’t take a front if someone has a problem with something. So often through a conversation with a sensitive, imaginative person. More often than not, you’re gonna get more good ideas and a sense of your own, you know, island that you’re standing on, and your certainty grows with what you want to do. So I find it, you know, a good editor, obviously, it’s worth their weight in gold and beyond.

Everyone needs an editor, even if you’re even if you’re just writing flap copy, everyone needs straight up again, I go out into the world without an edit. Can we talk about your literary influences for a second? I mean, you’re a published novelist for well, eight years now since 2014. But you had been sort of noodling around and thinking about writing before then and, you know, sort of famously wrote The Miniaturist on your phone as you were commuting to work. I love stories like that because I’m like, I walk to work so there is no typing.

We can get you one with a little ribbon wrapped around and hold it up. Okay, okay we won’t do that.

No, no, no I’m good, really, I’m not going to be the person writing a novel on my phone. But I love those stories. I mean, Qian Julie Wang also wrote a really fantastic memoir while she was working in a law firm in New York, same thing typing it out. And the stories are great, but who are the writers you keep going back to? Who are the people you want to reread or see more from or?

I mean, there’s some I’ll never see more from because they’re dead, which is a shame, but I do. So the deceased, my deceased heroes, I would love to see more from Anita Brookner “Alas”, my kind of like, top heroes. I mean, it’s Hilary Mantel. I mean, I just I love her range. I think it was really more for where I realized what historical fiction can do. And she’s just so brave all the time. And funny. She’s got such a wit. Siri Hustvedt writing I’m I love. I recently read a book by an author called Barbara Trapido called Brother of the More Famous Jack, which someone recommended.

What a great title.

Yeah, it’s so extraordinary. The voice again and I think she, she’s still alive. She’s about 81 or two, I believe, living in the UK. So that’s somebody who I’ve just discovered. Emily St. John Mandel. I love her writing. Jenny Offill, and who is you know, I get asked this and then I come across as most illiterate writer because I can’t remember who I’ve read. Rachel Cusk recently. I tend to I really love writers who are quite economical. I mean, Atwood growing up definitely like, you know, she was one of the first sort of serious novelists I was introduced to as a little, as a young woman as sort of 11 12. And recently, I turned 40 last week, actually, and my partner found a first edition from 1939 by Faber and Faber, of a book called A traveler in time, by Alison Uttley. And I haven’t read that book since I was 11. And I was very moved, because it’s sort of after everything that’s happened with my writing career and basically being alive and growing up to go back to a book that was I found in the school library before social media was invented, before I became a published writer. Oh, God, it was quite a goose bump moment, because I found I was meeting my younger self again. So that’s a book rather than perhaps a writer who has been so I know, having looked at it again now, like, how many years 29 years later, I realized is in my DNA,

Meeting your younger self, on the page, or in a book is a really interesting idea. Is that why you write historical fiction?

It’s funny that I do, I do write what is deemed to be historical fiction. And I think it is a conversation I’m having with my younger self, who loved the idea of time travel, who loved the idea that these people perhaps not so different from us, who quite quickly could imagine herself out of her body and into another world against all the laws of physics? And I know I’m not alone in that. I think so many people want to read for a moment in their day or week, of escape, but not mindless escape, but detailed, pleasurable, important escape, right? So yes, I think there is some kind of, you know, connection I’m making with my younger self. And it’s funny, like the more novels you write, I’ve actually written four novels for adults now. And it’s funny, the more you write, the more you’re read, if you’re lucky, and the more people almost analyze you or analyze what you’re doing or see patterns and things that perhaps unconsciously you don’t notice. I always remember Ali Smith being asked, How do you do what you do? And she’s like, I hate this question because if I have to describe it I’ll ruin the magic. and that’s the strangeness of being more public and being more read is that you have to hold on very much to your initial urge to write, which is from a much more innocent place. You’re not you know, not you’re not performing yourself as a published writer, you must try and, like be more private.

What’s next? Have you started working on the new book? I mean,

No, no, I haven’t because, um, I had my baby son, and I took the year off, which was wonderful. And he’s bumbling around next door, I can hear I can hear blocks being smashed on the rock, but he’s not alone. He’s not out there aged one. He is with his father. I have a children’s book that I’m scheduled to write and this is a children’s novel, like a proper novel and a long novel that is next on the slate. And then we will see because I just sort of feel like a bit. I mean, God knows how I managed to write this book, to be honest with you, with the pandemic and all the kind of vicissitudes of pregnancy, but also my parents house burned down in the middle of it. yeah, no, I mean, they’re alright, they’re fine. But it was just this odd mirroring again, of a family trying to find a new place to live. And it was literally my family. Whilst I was writing my other family, my Nella Brandt family, trying to find a place to live in the world. Because the baby came along, just as the book was handed in, normally, one has a decompression period of just like, What the hell does happen, I’ve pushed that book out, well, I push to a different book out. And I haven’t had much time to sort of gather my wits. I’ve not I’ve been asked, you know, how, how is it writing with now being a mum? I’m like, Well, I don’t know, because I haven’t done it yet.

Before I let you go, because we are bumping up on time and you do have a tiny person and you know, all sorts of stuff that’s going on. But I don’t want to leave without mentioning one piece of the book that we sort of stayed away from because stuff is happening, and but there’s a lot about the theater in Amsterdam, in the early 1700s, Thea goes to the theater a lot which I found a very pleasant surprise, because I do honestly think of this period is like very dour kind of Calvinist. Yeah, like theater. But I mean, it’s Shakespeare. There’s a lot of the Greek classic. I mean, it’s kind of extraordinary what you’ve been able to do to recreate this experience for Thea and Nella doesn’t really share Thea’s love of the theater in any way, shape, or form right

Nella is very suspicious of performance that she thinks is you know, deceitful. Even though obviously, she’s participating in a very different kind of public performance, which really can be called deceitful as well. Yeah, I mean, I used to be an actress. And I think that this is a sort of love letter to the theater in some way. You know, it’s not so much the public, or the audience’s knows what’s going on backstage as the actors, it’s the set painters, it’s the creation of false realities. In order for us to actually work out our own stories and to feel comfortable with uncomfortable things, which I think are often is theater, argues with her aunt and says no, they’re fabricators of truth. She sees it as this really positive thing that I think for me, and I think in all my novels there is often a creative person or a novelist or a painter, often a painter because I’m not a painter myself, so I find it this like thing shrouded in awe or mystery. That through lifelike scenarios that actually aren’t you can emancipate yourself or liberate yourself or envision futures for yourself that you don’t quite yet live that you might one day. At the same time. I think this book does comment on the perils of that as well, of imagination of having a too strong imagination. It can be as much of a prison, you know, your thoughts, or your visions as much as it can be something that sets you free. And I think that there is that commentary going on in this novel, about a balance between flights of fancy and, you know, cynicism that has a dead end to it.

Yeah, you put your characters through a lot in this book.

I do, I know

Fair enough. I mean, listen, it’s very entertaining. Read the pages fly. I mean, I will House of Fortune moves very, very fast. And it’s very fun. And yeah, you might if you’re like me, you might end up yelling at some folks on the page but I have no shame. I will totally own that.I am so not cool about that. I’m just like there are times I can be yelling at anyone on the page. So Jessie Burton, thank you so much for joining us on Poured Over. House of Fortune is out now.

Thank you