Poured Over: Maggie O’Farrell on Hamnet

Maggie O’Farrell joins us to talk about Hamnet, her dreamy, intoxicating story of grief and love and Shakespeare, now out in paperback. Featured Books: Hamnet, The Vanishing of Esme Lennox and I Am, I Am, I Am by Maggie O’Farrell, the stories of Alice Munro (Dear Life is a great place to start) and Mary Oliver’s poetry. This episode was produced and hosted by Miwa Messer and engineered by Harry Liang.
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Poured Over is a show for readers who pore over details, obsess over sentences and ideas and stories and characters; readers who ask a lot of questions, just like Poured Over’s host, Miwa Messer, a career bookseller who’s always reading. Follow us here for surprising riffs, candid conversations, a few laughs, and lots of great book recommendations from big name authors and authors on their way to being big names. New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional bonus episodes on Saturdays) here, and on your favorite podcast app.

Full transcript for this episode of Poured Over:

B&N: Maggie O’Farrell, thank you so much for joining us on Poured Over the Barnes and Noble podcast. Hamnet is your most recent book. It is extraordinary. It is dreamy, it is intoxicating. It unfurls like a fairy tale. Did this book really start for you when you were in school? I’ve read a couple of interviews where you’ve said, Well, I started thinking about Hamnet when I was very young.

Maggie O’Farrell: Well, that’s a very nice introduction. Miwa, thank you so much. It’s such a thrill to be here. I love Barnes and Nobles. And it feels like a long time since I’ve been in one. But I’m hoping it won’t be too long time in well, again. Well, I mean, I wouldn’t, I don’t think it would be fair to say that I began thinking about the book when I was 16. I mean, I began thinking about the boy, Hamlet, Shakespeare when I was 16. Because I heard, I was lucky enough to have an amazing English teacher at high school. And I was studying to play Hamlet for my Scottish highers, which is set when you’re about 16, coming up to 17. And under play just really got under my skin. And so this this teacher of mine, who was called Mr. Henderson, he just told us in passing one day that Shakespeare had a son who was called who had been called Hamnet, and he died age 11, about four or five years before he wrote the play Hamlet. And it just the similarity or the almost sort of echo of these names just really struck me. And I remember thinking, even though you know, it was a long time before obviously, I was a mother and writer. And I remember thinking, what does it mean for a man to call a play and his hero and the ghost? Let’s not forget, after you get some, what does that mean? You know, and then when I went to university, I studied literature, and I was reading a lot that you know, Shakespeare and biographies and criticism and literary criticism about him, and, and Hamlet, I was really struck by the fact that nobody really talks about Hamlet, and he got maybe two mentions and these big works of scholarship. And I’ve just always felt ever since then, really, that Hamnet has been really downplayed. He’s been really overlooked. He’s been relegated to a literary footnote, you know, I’ve read really respectable, respected biographers and scholars saying, you know, it’s impossible to know whether or not Shakespeare was thinking about his dead son when he called the play Hamlet. I’m actually you can hear my laughing, I just think, I just don’t say, are you serious? What person would but you know, because just to say they were the same name. In the 16th century, spelling was a lot less stable. So the names are interchangeable in not only Shakespeare’s documents, but also Paris registers of the time. So he did use the same name, but you know, the idea, somebody would likely take the name of their dead son, and give it to their play, and their character is, you know, I mean, it’s preposterous we’re both laughing as we’ve talked about this. He’d have to write that name again and again in the manuscript. He’d have to hear it over and over again in the rehearsals and in the production. And he’d have to speak it himself. Because, you know, there is a story that Shakespeare himself took the role of the ghost in the first production of Hamlet at the Globe Theatre in 1601. So, obviously, it’s ridiculous. So, I’ve just always felt that Hamlet the boy isn’t well known enough. His story isn’t well known. Not enough people realize that Shakespeare had a son called Hamner who died. And so I wanted to write this book to give him a voice and a presence to say this boy was important. His short life was significant. Without him, we wouldn’t have Hamlet and we probably wouldn’t have 12th night.

B&N: And yet, I need to talk to you for a second about Agnes who was Hamnet’s mother who is possibly my favorite character. I mean, I grew I glommed on to Agnes very, very quickly. She is a farmer’s daughter, she ends up marrying the Latin tutor, who we know is William Shakespeare but ends up having three children with him. There’s Susanna and then they’re the twins, Hamnet and Judah. And her story is really kind of wonderful and she’s connected to the world and way, even though she recognizes her husband’s potential and recognizes the kinds of stories he needs to tell, and the world he needs to be a part of, she’s grounded in a way that is so wonderful and smart and funny. Did she just kind of show up? Or did you think, Alright, well, I have a little bit of research and I know a little bit about the true person, but I think we’re going to go this direction.

MO: Well, it was lots of different directions that bigness came, to be honest. And I obviously I always knew that when I would write the book, Hamnet was going to have a mother. But I wasn’t sure you know, she’s very, I mean, the woman we know, as Anne Hathaway, we’ve been taught to call AnneHathaway is quite a shadowy figure, you know, I mean, we know very little about Shakespeare himself. You know, we only have six examples of a signature, you know, he’s left a very, very scant paper trail about himself. You know, despite this enormous output of his work as a kind of weird counterbalance that there’s not much we know about him himself has lots of stuff we don’t know about him. But if we think we know little about him, we know even less about his wife. You know, we don’t even know when she was born. There’s no register at all of her birth because she was she was born for parish records began, we know that they got married and that she had a baby six months later, Susanna, and she went on to have twins, we know that she ran a multi business later in life. We know that she died in her late 60s, which was incredible for that age, because we want the life expectancy in rural work was 48. But actually, you know, this paucity of knowledge about her has not stopped. Scholars and biographers, other novelists, writers, Oscar winning screenplays, from rushing forward to fill that void with a huge amount of opprobrium and hatred and criticism and vilification for her. And I was, I was absolutely shocked and horrified. And my breath was completely taken away by the things that have been said about her. You know, we’ve been taught there’s one narrative about her all this time, for 400 years, it was that she is this ignorant, older, peasant woman who lured this young boy genius into marriage, that he hated her that he ran away to London to get away from her, they regretted his marriage, all the stuff, and there isn’t a single not a single shred of evidence that I could find, to support any of that theory, any of that vision of their marriage and their relationship. And actually, it’s not that unusual for men in the 16th century, to go to London and work to go to London to find jobs as long as it isn’t now. And, you know, there’s no evidence at all that he hated her quite the opposite. Actually, if you, if you look at the plays, there are a huge number of very faithful, intelligent, beloved wives. And I just, I was so shocked and so furious about this. And you know, people will always bring up the famous behest and Shakespeare’s will about leaving his second best bed to his wife unto my wife, I leave my second best bed. And people are scholars have seized upon this thing. And this proves that he hated our show any affection to her, but actually, I mean, if you look at the wills, the document itself, there isn’t any affection in the will at all. It’s a very strange and dry document. You know, you would never think that the person who wrote that well wrote the best lines we’ve probably ever read about love. Actually, I mean, you know, the man was dying. Probably typhoid, which is a particularly unpleasant death. And there’s no sign of affection anywhere at all. But you know, what her detractors never mentioned is that in under Jacobean law, when Shakespeare died, she was entitled to a third of his estate, which was vast, he was the equivalent of multimillionaire at this point. So he just didn’t like the worth of his estate and also to live on in the house until her death. So the idea that she was rejected, wife tossed out on the pavement with just a note is preposterous. So I was so furious about all this that I thought I want to, I want to ask readers to forget everything they think they know about Anne Hathaway, and open themselves up to a new interpretation of their marriage, which, which was that it was a love match, that they did love each other, that there was it was a partnership and also, her name i. So when I one of the things I read was her father’s will. So her father, Richard Hathaway died a year before she married William. And he left her a very generous dowry in his world. And he referred to her as my daughter, Agnes. And I thought, you know, on top of that, it seems so emblematic to me on top of everything else, we’ve been calling her by the wrong name for almost 400 years, you know, because if anyone knows, we should know her proper name, it would be her father. And also Agnes is Latin for sheep for lamb. And of course, her father was a sheep farmer. So I always wonder if that’s why he called his daughter, his eldest daughter, Agnes.

B&N: I had no idea that Agnes was latin for lamb. But that doesn’t make perfect sense. Did anything really surprise you? Or anyone I should say, as you were writing this book. I mean, as you said, there isn’t a lot of documentation on Shakespeare and his life and his family. And you know, Hamnet himself gets to mess into sort of two mentions. So you’re essentially creating this world but you do have to ground it to a certain extent.

MO: I mean, there were so many surprises, you know, when I was very nervous about writing this book, because not only because it’s him, you know, Shakespeare who the untouchables, a literary icon, the BMR, I was very nervous about taking him on, but also about writing about a world that is so different from ours, you know, it’s 400 years and the lives of the characters in that in my novel, and those are the women and the current that are so so different from mine, you know, their days, and their thoughts and their demands on them are so, so different. So it did see it. So I was nervous about that. But I think what I tried to do really is I tried never to kind of think to myself, you know, I’m now writing a historical capital H novel capital N, because I think I would have been terrible about that. So I just tried to approach it as I would any other novel. And I did. I mean, I actually loved the research, I have to say, and the great thing about writing a novel that requires quite a lot of research is that, you know, there are always points, when you’re not always points in the writing of a book in the process of it in the two or three years that it takes you to write it, or you do hit a brick wall with the narrative or the characters or the dialogue or the setting, or whatever the plot, whatever it is. But if you’re writing a contemporary novel, there’s not a lot to do other than just tear your hair out until things start moving again, but see when you’re writing is don’t really think well, I’ll just do a little bit more research. Maybe I need to do a little bit more of that Elizabethan trade routes or a little bit more about, you know, the wattle and daub construction and the houses. But I think what I find interesting about it is the kind of balance you have to get between in writing about the past, you have to balance between plot and also research. So in order to write a scene in, we say three people having an argument in a parlor in an Elizabethan house, you’ve got to know what the walls are made of, and the floors made, we got to know what the windows looked like and what clothes they’re wearing, what the clothes are made, or what it feels like next to their skin, what’s on the floor. But actually you need to leave, you need to know that to give yourself the confidence just construct the scene, but then you need to probably jettison about 98% of it from the actual scene itself. Because otherwise, you’re going to write one of those historical novels that feels so laden with a writer desperate to show their workings is desperate, they’ve done their homework, because, you know, nobody wants to read a novel that reads like a PhD. You have to keep it moving along, you’ve got to always remember that your reader may not be as interested in wattle and daub construction as you are. You’ve got to kind of keep that through alive in yourself to not not to lose your reader. So yeah, the research was an interesting process.

B&N: And also the way you structured the novel though, you’re you’re going back into Shakespeare’s family’s history, and Agnes his family’s history, and alternating chapters with their children being very sick, the twins. Susanna does not get sick, but the structure was a really interesting decision. Did you know that’s where you were going to end up? Or is that where you start? How did you come to that?

MO: I think I mean, the thing is, I’m not much of a planner with either with writing or with life today. And I always have a vague idea where the book might end up. But I’m always quite open to things changing as I go along. You know, I think it’s a little bit like driving along a road at night, and you don’t know the road is in the country, and there are no streetlights, but you don’t have those cat’s eyes. And you don’t know where the road is gonna bend until you’re actually there. You don’t know the terrain until you’re until your headlights are illuminating it for you. But I mean, I knew that I wanted to go back to sort of reinterpret or revivify their marriage, you know, I felt so I felt that Hathaway has been given a very, very poor treatment over the years. So I wanted to reinterpret their marriage for readers. But it’s funny, I think structurally, in a sense, Hamlet is one of the most straightforward books that I’ve written it today, a lot of my books, the structure is quite, I’m very interested in structure. I think of it as a kind of three dimensional shape a bit like a sculptor would look at his or her work. But in a sense, I think the biggest challenge for me was with Hamnet was, of course, the timeframe and also grappling with who he you know, Shakespeare is. And so in a way I think I really need a simple stick stick with this one. It’s just too much else going on.

B&N: I do love the way though you never refer to Shakespeare by his name. There’s no William there’s no will. There’s no Shakespeare. There’s no, it’s Eliza’s brother, or her husband, or Hamnet’s father or Judith’s father, Susanna’s father. And I think it’s a really terrific device. And I mean, obviously, it’s deliberate. So how did you land there?

MO: Well, actually, I mean, it was a variety of reasons. Really. I mean, the point is, his name is probably one of the most recognized everywhere in the world. You know, I think it would be hard. Anywhere in the world that’s easy to find a person over the age of say, 10 or 11, who doesn’t know who he is, you know his name. Those two words carry so much heft and significance. So in a sense, I defended, I did experiment with using his name of various iterations of his name in the novel, but I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t bring myself to write a sentence like, you know, William Shakespeare walked up the path and knocked on the door, you know, I just instantly felt like an eejit. And I was just pulled out of the narrative. So I thought, well, if I, as the writer cannot stay submerged in this narrative, with hearing or you know, thinking about it, then I can’t expect readers to do it. So in a sense, I just wanted to just sort of, I don’t know, divorce him from that name, just take it away from him and just ask people or readers to see Him just as a person as a human being, because in a sense, the book begins where, before he was, who he become, you see what I mean, if that makes sense. You know, I think I was intrigued, actually, while I was writing it about the idea of what how people in Stratford upon Avon might have seen him before he became who he was, maybe even while he was doing his work, you know, you know, I think he must have even at the age of, you know, he was at, you know, he left school, probably about 15. And then he got married at 18. And, you know, I think, what would he have been like, as an 18 year old or a 15 year old, you know, he must have been extraordinary even then, you know, imagine what it was like to be his rhetoric teacher, or his Greek teacher, or, you know, I mean, we know now, of course, what his imagination and his mind was capable of. But in those days, I think he must have been considered probably quite an oddball thing. So I was just interested in what he would have been like, as a youth as a young man. And in a sense, I wanted to get rid of who he becomes. So the reader can just see them him as a person as a human being.

B&N: His family is complicated. Both his his family of birth and the family he creates. I mean, it’s, it’s all it’s all complicated. Everyone is bound by sort of the, let’s call them societal norms, right? I mean, we’re talking about 400 years ago, and everyone has their place. And if you lose your place, that changes everything, there’s no coming back from that, you know, Shakespeare’s father is disgraced for multiple reasons. His mother, Mrs. There sort of place in the world back when they had it. And yet, he marries someone who is just completely and I realized, we’re talking about fictional characters, with with some basis in history. But let’s be clear, you had a wonderful time making all this up to a certain extent and giving it life, but also giving value to a domestic life and a domestic existence that sometimes gets dismissed in literature, as you know, sort of small. Well, let’s use a bad sports metaphor. It’s small ball, right? Like, people aren’t thinking about what it means like how do you go out into the world? If you don’t have the grounding, if you don’t have a community if you don’t have your people?

MO: I mean, I think you know, I think obviously, I understand and appreciate why other works about Shakespeare, you know, both fictional and works of scholarship, do focus on his career in London, you know, I do I do get the big story is, you know, I understand that he created these plays and directed them and appeared in them, you know, I understand that. But to me, it’s always been, I don’t know, ever since I think I heard about the existence of Hamlet, Shakespeare when I was at school, it’s always felt to me that the biggest drama in his life happened offstage. And that’s instructed, and I do I, you know, I have found that in all the works, I’ve read about Shakespeare that his domestic life, you know, his family life back in Stratford upon Avon has just been completely dismissed. You know, I mean, obviously, there is a reason why scholarship focuses in on his career, but to me, I, you know, and I think they, I think the people have been, I don’t know what it is that whether it’s some kind of form of misogyny, or some kind of strange desire to, for our male artists to be Footloose, and fancy, free and unencumbered. But, you know, to me, there is documentary evidence of his links back Stratford, you know, and the idea that he just ran off to London didn’t come back for years. It’s actually nonsense. I’m sure he was back and forth. A lot, actually. And I think, you know, there is documentary evidence of the repeated number of times at the global, you know, whichever sector he was working at, was shot because of the plague. Right. You know, the first thing was civic authorities in London did as soon as there was an outbreak of plague in London, which happened all the time, you know, because of all this huge burdening and trade that was happening and all these goods coming in from all over the world into London. The first thing was civic authorities would do was to shut down the globe all the playhouses because, you know, if you think that the original Globe Theater had a capacity for 3000 people, and they were all gathering in the middle of the day and heat of the sun in summer, you can see why it would be a horrible breeding ground for that bacterium you know, the fatal bacterium Yersinia pestis. So I think you know, if it was if it was a bad outbreak, you probably have gone home to start from If it was a smaller outbreak, he would have taken his company on tour and different areas around London. But you know, and also what was most significant to me is that, you know, he, I mean, he was an incredibly good businessman at the end of his career, he was incredibly wealthy. But he lived in one room very modest one room lodgings in London, right at the end of his career when he was in his early 50s. And all the money he earned, he sent back to Stratford. So he could have set up a household anywhere he wanted in the world, but he bought his, his wife and daughters in a mansion of a house a year after Hamlet was born into upon even, he also invested over time in various fields and properties and cottages and land that he leased out in Warwickshire and Stratford upon Avon, which, again, suggests that that was where his heart was lying. And then of course, oh, significant thing to me is that at the end of his career, when he retired, he, he could have lived anywhere, but he chose to go back to Stratford upon Avon to live with his wife to to live the remainder of his retired life with his wife, we didn’t actually turn out to be that long in the end, because he did die pretty young. But, um, but that the idea that it’s rather meant nothing to him that he had to run away, I think is nonsense.

B&N: No, I agree with you on that, especially knowing that he went back at the end of his life after making all of these investments and the way he lived in London. It’s just kind of like, huh, yeah,

MO: It doesn’t add up.

B&N: The book was published. Hamnet was published in the UK in March of 2020. Published in the US in July 2020. Right at the height of everything. And the subtitle of this novel is a novel of the plague. And yet the plague is it’s there, certainly. But how did you settle on that subtitle?

MO: I should say that it’s not known what the real Hamlet Shakespeare died of, you know, there is a record of his burial on the 11th of August 1596. But there’s no cause of death. So nobody knows what actually what he died of. But he did die in high summer in a plague year. And various things, and also the life of his twin Judith really intrigued me. So Judith, lives until the early 70s, which is actually jaw dropping that to that day and age. So it’s always seemed to me that Judith lived two lives in a sense, she lived hers, and she also lived Hamnet’s as well towards the end. But you just life was not straightforward. In fact, it was pretty heartbreaking. She had three sons, all of whom died. So the first one glide when he was two, he was called Shakespeare, Shakespeare. And then she had two other sons who died in there when they were 20, and 21, and 22. And they die within a week of each other in high summer. And her husband also died in the same outbreak of whatever it was, it was also a failure. So just looking at these deaths, and looking at her incredible survival through it all, I just got the picture of somebody who was somehow immune to whatever it was felled these, let’s think for five important men in her life, her twin brother, her husband, her three sons. And so I got the idea of this child who had survived the plague, had immunity to it, and was able to nurse these four other mentors through their illness and through their death and live to tell a very long time. But also, I have to say the other thing that is why when there’s a huge there’s a very weird and loud echoing absence of the plague in Shakespeare’s plays. You know, I think what intrigues everybody about Shakespeare’s writing is the enormous breadth of knowledge and themes and images that he draws on in all his plays, you know, and geographies and characters and animals have, you know, you name it law he’s got, it’s all there. And it’s astonishing what he knows, you know, botany, falconry, it’s everything, but he never ever, ever, in any of his plots, in any of his metaphors, draws on the Black Death, which is very peculiar. When you think about how prevalent it was in those days, it would have been the biggest fear of any Elizabethan, everybody would have known its signs and symptoms. And it just seems to me a very significant outcome. And he does mention the pestilence a few times, there’s one there is a mention of a plague that stops the fryer, of course, in Romeo and Juliet, which is a very important plot point. And there’s description that was close, and now it’s gone, but it is about a pestilence in the air, but he never utilizes reaches for that. And it’s, it’s significantly and one of the things I find, you know, I think one of the many things I find really intriguing about the play Hamlet is that I do think that in in, in that play more than any others that Shakespeare is more visible to us as a human being than He is in any other place. I mean, in a kind of in a in a good, you know, in a sort of positive way. If you look at the scene where Hamlet is has written a play within a play. And he does an amazing speech where he talks to the actors who are going to speak his play. And he says to them, I want you to do it like this, but not like this, I want you to pronounce it trippingly off the tongue. And you read that scene, and actually, the hairs on the back of my neck go up, because I think, there he is. There’s William, we can see him. But also the other thing, that scene I find the speech actually I find almost too painful to read. After having written Hamlet, is one where the ghost is describing the manner of his death. So he’s describing to his son how he died. And he’s saying I was laying in an orchard and my brother came along, poured poison into my ear. And then he describes the cause of the poison through his body and the agony of it, the physical agony of it coursing through the gateways and alleyways of my body, the gates and alleyways of my body. And he says, it’s horrible. It’s horrible, most horrible, actually, I can’t even now actually emotional talking about because I, I have a horrible feeling that I really hope that Shakespeare made that speech up that he plucked from his imagination, but I have a horrible feeling that he is describing Hamnet’s death in that. And if you read it, it’s so close to contemporary descriptions of somebody dying of the plague. So it was, these are the places that I drew Hamlet’s manner of death, my Hamnet’s manner of death from.

B&N: And there’s a moment to where Shakespeare’s mother says, if you’ve ever seen someone die, you know it’s not peaceful. And that sounds like something you say when you say this. And I mean, Elizabethan England, I mean, you could die of a stubbed toe, literally, you could die from this winter, you could die from things that, you know, no longer kill us. And certainly plague is one. But do you have a favorite character in Hamnet?

MO: I’m very fond of all of them in different ways, actually. And they were all really good to write about, I enjoyed write well, and I enjoyed, you know, it has quite a big cast of characters, and they were interesting combinations of putting people together. One of one of the weirdest things right, in terms of kind of technically, was the scene that was hardest to write, in a sense technical sense was the one where Shakespeare has a kind of argument or falling out with Agnes his brother Bartholomew, only because there was only that was the trickiest scene. To get around, grammatically, the fact that he isn’t named. So if you have two characters, both needing the male pronoun he or him, it’s actually very difficult to get around the fact that one of them doesn’t have a name. So that’s the one I went over and over totaling over thinking, how can I get the language to bend around the fact that I don’t want to use one of the characters name? So every time I see that scene, I think, Oh, thank God, I finished it. It was the most most of a headache.

B&N: Did the book start with character? Or did it start with a moment? I mean, did it really start with just the idea of taking back Hamlet and saying, okay, world, you don’t know who this kid is? I’m going to let you know who he is? Or did it start with this sort of vision of what the world of this book is?

MO: It definitely started with a sense that I feel Hamlet has been overlooked and under, and ignored for too long, and also that nobody has ever I don’t think anyway, I don’t think anybody has ever emphasized the connection between this boy’s death and the play. You know, the play, I mean, obviously, there are so many different ways to interpret Hamlet, and people are going to continue to find new ones, you know, which is one of the most fantastic things about Shakespeare. But to me, if you look at the play through the lens of the lost son, it feels so so poignant, that it is a message pointedly to me that it’s a message from a father in one realm to a son and another. You know, it doesn’t take a psychiatrist to suggest why a father who has lost a son would write a play, where the son is alive, and the father is dead, you know, because that is, as any parent will tell, you know, if your child is suffering, your biggest sort of urge is to make some kind of strange supernatural bargain and say, I’ll have it you know, give me that broken, or give me the dislocated arm. If you know I will change places I will take it and if you can spare the child, that’s what you want. I think that’s what Shakespeare has done. He’s He’s taken his son’s death and he’s given his son life in the play. It’s a kind of odd sort of wish fulfillment. So it just you know, and I don’t think anyone has ever has ever traced the you know, I mean, to me that the book really is about art. You know, why we make it, why we need it, why we need to make it why we need to see it, why we need to watch other people’s stories, why we need to make our own and it’s about how you can mutate grief. into work into art. And that’s that I think that’s what Shakespeare was doing with the play Hamlet, certainly. And I think it feels very different to play Hamlet feels very different from all the others. And I think that’s why because it’s because he was thinking about his son.

B&N: And it’s just it’s too personal not.

MO: Yeah. Why would you use that name?

B&N: What happens though to the women who don’t they have the grief? I mean, Agnes and her mother are preparing Hamlet’s body for burial. They don’t have that outlet for their grief, they simply have their grief. So what happens?

MO: I mean, I think what interested me most actually, about the lives of the women in the novel was that they’re so undocumented, of course, I mean, that, you know, Agnes and Mary are literally undocumented. There are no, there are very few records about them in the parish, but also, you know, I came up against this fact, again, and again, when I was researching and writing the book, you know, I mean, I remember I was about four paragraphs into the book, and I was describing this boy coming down a flight of stairs, and he’s worried about his sister who’s sick, and he’s looking for somebody to help her. And at the bottom of the stairs, he stumbles and falls on the floor. I’d actually written that point where I suddenly thought, I wonder what the floor is made of, you know, is it rushes is it carpet, is it floorboards? Is it tiles, you know, I had no idea. And I looked it up, and I could find out what to do palaces, floors were made of, I can find out what the globe, the Globe Theater floor has made. But I could not find anywhere, what the floor of a house in a small, you know, small house in a market town in works, I was made off. So. But even that, you know, there wasn’t really any sense, it was very difficult to find out what they wore, and you know, what their lives were like, you know, and I had a lot of it was imagination, you know, but but some of that, you know, you can look down the list of births of say, Mary Shakespeare with eight children. She buried three daughters, so the two baby girls who died before William was born. And then she had four girls and four boys, but three of the girls died, they only had one surviving one daughter who survived to adulthood. But just, you know, you think, number of children in house, you know, basically, she had six children, to look after the clothe and to feed and to keep safe and to educate and to teach and you just think, I mean, you just think about that, and think about not only the number of pregnancies, and, you know, childbirth, and feeding, you know, looking at tickets, but also just the sheer size of the labor, the daily labor of keeping those kids alive, even clean and fed. You know, I think that was astonishing to me. And also this huge multi generational households are living together, you know, because, of course, then, you know, when William went off to London, Agnes and her three children were all they were all living basically, in the same household. I mean, it’s just, it’s jaw dropping to us, as women, you know, the beginning of the 21st century, when we’ve got all this, you know, we’re allowed to educate, we’re educated, and we’ve got jobs and most I’m not saying all women have this, because I wish that were only true throughout the world, but certainly in Scotland and LA where we’re talking the reality for most women. But so that was initially but I find in certainly in researching that aspect of the book, but actually library based research, which of course is very useful for the rest of it wasn’t actually that useful. So with for particularly the Agnes I did a lot of sort of physical hands on research. So I planted my own Elizabethan medicinal garden, as you can’t see it from here. On the other side, and I went on a course to learn how to make these plants into the traditional medicines, which they would have used. Because, you know, there’s only you can only, there’s only so much you can get from a book. So you can read in a book, you know, they used to eat arthritic joints, but actually, you know, until you plant the comfrey plant, and you harvest the leaves, and you learn how to make them into a poultice. And you don’t really understand. And I also as I went, the most fun thing I did was to go and learn falconry. So I went down to the Scottish Borders, and I met this very cool Falconer, 25. And she has all these birds. And it taught me to fly Kestrel. So that’s actually the most fun thing I’ve ever done in the name of research. And I went on an archeological dig along the River Thames in London, particularly outside where the original Globe Theatre was. And in the sand, if you dig deep enough, you can find hundreds and hundreds of these brass pins that were used to pin the costumes. And so they were used to make keep the rough on and to keep the wigs on and so that was really that was a kind of hairs at the back of your neck moment because I was thinking, well, some of these might have been six pairs, some of them might have been using the original production of Hamlet.

B&N: So we know Shakespeare is a major influence on you, as a writer as Maggie O’Farrell, the novelist and memoirs. Who else? Who are the other writers who’ve shaped you in your career in the kind of work you produce?

MO: Well, how long do you have Miwa honestly? Like, you’re not until. I mean, I would say early on, I really fell in love with Toby Hansen’s books, the moving books. Yeah. And I loved Pippi Longstocking. She was just the best. She’s such a great role model for young girls, isn’t she, you know, adventuring, messy clothes, climbing trees, keeping getting into all sorts of scrapes and travel. So she was wonderful. And I really when I was a teenager, I loved Albert Camus the outsider that really, I remember even when I was about 16, and I was so shocked, I didn’t know that was possible to write like that and construct a story that we’re this peculiar voiceless peculiar vision on the world, and a character who just sort of does arbitrary things, because he doesn’t see any reason not to. So that really fascinated me. And I love. I really love Molly Keane, the Irish writer. I think she’s fantastic. And I’ve loved Charlotte Bronte. I love George Eliot. And one of my favorite writers is Alice Monroe. I was asked what my desert island book would be. And I didn’t choose all selected stories. I think she’s extraordinary. There’s nobody else like her, you know, the generosity of spirit and the amount she can pack into a 40 page short story is just, you know, and I do read the material, which gives you a little bit, so I’m not some what other novelists might take three, you know, a trilogy of three books to get through. She’s extraordinary. And I love Margaret Atwood, I love and Patchett I love Jennifer Egan. Who else? William Boyd. I’m a big Michelle Cheban fan. I love a lot of poetry as well. I do read love poetry, particularly when I’m actually at the moment, I’m just coming to the end of writing a novel. And I find I read all the time I read novels all the time. But the only point at which I almost can’t read novels is when I’m just about to finish a draft of my own books. It’s almost as if my head is about to fall, then I will read short stories, and I will also read poetry. So I’m actually begun on a whole Mary Oliver. I mean, honestly, I love her so much. I actually I sort of write them out and I put them on the fridge. Because I just love the zone, I feel that everybody in the household needs to read about them read about her stones and her trees and her wild imaginings and her boat, but we’re gonna win. They’re all getting some milk from the fridge. So that’s just something to be going along with.

B&N: Have we missed anything about Hamnet? I sort of feel like you know, at this point, the hardcover has been out in the world. I love the paperback package that vintage put on this book is beautiful.

MO: There’s no no really lovely, yeah, it’s very, very comfortable.

B&N: Is there anything I’ve missed that because I there are certain plot points to that people need to experience for themselves. And I don’t necessarily feel like we need to spill everything. But the atmosphere of the book is really important. I think the readability is off the charts great.

MO: Well, I was very keen, I didn’t want to write a book that felt exclusive, I didn’t want to write a book that you that people have to have a good knowledge of Shakespeare to understand or enjoy. I didn’t want to write that kind of book tour. So it doesn’t you know, I wanted to write a novel that was if you you know, there are certain illusions and hints, but they’re there if you want to see them. And it doesn’t matter if you don’t if you don’t get the illusion to

B&N: know I was really caught up in the family’s life and the dynamics of the family. And I loved the chapter where the Venetian glass beads come to. And that sort of a chapter. It’s such a, I mean, obviously, it’s a very sad storyline. But I mean, that chapter is so much fun. And you can sort of feel the movement, everything else. But I feel like that’s a chapter that people should experience. Because it was a moment in the story where I got to breathe a little bit.

MO: You know, it’s funny, it was one of those things that I hadn’t planned at all when I was writing the book. But it’s just that was also the halfway point in the book and I suddenly felt that I wanted to throw the book open wide a bit you know, mostly takes place in one town quite small town one house pretty much in a small town in England. And I just felt like I wanted to I don’t know a bit like a movie director with suddenly pull the camera back, pan back come back and I wanted to give a kind of global perspective on what was happening. You know, an idea so weird because I do remember when I was writing it, having to start consciously think my destiny thinking I wonder when I was little I wonder what it would have been like to live through a pandemic, you know, to be sitting in a house knowing that this disease was coming sweeping towards you. So, but I did, actually, I’m glad it’s quandary because I did have a lot of fun writing and actually, it was a really, it was great because there was lots of research and it was just it was sort of a kind of a, it’s almost like a break in the narrative. A little break.

B&N: Yeah, it felt very cinematic. It felt very cinematic watching this kid, you know, as the boxes moved, and everything else and you’re like, Oh, this is not going to end well. You know, because I don’t want to make the book so much obviously, about living through a pandemic. We’ve all done it. It’s, it’s, you know, I’m looking forward to being back in the world and going to events in store. We’ve been hosting a lot of events online, and I miss my studio, I miss having Harry right. Running the soundboard and doing the things and it’s like, let’s hope that we got everything we need.

MO: And we’re gonna get back to our new normal, hopefully.

B&N: Before I let you go, though I do want to talk about, I Am, I Am, I Am a little bit just because it. I mean, it was your first piece of nonfiction. It’s a memoir, it is deeply personal. And now I feel like going back and reading your fiction, I see moments in your fiction that are clearly tied to moments in your own history. Are you ever going to write another memoir?

MO: Well, it’s funny, I shouldn’t mean I want to say no, but I always said I would never write memoir anyway. So I probably shouldn’t say no, because you never know what’s gonna work. You never know what’s gonna come out. I always feel that you never are. I don’t choose the books in a sense, I feel they choose me. You know, I think you always have to, you have to kind of she you have to write the book that you can’t not write, you know, you can’t necessarily think Well, I must do this one. It’s not a conscious decision. I think you should always write the one that’s just tugging at your sleeve, you know, just constantly whispering in your ear and demanding attention. So I don’t know. I can’t imagine that it will. But you never know.

B&N: You went from writing a memoir, though, to writing Hamnet.

MO: So it was so great to get back into fiction. I was so happy to get back to writing a novel. It was like getting into a warm bath. I thought thank God, the truth is really hard. It’s much harder to tell the truth than it is to make things up. You know, that was the thing. I when I was writing, I Am I I felt a bit like a kind of horse every now and again, my brother would be totally yanked back. Because I’d be thinking I’d be writing a scene and I think if I could just, you know, relocate this whole thing to France or put it in 19th century. Bring in an extra character and I think, Oh, God, I can’t do that. Because I have to stick to the truth. It was such a shock to somebody who you know, who’s very wedded to fiction. So, yeah, it was very, it was a very interesting experience writing my memoir, but I don’t know. I don’t know. I wouldn’t be desperate to run back to nonfiction certainly about myself. No, maybe nonfiction about something else.

B&N: Can I ask what the new books about? Are you still cooking it?

MO: I can’t The only thing I really hate talking about books. I haven’t finished because I feel like all I can say is this also set in the past.

B&N: Oh, okay. Well, that’s fun. And I mean, this isn’t actually the first time you played with the patent. It is the first time you’ve played with 400 years worth of research. Esme Lennox was B&N recommends pick.

MO: I remember back in the day, a long time ago.

B&N: It was a while ago, and honestly, I hadn’t picked it up. Since. I mean, obviously I’d read it then. And it was wild to me how sort of Gothicy, I hadn’t remembered it being sort of that Gothic and dark and it’s like, Oh, right. And then the ending I was just like, Oh, yes. Now because it wasn’t going any other way. I don’t know if there’s a direct line that we can draw between Hamnet and Esme Lennox except for the fact that you created both of them and they’re both really wonderful books but Is there anything that as me Lennox, that you sort of carry around with you? Or maybe not? It’s, it was a fun reread I zipped right through it. And it’s like, oh, this book, this book.

MO: I always I always think about that book with Barnes and Noble. I remember, I remember coming to New York, I was booked when I came to New York, I very shyly walked into Barnes and Noble, I thought, I wonder if it’s here. And I stood right in the front with just in front of the door. And I was looking around and I was looking everywhere. And I thought, No, I can’t see it anywhere. Maybe they haven’t got it. Looked down. And right in front of me. Was this table. Huge table filled with shocked I nearly fell over. Still remember that moment. So it was such delight, doesn’t realize I mean, I don’t know I haven’t I haven’t real fondness, but as Moulinex I do, I mean, yeah, it goes back to the 1920s. It’s, I was having a debate the other day with another writer, because we were talking about what makes historical fiction, where do you where’s the cutoff? Because there’s a, there’s a prize? And it’s an interesting question, isn’t it? And somebody, one person said, I think it’s 30 years, which to me is a bit arbitrary. But there’s other novelists that I was writing I was talking to, she said, I think it’s beyond living memory.

B&N: Yeah, beyond living memory feels that feels really 30 years, I’m doing some mental math. And I’m like, that’s not that long ago.

MO: The 80s Isn’t it? Which is interesting. But it’s funny, because when I wrote my grandmother was alive. And I remember saying to her, when I was writing it, I said, What would have what would have a girl in from a nice sort of, you know, respectable family? What lipstick would what color lipstick? As I’ve written this whole scene about lipstick, so my grandmother said, she wouldn’t have any lipstick. Very idea. And I thought, actually, but you know, I think now, obviously, my grandmother passed away, but I wouldn’t be able to ask her that. But to me, maybe I think that’s quite an interesting definition, that there’s nobody around that you can ask you have to do it all by research or sort of excavation somehow. I don’t know. I don’t know what the answer is. But it’s an interesting theory.

B&N: And acts of imagination. I mean, it’s flat out acts of imagination, you’ve got to conjure things from sort of whole cloth as it were.

MO: I remember the definition received by Marina Warner and she said that writing is imagination working hand in hand with reason, which I thought was so brilliant.

B&N: The reason piece is really interesting to me.

MO: Yeah, but the idea that they’re sort of hand in hand and there, you need both of them, which I thought was a brilliant, brilliant definition of writing fiction.

B&N: That sort of seems like a really good place to end to. To be perfectly honest. It’s like that’s a really good line.

MO: So that’s a good good thing to end with.

B&N: We can definitely give her a shout out. But Maggie, thank you so much for doing this. I really appreciate it

MO: It was totally my pleasure, Miwa. Thank you so much. I felt like we could have we could have chatted for hours.