'Marriages Have Secrets'
Podcast with Charlotte Mendelson on her novel WIFE
The novelist Charlotte Mendelson has a very welcoming home, full of warm bright colours and beautiful objects and books and cozy furniture. It was very easy to sink into that blue sofa and talk and talk - about WIFE, her latest novel, but also about her earlier work (the novels ALMOST ENGLISH, THE EXHIBITIONIST, to name a few), and about her other passion - gardening. We recorded this interview in early June, when her roof terrace and the garden below were very green, very lush, and, as she told me, ‘almost entirely edible.’ She now writes about gardening for the Observer, and before that, she had a gardening column in the New Yorker magazine. ‘Fiction is my heart, gardening my outside,’ she explained. She doesn’t mix these two loves in her writing.
Mendelson’s reading on the podcast of an excerpt from WIFE also hints at her protagonist Zoe’s two loves: Penny, the woman she had married and was now (possibly) trying to leave, and their children: not, at this point, a reason to stay, but, on the contrary, a key motive to seek freedom from the toxic marriage. The portrayal of marriage in WIFE is one of the most incisive I’ve read in contemporary fiction: a loving but intrinsically uneven relationship between a shy younger woman and a charismatic older woman. Narcissism is instantly in plain view to the reader but not to the novel’s heroine, who matures into understanding the roots of her powerful seduction. ‘It’s a second coming of age story,’ says Mendelson. This type of ‘sentimental education’ is at the heart of many works of fiction, but in WIFE, there are unusual complications: the children’s sperm donor is also the very controlling brother of Penny’s still very present ex girlfriend. The two perspectives - Zoe’s and Penny’s - are so well executed that it is not only the narrator or her point of view that may be unreliable, but, by extension, all internal problems as seen from without. ‘In fiction, we totally believe in unreliable narrators. But when we are told an extremely binary version of what happened in a divorce, we just believe whoever we are talking to.’
There are unreliable narrators in real life, not only in fiction - WIFE by Charlotte Mendelson
I haven’t read another novel about a lesbian marriage and divorce, and was surprised to hear that an earlier version of this book was about a straight couple. ‘‘I’d always thought I want to write a novel about lesbians just as normal people. I am one. And I’ve had lesbian relationships in my fiction, but I’ve never dared make a lesbian the protagonist. I thought, if I’m not going to write this, who is going to write this? I bloody can. You know, this is not my first rodeo. it’s my sixth novel.’
Charlotte Mendelson is amused by ‘hilarious assumptions people have about lesbian relationships. That it’s a kind of idyll of fairness and nothing ever goes wrong. But, one of the things I wanted to say was, gay people can be arses too.’ She is fascinated by marriage - the secrets, the hidden truth in a relationship, the complicated ways of solving problems - especially when children are involved. In her novels - WIFE and others - she dissects her themes with great precision and meticulousness. She can’t write without really knowing and visualising her subject matter, in great detail. As a former editor, and now teacher of creative writing, she is aware of what goes into ‘the process’ - but when it comes to her own work, she will only discuss what has already been written, never her future ideas. I truly sympathise.
If this sounds like a very serious conversation, it was also a lot of fun. I particularly enjoyed Charlotte Mendelson’s nuanced openness when exploring any topic, and linking several of her novels into a kind of chronicle of home truths and illusions laid bare.
We stepped onto her roof terrace at the end of the interview. Here was a part of her beloved garden, as multilayered as her fiction but treated only as something to ‘get her hands muddy’ every day. And to eat.
I can’t resist referring to Charlotte Mendelson’s writing as her garden of narrative delights. It is smart, sexy fiction you can immerse yourself in while giving all her characters and their dilemmas a fair chance to figure things out - with interesting implications for our own lives.
Enjoy this episode.
WIFE by Charlotte Mendelson is published by Picador
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