Nicholas Jones talks to Diane Setterfield about her first novel, The Thirteenth Tale, a compelling emotional mystery in the timeless vein of Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca, about family secrets and the magic of books and storytelling. They are joined by the reader, actress Juliet Stevenson (Truly, Madly, Deeply; Bend It Like Beckham).

Transcript of the audio interview with Diane Setterfield and Juliet Stevenson

Hello, I’m Nicholas Jones, co-producer of the audio book of Diane Setterfield’s novel, The Thirteenth Tale. We invited Diane to come along to the studio and meet reader Juliet Stevenson in between recording sessions, and now we’ve taken the chance to put the two of them together round a microphone, to talk a bit about their respective roles in this project.

Storytelling

NJ: Diane, we’re all here today because you’ve written a story. You’re evidently passionate about storytelling, indeed, it is itself the subject of this, your first novel. Why is storytelling so much part of your make-up?

DS: Being told stories is where it began. Just mum, dad - reading stories. I can remember that I was quite mystified by the presence of the book, because it seemed to me that all I needed to be told a story was my mum or my dad, and they had this insistence on having this kind of little, papery block-thing, which seemed totally irrelevant to me, and there were times when there weren’t any papery block-things around and I’d be asking for a story and they’d say, ‘Well, no. I haven’t got a book.’ And I would think, ‘But, y’know, why do you need a prop? Just tell me a story!’ It seemed to me that the stories came directly from my mum and my dad, and the presence of the book itself was a mystery to me for quite a long time. It always surprises me when people say, ‘Where do you get ideas from?’, because my instinctive response is always to say, ‘Well, don’t you have ideas for stories all the time, y’know? Don’t you constantly go around living your life with all these bits of story in your mind?’ But I think just by growing up and talking to people I’ve now realized that not everyone does have that. But I still do think that it’s very, very common. I think that narrative and storytelling is, sort of, part of what being a human being is. I think, to an extent, we all do it. I probably just take it to, um, unreasonable extremes.

Interpretation

NJ: [laughs] Juliet, you tell stories every time you take to the stage, or appear in film, or read aloud, but your then interpreting someone else’s words and ideas. Does that make an actor’s job very different from a writer’s?

JS: I think what an actor does is strange, sort of, hybrid platting of stories that have been laid out by the playwright or the writer of the screenplay, or whatever it is. And that’s like the structure of the house, if you like, and then what an actor does, or what I do, is you fill out the story; you flesh out that story, by ransacking and raiding your own life, and all the stories in your own head. I mean, the way I love working is to fill out every possible detail I can about the character, and her situation, and the situations of those around me, and for that, you’re very often adding to what the writer has given you, or drawing something that the writer has suggested and magnifying it and elaborating it and so on. So you end up, I suppose - I mean playing Arkadina in The Seagull at the moment; Chekhov’s character – I suppose what I’m ending up with on that stage is the story of a women who is some part Chekhov and some part me, inevitably, because you recycle yourself. As you interpret the narrative you’ve been given, you then recycle your own experience, when you pull on your own imagination, and influences. So, if you like, the writer presents the structure of the house, and then you furnish it. That might be an analogy.

Connection

DS: As a reader - because I always think of myself as actually a reader first and a writer second – as a reader I think that is also what you bring when you read; when you’re sitting, quietly, on your sofa, reading. The book itself comes to you as you read. You are scavenging, if you like, your own personal history, your own personal, sort of, emotional map, in order to connect and to feed and to make real, and I’m sure that if someone was reading and was connected to one of those devices they have in hospitals – for actually your physiological responses when you read are very similar to actual experiences. If you’re reading about a fabulous meal, you know, you might start to salivate, and if you’re reading about something very frightening, I imagine that your heartbeat goes up. So it’s personal, and it’s actually universal, it’s kind of communal and individual at once.

JS: It’s the same as an audience. I mean, what you’ve described is just like an audience. You can make all sorts of decisions about the interpretation of the story that you’re putting onto a stage, but when the audiences come and sit in the dark together and listen to it, and watch it, and witness it; like the reader they will bring all their own stories and experience and life…interpretation of their own lives and their own experiences will be mapped on to what you’re presenting to them, which is why you get this sort of myriad responses. So the story they take home with them is always going to be, again, some sort of strange hybrid of the writer, the actors, the designers, they’re own - a cocktail of everybody’s different interpretations is coming together.

NJ: Right. So we’re saying that reading, or watching a play is never a passive process; that the reader or the audience is always actively involved. Juliet, here, reading an audio book, you’re communicating one to one, and Diane does that when she writes, but much of your time is on stage. Is that very different?

JS: Well, I think simply that you’re telling a story collectively. But I don’t think there is such a huge difference, really. Perhaps the difference is, in the theatre or on film, is that you’re not just reliant on the word. So you’re also communicating all sorts of other things, through other means. So you giving off all sorts of biochemical signal, physical signals and so on, which perhaps makes it more general. Maybe it’s a looser map.

NJ: I wonder if the increasing move to screen-based entertainment will alter future audiences abilities to deal with storytelling that’s just words.

Bodiless, Haunting Presences

NJ: Diane, if storytelling is such an interactive process, as we seem to agree it is, are you prompted to write with a particular purpose? Do you ever consciously try to evoke a particular response in your audience?

DS: I don’t have any educational agenda when I write. For me, with this book, writing has been purely about pleasure, and what I’ve had in the forefront of my mind the whole time is pleasing myself as a writer, and pleasing readers. And that doesn’t really mean that I haven’t also tried to write a book that is intelligent, but for me, what I’ve been trying to do is really focus on the sensual experience of reading, and that absolutely blissful moment of losing yourself in a book; of giving yourself up to a book, and forgetting yourself. Losing all consciousness, really, of where you are, losing consciousness of your own worries, of your own physical self, and actually becoming what a reader is when they’re reading, which is a sort of a bodiless, haunting presence in another world.

NJ: Juliet, that makes me think that Diane is sometimes surprised by where her characters takes her. She doesn’t always know what’s going to happen when she embarks upon a project. Do you find the same?

The Rhythm of Writing

JS: Oh, often. Often. And I think once you read it out loud, and start to inhabit those different characters – and that’s one of the many, many joys of reading a book out loud – is that you sort of hop around inside the psyches of so many people. I mean, y’know, you find yourself playing anything and everything; far beyond the scope offered to you in the theatre or in film. Yes, once you start reading out loud, it often takes you by surprise. Often. I mean, I’m obsessed with rhythm, the rhythms of writing, and all good writing has rhythms in it that will take you to places that you don’t necessarily get taken to when you’re reading inside your head, because that is a different experience. Just putting voice into words, and the energy and the shape of the words themselves, have kinds of resonance that we don’t always here when we’re reading inside our heads. Reading inside your head is a glorious thing to do – it’s not a qualitative judgment I’m making – it’s just a different thing. And reading out loud, with the energy of breath physically passing through your body, just ads something else to the language, that’s all. And the rhythms of writing often take me be surprise. Part of the joy is that you’re in here for a long time, y’know, for maybe 7 hours a day or something, and I live that, because after a while the whole shrinks away and you’re just in this little cubicle, you and this book. And the very fact of the sort of discipline of it, and the time that it takes; you get completely immersed.

Discipline

NJ: Diane, as Juliet says, reading this audio book will be a couple of 7 or 8 hour days of concentrated work, and many hours of preparation before hand, but you writing the book in the first place is hundreds even thousands of hours of work, and you’re doing that on your own, too. Is it easy to find the necessary discipline to write it?

DS: I haven’t found the discipline of writing, yet! I think I must be one of the most indisciplined writers there is, but I am hoping to improve. In the early stages, the most difficult thing is actually separating out the strands, and being able to recognize which stories actually have that affinity, and which stories are going to connect, because sometimes you can live with a storyline in your mind, imagining that it’s going to be part of the next book, and you flesh it out, and those characters become real to you, and you understand the insides of their heads; you know what their desires and their fears are, and then you reach a point where structurally you look at it and you think, ‘Oh! Actually, I don’t think that works.’ And then you, you just have to lose them, and cut them adrift, and it’s quite painful. It’s not so much, what I’ve heard other writers talk about, y’know, the difficulty when they’ve put time and they’ve created their text, of then saying, ‘No, that has to go. We have to edit it out.’ It’s actually the pain of having, sort of, half brought into the world a person, and then having to tell them to go away again.

Immersion

NJ: Juliet, do you find the characters invade your life as much in your kind of work.

JS: Oh often. Often on stage, and reading. I mean perhaps on stage more, because you’re inhabiting someone more fully, but yes, and I completely identify with what Diane just said about, y’know, you live with these people for a while and the when you have to let them go, either ‘cos you’ve finished the book, or you’ve finished doing the play, or the film, y’know, it is a kind of strange bereavement, and you wake up thinking, ‘There’s somebody missing. Oh, yeah.’ And some of them never quite go away. They go on jumping around in your bloodstream quite irritatingly for years [laughs]. You were asking about are we sort of losing our relationship to storytelling because of the media and screens. I mean, that is a worry with children, but I keep thinking that there’s a really interesting ingredient in this book – I mean there are many – but one thing that really strikes me is that Vida Winter’s argument, y’know, that what is a life, anyway? I mean it’s much better to make up the stories about yourself than to tell the truth. And I’ve increasingly realized, as I get older, that the story of your own life, which would appear to be objective, biographical reality – there’s no such thing. You go home at the end of the day, you tell you loved ones the story of your day; we tell stories all the time. We may not think of them as stories, but we are involved in the process of narrative and describing our lives in story form all the time.

Beginnings

DS: Absolutely! Absolutely. I have always been fascinated with the fact that no one can remember their earliest years, and that, y’know, what it boils down to is that the person that I once was is a person I don’t know, is a person I have no access to via my memories, and all I know of that person is what other people have told me. And I think actually that it’s rather like you wake up to your life, in the same way that a person arrives late at a play, and has to figure out what must have happened earlier from what’s going on now. And it does seem to me that the fact that none of us really knows the beginning – that’s when we have to start the process of construction. We have to invent. In my book, my characters don’t always have someone to tell them that beginning, and I’m fascinated in that, in itself; but even those who do, the beginnings of our stories are always second hand. And then because we’re young, we pick up bits from other people. And it is interesting how children are fascinated by stories of the time before they can remember and that in itself fascinated me, and the way that you then build on it. You remember what you choose to remember; you embroider; you’re selective; and you begin to construct a narrative for yourself, and that process of construction goes on for ever and ever.

JS: I think the beginning of your life is a sort of fog; it’s a soup, out of which some semi quasi-fictional incidents then start to emerge into your consciousness – for me, anyway – and maybe the panic is to do with identity. In some way the panic grips the characters in this book…

DS: Yes.

JS: …that they don’t know where they come from.

DS: Yes.

JS: We do. We know, biologically, where we came from, and y’know, socially, and economically, and all the rest of it; but then there’s a sense in which we don’t know where we came from, and we don’t know what the first act was, and, as you say, we’re dependent on other people to tell us – and we know how unreliable that is. And when my children now ask me – endlessly! They love asking questions about when they were born, or their very first weeks or months, or what they did or how they were as babies, and I struggle to remember but they’re fascinated with it. Even my 5 year old – though only 5 – is still very preoccupied with the idea of his own beginnings. So it’s obviously something that we start trying to hold on to quite early on, and then we build that into the fiction of our lives.

NJ: So what you’re really both saying is that we can never tell what’s true and what isn’t?

DS: Yes. And that is very much what The Thirteenth Tale is about.

NJ: Juliet, Diane - thank you very much.