“You can not combine memoir with fiction!”: Sylvia Brownrigg in conversation with Sarah Stone about The Whole Staggering Mystery: A Story of Fathers Lost and Found
Sylvia Brownrigg, the Northern California Book Award and Lambda Literary Award–winning author of seven works of fiction, is also a critic and book reviewer, including for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Guardian (UK), the Times (of London) and in journals such as the Believer Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the New Statesman and the Times Literary Supplement. She has thought very deeply about how books are made and developed a brilliant, empathic, curious approach to characters. Here she talks about family, writing in hybrid forms, and the writing of her new book The Whole Staggering Mystery: A Story of Fathers Lost and Found (Counterpoint Press). This beautiful hybrid memoir brings together multiple lives and contains a mysterious long-lost package, family secrets, a possible suicide, and British aristocrats, including Sylvia’s father, a baronet who lived a far from ordinary American life on a California ranch. In this engrossing, surprising book, Sylvia brings together one of the great pleasures of memoir—giving us a deeply thought-out version of real-life people and events—and one of the great pleasures of fiction—allowing us to sink deeply into other lives. Sylvia and Sarah Stone have been friends for a number of years, and this conversation began over dinner and then continued through an exchange of emails.
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Q: What was the first seed of The Whole Staggering Mystery for you, and when did you know you had to write it?
Since the book itself changed shape over the time I was writing it, there are several distinct origin stories for the Mystery.
After 2016, when my brother and I opened the package that contained a trove of material about my grandfather Gawen Brownrigg, I certainly began to imagine a novel based on his life and work (tempting, as Gawen himself was a novelist). I had discovered that my grandfather spent a year studying at Oxford, a city I grew up in and knew well, so the novel’s beginnings would be there; and I had new details about his life in Nairobi and intended to expand on them and build out a plot more satisfying than his own shortened life permitted.
Meanwhile, I would tell people the story of this long-lost package in that Los Angeles basement, and how long it took to surface. Any writer, or for that matter reader, who heard me tell this story always said to me, “Well there’s your next book! It practically writes itself!”
I’m here to say that the book did not, in practice, write itself. (Must learn that trick.) I had to decide how to fold my telling of the discovery of the package and its contents in with the discoveries themselves, in other words the stories about my fragmented family, secretive father, and the reverberating effects not just of divorce, but of a mother holding important truths back from her own son.
Q: How did you move from writing about Gawen to making this into “A Story of Fathers Lost and Found”?
It soon became clear that I did not want to write about Gawen without also writing about my father, Nick, as I felt that the two men, wildly different though they apparently were in geography, circumstance, and lifestyle… nonetheless illuminated each other’s characters, and lives. In the course of my father’s last extended illness, and after he died in September 2018, I channeled much of the grief over that loss into writing stories about my childhood, our occasional visits to the wild, beautiful ranch where he lived, and the man I gradually came to know later in my adult life.
Q: You’ve created such a remarkable hybrid of memoir, biography, and historical fiction, with so much empathy and wit. What was the process that led you to this mixture of forms?
In brief: trial and error!
Writing about my dad and also my grandfather meant from the start that there would have to be a mixture of memoir about my dad, the man I knew, and biography or essay, about a man I never met, my grandfather, who died in 1938. And from early on, I wanted to explore the world my grandfather came from, a privileged corner of England in the early 30s, as well as the one he traveled to when he sailed to Mombasa in 1937, Britain’s troubled colonial venture in Kenya.
When it came to capturing the character of my dad, I discovered I could only be free enough to convey his colorful and complicated character if I created fiction for him to inhabit. Combining stories about Nick with the memoir form initially seemed bold, or risky, though as I have widened my own reading of ‘hybrid memoirs’—it does seem to have become its own mini genre—I came to see that many other writers create their own weave, in an effort to get at what is truest in their own memories, or in the history they are trying to recreate.
For a long time I remained wedded to the idea that I would write about Gawen more essayistically, perhaps including long quotations from his own mother’s writing about him. However, that eventually seemed too static, and I could not get fully comfortable with the all-knowing voice that seemed required to tell the entirety of Gawen’s story in an objective, historical form. It turns out that I am not a biographer!—though this writing process has only deepened my great respect for my friends who work in that form.
So, at a point when I had thought the book was complete, on a long walk one day I had the idea to bring Gawen to life in the same way I had with my dad: namely, by writing short stories. By that point, I was working with the great editor Jack Shoemaker on the book, and Jack’s encouragement of that idea was liberating, and frankly a godsend. I knew the events of Gawen’s life pretty deeply in my bones at that point, so turning what I knew into historical fiction came more easily, freeing me to bring his world to life in a way that I hope has more vividness and humanness in it than I had managed when I was constrained by the tones of nonfiction.
All of that said, for the passages about my own childhood, and as well the period leading up to my father’s death, writing memoir seemed the authentic and right frame for the telling.
About 5 years ago I was driving to a reading event with a writer friend and chatting about my ideas for this book, and she told me definitively, “You can not combine memoir with fiction!” This was a disappointing and stern piece of advice, as I had already begun to wonder if that would prove the best way to combine my father’s and grandfather’s stories. But she did begrudgingly add: “Still, if you want to read a book where someone pulls it off, find The View from Castle Rock by Alice Munro.”
I did seek out and read this wonderful book, and while acknowledging that it is by the great Alice Munro, who can do no wrong and could probably rewrite the phone book in a compelling way, I can say that I learned from the way she wrote her family stories in this book. Some are historical, and some are fictional retellings, and together…they work, beautifully.
Q: How did you choose the different people you would inhabit for the short stories in Gawen’s section, and how did you find the balance between historical accuracy, real documents, and imagination?
Perhaps the most unexpected of those four characters is Claude Anderson, the managing director of the newspaper where Gawen worked, and so his ultimate boss. After three years or so of reading about Gawen, and his death, and his mother’s urgent letters to Anderson trying to get him to persuade a Nairobi tribunal that her son had not died by suicide…I started wondering what it was like to be him—Anderson—trying to deal, tactfully, with this grieving mother thousands of miles away in relation to an employee of his—when he did after all have to keep doing his job, and running his newspaper. And I got excited and interested by the thought of looking at a possible suicide through a more mundane lens, almost—some of the less expected ways an unexpected death troubles and changes the people around someone. By the time I was writing that story I had also read so much about Nairobi in the 1930s that I felt able to imagine it, to color the world of Anderson, about whom I had also read a lot. He was, in himself, an interesting colonial figure and quite distinct from the sort of badly-behaved aristocratic Brits people like to write about. That made him more appealing to me, as well.
So that is one answer. Another answer is: after all this reading, I felt I had to and wanted to write about Beatrice, Gawen’s mother. In some ways I feel I could have written a whole novel about her—who knows, maybe one day I still will. But the essence of her life is work, duty—and loss. And so I distilled that into one story. Before I wrote about her, I walked a lot in the area of London where she lived during the war, Westminster, and where she was living when she put together the scrapbook of memories and clips about her late son. I sat at an evensong service at Westminster Abbey, as she does in the story. The evening I went there, the honored guests at the service were ministers from Kenya, which just seemed the kind of coincidence that underlined how right it was that I was there.
Choosing John Burnham for the last story in that section was another interesting adventure, as he was the husband of my grandmother’s she spoke the least about. This freed me up to imagine him, and also to imagine my father as a child, and there was something poignant for me in creating that story, and going to that moment of revelation of Gawen’s death to his ex-wife, and his young son—a death that had such profound effect on them both.
Q: What can you tell us about the connections between your grandfather’s novel and your own work and life?
I describe in the book a kind of “cosmic joke” linking us. When my grandfather was a young married man—twenty-one years old, with an infant son (my father) born in California—he wrote his first novel, called Star Against Star (published in 1935). The novel was a love story… about two women. I first read it when I was twenty-one, having not been aware of it until then.
This was an unusual and highly controversial subject at the time, so soon after Radclyffe Hall’s iconic lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness (1928) had been banned for “obscenity,” all copies ordered to be destroyed. My grandfather would have been aware of this case—his own Paris publisher also took on The Well of Loneliness after the ban— but I can never know what drew him to imagine these two women, one a glamorous older writer who falls in love with a distractingly beautiful younger woman.
I did not deliberately draw on my grandfather’s work when I wrote Pages for You, an intense story of first love between two women and probably still my best-known novel. (My sequel, Pages for Her, was published in 2017.) I did draw on my own life. It’s not an autobiographical work, the character Anne is an invention, but young exploring Flannery is similar to myself at that age—seventeen, at college, discovering love and sex and intellectual life all at once.
My grandfather was not in my awareness when I began my career. I did not consider him an especially good novelist—he described people well, but had a tendency toward melodrama and a glib flippancy in his characters that was probably modeled on Waugh without being as witty—and so I was eager to forge my own literary path. But when an English bibliographer came to interview me in 2002 about Gawen Brownrigg, he pointed out the synchronicity between our two novels, and I realized that my own might have been a heartfelt response, seventy years later, to Gawen’s early, bold, literary call.
Q: What are some of the other memoirs or biographies (or novels!), that serve as touchstones or inspiration for you in the project of this book?
There is a section at the end of the book called “Readings,” which is not a bibliography as such but does give an idea of the works of British writers in the 30s, histories of British colonial Kenya, and some California writings that helped inform my writing along the way. I read quite a lot of Evelyn Waugh, and also Anthony Powell, to get a sense of the world my grandfather was a part of, but also the fiction of Vita Sackville-West, since she was a friend of my grandfather’s and gave him literary advice.
Other books that were important to me in the course of the writing, touched on different elements of the story: Yiyun Li’s remarkable book Where Reasons End: A Novel helped me think through the excruciating situation of a mother who loses a son to suicide; looking again at Blake Morrison’s And When Did You Last See Your Father? showed me a way of capturing an impossible and charismatic father, as well as the sadness of the time when that father fades. I think of many contemporary writers of close-hewn autobiographical fiction, anyone from Karl Ove Knausgaard to Elena Ferrante, as writers who have beautifully expressed the never-out-of-date fact that our childhoods mark us, and shape us, and are often the source of the deepest, strangest truths we know.
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Sylvia Brownrigg is the author of seven acclaimed books of fiction: five novels, including the Pages for You series and The Delivery Room, two volumes of short stories, and a story for middle-grade readers, Kepler’s Dream, which won a Mountain Prize for best children’s book and was turned into a feature film starring Holland Taylor and Kelly Lynch. Sylvia’s works have been included in the New York Times’ and Los Angeles Times’ lists of notable fictions and have been translated into several languages, and she has won a Lambda Literary Award. Her stories have been read as part of NPR’s Selected Shorts series and on BBC Radio 4. Sylvia was on the board of Narrative Magazine, has been involved with the Bay Area Book Festival, and has served on Oxfam America’s Leadership Council since 2008. Sylvia has a son and daughter, as well as a stepson. She lives with her family in Berkeley, and continues to spend time in London.
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Sarah Stone is the author or coauthor of four books, including the novel Hungry Ghost Theater and (with Ron Nyren) Deepening Fiction: A Practical Guide for Intermediate and Advanced Writers.