There would be no strolling around the streets where history had taken place, taking in the atmosphere, learning first-hand. I worked solidly through January and February, looking forward to a residency in Paris planned for March, from which I would travel to the town itself.īut as the news started to roll in, and my residency was cancelled, I realized the process of writing from fact was going to go much differently to how I had imagined it.
Sometimes I wonder if it would have been dispelled, veered so far into something else, if it hadn’t been for the circumstances in which it was written. This complacency- it’s a story pretty much written already, we know how it goes-was quickly dispelled. Part of the frustration and fun of writing is the not-knowing until the words are on the page whether they will bear weight, ring true. This time I was working from fact, from a kind of framework, or at least I believed I was. This time, I told myself, I wouldn’t have to do so. I can’t help but feel there is a nobility in exhaustive research.
The tragedy had taken hold of me ever since I had happened upon the story, due to its strangeness, and due to the theories behind its cause. One night during the summer of 1951 in the town of Pont St-Esprit, 250 inhabitants found themselves struck by terrible hallucinations seven died, while more were committed to asylums. My previous two novels had tended towards the speculative, but this time I was working from the seed of a fact-a real-life case of a mass poisoning in South France-and so branching out, technically, into historical fiction. I have always loved that moment, the plunging into possibility, and this time I felt an extra edge of excitement, because I was striking out into what felt like vaguely uncharted territory. It was a day that felt like a small miracle, clear blue sky and freshness, and I went afterwards to a nearby cafe and sat and wrote the first sentence of what would become Cursed Bread. I was the only one there for quite some time, observing small and perfectly-formed ceramic sculptures. It was still as a cathedral, bathed in white light. On January 2nd, 2020, with no idea what to come, I started off the year by taking a long bus into central London, and then walked around a small art gallery where you had to take your shoes off.
0 kommentar(er)
