That's all from Marilynne!
Marilynne must dash to catch a flight. Thanks so much to her for leaving such thoughtful answers, and to everyone who sent in a question!
Join us next Tuesday on the Reading group, when we’ll announce our February author. A clue: she’s having a big birthday...
boguscoleman says:
Big, big fan. Thanks for many a fascinating evening with your books. When I first read Gilead, I had no idea that there would, or could, be another part to the story. My question is: did you? When you wrote Gilead, was Jack Boughton complete in your mind? I mean a more complete character, as we see him in Home? And if so, did that make writing Home easier in that you had this fully fleshed out character to inhabit and give more of a voice to? Or perhaps more difficult in that by returning to the events in Gilead you risked upsetting the beautiful and delicate balance achieved in that work?
'Historically the Midwest is among the most progressive regions in America'
Fazzoletti says:
I am afraid my question is just a pretext, so I can also say what a huge fan I am (one of the couple hundred you have in Germany); your books, especially Gilead and your essays, have had a massive impact on my ideas and beliefs.
I wonder, though, if writing about the Midwest in the 50s is not some kind of escapism - have you, so to speak, created your very own Midwest of the mind because the real Midwest these days is so much harder to love? Or to put it another way: can you imagine writing a novel set in present-day Iowa or Illinois?
Guardian contributor Gilead is about people living in the aftermath of a great upheaval, the Civil War. And after that the depression and the other wars. All these had an enormous impact on the Midwest. The idea that the region is or was any kind of still center is really a cliche. Granted that, like many parts of the country, its politics is regrettable now, historically it is among the most progressive regions. It is so soon forgotten that Barack Obama was a senator from Illinois who won the caucuses and two elections in Iowa.
'Trump is trouble we can hope to weather. And I think we will learn to take better care of our democracy'
mcdz says:
Hello! Really love all of your books! I listened again today to your conversation with Barack Obama. It was interesting to hear it again in light of the current political and cultural situation in America. Taking one point in particular, I was struck by your comment that, in earlier times, the president was the symbolic achievement of democracy, that we respect this personification of a democratic culture. Also, that we cannot take it for granted. It is a made thing, that we remake continuously.
My question would be how to reconcile that idea, that respect, with the current president. Is he really the personification of our modern perception of a democratic culture? Or is this what we are rewarded with when we take our democratic culture for granted?
(And if you can you tell me what the secret is to finishing writing a novel, I would be ever so grateful. (It’s just to effing get on with it, isn’t it? Argh.)) Thank you!
Guardian contributor Trump is a fluke. The electoral college trumped the popular vote. He illuminates by starkest contrast the ideal, even the typical, president. He is trouble we can hope to weather. And I think we will learn to take better care of our democracy.
As for endings--don't put pressure on yourself. A bad solution is no solution. Think about other things, and trust your order-making, estheticizing mind to be working when you are not aware.
ID75577 ID75577 says:
I am your Hellenic Orthodox Christian Common Reader ... I have always been fond of Unorthodox, Underground Spirits, like Lila or Jack. When & what was Last Temptation?
Guardian contributor I have no orthodoxy to support this speculation. But I suspect that Christ's last temptation was to make the cup pass away, to evade death and stay on in the world he so clearly hated to leave,
'Quiet is very beautiful to me, the medium of everything that matters'
rubyfruit12 says:
To me, your books have a remarkable thread of quietness running through them. I was wondering how you think you achieve this and if you ever struggle to maintain confidence in the impetus that this quiet contains, both as a writer and in its later transmission to the reader.
Your books and essays, your ability for conceptualisation and articulate political argument, stay with me, for which I thank you hugely.
Guardian contributor I just write what I want to write. Quiet is very beautiful to me, the medium of everything that matters. I'm grateful for the patience of my readers, certainly. But the fact is that a novel takes over a writer's life for literal years. What I write, day by day and word by word, is much of my felt life. It would be a terrible capitulation to give up my explorations of quiet because of anxiety about the receptiveness of readers. I have found that readers are very much to be trusted.
'To be human is a very high and very complicated privilege'
nicandrach88 asks:
Marilynne - Gilead is the book that brought me back to the world of reading after many years in lost in the book ‘doldrums’. So firstly I would like to thank you for that.
When I read your books I feel that you are not only asking me to observe and question your characters, their beliefs, prejudices and worries but also to do the same with my life too.
Is this your intention? Do you want the reader to look into their own world, at their own outlook and behaviour, whilst travelling through the world you have created with your books?
Guardian contributor I write a book because there is a voice in my mind, a burden of narrative. Of course I am pleased that these voices interest other people, too. When I write I am always aware that perception is beautiful, and that to be human is a very high and very complicated privilege. I want my fiction to be true, and to me these are very essential truths.
Swelter has been reading Housekeeping and has two questions about it:
1.) Did you ever consider having a map of Fingerbone included in the novel? I found myself wondering if certain scenes were hallucinatory because, though most descriptions seemed to place the town on the lake’s eastern shore, at one point when Ruth and Lucille leave town, “We walked north, with the lake on our right hand,” which makes it seem the town is on the western shore. (I consulted a map of Sandpoint, ID to have a mental picture of Fingerbone’s orientation in relation to the lake).
2.) Sylvie’s behaviours, especially the hoarding and extended mental absences seemed to me to indicate definite mental health problems, serious enough that the townspeople’s intervention appeared justified. Did you intend the reader to see her as mentally ill to the extent the she is not fully responsible for her actions, or as an eccentric in full control of her actions? Or was this intended to be ambiguous?
Guardian contributor I go to fiction to recuse myself from the kinds of judgments that culture and society routinely make. I hope Sylvie can be seen as Sylvie, with whatever thoughts and associations she brings. I think of fiction as more like painting than like reportage.
Ruthie and i have some things in common, including, from time to time, imprecision.
ReneCoffey asks:
Do you think the depth of horror, the alienation of consciousness, the concealment and denial that Edgar Allen Poe faced, explored and evoked is exceeded by the reality of Sellafield?
Guardian contributor Yes. And by much else that is done to wound this glorious planet.
Marilynne wrote about the environmental disaster at Sellafield in her 1989 non-fiction, Mother Country (which you can read a little about here).
'I like classical theology, the kind that seems difficult to people who are not yet accustomed to literature of this kind'
behalla93 says:
Dear Mrs. Robinson - first, thank you so much for your books. They have brought me great comfort and pleasure in some dark moments. I grew up in a fairly atheist country and therefore religion as such was not part of my formal education. I am hoping to re-read Gilead soon. What religious texts, or even books about religion, would you recommend to a reader that wants to gain the most understanding out of your books?
Guardian contributor The English Puritans i mention in some of my essays are often wonderful, very gracious in their expressions of Christianity. John Flavel is an example. I know this is not their reputation, but one only needs to look at what they wrote. I like classical theology, the kind that seems difficult to people who are not yet accustomed to literature of this kind--Calvin, Edwards, Barth. I have read so many books and heard so many sermons that it is hard for me to identify particular influences, after the Bible itself.
'In the US we have an administration and majority party that seems actively hostile to books and ideas ... and a lucid, fervent articulation of humane values in opposition to them'
Inionanteaglais starts off:
Ms. Robinson, thank you for the gift of your writing. You observe in Absence of Mind that intellectuals renowned in their time made significant contributions to the worst of modern history. I am wondering if you consider that we have any contemporary equivalents to the intellectuals of the late 19th-early 20th centuries, who they might be, and whether there is any hope that we may look back on our period in history with any sense of having made significant contributions to the intellectual tradition?
Guardian contributor In fact, and ironically, I think the intellectual conversation now is simply so vast that it is hard to have a clear sense of it. Over time winnowing will occur that might identify the work of real value as opposed to the voices that are noticed on other grounds than their merit and their integrity. I don't feel that I know what we we will leave to history. In this country, as the world knows, we have an administration and majority party that seems actively hostile to books and ideas. on the other hand, we have a lucid, fervent articulation of humane values in opposition to them. Either could be an important part of our legacy.
Marilynne is with us now!
Thank you to Marilynne for joining us from New York. She’s ready to answer your questions, so if you haven’t posted one yet, please do!
Join us for a webchat with Marilynne Robinson on Friday 26 January
Marilynne Robinson is one of the most critically acclaimed living writers – and surely among the most fervently loved. She’s been winning passionate admirers since 1980, when her first novel Housekeeping was announced to the world in an extraordinary New York Times review, when Anatole Broyard declared:
“It’s as if, in writing it, she broke through the ordinary human condition with all its dissatisfactions, and achieved a kind of transfiguration … Though her ambition is tall, she remains down to earth, where the best novels happen.”
Housekeeping was an instant classic and was spoken about with reverence long after its original publication. Which was perhaps just as well, because Robinson didn’t publish another novel until 2004. But Gilead was worth the wait: our reading group novel won the Pulitzer prize and the US National Book Critics Circle award for fiction.
Equally well regarded are her two more recent novels, which form a trilogy with Gilead: Home, which won the 2009 Orange prize, and Lila, which secured Robinson a second National Book Critics Circle award in 2014.
Although there was a 24-year gap between her first and second novels, Robinson remained a productive author of non-fiction. In 1989, she published Mother Country: Britain, the Welfare State, and Nuclear Pollution, an investigation of the Sellafield nuclear reprocessing plant. Ten years later there came The Death of Adam, a collection of essays on topics such as Darwinism, Calvin and Nietzsche. She has also published the collections of lectures and essays Absence of Mind (2010), When I Was a Child I Read Books (2012), and The Givenness of Things (2015).
For 25 years, until last spring, she also taught creative writing at the venerable Iowa Writers’ Workshop, so she might have some useful tips for anyone struggling with their own manuscript.
In 2016, Time magazine included her in its list of the 100 most influential people. So we’re exceedingly lucky to have her with us at 3pm (GMT) on Friday 26 January – but do get your questions in early below.
These characters stayed in my mind so strongly that I gave them their own books, I wanted a better look at them, myself.