In your story “Old Babes in the Wood,” two elderly sisters spend time at a family cottage by a lake—a place they’ve been visiting since their father built it when they were children. Did you have a particular cottage in mind while writing this?
Yes, it’s a real place, or places. I’ve spent a lot of time in various locations in the northern boreal forest, and, like the cabin in the story, they all had sand and hand pumps. These were not originally summer cottages, however. My family lived in the boreal forest for two-thirds of every year, from before ice breakup until snowfall and freeze-up. My father was, at that time, a field biologist, and these places were isolated and did not have electricity. The structures themselves were built with hand tools.
What made you choose this place as a prism through which to look back at these women’s lives?
Places choose you, as a rule. I find it difficult to write about places I haven’t actually seen or lived in.
Is the cottage, in a sense, haunted by Nell and Lizzie’s earlier lives? Is it a repository for their memories?
All houses/locations lived in for long stretches of time are repositories for memories. Houses have been used to diagram the Freudian psyche, with the cellar being the unconscious id and the attic being the superego. I wonder what Freud would have done with a structure that lacks both. “Freud in the North Woods”: now that would be a story! “But there is no sofa!” I think he would have found it too primitive. And are ghosts always the return of the repressed? Sometimes, surely, they are the unrepressed!
Nell has recently lost her husband. There’s a devastating passage in the story about her family’s methods for coping with grief: “My heart is broken, Nell thinks. But in our family, we don’t say, ‘My heart is broken.’ We say, ‘Are there any cookies?’ One must eat. One must keep busy. One must distract oneself.” Is this, to your mind, emotional repression or a healthy way of getting through loss?
Neither. It’s just culturally accurate; that is, it’s not a recipe, it’s a description. Different cultures have very different ways of coping with loss. In some, the dead are never mentioned; in others, people scream and tear their hair; in others, the loved one is buried under the floor. We all have rituals to help us through. . . . It goes way back.
The sisters’ manner of aging and of coping with the challenges of the cottage is quite different from their brother Robbie’s. He seems somewhat disdainful of them, telling them not to touch things until he gets there, and so on. Is this a lifelong dynamic among these siblings?
I wouldn’t say Robbie is disdainful. He is precise. And has his own ways of doing things. He’s an older brother. He does think the sisters are funny, some of the time, but they think he’s funny, as well. That’s families.
Do you have any favorite novels or stories about aging?
Oh, lots. Margaret Laurence, “The Stone Angel.” Some of Alice Munro’s stories, such as “The Bear Came Over the Mountain.” “Beowulf,” Part II (the dragon episode). “The Lord of the Rings,” last episode (Frodo departs). Muriel Spark, “Memento Mori.” Molly Keane, “Good Behaviour.” Edith Wharton has a bunch of stories along these lines. And on and on. There are a lot. Well, why shouldn’t there be? It’s a stage of life: see Shakespeare’s seven-ages speech (schoolboy to dotard).
Another question you could ask: Why get rid of mice? (Hantavirus.) And: Does the swing-top garbage-pail method work? (Yes.)
