The Forgotten Hours(95)
Q&A WITH KATRIN SCHUMANN, THE FORGOTTEN HOURS
Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich is the award-winning author of The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir, a book about how the story of one crime was constructed—but also about how we grapple with our own personal histories. It tackles questions on the nature of forgiveness and whether a single narrative can ever really contain something as definitive as the truth. Winner of the Chautauqua Prize, it was named one of the best books of the year by Entertainment Weekly, Audible.com, Bustle, Book Riot, the Times of London, and the Guardian. The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, and Yaddo, as well as a Rona Jaffe Award, Marzano-Lesnevich lives in Portland, Maine, where she teaches at Bowdoin.
AML: The Forgotten Hours feels almost astonishingly contemporary, raising questions of consent, power differentials in sex, and #MeToo. Yet, of course, you must have begun writing the book a long time ago! How long did you work on it, and how did the idea come to you?
KS: The characters were in my head for years before I found my way into this story. It took a while to work out how to unfold the narrative so that it felt honest and nuanced and conveyed the turmoil that these kinds of cases can cause. It was incredibly important to me that I do justice to this story, and it was a struggle at times. Once I found the voice and rhythm of the narrative, the structure fell into place, and the book began to take on a life of its own. That was when I started to have fun with it on a sentence-by-sentence level and when I felt I’d actually succeeded in writing the book I set out to write.
As for the idea, in some ways, Katie is a standin for me. I had two close friends become embroiled in legal proceedings around separate assault and consent issues—each on polar-opposite ends of the spectrum. I saw with my own eyes what happens to the accused and the accuser. I felt immense empathy for everyone involved—and it sent me into a total tailspin. I wanted to capture that confusion.
AML: Are you surprised to find the book so urgently relevant?
KS: The conundrums around sex and consent aren’t new—it’s a problem women have been trying to get to the bottom of for centuries, but no one really wanted to hear them out. It upsets our way of seeing the world. What’s astonishing is that now, finally, it’s becoming something both men and women can talk about, and people are actively listening.
There is such shame for girls and women around this topic, so much judgment, so many biases and assumptions. And a lot of well-meaning men have had their heads in the sand. The fact that my book is coming out now seems like a real gift, because it will get people of all ages thinking more deeply and talking more openly—and those are healing conversations.
AML: Part of what makes the book feel so real, I think, is how complex every character’s actions and motivations are. John’s not a simple villain—and Katie is forced to reexamine her feelings about her former best friend, Lulu, and even her own mother, Charlie. Was the complexity of how the reader would view the characters something you were conscious of as you were writing?
KS: Yes, that’s at the very heart of the book! A friend who suffered abuse once told me, “It’s possible for people to be two things at once: kind and cruel.” Of course, it works the other way around too: “good” people are not all good; they make mistakes.
We want to see the world as black and white and fit people into silos—it makes us feel as though we have some sort of control over what happens to us (and it informs the choices we make). But the truth is that life isn’t like that. It’s far more complicated. This is something I experienced myself, and I spent years feeling torn about my loyalties. When I was able to make better sense of that bewilderment, it was an enormous turning point for me.
AML: You’ve described feeling torn, and the relationships in this book feel so true to life in that way too—webs of conflicting loyalties, emotional entanglements, and histories. As a writer, I was struck by the high-wire act you did of pairing a complicated plot with intimate, nuanced portrayals of each of the characters. How did you approach that balance, and what books were inspirations to you along the way?
KS: I think the characters just felt really real to me. We all have different versions of history. We may share the same experiences, but we all feel them differently. So I took that idea and looked at it closely. I chose a single, limited point of view so that readers could form their own opinions about how “truth” is constructed. Also, a lot of editing and rewriting went into this book. It went through many drafts, and each time I thought deeply about human motivation and desire.
I tend to read very intensely and quite widely while I write, to remind myself of what writers can achieve and to figure out what my own goals are in terms of tone and story. Tim Johnston’s novel Descent was inspiring, because I so admire the fast-moving story line and the beautiful writing. Same with Carol Anshaw’s Carry the One, which does a stellar job of conveying her characters’ complexities and growth. British writers like Tessa Hadley (The Past) manage to convey an interiority that never veers into melodrama. And then other books like The Goldfinch, by Donna Tartt, or Beautiful Ruins, by Jess Walter, remind me to have fun, to take risks. They inspire me to play more with the words and ideas and characters and not be so uptight. That’s always a good reminder for us writers!
AML: It’s interesting, too, that you’ve mentioned control in thinking about characters’ motivations. Different characters in the book have different ways of trying to feel control over the complicated, difficult situations in which they suddenly find themselves. Katie’s mother distances herself from her family, including from her own children, in a way that’s very painful to Katie. Even Charlie’s father, Katie’s grandfather, Grumpy, separates himself. Yet Katie herself chooses a very different way of trying to regain her sense of control. She chooses not distance but kind of an extreme closeness to her father. She chooses to believe him absolutely. In a way she chooses him over everyone else, including even her best friend. It’s only as her trust in her father’s denials begins to crack that she starts to look into the case and revisit her memories and realize she may have been wrong. Did you know from the start of writing that you’d have her dig into the case?