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We were delighted that Linda Grant, author of the forthcoming novel The Story of the Forest, made some time to talk to us and share some of the inspiration behind the novel. The Story of the Forest is a new title in the SJP Lit imprint, created by Sarah Jessica Parker. It publishes November 12, and it is available to preorder now.
Linda Grant: At the beginning of the twentieth century, a young girl walks into a forest on the edge of the Baltic Sea. Who she meets there becomes the story of family history and legend.
LG: My inspiration was the many family stories I heard when I was growing up. My grandparents came from Poland at the time of the pogroms, planning to reach America but getting no further than Liverpool. When I was growing up, the city was the home of the Beatles (Paul and John lived in our neighbourhood). To the teenager I was then, the present had a far stronger hold than the old people who spoke with strange accents and talked of the place called ‘over there.’ There was little official documentation of their lives and an absence of paperwork. What they told me about the past seemed mythic, improbable, and always contradictory: one relative’s telling was not another’s. I worked out that what my family had was the ability to tell a good story, irrespective of the facts. I also learned from them that when you are a migrant or refugee you can’t afford to have too many scruples about telling the truth: ‘Always tell the authorities what they want to hear’ my parents advised me.
I also knew that that there was a shadow family somewhere behind the Iron Curtain, a parallel history of relatives who hadn’t got out and who may or may not have survived the Shoah. We were connected to a big history which extended across continents (some had made it to America). But we were also remaking ourselves, becoming definably more English with each generation until we could easily ‘pass.’ I wanted to show a family becoming more and more assimilated, until there is only the faintest connection left with where they had come from, from whom the events that took place before the First World War might as well have happened in a picture book of fairy tales.
LG: Ha! Good question. When I wrote The Clothes on their Backs which was published in 2008, I went to Budapest to take a look at the city my leading characters came from. Little of the novel was set there, but I needed to see the streets they walked through and feel the air and the atmosphere. This novel I started in February 2020 with the intention of spending some time in Riga, a city I’ve never been to and chose because, like Liverpool, it’s a seaport. Then the pandemic closed everything down tight, there was no going anywhere. I was reduced to a room, a window, a street. I had to do what my parents had done: embellish the truth with stories of my own devising.
By the time I was willing to risk travel again, the book was nearly finished, so I had had to rely on that dubious source, the Internet. This is fiction I was writing, after all. My mother had worked during the Second World War in the wages office of a munitions factory in Liverpool, so to give Mina a job, I googled munitions factories and found some fascinating material. Hope it’s all true.
I also used our own family documents, like the letter received after the war from an anonymous individual calling himself ‘Anti-Jew.’ A real treasure trove was a document detailing all the Jewish business on Brownlow Hill, the old Jewish quarter of Liverpool. A lot of the rest is family stories, and in the case of wicked uncle Itzak, I’ve relied on the master Ukrainian short-story writer Isaac Babel.
LG: I’m always nervous about prescribing what readers will take away from my work. They write to me, or leave a review on Amazon or Goodreads and it feels like an arrow aimed in the dark towards an unseen target. They will take whatever they get out of it and I could endlessly blame myself if I feel they miss the mark. But for this novel, I hope readers leave with Mina. I love the cover, which shows a young girl who, for the rest of her life, knows that something was promised that remains missing: a wildness and capriciousness that she hands on to her daughter, a curiosity she holds inside her about another, unknown life.
LG: I’ve just finished E.M. Forster’s Where Angels Fear to Tread. It was his first novel, published in 1905, and I’d assumed it would be an amusing social satire in a Tuscan setting, like A Room With A View, which was made into such an enjoyable film.. To my surprise the earlier work proved to be much darker. A widow travels to Italy for a year where she falls in love with a local boy, the son of a dentist, years younger than her. As her horrified English relatives predict, the cultural gap proves too vast, and it proves not to be a happy marriage. She dies in childbirth and her brother-in-law and sister-in-law, and a friend go to the (fictional) Tuscan town to persuade her widower to give up the baby so he can be brought up as an English gentleman. The novel centres on those who live life with uncomfortable, inappropriate passions and those who float through as a spectator, never fully engaging.
I think there is an element of Forster’s own feelings about his sexuality and all he kept hidden. The story telling takes some sharp, unexpected turns and I came away feeling it should be better known.
LG: I’m still playing around with beginnings, seeing which story has legs, stands up and wanders off holding my hand and grabbing me along with it. I can’t say anything more than that at this stage.
LG: When I was sixteen in the spring of 1967 and studying for GCE exams, my friend Viv would leave school and get the bus to the Picton Library in the centre of Liverpool and do our revision. The library, which opened in 1879, is circular in shape and modelled after the British Museum Reading Room. It was with a feeling of the weight of its magnificence that we raced through our studies, the rotunda shelves reached by iron ladders, then went into the ladies to change into our miniskirts and apply our makeup before heading off to the Philharmonic pub, the center of the poetry scene where we illegally drank alcohol. I’m grateful for both their influences.
