An interview with Anita Shreve

While American author Anita Shreve may have come to wider prominence in 1999 when her novel The Pilot's Wife was chosen for the Oprah Winfrey bookclub, she was already well established as a writer. Ten years earlier, with the publication of her debut novel Eden Close, she gave up a career in journalism to write fiction full-time. Since then Shreve's novels - including Bibliofemme book choice The Weight of Water - have been acclaimed by public and critics alike.

Her latest book is Light On Snow. It's a story of loss, grief and new beginnings that opens on a wintery New England evening when twelve-year-old Nicky Dillon and her father, Robert, make a shocking discovery in the snow. The abandoned newborn baby girl that they save from certain death becomes a catalyst enabling the Dillons to restart their own stalled lives. Anita Shreve was kind enough to answer some questions posed by the Historian about Light On Snow.

Light on Snow is narrated by the thirty-year-old Nicky Dillon looking back to events that happened when she was twelve. Why did you choose to filter events in this manner?
I chose to narrate Light on Snow through the eyes of Nicky Dillon at thirty looking back to the winter when she was twelve for two reasons: 1) the vocabulary and language of a twelve-year-old are too limiting; and 2) a thirty-year-old woman had an adult perspective on a childhood event, all of which makes for a much richer novel.

At the start of Light On Snow Nicky and her father save the life of an abandoned baby. But, as the reader gets to know these characters, it emerges that they have their own personal tragedy, something that happened at an earlier stage before the book opens. Why did you decide to start the story at that particular point?
I started the book with the scene in the woods because that was the image I had in my mind when I first conceived of the novel. I saw the scene very clearly - the father, the daughter, the snowy woods, hearing the first unusual cries in the silence. It was later that I began to imagine why this man and this girl had removed themselves from the world that I gave them that particularly tragic history.

You contrast Nicky's grief with that of her father. After two years she's ready to move on and welcome life in, while he is still frozen in time. Why do you think that he is unable to move beyond the loss of his wife and daughter?
I think that Robert's grief is more intense than Nicky's for several reasons: 1) He's lost a child, which I believe is the most painful loss imaginable. Nicky has lost a mother and a sister, but in the span of her lifetime, that event is already beginning to fade. She has her whole life ahead of her. Robert's memories would be more intense, as would his understanding of what exactly he has lost.

The abandoned child's mother, 19-year-old Charlotte, comes to the Dillon's house and is trapped there by a snowstorm. Nicky - anxious for female company and still mulling over the mystery of the baby - is glad and hopes that she will stay but Robert wants her to go away. Why doesn't he just turn her in?
Robert thinks about turning Charlotte in - and might have had the police chief been at the station when he went there - but he's ambivalent. He sees that Nicky has begun to come alive in Charlotte's presence; he's not sure it's the right thing to do; and I think he feels he needs to learn a bit more about what happened, which, in the end, he does.

The ending of Light On Snow comes all too soon, with just a tiny glimpse into Nicky's future life. Might Nicky be a character that you return to explore in another novel?
I've only used one character again in a novel - Thomas Janes in The Last Time They Met. I'm not sure I'll do it again, though I won't rule it out. Yes, I agree, that there's another novel there - about Nicky's life with her new blended family.

Read what the femmes had to say about The Weight of Water.

Also by Anita Shreve
The Last Time They Met