emma donoghue:thank you very much. it's a thrill to be here. your smoothies arefantastic i'm going to read just a couple ofpages from this, because what i really love is answeringquestions and chatting, so i don't wantto read too long. but on the other hand,i love giving readings, so i couldn't quitedo without that. i wrote "frog music"because about 15 years ago i
came across a particularunsolved murder. and there's a lot of unsolvedmurders in the world, you can't worryabout them too much, but this particular onewas about 27 year old frog catcher you made her livingcollecting sacks of live frogs and delivering them tosan francisco's chinese and french restaurants. and to do thisshe wore trousers, and that means she gotarrested roughly once
a month under sanfrancisco's little known anti cross-dressing laws. so she's the kindof character who, if you dropped her on thestreets of san francisco now, she wouldn't turn a--nobody would bat an eyelid. that's the metaphori'm looking for. but in 1876, herattitude towards gender, her playful, individualistic, doyour own thing kind of attitude was unprecedented.
she never disguisedherself as a man, she just swaggered around townin her pants and her pistol, which in fact she'd taken outon a kind of hired purchase from a pawn broker. it didn't even belong to her. and somebody shot herthrough a window at 27. and the other woman in theroom who emerged unscathed was this french eroticdancer called blanche beunon i'm going to read you alittle scene where blanche
is she's performing on stage atthe house of mirrors bordello. here we go. "blanche goes to standoutside the stage door, recognizing the final thumpsof fabienne's flamenco skipping rope act. the piano has been tuned,which is some relief to her. blanche goes over herroutines in her head, trying to block out thesound of madame's hushed, thrilling voice asshe warms the crowd up
for the enigmaticblanche le danseuse. blanche opens the stagedoor a crack to check whether the lights have gonelow, and she waits for silence. the excited battleof the audience dies away in the near dark. blanche walks outonto the stage, as formal as some courtier,and a storm of applause rises when the lights flare up. blanche avertsher face from them
until the cheering subsides. she makes a rapid scanof the whole room. not a single redvelvet chair is empty. the tune is a nervoustarantella, slow at first, and then it starts tohurry, and blanche twitches. this one's a simple routine,no intricate steps to remember or fleets offlexibility to perform. blanche simply pretendsthere's something in her clothes, flea, spider,skeeter, bee, wasp, it really
doesn't matter as long as sheimagines it vividly enough. and the music is halfthe trick of this one. stop and start,itchily agitated, then more, and more maddenedas the invisible parasite starts to bite. madame has always advertisedblanche the lively flea as having the specialityof the tarantella straight from gayparis, and in june when some girl overon california street
started doing the dance, madamesent a bouncer over to put paid to that. but the fact is, blanchepicked the gist of this act up from another show girlwho spent only a few weeks at the house of mirrorsbefore heading off to chicago. the only difference isthat blanche plays it for earnest, not for laughs. tonight, what shepictures up her skirts is one of those viciousmosquitoes from san miguel
station. so she flinches, twists,spins around on herself. her fingers pursue theinvisible invader up her gloves, down her neck, underher sweeping black hem. every customer inthe house must be able to imaginewhere the bug has got to, every fold and crevice. the tarantella is drivingblanche out of her mind now, and she's peeling her glovesoff and flinging them away
towards the audience. her own hands molestingher, plunging up her skirt, raking her thighs,clawing at her skin as if she wants to shed it. she's not even wearingflesh colored tights tonight because she hasbroken with protocol, and her pale flawlesslegs are bare, and her eyes are terrified. she wrenches off thelittle bolero jacket,
hearing a seam rip. she fights her hair in it's[inaudible] till it falls down. she tears the black satinbodice open down the middle, and fake pearls explode ontothe boards of the little stage. some of the men in theaudience look more alarmed than aroused, itoccurs to blanch, but does she givea good goddamn? she goes into onelast fit of frenzy and collapses in themiddle of the stage.
woo hoo! men are throwing up theirhats and catching them, roaring blanche,blanche, blanche! she waits for theclamor to die away. do they like her like this,laid low, hair in her eyes, coal halfway downher cheeks, kneeling in a plain corset and drawerslike any destroyed woman. the professor's eyes at thepiano are as neutral as ever. he gives blanche that privatenod that means, ready?
and then he launches intothe simple, jolly chords of her last number. rage, blanche recognizesthe feeling of last. rage, and deep down revulsion,at the prospect of spending another night of her lifeturning this old crank. she summons herforces and stands, hand on her hip like someslap dash street walker. i wish i was the diamond--she begins sweetly. i wish i was a diamondupon my lulu's hand,
and every time iwiped my ass, i'd see the promised land, oh lordy. her gestures are broad, clownishnow, and the men love it. for the chorus, shethrows out her arms, conducting the audiencelike an orchestra. bang away lulu, banganyway good and strong. oh what'll we do fora damn good screw when our lulu's dead and gone." i'll leave that there.
[applause] emma donoghue: one of thehardest things to research for this book was to find outwhat exactly erotic dancers did in the 1870s. you might think it's prettyobvious what erotic dancers do, but no, they did not strip. they didn't take offtheir clothes bit by bit. they did not pole dance. nobody had inventedthe poll dance.
so it was very hard tofind out what they did. there's a lot of vaguestuff about mysterious women of eroticism inprevious centuries, but it was very hardto find specifics. and two of the onlyspecifics i did find where this tarantellathing, this bug up the skirt dance that seems the oldestform of erotic dance known. i mean, maybe the fact thatthey were all flea infested, they just decided tomake a virtue of that.
[laughter] emma donoghue: i cannot imaginethrilling an audience nowadays by pretending thatyou're infested. we just havedifferent standards. and another kindof dance they did a lot was the skirtdance where they would have this hugeskirt, 44 feet around, and they would hide in theskirt, make a butterfly of it, make a screen of it, and thenat the end they would undo
the skirt and have itswoop over the audience. i decided that i didn't knowwhether these dancers sang, but there were somany good songs around that i decided we haveto include some songs in it. i had to find out of copyrighttexts for all the songs, which proved very difficult. because often, some lyricsjust float around online. and everyone says, oh yeah,here's an old version. and you're thinking,how old is that version.
i need specifics. there's a great folkmusic site, called mudcat, where all these really geekyguys share their knowledge. and they're like,that's the 1921 version, you're mistakingit for the 1922. emma donoghue:it's just fantastic getting to suck the brainsfrom geeky guys online. they're just so happy toshare their knowledge. so i found really earlyversions for most of the songs,
but that lulu song was almostimpossible to track down because it was a dirty song. and some of the laterversus are far worse. and because it was rude,before the 20th century nobody would write it down. they'd say things like,and of course, we all know the notorious lulu song. and i'd say, no we don't. give me details.
and then finally,in the 1960s, bless him, one particular editorof a book of dirty songs, he not only publishedthe text, but he said at the start-- i alwaysimagined he was smoking pot at the time-- thisbook copyright free, share the songs. and then i noticed in the secondedition his publisher was like, all applications must besent in writing to us. this book is copyright-- i hada copy of the first edition
with this lovelyhallucinogenic cover. i finally got a copyright-freeversion of lulu. there are also many sadthings in this book. it's not all funand games obviously. san francisco was havinga particularly hard summer in 1876. i didn't need tomake any of this up. it was having a recordheat wave, which is unusual for san francisco.
ice would fall offcarts in the street and children would surroundit and lick the blocks. and they were simultaneouslyhaving a smallpox epidemic, which usually wasa winter thing. so they were justhaving a cursed season. and, as you can probablytell, i absolutely loved immersing myself inthis strange, and sticky, and unhygienic world. questions please.
questions about anything. audience: well,i will start off. i wanted to know, when youwere in your college career, and then graduatecareer, did you think that you weregoing to be an historian, or did you know that you weregoing to be a writer, as well, of literary stuff. and did you plan tomerge those two things? emma donoghue: sure.
i thought i was going tobe a professor of english. my dad, dennis donoghue,who taught at nyu until last year, he'sa professor of english, and i thought i wasgoing to be one too. i now realize that would havebeen a doomed plan, because i would've been the lessfamous professor of english. you should really try notto follow your parents into any line of work. but i thought that's what iwould do, because i thought,
well, at least then ican read books all day and write books at night. i think in fact,i would have been a very discontentedprofessor of english. and you know the better kindis always saying to students, well i did an hourof office hours, but now i'm writing my novel. i didn't think i would be ahistorian because, growing up in ireland, ithought history was
the tale of the many patheticlittle revolutions we had. every few years we'd rise up andthe english would gun us down. and i just thoughtthat's what history was. i hadn't quite clicked thatsocial history is history too. but anyway, theni started writing novels when i was about 20during my undergrad degree. and my mother waslike, couldn't you get your exam firstand then your novels? and i was like, no, can'twait, inspiration is knocking.
and i managed to sell twonovels when i was about 23, and then i thought, maybe icould just not have a job. i could just write. how cool would that be? and somehow, at 44, it hasworked, so far at least. and yeah, so i've never had,not just a nine to five job, but any kind ofjob where you have to turn up and do whatanybody else tells you to. never.
somehow got away without it. which means that when i'mwriting contemporary fiction, i have difficulty describingreal jobs for my character. so i have to say tofriends, what's it like? what time do you have toget up in the morning? you have to shower every day? [laughter] but youprobably don't have to at google, do you? so yeah.
in a way, i'm anacademic gone wrong. and i think my academictraining has left me with not only a profoundinterest in research, and getting things right. i absolutely lovethe forensic task of making a booklike "frog music" true as much as i can makeit, as well as fiction. you've got these twoloyalties, these two jobs. i would say there are about 26characters in "frog music" who
are real people from the time. often all i knowis one tiny thing, like one particularfrench prostitute in the gold rush, maria laforge, she got in a fight with her pimp and hethrew acid at her, which was the crime of the day. that was very commonin those days. she had half a face. i just thought,she's irresistible,
i have to include her as anolder woman in my novel set 20 years laterwandering around san francisco withthis mangled face. i'm not suggesting thati'm able to completely conjure these people up asthey were, but give them at least a moment inthe spotlight again. i always assumethey're grateful, because otherwise they wouldbe completely forgotten. whereas if you're writingabout really famous people
from the past, you mightfeel that they're like, don't bug me. don't dig me up again. but the kind of obscurenobody's and oddities that i write about,i always assume they're grateful fora little attention. you know? audience: so how doyou write? [inaudible]. given that you don'thave to get up at 6:30
and get on the train. what do you actually do? emma donoghue:well, a great thing that structures theday is children. so, i used to be ableto write any old time, so sometimes i'd find ita bit hard to get started. but now, when my kids aredeposited on the school bus, i just feel thissurge of adrenaline. they're gone, i can write.
and so i run to my desk, andthese days i run at my desk as well because i use atreadmill for about half the day. and again, it'll be notthat exciting to you, but in the writingworld it's fairly freaky still to use a treadmill. audience: yeah, we have a fewof those around the building. emma donoghue: yeah. [interposing voices]
emma donoghue: fantastic. you see, i hate exercise. so the idea that i can beexercising without knowing it while i'm writing is fantastic. for the first year i wasgetting static shocks because nobody had told meabout antistatic bracelets. i should have asked earlier. i just thought it waspart of the process. emma donoghue: and so yeah.
so i would say the dayalternates between sitting down writing, standing up writing. and i do a hugeamount of planning. i use a really good appleprogram, a program for mac called scrivener. i used to use word, andso i'd write my novel in one huge, long word file. and then i'd go, where isthe bit about the dog, search for the dog, cutand paste sections,
occasionally forgot topaste a section and lose it. i know this soundssilly, but scrivener lets you write in lots oftiny, little postcard chunks and then move them around. so, for instance,i started writing this book in chronologicalorder from when blanche and jenny, and all theirfriends meet in the summer, through to jenny'smurder and the aftermath. i'm not giving toomuch away because jenny
get's killed in the first page. and so i was writing it thatway, and then i thought, you know, it feelstoo undramatic just starting withthem making friends. i want to start withblood on the floor, and then cut back and forward. and so i was able to justmove all the scenes around like a puzzle pieces. so i'm a big planner,and sometimes
when i'm describing this toaudiences of book lovers, they look at me like,how coldblooded you are. but to me, it's like youwouldn't try and plan a building without blueprints. you wouldn't just say, oh,let's just get creative and build it from the groundup, because it would fall down. and some of my bookswould fall down if i didn't do alot of planning. and in particular i'mnot very good at plots.
i can do dialogue tillthe cows come home. i'm sort of naturalwith characters, but plotting, and in particularsuspenseful plotting, doesn't come naturally to me. so i do a lot ofplanning, because if i have got a chart of what happensin each chapter and each scene, then i can easily see thatit's a big problem when nothing happens in chapter three,nothing real happens. there are no revelations,no major changes.
and i say to myself, let'snot have a chapter three, let's just cut it. so that kind of planning,i think for the last maybe about fourbooks, has really helped me tightenthe narrative thread. whereas i thinksome writers just do that at an unconscious level. the writers who say thatthey just sit down and start on page one, and they don'tknow where they're going,
i think in theback of their minds they must somehow knowwhere they're going. but i need an actual blueprint. and of course, you can stillchange things as you go along. just because you'vecommitted yourself to the bar fight in chaptersix, it doesn't mean, when you get there, you can'thave a love scene instead. audience: do you do allthe research first then? emma donoghue: i do a lotfirst but then-- of course, i
don't use most of it. so i'm just looking for thatone bizarre little detail. and so it's not likeresearching for-- if you're writing an articleabout a place, you feel obliged to tellpeople all about the place. i'm more like, what's theone, little, odd thing? so i do a lot beforehand,then i start to story plan. for instance, one ofthe newspaper articles i found aboutjenny had mentioned
that when the press had caughtup with blanche's boyfriend arthur, he had a coupleof poxs on his face from a recentoutbreak of smallpox. and i thought, oh, didthey have that at the time. so next thing i knew, i wasplanning an entire chapter in which arther nearlydies of smallpox. so the story sort of arisesnaturally out of the research. so then i startdrafting it, and i have to stop constantly to domore research as i go along.
and on the researchinvolved a lot of pictures this time, a lot of photographsof san francisco, architecture that just all crumbled awayin the earthquake in 1906. lots of, say, promotionalpostcards of burlesque dancers. because nobody was keepingdetailed accounts of what they did, so you have to deduceit from their crazy costumes. you know, girls wearing horsesheads, and bows and arrows, and breast plates, and ofterquite playful military stuff. they'd have a jacketwith frogging on it,
and military stripes,and then no skirt. so you had to deduce alot from the pictures. so some of the amazingphotographs of eadweard muybridge, he'd had somealmost stop motion one's he would take. he'd rig up a stringand take 20 pictures over three seconds of,either a horse most famously, or of a woman carryinga towel or something. so yeah, i love the research.
i don't find thatit gets in the way. so long as you ruthlessly dropanything that doesn't fit. i really don'tlike any paragraph in a book that soundslike the author is stopping to educate you. so if my point of viewcharacter wouldn't care what political partyhas won the election, then i don't mention it. audience: anyone else havea few questions or comments?
come on. googlers are not this shy. audience: so with"room," which, i'm sure you've gotten this questionbefore, you have children so-- although i have children,i wouldn't be able to do it-- but i'm assuming that helpedin the five year old's voice. i thought what was interestingwas not so much the lack self pity, because he had no ideawhy he would pity himself through the whole thing, butit's after they were escaped,
and for him this new freedomwasn't really freedom. how were you-- the adultand child situations were flipped in thereal world, so to speak. i don't have a question. audience: talk about that. audience: yes. talk about it. emma donoghue: in a way,what anchored "room," writing about such a weird,one off situation,
is that i kept tryingto think of every day, normal experiences we'veall had which are like that. because jack goes frombeing in a new born situation, in that he's nevermore than a few feet away from his mother. she's eternallyavailable to him. he's still breastfeeding,so he's like a newborn. and then he goes through tobeing more like a seven year. having to spend lots of timeaway from his mother even.
so i kept thinking of what's aneveryday situation like that? the first time you dropa kid off at playschool and you're thinking thechild will be sobbing and the child walks awaywithout looking back. and you think, where'sthat intense bond gone. he just used me. emma donoghue: so everyparent has got those moments. or when you'replaying with a child, and you're givingit all you've got
and you think, i'm so magical,and then they say, i'm bored. could we do something else? those moments of reversal. or i remember onemoment with my daughter where i brieflylost her on a cliff. we were at a monument to[inaudible] in france, and it was this amazing glasstube heading towards the sea. so i was having my momentthinking about [inaudible] and then i can't findmy three year old.
and i just completely panicked,and then i spun around, and there she was, shesaw i was all shaky and she was like, it's ok. i'm right here, it's ok. and i thought,she's comforting me. this is just a bizarre reversal. and similarly, ifind as adults we have to explain the rulesof our society to children all the time, because ina way, they're always new.
the first time you haveto explain to a child that things like ina big supermarket you can collect everythingand only pay at the end, but in a shopping mall, eventhough there's no actual door, as soon as you stepout of one little space and into the corridoryou're shoplifting. so you have toremember to pay first. that rule was actuallyexplained in the hand book for new canadians that i wasgiven when i moved to canada.
they're clearlyassuming that you're coming from some very otherculture where they don't do shopping malls, and so theyspell all these rules out. and i remember thinking thata child wouldn't know that, so a child wouldaccidentally shoplift. a child would hug,rush towards a dog and get their handbitten as my son did. and a child would hug somebodywho they're not meant to. and so i just thoughtjack is just like that,
but he's having to learnthe rules all at once instead of graduallyover a number of years. but it was a veryinteresting exercise. it was a defamiliarizationeffect on my entire life. everything i lookedat, i'd say, wow, if you'd been livingin a locked room, that would look very different. and a lot of it,a lot of our world seemed incredibly stressfulfrom jack's perspective.
and i put myself in thebook as a bad starbucks mom. i have jack broughtto starbucks, and there's moments where he'snoticing some mother who's fobbing her child offwith a giant cookie so she can talk to her friendsand check her messages. i thought, that'sme the part mother saying leave me aloneso i can write my scene. emma donoghue: that book mademe feel like such a bad mother. but luckily, inthis book, blanche
has a baby she'svery neglectful of, and i felt like a greatmother compared with her. so this one wasa real refresher. emma donoghue: you know,by 1870s standards, i'm supreme as a mother. audience: so where did theidea for "room" come from. emma donoghue: it happened to bethe fritzl case in austria that inspired it, but iremember thinking, ok, i don't want anyone thinking i'mwriting about a real victim
here, that would be tacky. because when you writeabout people in the past, that's fine. they're never goingto knock on your door. but writing aboutreal people now, that would give me the creeps. so i thought, i'llset it in america, very far away from austria. in the fritzl case inaustria, she and her children
were in an underground dungeon. and i thought, ok, i'llmake it above ground in a shed with a sky light. it'll be totally different. and then right afteri'd written the book, jaycee dugard was discoveredin a shed in california. and i thought, youjust can't win. and then the clevelandcase happened, and i had peopleblogging saying,
emma donoghue mustfeel so guilty that she's inspired this crime. and i thought, don't tellme that those monsters read literary fiction. i just don't believe it. i mean, copycats all ofother crimes to copy from. they don't need toread novels to do it. it's funny, you get so usedto a particular subject you're researching likesmallpox, or infanticide,
that you learn to be able totalk about it quite flippantly, and then you suddenly think,i've just said the word rape and i'm giggling. it's awful how you get usedto whatever your topic is. audience: what'scoming up next for you. what are you working on now? well you see, with"frog music" i set myself the challengeof making it a real murder mystery, as well asa literary novel.
i thought the mysteryside of it has to work, because people who likecrime, they read it a lot, and they're very sophisticatedreaders of crime, and they do not want you tomake some pathetic, halfhearted attempt at crime. it's got to work. and there's a kind of acontract with the reader. and similarly, ifound it so enjoyable to have that particular kind ofgun to my head, at every point
i was like, will the crimefans be happy enough? will they accept itas a crime novel? now i'm trying to writea children's book, and that's way scarier,because a lot of writers think, oh, i'vewritten for adults. i can write for children. or, oh, i'm a mom, ican write for children. but i don't assume thatany of these things give me the abilityto write for children.
and so, in another month ihave to submit the first draft to my son and histwo best friends. [laughter} emma donoghue: i'm terrified. so i've written up areader's report for them to fill in for me. i'm trying to givethem questions that won't hurt my feelings. so i don't at any pointsay, do you like this book?
i say things like,which character did you find most interesting? but of course, they could stillsubvert this by going, none. because kids just have no tack. so i'm nervous about that,but on the other hand i'm planning a five book series. so i'm veryconfident in one way. or rather, with everybook, i've found that if you just, fromthe very beginning,
assume it will be published in alovely cover and given a title, and even write thoseblurbs on the jacket. i write them very earlyon before the book. emma donoghue: it's like, if ifake it, somebody will make it, you know. i'll call it a room, and i'lleven talk about it in public to googlers, andtherefore it will happen. audience: so, doesanybody else have anything they would like to addor ask or anything?
we do have mcnallyjackson in the back with us-- yay-- to havecopies of both "frog music" and "room." these are thesubsidized editions that you can get for $10 cash. and maybe emma will sitfor a few more minutes and sign copies of them for us. audience: so, if anybodyelse-- unless there's anything else toask, let's just hang
out and chat fora couple minutes. thank you emma. emma donoghue: thank you. that was fun.
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