Certainly, summer has yielded countless novels of quarantine and viral disease, of national unity and disruption.
EW caught up with the author on that and more in a wide-ranging conversation.
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: This came out a while ago in the U.K.
Credit: Murdo MacLeod; Knopf
So you’re now in yoursecondround of virtual press, right?
MAGGIE O’FARRELL:Yeah.
I’m going to be wearing this in two weeks."
And then, of course, I wasn’t.
Yeah, it has been very opposite.
When I first was talking about it to press in the U.K., it was all very new.
We’ve had this weird experience of watching it come closer and closer from China.
So yeah, it’s very strange.
It’s all very strange, isn’t it?
It comes out on a boat.
So when I wrote those, it was a kind of an intellectual exercise.
It was all about research.
But it seemed so distant.
It was just about imagination.
We thought we were invincible.
And a lot of them are these sort of pandemic thrillers that hit a particular nerve.
Crisis thrillers, yeah.
And there’s of course nothing wrong with that!
Obviously, it isn’t actually known what the real Hamnet Shakespeare died of.
There’s no cause of death recorded for him, just his burial.
But there was no shortage of anything that could kill you, unfortunately, in Elizabethan times.
I mean, there are any number of very dangerous diseases.
Hamnet did die in high summer, and he did die in a plague year.
This COVID crisis has [made me] think how terrified Elizabethans must’ve been all the time.
In a way you couldn’t have thought before, right?
The plague was probably the biggest and most dangerous contagion there was.
But it must’ve been absolutely ever-present in the footprints of their mind all the time.
It’s no wonder the plague would have spread fast.
Our word for quarantine comes from that time, from Venice.
They knew how to deal with the pandemic.
What they didn’t know was how to cure it.
They didn’t know how to treat it.
I feel myself much closer to them in a sense.
So how does this relate to you telling Hamnet’s story, in a sense?
Obviously you were drawn to him before all this.
He was much too underplayed.
He wasn’t given a voice, enough of importance.
He’s lucky if he gets maybe two minutes [in a biography].
They mention he was born and then they mention he dies.
And often, his death is wrapped up in this statistical analysis of child mortality in the 16th century.
It’s such an outrageous thing to think.
How could they not have grieved him?
Death was obviously so central there.
I’m just curious about that evolution.
It’s funny, I think all books are kind of related to their predecessors.
I wanted to writeHamnetfor so long.
I made several attempts and then I ended up swerving away.
I think I’ve written three books now instead of writing it.
[Laughs] Honestly, I was thinking about it.
It is something that we’re all aware of.
I mean, either that or we deliberately avoid thinking about it.
And I think in a sense I needed to write my memoir before I wrote this.
Memoir was the key turning in the lock.
I said, “I’m sure.”
That kind of idea you come close to death.
What does it mean to have avoided it, or to step out of that loophole?
This is how we deal with grief.
This is the pain you deal with.
It’s where it comes from.
That’s why we do it.
I do think fear of loss is a huge part of love, actually.
And I think it makes up quite a lot of our feelings for other people.
Particularly a parent’s love for children because it goes against the natural order of things.
It’s every parent’s absolute, most visceral fear, that you may have to bury your child.
I don’t know.
It’s a bit like turning a sock inside-out on itself.
It’s the other side of love, in a way?
Or maybe this moment?
I mean, obviously it doesn’t just kill people over in the latest seasons of life.
I do realize it that it does attack other people and children.
But she said, “Imagine if the statistics were inverted, what it would be like?”
We were all carrying on in our houses thinking we were going to lose our children?"
And that made me think about the Black Death.
The Black Death was totally indiscriminate.
That’s very true.
I think about Mary Shakespeare, Shakespeare’s mother, a lot.
She had two daughters who died in infancy.
Her third child was William.
He was 3 months old.
There was plague all over the town of Stratford.
These are people she would have known.
They were her neighbors.
They lived just down the road.
I mean, how terrified must you have been that summer?
The only one who survived.
I mean, thank God he grew up and he lived to tell us many stories.
But I don’t know.
I have it okay.
