Mademoiselle Benoir
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Author Bio/Q&A Christine Conrad has worked as the New York City film commissioner, as an editor in book publishing, as a screenwriter for motion picture and television, and as an advocate for women's health. Her most recent book, Jerome Robbins, is a pictorial biography inspired by her long friendship with the renowned choreographer.A CONVERSATION WITH CHRISTINE CONRAD How did you come to write Mademoiselle Benoir? In 1992 a friend gave me the surprising news that her son, an American male in his thirties living in New York, had decamped for rural France. This fact interested me extremely, as many of us fantasize about such a move, but few of us have the courage to carry it out. So I was always eager for periodic news of his progress: he was restoring an old farmhouse; he was painting seriously; he had a French girlfriend. Then news came that he had been "adopted" by a quite grand French family. Stories of the family took on an enchanted Jane Austen quality. There were three sisters who painted, sang, and sculpted. They lived in a nineteenth-century château with beautiful parklands and vineyards sprawling down to the river. Then I began to hear of the young man’s budding friendship with one of the sisters, also a painter. And then, seemingly out of the blue, I was told that the young man and the sister had fallen in love and planned to marry. The woman was beautiful, charming, cultured, unmarried . . . but she was nearly twice his age. News of the impending wedding had the effect of a cluster bomb exploding inside the woman’s family, uncovering incendiary layers hidden beneath the surface of this seemingly idyllic French country scene. Shortly thereafter, on a trip to Paris, I met the newly married couple, and then later traveled to visit them at the woman’s family château. I was completely enthralled by their romance and the extraordinary strife it inspired, and I knew immediately that here was a one-of-a-kind tale, one that resonated for me with that writer’s sensation: This is my kind of story. Even better, it was a story with something for everyone! Given my long screenwriting experience, I was sure it would make a wonderful film, but I also knew that to do justice to the rich complexity and uniqueness of the French setting, it cried out to be a novel. Did the writing involve special research or travel? Once I committed myself to the story, the ultimately mysterious and ineffable process that became Mademoiselle Benoir began: a slow alchemy of imagination and research that would transform the bare outlines of a story into a work of fiction that was completely my own. I began doing research on yearly trips to France — scarcely a hardship! — and at the same time I read a wide array of books about French culture and history. I was determined to create for the reader a sense of place that was immediate, alive, and rich with the uniqueness of France that conformed with my own experience. I was very fortunate to have the cooperation of the couple, who shared details of the progress of their romance and life together in interviews and correspondence. But I would write three other books before I became solely focused on Mademoiselle Benoir in 2001. Every step of the way, I felt so lucky to be working on a book for which my belief and enthusiasm never flagged. I loved every second of the research process — although admittedly not every second of a long writing process! — and I never doubted that if I did my absolute best the story would have universal appeal. How closely does Mademoiselle Benoir resemble the events that inspired it? The novel as finally realized is in every way an imagined story. The location in France, names, characters, ages, events, and so forth have all been transmuted and are only loosely related to real events. Although some of the characters have real-life counterparts (the couple, of course), a majority of the characters — such as Count Fishy and Monsieur Bête — have counterparts in French society but are completely invented by me. My inspiration for the letter form was actual letters from the young man to his family, but the letters in the book are all fictional. What I discovered in the early stages of my writing process was that the letter form gave immediate access to a character’s emotions, and that the form was organic to how the story unfolds, providing the points of view of the interested parties on both sides of the Atlantic. My ultimate goal was to create a real page-turner, so that as you begin reading the letter form fades and you are immersed in a world that holds your interest completely. Which character in Mademoiselle Benoir do you most identify with? The most obvious answer would be Catherine Benoir — and yes, of course, I couldn’t have written this book if I didn’t identify strongly with her. But I identify just as strongly with Tim, as it is his voice that propels the story forward, and France is viewed through his American eyes. In fact, I’m sure that all of the characters — both the good and the bad — carry a piece of me within them. What is the greatest challenge facing Tim and Catherine? If romantic love requires a "leap of faith," then love outside a conventional framework requires a special courage. Catherine must stand up to the rigid traditions of her class and French society as a whole, and Tim must defy expectations and conventions of a different sort. Although it’s commonplace to think of love as "woman’s business" — or believe that women are motivated by "emotion" and men by "reason" — the truth is that love is sought out equally by men and women. The longing for the experience is genderless. Love is the "glue" of life and its greatest mystery. Who can say why we fall in love, or why we choose what to others can seem the most unlikely of mates? Many dismiss love, or shun it, or fear it, or can never feel it or find it — and of course love has an endless capacity to inflict pain. The French philosopher Rousseau said, "My passions have made me live and my passions have killed me." But the need to love and be loved — to be the most important person for another — is a constant of human experience. |
