In the new novel "All that Life Can Afford," by Emily Everett, an American graduate student from Northampton, Massachusetts, goes off to London. Anna is eager to leave the U.S., steep herself in the land of English literature and write her dissertation on Jane Austen. While abroad, she begins to live a double life. At times, she doesn't have enough money for train fare to get to her tutoring job and yet she finds herself socializing with a new circle of wealthy friends. NEPM's Jill Kaufman asked Everett how Anna landed in this tense situation.
Emily Everett, author of “All that Life Can Afford” After Anna's been tutoring for a couple of months in London, she gets a new tutoring student who's living at the Savoy Hotel, which is a beautiful, beautiful hotel in London. Very glamorous.
At the end of the couple of weeks that she spends tutoring the student there, Pippa who's the teenager, sort of manipulates her mother into inviting Anna to come and stay with them for the Christmas holiday and continue the tutoring. Once she's there for a whole month Pippa's older sister Faye sort of takes Anna under her wing, takes her out, socializes her, and eventually, you know, lends her some nice clothes, some nice shoes so she can fit in socially a little bit.
Anna finds herself sort of swept up in this group of people who have nothing to worry about. No one's ever worried about who's getting the bill. The only thing they have to worry about is when the bar closes.
I knew that for someone like Anna, who's always had to worry about money, whose mother had to worry about rationing her insulin because of money, the ease of the lifestyle would be very bewitching for her.
Jill Kaufman, NEPM: Anna begins living a false life, starting with what she wears. She lands in a wonderful apartment via Pippa's family who are happy to see her succeed and live in a more comfortable place. Then Anna starts going into Faye's closet. Borrowing clothes, very, very discreetly at first. And then of course, she and Faye run into each other.
So the story is about all of this, this duality. But it's also about grief. Running through the narrative is the death of Anna's mother. Why did you include that in the storyline?
Part of that was, you know, I lost my mother myself a couple of years ago, and so it's something I know intimately.
I wanted to write about grief and the motivation to escape grief, and the way you can try to leave it all behind by sort of not talking about it.
Anna strategically doesn't tell a lot of her new friends that she's lost her mother because she wants to be the version of herself that is perfectly happy and has no problems.
There was a lot of poverty in Anna's life. She’s off in Europe, but back in Northampton, she watches her mother have to handle her diabetes.
So Anna's mother dies very young from complications from diabetes because she's been rationing her insulin, which is something that low income people will often have to do in the US because they can't afford all the insulin or test strips that they need to, you know, to really carefully monitor their diabetes and treat it. And I really was hoping that I could shed some light on something that I think a lot of people may not be aware that is happening here, but also something that, doesn't happen in the U.K., where healthcare is free and where medicines are free for chronic illnesses.
So I had a scene where Anna's mother has a hypoglycemic incident, which is basically that her blood sugar goes so low that it's almost as if she's drunk.
So she's slurring her words. She's a little wobbly. And these incidents are really, really dangerous. Like the next step is basically having a seizure or losing consciousness, you know, having to be rushed to the hospital.
I knew it would be a moment that would be emotionally intense, but also very practically intense.
These things aren't just sort of abstract concepts. People not having access to their medicine or being low income means that their entire lives are affected and sometimes their lives are shortened, and for Anna, her whole life is affected by losing her mother young.
That's powerful, that you can, as a writer, create empathy not only for me to go and read about who's doing what in Saint-Tropez, but for me to understand what it means to not have enough money to buy your medicine.
I think creating empathy for people in situations and lives that are so different from your own is such a magical thing of fiction. If you're reading, you know, a nonfiction piece, sometimes we can get a little defensive, based on our politics or our financial situation, our privilege.
But if you're reading fiction, you're just absorbing it so naturally, as a human that you know is having this experience, even though you know somewhere deep down inside, you know it's fiction. When I was growing up and I didn't have tons of money or a lot of travel, I was able to do that through reading fiction.
And I think people who do have a lot of money might be able to read fiction and find out what the daily lives of people who don't have access to all the healthcare they need might be like.
Anna's dissertation is based on Jane Austen, based on other British literature. Talk a little bit about what it meant to have Jane Austen running through this book, the lives of those characters and Anna's own life.
It was very self-indulgent, honestly, to have some Jane Austen in my novel, because I felt like I could pretend that my book was in conversation with, you know, one of the greatest writers we've ever had! But also one of the smartest writers we've had about class and society and the role of women.
I think Jane Austen really rewards her heroines for being very plucky, for not taking their knocks sitting down, for maybe stepping outside of the norms.
Anna, as she's writing her dissertation, is trying to make some sort of assessment about whether (she's focusing on what I call the “fish out of water heroines” in literature ) these characters who sort of end up outside of their natural surroundings, maybe in a foreign country or a foreign city and have to sink or swim, get their happy ending.
Because she wants to know if she's going to get hers. The truth that she finds in her dissertation is that the answer is probably somewhere in the middle, with lots of messiness.
