An Interview with Jane Delury
An interview with Jane Delury, originally published in Little Patuxent Review in 2020.
Jane Delury's new novel in stories, The Balcony, feels like a multi-generational family dinner, a French feast of many courses with the tables laid al fresco.
The ten stories are tethered to a fictional estate and forest outside of Paris, and all carry the mark of Delury’s sure hand as author, leading us through the thickets and tangles of semi-functional families, betrayals, an environmentally egregious pedophile, teen pregnancy, a touch of cancer, and the plundering of a manor house during World War II.
These stories fit together like jigsaw puzzle pieces, with repeating characters over a span of a hundred years touching down at various points in their lives at the estate’s manor house, forest, or servant’s cottage. Although it has become a cliché to say, the book’s setting becomes a character, with its own secrets, including a key to the piano room dropped down the kitchen drain, suicide stains on the terrace, buried treasure under the cherry trees, and a balcony that is a source of both sorrow and solace.
Delury asks her readers for sustained attention to the stories with their repeating characters, icons, and motifs, and to perhaps even dredge up some tenth-grade French (mea culpa). Familial relationships pop up throughout the book, then touch other stories: One family’s wayward daughter becomes the lover of a French African poet in another story, who becomes the subject of an alcoholic’s never-published book in a third story.
Short stories are complex in their brevity, but also distilled to an essence, and Delury manages to convey a story into a few lines. In “Half Life,” a character’s girlfriend adopts a homeless dog who brings her a dead bird, prompting memories of driving to his parent’s cottage, then a clear-eyed summation of relationships (human and canine alike): “Everything was a test once you told someone that you loved them.”
Delury knows just how far ahead she needs to lead her readers to help us ponder the questions she’s posing.
At the core of the book is a ransacking of the manor house during World War II, and the individual and collective responsibility for that act of pillage. Who collaborates with and who resists the Nazis? Does feeding a hungry child legitimize stealing a green silk-covered chair and a set of nesting dolls? Does watching a father drown saving a son in an icy pond inspire the courage to face bullets to rescue comrades?
The questions Delury raises are as complicated and existential as a family, as filling and titillating as a well-cooked meal. The New York Times said The Balcony was “a shimmering debut,” and Jennifer Egan called the book “sweeping, suspenseful, rich with surprises and eerie atmosphere.” The novel won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
The Klein professor of Writing and Literature at the University of Baltimore, Delury has written short stories for decades. After a junior year abroad in Grenoble and a degree from University of California Santa Cruz, Delury finished a master’s degree in France and taught English there, then returned to the U.S. to study fiction at the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars.
While she won’t talk much about her next project because, she says, it’s likely to change, she’s been working on a novel for a few years, and it involves history, gardens, and questions of identity, much like The Balcony.
__________
Susan Thornton Hobby: What is it about the short story form that appeals to you?
Jane Delury: As a reader of short stories, I love how much can happen in such a small space. As a writer, I love being able to spend more time on my sentences and to try to get them as close to perfect as I can. I enjoy working in a smaller tableaux for that reason. I just try to get every moment right. And I enjoy inhabiting different characters, so writing stories allows you to try on different hats. I think, too, it's a form that has been very suited to my life in the past 10 years because I work full-time and I've been raising two kids.
I really like to draft all the way through then spend a lot of time revising. I haven’t had long stretches of time, but I like finishing things. … I am moving into a different phase now, so I can live in a longer form a little more easily, but I’m still writing short stories. I will never stop writing short stories.
STH: Who are some of the short story practitioners that you read?
JD: Alice Munro, she’s amazing. I’ve been reading lots of Zadie Smith, really, really loving her. Chekhov. Italo Calvino. And Dino Buzzati. So those are the names that pop into my head right now. And then the writers who’ve been wiped out by the Me Too movement. (laughs). It’s like half my syllabus.
STH: How did you realize that you had a novel in stories?
JD: I was not writing the stories with a book in mind. I wasn’t even really writing them with a story collection in mind until pretty late in the game. I had about twelve stories, and this story “Plunder” about the plundering of the manor, was an earlier story. I was very haunted by the event in that story, the plundering of the manor house, the destruction of this house, as an event that kept coming up. It just raised a lot of questions for me.
I think that was what really prompted the bigger narrative, the questions around what had happened and why people had done what they did, and the questions of community, but also the individual who lived in the house at the time, and individual responsibility and collective responsibility, which are these bigger questions and themes that I could explore in a longer form than in one story. ...
The first story “Au Pair”, I wrote for the novel in stories, and then “Tin Tin in the Antilles” I wrote for the novel in stories. And then I did massive gutting and rewriting of everything.
STH: How much reshaping of the stories did you have to do to fit into a narrative arc?
JD: A lot. (laughs) So I had to I switch out some characters so the characters would repeat. I had to make everything work with a certain timeline. You can't avoid it -- unless you're writing fabulism, you can't really play with people’s ages -- so I had to figure out how old everyone would be at a certain point in history. I knew that at the core of this book was the story of the estate, the manor house and the guest cottage.
So I had a timeline of the property, of that character, so then I literally laid out all the stories on a long table and walked around and thought, who would be where when? Who wouldn't be there? Then those characters had to go. Who could have been there? It was a pretty organic process, once I did some cutting, the difficult cutting, the new iteration started to create itself. As long as I kept my eye on that character of the estate, I could find the through-line of the book, and I followed that.
STH: This estate and wood, is it based on a real place?
JD: Well, not really. The forest is based on the forest of Chateauroux near the town of Le Poinçonnet, which is in central France. My ex-husband's grandparents lived on the edge of it. When I lived in France, we used to go there a lot. I just loved it there. I ran at the time, and I would go running there by myself. I would go from this very intense sort of intimate family experience to solitude in the woods. I think in that freedom that I would find there, I started to find stories.
The manor house is actually based on a home that I vacation in with my mother and my family, near Carcassonne. And the cottage is based on an abandoned building that was on the property of my ex-husband's grandparents. But when they came together, that created a space.
STH: These stories are sprinkled with so much French, more than most stories, even stories that are translated and set in France. It’s a challenge for the reader to keep up. Some of the dialogue is translated, some not. Tell me about those choices.
JD: I think I’m interested, as someone who lived as an expatriate for almost five years in France and who has children whose his father is French and who has spent time in France, in another culture, another language, I'm interested in the insider/outsider relationship that can occur with another culture and language. It was important to me to include French in the book, and my editor actually suggested that I include more French.
What I also realized at some point was that when I was writing in the point of view of a French character, or writing dialogue, I was actually thinking in French, and translating. There are shifts in voice that I recognize that have to do with the consciousness that I’m writing, being in the French language and not in the English language. I guess it felt more honest to include some actual French in the book.
But I am asking the reader for some work there, and I’m also asking the reader to do work in putting everything together. I tried to have some non-French readers read it. I never want to lose anyone, so it’s a tricky balance.
STH: The way you write about forests is almost Transcendental, capital T. In the final story, “Between,” Élodie says, “The forest parts for me as a rib cage once parted for him. My body is mine. I can feel every tendon. My mind is as big as the sky, only suggested by glimpses. I understand nothing and I understand everything.”
JD: I think you're right, I think there's a Transcendental element to it, I have never really consciously thought about that. For me, there’s a melting away that can happen in nature. That happens for me mostly in forests and mountain settings, which I find really restorative and always have. When I lived in Grenoble (France), I did a lot of hiking in the Alps. There’s something about being swallowed by a forest and then coming out.
STH: Besides the estate setting, there are objects, such as the peg solitaire game and the Russian nesting dolls, as well as your web of characters’ relationships, that mesh the stories together. Why does this book need that treatment?
JD: The Russian dolls I added. The peg solitaire was in the original. I think each of those objects are there to some degree for different reasons. All of those objects work structurally, but then they also have to work, for me anyway, metaphorically, so they all have their own reasons, but in a very practical structural sense. They are signposts in the book. They’re marking time. Peg solitaire looks the same in 1970 as it does in 2010. The people who are interacting with it, some of them have died, the hands have changed.
STH: Your novel spans more than a hundred years. It seems to me the writing styles change with the time periods of each story. Could you talk about that?
JD: First of all, it is a novel in stories, which suggests that they are stories, so there is going to be less uniformity of voice all the way through. But I try to go through with a planer. I would just reread everything from the beginning to the end, to smooth down the places where there was any kind of jolt or snag, but the last story of the book is very stylistically different than the others. And if it weren’t a novel in stories, then that wouldn’t work. For me, structurally, that story reflects where Élodie is, emotionally, it reflects her predicament.
But in a way, I think, that it reflects the predicament of everybody in the book. Everybody is stuck between worlds. Sometimes these things make sense for the writer in one way and then you give the book over, and the reader makes whatever sense they do or don’t make of it. In my mind, that’s why it makes sense to end on that note. It’s not tidy. Any novel is trying to create order out of chaos. There was something that felt more honest to me about ending on a slightly off note, structurally.
STH: There seems always to be a question of clarity with your characters – who are these people and what is transparent and hidden about their motivations?
JD: I think I, personally, am very interested in the way that the longer you go through life, the more people you end up being. That’s the way I look at it. It’s a preoccupation I have. How do we reconcile all of these people we’ve been? That is very present in the way that I approach character. How consistent is anyone? What does that even mean to be consistent?
There are very few relationships in a life where you share all of your complexity and your contradictions and share all the people you’ve been. That’s a real gift to have those relationships. I don’t think many people ever necessarily attain that. I think that’s what everyone ultimately wants, is to have that kind of connection and understanding and honesty, so I think that’s what my characters strive for. I think many of them don’t achieve it. (laughs) In “Plunder”, in that marriage, that’s one of the few happy marriages in the book, but that’s a relationship where there’s true honesty, love, understanding, but it’s rare in that book. I think my characters often go about finding it in the wrong ways. Even if the motivation is pure, the way that they go about looking for it is sending them in not great directions. (laughs)
STH: You tell your students to write into the chaos. Could you talk about that?
JD: I know that I’m only happy with work that comes out of chaos. If I try to lead with structure, with idea, with goal, the thing just doesn’t have its own lifeblood. That’s the only way I can say it. So I have to plunge, and hope I don’t drown. And sometimes I do. Even with putting The Balcony together, it was very scary to go back into these stories and rip them apart. But the more you write and the more that you have the experience of something taking over, and making itself true, the more faith you have in the process.
I can really only speak for myself. That’s the way it works for me. I’m working on something longer right now, and I have an outline, but I don’t stick to it. And then I change the outline according to whatever is on the page. So one wonders, what’s the point of the outline? (laughs) It’s a map that I go in and erase and change.
I think my imagination is the smartest part of my mind. I try to give myself over to it. (Sometimes it fails me.) But as long as I’m doing that, I usually end up with something, but more importantly, I enjoy writing and so all of the hours I’m spending doing this, mean something and make my life richer.
STH: You had a central question for The Balcony, about escaping the past. Do your stories say it’s impossible or do your stories say you can?
JD: Good question. I’m distracted because it’s also a central question in something else I’m working on right now. I don’t know. That’s my answer. I haven’t figured that out yet. I think maybe in twenty years I’ll be able to answer that. I’m still wondering.
STH: Because the characters, in some ways, exhibit that they can. But in some ways, the past is always in them. Did you have that question in mind when you were going into the stories or did you figure it out as you were writing?
JD: It goes back to the question of France and language and culture and self. I think that the experience of living in another country and another language also creates a sense of another self. I always felt that the me who lived in France, who spoke French, was quite different from the person who spoke English in Sacramento, California. That’s alienating, from the self, but it’s also empowering and amazing. It suggests that we can change, we can be different and we can become better in some ways.
The me who lived in France and who spoke French all the time is now in the past. And I don’t know where she is now, in relationship to the me I am. But I know she’s still there. My life changed, I no longer live with someone who is French. I stopped speaking French for a few years. Then I realized at some point that a part of me was missing. So I started speaking it again with my daughters, I started listening to French radio, I started reading again in French. I’m having this new relationship with this language and this culture. It’s from a different vantage point, but my previous relationship is still there as well.
I’m tying together this question of how many selves we have and of time, and how you can return to a relationship and have a new version of it later. But the original version is still there, informing the new version.
Going back to my statement that I don’t know if you can escape the past – maybe that’s okay. The nature of time is that it folds all the time. It is one of the nice things about getting older, the trippiness of time.
Jane Delury's new novel in stories, The Balcony, feels like a multi-generational family dinner, a French feast of many courses with the tables laid al fresco.
The ten stories are tethered to a fictional estate and forest outside of Paris, and all carry the mark of Delury’s sure hand as author, leading us through the thickets and tangles of semi-functional families, betrayals, an environmentally egregious pedophile, teen pregnancy, a touch of cancer, and the plundering of a manor house during World War II.
These stories fit together like jigsaw puzzle pieces, with repeating characters over a span of a hundred years touching down at various points in their lives at the estate’s manor house, forest, or servant’s cottage. Although it has become a cliché to say, the book’s setting becomes a character, with its own secrets, including a key to the piano room dropped down the kitchen drain, suicide stains on the terrace, buried treasure under the cherry trees, and a balcony that is a source of both sorrow and solace.
Delury asks her readers for sustained attention to the stories with their repeating characters, icons, and motifs, and to perhaps even dredge up some tenth-grade French (mea culpa). Familial relationships pop up throughout the book, then touch other stories: One family’s wayward daughter becomes the lover of a French African poet in another story, who becomes the subject of an alcoholic’s never-published book in a third story.
Short stories are complex in their brevity, but also distilled to an essence, and Delury manages to convey a story into a few lines. In “Half Life,” a character’s girlfriend adopts a homeless dog who brings her a dead bird, prompting memories of driving to his parent’s cottage, then a clear-eyed summation of relationships (human and canine alike): “Everything was a test once you told someone that you loved them.”
Delury knows just how far ahead she needs to lead her readers to help us ponder the questions she’s posing.
At the core of the book is a ransacking of the manor house during World War II, and the individual and collective responsibility for that act of pillage. Who collaborates with and who resists the Nazis? Does feeding a hungry child legitimize stealing a green silk-covered chair and a set of nesting dolls? Does watching a father drown saving a son in an icy pond inspire the courage to face bullets to rescue comrades?
The questions Delury raises are as complicated and existential as a family, as filling and titillating as a well-cooked meal. The New York Times said The Balcony was “a shimmering debut,” and Jennifer Egan called the book “sweeping, suspenseful, rich with surprises and eerie atmosphere.” The novel won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
The Klein professor of Writing and Literature at the University of Baltimore, Delury has written short stories for decades. After a junior year abroad in Grenoble and a degree from University of California Santa Cruz, Delury finished a master’s degree in France and taught English there, then returned to the U.S. to study fiction at the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars.
While she won’t talk much about her next project because, she says, it’s likely to change, she’s been working on a novel for a few years, and it involves history, gardens, and questions of identity, much like The Balcony.
Susan Thornton Hobby: What is it about the short story form that appeals to you?
Jane Delury: As a reader of short stories, I love how much can happen in such a small space. As a writer, I love being able to spend more time on my sentences and to try to get them as close to perfect as I can. I enjoy working in a smaller tableaux for that reason. I just try to get every moment right. And I enjoy inhabiting different characters, so writing stories allows you to try on different hats. I think, too, it's a form that has been very suited to my life in the past 10 years because I work full-time and I've been raising two kids.
I really like to draft all the way through then spend a lot of time revising. I haven’t had long stretches of time, but I like finishing things. … I am moving into a different phase now, so I can live in a longer form a little more easily, but I’m still writing short stories. I will never stop writing short stories.
STH: Who are some of the short story practitioners that you read?
JD: Alice Munro, she’s amazing. I’ve been reading lots of Zadie Smith, really, really loving her. Chekhov. Italo Calvino. And Dino Buzzati. So those are the names that pop into my head right now. And then the writers who’ve been wiped out by the Me Too movement. (laughs). It’s like half my syllabus.
STH: How did you realize that you had a novel in stories?
JD: I was not writing the stories with a book in mind. I wasn’t even really writing them with a story collection in mind until pretty late in the game. I had about twelve stories, and this story “Plunder” about the plundering of the manor, was an earlier story. I was very haunted by the event in that story, the plundering of the manor house, the destruction of this house, as an event that kept coming up. It just raised a lot of questions for me.
I think that was what really prompted the bigger narrative, the questions around what had happened and why people had done what they did, and the questions of community, but also the individual who lived in the house at the time, and individual responsibility and collective responsibility, which are these bigger questions and themes that I could explore in a longer form than in one story. ...
The first story “Au Pair”, I wrote for the novel in stories, and then “Tin Tin in the Antilles” I wrote for the novel in stories. And then I did massive gutting and rewriting of everything.
STH: How much reshaping of the stories did you have to do to fit into a narrative arc?
JD: A lot. (laughs) So I had to I switch out some characters so the characters would repeat. I had to make everything work with a certain timeline. You can't avoid it -- unless you're writing fabulism, you can't really play with people’s ages -- so I had to figure out how old everyone would be at a certain point in history. I knew that at the core of this book was the story of the estate, the manor house and the guest cottage.
So I had a timeline of the property, of that character, so then I literally laid out all the stories on a long table and walked around and thought, who would be where when? Who wouldn't be there? Then those characters had to go. Who could have been there? It was a pretty organic process, once I did some cutting, the difficult cutting, the new iteration started to create itself. As long as I kept my eye on that character of the estate, I could find the through-line of the book, and I followed that.
STH: This estate and wood, is it based on a real place?
JD: Well, not really. The forest is based on the forest of Chateauroux near the town of Le Poinçonnet, which is in central France. My ex-husband's grandparents lived on the edge of it. When I lived in France, we used to go there a lot. I just loved it there. I ran at the time, and I would go running there by myself. I would go from this very intense sort of intimate family experience to solitude in the woods. I think in that freedom that I would find there, I started to find stories.
The manor house is actually based on a home that I vacation in with my mother and my family, near Carcassonne. And the cottage is based on an abandoned building that was on the property of my ex-husband's grandparents. But when they came together, that created a space.
STH: These stories are sprinkled with so much French, more than most stories, even stories that are translated and set in France. It’s a challenge for the reader to keep up. Some of the dialogue is translated, some not. Tell me about those choices.
JD: I think I’m interested, as someone who lived as an expatriate for almost five years in France and who has children whose his father is French and who has spent time in France, in another culture, another language, I'm interested in the insider/outsider relationship that can occur with another culture and language. It was important to me to include French in the book, and my editor actually suggested that I include more French.
What I also realized at some point was that when I was writing in the point of view of a French character, or writing dialogue, I was actually thinking in French, and translating. There are shifts in voice that I recognize that have to do with the consciousness that I’m writing, being in the French language and not in the English language. I guess it felt more honest to include some actual French in the book.
But I am asking the reader for some work there, and I’m also asking the reader to do work in putting everything together. I tried to have some non-French readers read it. I never want to lose anyone, so it’s a tricky balance.
STH: The way you write about forests is almost Transcendental, capital T. In the final story, “Between,” Élodie says, “The forest parts for me as a rib cage once parted for him. My body is mine. I can feel every tendon. My mind is as big as the sky, only suggested by glimpses. I understand nothing and I understand everything.”
JD: I think you're right, I think there's a Transcendental element to it, I have never really consciously thought about that. For me, there’s a melting away that can happen in nature. That happens for me mostly in forests and mountain settings, which I find really restorative and always have. When I lived in Grenoble (France), I did a lot of hiking in the Alps. There’s something about being swallowed by a forest and then coming out.
STH: Besides the estate setting, there are objects, such as the peg solitaire game and the Russian nesting dolls, as well as your web of characters’ relationships, that mesh the stories together. Why does this book need that treatment?
JD: The Russian dolls I added. The peg solitaire was in the original. I think each of those objects are there to some degree for different reasons. All of those objects work structurally, but then they also have to work, for me anyway, metaphorically, so they all have their own reasons, but in a very practical structural sense. They are signposts in the book. They’re marking time. Peg solitaire looks the same in 1970 as it does in 2010. The people who are interacting with it, some of them have died, the hands have changed.
STH: Your novel spans more than a hundred years. It seems to me the writing styles change with the time periods of each story. Could you talk about that?
JD: First of all, it is a novel in stories, which suggests that they are stories, so there is going to be less uniformity of voice all the way through. But I try to go through with a planer. I would just reread everything from the beginning to the end, to smooth down the places where there was any kind of jolt or snag, but the last story of the book is very stylistically different than the others. And if it weren’t a novel in stories, then that wouldn’t work. For me, structurally, that story reflects where Élodie is, emotionally, it reflects her predicament.
But in a way, I think, that it reflects the predicament of everybody in the book. Everybody is stuck between worlds. Sometimes these things make sense for the writer in one way and then you give the book over, and the reader makes whatever sense they do or don’t make of it. In my mind, that’s why it makes sense to end on that note. It’s not tidy. Any novel is trying to create order out of chaos. There was something that felt more honest to me about ending on a slightly off note, structurally.
STH: There seems always to be a question of clarity with your characters – who are these people and what is transparent and hidden about their motivations?
JD: I think I, personally, am very interested in the way that the longer you go through life, the more people you end up being. That’s the way I look at it. It’s a preoccupation I have. How do we reconcile all of these people we’ve been? That is very present in the way that I approach character. How consistent is anyone? What does that even mean to be consistent?
There are very few relationships in a life where you share all of your complexity and your contradictions and share all the people you’ve been. That’s a real gift to have those relationships. I don’t think many people ever necessarily attain that. I think that’s what everyone ultimately wants, is to have that kind of connection and understanding and honesty, so I think that’s what my characters strive for. I think many of them don’t achieve it. (laughs) In “Plunder”, in that marriage, that’s one of the few happy marriages in the book, but that’s a relationship where there’s true honesty, love, understanding, but it’s rare in that book. I think my characters often go about finding it in the wrong ways. Even if the motivation is pure, the way that they go about looking for it is sending them in not great directions. (laughs)
STH: You tell your students to write into the chaos. Could you talk about that?
JD: I know that I’m only happy with work that comes out of chaos. If I try to lead with structure, with idea, with goal, the thing just doesn’t have its own lifeblood. That’s the only way I can say it. So I have to plunge, and hope I don’t drown. And sometimes I do. Even with putting The Balcony together, it was very scary to go back into these stories and rip them apart. But the more you write and the more that you have the experience of something taking over, and making itself true, the more faith you have in the process.
I can really only speak for myself. That’s the way it works for me. I’m working on something longer right now, and I have an outline, but I don’t stick to it. And then I change the outline according to whatever is on the page. So one wonders, what’s the point of the outline? (laughs) It’s a map that I go in and erase and change.
I think my imagination is the smartest part of my mind. I try to give myself over to it. (Sometimes it fails me.) But as long as I’m doing that, I usually end up with something, but more importantly, I enjoy writing and so all of the hours I’m spending doing this, mean something and make my life richer.
STH: You had a central question for The Balcony, about escaping the past. Do your stories say it’s impossible or do your stories say you can?
JD: Good question. I’m distracted because it’s also a central question in something else I’m working on right now. I don’t know. That’s my answer. I haven’t figured that out yet. I think maybe in twenty years I’ll be able to answer that. I’m still wondering.
STH: Because the characters, in some ways, exhibit that they can. But in some ways, the past is always in them. Did you have that question in mind when you were going into the stories or did you figure it out as you were writing?
JD: It goes back to the question of France and language and culture and self. I think that the experience of living in another country and another language also creates a sense of another self. I always felt that the me who lived in France, who spoke French, was quite different from the person who spoke English in Sacramento, California. That’s alienating, from the self, but it’s also empowering and amazing. It suggests that we can change, we can be different and we can become better in some ways.
The me who lived in France and who spoke French all the time is now in the past. And I don’t know where she is now, in relationship to the me I am. But I know she’s still there. My life changed, I no longer live with someone who is French. I stopped speaking French for a few years. Then I realized at some point that a part of me was missing. So I started speaking it again with my daughters, I started listening to French radio, I started reading again in French. I’m having this new relationship with this language and this culture. It’s from a different vantage point, but my previous relationship is still there as well.
I’m tying together this question of how many selves we have and of time, and how you can return to a relationship and have a new version of it later. But the original version is still there, informing the new version.
Going back to my statement that I don’t know if you can escape the past – maybe that’s okay. The nature of time is that it folds all the time. It is one of the nice things about getting older, the trippiness of time.
