My book club, Historical Fiction Heart, recently finished reading The Lost Diary of Venice by Margaux Deroux.
Our usual live online book club chats are a mixture of laughs, clinking wine and cocktail glasses and avid discussion about what we love and loathe.
However, when we met to discuss The Lost Diary of Venice our group logged on with a sense of anticipation. This time we would be joined by the author, Margaux Deroux.
Before you read the author interview, allow me to take a moment to say what an absolute pleasure and joy it was to speak with Margaux Deroux.
Growing up in a house full of artists, she was taught to question and describe the things she saw.
This was an incredible gift that I have no doubt aided her ability to build settings, brick by brick, until the reader can smell the Alchemist's concoctions and feel the layers of silk in the courtesan’s gown.
The group interview experience was both fun and, at moments, really touching.
Read our questions and Margaux's answers here:
You’re a debut author. Had you written any fiction before?
Nothing. No. I’d written essays for collage and then I was working as a copywriter for a little bit of time for a marketing company. But it’s not fiction writing.
No, I hadn’t written anything except very bad, lovesick poetry in High School.
That was a big part of why it took so long for me to actually start writing because I hadn’t written anything. It felt like such a long shot dream that I had a really hard time letting myself pursue it.
It really took getting burned out on my high stress, strategic IT company day job to realise that I needed a change. I needed to do something different and I realised that I just wanted to write.
I had started doing little vignettes for the book. It felt so good and I just wanted to do that. I finally reached the breaking point and thought I have to just try.
You seem to have a theme of art, is art important to you or are you an artist?
My Dad was an artist growing up, which was very challenging financially, but good because I got to grow up with someone who was pursuing their passion and get an imprint of that.
I love my Dad and he always talked to me like I was an adult. He was talking to me about art theory since age three. I really think he is such a good art theorist and art critic that he could have done something in that world in addition to being a painter.
Anything I write, I’m sending to him and he’ll let me know if anything is not quite right.
One of my earliest memories was my Dad making tempera paint out of egg yolks.
I paint myself. I haven’t painted in a long time because my focus has been the writing. But it’s something I hope to start bringing back into my life more.
Is there a little bit of your father in the character Giovanni?
Yeah, absolutely. I think he’s in Giovanni and William. Especially William, when he was second-guessing and changing his art style and thinking through his process.
One of the themes that I found most interesting in the novel is Anti-Semitism. I knew that the Jewish people had been persecuted for what seems like an eternity, but I had no idea that the first ghetto was actually a Jewish community in Venice and that Jewish people even in the sixteenth century had to wear articles of clothing that identified them as being Jewish. Can you speak to us more about this theme and your research?
There is a little debate over where the very first ghetto was, but the one in Venice was definitely one of the very first.
There was so much more information that I couldn’t even get into because I needed to keep the balance of the story.
That is one of the hardest things about historical fiction, it’s understanding how much of your research you actually need to put into the story.
The expulsion of Jewish people, how they had to migrate, restrictions on activities and how at every turn their family property was taken away - it was so intense.
What’s interesting from a psychology standpoint is that a lot of the propaganda and language and symbolism around Jewish people is the same throughout time. It’s very specific symbolism and language like Jewish people being compared to rats that is so heavily imbedded.
And you can’t feel stupid for not knowing this, because it’s not taught. No one is saying, ‘This is the ugly part of history.’
I think America is currently going through its own reckoning with oppression and the lack of knowledge and history and the way that it has been handled in classrooms.
That’s part of the reason that I like historical fiction, it makes people re-think their understanding of history. It’s powerful. It’s not a dry text book. It helps you be there and experience it.
Who is your favourite author?
I love Kate Morton. Right now, I’m reading The Lions of Fifth Avenue by Fiona Davis. It’s set in the New York Public Library and is right up the alley of book lovers and people who love libraries.
When I’m writing I read a lot of poetry. It helps me focus more on the single word and get into the cadence of a sentence and how I’m trying to construct it. I love Mary Oliver. Her nature poems are beautiful and peaceful.
There is a gentleness to you that I felt in your character Rose. Did you put some of yourself into Rose?
I can see why in certain aspects we would be alike, but I didn’t do that intentionally. I’m definitely an introvert and I love old books and libraries so we have that in common.
One of our book club members, Lili, moved back from Dublin to look after her father who was palliative with cancer. The way that you portrayed the ongoing relationship with Rose’s father after he deceased was beautiful and very real. Have you experienced that kind of loss yourself?
I’ve lost friends. I haven’t lost my father. He has Parkinson’s but is doing very well.
My mum told me that after she lost her father she continued a relationship with him. He kept popping in.
Why did you choose the setting of Venice?
So Giovanni is a real person who was in Milan. I transported him to Venice during the research process. I discovered his treatise, which is so interesting and weird looking, there is the vitruvian man image and weird sketches in it. It was all about colour theory which I love. I knew I really wanted to investigate this life.
I started researching the time period and it was right when this war happened. Then I got really interested in that and was thinking how I can tie them together.
So, I moved Giovanni to Venice. It allowed me to tie in all these other really interesting historical events.
And my parents had lived in Istanbul for a while and I had spent time there and saw Turkey. I have a friend who lived outside of Venice. I was living in France at the time, teaching children English. Little French children with their little French accents are the cutest things in the world.
On my way back I stopped by Venice and got a real contrast between Turkey and Venice – the colours and the iconography.
We cannot finish our interview without talking about The Crow, Corvino!
When I was writing this huge crow that I had not seen before just flew in and landed right in front of my window. Like he wanted to be in the book.
For Corvino, what I was trying to solve…and I don’t know that I solved it because I’m still interested in it, is the relationship between self and ideology and how you’re weaving your own trauma into your ideological commitments.
How you navigate your world through that lens and how you judge everyone through that lens.
Dogma…I’m very interested in that aspect of the human psyche.
I felt more pity for him than anything because he was this wounded, wounded person.
He was causing more harm but unable to see that repetition of pain.
There have been a lot of characters in history who have acted out their pain on the world and his backstory was about trying to understand how that happens.
We absolutely loved your Alchemist, Aurelio!
Alchemy is so wild. Researching alchemy and seeing how many Presidents and important people were alchemists. There was so much there, but I had to put my blinders on and just focus on the story.
Do you have plans for a new book and can you tell us about it?
I wanted to give people something similar but not too much the same. My new novel is only at the proposal stage. It jumps between modern day New York and Paris in the Belle Epoch. It’s focussing on artist George Sear. It’s all about the impressionists and you get that beautiful moment of Paris.
Everyone participating in the interview live was completing in love with Margaux and already hooked on her writing.
To view a full recording of the interview and all the hilarity and emotion that happened in between click here.
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