Featured Interview With Anne McClard
Tell us a little about yourself. Where were you raised? Where do you live now?
I was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania but lived in many different places growing up. My dad was a surgeon in the Navy, and my mother was a housewife. After seventeen years of marriage and having had six children with my father, my mother divorced him, something rare in the early 1960s. So, we moved a lot and, for a time, were what people nowadays call “unhoused.” We lived in Virginia (Norfolk, Virginia Beach), Colorado (Breckenridge, Empire, Georgetown, Denver, Boulder), Billings (Montana), and Santa Fe (New Mexico), where I came of age attending St. John’s College. I think of myself as coming from the “Rocky Mountain Corridor.” As an adult, I have lived in Rhode Island, Denver, Boulder, and the Bay Area. I am married and have two children, one living at home, and the other in Los Angeles, where he is starting his fledgling career in the film industry. Last but not least, we have two adorable senior Tibetan Terriers.
At what age did you realize your fascination with books? When did you start writing?
I have been writing for my entire life. The first time I thought of writing a book was after reading ‘Little House in the Big Woods’ by Laura Ingalls Wilder. A couple of years later, I read ‘Harriet the Spy’ by Louise Fitzhugh and went right out and bought my first journal. I have kept a journal in one form or another ever since then. It is no accident that I ended up being a cultural anthropologist—notebook , pen, and observational skills are the main tools of the trade, as is documenting every day life.
Who are your favorite authors to read? What is your favorite genre to read. Who Inspires you in your writings?
I gravitate to literary fiction, regardless of genre elements. Magic, romance, mystery, culture, history and good world-building are all part of what I look for. I really love well researched novels with developed characters who have complex back stories. Intricate plots also fascinate me. As an adult reader, I have been most influenced by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Barbara Kingsolver, and mystery writers like Tana French and Donna Tartt. I also love good ethnographic fiction. The books I enjoy reading the most teach me something but also entertain. And, that is the kind of books I try to write.
Tell us a little about your latest book?
Margaux and the Vicious Circle is the book I most recently finished writing. It will be released on September 30, 2024. It tells the story of Margaux, a young writer in 1985 Manhattan, who has penned a semi-autobiographical novel that includes the unresolved disappearance of a childhood friend. She faces the usual impediments that all authors do—difficulties finding an agent, and pushback from family members who feel that her book reveals too many secrets they have worked hard to hide.
Margaux, like me, has four siblings, and her backstory is scaffolded on many events that took place in my own family and childhood, but she is definitely not me, and the novel she has written is only tangentially related to my life. The characters are wholly fabricated. Character building is one of the most fun parts of writing for me. I spend almost as much time writing backstories as I do writing the book. I was able to produce a complete draft of this book in approximately six months.
This book was particularly tricky because it weaves two timelines. The story is really two complete novels that mingle details of Margaux’s childhood with her current life. Multiple mysteries are opened and closed in each timeline. Thematically, I was inspired to write the book because my mother kept fretting about how dangerous the world had become. I argued that the world has always been dangerous, recounting the dangers she faced in her childhood and the dangers my siblings and I faced in ours. Childhood might actually be safer now! Another important theme, present in both of my novels, is the power of magical thinking and imagination for overcoming adversity.
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