NORA CHASSLER
About Nora Chassler
Nora Chassler grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and attended state schools. She graduated from Hunter College where she earned a degree in English and Film Studies. She has worked as a fashion model, a Repatriation Case Worker and a housewife. She now lives in Dundee, Scotland, with her partner, the poet Don Paterson, and her daughter, Frances. She is working on her second novel.
Nora featured in Stories of My Life, a regular column in The Sunday Herald, on December 27 2009.
To read an interview with Nora in The Sunday Times, click here.
Praise for Nora Chassler
‘Nora Chassler has written an original and exuberant first novel. With a beguiling mix of voices, it's a romance, a mystery, and a coming of age story set in New York City. Her writing is fresh, poignant, wide-awake – and very funny.’ – Galaxy Craze
‘Windblown, storm-tossed, passionate and electric, Miss Thing is exceptionally compelling fiction. It is also the first time you'll encounter the name Nora Chassler. It won't be the last.’ – Alan Furst
'Chassler is based in Scotland but hails from New York, and her first book is absolutely in that city's bright, sardonic and witty tradition ... What is truly enjoyable enjoyable about the book is the old-fashioned love story at its heart. When I say old-fashioned, I mean somewhere between Nabokov and Bret Easton Ellis ... Chassler's characters illicit real emotion. They also make you laugh out loud. their individual stories grip you to the last and leave you wanting more.' – Chris Dolan, The Herald
'Nora Chassler’s debut novel marks the arrival of a distinctive new voice onto the Scottish literary scene ... this debut is to be admired for the audacity of its central conceit and the overall stylishness of its execution.'
– The List
An interview with Nora Chassler
When did you first begin writing, and what inspired you to do so? Have any specific books/authors served as inspiration for you?
I began writing when I was ten. I wrote a description of a beach and used the word 'serene' and my teacher was impressed. I quickly began to use writing as a way out of my present. I’ve written journals since I was 14.
I read novels starting around when I was 14 too. I loved A Room with a View, Catcher in the Rye, The Beautiful and Damned, Crime and Punishment, Pride and Prejudice, Bartleby the Scrivener, The Country Doctor, Death in Venice, Jude the Obscure, pre-Wide Sargasso Sea Jean Rhys, The Red and the Black, Madame Bovary, In Cold Blood, Germinal… I never finished a book I didn’t love in those days; it was kind of a bad habit to get into, actually.
I’m not sure any of those novels were inspiration. I wanted to be in one of them (OK, maybe not In Cold Blood). I think it was Susan Sontag who said “A writer is a reader gone mad.”
Can you tell us something about the inspiration behind Miss Thing in particular? And about what you were trying to achieve; what ideas you were trying to convey?
I wrote an outline/sparse short story version of Miss Thing called A Nice Story! while I was pregnant and on jury duty in New York. I’m not sure what I was thinking when I wrote it.
Later I tried writing it from different points of view. I couldn’t choose one so I chose loads. Then I realized I was interested in the idea of Andromeda being invented by everyone in the book simultaneously. I wanted to point out how big a part the reader plays in making a character up, too. It comes back to wanting to be in a book, I think.
I’ve always been uncomfortable with the idea of myself as an author and the more I worked on Miss Thing the more I realized it was not just simple insecurity – it was actually a genuine beef with the hubris of the omniscient narrator. It seems tied in with a tradition of linear thinking that has got us in a conceptual hole, wanting to be the heroes of our own lives and all that. I don’t like the paradigm of Campbell’s 'Hero’s Journey'; I think it makes people delusional. Leads to all sorts of crazy and often sexist ideas, like a belief in progress… On the other hand, you have to keep people amused and engaged if you want them to listen to you, even if what you are saying is anti-narrative. I’m still working on this. I can’t shake my annoyance with goal-oriented narratives.
How do you go about creating your voice on the page?
I wish I had less of a voice. I go about trying to dismantle my voice. My voice won’t shut up! It created itself at some point, one assumes.
How and when do you write?
I don’t write for six weeks and then I write for six weeks. I think. Honestly I don’t keep track. I think I start writing when I can’t take not writing anymore. I write when I have something I need to explain to myself.
What do you enjoy reading? What are you reading that you can recommend at the moment?
I just reread The House of Mirth and was very very moved by it. When Rosedale (anti-Semitically portrayed by Wharton) turns out to be morally superior to the upper-class folk who shun him, when he comes through for deluded and screwed Lily Bart, I could not stop crying. I think it was also that the book was ending. I wanted to stay in the novel, where everything matters.
At the moment I am thinking about writing from children’s point of views, so I’ve been re-reading What Maisie Knew, which is also amazing, though not my favourite James novel. Maisie is like a doll in a room full of people. I know a bit about what he was trying to do because I read a letter or something he wrote about it, but still it is odd…
OK, what did I read that has no 're-' in front of it?!
Steve Aylett! Don and I read Lint out loud to each other and finally had to stop from laughing … in terror. He is inspiring. He writes really really beautifully. I love the way he can write a sentence that makes no sense yet makes more sense than if it did. Plus he is one of the funniest authors I’ve ever read.
Christa Wolf’s Medea is fanfuckingtastic! Her depiction of injustice and the machinations through which people exercise power is so hearteningly clear. It made me want to stand up and cheer.
I also read the short story collection Rashomon by Akutagawa. I really love his tone. He’s hilarious.
Last night I reread Mary Bernard’s Sappho. That was lovely. It made me feel both far away and safe.
