Claire Messud: “I couldn’t understand why someone would care about imaginary lives when reality was so overwhelming.”
Claire Messud, author of the masterful and sophisticated novel The Emperor’s Children (Vintage, $14.95), focused on the importance of fiction and what it teaches the reader when she addressed members of the Indian River Literary Society at a recent meeting. She is the author of three critically acclaimed novels and her collection of novellas was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award.
The Emperor’s Children is set in New York City in the months before and immediately after Sept. 11, 2001, and follows the lives of three friends who had graduated from Brown University in Rhode Island a decade earlier. They should, by this time, be on their way to success – or “something important”; instead, they are floundering and whining.
Claire’s editor, needing a pithy statement to explain the book, wrote, “It is a novel about the intersection in the lives of three friends, now on the cusp of their 30s, making their way – or not – in New York City.”
Read the entire article in the September 2008 issue
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