Elizabeth Enfield Meet the Author


Elizabeth Enfield

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as much money for them as possible.

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Now it's time for Meet the Author.

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Two children are inseparable.

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They're torn apart by an accident;

late in life they meet again.

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Then we're taken into a parallel

world, where they meet in middle-age

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and have a passionate affair.

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Then another, in which they marry

young but confront unhappiness.

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They are Ivy and Abe,

and in Elizabeth Enfield's novel,

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each of these stories reveals a part

of their character as if all of us

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aren't just who we are here and now,

but are always carrying with us

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the weight of the oldest

question of all - what if?

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Welcome.

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In this book, we are reminded that

life and your fate can change

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in the blink of an eye.

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Do you think of that

as being reassuring or alarming?

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I think it's both but I think it's

one of those tantalising thoughts

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that people have a lot,

that sort of "what if I'd done this"

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and "what if I'd done that,"

and I think the thought is very

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alarming, especially if you've

based your whole life or you've

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lived your whole life dependent

on one route you've gone down.

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But I actually think

the exploration of it,

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which I've tried to do in the book,

is less alarming because

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I think that life...

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There are a lot of themes

to the book, not just the issue

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of the relationship between the two

people, but I think life has

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a habit of turning out

as it's going to turn out,

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and those paths not taken

have a sort of way of rejoining

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almost, so that you can look back

and think, "If I hadn't done,

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that my life might have been very

different," but very often it's not.

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It's similar.

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That is the reassuring answer,

but what's interesting

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about Ivy and Abe of course -

the couple we follow and then go

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backwards with in this book -

is that it's not so much

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what they have done,

decisions they've made,

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it's about things that have happened

that are beyond their control,

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an accident for example

when they are children,

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that throws them apart.

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A lot of it is accidental,

so they're not to blame,

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or it is not something they have

done that's produced good or bad,

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it's just stuff that happened.

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I've tried to work in...

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There's something else in that,

that there are two things

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in the book that Abe's life...

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so the two people have different

things going on in their lives

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and Abe's life, as you said,

is there's an accident which happens

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in each of his parallel lives and it

always has a different effect.

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So it's a completely

random accident.

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Whenever it happens,

the effect of that accident

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plays out differently.

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And against that, I wanted

something that was more sort

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of set in the stars,

if you like.

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So Ivy has something which is -

when I was writing it,

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I was thinking what can she have

that's just almost immutable,

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that's not going to suffer

the same random effects,

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so she has something in her genes

which also plays out,

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which I don't want to give too much

away, but that was my thing

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of what can you have in your life

that is absolutely set that

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you can't affect, and that

seemed to me like it's

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something you're born with,

your cards are marked,

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your genetic card is marked,

and that's going to play out no

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matter what happens really

in the rest of the world,

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the way that it will.

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We don't want to give too much away

but we can say that we see them

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operating in parallel worlds.

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I mean they're children,

then they meet when they are much,

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much older, elderly really.

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Then there are two other episodes

when they're in midlife,

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and we see these things

almost acting simultaneously.

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It is inevitable when this book

is reviewed that people will look

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back to that film Sliding Doors

and say, "Oh, that's the kind

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of thing we are talking about here."

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People will remember that movie.

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As you say, Ivy and Abe

meet again and again,

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and it's like Sliding Doors but not

in that it's not that same time that

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might have gone differently,

it is at different times

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of their lives.

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They are children, they're

in their 70s, in their 60s,

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in their 50s, 40s, 30s.

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We go right through,

and within those chapters

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we have a little bit of background

and a bit of information so we know

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what that particular life to date,

how it's been slightly different

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than it was to another version.

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You are writing a fascinating story

because it's absorbing, you know,

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what will happen in this

circumstance and how does it compare

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with what's happened

before or what's to come.

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Were you conscious at all,

when you were writing the story

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and as the novel developed,

that you wanted to say something

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about the nature of life

or our own experiences,

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or how we look at our emotional

lives, or were you just saying

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I want to tell a good story?

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Both.

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I think...

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You know, one of the premises

of this novel was I gathered

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a lot of stories of,

A, people who'd had relationships

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that they had thought maybe if I'd

met someone at another time it might

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have played out differently.

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So the circumstances of their life

at that particular time had affected

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a particular relationship.

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And, B, that almost everyone

I suppose, especially as they reach

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the end of their lives,

and the stance at the end

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of Ivy and Abe's lives

has a sort of slight...

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Not really a yearning

but a wistfulness.

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And I don't mean a deep sad

wistfulness but a slight

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nostalgic "I wonder

what might have happened..."

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A natural curiosity.

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Yes, a natural curiosity.

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"What if I hadn't done that?"

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I think generally people think, "I'm

glad that I didn't because my life

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has turned out fine."

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I'm interested in the

names, Ivy and Abe.

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Both very simple and

almost very intimate.

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You know, my friends, Ivy and Abe.

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You can think of them.

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There's nothing

artificial about them.

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It's the kind of question readers

always want to know.

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How did you come to Ivy and Abe?

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Well, I started actually,

and there are traces of this

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this still in the book,

I started with Robert and Eleanor

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because I wanted names that

I could change and give

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a variation of.

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And then when I finished the book,

I decided it was too confusing

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and I just wanted names that

were easily recognisable,

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not unusual, not "how do you spell

that," but also unusual so that each

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time you met them it was

obvious it was them.

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It wasn't another Tom,

Dick or Harry, or Sarah or Kate.

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It was like, "Oh, it's Ivy."

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Then actually on the

page, they look...

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They look nice together.

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They look sort of right.

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I like the way that

words look on a page.

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I love the way they look

on the cover of the book.

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You talk about the cover,

it's interesting because you've got

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the names on Scrabble tiles

and a heart on another tile.

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It's a lovely idea because we all

know how infuriating and how

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wonderful that game is according

to how the tiles fall.

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Exactly.

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It's a lovely analogy

for the story really.

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Exactly and you can, you know,

if you were playing Scrabble,

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they might land anywhere

on the board, they might repeat

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themselves on the board

so it is a great sort of metaphor

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for what the book is about.

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I come back to the idea

of alternative lives,

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which were always waiting out

there for us and we

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could have taken.

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How did the idea come to you?

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It came...

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I mean, I'd love to say there was

a eureka moment but there wasn't.

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It came...

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I sort of am constantly

collecting people's stories

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so from reading the paper,

from listening to the radio,

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listening to television,

talking to people, and I sort

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of ended up with this collection

of stories which was the sort

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of theme running through them

all was, you know, is there a right

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person or a right time.

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You've written a lot of short

stories so your mind, in a way,

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you know, for some years,

has been used to that idea of taking

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a lovely little episode

and constructing a beautifully

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chiselled story, and this book,

it seems to me, has a lot

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of that skill in it.

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You've put a lot of these things

together and say, hang on a minute,

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there's a big mosaic

here which hangs together.

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It was lovely to write from that

point of view because it did feel

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much more like initially I'm writing

a series of short stories

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but there is a thread of a lifetime

and of similar circumstances

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which runs through them all.

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But I was almost able to let

the characters live their life

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at a particular moment

without worrying about the before

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or after, and then thinking

about that afterwards.

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Elisabeth Enfield, author of Ivy &

Abe, thanks very much.

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Thank you.

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