This month we asked our Author of the Month, Suzanne Berne some questions about her book  The Ghost at the Table.

1. Why is the relationship between sisters such a rich one for novelists?

I think it’s because sisters know so much about each other.  Often they share secrets they wouldn’t trust with anyone else, and at the same time they have such a long history of rivalry.  Siblings in general and sisters in particular, never feel they all received equal attention when they were growing up, no matter how fair-minded their parents tried to be.  For whatever reasons, one child always demanded, and usually got, more than the others—the one who was the darling, or the invalid, or the trouble-maker, whatever it was.  Usually it works out all right, anyway.  Everyone leaves home, goes into therapy, gets over it.  But when a family crisis occurs, like a parent falling ill or dying, the faultlines of old grievances crack open.  Sisters who have been amicable for years find themselves suddenly enraged at each other, and bewildered by that rage.  And yet those same sisters find the need to stick together is stronger than ever. That mixture of trust and resentment, of dependence and competition, can be quite explosive. 
 
2. Why is family history often such disputed ground among family members?

I suppose because no one can agree on the “true” story of a family’s history, since there isn’t one.  Families are made up of individuals, and so how each person feels about being a member of that family is bound to be different.  You can ask three siblings the same question about something that happened to them in childhood and all three will have a different answer.  Especially when it comes to major events - deaths, births, divorces, the moments of displacement - perceptions can vary wildly among family members.  Family disputes most often occur when one person tries to insist on his version of history over another.
 
3. How does childhood shape the adults we become?

Well, I’m not a psychologist, just a novelist, so I can only answer that question the way a novelist would answer it: We are who we believe we are, at least to a large degree.  And childhood is where we begin that process of self-definition.  We get told some specifics by parents and teachers - that we are bookish, for instance, or good at sports or bad at math - and we also arrive fairly early at some general assumptions based on other people’s reactions to us.  That we are easy-going, clumsy, ugly, charming, etc.   From there we decide what we can expect from life and behave accordingly. 

As we get older, though, those perceptions are usually challenged by people who see us differently than we see ourselves, and by events that force us to respond in ways we haven’t before.  This is precisely the action of novels, where characters are placed in situations where they cannot operate by old definitions or values but have to find new ways of coping with and understanding the world.  In novels all this questioning and redefining eventually makes sense, however, which unfortunately is not always true of life.

4. Did you intend the Twain sisters' story to intrude more into the novel?  How does it relate to Cynthia and Frances' stories?

I originally intended to write an historical novel about Mark Twain’s three daughters, but from the start I was bothered by the notion that I was only telling my version of what their lives had been like, that I would never really know who they were or how they felt about each other and their famous father.  In fact, the more I found out about them the less I trusted my assumptions about them.  They lived a hundred years ago.  Life is vastly different today.   The circumstances of their lives were nothing like the circumstances of mine.  Most writers of historical fiction make peace with this problem; I couldn’t.  So eventually I decided to write about the problem itself: specifically, whatever story you tell about someone’s life—even the story you tell about your own life—is just one version.  There is no “history” that is not subjective.  As Mark Twain himself remarked, “The very ink with which history is written is merely fluid prejudice.”

In terms of Cynthia and Frances, the problem of whose version is “the real story” provides most of the tension in the novel.  They perceive their shared history so differently that one has to wonder whether they shared a history at all, or inhabited parallel ones.

5.  Who do you want us to believe in at the end of the book?

Both of the sisters Cynthia and Frances are both telling the truth.  But it’s the truth of their emotional experience, not necessarily “factual” truth.  The story each of the sisters tells about the past is the story that makes sense to her and that has helped her accept the hand she’s been dealt in life.  Which doesn’t mean it’s a story she has to hang onto forever - we are always modifying the past based on what we encounter in the present, which is why the past stays so dynamic.