This month I had the pleasure to speak with MoonShine Art Spot in a special author interview, released in conjunction with the Summer Giveaway Hop 2013. I had the chance to address my inspiration for "Gibbin House" and other personal experiences that made it into the book. Here is an excerpt from the interview. To read in its entirety, follow the link:
In your debut novel “Gibbin
House”, the protagonist is a young Romanian woman who is forced to leave her
home after the Second World War and start a new life in London. Is this story of exile based on anything
that happened to you?
To some extent, yes, although I was much younger than Anka when I
left Communist-era Romania in 1979. Five
years earlier, my father had traveled from his native Peru to Timisoara, to
study biology at the Polytechnic University.
He hadn’t been there long when he went to a party and met a leggy blonde
with John Lennon glasses. He barely
spoke a word of Romanian, but he was beautiful and brilliant in after-shave and
bell bottom jeans. It was a typical
hippie love story, but for the fact that the Ceausescu regime forbade
relationships with foreigners... to continue...
Did you have your mother in
mind when you wrote about Anka’s journey to London?
Naturally. Here is this
young woman – my mother - with an old suitcase and a baby in her arms, without
a penny to her name, having never eaten spaghetti or watched a scary movie, in
clothes she’s sewn herself, getting on a plane, and seeing her own mother, as
far as she knows, for the last time in her life...to continue...
Do you see migration as a
central theme to “Gibbin House”?
Certainly
one of them. I’m interested in how
people find a ‘home’, what that means.
It would have been a very important consideration after the war, with so
many homes destroyed, families separated, political boundaries redrawn,
deportations forced on various ethnic groups.
How do people recapture ‘home’ after all that?...to continue...
Did any other personal
experiences find their way into the book?
Like
most authors, I write what I know, mostly in terms of relationships between
people. Anka’s feelings in a new country are very familiar to me; her inability
to speak mirrors my many months spent in silence every time I moved to a
country where I did not know the language.
Her close connection with her mother is also something where I could
inject elements of myself. And of
course there’s the romantic plotline...to continue...
To read the interview in its entirely, go to www.MoonShineArtSpot.blogspot.com
