Springtime: How Does a Story Blossom?
Agnès Madrigal, interviewed by Sara Parrot
Agnès Madrigal is a writer of works of fiction. She has completed two novels and several short stories, among various other writings. I met with Agnès to discuss her novel, Springtime, which is a classical coming-of-age story. In it, a sixteen-year-old girl interweaves her complicated family relationships with her desire to become a writer. Agnès and I discussed this story at Tartine Manufactory in San Francisco on a cold and not very springlike day! Here are some of the pieces from our conversation. SP
Sara Parrot: Tell me about Springtime.
Agnès Madrigal: Well, I always say that Springtime is what I consider to be my first novel. I had written other “novels” in the past, but none with this level of focus and determination. I understood this book, from its very beginning, to have a specific story line, a particular mission. It was a story I had carried inside of me for many years, maybe since I was a teenager, certainly since I was in my early twenties. It is not an autobiographical retelling, but it is a coming-of-age tale that apparently wanted to be told, and it broke ground for me to be able to write it and the other stories that streamed forward afterward. I was not expecting to write Springtime when I did and, until I did, I don’t think I realized the necessity I felt to write it, that it had been there, burning away in the interior as particularly resonant things do.
This photograph of tulip magnolia blossoms, taken by Agnès Madrigal, is pinned on the bulletin board next to the author’s desk. It has been used in sample designs for Springtime, which opens with a description of a blossom.
SP: What made you finally put the story into words?
AM: I had tapped at the story at various previous points without knowing it. I wrote, for example, a story of a young woman’s love affair with an artist named Musset. Musset, or Muss, appeared in various short fictions for a while, but a narrative never really formed around him. I do think, though, that this character was the foundation for the one who appears in the second half of Springtime. Other characters helped to foreground Springtime: the narrator’s mother; her sister, Léa; and, of course, her wonderful grandmother Maman. Along with these characters, voice also played a critical role.
“She wrote on the top of one page: ‘ghost, artist, occasional lover.’ Where did this concept come from? Just after having written the words, an image occurred to her. The image might have preceded the words, but it happened so quickly that she missed it, while the words were scrawled on the paper convulsively. Now, analyzing the words, she retrieved the image in earnest:
Through a painted blue door, there was a long white hall that led to the opening of a cavernous room, and in the room, there were the common messes of his paint—tubes and cans of pigment, splatters on the floor and on the wall, paintings at various stages of completion leaned against the walls. There was a striped mattress on the floor in one corner, a wood table and four caned chairs, two tall windows that faced the street, and a single light bulb that dangled from a chain overhead.
She did not even need to picture his spindly body in this room her mind had made. It was Muss, was it not?”
—from an untitled story by Agnès Madrigal
SP: I am not surprised to hear you say that. The voice of this story—and the tonality of much of your work—is unique and sometimes haunting. What can you say about that?
AM: I struggled with voice for many years. I think I even have some short stories that tell of characters trying to define their voices, skirmishing with the obstacle as I did. When I was first starting to write stories years ago, voice came very easily, very authoritatively, but I did not trust it—it was too simple, too thin. As my life unfolded, I came to dislike that initial voice even more, and sought another one, a deeper one—one that was perhaps more questioning, more, I would like to believe, authentic. One of the triggers that really enabled Springtime to begin was my experience reading Marguerite Duras again, most especially her novella The Lover, as beautifully translated by Barbara Bray. I have read this book many times, and I still never tire of it. I think it has to do with the clarity and the simplicity of the voice that Duras presents, its courage and its honesty. Rereading this work before I began to write Springtime enabled me to test a new voice for myself and that voice is what carried the story once it happened. I don’t think I could have written this book, or perhaps any book, without the inspiration of Duras.
SP: Springtime is a coming-of-age story, it is also a loss-of-innocence story. What can you say about that?
AM: Only that these types of stories—loss-of-innocence stories, as you call them—are, perhaps, some of the most difficult to write. They demand so much openness on the part of the writer, so much truthfulness, and that is not easy. Sometimes we like to think we’re being open and honest, but we discover we are guarding something, distorting something, making it as we want it, which is often inaccurate. I think this is where voice comes in and challenges us about what we’re saying, what we believe. Voice can stop us, force us to relook, question again, if we’re paying attention. And voice can, if rendered well, turn a key. I deeply admire these kinds of stories, especially when told by women. They are not easy to tell, but they are so important, for the writer and her readers, in understanding better our nature, our world, and one another.
“Sometimes I stay at the creek past dark. I float in the shallow water, watching it fill with stars. I dip under its surface and the stars pierce my body. The elms change colors in the dusk, eventually turning to blunt animal forms that create a band between the stars above and the stars reflected. When there is still enough light by which to see, the trees are cheerful giraffes, cows, elephants, dogs. After the blackness settles in and the trees become less clear, they are even frightening as they disappear into sound and presence. Their leaves rustle in the night wind like the movements of monsters or gods—I cannot be sure which type it is, except that I am still here, floating, and so the latter must prevail. Every day that I am here, there must be some small god somewhere, even lodged within my body, making certain that everything remains real.”
—from part one of Springtime
SP: What authors do you think tell these types of stories well?
AM: I have already mentioned Duras, but alongside her I would also name Annie Ernaux, another great French writer. As a woman, I am maybe drawn to women’s stories of this nature, but it is not to dismiss the work that male writers have done in this genre. Frank Conroy’s Stop Time is nearly a textbook definition of this type of work. Hervé Guibert wrote gorgeous texts that describe a very heartbreaking form of innocence lost.
SP: To conclude, what do you hope readers glean from a book such as Springtime?
AM: Well, I hope it is something like what I have gained from reading the writers listed above and others like them. It is an intimate sense of another person in the world, a person’s uninhibited thoughts and descriptions of a time in their life that changed them irretrievably. It is a means of understanding another perspective, another human being. I think stories like this resonate because, when told well, we can understand them, they are familiar to us even if unidentical to our own lives, our own trajectories. And this causes an extraordinary epiphany in us, a recognition, a sense that we are part of something that is the same, that all of our life stories are interconnected.