![]() MM: I absolutely felt like I could flip some of them. John Plotz (JP): Did you feel you had to be in concert with those four texts? Or if you needed to flip some of them, was it okay to do that? He means romantic love, but I took it to mean something more like empathy, which most gods (who today would be sociopathic narcissists) cannot experience. Also, there is a very quick line in Ovid where he describes her as having an ingenium-a temperament-that is more fitted for love. She’s standing with a foot in two worlds. That was incredibly important to me in imagining her character: she doesn’t quite fully belong to the world of gods. Homer describes her as being “the dread goddess who speaks like a human.” He doesn’t really explain that at all-what it means to speak like a human. Everything else was me just kind of trying to figure out who this character was and who she would be, and there were some details within those texts that ended up being very important. So, those were the four myths that I had. Getting to animate that, and imagine this meeting between Circe and Penelope, was incredibly exciting. It’s the story of Telegonous, Circe’s son with Odysseus, growing up on the island of Aeaea, going off to find his father, then accidentally killing his father, and bringing his brother, Telemachus, and Penelope, Odysseus’s wife, back to the island of Aeaea. It’s from an ancient epic like the Iliad and the Odyssey, but we only have it in summary. The fourth piece that I was using doesn’t even really exist it’s lost to us. Medea does veil herself, hiding herself from Circe as she does in my book, but the meeting between them is totally imagined by me-the dialogue and all of that. Jason and Medea really do show up on Circe’s island looking for absolution from their various crimes. The meeting with her niece Medea-the other great witch in ancient literature-comes out of the Argonautica. So, I wanted to give her much more of a psychological reason for doing what she does, for making this terrible mistake, and then, more importantly, I wanted to make her live with it. He makes her a very pathetic figure: she’s always falling in love with the wrong guy, and then she gets angry and lashes out. He’s not really interested in her psychology in the same way. Ovid is really interested in her power and her magic and her anger. In the Metamorphoses, she’s the Goddess of Transformations-and that was the source of the love triangle between Scylla, Glaucus, and Circe. ![]() MM: Well, there are four major sources about Circe, and that’s pretty much it. There are only a few lines about her in the Odyssey, yet you’ve spun this wonderful, rich, deep story. Gina Turrigiano (GT): That makes me wonder what besides the Iliad and the Odyssey inspired this story about Circe. For a teenager, that’s a really epic amount of effort, but it was all worth it. We met on early morning Saturdays and before school. He saw that I was completely obsessed with these stories and took me aside, and said, “I can have you reading the Iliad in the original in about a year.” I said, “Sign me up.” So, he did this small group meeting with me and a few other students. My poor mother: I think she always wanted to go look at the impressionists, but I was very insistent.Īnd then we moved to Philadelphia, for high school, and that was where I found my wonderful Latin teacher who taught me Homeric Greek. My mom would take me at least once a month we would go and look at the Greek and Roman collections and the Egyptian collections, as well. Madeline Miller (MM): I was born in Boston, but when I was about a year old, my parents moved to New York City, so I grew up in Manhattan, close enough that we could go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which was a huge part of my upbringing. You can listen to the whole thing, which includes Miller reading two wonderful passages from Circe and her recommendation of related books, here, or by subscribing to Recall This Book on iTunes, or Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Below is an edited version of our conversation with her. In planning the first few episodes of Recall This Book (a new podcast partnered with Public Books), we quickly put Miller on the top of our must-interview list. It begins as the story of a few of the women who have crucial parts to play in Odysseus’s rambling, manly road trip, but as the novel goes on, we realize that its “mythological realism” is polyphonic, satirical, and, in the best sense of the word, upsetting. Her 2018 novel, Circe-critically acclaimed and a fixture on the New York Times best-seller list that year-is a sort of Odyssey from the side. ![]() Her degrees include a BA and MA in classics from Brown, and her first novel, The Song of Achilles, won the 2012 Orange Prize for Fiction. Madeline Miller is a Boston-born writer who currently lives in Philadelphia.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |