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MORE ABOUT THE AUTHOR!
Karen Joy Fowler was born in February 1950 in Bloomington, Indiana, where her father was a professor of psychology. Her mother was a polio survivor, a schoolteacher, and a pioneer in the co-operative nursery school movement. Her family loved basketball and books. Karen recalls, ‘the day I got my first library card there was a special dinner to celebrate. And before I could read myself, I remember my father reading the Iliad to me, although really he was reading it to my older brother, I just got to be there… And I remember Mary Poppins and Winnie the Pooh in my father’s voice and a bunch of other things that weren’t movies yet. My parents strongly disapproved of the Disney version of things. Pooh believed in a spoonful of honey, but Mary Poppins did not.’
Karen says, ‘Bloomington lives in my mind as a sort of Oz-like place where I caught fireflies and watched lightning and ran around. None of the yards were fenced, so we could play games that covered massive amounts of territory.’ When she was 11 her family moved to Palo Alto, California, where Karen was outraged to find that all the yards had fences.
An ‘antiwar activist’, Karen gained a BA in political science from the University of California at Berkeley between 1968 and 1972, ‘a very heated period,’ she notes. ‘I was in Berkeley during People’s Park, when the city was occupied and there were tanks on the street corners, and I was there during the Jackson State/Kent State killings. I met my husband there. He’d been part of the free speech movement; that was my idea of glamour.’ In 1972, she married Hugh Sterling Fowler II and moved to Davis. She had her first baby at twenty-three during the last year of her master’s program (at the University of California). After completing her master degree she entered what she refers to as her ‘child-rearing years’. Though she loves her two children with an intensity that still amazes her, at the age of 30 – when her daughter Shannon, was 7, and her son, Ryan, 5 – Karen began to feel restless and started to look for an occupation. ‘I loved being a stay-at home mother, but it was a job that was going to expire on me,’ she said. So she decided to reclaim some space for herself. She tried dancing, learning languages, dropped them all. ‘I was terrified of failing,’ she said. Next came writing. If she didn’t succeed in a year, she told her Hugh, who was by now an environmentalist for the Sacramento Municipal Utility District, she would find another profession. In 1980 she joined a peer-writing workshop at the Davis Arts Center. A year passed. And only failure, rejections from magazines, the criticism of her colleagues. ‘It was going to be more work that I realised,’ she said, ‘but I found out how badly I wanted it.’ She renegotiated with Hugh for another five years.
Just as her time was nearly up, she sold a story, The Natives, to a magazine, helicon 9. This story was based in the science-fiction genre, not what you might first expect from the author of a book based around Jane Austen! Karen has begun reading the genre while in college, concentrating on such feminist writers in the field as Ursula K LeGuin, Joanna Russ and Kate Wilhelm. She sold three more stories to science fiction magazines and soon made a name for herself in the sci-fi community with the publication of Artificial Things, a collection of short stories. Karen followed this success with her first novel, Sarah Canary, after one of her editors suggested she try the novel form. The book, which was critically acclaimed, tells the story of a mysterious 19th century woman in the Pacific Northwest who speaks in incomprehensible sounds and is taken under the wing of a Chinese labourer. The Sweetheart Season, a romantic comedy with historical and fantastical elements, followed and a second collection, Black Glass, was published in 1998. Her third novel, Sister Noon, which features a voracious female reader haunted by an ‘unseen narrator’ who seems to be plotting her every move, was a finalist for the 2002 Pen/Faulkner Award. And if that doesn’t sound about as far removed from Austen’s world as you can get, Karen is now working on a novel based on a 1950s experiment in which chimpanzees were home-raised with humans to see what their linguistic capabilities might be.
You could be forgiven for thinking that Karen suffers from a severe case of literary schizophrenia, but Karen – who says her all-time favourite TV show is Buffy the Vampire Slayer – likes to set people straight on this. ‘I like reading anything that takes place in a strange landscape that I have to imagine,’ she says. ‘A lot of my friends in the science-fiction field read Jane Austen the same way they read sci-fi: It’s kind of a world-building exercise. It’s a strange world, and you’re trying to make sense of it.’
The Jane Austen Book Club is Karen’s fourth novel. And although it is sunnier than Karen’s usual fare, it isn’t without shadows. It took a year and a half to write and The New York Times Book Review described the finished product as, ‘that rare book that reminds us what reading is all about’. Now in her 50s, Karen recognises that her own relationship with Austen’s work has changed. As a teenager, she gobbled up the novels, believing them to contain stories of perfect love. In college, a raised consciousness allowed her to see early feminism in Austen’s work. She also began to see that Austen didn’t always mean to imply that the supposedly perfect romances were truly perfect. Later, as a married mother of two, Karen decided that Austen wrote primarily about family. ‘I’m astonished that whatever is my current obsession in my private life, suddenly Jane Austen seems to be about that,’ she says.
Through all the changes, Karen has remained fixed on Austen’s humour and her presence in each of the novels. ‘There’s an intimacy in the voice of the books,’ she says. ‘She is in all the main characters, so when you’re done with a book, you feel you’ve spent intimate time with her. Yet you don’t know the first thing about her.’ ‘I’ve done my best to be true to [Austen’s] sensibility,’ Karen says. ‘And in the spirit, a lot of the romance has a kind of edge to it. It’s not utterly satisfying. Hollywood in particular tries to ‘fix’ that.’ ‘One of the things I anticipated when I wrote the book is that I would hear from a lot of people who liked Austen,’ she says. ‘But I am also hearing from a lot of people who don’t like her and tend to be extremely apologetic about the fact. People tell me she’s annoying, and I’m not sure what that means. And they say they can’t bring themselves to care who marries whom. Which is such a small part of what’s going on in her books.’
Karen sees Austen as ‘a rock star’ of literature, someone who fills the gap between high culture and low. She says she ‘doesn’t get at all’ people who couldn’t care less about her idol, adding that ‘there aren’t very many writers who are, at one and the same time, embraced by academics and are someone people go out to bookstores to buy because her books are fun to read.’ All that said Austen is obviously Karen’s favourite writer. ‘But she isn’t the writer of my favourite book.’ T. H. White’s The Once and Future King holds that distinction. It’s this mass appeal, coupled with the current popularity of book groups that seems to have propelled sales of Karen’s novel. But she’s the first to acknowledge that Austen has always been a big seller and, in a sense, The Jane Austen Book Club is benefiting from a spillover of her readers. ‘I read somewhere years ago that Pride and Prejudice was outselling Grisham’s The Runaway Jury,’ says Fowler with obvious delight. ‘Now, this was not the year that The Runaway Jury came out. But it was also not the year that Pride and Prejudice was published either.’
Karen still belongs to the peer-writing workshop she joined more than 20 years ago when she was starting out. Her fame has far exceeded that of its other members. But ‘I was not the most talented,’ she insists, ‘not the most hard working, not the one to whom writing mattered most. I succeeded because I was the toughest.’ She has kept all of the 200 rejection letters she has received in the course of her career and shows them to her students when teaching classes and workshops. ‘Every one of those hurt me when they came in,’ she says. ‘When I look at them now, I’m enormously proud. Look how many people tried to stop me. I refused to be stopped.’
In 1991, along with science fiction writer Pat Murphy, Karen created the James Tiptree Jr Memorial Award which, in Karen’s words, ‘is presented annually to a short story or novel that explores or expands our understanding of gender… both to honour Alice Sheldon [the science fiction author who used the pen name James Tiptree] and to remind the field of its own importance in the continual struggle to re-imagine more liveable sexual roles for ourselves.’
Karen still lives in Davis and writes full time. She is also the facilitator of a book club run out of the Avid Reader, her local independent bookstore.
INSPIRATION FOR THE JANE AUSTEN BOOK CLUB:
Among her novels The Jane Austen Book Club is the only one for which Karen can pinpoint the moment she wanted to write. Two years ago, she was in a Corte Madera bookstore waiting to attend a friend’s reading. She spotted a sign on the wall advertising ‘The Jane Austen Book Club’. ‘I thought it was a book,’ she says. ‘I thought it was a book I was waiting my whole life to read.’ Her heart sank when she realised the sign was promoting a book club – one too far from home to even join. After recovering from the disappointment of not being able to buy the book, she realised she could, in fact, write it. On the drive home, she remembers crossing the Richmond Bridge. When her front tires touched its surface, she knew only that she would write a book. Two minutes later, when her back tires left the bridge, she formed the book’s whole structure in her head – six characters, six meetings of the book group, six chapters, six Austen novels. ‘The book came in many ways as a gift,’ she said.
Karen started reading Austen as a teenager, but she doesn’t remember which book started her off because she quickly consumed all of them. Now she rereads them regularly. ‘I have never not loved her, but every time I read her, I love something different about her,’ she says. ‘It seems to me that the older I get, the smarter she gets.’
For all but Grigg [the only male in the group], my starting point was a Jane Austen character, then I tried to fill it in in different ways that would take the character in different directions’, says Karen. This is not to say that you have to be an Austen expert to enjoy the book. Although there is plenty of discussion about Austen’s work in the novel, knowledge of the books is not a prerequisite. Even if all you know about Jane Austen comes from the film Clueless (based on Emma) – which, incidentally, is Fowler’s favourite film adaptation of Austen’s work – you’ll do just fine. As Patricia O’Connor from The New York Times promises, ‘Lovers of Austen will relish this book, but I envy any reader who comes to it unfamiliar to her. There’s no better letter of introduction.’
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