Illuminating Fiction

Margot Livesey: A Little in Common

180 Margot Livesey A Little in Common Banishing Verona, Margot Livesey’s most recent and fifth novel, tells the story of Zeke Cafarelli and Verona MacIntyre, who share a passionate onenight affair in London. Zeke is a handyman who has Asperger’s Syndrome and a host of related symptoms. Verona is already seven months pregnant, a confident, quick-tempered, moderately successful radio show host. After their evening of intimacy, Verona leaves for Boston and Zeke feels he has no choice but to pursuit her. In Livesey’s captivating fourth novel, Eva Moves the Furniture, Eva McEwen is visited by two other-worldly companions; the reader is never sure if the companions are there to protect or harm her. “This is a novel that enters the reader’s life in much the same way that the companions come to Eva,” wrote Valerie Martin in her the New York Times review. “It looks harmless enough, like a child’s fantasy, inhabiting a fairy tale in which powerful, otherworldly forces are at work, but reader beware.” Eva Moves the Furniture was a finalist for the L.L. Winship/PEN/New England Award, a New York Times Notable Book, and an Atlantic Monthly Best Book of the Year. Livesey is the author of three other novels: The Missing World, Criminals, and Homework. Among her first published works of fiction were short stories that are in the collection Learning By Heart. She also co-authored Writing About Literature: An Anthology for Reading and Writing. Livesey has been received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, the Massachusetts Artists’ Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Canada Council for the Arts. Since 1996 she has been a Writer in Residence at Emerson College and since 1990 she has been a Visiting Professor at the Warren Wilson MFA Program. She was previously a Visiting Professor at Brandeis University, at Boston University, at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and at Williams College; an Assistant Professor at Carnegie-Mellon University; a Writer in Residence at Cleveland State University; and a lecturer at Tufts University. She has also taught writing at the Bennington Summer Workshop, the Napa Valley Margot Livesey 181 Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and the Bread Loaf Writers Conference. Her essays and short stories have been published in the Atlantic Monthly, Five Points magazine, the AWP Chronicle, the New Yorker, Story magazine, and the Kenyon Review as well as many other magazines and anthologies. She frequently writes book reviews for the New York Times Book Review and the Boston Globe. Livesey grew up in Scotland on the edge of the Highlands. She and her husband divide their time between the U.S. and Britain. I met with her at her dining room table on the second floor of her three-story townhouse in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Sherry Ellis: When Banishing Verona begins, Zeke, the protagonist, is changing light bulbs. Unbeknownst to him his life is about to change as well. In this novel electrical surges and electricity itself are motifs that carry the novel forward. How did you develop this powerful symbol? Margot Livesey: Zeke was a character whom I’d long wanted to write about. He was hovering in the margins of several other novels, never making it onto the page. But specifically, about electricity, I had this image of a man working in an empty house, in particular Zeke working there and light bulb after light bulb popping into darkness. I don’t know if you remember Nabokov’s story “Signs and Symbols.” It’s about this elderly couple whose only son is in an institution because he thinks everything in the world—the wallpaper, the clouds, the trees—is sending him messages. The parents go to visit him, and they too keep reading everything as a sign, including a series of phone calls which turn out to be wrong numbers, until, perhaps, the last one. It’s a very short and beautiful story about the way we both over- and under-interpret the world. In Zeke’s case he largely forgets about the light bulbs but maybe readers will think that they did mean something; that they heralded the approach of this electrically magical person, Verona. Ellis: On the surface, lovers Zeke and Verona have very little in common. Zeke is a man who can’t lie; limited by Asperger’s Syndrome, he is an open book. Verona is a woman who rarely tells the truth and whose attitudes and beliefs often take...