Melanie Benjamin Gets Curiouser and Curiouser About Alice

Confession time: I’m actually promoting a longtime friend’s novel today; I first met Melanie Benjamin (or, as I know her, Melanie Hauser) at a book fair several years ago, thanks to another writer of our mutual acquaintance, and we’ve crossed paths on the festival circuit several times since then. So when I heard that she’d taken a detour from her usual contemporary fiction into the historical/biographical world ofAlice I Have Been, I couldn’t wait to get a look. But I was interested in what prompted this shift in subject matter, and I thought you might be, too. So here we are…

As I prepared for the publication of Alice I Have Been, I found myself knee deep in guest blog posts, Q&A’s, interviews, etc., for both print and online book sites. It’s a rite of passage these days, and while it can be time consuming, there’s also a very appealing aspect to it all; it requires an author to pause a bit and reflect upon the whys and reasons and the very definition of the creative process.

One of the questions I find I’m asked repeatedly has to do with my muse. Do I have one, what does it look like, what advice can I give other authors about following it? This is the kind of question that can make me feel very inadequate, because I’ve never thought in terms of a muse. I think of myself as a hard working author who just tries to get it done, and if one thing isn’t working out—as has happened to me in the past—then I switch gears and try something else until it does. Where’s the muse in this? I admit I’ve never seen it; I just see a lot of hard work and perseverance.

Yet I suppose there is one thing I do follow, but it’s not exactly my muse. (Honestly, I don’t believe I’d recognize a muse if it perched itself on my laptop and screamed, FOLLOW ME!)

Thanks to all these interviews and Q&A’s, I’ve come to realize that what I follow, what leads me to places I’ve never gone before, is my curiosity.

It was curiosity that compelled me—an author who had published two very contemporary novels before—to wander into an exhibit called “Dreaming in Pictures: The Photography of Lewis Carroll,” one summer afternoon a few years ago. I saw a sign, I was curious because I had no idea Lewis Carroll had ever taken a single photograph in his life, and I wanted to know more about it.

Once there, I found my curiosity further whetted by all the startling photographs displayed; photographs of prepubescent young girls. Again: I had discovered something new to me; I was dying to know the story behind these photographs. And when I came across one photograph in particular, that of a very young girl clad in rags but with such an adult, wise and wary expression on her face, I had to know just who she was. Discovering that she was 7-year-old Alice Liddell, the inspiration for Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, floored me. Up until that moment I had no idea there was ever a real Alice. I wondered what happened to her after she grew up; I wondered what happened between the two of them to result in such a startling photograph.

I wondered. I was curious. I realized that if I was dying to find out the truth behind this story, others might be, as well. And so I followed that curiosity to what was the logical conclusion for a novelist; I researched it and wrote about it. Every nugget of information I discovered—that Alice Liddell and Charles Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll) had a very intense friendship when she was a little girl and he was twenty years her senior; that it ended abruptly, perhaps scandalously, when she was just eleven; that she was rumored to have a romance with a Prince of England; that she later married and sent three sons off to fight in World War I—somehow formed a basis for a novel in my head. Because each of these nuggets only made me even more curious to discover what else had happened to this remarkable woman, long after she grew up and left Wonderland behind.

And so I realize—thanks to all these wonderful Q&A’s and interviews and opportunities to write for sites like Beatrice!—that as an author and a reader, both, I want to know—more. Everything. Each and every day. It’s why I read, this urge to discover. And I finally have realized it’s why I write, as well. Because I just want to know.

So if I have a muse, that is it; my desire for knowledge. Curiosity may have killed the cat but it has made me a historical novelist when I wasn’t one before.

And I can’t wait to follow that curiosity—much like Alice did the white rabbit—to see where it takes me next.

2 February 2010 | guest authors |