Anshaw is the author of the novels Aquamarine ( 1992 ) , Seven Moves ( 1996 ) and Lucky in the Corner ( 2002 ) . She has won the Carl Sandburg, Society of Midland Authors and Ferro-Grumley awards for fiction, and has been a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award three times.
Anshaw is a past fellow of the Illinois Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts. She teaches in the MFA in Writing program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She lives in Chicago and Amsterdam with her partner, Jessie Ewing. Anshaw recently provided the following comments to our questions.
WCT: You teach writing. What's the most important thing you tell your students?
Carol Anshaw: I like to work with aspiring novelists, and what I tell them is that it is way more difficult to write a novel than they think it will be, that it will take longer than they envision, and that they just have to hang in past the failure of nerve that is certain to come at some point along the way. But that, eventually, with persistence, novels get done.
WCT: You live part of the year in Chicago, part in Amsterdam. Why Amsterdam? How do you contrast the energy of the two cities?
CA: I love each city for different reasons, but what they have in common is water. I live by the lake here and on a canal there. The presence of water is crucial. I've lived in Chicago a very long time and know a ton of people. In Amsterdam, I know about three people, which makes it a very good place for me to write. … It's a casual but elegant place—lots of art, great restaurants [ and ] bookshops. But there is no dog beach in Amsterdam. My dog, Tom, would be too confined. So my partner and I spell each other in staying over there, so he is not without us for too long.
WCT: Nick, one of the characters in Carry the One is an astronomer. Why astronomy?
CA: I love astronomy and astrophysics. I understand about 1/100th of anything I read on the subject, but even that is thrilling. We humans are so tiny in the scope of things. Sometimes that's annoying; other times I find it a huge relief. Astronomers have better maps of what's going on out there than they used to, but an enormous percentage of the universe is "dark matter." Nobody knows what it is. I love that. I also like that time is a dimension and didn't exist before the big bang.
WCT: Is there a subject you want to tackle in your writing but which, as yet, eludes capture?
CA: Not that I can think of. I always try to do something new with every book. Now, I'm trying to make more and more agile narratives. Stories that don't move in expected ways. I also think my books are becoming darker as I go.
WCT: You're also a painter. You've done a series on Vita Sackville-West. Why did you pick her as a subject?
CA: Oh, she's totally delicious. I twigged onto her years ago on account of her affair with Virginia Woolf. She was a mediocre novelist and poet, a world-class gardener. She rebuilt a castle because she needed to live in one. She was a fairly terrible person—an aristocrat with a huge sense of entitlement. She was queer but married. Her husband was also queer. They had two sons, then she began leaving them for months at a time to carry on an affair in Paris. Cross-dressing and louche bars. She was a serial seducer. So I have paintings of her young, as a bride, with her family, paintings of the jettisoned girlfriends, paintings of her old in her garden. I know there has to be an end to this project eventually, but I'm not quite there yet.
WCT: What author has made the biggest impact on you? In what way?
CA: There are two: Don DeLillo and Shirley Hazzard—DeLillo for his vision of America and the lives we live in it, the false connections. [ I like ] Hazzard for style. Hazzard and Alice Munro—they are the style queens.
WCT: What's your next creative project?
CA: I'm a ways into a novel about life in the city as it is lived on separate—as the quantum theorists would say—separate membranes, parallel realities.
In her newest novel, Anshaw explores the weight of a little girl's tragic death on the lives of the people in the car that hit her. We follow Carmen, Alice, Nick and Maude principally as they travel on their way through the next two decades, each dealing in his or her own way with the burden of carrying the one—Casey, the child whose life was snuffed out due to their negligence. Alice explains the interconnectedness of all these characters: "Because of the accident, we're not just separate numbers. When you add us up, you always have to carry the one."
These folks grapple with their memories and guilt over the summer night in 1983 that changed their lives. Some of these people we cheer for, others we sorrow for. Some we just want to go away. One, we are left wondering for much of the novel what happened to her as she stays hidden from view.
Anshaw's books always deliver—easy-to-read, sweet and touching tales of ordinary people with identifiable crises. The author unfolds her novels with great insight, humor and fascinating milieus. In Carry the One, in addition to various parts of Chicago, we enter the world of Moroccan hammams ( communal bathhouses ) in Paris, art gallery openings in Amsterdam and the rolling country hills of southwest Wisconsin, where the story begins.
But this is not a travelogue, unless we consider the main paths and byways the human heart leads us along. Carmen is the social-activist sister, the one whose wedding begins the book. Though not in the car that leaves the wedding celebration late at night with only its fog lights on, Carmen carries guilt over letting her stoned, drunk, and sleepy guests depart so unprepared for what was to happen. Her sister Alice, the artist, and her brother Nick, the astronomer, are passengers in the car—Alice in the back seat making out with her newfound love Maude, and Nick gazing out the window at the stars from the front passenger seat and stoned out of his skull.
It is these three—Carmen, Alice and Nick—whose journeys over the next quarter-century are the focal point of the novel. Others haunted by the girl's death pop in and out.
Perhaps the most touching character is Nick. Success in life eludes him. A brilliant astronomer, his quirks mean he's constantly shunted off to the sidelines of his profession. It seems he can deal with the macro and micro views of the universe but not what's right in front of him. As Nick puts it, "I understand the Theory of Everything, which doesn't even exist yet. Then I sober up and lose it all." As messed up as his life is, ironically Nick is the one co-conspirator in little Casey's death who achieves the greatest connection to her family.
One of the joys in reading Anshaw is the delight in her use of language. An example from Carry the One, where she describes the receptionist greeting Carmen and her charge at the hamman: "She towered over them, like a schoolmistress in a dark dream." Anshaw towers over our imaginations and our understanding of the human condition. It's an enriching read.
