Interview with Elizabeth Kostova,
Dec. 29, 2009
Interviewer: Rob Neufeld
Q: What is it like embarking on the debut of The Swan
Thieves?
A: I’m struck by how different from The Historian it is…When
I wrote The Historian, I had a lot of models in mind. I was
re-reading Victorian novels and thinking about them, and about
early Gothic novels, and re-reading Dracula. I had all these
spirits nudging my elbow, and models of plot to follow. But with
The Swan Thieves, I had to invent a form and language.
Q: Your father was a great story-telling influence for The
Historian. From where else did you get your love of
literature?
A: My grandmother (Eleanor Stephens Johnson) was a huge part of my
loving books as a child and I’m very sad that she died before my
writing career really became a career because I think that she
would have been so pleased to see me having time to write, for one
thing…Before I was fifteen, she read me all of Jane Austen out
loud…She had a beautiful reading voice. She was a professional
librarian, and she constantly shared her love of literature with
other people…She was the first person who made me read mystery
novels. She gave me really good ones—Dorothy Sayers and P.D. James
and Ngaio Marsh—and insisted that they were worth reading. And I
think that was great training for me as a writer to read those
plots.
Q: How have the experiences with your grandmother affected your
writing?
A: One thing I have thought about is that The Swan Thieves
is in many ways a book about the love of young people for old
people, and old people for young people. And I don’t mean that just
in the sense of the love affair (names deleted for spoiler
reasons), which has this unusual age difference, but also it’s a
book about mentorship, and the ways that we learn from the people
who are older. Older people have been hugely influential in my
life. I think any young life that has the privilege of close
friendship with older people is always going to be a much richer
one, if those old people are wise kind of people. But people like
my grandmother and my grandfather and Anthony Lord and many older
citizens of Asheville were my training ground in life. They told me
stories of their lives. I saw them struggle with dignity as they
went into age. The Swan Thieves is in many ways a tribute to
the process of aging and the people I’ve seen go through it.
