Ste are rural Virginia in 1929 and here begins the story of seven brothers raised by a father, Jim Shaw, who in addition to having land and livestock also has Marie, a wife who is not only the mother of those children but is first of all a woman lost in sleeping pills and the mists of mental illness.
Rebecca Kauffman was born in Ohio and studied violin at the Manhattan School of Music and creative writing at New York University. Her previous novels are “The Gunner House” and “The House on Fipp Island”.
The story goes on – beyond the 50s – and what it reveals has to do with the meaning of existence and the truths about love: the story, with a perfect narrative rhythm, is that of The Shaw familythe latest novel by Rebecca Kauffman (BigSur), 39, Virginia-based, violinist, writer compared since times to Alice Munro, and a specialist in works with a polyphonic style: relationships with others – Kauffman has often stated – are the forge of what we are.
“The Shaw Family”, the latest novel by Rebecca Kauffman (BigSur).
Why did he write it?
It was March 2020, I had stopped working on a book that I had been dragging on for two years and something happened to me subconsciously, a breakthrough that I believe was the result of the pandemic. That’s how I wrote it in three months and in the throes of conflicting emotions: fear, but also an immense gratitude for the few things that seemed stable to me in the great instability of the period. One of these was the family.
For Robert De Niro, the family is always an open wound. And for her?
Even the writer Julian Barnes says that the more value it has to us, the more it will make us feel bad. Those who know us better will know how to hurt us worse, of course, but the joy of feeling understood and connected as a family, for me is superior to everything.
“Jim had taken care of his wife all those years, never raising his voice at her or criticizing her in front of the children. On the contrary, he had always stood up for her when one of them said something mean or demeaning about her,” he reads. It’s not easy to love a depressed person, especially in those years when there was still no diagnosis.
I wanted Jim Shaw to appear as a good man, with a pure and unwavering love for his wife, something miraculous in some way. I believe that anyone, regardless of the nature of their struggles, is lucky to have someone next to them who accepts them with this kind of love.
Why did you choose the postwar era?
To escape from the present. When covid started dominating every headline, I escaped by reading books by Wallace Stegner, Alice Munro and Sherwood Anderson. Coming up with a simpler, slower-paced version of life like the Shaws helped me a lot. I think there has gone into this story the feeling that our every interaction was limited to closest family members due to social isolation.
It also tells the story of a couple, another mysterious world, where fathers and husbands feel inadequate even then…
Yes, the empowerment of women’s rights and changes related to role expectations have challenged male identity. All of this is important above all because it takes place in the family and involves people who have good intentions in creating loving relationships but find themselves challenged by the evolution of the world.
The soldiers on their deathbed, “all wept and invoked their mothers”. The theme of motherhood is the common thread of the work and she is also a mother: what power does motherhood have?
Becoming a mother has been the most joyful, heartbreaking, and life-changing experience of my life. Only rarely do I have time to reflect on this power and when I do I get a little scared.
Why does the theme of suicide bring up the mysterious death of the mother?
I wanted to explore absence in all its forms. Marie Shaw’s central one in the lives of her children, even in her illness, the lack of clarity as to how the death occurred and the parting words she might have left for her children.
Absence is painful and confusing.
And I have tried to investigate the various paths that everyone takes in an attempt to fill it: alcohol, a partner to love, a child to raise, a better education, wealth, deciding to sacrifice oneself to take care of the rest of the family for always. Does each of these choices fill the void, or are some losses so profound that they remain wide open for life?
That absent mother also loved a lot. What is her love for her?
In the very short story by Lydia Davis Happiest moment a man confesses that the happiest moment of his life was when his wife told him about her trip to Beijing and about the duck she ate. Knowing someone and loving their experiences (of joy and love) as if they were our own is the highest form of love.
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