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Before she could write her new work of fiction, This Strange Eventful History, Claire Messud had to wait for people to die.
That’s because the acclaimed novelist wanted to tell her family’s story, but not while her grandparents, aunt, or parents were still alive. “There wasn’t ever really any question in my mind of writing a nonfiction book [instead],” Messud says via Zoom from her home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “And since this is a novel, there’s a certain amount that is just full-on fictionalized.” She continues, “There’s always the question that to write about anything that comes close to one’s life and to the people in one’s life is a betrayal. If my parents were alive, I would never have written, could never have written this book.”
Now that This Strange Eventful History is on shelves, the author of The Woman Upstairs believes she was right to wait. “I couldn’t see my parents or grandparents clearly when I was bound up in the complexities of familial relations with them,” she says. “After their deaths, I was able to reach a point where I have huge compassion for all of them—compassion and love and tenderness.”
Although the book isn’t exactly autofiction, This Strange Eventful History evokes much of Messud’s own family history. Observing the imperialism, global conflict, emigration, corporate greed, and art that influenced her own ancestors, she then transmitted those themes to a fictional family, one whose beginnings in French colonial Algeria lead to endings (and then more beginnings) in North America.
Set across seven decades, from 1940 to 2010, the novel introduces readers to characters inspired by her close relatives: Messud’s father was a pied noir, a European descendant brought up in French colonial Algeria, and her mother a Canadian, while Messud herself was born in the U.S. In History, protagonists Gaston and Lucienne Cassar are also pieds noirs, who meet and fall in love in the city of Tlemcen in 1928. They raise their children, François and Denise, to believe in both their undying love and in Roman Catholicism, but as the Second World War strikes, the kids are left in the care of family members back in Algeria. François eventually attends college and graduate school in the United States, marrying the Canadian Barbara—from whom he could not be more different—and fathering two daughters, Chloe and Loulou. Ultimately, it is Chloe who becomes convinced that chronicling her family members’ stories is the only way to provide them with the closure they need. (Chloe, no surprise, bears some resemblance to Messud herself.)
The author says she originally wanted to write This Strange Eventful History as four separate, but connected, novels: “My husband [James Wood, books critic for The New Yorker] laughed at me, and then my editor [Jill Bialosky, executive editor at W. W. Norton] laughed at me, so I couldn’t do that. It then became all about figuring out how to capture the sweep of time and how everything shifts over time.”
Part of what shifts for the Cassar family isn’t only time but also geography. As a French naval attaché, Gaston must serve during and after World War II, leaving his wife, Lucienne, and their children, François and Denise, to bounce between Algeria, Lebanon, and France.
This ever-shifting reality made Messud think closely about the ethics of family-rearing in times of conflict. “I remember, while growing up, hearing about World War II all the time and everyone was like, ‘Okay, there were the bad guys and these were the good guys,’” she says. “But while some parts of that were very clear, others were less so. Whatever strange place you found yourself in June 1945 could mean, ‘What should I do? Where’s my wife? Where’s my children? How can I find my family?’ Even if you were considering ‘the greater good,’ you also were thinking about personal concerns.”
For Gaston’s son François, as well as for Messud’s real-life father, personal concerns about family were part of the choice to immigrate to North America. Like François, “[my father] wanted his children to be North American; we were in Canada,” Messud says. “He wanted us to be in the ‘new country.’” Also like François, Messud’s father wanted his children to be free of his family’s devout Roman Catholicism, which Messud’s grandfather—like Gaston—considered the foundation of everything: “When communicating by telegram, my grandfather would add the line, ‘Keep faith in Him,’ an extra expense, but part of what he considered the greater good.”
Although the Cassar family patriarchs drive much of the book’s action, Messud found it especially important to explore the motivations of the Cassar women—and, particularly, of François’s sister, Denise, inspired by Messud’s own aunt. In the book, Denise—a fragile and sickly child—grows up and trains as a lawyer, living her entire life as a single woman without children. “The lives of all the women in this book are complicated,” Messud says. “I could totally understand, growing up, the frustrations that my mother faced, but I don’t think I understood, or even still understand, the frustrations that my aunt had. Her internalized culture was so different from mine. She was brought up to believe, as a devout Catholic, that marrying and having children was a woman’s role on earth. And she did not want to do that.”
At one point in This Strange Eventful History, Denise thinks: “Why must she be herself? Why was it so unacceptable to be herself?” Of this dilemma, Messud says, “There’s a line at the end of Magda Szabo’s novel The Door: ‘It’s very difficult to be a woman alone for whom nobody will make a place in the world.’ I feel I failed my aunt while she was still alive by trying to impose my idea of how her later life should unfold, rather than just really listening, and trying to support her in her wishes.”
Similarly, in History, Chloe struggles with her responsibility to her aunt: After Gaston’s funeral, she’s asked to stay and care for Denise, and—as Messud puts it—“sort of thinks, Do I have to? Why do I have to? And I was that person. I was not as gracious as I would wish.” It was ultimately Messud’s own family archives that helped her have compassion for her younger self, and to better understand the relatives who’d inspire her characters. These archives consisted of photos and certificates; letters between her grandparents, parents, and extended family members; and a nearly 1,500-page memoir by her grandfather, which he titled Everything That We Believe In.
Reading these words directly from the source, Messud says, “from people whose real-life voices were so known to me—my mother, in particular, was a wonderful letter writer—allowed me to see aspects of their personalities I didn’t know.” In her role as novelist, she feels, the accretion of time and experience. “I feel my job is to create an absence of myself, to convey people as they are, not as other people want them to be. That was part of the learning trajectory of this book: to get myself out of the way. I think I used this metaphor 20 years ago, but it’s still true for me. As a writer, you’re a safecracker. You’re listening for the ‘click’ when things fall into place.”
One of those things that “clicked” for Messud was how identity connects to place. The pieds-noirs of Algeria existed because France had colonized the country. They grew to nearly one million in population, but when they exercised rights pertaining to French citizenship, or relocated in France, they were often subject to great racism and prejudice. “I feel as though in the beginning of this century we can’t just put it all behind us,” Messud says. “In our own country, questions of identity, racism, and enslavement are not far behind us.”
Both Gaston and François, in their professional lives—Gaston as a naval officer and bureaucrat, and François as an executive for a large aluminum corporation—hold to the idea that the world is becoming more connected in positive ways. (Messud pushes up her chunky black eyeglass frames and sighs. “We haven’t done a great job of that,” she says.) But tellingly, the two men with a shared vision of global peace had very different marriages. While Gaston and Lucienne hewed to the traditional model, in which a husband ventured into the wider world and a wife cared for home and children, François and Barbara begin their partnership at the cusp of great societal change. As François chases money and promotions, political events affect his company’s fortunes, and as his wife begins to work and their daughters enter college, he becomes increasingly angry and devoted to Tanqueray. François—irascible, reserved, yet devoted—stands in for the first-gen aspect of Messud’s own heritage: her father, the person who chose a completely new path on a new continent, and the person who made the author’s work possible.
“In life, you realize things that might superficially look like failures are actually sort of amazing acts of great persistence and courage and love and grace,” Messud says. “I wrote this book for both of my parents, but my mother—who was lovable—knew she was loved. In an important way, this book is for my father, who always doubted his own lovability.”
She continues, “I’ve needed to write [this book] for a long time, and it wasn’t until now that I was able and ready to write it. I hope people enjoy it. If they don’t, that’s okay. Because the thing is that I wrote it and it’s there, and that’s meaningful to me.”
Messud has cracked open the safe of her family’s history, giving her family’s treasured memories a new life through narrative. The real-life Messud family members, including the author’s children, have a new perspective on their background. And the fictional Cassars of Tlemcen, Algeria, now belong to the wider world.