Visit Gail Godwin's website.What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?
Personal experiences, family matters, slippery moral dilemmas, “what if?” musings. Once I dreamed the opening words of a novel, The Finishing School (1984.) That novel was also influenced by an upstate NY farming community, to which I had recently relocated. I moved my characters into the 250 year old Dutch farmhouse I was renting at the time, put in a grand piano, and lived the whole novel in a sort of waking dream.
The prod that sparked Old Lovegood Girls was the 1943 movie Old Acquaintance. Two longtime friends become writers. The Bette Davis one is the dedicated artist and well- respected writer. The Miriam Hopkins one, married with a family, becomes envious of her childhood friend and decides to “be a writer” herself. She becomes a huge commercial success. The movie was reimagined in 1981 as Rich and Famous, with Jacqueline Bisset as the serious writer and Candice Bergen as the splashy one. I was unsatisfied with the either/or dichotomy. I wanted to imagine two lifetime friends, both writers, not in competition, because as competitive Feron remarks, “How can it be a competition when only one person is competitive?” Before I was done with my drafts and revisions, I had written a moral tale as well, about values, memories, and...[read on]
My Book, The Movie: Grief Cottage.
The Page 69 Test: Grief Cottage.
Q&A with Gail Godwin.
--Marshal Zeringue
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