A Writer's International Wanderings
From the Manhattan of Andy Warhol to gypsy camps in France, novelist Fernanda Eberstadt has made her life exploring unusual settings. She speaks to Susan Salter Reynolds about her own journey and her stunning new novel, Rat.
Fifteen-year-old girls make powerful protagonists. Unaware of their own strength, they teeter on the edge of the victim abyss. They fly from the nest into an increasingly dangerous world. Rat, the plucky heroine of Fernanda Eberstadt's new novel, is no different. Nor was the author, one suspects, at 15, when her favorite fictional character was Scout, the girl with a thousand questions, the young vigilante at the heart of Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird.
Eberstadt’s mossy voice contains several languages—a little New York, a little laid-back Brit, and some mouthy street French. She could, at any age, have subbed in as one of Sir Leslie Stephen and Julia Duckworth’s daughters—Vanessa Bell for the painterly sensibility, Virginia Woolf for the quick wit and layered literary aspect. One of the great beauties of her generation (she turns 50 in November) of Manhattan wunderkinds, which include Bret Easton Ellis, A.M. Holmes, Rick Moody, Jay McInerney, and others, Eberstadt has the dewy, round eyes that Julia Cameron loved to photograph and the otherwordly empathic intellect of both women—one eye on the battlefield and one on the household books. “ To Kill a Mockingbird is absolutely my favorite American novel,” Eberstadt says. “It’s not just a kid’s book. Pass the damn ham,” she says in Scout’s tough girl Southern dialect.