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| (photo: Karen Brown) | |
Minnie Darke is a Gemini, a cutthroat Scrabble player and a lover of books, knitting, freshly sharpened pencils and Russian Caravan tea. She lives in Tasmania, off the south coast of Australia. Star-Crossed, coming from Crown on May 21, is her first novel.
What inspired you to write a novel focused on astrology and the stars?
The idea for the novel came to me quite a long time ago, when I was a journalist at a small newspaper. Because the staff were few, and it was handy for everyone to be able to make changes to the paper right up until deadline, I had a login that gave me access to the entire publication. I was working late one night when I had the idea that I could, if I wanted to, fiddle about with the astrology column. Hmmm, I thought. I could make the entries spookily relevant to my friends' lives, or perhaps take a hand--invisibly--in their decisions. I'm not saying I definitely ever did any of that, but it was a seductive idea. It was also, I thought, a good basis for a novel.
It was quite a while, decades in fact, before I actually sat down and wrote Star-Crossed. In those intervening years, I learned that even people who aren't "into" astrology tend to know their own sun sign, and the basic stereotypes that go along with it. For a lot of people, their star sign is part of what they consider to be their identity, and they'll glance at their horoscope if they come upon it in a newspaper or magazine--even if they don't take astrology even vaguely seriously.
We humans are reliably interested in questions of fate. Are we living out a preordained pattern? Or are we just drifting, bumbling along? We know that there are forces acting on us all the time, but are some of them as far away as the stars? Could these forces be known, and therefore harnessed in the service of our dreams? These are all interesting questions.
Star-Crossed is mainly Justine and Nick's story, but there are lots of other overlapping and intertwined narrative threads, which connect in surprising ways. How did you keep track of all the different characters and their potential effects on each other's lives?
If you think about it, most of us pretty easily keep track of all the people in our lives, and we keep in our brains a mental map of how those people intersect. We tend to know a bit about those people's parents, friends, siblings, children, pets, co-workers and so on. Being a writer just involves doing that in more than one reality at once. A lot of the invisible background work of writing fiction is what might be called daydreaming, but is actually the important job of living amongst your characters. So, primarily I just moved part of my mind into the world of Star-Crossed. The design of the plot, however, did take a lot of planning. I confess that many whiteboard markers died in the making of Star-Crossed.
Justine is a Sagittarian skeptic and Nick is a true-believer Aquarius. Many of the other characters, no matter their signs, fall somewhere in between. What about you? What's your relationship with the stars?
I don't know if I believe in astrology, but I certainly like it. I like the way people enjoy fulfilling, and also confounding, the stereotypes of their sign. And I like the way people use astrology to understand others and their relationships. Just as humans like to seek out systems of meaning, we're also pretty interested in classificatory systems. We like to put ourselves in categories--whether we're using the ancient notion of the four humours, or taking a Myers-Briggs questionnaire.
As classificatory systems go, astrology is pretty good fun, and I think I learned this from my grandmother. She kept two very well-thumbed and dog-eared books on a shelf near her favourite chair. One was her crossword puzzle dictionary and the other was a copy of Linda Goodman's Sun Signs. She was a great one for saying things like, "Oh, your grandfather's just being a miserly old Capricorn." Or, "Your dad's not one for risks; he's a Cancerian after all." She was a nurse, and a classic Virgo--always ready to patch up people's ailments, and to take a close interest in their personal affairs.
The novel is lighthearted, but it asks big questions about decisions, fate and the surprising twists our lives often take. What are your thoughts on the relationship between decisions, free will and destiny?
One of the things I love about being a writer, as opposed to being a philosopher or a politician, is that it's not my job to come up with answers or solutions to tricky questions. My job--and I think it's the best job of all--is just to keep asking those tricky questions in new and hopefully entertaining ways. Perhaps the way the plot of Star-Crossed resolves at the end suggests that there is such a thing as fate, or destiny. Or, perhaps Star-Crossed is simply a depiction of a series of events that take place in a world full of lucky, random chaos. It really will be up to the reader to decide.
What is certain is what I mentioned before, that humans--some much more than others--are driven to seek systems of meaning. As a species, we really like the idea that if only we could understand the forces that act on us, we could predict the ways in which things will turn out, and pick out providential pathways for ourselves. Astrology appeals to that part of us, whether or not we fully and seriously believe in it.
I'd like readers to know that Star-Crossed was written in a spirit of joy and mischief, and I hope with all my heart that they will be amused, moved, uplifted and entertained by it. --Katie Noah Gibson