Interview with Agatha Zaza - 2021
Interview #6 (fiction, literary fiction, short stories, suspense, crime fiction, novel)
Agatha Zaza lives in Auckland, New Zealand where she works in communications and non-profits. She also calls Helsinki and Lusaka home.
Agatha’s debut novel The Pretenders was born in Singapore, where she spent three years both as a trailing spouse and a freelance consultant. There she rekindled a long-dormant love of writing. Aside from Singapore, Agatha has worked and lived in several countries, among them the then-Soviet Union. While in Ireland, she earned a Master’s in Equality Studies from University College Dublin and followed that with a stint in international development in Uganda.
Agatha’s work can be seen in the Johannesburg Review of Books and in a PEN International special edition on African writers. She’s a dedicated slow runner, an occasional composter, and has been known to reupholster armchairs on occasion.
Randal Eldon Greene: Hello, Agatha Zaza.
In your debut novel The Pretenders, you've given us a story full of hidden layers. And each layer leads to more and fouler revelations. It's the type of book you read knowing a kind of terribleness is going to be revealed, but unless you're a good or lucky guesser, you won't know what form of devastation is in store. With a story that's so dependent on withheld revelations, I'm curious how exactly you talk about your book. What would you tell a prospective reader about The Pretenders?
Agatha Zaza: Hi Randal,
That's quite a tough question as I find it quite difficult to summarise The Pretenders. You're right, it has many layers and the joy of writing it was peeling through each layer of my characters and their situation and finding a new layer beneath it and wondering what would be at his or her core.
The book is not a thriller, though it could be seen as thrilling; neither is it the story of a single day because it's also the story of the many years before it. I suppose The Pretenders is really about your own family, friends and neighbours. Nothing that occurs in the book is inconceivable outside an ordinary upper middle income neighbourhood. None of the couples or the brothers at the heart of the story are vampires or drug dealers; in fact, individually their circumstances are rather mundane. None of my characters set out to be anything other than an ordinary partner, brother, father or lover - except perhaps John.
While I may insist that the book is not about a single day - however - the book describes that one day in the lives of six people when six lifetimes collide. It is about when all their histories and insecurities, their fears and their unfulfilled desires clash. It's about an inevitable day, how long were they supposed to continue as they were - pretending?
At the centre of the story is the relationship between two brothers. But is that really the centre? My early draft was about Jasper and his perspective, but it subsequently evolved into Edmund's story because he was the only person who could have changed the trajectory that the characters were on; right up to that day he could have changed everything.
If I am to summarise the book, I'd say the title does it incredibly well. When Sam [Brace] at Agora Books suggested The Pretenders, the first thing I thought was there must be a million books with that title. Surprisingly they were very few and most had to do with the band. Everyone is pretending that everything is ok, or will be ok.
Randal Eldon Greene: I think your zigzagging between the thoughts of the six characters and in and out of the past actually adds to the present moment in a very well-crafted, cumulative manner. We all live three lives really, wouldn't you agree? The past life that's continually dredged up into consciousness, the future life through our dreams and desires, and the present life which is a series of moments jarring us out of our recollections and our reveries. Your book portrays these three simultaneous lives without betraying a sense of mystery or tension.
Agatha Zaza: I'd agree that we all live three lives. Regarding their three lives, the future, or rather their dreams and desires for the future, is as essential to understanding how my characters behave as the past. For instance, to Jasper, one of the brothers, his fiancé Holly embodies what his future could be. To the other characters it may be decisions they have to make to ensure the future that they want even if that desired future is nebulous - undefined.
The cumulative effect that you mention again goes back to peeling away the various layers of the characters and their situation. As I wrote, I continually asked myself what went before the present or how did this person get to be where he or she is now?
Randal Eldon Greene: When you write, do you tend to approach characters or plot first?
Agatha Zaza:The Pretenders is unequivocally character led. The brothers and Holly came first. I think Holly was a mad scientist bent on taking over the world; I had to tone her down while retaining her significance. Ovidia was a more marginal figure in my earliest draft, then I changed her clothes and she came to life.
The plot came together quite early, the story was clear in my head - the difficulty was conveying what I could see in my head (and heart) in words. There were also many ways I could have told the story and setting it in a single day helped stop it from becoming too sprawled out. This came about when I saw the house online and this really helped me flesh out their universe. Someone out there in London lives in that house - I hope he doesn't recognise it and cry foul. Once I had the setting, the story came together and my first draft was ready in a few months.
I had, and still may have, a picture of the children's playhouse described in the first chapter. It was from a House & Garden magazine.
When I look at my short stories, one in particular "Waking a Sleeping Sun" was a story told to me in entirety - the essence of the plot is almost as it was described to me. However, the characters are of my own creation which made the story almost unrecognisable and enabled me to add the backstory and the additional characters.
"The Grass Beneath Us" published in the Johannesburg Review of Books was character led. It began as several pages of dialogue between two women who were so real to me that I felt I knew them. I had to extract a plot from their dialogue in order to create the short story.
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