Costco Connection - October 2007

book
pick
Best layered plans
Debut novelist shares the
intricacies of her creative process
By Jennifer Pirtle

FROM HER EARLIEST days, Diane Setterfield, author of this month’s Book Buyer’s Pick, The Thirteenth Tale, was a passionate reader. “When I was a child it broke my heart that I couldn’t be a girl in a book,” Setterfield recalls. “Then I realized that you could get close to that by being a writer.”

Yet it wasn’t until decades later that she would consider writing as a viable career option. “I always had a sense that writers were wild and chaotic,” says Setterfield, who lives in Yorkshire, England, with her husband and four cats. “Since I wasn’t that way, I felt I was destined to be a reader, not a writer.”

As a young adult, Setterfield held jobs ranging from a chambermaid to a baker’s assistant (injecting doughnuts with jam was a particularly low point, she says). Later, she began a career in academia, studying 20th-century French literature and specializing in the works of

André Gide, a writer who received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1947.

But a chance meeting with Val McDermid, the successful British crime writer, rekindled her interest in writing. “We spoke only briefly, but I discovered that she was great fun, not a mad, chaotic person at all,” recalls Setterfield. “I realized then that books are extraordinary, but writers are no more or less extraordinary than anyone else.”

When a colleague suddenly succumbed to cancer in 1999, Setterfield’s growing disillusionment with the academic world was thrown into high relief. “This woman was my number-one mentor when I arrived at the university,” Setterfield tells The Connection. “When she died, I asked myself, ‘Am I really living in accordance with my strongest wishes? Or am I constantly thinking I’ll do it later?’ ”

A few months later, Setterfield quit her job. She gave French lessons and eventually began work on the novel. “I had been thinking of Patricia Highsmith’s character [Tom Ripley in The Talented Mr. Ripley], who leads a double life,” she says. “I thought that if you were to die without showing your true self to someone, it would almost be like dying two deaths. At that moment, I knew what I wanted to write about.”

From there, the details of The Thirteenth Tale began to slowly unfold, starting with Vida Winter’s story. Vida is a mysterious author who has always kept her violent and tragic past a secret. But when she calls on a bookseller’s daughter to become her biographer, the young woman becomes mesmerized by the ailing author’s storytelling. “Although I wasn’t sure about her gender, I knew she was a storyteller,” Setterfield recalls. “I wondered what was

Signed book giveaway

COSTCO HAS 50 copies of Diane Setterfield’s The Thirteenth Tale with signed bookplates to give away. To enter, print your name, membership number, address and daytime phone number on a postcard or letter and send it to: Diane Setterfield, The Costco Connection, P.O. Box 34088, Seattle, WA 98124- 1088. Or send an e-mail to giveaway@costco.com, with “Diane Setterfield” in the subject line.

No purchase is necessary. Open
to legal residents of the U.S.
(except Puerto Rico) who are
age 18 or older at the time of
entry and who are current
Costco members. One entry
per house-hold. Entries must
be received or postmarked by
November 1, 2007. Winners will
be randomly selected
and notified by
mail on or
before Decem-
ber 3, 2007. The
value of the prize
is $26. Void where
prohibited. Winners
are responsible for
all applicable fed-
eral, state and local
taxes. Odds of
winning depend on
the number of eligible entries
received. Employees of Costco
or Simon & Schuster and their
families are not eligible.

behind this cranky, magisterial woman who played with the truth.”

From there, it was a matter of simply peeling back the layers. “There’s very little invention in writing fiction,” she says. “If I start making things

up and imposing them on the characters, they feel very rigid.”

JAVAN LIAM

While critics have compared her work to Gothic novelists Charlotte Brontë and Daphne du Maurier, Setterfield suspects that the comparisons have more to do with the setting of her novel—the mist of the moors, the dark, haunted ruin of the mansion—than with its modern characters. In any case, the atmospheric tale has captivated readers, reaching the number-one spot on the New York Times bestsellers list just one week after its release in September 2006. (The

Diane Setterfield novel has since been translated into

42 languages.)

She currently spends much of her time promoting The Thirteenth Tale, but she’s also making plans for a second novel. When she gets time to write the book,

expect to find her working at her computer at, “before the red pen wakes up.”

Even on a good day, when the words flow easily, she admits she’s hugely curious about the mysterious aspects of writing. “There’s a sense in which your brain splits off and you are capable of working on things in the dark,” she says. “It’s your job, as a writer, to consciously find a door into those other aspects of your creative brain.” C

Jennifer Pirtle is a features writer based in London.

Pennie’s pick

ON THE PUBLISHER Simon & Schuster’s Web site, Diane Setterfield’s debut novel, The Thirteenth Tale, is described as a “love letter to reading.” As an evangelist for reading myself, I think one of the best ways to share that love is to belong to a book club. To help our book-clubbing members, Costco is selling copies of The Thirteenth Tale individually and in packs of six. (A big “thank you” to the member I met at my local Costco for giving me this idea.) I think this is an economical and convenient way for book clubs to purchase books. What do you think? Let me know at bookclub@costco.com.