Michelle Lovric

The Good Book Guide interview

1) What is the last book you read?

I just finished an Italian novel called La Bambinaia Francese, the French Nanny, set in the 1830s. It’s an imagined prequel to Jane Eyre, rather like Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea, but from the point of view of Sophie, Jane’s French counterpart. I live in London and Venice, and my novels are set in both cities too, so I like to read as much Italian as possible. Apart from eavesdropping in bars, it’s the best way to refine your grasp of a foreign language. It’s also good to read the work of other historical novelists. But I am also researching my next novel, so I have a stack of reference books on my desk, by female Victorian travellers in Egypt and Italy.

2) Which book changed your life?

A book changes my life at least once every two years. It’s nearly always a sentence or image in a book that triggers an idea for a new novel. Often, a very unlikely book; usually, a one-line idea perfectly tangential to the original source. Then I can spend two years in servitude to a tiny idea that flashed up as briefly as a firework. Virginia Woolf observed ruefully that all her novels were wonderful before she wrote them. I think all writers would agree with her. The most recent book to change my life in this way was Fuller’s Pharmacopoeia Extemporanea of 1710, a book of recipes for apothecaries. In the eighteenth century medicine could be numbered among the performing arts and the ingredients were necessarily showy to capture the imagination of the public. So Fuller’s quite seriously instructs budding apothecaries to use peacock dung, balsam of peru, crushed millipedes and ‘Venetian Treacle’ – a compound of at least seventy ingredients including bits of viper. When I starting reading Fuller’s, I immediately had the idea for The Remedy, and was set on a long and fascinating course of research and writing.

3) Describe your favourite travel destination.

It is always Venice, but because I spend so much time there, I find different destinations within the town. I am always walking around ‘in costume’ – I mean mentally as one of my characters. So there are warm spots all over Venice where my various characters live. At the moment I have a warm spot in Sant’ Alvise and one at San Silvestro.

4) If you could live in any historical era/meet any historical figure, which would it be?

I am at my ease in the eighteenth century. Feminine values were prized then, too. After that, in many ways it was downhill for women. The Romantic movement allowed them only two roles: the victim or the mother of the Dark Byronic Hero.

5) Where do you find inspiration to write?

I love the London Library, for the serendipitous discoveries among the open shelves. I am usually on half a dozen deadlines, but sometimes when I go there I allow myself the sin of ten minutes promiscuous browsing. Anything can happen then. I also love writing out of doors.

6) Do you have any routines/rituals to your writing day?

I like to be at my desk by 6.30 or 7am, as if I can startle an idea by creeping up on it so early. I usually have a lot of projects simultaneously – one novel and four or five non-fiction ones – so some days I force myself to change books every two hours, which makes sure that something is achieved on each project, whether it is correcting colour proofs, finishing a chapter, or writing a submission. If I am in Venice I always take the manuscript to my local bar at around 6am, and I spread it out on the zinc table for rewrites fuelled by cappuccino.

7) What’s in store for your future? (with regard to upcoming publications, tours, etc)

I am deep into my fourth novel, which is set in London, Venice and Egypt in the 1880s.

8) Which author do you think most deserves a wider audience?

I can’t boast to have discovered anyone – but I think everyone would do well to read more Tim Winton, Laurie Graham and Sarah Salway.

9) Which film could you watch 100 times?

I love Oh Brother Where Art Thou, the Coen Brothers take on Homer, scored with music from the Depression. Every time I see it I discover more Homeric references. It is also extremely funny.

10) Which of your characters is closest to your heart?

The character I am writing now for my next novel is someone who doesn’t quite fit anywhere but feels a curious affinity with Venice. She feels like someone I know.

11) What would you do if you weren’t a writer?

I’d make cups of coffee for other writers. Seriously, I guess I’d do what I do anyway – research.

12) What job did you hold before becoming a writer?

I did and still do compile anthologies for various publishers and retail chains in the USA and the UK. Often the subjects bleed into my fiction. I have worked in journalism and publishing all my life. I cannot imagine not working with words.

13) What is the most enjoyable step of the writing process (research, editing, etc)?

The best part – and the only part – of a novel that gives unalloyed pleasure is the idea. That descends in three seconds usually. I always say that the difference between this stage and delivering a finished book is similar to the difference between having an orgasm and having a baby. Perhaps this is why so many people talk about writing, and not so many can deliver a finished manuscript.

Magazine interview with Sally FitzHarris
February 1^st 2005

It is not hard to imagine Michelle Lovric as an eighteenth-century Venetian, masked in white lace and reclining in a gondola. On the contrary, looking at the pale, oval face, and masses of long dark curls, it is harder to see her as part of twenty-first century London.

Perhaps this is not surprising. Lovric, a best-selling author who has just completed her third historical novel, has had a love affair with Venice for many years: ‘I first saw Venice when I was eighteen, but like Byron, I was in love with her long before we met.’ Venice is not so much the background to the novels as one of her heroines: ‘the city of absolute and picturesque pleasure.’ She feels now that her dues are paid: ‘I entered into a contract at that first meeting. I knew she would be the subject of my books.’

Lovric had always wanted to write fiction: ‘But it was only when Love Letters: an Anthology of Passion became a New York Times best-seller that I had the economic freedom to live in Venice and dared to write about her.’

Now she spends much of the year in Venice, and praises the ‘friendly, nurturing Venetians’ who welcome her. From her London flat which looks over the Thames to St Paul’s, she speaks wistfully of that other life: rising at 6 to drink cappuccini and write in her favourite bar. But this image of bohemian cafe artist disguises her professionalism and formidable capacity for work.

At eighteen she left the ‘ocean town’ of Sydney where she was born, to learn the trade of journalist with a Devon newspaper. A career in publishing followed where she worked in production, editorial and design. Fifteen years ago she started work as a freelance packager: ‘I create ideas and deliver the finished book – everything from research to design.’ She has nearly 100 anthologies to her name, including the best-selling idea How to insult, abuse and insinuate in classical Latin, which has sold 100,000 copies.

Lovric was taught Latin by a nun: ‘She was a very nice nun, and doesn’t deserve the horrible nuns in my books!’ This mentor might want to skip certain passages of her pupil’s fiction, but she would surely be proud of her ability to translate. The Roman poet Catullus, famous for his erotic poetry, hovers behind her second novel The Floating Book, set in fifteenth-century Venice. Lovric weaves his life into her narrative and translates his poetry at the start of each chapter.

Her poetic skills give the book a lyricism and intensity: ‘I write many of the most dramatic passages as poems first. Then I draw a picture of the poem. Then I turn that sketch back into words. It forces you not to be lazy. You have to be compact.’

The Floating Book was chosen by WH Smith as ‘Read of the Week’. Returning to London last autumn, Lovric was confronted by a vast window display of her new novel, dramatically headlined: An assault on the senses. ‘But I thought I was writing about the art of the book.’

It is a book about books, giving Lovric a chance to examine the trade she knows best. A young German printer sets up the city’s first printing press and chooses to publish Catullus’s poetry, a perilous decision when many considered any book other than the Bible to be immoral. It is also about much else: the ‘otherness’ of foreigners, love and rejection, a marriage broken and mended.

While the historical background is minutely researched, ‘in a two-year odyssey round the libraries of London and Venice,’ some of her characters have a touching modernism; human nature doesn’t change. This indeed is one of Lovric’s themes: ‘We find the marriage manuals of the fifteenth century hilarious: if you want to conceive a boy you both have to wear a little woolly hat, make love early in the morning and look into each other’s eyes at the right moment. But we are still obsessed with the same kind of self-help books which tell us how to find love and keep it … and research shows that most boys are conceived in the morning.’

This is Lovric, the doctor’s daughter speaking. ‘I always turn to my father when I need to know about medical details.’ Her third novel, The Remedy is about charlatan doctors of the eighteenth century. ‘Which city turns out to be the home of all quackery? Venice of course.’ Here too she draws a modern parallel: ‘We think our lives are perfectible, that if we have enough money we can buy perfect health and beauty. This book is parodying the “wellness industry”.’

If her books are a tribute to the city she knows as La Serenissima, they also encompass its dark side of witchcraft and cruelty: ‘A writer has to be prepared to encounter the dark I think. But I find the darkness of Venice alluring. And everything is mitigated by her beauty.’

‘Alluring darkness’ might describe some of Lovric’s heroes. Casanova, notorious eighteenth-century philanderer who spent much of his life exiled from Venice, and the poet Byron, famously described as ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’, are both subjects of her first novel, Carnevale. And Catullus was a master of invective; a great hater as well as a great lover. Does she like men who are mad, bad and rude? She laughs: ‘Well, my husband says he is quite different at work. No, fortunately, love does not have to be like that, I know it doesn’t.’ Lovric appears serenely happy in her marriage to Graham Morrison, a leading British architect.

There is certainly little hint of badness or witchcraft in their vast and beautifully converted warehouse flat. Even the cat has behaved with perfect decorum, sitting politely at the table throughout the interview. ‘Meet Rose la Touche of Harristown, named after the girl adored by John Ruskin, the Victorian artist. A beautiful soul but completely neurotic.’ Rose la Touche, a slim and elegant tabby, rather pointedly gets up and leaves.

Is Lovric in the wrong century? ‘No, I like e-mails and computers and aeroplanes, they give one freedom to spend more time doing interesting things.’

Her gaze wanders out of the window to the Thames, thinking perhaps of her next migration to Venice, of the journey by water taxi to her flat on the Grand Canal. She has written: ‘The drivers are like priests, taking people from one life to another, from not-Venice to Venice, a difference as crucial as life and death.’

Time to follow Rose la Touche and leave.