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Women.com presents

Author Judith Thurman
"Secrets of the Flesh"

October 28, 1999

Author Judith Thurman, award-winning biographer of Isak Dinesen, is here today to discuss her new book, "Secrets of the Flesh," a biography of the French writer Colette.

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HomeArts: Good afternoon and thanks for joining our one-hour chat with author Judith Thurman. Judith was Victoria's 1996 writer in residence and is the National Book Award-winning biographer of Isak Dinesen. And now, she's just released "Secrets of the Flesh," a biography of the French writer Colette. Please welcome Judith!

Judith Thurman: I'm delighted to be online with readers and people interested in Colette and people who may have read my work in Victoria. This is my first online chat and I think it's very appropriate that this sort of 21st Century technology is going to make biography more accessible to a new generation of readers. I welcome everybody's questions and interest in Colette. It reminds me a little bit of Colette's own radio broadcast during the Second World War to America! I'm sitting in my bedroom looking at a beautiful old elm tree which managed to survive for three hundred years, and the leaves are falling and the light is blue and it's a very peaceful moment-- a day before my birthday. (smiling) And today also happens to be the day of my book party, so it's a very special day for me. I'm ready for your questions!

Susanna: Did you always aspire to be a writer?

Judith Thurman: I did always aspire to be a writer. I wrote poetry as a child. My mother also aspired for me to be a writer, (laughing) so in a way it was hard for me to distinguish between my own ambitions and hers. But I think I did know very young that that's what I would do. In sixth grade our teacher asked us to write a little essay on how we saw ourselves in fifteen or twenty years and I wrote about wanting to be a journalist. But I had no idea that I would ever become a biographer.

Bookluver: What made you want to write about Colette?

Judith Thurman: Well, I waited after the biography of Isak Dinesen. I took quite a bit of time off because I was exhausted. Dinesen took seven years, so I waited before I chose a second subject. It's sort of like a re-marriage -- you know you are going to be living with someone for a very long time. And Colette's life fascinated me because it seemed to me that she really was the first modern woman, that she lived throughout her life on the cusp of a wave. She really invents a new way of life at every stage -- she invents the modern teenage girl, she really invents the thirty-something career woman, the mother who has an only child late in life -- and these are all roles really that are still very, very new, ones that are still being explored at the end of this century -- juggling a career and marriage and family. And I really felt that it would be a challenge to understand her originality in a more simple way. I was a single mother of 40 myself when I started to work on the book and I needed a subject that would be rich enough, both literally and intellectually, to sustain me for a long period of time. Literally, in the sense of being able to support myself -- a subject that would be major enough and commercial enough -- but that would also be extremely engaging intellectually.

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