Cathleen Schine's The Three Weissmans of Westport is a little bit 21st-century homage to Sense and Sensibility and a little bit homecoming to her childhood town of Westport, Conn.
What made you want to write your own version of Sense and Sensibility?
I'd finished reading Sense and Sensibility for the millionth time, and I wondered what the modern equivalent of that sudden shift in your life would be. We don't have primogeniture in the United States, so for modern American women a comparable situation would be divorce. I used Sense and Sensibility as a jumping-off point, but the characters did pull me in different plot directions than Austen's.
Was it intimidating to try to put your own stamp on a classic?
At the beginning I was a little too literal-minded, asking myself, “What is Romanticism now?” Things got easier when I found Betty, the mother and main character. Once she appeared, her husband came easily. Miranda and Annie, the two daughters, took a while longer.
Did the Westport of your childhood influence the story?
The town has changed so much since I was growing up. My mother sold her house and kept the barn—all around it, these huge houses have gone up. The barn looks like the gardener's shed now! As I was creating the cottage in Westport where Annie, Miranda, and Betty would live, I was inspired by a house on the beach that my friend was living in. It was a tiny cottage surrounded by huge, completely renovated houses. It certainly wasn't as decrepit as the one I describe in the book, though.
You entered graduate school expecting to be a medieval historian and ended up a fiction writer. How did that come about?
I spent a year in Italy on a fellowship studying paleography, and I discovered that I can't remember names, dates, or abstract ideas. This was not a good qualification for a historian. Also, while in Florence, I spent more time buying shoes that I did in the archives. I actually thought I should become a shoe buyer, but I couldn't get a job doing that. I never took a writing class because I was afraid of not being good enough, but I started writing a page a day and found it was really fun.
Have you always written?
I wanted to be writer when I was a little girl, and I wrote terrible poetry. When I was home on vacation while in graduate school, I found a whole folder of it. It was so bad that I was afraid someone would pull it out of the trash, so I drove it to the city dump to get rid of it. Later, I found my mother had saved another folder I'd missed—and felt the complete sweat of humiliation. I actually put a scene based on that in my novel The Love Letter.
