Authors Interviewing Characters: Elizabeth Buchan

We are delighted to feature  Elizabeth Buchan who interviewed her character Nina Lawrence from Two Women in Rome!

About the book:

TWO WOMEN IN ROME

In the Eternal City, no secret stays hidden forever…

Lottie Archer arrives in Rome excited to begin her new job as an archivist. When she discovers a valuable fifteenth-century painting, she is drawn to find out more about the woman who left it behind, Nina Lawrence.

Nina seems to have led a rewarding and useful life, restoring Italian gardens to their full glory following the destruction of World War Two. So why did no one attend her funeral in 1978?

In exploring Nina’s past, Lottie unravels a tragic love story beset by the political turmoil of post-war Italy. And as she edges closer to understanding Nina, she begins to confront the losses in her own life.

Q & A with Nina Lawrence from Two Women in Rome

Nina, you are dead but your voice is heard throughout the novel. How come?

Diaries and journals have been a fertile device for biographers and novelists. My journal is the record of what happened to me living in Rome during the nineteen-seventies and how what happened to me changed my perceptions.

Who is reading it?

Not every reader of a journal is empathetic, but I was lucky. Lottie Archer, who has taken up the position of Chief Archivist in a Rome archive, finds the journal and is drawn into my experiences. 

Is there any particular reason that Lottie is so sympathetic?

Lottie is the same age which helps the points of contact between us. Having recently married and moved to Rome, she is also undergoing a sea change. She, too, finds living in Rome is to be seduced by its allure, its style, its many incarnations. Like me, she celebrates its antiquity and her capacity to re-invent herself as artistic and style capital. It is a city to which many have found their way through the centuries and has nurtured Caesars and popes, saints and fools, lovers and murderers, poets and barbarians. ‘How many Rome’s are there?’ asked one English writer. There is no definitive answer but what is true is that Rome exerts a magnetism that few can resist.

However, it also has its dark areas. What I record in my journal is the civil and political turmoil of the country divided by extremes of right and left. These years, from the Sixties to the Eighties, were nicknamed, ‘The Years of Lead’. There were bombs, shootings and assassinations and, sensationally, the kidnapping and murder of a former prime minister.

Are you involved?

Yes and no. Certainly, I find myself in danger. 

What were you doing?

The answer is, like Rome’s history, many layered. Technically, I was a landscape gardener, helping to restore the gardens that had fallen into decay since the Second World War. Many of the older gardens near Rome had been originally created by cardinals, prelates of the Church, who did not see any problem with building palaces and creating paradises on earth. Other gardens belonged to aristocratic families whose past glories and fortunes have dwindled. I am useful to them because my skills made it possible to restore their gardens to something like their former magnificence. While I do so, I watch my clients…

And?

Good gardeners observe intently. They need to register the shift in the earth, the bend of a plant, the spot of decay, the arrival of the aphid.  So do those whose business is to gather other kinds of knowledge. I was one of a team, sent to Italy to find out what was being plotted by those who wished to destabilize the country further. I was past master at slipstreaming into my client’s social lives – attending dinners, listening quietly and, occasionally, leaving a recording device in a library or salon. Sometimes, I had to go to extreme measures and sleep with them.

However, after I met Leo, everything changed.

How precisely?

Perhaps I knew that, as a result, I would become careless and my heart would be turned inside out. He was fifteen years younger and not in a position to make his feelings public. In the journal, I wrote about him and me – the furies of lust, the delight in each other, the danger that both of us were in.

Was it a shock to fall in love?

It was and I did not welcome it. I had done so only once before and it was an episode I looked back on with regret. In Rome, I was mixing with unscrupulous and violent people and I needed all my wits. Loving Leo was a distraction and not easy and I was frightened it would end in disaster.

Did it end well?

Yes and no. 

What was the yes?

The ‘yes’ has to be discovered, via the journal, which takes Lottie to a couple of paintings which contain the clues. 

 What do you think Lottie gets from the journal? Does it impact her own life?

Lottie’s upbringing was problematic. In contrast to its instability, she has pursued a job which requires organization and patience. Reading of the tumult in my life stirs up the unease that still plagues whenever she is at a low ebb. She also recognized parallels with her own experience. It is very strange – but we become friends. We never meet and it defies logic but it is true. 

Two women, two eras, one city

Thirty years separate us but, as Lottie discovers, and via different paths, we arrive at the same conclusions. Forgiveness and sacrifice are crucial. So, too, is love.

—

Elizabeth Buchan began her career as a blurb writer at Penguin Books after graduating from the University of Kent with a double degree in English and History. She moved on to become a fiction editor at Random House before leaving to write full time. Her novels include the prizewinning Consider the Lily – reviewed in the Independent as ‘a gorgeously well written tale: funny, sad and sophisticated’. A subsequent novel, Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman became an international bestseller and was made into a CBS Primetime Drama. She received letters from all over the world after it was published and people still come up at book events to say how much the novel affected them. Later novels included The Second Wife, Separate Beds, Daughters. After talking to some amazing women who had been employed by SOE, she wrote the Danish wartime resistance story, I Can’t Begin to Tell You, which was reviewed as ‘nerve-jinglingly engrossing’ by the Sunday Times. The New Mrs Clifton is based on a situation that happened in her own family after the war – only in reverse. Her latest novels are The Museum of Broken Promises which Marion Keyes has called ‘a gem of a book’ and Two Women in Rome.

Elizabeth Buchan’s short stories are broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and published in magazines. She is a past reviewer for the Sunday Times and the Daily Mail, and has chaired the Betty Trask and Desmond Elliot literary prizes. She was a judge for the Whitbread First Novel Award and for the 2014 Costa Novel Award . She is a patron of the Guildford Book Festival and co-founder of The Clapham Book Festival

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Category: On Writing