Sharon Dogar
About Author
Sharon Dogar, author of Waves and Falling, was born in 1962 just outside Oxford, where she now lives with her husband and three children. Among her favourite books are To Kill a Mockingbird, Skellig and Where the Wild Things Are. As well as an author, Dogar is a social worker who counsels troubled teens.
Dogar's debut novel, Waves (Chicken House), was published in 2007 and is a coming-of-age story about a family dealing with the accident of their daughter. Her second novel, Falling (Chicken House), was published in 2009 followed by Annexed (Andersen Press) in September 2010.
Interview
MONSTERS
ANDERSEN PRESS
FEBRUARY 2020
MONSTERS is the powerful novel by SHARON DOGAR - now available in paperback - in which she explores the life of Frankenstein author Mary Shelley.
The novel brings to life the precocious teenaged girl, born in 1797, who left her family aged just 16 to flee to Europe to be with the person she loved.
MONSTERS explores Mary Shelley's relationships and the events that led to the creation of one of the most recognisable and enduring monsters in English literature.
We asked SHARON DOGAR to tell us more about MONSTERS:
Q: Monsters follows the life of Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein. Whose idea was it to approach the story of Frankenstein through the life of the young woman who wrote it?
A: Andersen editor Charlie Sheppard commissioned the book, asking me to write about Mary Shelley's life. It was clear from the start that the creation of Frankenstein, and Mary's time in Geneva (where the book was conceived), would be a crucial part of the novel.
The idea of Mary's own life informing the creation of her monster evolved naturally out of the writing and editing process. For me, the moment when Victor Frankenstein flees from his monstrous creation mirrors the complex (and largely unconscious) feelings Mary had around the death of her own mother, a mere ten days after her birth. Did her mother die at the mere sight of her? Is Mary herself a monstrous, destructive child?
The prevalence of death in the early 18th century also affected Mary. It naturally led to a belief in God and an afterlife, and she believed that her mother was alive in this afterlife - somehow. And yet this assumption was being questioned, most fervently by the man Mary falls passionately in love with - Percy Bysshe Shelley. How does Mary make sense of this?
Mary's writing of Frankenstein addresses big questions; Can we defy God and create life, and if so, what would it mean for society as a whole? How and why does rejection, lack of love and social ostracism affect us? Monsters tries to explore how such questions arose within Mary, driving her inevitably towards creating one of the most enduring Monsters of all time.
Q: And why did you want to write this story?
A: I didn't want to write the story initially; mostly because I'd made a decision that I would no longer write for publication. Writing for publication means exposure, and that can affect how free you feel to write to go wherever your imagination might take you.
My last novel, Annexed, had a lot of attention, it was short-listed for the Costa, but at the same time caused a vicious debate (still current more widely) around whether writers have the right to imagine outside of their own cultural context. As a mixed-race muslim/anglo catholic, yet also protestant, woman, how did I have the right to imagine Auschwitz? Or to imagine a cultural Icon like Anne Frank as an exceptional young woman who had very ordinary thoughts about sex and love?
Every novel before Annexed was written with a sense of total imaginative freedom. After it was published I felt I had to make a choice: carry on writing for publication, but always feeling anxious about what I could and couldn't imagine, or stop publishing. I love writing far more than I love publishing so the decision was easy. I didn't offer any books for publication for six years. And then Charlie Sheppard asked me to write this book.
Being commissioned to write a novel helps take some of the pressure off, not least because I'm not responsible for the original idea. This book arose out of a collaboration with Charlie. It's the first of my books that has been subjected to a joint editing process from the first draft. It's chronological rather than a time-slip novel, and is written by an older, far more self-conscious, writer.
As to why write Monsters? Well, who wouldn't want to write about Mary Shelley. The story of her young life is a ready-made plot straight from heaven. How anyone managed to live through so much, so young, and rather than fall apart under the strain of the tragedies life threw at her, turn it all into an incredible novel? The only fear was that I might not do her justice.
Q: Why did you decide to write Monsters as a diary, and in the present tense? And how did you choose the title?
A: Some novels just present themselves a certain way. Diaries and letters are an effective way of giving the reader information and of describing the passing of time. They present the reader not only with what's happened but also provide a sense of the internal life of a character. The form of the novel was a practical decision, interspersing the odd letter with the story as it unfolds. It also mirrors the structure of Frankenstein.
Writing in the present tense is something I do naturally. I think it offers the reader a sense of immediacy, and a way of identifying completely with the character, whilst the fact that it is not an internal narrative, but written by a narrator, maintains that crucial sense of being told a story. We live our lives physically in the moment, whereas our minds move backwards and forwards across time, and I enjoy novels that mirror that process.
The title was a working title. I never really expected it to be the final title! It came about because as I was writing it occurred to me that every character in the novel is forced (usually by a clash between their ideals and reality) into doing monstrous things. When Mary's passionate belief in free love is challenged by the reality of actually having to share the man she loves with another woman, she behaves monstrously. Mary's father, who has brought Mary up to believe in the freedom of a woman to choose her partner, and remain unmarried, is appalled when Mary does exactly that - and behaves monstrously - rejecting his own daughter, and actively encouraging his friends to do the same, even when he knows she will be ostracized and alone whilst pregnant with her first child.
Q: How much did you know about Mary Shelley and her step-sister Jane before you started to write Monsters? Where did you go to research their lives?
A: I'd studied The Romantics. I knew some of Shelley's poetry and I'd read Frankenstein. I knew they were one of the first celebrity couples. I had no idea of how much they suffered, or of the price Mary paid for her determination to be a woman who not only believed in equality of both mind and body - but was prepared to act upon her beliefs. I had never heard of her step-sister Jane (who becomes Claire).
Claire was a revelation to me, and I fell utterly in love with her. She acts as a counter-weight in the novel - smiling at Shelley and Mary's high-faluting ideals, and wondering why people have to spend so much time dressing everything up in words when really they are just longing to kiss one another.
It was Jane/Claire's journey, from an unsure child born in a prison, to a young woman who both ensnares and then defies the great (and not particularly pleasant) Lord Byron that originally entranced me. I felt I wanted to rescue her from obscurity, and a history that had decided that she was only ever a side-kick. The evidence suggested (at least to me) that she was far more than that. I am always smitten by history's observers; by the forgotten. It was Claire who got me into the story, and it was through her that I became equally obsessed with Mary and Shelley. She remains my favourite.
I wrote the story in cafes, in the Weston Library, Oxford (where the Mary Shelley archives are). And at the kitchen table.
Q: What for you stood out in their life stories?
A: It's hard to answer this one without giving too much away, so I'll answer generally. The level of abandonment in Mary's life stood out for me. She lost her mother at birth and was rejected by her father - leaving her effectively parentless at sixteen. In this context her desperate need to be loved makes perfect sense, and yet it stands in such stark contrast to her fierce intelligence and independence of thought.
Age also stands out for me. Both girls are 15 at the beginning of the story: teenagers, as was Bysshe when he wrote the first ever published article refuting the existence of God. They are each teenagers who do remarkable things. As young adult writers I sometimes fear we are in danger of infantilizing teens, of believing that they only want to read books that absolutely reflect their own lives. Yes, we all love reading ourselves, but teenagers are also perfectly capable of reading beyond themselves.
Mary, Claire and Bysshe each demonstrate just how remarkable teenagers have always been. They are the social group most likely to challenge us and our unquestioned assumptions. When that youthful combination of passion, hormones and intelligence is set free (think the hippy movement,) then teenagers can, and often do, change our world.
It bemuses me when people choose to insult young people, calling them snowflakes rather than focusing on the incredible challenges they make to our thinking. I learn so much from my children, how my binary thinking should be challenged, how our sexual identity has the freedom to be fluid. How important detailed language is to the freedom to be transgender. Mary and Shelley are far more naturally aligned with the young, and their discourse, than with my generation.
Q: How much room was there for you as a writer in building on their life stories, given the amount that is written about them?
A: Historical fiction relies first upon researching what did happen, and second on looking for the gaps between the facts. It's within the gaps that the writer's imagination is given free reign, taking what one knows and using it to surmise what might have been.
An ability to completely ignore what anyone else thinks, at least during the time of writing, is essential. It's a balance between respect for the historians who have done all the hard graft of information gathering, and the letting go and allowing the imagination to do its work, accepting that you might get the odd thing wrong.
Q: How did you go about developing Mary and Jane's characters for Monsters? How important was reading their own writings in doing so?
A: Reading their own writing lay at the heart of developing their characters. Mary comes across in her diaries as very contained, as though painfully aware of herself as the daughter of two famous writers, and expecting to be judged alongside them. Claire is freer, and far less circumspect. It was a revelation to me that Mary, (not unlike Anne Frank) was probably already editing her own history long before she became famous. This need to control how she might appear in history informs one of the most dramatic and terrible moments in the novel.
Q: Did your training as a psychotherapist help you understanding the threads of Mary's life that lead to the creation of Frankenstein - and had you decided which threads to work with before you started writing the book?
A: The instinct of a therapist to listen and, at times, to come to see an underlying pattern that might be driving certain behaviours, definitely helps the writing. I think my training provided a framework for something I was already doing - enabling me to enact it professionally, and making more sense of the process of writing for me.
No, I never know what's coming when I write. I do all the research fully intending to make a plan, and then the writing starts. Before I know it I'm writing a scene that comes from the research - usually on the opposite page of some notes I've taken. Just a bit of writing, I always think. And then I can't stop, and the characters begin to live, and the background starts filling in, and if I'm lucky the story begins to take on a life of it's own, running ahead of the research.
The underlying theme of the story eventually emerges from the terrible mess of trying to edit what I've made. And that really is like the process of having therapy! Every single time I swear I'll do it differently, and plan, and every single time I get caught up, over-excited and begin to write without one. I think I've come to accept now, that that will never change.
Q: How difficult was it to develop Bysshe's character and what was most difficult for you as a modern woman in doing so?
A: Where do I start? In a scene that was cut the young Bysshe looks into a pond, staring at his own reflection. He has a moment where he separates from his reflection - and feels there is forever another, different Bysshe, waiting for him somewhere beneath the water.
For me that scene, with its reflection of the story of Narcissus, explains Bysshe. He was an only son, an incredible, sensitive and exceptionally imaginative child who was utterly adored. He ran riot round his home, setting the butler's trousers alight and subjecting his five sisters, who revered him, to his experiments and story-telling. His life was wonderful. And then he was sent to boarding school.
Aged seven his life ruptured, and he never recovered. His intellect and feeling seem to have somehow separated, so that he could both feel intensely, and intuitively, and yet act (when in the grip of an idea) absolutely appallingly. He took Mary too literally at times, failing to understand how she truly felt about poly-amory, and yet he undoubtedly loved her, and his steadfast belief in her talent was instrumental to the creation of Frankenstein He is perhaps the most complex character within the novel. Byron is more of a proper baddy, but Bysshe confuses us. I wanted to engage with that, to portray it, and avoid making judgment one way or another.
It was hard, because some of what he does is so dreadful to our modern eyes - but that was also true of writing Godwin, Mary's father. In choosing Bysshe, Mary repeats her relationship with her father. She chooses a man who loves and adores her, but who, at crucial moments in her life, fails her - just as her father has. I'm always more interested in developing the emotional realities and complexities of a character or situation than I am in vilifying - so in that sense it was enjoyable developing Bysshe's character. I like to offer the reader the right to decide in what ways they feel he should be held to account.
Q: If you could step back in time to any point in this story and spend time with the characters, where and when would you go?
A: Well that's really easy. Geneva: red wine, mountains, mayhem, and the chance to know what really happened. But then again, there's a scene that got cut from the book, where Mary is at her mother's grave with her father. I would love to be able to go back and take her little hand (as it traces the letters of her dead mother's name) and hold it. To let her know that she was loved.
Q: What would you like today's readers to take from Monsters? Do you hope that they will read Monsters before or after reading Frankenstein?
A: Writing the novel it struck me how relevant to the modern world so much of it remains. Mary and her mother fought against women being the property of men. The objectification of women continues today, powerful men like Weinstein believe they can treat women as objects who exist only to fulfill their desire. Women are blamed and shamed for feeling that they must comply with such behavior if they are to succeed.
Social media has unfortunately provided a platform for the hatred that still exists towards confident, intellectual women such as Mary Beard. They hate her because she refuses to conform to their ideal of beauty; completely happy in her naked, make-up less face, she confronts them with no way of objectifying her. So they spit venom at her. Civilisation is not a thing that is achieved and then we stop, we have to keep ourselves continually upon our toes in the fight against the oppression and hatred of difference, as well the objectification of women.
Having said all that I don't have any desire for readers to take anything in particular from the book, I'm just grateful to them for reading it - especially if they are enjoying it enough to read to the end. For me it's a cracking love story, as well as a novel of ideas and readers can take whatever they want from it. Once they open the cover it's not mine anymore anyway, it's theirs.
I don't think it matters whether readers have read Frankenstein already or not - hopefully the story makes enough sense on its own
Q: What are you writing now?
A: About five different things. Can't settle. It's like having another baby, you have to forget how hard it was before you can totally commit again - or at least I do these days. When I was younger I just started the next thing straight away.
Q: What are your favourite escapes from writing?
A: Most of the time I don't really want to escape from the writing. But when I do - reading helps. And gardening. Of course I do have another job, as a therapist. When I'm stuck with a story that's a mess, cooking something complicated and new can help. It's like the alchemy of cooking reminds me that things put together in the right way can make something delicious. Holidays with my husband when a book's finished are wonderful. And any time I can get with my three grown-up children, and/ or their partners puts writing in the shade. Being with friends after a day's writing is lovely, remembering that the real world is still out there. The usual things.
Thank you for asking me about Monsters.
ANNEXED
ANDERSEN PRESS
MARCH 2011
Julia Eccleshare interviewed SHARON DOGAR at the launch of her new title, ANNEXED (Andersen Press), which explores Anne Frank's story from the perspective of Peter, the boy who was also in hiding in the Annexe in Amsterdam during WWII.
Eccleshare asked Dogar, how did she come to write the novel, one that is difficult and challenging, and which meant writing within a framework and with characters that were already established? This is Dogar's response:
"I think every book I have ever written has started with a character and a series of questions. With this book, it started with, 'what if Anne's view is not the only one?' I reread her diary obsessively. I first read it when I was 12 and I fell in love with her completely. I felt I had a very personal relationship with her. I lived near Oxford as a mixed race child and here was a child who was considered worthless but who could write and still have dreams and desires, and it meant an awful lot to me.
"When I reread it my 30s, after studying psychoanalysis, I thought her perceptions were questionable. She describes Peter as a bit of a wimp but I saw him as suffering from depression, which was a reasonable place to be in those circumstances. Anne coped by making up stories in which everything would be alright. I think she played a game with herself, it was almost like she was living in a dolls house, a safe house, it was a safe place for her to think about things. But I was more interested in the question of Peter and what it would be like for a boy to be in hiding.
"Peter and Margot were very quiet and thoughtful and there is enough in Annes writing to give you a sense of their characters; the other characters in the house are almost too forceful.
"I started to write the story by writing vignettes, sections between Anne and Peter, and as I wrote them their characters grew although with Anne, she is so multifaceted, all you want to do is to respect who she is based on her diary.
"I was very careful writing about the relationship between Anne and Peter. I read the diaries so closely and so carefully to imagine what was going on between the lines. The diary is Annes view of reality. Annes father once said that he didnt recognize his daughter, that the Anne he knew was different from the Anne in the diary, and that was liberating, it set me free to write the book.
"Margot was the character who was the hardest to listen for and she became important to me because she did a remarkable thing, she gave Anne space, and I think she did it consciously. I also know what happened later and how close she and Anne were at the camp, and I wanted her to be present in this part of the story.
"What upset me about Annes diary when I first read it was the suddenness with which it ended. I thought she must have been taken to the camp and died quickly, and I felt cheated that I didnt know the rest of the book, which is really the real story of the Holocaust. And thats the book that I have written, Peters last days in Mauthausen camp in 1945, in the sick bay’. Of course it wasnt a sick bay, there was no medicine, you were just taken there and they waited for you to die.
"The first part of the book that I wrote was about Peters first moments in the 'Annexe'. As I was writing it, I found myself writing Peter's words when he is in the sick bay at the camp, which is the end of the story. I dont know where the voice came from, it just appeared, and thats when I realized what I wanted to do, to have Peter talking from two different points in time - at the Annexe and at the camp.
"I remembered something that I had heard was said by survivor of Auchwitz; the moment the body stops and the moment you lie down, everything comes back to you and your previous life erupts, and its unbearable because your survival depends on you forgetting everything about your life before. I thought that that might have happened to Peter during those three weeks at the end of his life, that he started rethinking his life. Thats when I started researching into the Holocaust.
"Life in the Annexe is enormously difficult and Anne is very good at describing life and their relationships in her diary, the endless arguments. They talk and talk about being freed, but no one talks about not being freed. Thats the elephant in the room. When my daughter read Annes diary she asked the same questions that I had, including what happened next?, and we know what happened next and it was terrifying.
"The second part of the story is about Peter going to the camp, on the death march, then being at Mauthausen, and I could hear his voice very clearly the story being spoken in my mind in a particular voice - and every morning when I woke up I hoped that I would still hear it, and every day I asked the question, should I be doing this, writing this book? Eventually I decided, well, I am doing it and if I am not happy with it, I dont need to publish it.
"The second part was much harder to write. I had chosen not to do any research before I wrote the first half but, as Peter says in the back, its coming, so I felt like that, that what happened next was coming, but the more I got involved with the characters and the story, the less I wanted to write that part.
"At that point, I stopped writing the book and I read websites, read survivors accounts, history books, and gradually I began to see how I could write Peters story, not about him as an individual but a story that would give people a clear sense of how the camps were run and how they dehumanized people. The only way I could write it was to see Peter as an Everyman.
"In hindsight, I think I was incredibly nave about how the book would be received and I had no idea how it would be received. To say I cant write about an event in the past for me is like saying, look, heres a really beautiful field, why do you want to paint it? I understand how writing about this may feel threatening to people who are afraid of Holocaust deniers - but dont make the act of imagining a story invalid.
"For me, like Anne, the story is about storytelling; thats my democracy and the pages between the cover, they are safe. For me, all that was a given and for that to be misunderstood was shocking. But I realize now that if you write about something uncomfortable, if you write about hate, you may attract hate.
"What do modern children get from this book? For me, its that they need to go on knowing the story. I didnt think about that while I was writing it but I did think it while I researched the second part of the book. I want this book, which is rooted in reality, to be read alongside Anne Franks diary. Perhaps read it based on your memory of the diary and then go back and read the diary once youve finished this book."
In the Preface to Annexed, Dogar writes, "Re-imagining can be an important part of keeping history alive, and there was no one more acutely alive, clever and curious about the world than Anne Frank. Sadly, we can't change what happened to her, or her family and friends. But we can keep on telling her story, keep on thinking about what it means to be human, in both our love and our hatred for ourselves - and we can (as Anne Frank has), try to keep the facts of what happened during the Second World War alive for each new generation, in the hope that they can remain aware of how catastrophic the consequences of hate can be."
REVIEW OF ANNEXED by Sharon Dogar (Andersen Press)
The Diary of Anne Frank has been a fundamental resource for teaching about World War 2 and the Holocaust and has profoundly affected and inspired many young people. But are we in danger of it being so well known now that it loses some of its power?
In this brave novel, which has attracted some controversy, the author takes us into that dreadful claustrophobic hideaway through the eyes of a very different character: Peter Van Pels.
This view of Anne and life in the annexe and the subsequent trauma at Auschwitz is both affecting and very effective. Peter is a remarkable character and the author really gets us into his head, heart and soul. His shyness, introspection, frustration with imprisonment and not being able to fight and his very normal adolescent feelings will really make him come alive for modern readers.
It is very apparent that the author has been impeccable in sticking to the facts as portrayed in the Diary and historical records, but where no records exist, the writing is allowed free rein and the sections in Auschwitz itself are powerful indeed.
This book does a very important job because, as the very best historical fiction can do, it powerfully reawakens this story for a whole new generation. As the author says, each generation must learn for themselves about how 'catastrophic the consequences of hate can be'.
A sensitive and hugely compassionate story that will continue to resonate with you long after you put it down and is a valuable addition to history and citizenship studies as well as a gripping read.
Reviewed by Joy Court
Monsters: The passion and loss that created Frankenstein
