Earlier, you suggested a dichotomy between writing about our own times and writing about the past, but there were many moments in Life Mask when I felt very much like you were writing about the present.
ED: Absolutely, and I would say this is the first time I've done that. Obviously, in my previous work I had contemporary concerns, and I wasn't shy about having a slant on the events of the past—you have to have some slant. But, in writing Life Mask, I was startled by similarities between the political climate in which the story takes place and the political climate of today.
It just jumped out at me after 9/11. I was halfway through the book already, but I suddenly starting thinking, "Oh my God, the way Bush and Rice and people like that speak now: It's just like the government of Pitt the Younger in the 1790s—it's a classic right-wing backlash in a time of terror."
As I did more research into the politics of the day, I was fascinated and appalled by how many similarities there were, and how, in a 10-year period, so many ideas about freedom and justice were just thrown out the window because people panicked. I found for the first time that I was actually making explicit some of those connections between the past and the present. I tossed in the odd phrase like "weapons of mass destruction" to alert the less attentive reader. Read more…
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