Newcomer Mary Sharratt uses her expat insights to spin a fine yarn
Mary Sharratt was born and raised in Minnesota, but Munich has been her home since 1989. It is here that she wrote her debut novel, Summit Avenue. Munich Found talked with Sharratt about her experiences as an expat and her vision for this poetic novel.MF: How do you think living in Munich while writing your novel Summit Avenue affected the story?
Mary Sharratt: When I started writing here I was in complete isolation from other English-language writers. I had no teacher and no writers’ group in the beginning (I later started my own). The only thing I had to draw on was my experience in another culture. In many ways, Summit Avenue is like a mirror image of my own struggles as a foreigner in Germany. I feel that this is a book only a foreigner could have written — I poured all my alienation, estrangement and yearning for home into it. If I had never left the U.S., I could not have come up with a character like Kathrin. Living in Germany made my heroine real and allowed her voice to speak through me. From that distance, it also made Minnesota into a mythical and far off place, a lost and longed for home that I wanted to reconstruct in my fiction.
MF: Is the lesbian relationship in the book something you planned from the outset or did it form as you wrote?
MS: When I am writing I’m not really thinking about how other people are going to process the novel, I am just telling a story. I always knew there would be a close relationship between the two women, but didn’t know how it would play out.
I chose the historical setting because I wanted to get past the labels that are too readily applied in modern society. By setting the story in 1912 I remove the labels. Kathrin is falling in love with another woman without having any sexual definition to attach to her experience.
She does not and cannot call herself a lesbian, because that word does not exist in her vocabulary. She has only fairy tales to help her frame and define her sexual awakening and loss of innocence.
MF: How did your passion for fairy tales turn into an instrument of your fiction?
MS:When I had some people read my first draft, they told me it was a little bit flat, that the characters needed more depth.
I was teaching English to Japanese children at the time and had checked out fairy tale books from the Gasteig library. I became completely absorbed in them. The haunting quality of some of the older tales really got me hooked. That is when I came up with the idea to have Kathrin working as a translator of German fairy tales.
In the first draft she was an Irish immigrant.
MF: What made you think that it would work?
MS: Fairy tales are set in a timeless space, in another sphere, but the teller of the tale is always shaped by the time and place in which she is living. I was inspired to write about the Twin Cities in the era of 1911-1918, because at that time Minneapolis was the flour milling capital of the world and the upper class of Summit Avenue was experiencing its golden era.
I wanted to place my heroine in a dynamic time and place, in a setting, which was exciting and a little dangerous.
Also, historical fiction allows you to explore facets of history that most text books ignore. . . . Historical fiction is a way to address issues of labor, sexuality, feminism, and militarism without seeming didactic or heavy-handed. The reader is more likely to pay attention.
MF: If Summit Avenue is a fable, then what is the moral?
MS: The culmination of my heroine’s journey is the realization that the true meaning of home, identity and belonging goes deeper than geography and ethnicity. It’s a deep inner rootedness. It’s finding that house in the forest that exists inside your deepest self.
summit avenue** By Mary Sharratt
Coffee House Press
Mary Sharratt’s debut novel, Summit Avenue, tells the story of Kathrin, a 16-year-old German immigrant to the United States. Raised in the apparently grim Höllental (valley of hell) in the Black Forest, she is sent to America by her uncle after her mother dies in 1911. If life in Germany was bad, the beginning of her new life in Minneapolis isn’t much of an improvement. Employed in the Pillsbury factory, where she sews flour bags for a meager wage, Kathrin finds some happiness between the shelves of a bookstore, where she spends hours reading.
It is here that she meets Violet Waverly, a wealthy widow who employs her to translate German fairy tales. Kathrin feels like she has entered a fairy tale herself as she goes from a skinny mill girl to a young lady enjoying the finer things in life as well as the affection and companionship of her employer — “Mrs. Waverly opened a bottle of white wine. When she poured it into the glasses, it glowed golden in the evening light, sparkling with a luminosity of its own. This was how I imagined a magic potion would look. I felt like a mill girl again . . . who had wandered into a palace by mistake.” Captivated by her new life and by Violet herself, Kathrin struggles in reconciling both worlds: the old and the new. The two women grow increasingly closer while Kathrin’s boyfriend, John, constantly reminds her that they are of a different class than the wealthy Mrs. Waverly.
Though the plot contains all the elements of a traditional coming-of-age novel — naivety, sex, disappointment and triumph — Sharratt sets her story apart with its fairy tale theme. Not only does her language captivate in the same way that a fairy tale does, but in each section of the book Kathrin’s life mirrors that of a specific tale woven throughout.
The sections bear the names of the three major female archetypes: Maiden, Mother and Crone. Kathrin passes through each phase with a voice that is tender and dreamy.
When confusion and tragedy strike the protagonist, it is sometimes difficult to believe that such an intelligent and perceptive character could be as naïve as she is portrayed. However, the novel is set in an age in which words for what Kathrin experiences and feels did not exist, or were simply left unspoken. Newcomer Sharratt is certainly skilled in the art of making all these elements complement her story. By weaving the fairy tales through the novel, unlikely situations are made believable.
Mary Sharratt will read from Summit Avenue on October 24 at Words’worth booksellers.
See What’s Up for details.
