Priya Parmar Biography, Books, and Similar Authors

Interview

Author Priya Parmar discusses why she decided to write her novel Vanessa and Her Sister in epistolary format and how she gained "fluency" in Virginia Woolf.

I first heard the famously dismissive (and apocryphal?) admonition from Virginia Woolf to her sister, Vanessa Bell—You will have the babies, and I will write the books—when I was in college and beginning to think of myself as a writer, and I'll never forget the firestorm of debate and despair those words caused. Did a woman writer have to choose? And if we didn't, did that make us less of a writer (or an artist)? Vanessa and Her Sister is a powerful answer to that question, but I'd love to know what drew you, as a writer and as a woman, to the two Stephen sisters and their story to begin with?

That remark might be apocryphal, but that specific, resentful sentiment pervaded Virginia Stephen's correspondence in the months after Vanessa Bell gave birth to her first son, Julian. Virginia was desperately afraid of being left behind as Vanessa moved into her new life as wife and mother. Virginia's letters are salted with spikey, barbed jabs aimed at her happily married sister.

Virginia Woolf was not an easy person—-gifted, charismatic, quixotic, charming, and brimming with creative genius—-but never easy. She believed in possession and in relentlessly coming first in the affections of ...