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Edward Carey is a novelist, visual artist, and playwright. His previous novels include The Swallowed Man, Little, Alva & Irva, and Observatory Mansions, and an acclaimed series for young adults, the Iremonger Trilogy. His writing for the stage includes an adaptation of Robert Coover's Pinocchio in Venice, a continuation of the Pinocchio story. Born in England, he now teaches at the University of Texas in Austin, where he lives with his wife, the author Elizabeth McCracken, and their family.
Edward Carey's website
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Marie Grosholtz was born in 1761, a Swiss orphan raised in France. Almost nobody would recognize her name, let alone know her life story. But after marriage, she took a different name, one she would use to start a business in London. It's that name that would become internationally renowned, the name associated with a massive worldwide entertainment empire that persists to this day: Madame Tussaud.
English novelist Edward Carey (who currently resides in Texas) spent 15 years writing Little, a novel that follows the, well, little Marie Grosholtz from her sad childhood through her chilling involvement in the French Revolution, and the many famous faces she meets and casts in plaster along the way. Carey spoke with EW about Grosholtz, his own childhood, and working in her museum.
You said you took 15 years to finish this book. What were you doing for that time?
Edward Carey: I've written other books before, but they've all been set in imaginary places, and Paris, apparently, exists, and the French Revolution apparently happened. And so I had to do a lot of research, but also it took me a long time to get Marie's voice. That took me the longest time, because sometimes she came across as uncanny and I didn't think that...
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