Author Mary Fleming moved from Chicago to Paris in 1981. Following a career in journalism and consultancy she has now turned to fiction writing full time. Civilisation Française, her third novel set in France, tells a mesmerizing story about how even the best intentions can produce unthinkable results. We are so pleased to have had the chance to conduct this Spotlight interview with Mary about some of the particulars that make her new book so compelling.
I love your ability to come up with facts that seem peripheral but actually really help define the characters’ relationships. For instance, Madame Quinon, who grew up on a Wyoming ranch, includes no longer having to worry about broken fingernails as part of the larger package describing why she loved François and moved with him to Paris. Do you rely on instinct to decide how far to go with such details as you write, or is it something that happens in second or third drafts?
I never know when a detail is going to come in handy. Sometimes they come to me right away in the picture that forms in my mind’s eye of the character. Other times, I see the way a friend or someone at a party pushes back her hair and think: I can use that for character X. Sometimes a detail I witnessed long ago—remembering the way a man fiddled with his cutlery on the table—comes back to me and seems to fit with a character who is already a draft or two old. Since those small details define us in real life, contribute to the person we are, it’s important to reproduce that phenomenon in your fiction. Tolstoy said: “No detail must be neglected in art, for a button half-undone may explain a whole side of a person’s character.” Of course, these details must be used parsimoniously. Too many weigh down the story, result in you telling rather than showing. But as Tolstoy implies, we are all, on some level, the sum of our personal tics.
Your protagonists are both American-born expats living in Paris: Madame Quinon is a rich, elderly widow looking back on the regrets and failures that have marked her life; Lily Owens, a young student at the Sorbonne, has come to Paris to see if it may offer clues to her future. Madame Quinon and Lily are very different, in character as well as circumstance, but they do have in common more than just the fact that they both live in the same house. Please talk about their similarities.
Both Madame and Lily have difficult pasts that they do not like to talk about. In Madame’s case it was the events around World War II that caused her life to unravel. It is History with a capital H, the world stage that intervened to affect the course of her life. In Lily’s case, it is history with a small h, her strange childhood with a mentally unstable mother and formative years spent living with a cold, nasty French woman that was damaging. Whatever the cause, they share a backdrop of sadness and a penchant for concealing it.
Both Madame and Lily are also outsiders. No matter how well they understand and sympathize with their adopted culture, as ex-pats, they will always be different, reside in a place at the edge, maintain a position as observers. Some people—myself included, I might add—feel more comfortable at that distance, enjoy living in a space that is hard to define. Madame has felt that way for years, and Lily is finding out that she does too.
And that may be because even before they came to France they felt like outsiders. On the ranch in Wyoming, Amenia had a weird name and a mother who aspired to sophistication. Unlike the other farmers, they lived in a stone house lined with books. Lily grew up in England with American parents so felt—and was made to feel—different. On top of that, she had the strange interlude with Madame Flaviche which really set her apart. In Paris, she immediately feels unclassifiable and therefore more comfortable.
Your movement back and forth between Madame Quinon’s and Lily’s first-person narratives seems to be the perfect vehicle for carrying the story forward at an appropriate pace while also leaving enough space to develop backstories for the characters. Did you know from the start that you would write from alternating points of view? What are the challenges (and the advantages) of having two narratives going at once?
After writing two novels from the point of view of one character, I did want to experiment with different voices. At first I tried multiple perspectives, but that was too diffuse. I felt I was asking the reader to invest intensely in too many people’s lives. So I settled on the two main characters, Madame and Lily. That choice also served the story I was trying to tell of Paris in the early 1980s, a crossover time when World War II was still a not-so-distant memory but younger generations were moving on. With Madame I had a character whose life spanned the whole century up to that point. Though she didn’t lose anyone of importance to her in the First World War, her husband François did, and those losses permeated his life and therefore affected Amenia too. “This murderous century,” she called it.
My other interest in using the two-character perspective was to think about the extent and limits of our free will. As I mentioned above, Madame’s life was tragically affected by History. It was perhaps beyond her power to guide the outcome of her life. Lily, on the other hand, can perhaps overcome or at least manage the traumas of her childhood; her life is more in her own hands because she hasn’t got a war or an occupation imposing consequences. One of my major themes generally is that we do not leave our pasts behind us. We lug them around like a suitcase for the rest of our lives. Sometimes we can move beyond them, sometimes we can’t.
If one only considers the story unfolding in the present (as opposed to some of the horrifying events that occur in the backstories) one could say there are no real villains in this novel; rather, people with mostly good intentions make really bad choices that will prove to have outsized consequences. Do you agree with this assessment?
We all have villains in our lives but often not in the here and now, in medias res. I was more interested in showing the long-term effect of the baddies on characters’ lives. Madame Flaviche on Lily, for example. Those years echoed down the tunnel of time—Lily can still imagine the old witch chiding her. Madame has had—still has—her husband’s family. As she says: “It’s a malevolent thread—my mother-in-law Hortense to her child Agnès to her child Octave—that has been woven through my life in Paris, and it still has the power to almost unravel me.” I would say Octave and his wife veer into the villainous. They’re keen on putting Madame in a home and only really care about the money. But if you’re talking about bookable crooks, no, there aren’t any of those in the story.
More than once your various characters comment on the fact that “family” doesn’t always have to mean people connected by blood. But while the potential for alternative “family” units often seems just within reach, something holds your characters back from crossing that line into greater intimacy and commitment. What is it?
Because of their personal histories, both Madame and Lily are wary of other people, of risking further hurt by going out on an emotional limb, which you must do, if you are trying to create the intimate closeness that a family of your choosing implies. That being said, Madame does feel a familial link with Germaine and her daughter, and it is reciprocated. They have been joined by circumstance, both personal and historical, and feel a unit. Without giving too much of the story away, I would also say that Lily is beginning to form such links at the end of the book. And who knows what would have happened between her and Madame, had that warming relationship been able to heat up further.
What is certain is that moving away from your genetic family, which is inherently part of the ex-pat experience, means over time, you tend to rely heavily on other relationships. Friends that I’ve had for forty years here in Paris, for example, certainly approach a kin-like status for me.
What are you working on now?
I’m working on a family story, an American woman married to an Anglo-Frenchman and their three children. Though this story too begins in Paris in the early ’80s, most of the action takes place in the 2000s and focuses on the life of the daughter who has trouble locating her cultural identity. Through her, I want to show what’s good and bad about growing up in Paris, as well as how the city has changed in the last twenty years. It’s not just immutable Old World, quartier latin Paris anymore but a vibrant place where the center of gravity has shifted to the northeastern parts of the city. Sadly, the threat of terrorism evolved too. The story ends in 2015, a tragic year for Paris and the family.
Mary Fleming, originally from Chicago, moved to Paris in 1981, where she worked as a freelance journalist and consultant before turning full-time to writing fiction. Her novel Someone Else was published in 2014 and The Art of Regret in 2019. Heliotrope Books published her third novel, Civilisation Française, on July 16, 2024. She chronicles her French life between Paris and the Perche (Normandy) in the online photo-essay A Paris-Perche Diary. You can follow her on Instagram here: @flemingm6.
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