Sue Eckstein: interpreting life

Her day job is lecturing in medical ethics, and in her personal life she’s recently undergone surgery to amputate a limb. She’s also just published her second novel. Ian Macrae has been hearing more about her own and her characters’ stories

Usually, discussing a book while avoiding giving away the plot is a pretty straightforward business. You just don’t talk about what happens at the end.

But with Sue Eckstein’s Interpreters it’s more complicated than that.

The book is a bit like an onion, and not only because it may bring tears to some readers’ eyes. Its structure is layered so that things emerge, are revealed or realized slowly.

Sue Eckstein explains: “The onion description fits very well. I created the structure like that very intentionally because I wanted it to be a slow reveal, for people to have to work a bit to figure out who was who. I think a reading audience can enjoy that sort of trickery.

There are two central characters in each of two separate but ultimately intertwined narrative strands. One is a younger woman, Julia Rosenthal going back to visit places significant in her past and at the same time reflecting on incidents which shaped or affected relationships, in particular, those with her brother Max and her daughter Susanna.

The other strand is the retrospective story of a wartime childhood in Germany as told by a woman in old age.

Since many novels are autobiographical or have elements of autobiography in them, it’s all too easy to assume, or at least wonder whether Julia is Sue herself.

“She’s not me to the extent that the book isn’t autobiographical. In all my writing I draw from real experience and there are bits of Julia that my friends would recognize as being very like me, but it isn’t the same life, as it were.”

Even the title appears to have layers of meaning. It refers not only to the ways in which the characters reflect on and interpret their own and other people’s lives. It also puts the reader in among them. We become our own interpreter.

“The title came to me half way through the novel and it’s very much about the way we interpret the past and interpret our lives and other people’s lives and the fact that that’s not always reliable.”

All of the relationships in the book are in some way and to some degree fractured. Some of them are positively (or negatively) damaging. But Sue Eckstein says there is something which they have in common.

”I realized when I looked back and saw the thread that it is the influence of war which fractured them, although some were from a distance of very many years and many of the people would perhaps never think that it was that which had such an effect on their relationship. I think ultimately it’s quite an optimistic book though there is sadness in it.”

It’s a book which was written and took shape during a time when the author was approaching and reaching a crossroads in her own life. Two operations resulted in first a below-the-knee, and then an upper leg amputation. She explains how the process of writing fitted in with and progressed through all that.

“Writing for me is kind of my only real escape. The years of surgery I had on my foot and then the first amputation, they oddly had no impact on the novel because writing is the time when I’m most at peace. I can write without thinking about anything else that’s going on in my life, including impending amputation, actual amputation and then re-amputation.”

As an amputee now, however, Sue feels more inclined to take it on as a subject for writing.

“Since the amputations, I’ve been very interested in writing something fictitious which would have an amputee in it. Obviously I would not have thought of that before I became an amputee.

“But as soon as I had the first amputation, I had this great idea – what I thought was a great idea – for a kind of amputation comedy: a radio play that would take various amputees from fact and fiction and put them together in rather unusual ways. The producer who produced my other radio plays liked it, but they couldn’t get it beyond the drama commissioner.”

Looking at her blog before we spoke, there was a definite wryness of tone to the entries. But on the day we spoke, Sue told me that was about to change.

“For the first time yesterday I was overcome with rage. I have oddly not felt as bleak about the whole thing as I would have expected to. So I was interested by my response that came from nowhere of now feeling fed up. I think it was the realization that it’s for ever. And it’s hard work. An upper leg amputation is incredibly different from a below knee one. I’m learning to walk. And the fear of falling is always there now. Falling over as an adult is really shocking I find.”

And Sue finds that she is embracing the notion that it’s the things outside of us which are disabling.

“I very much believe that, and increasingly so. It has meaning in very practical terms, doesn’t it. Places of work take the cheapest possible option on disability access. I work in a relatively new medical school where there is supposedly disability access. But I wrestle with fire doors on my way in and out of work every day.

“But equally, by being visibly disabled in a medical school, it doesn’t do any harm. It shows medical students that the fact that I’ve got one leg doesn’t stop me being as effective a lecturer as anyone else they’ve got.”

• Interpreters is published by Myriad Editions. RRP £8.99