The Hours

"The stories revolve around Virginia Woolf, who committed suicide, a forties housewife named Laura Brown and Clarissa, a contemporary lesbian editor. I could not be more different from all three of these women. I chose this book because I think Laura Brown makes the strictest of tiger mothers look wonderful by comparison. She is totally detached and can’t get out of her head, so she retreats into books, specifically Mrs. Dalloway . She can’t feel love for her family. It fascinates me because I’m the opposite, my daughters are my main source of joy and energy. Laura Brown deserts her son; I think she goes to Toronto. In my estimation, that’s a lot worse than demanding two hours of violin practice. It’s been interesting to me, the kind of things that I’ve been criticised for: “You’ve made your daughters drill math!” I’ve always found that surprising and maybe reflective of some cultural differences. Because parents who make their kids practice sports for five hours are celebrated. And then there is also neglect, parental indifference and even physical cruelty. It’s been interesting for me to reflect on different kinds of parents and how we’re judged. I do think that mothering is one of the areas where we all can be intolerant. I think it is insecurity driven, and I include myself in that assessment. We all want to believe that what we are doing is right. We’re all so afraid that what we’re doing is wrong. It makes us very quick to judge others. Which is odd, because you just look around and it’s so clear that there are so many ways of raising happy, strong kids. I do notice an asymmetry. There are so many movies, novels and books that celebrate paternal firmness. Real life soccer dads get a pat on the back for tough tactics. My parenting style would seem wildly permissive in China, Korea or Japan. My kids wear what they want. They go to parties. They talk back in a way that would be unacceptable in Asia. The fact that I’m characterised as an extreme parent in this country reflects a real cultural difference, and I think you might be right that there is a real difference in how we judge mothers and fathers."

"In this novel, Michael Cunningham weaves together a day in the life of three women across three different time zones. Each is grappling with despair and struggling to find her place in the world. All three women are connected to a fictional woman, Mrs. Dalloway. In fact, The Hours was the original working title for Mrs. Dalloway . This is the book that made me want to write biographical fiction, because it shows what you can do with the genre. It’s so vivid! The first storyline is a fictionalised biography of Virginia Woolf herself. The year is 1923, and she is recovering from a mental breakdown while immersed in writing Mrs. Dalloway . Throughout all three narrative strands, mental illness is a haunting spectre. In the case of Virginia Woolf, she’s terrified that it will come back, but at the same time it informs the writing of Mrs. Dallowa y. It gives her the insight and the personal experience to write the Septimus Smith sections of the book; he is a war veteran who is traumatised by what he’s seen. The second narrative follows Laura Brown, a 1950s housewife in Los Angeles . She is suffocated by marriage and motherhood, and finds some relief in reading Mrs. Dalloway . The third is about Clarissa Vaughan in New York in the early 2000s. She’s planning a party for her best friend, a poet who has just won a major award and is dying of Aids. Clarissa’s story is based on the plot of Mrs. Dalloway . There’s a crafted literariness to the novel, which is a little bit self-conscious but I also found it deeply rewarding. It is rich with recurring motifs like mirrors or moments of intense awareness or luminescence, and these motifs run through all the narrative strands. And it’s stuffed with allusions to Mrs. Dalloway . Because I love Virginia Woolf’s writing, that made the novel even better for me, but I think it can be enjoyed as a standalone without prior knowledge of Woolf. The Hours is exceptional, and it really inspired me. Michael Cunningham has a real gift for capturing fleeting emotions and characters’ inner lives. I think what it felt like to be them and how they’re connected is the focus of the story. The emotional life is the centre, but he does illuminate the time periods they lived in."