Claire Messud isn’t entirely sure how long she has worked on her latest novel, This Strange Eventful History, which will be released in mid-May. Over lunch in Manhattan earlier this month, she laid out a timeline with as many hops and skips as her entwined plots. The project began about a decade ago with students in Hunter College’s MFA program serving as her research assistants, but in some ways, she has been waiting to write this story her whole life.
Though the novel intersects with current politics, Messud said it was the moral questions of our time that preoccupied her. “The world that I was brought up in, and the beliefs that I had seemed absolutely historical to my kids,” she explained. “My parents brought us up believing that borders were coming down, that internationalism was the future—hybridity, the dissolving of identities. Everybody would come together.” Over the last 10 years, she’s wondered why that future didn’t exactly come to pass.
This Strange Eventful History follows the Cassars, a small, peripatetic family as they travel and establish themselves over three generations and seven decades. As pieds-noirs, or people of French descent who lived in Algeria during its colonial period, Gaston and Lucienne are dually uprooted by the Second World War and Algeria’s violent struggle for independence. Their son, François, finds himself in a difficult marriage with a Canadian, Barbara, and becomes a world-traveling oil executive. The family’s story is told from the vantage of Chloe, Gaston and Lucienne’s daughter, a writer who it seems cannot understand her parents’ histories or their persistent unhappiness.
Messud’s past six novels have drawn some inspiration from her biography—from the pair of sisters in 1994’s When the World Was Steady to another family of pieds-noirs conjured in 1999’s The Last Life. But this is the first time she has written a roman à clef so directly inspired by her family’s story. The Cassar family’s structure and backstory mirror her own, and the patriarch, Gaston, shares her grandfather’s name. There’s even a literary British husband. Messud is married to the literary critic James Wood, though in the book, you’ll encounter a writer named Oliver (named after a dog the couple shared). And of course, the story’s central rupture—a marriage between an aunt and her nephew that shocks a community—really happened in Messud’s family.
The book’s true germ was a memoir her grandfather wrote in the 1980s and distributed to the members of her extended family, a feat of self-publishing from a past era. After he wrote his life story in longhand, a friend typed it out, and then her grandfather made five bound copies. The book included stories from his days serving in the French Navy during World War II and his experiences leaving Algeria during its violent war for independence. In part because of the incest, Messud’s father wasn’t interested in reading the book and returned it. “My grandfather gave it to me probably 10 or 15 years after that. I gave it to my father again, but he never spoke of it. As far as I know, he never read it,” she says. “The family formed a bubble, and though my aunt wanted to stay inside, my dad wanted to run far away.”
Messud was initially fascinated by her grandfather’s war stories and a letter he wrote to his children in case he didn’t survive. “At first I thought I could just do something that was based on these stories, just about him,” she says. “Then I realized there was just a lot more I wanted to try to do, and that somehow I was really interested in the distance between there and here.”
A few declarative sentences stood out in particular. “He said, ‘Here’s what is important for you to know about us: we are Mediterranean, we are Latin, we are Catholic, we are French, in that order.’ I thought, Okay…and I’m American and Protestant.” She wanted to understand how such a rapid transformation in identity could happen in just two generations. She also wanted to understand what Catholicism meant to her grandparents. “Being devoutly Catholic really brought them a huge amount of peace, even in really, really difficult times,” she says. “I’m not myself religious, so I feel as though the Catholic Church is quite a complicated institution for which one cannot support. I also wasn’t raised Catholic.”
Her grandfather’s account also helped her understand why the family history of incest was treated like an open secret, simultaneously too sensitive to mention often but approached somewhat breezily when it was. The couple in question got a dispensation from the Vatican to marry, which led to a degree of acceptance among their relatives. “As far as they were concerned, they were Catholic, and the Pope gave it a thumbs up,” she says. “All these mortals don’t really matter. It doesn’t matter what people around you say because God’s infallible representative on earth has given it the okay. Or the secretary or the secretary, and so on, of God’s infallible representative on earth.”