‘I took a risk publishing this book but it meant a lot to me’

I first met Heather Clark at the West Cork Literary Festival back in July, and interviewed her in Bantry library. She was so engaging — so utterly fascinating and intelligent, that I was keen to catch up with her again. 

And with her book tour finally over, Heather is chatting to me over Zoom from Cape Cod, where she’s relaxing, reading, and looking back at the success of her debut novel,  The Scrapbook.

The tour was tough, though she’s glad that she did it.

“I was naïve about how much it would take out of me,” she says. “I ran myself into the ground and I came down with covid at the end. And now, in this post tour crash, it’s like, what just happened?”

An academic, Heather has three non-fiction books under her belt, including Red Comet on the short life and blazing art of Sylvia Plath; and that one, winning myriad prizes, was shortlisted for the Pulitzer, so she is no stranger to success.

“But I feel like I took a risk writing this book,” she says. “I could have just published my next non-fiction book and then the next, but the subject matter of The Scrapbook is very important to me.”

Set partly in Harvard in 1996, The Scrapbook examines a love affair between Anna, a student who will shortly graduate, and Christoph, a German student who is visiting the college. 

Anna falls instantly for Christophe, and later visits him in Germany, but she feels uneasy there. 

Grandfathers’ roles in Second World War

As he shows her his country, they examine the part their grandfathers played there in the Second World War, and an uneasiness lingers.

It’s a wonderful novel; highly literary, yet page turning, and I learned so much from it. It’s the sort of book you press on everyone you know, and spend hours discussing, once they’ve read it too.

Heather started writing The Scrapbook back in the late nineties, when she visited friends in Germany.

“I was a writer for Let’s Go travel guides in college,” she says. “It was how I spent my summers, going around Europe, hitchhiking and writing.

“I’d amassed a lot of international friends, and I’d go visit them. But in Germany I felt a sense of disconnect and disquiet.

“I had this sense that there were no memorials from the war. No monuments. Where were they?

“My German friends all seemed so beautiful and well dressed. But I have this sense that Germans, and especially the men, have been raised in a culture of repression, silence, and shame.”

I wanted to write about the cost of that — and the damage on the second and even third generations. How does that affect your ability to be intimate?

“I had begun the novel as this love story that was going to be shadowed by the weight of history. I had the theme, but I didn’t know how to push the plot forwards.

“I wrote maybe two or three chapters and put the manuscript aside for 25 years.”

Meanwhile, writing her honours thesis in Harvard on James Joyce, Heather became entranced with Irish literature.

“I did my junior semester at University College Galway,” she says, “and I went to Trinity, (College Dublin), after I graduated for an M Phil in Anglo Irish Literature.

“I was at Trinity at the time The Scrapbook is set living with my then Irish boyfriend.”

From there she moved to Oxford, where, for her PhD, she studied poets Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, Derek Mahon, and Paul Muldoon.

“I wrote of their time in Belfast in the 1960s. I was very interested in this question of the relationship between ethics and aesthetics; and that tightrope the poets were walking in the sixties.

“How do we write about war and violence without sentimentalising it or making it beautiful?”

How do they honour the dead? How do they honour the murders without putting in the propaganda?

From Irish poets, Heather moved on to an American — Sylvia Plath. Writing first about the relationship between Plath and Ted Hughes, published as The Grief of Influence, she then wrote Red Comet, taking 10years to do so.

All three books have influenced The Scrapbook. In Plath’s case it was the idea that, with Hughes, she was losing herself to a magnetic lover, even when it was likely the affair would end badly.

“Everyone has been in that place, right?” she says. “And you know it’s not a good idea, and you can’t seem to stop.

“And there’s an interesting parallel of being seduced by the wrong political idea. Plath really picked up on that.”

It was in 2015, when Heather’s grandfather died that she returned to fiction.

“I had heard rumours of a scrapbook of photos from my aunts and uncles, but I’d never seen it.

“After he died my grandmother put it out in the dining room. I saw it and spent 15 minutes going through it.”

I saw photos of France and Germany, and bombed out Munich, but I also saw photos of Dachau.

“They made a fascinating documentary story of a young GI in Europe, but the photos really haunted me.

“I couldn’t stop thinking about them and what my grandfather had been through, and it brought me back to my earlier manuscript.

“The file was still on my computer. I read it back and thought, this is OK. I can see where this can go.”

Writing the manuscript in 2023 was a joy.

“There was a real sense of freedom and liberation in not having to footnote every sentence. I felt that I was getting away with something, almost; there was this sense of, I can just do this.”

In the writing, and in thinking of her grandfather, Heather became interested in post-traumatic stress disorder.

“These American GIs came back from the war. They had seen horrific things, but they weren’t allowed to talk about it because they were the victors.”

They were the heroes and were expected to celebrate and have houses in the suburbs and have babies and barbecues. There was no space for them to process.

Currently editing a group biography of poets Plath, Anne Sexton, Adrienne Rich, and Maxine Kumin in the 1950s when, just before fame came their way, they all lived in Boston, Heather says she would like to try fiction again.

“But the market for serious literary fiction is tough these days,” she says. “ The Scrapbook is not meant to entertain. It’s not meant to comfort. It’s meant to haunt.

“And I think my future novels will be the same. I like writing about these big moral and philosophical questions, and of how history shakes us up.”

The current rise of authoritarianism in Europe and the state of America right now worries Heather greatly.

“On the morning of the election I just cried and cried. This man has been accused of rape and moral infestation, and nobody cares.

“As a woman to see that kind of man voted into power — it was one of the worst moments in my life.”

People often ask Heather why she wrote about Germany.

“They ask, ‘why not Ireland, where you spent so much time?’.

“When I went back to Germany in the summer of 2023 to research, I went back to Nuremberg, to Dachau, and to the Eagle’s Nest, and part of it is because my grandfather bore witness.

“I’m proud of him for having the presence of mind to take the photos, and I felt I had to finish what he started.

“I’ve been haunted by this family history that was in the dark for many years. I guess I wanted to try and bring that out to the light.”