The Library is pleased to interview Caroline de Margerie, Conseiller d’Etat and author of the new biography, ‘American Lady: Une reporter en gants blancs,’ which has been nominated for the Prix France-Amériques. We are looking forward to her talk on the extraordinary Susan Mary Alsop, who cut a swath through Washington and Paris.

This event is in association with, and hosted by, France-Ameriques on Wednesday 29 June at 18h30. (The Library will be closed for renovation from 19 June to 31 August.) France-Amériques is at 9, avenue Franklin D. Roosevelt 8ème. Reservations and advance payment (€10 for Library members) are required by June 24. Reservations and payment: www.france-ameriques.org.

According to the Washington Post, Susan Mary Alsop was ’the grand dame of Washington society whose Georgetown dinner parties epitomized the nexus of political power and social arrival in the 1960s.

Susan Mary Patten and her infant son William Patten, 1948 (in Vogue).

‘Mrs. Alsop’s dining room was considered the absolute center of Georgetown’s social scene at a time when President John F. Kennedy’s arrival energized the once-sleepy capital. Her guests were the witty, the accomplished and the credentialed from the worlds of politics, media and diplomacy, and they used the opportunity to strike alliances, argue foreign affairs and bargain over the nation’s fortunes.

‘As the descendant of one of America’s first families (she was a Jay, as in John Jay, the first chief justice of the United States), she grew up privileged and firmly a member of the most elite Eastern Establishment circles. She dined with presidents and prime ministers, often at her home, and frequently at the salons of the rich and powerful, where the conversations often were continuations of parliamentary or embassy debates.’

Today, her biographer gives us a behind the scenes glance at the writing process.

Caroline de Margerie, how did you become interested in Susan Mary Alsop? Had you met her?

A friend who is an editor at the French publishing house Robert Laffont gave me an article that had been done in Vanity Fair on Susan Mary Alsop and suggested I write her biography. I did not know Susan Mary but I knew of her. I am sure I would have enjoyed meeting her, which could easily have happened, but as her biographer, I am glad I didn’t.

How long did it take you to research and write?

I started collecting material and interviewing people in the US, the UK and France in a leisurely fashion, before taking a year off from my work at the Conseil d’Etat to write the book. It was almost sufficient. It was quite intense, all work and no play, and I have seldom had such a good time.

Were there any surprises along the way? What did you learn that surprised you the most?

The most wonderful surprise was that Susan Mary’s love letters to Duff Cooper had not disappeared, as every one thought. They were in London and were made available to me. I went out to photograph them, all 500 of them. They cover 5 years, from 1947 to 1953, and are very moving, informative, and well-written.

What can readers learn from Susan Mary Alsop?

She is an amazing woman, who decided from the start she wanted an interesting life and set about it. She belongs to her class and age and yet is not wholly defined by them. She was intensely aware of what was going on in the world. She reported on the present and also wrote about the past.  I like her intelligence, her charm and her courage.

When will the book be out in English?

It will be published by The Viking Press next year.

What is next for you?

A biography, certainly. But I am not quite sure what form it will take.

We look forward to welcoming Dinaw Mengestu back to the Library on Wednesday 8 June at 19h30. We hope that you will enjoy this interview in the Paris Review.

How to Read the Air is the second novel by Dinaw Mengestu. It’s narrated by a young American Ethiopian named Jonas Woldemariam. Jonas’s disintegrating marriage to his wife, Angela, forces him to retrace the steps his parents, Yosef and Miriam, took when they first emigrated from Ethiopia to the United States. Their abusive and loveless marriage stands in stark contrast to the hopes of the American dream. But in distinguishing their past from his life, Jonas may be closer to understanding his own failures.

Why did you set part of your novel in Peoria, Illinois, the same town where you grew up?

I always wanted to write about the Midwest. I’m also very aware of the idea of “immigrant literature” and how it is excluded from the traditional category of the American literary novel; there’s the American literary novel and then there’s the immigrant novel, which is seen as a derivation, and not a natural extension of what someone like Saul Bellow and other American immigrants traditionally have been doing. Beginning my novel in the Midwest was deliberate; I was staking its claim in America. I wanted Jonas, the narrator, not to be an immigrant but to be someone who was undeniably born in America.

What do you not like about the immigrant novel as its own category?

If it wasn’t a category, then it would be great. If it wasn’t already pigeonholed and marginalized, then it would be fine. I would have no problems. When I think of my work, I’m aware that I’m American and African at all points and times. And without a doubt, my experience and understanding of America was shaped by having immigrant parents. At the same time, people say, He’s an Ethiopian novelist or an American Ethiopian novelist. And I want to say, I became an Ethiopian novelist at what point? I’m not. I wrote my first book without being to Ethiopia since I was two years old. Why is this an Ethiopian novel and not an American novel? The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears is very much about America—it just happens to have African and Ethiopian characters, and in fact, it happens to have more characters who are not Ethiopian than who are. It’s more the way the conversation is framed and always debated. You’re being spun off because of your ethnicity.

But do you think your book is marketed in a certain way that promotes your ethnicity?

No, I don’t think so. Obviously, in marketing, the best tool is to show the autobiography in fiction. It’s inevitable how that happens, but it’s generic. Say I’ve written a story where my sister dies. “Well, did your sister die?” No, she did not. But people use those straws to grasp at the difference between reality and fiction. I think they mistrust fiction for some strange reason.

Speaking of mistrust, let’s talk about Jonas, your protagonist. He is both a storyteller and a liar, which gets him into trouble. What is the difference between telling a lie and telling a story?

There’s a difference for each motivation, but they serve a common purpose. Jonas lies as a way of protecting himself. He lies to avoid the difficult things in his life: his own issues, his own complicated history, his own failings. At the same time, he tells stories as a way of rebuilding himself. The process of inventing history still demands an emotional engagement. It allows him to re-create himself. They both come from the same root. You use stories to hide from your life, but you also use stories to reveal something integral about what you don’t actually know.

How did the idea for this novel happen?

There was a sentence that came into my head. After I first went to Ethiopia in 2005, one of the first things I did was drive to Peoria, where I hadn’t been in many years. I was trying to put these two places, which were very much opposed, visually together in my head to see how that experience would feel. As if I had never been to Peoria before and I was coming straight from Ethiopia—it is a very similar trip to the one I took when I was two years old and the one my father took before I was born. Part of the novel began there.

What were you trying to say with the dissolution of Jonas and Angela’s marriage?

Don’t get married. Get married and get a prenup. No, I think it was as much as anything about two people who have equal desires but are unable to communicate their needs to one another. In some ways they very much mirror what happens to Jonas’ parents: there is this gap in communication, a gap in language, and the inability to use words to say what is troubling for them. I wanted the marriage to dissolve in discreet moments, and not blow up. I wanted to show how two people can be attached to each another and still feel completely alienated.

I thought that you were, perhaps, also trying to show how abuse can last for many generations.

There is a physical abuse that happens to Jonas, and there is the isolated emotional abuse that happens to Angela. They’re two people who are recovering, but their equal levels of damage mean they are unable to form this identity that they wished they could. At the same time, they do make an effort, and even though it fails in the end, there is this hopeful sense that at least they have tried. That effort is one process of removing themselves from their past.

Your characters seem very isolated from the world. Why is that?

I think they’re all deliberately disengaged with the world. They’re not seeking tangible connections, like a great career or a great life. They’re very happy to be protecting themselves and living in their small isolated realities, because, in a certain way, there’s more comfort. Certain characters have great failings because of their inability to move outside of their own damaged terrain, and it’s only until they do that they become fuller, more meaningful people.

Do you believe in happy endings?

It is a happy ending. Nothing is resolved permanently, but I think it’s happy because there’s an understanding of mutual love at the end that reconciles the brutality and violence that have shaped the narrator and his marriage. It is integrated into who he is in a way that allows him to accept it coldly and with a certain amount of grace.

How did it feel to be named one of The New Yorker’s “20 Under 40”?

You know, unabashedly great. I was still in college when the first list came out. I was working in my university library, and I was reading a lot of contemporary literature. I read that list thoroughly when it came out, and had very quiet, squirreled-away dreams of my own. Like, Wow, wouldn’t that be fucking cool some day. I never actually thought they would even do the list again, let alone that I would be in line for it, so when it happened—obviously lists are complicated things, but fuck all that for me—it was a good feeling. Some children dream of being in a band, I had my dream of being on a list someday.