E-mail a friendZoe Heller
airdate March 19, 2009
Zoë Heller is credited with being one of the first female "confessional" writers. The London-born journalist is the author of Everything You Know, Notes on a Scandal, which was adapted into a feature film, and, her latest, The Believers, about a family's struggles with its dilemmas and doubts. Heller was educated at Oxford and New York's Columbia University. She wrote book reviews for various newspapers and was a feature writer for The Independent before making the transition to literary fiction.
Novelist criticizes authors who take Hollywood's paycheck but can't deal with their reconceived work. (1:02)
Full interview. (11:57)
Zoe Heller
Tavis: Zoë Heller is an acclaimed best-selling novelist whose previous works include "What Was She Thinking," "Notes on a Scandal," and "Everything You Know." Her latest is called "The Believers," which, like "Notes on a Scandal," is already slated to be turned into a feature film. Zoë, you don't waste any time on these film projects, do you?
Zoë Heller: Well, it's not me. (Laughter) It's not me. I've been very lucky, and this one has been optioned. Of course, there's always the possibility it won't actually make it to the screen. A lot of these things get bought and they don't. There's a better chance for this one than with most, because the producer who's bought it, Scott Rudin, tends to get things made.
Tavis: He has a track record in this town.
Heller: Yeah, he does.
Tavis: He can get some things done.
Heller: He does.
Tavis: While obviously you're not sitting down writing a book with the thought how do I write a book that gets optioned and turned into a feature film, you're not writing it for that purpose, but how does it feel when it does happen, number one, and what do you make of the fact that your stuff has gotten to the point where people - you're writing in such a way that it makes for good feature film material?
Heller: Well, I feel a little - I guess there's some anxiety, because I think there's something very different about the project of writing novels to writing movies, and in both cases neither book - neither the last one nor this, "The Believers," appears to be a very obvious film subject.
This one is all about orthodox Jews and the radical left; the last one was about two schoolteachers in north London teaching at a public school. So they're not obvious film subjects. I count myself very lucky because it's wonderful to get the sort of exposure that a movie gives you, but I certainly don't, as you suggest, I don't write with any intention of having something made into a movie.
With the last movie, I handed the book over, understanding that it was going to have to be changed. It was a book written in the first person by an unreliable narrator. It needed a lot of things done to it in order to make it a viable movie.
They did make those changes, and it's a quite different experience to watch the movie than to read the book. I loved the movie. My book still exists as a book, and so it seems to me the best of every world.
Tavis: It's fascinating to hear you say that, because some writers feel the exact opposite - you stray too far from the storyline and they have a problem with it. So it's fascinating to hear your take on that.
Heller: Right. Well, my sense is that number one I think writers who kind of take the check and then complain are sort of being slightly bad sports. And number two, I think you have to - they have made that choice with unreal expectations about what happens in adaptations.
In a sense, if your book could be translated flawlessly into a movie without losing anything, it would probably suggest that it wasn't such a great book to begin with. The thing about poetry is what is lost in translation I think might be applied to novels, too - something has to get lost in the translation. What you hope is that they add in something different, and that the medium - the new medium - offers something interesting.
Tavis: I never quite thought about it that way. That's a fascinating way to look at it, though - how you situate what a book is and ought to be, what a movie is and ought to be. They don't have to be the same thing.
Heller: It was really a fascinating process, because I was very lucky. Number one, with the last movie, I had a very talented playwright-turned-screenwriter, Patrick Marber, who did the adaptation work. I had a very talented and sensitive and interesting producer working on it.
And so to watch a bunch of incredibly smart people do something different with your work was nothing but kind of illuminating and interesting and I count myself lucky.
Tavis: Your background - you are a journalist turned novelist.
Heller: I am, yes.
Tavis: A journalist turned novelist. Does that have anything to do with the fact that you find such disparate subject matters to write about, as compared to some writers who write in a particular genre?
Heller: Goodness, I never thought about it that way. I don't think so. I think maybe I find a bunch off different things interesting, and that's why I became a journalist in the first place.
Tavis: Fair enough, yeah.
Heller: Journalism gave me lots of things, including probably a kind of respect for deadlines and a capacity to write.
Tavis: Editors love that, I'm sure. They appreciate that.
Heller: Well, it doesn't mean I don't break them still. (Laughter) And also I think possibly a kind of succinctness.
Funny enough, my great ambition is to write a big, fat book. I think that's what real grown-ups do. I find it quite hard - no matter how hard I try I end up writing fairly slim books. Again, my editors like that because they say, "Oh, slim books sell better." (Laughs) But what I would like to do is write one of those big Icelandic sagas.
Tavis: I'm sure you'll get around to it one day.
Heller: I hope.
Tavis: But for now it's "The Believers," which we shall talk about right now. It's about the Litvinoff family and I'll let you explain the title of "Believers," but one of the things that I got to see, once you get into the text, into the novel, is that these believers are struggling with all kinds of beliefs. It's not a struggle just about one set of beliefs or beliefs about a particular thing. But I'll digress and let you explain what the book is in detail, in short.
Heller: Okay. Well, it's set mainly in 2002 in New York. It's about a family of Jewish radical left - it's about a family of Jewish New Yorkers who are radicals. The father is a progressive lawyer - a radical lawyer who started out working for the civil rights movement. He is now 72 and approaching the end of his career. Right at the beginning of the novel he has a stroke and spends the greater part of the novel in a coma.
The novel is about being on the left, but it's about any number of other kinds of belief, including orthodox Judaism, which is the faith to which one of the daughters turns in the course of the book.
Tavis: Not to cut you off, but when you say being on the left, you mean the left politically.
Heller: Yes.
Tavis: Okay.
Heller: And I suppose I wrote the book because I was interested to see how belief operates on its adherence, and what happens to people when they invest all of their identity in what they believe and subsequently discover fissures forming in the edifice of their belief system, and how they cope with that.
The classic example that I kind of had in mind when I started the book was the Communists and fellow travelers of the 1930s who began to receive information trickling in from the Soviet Union that Uncle Joe Stalin was perhaps not the great guy they thought he was and the varying ways in which they dealt with that.
Some of them clung desperately to their a priori convictions about revolutionary socialism, and others faced up to the new reality, which was that actually, the Soviet Union was capable of doing some rather unpleasant things.
Tavis: Fair of me to say that what we learn in the novel, to the issue you raised earlier of how people actually practice those beliefs, that dichotomy between what they believe and what they do, fair to say that we learn from these various characters they don't have the same answer, they don't have the same process, they don't apply the same formulation to their beliefs and how they enact those beliefs?
Heller: Yes, absolutely. I think that's fair enough.
Tavis: Okay. Conscious chose on your part to take us in five, six, seven different directions around the notion of beliefs?
Heller: Well, yes, because one of the things that slightly alarmed me about the reception of this book is that in some quarters, some of the people who've actually liked the book best, in fact, have imagined that it was a book written against the left or a sort of satire on '60s values.
Well, I regard myself as kind of an old leftie, so it certainly wasn't that. I chose to write about a family, a leftist family, because that's the kind of political culture I know a little bit about. I think you could write a similar book about people of the right. It's not so much the content of the belief that I was interested in - it's how people deal with doubt.
Tavis: Why - and I'm not complaining, I'm just asking - why, though, just out of curiosity, why an orthodox Jewish family to tell that story, to wrestle with these issues?
Heller: Okay. Well, the family is an Atheist family and one daughter chooses to leave, as it were, their Atheist faith.
Tavis: To become an orthodox Jew, exactly.
Heller: Right.
Tavis: I stand corrected.
Heller: So I think - well, first of all I'd read quite a lot about the ba'al t'shuva movement, which is people who start out, perhaps, as Jews, but as secular Jews, non-believing Jews, and return to the faith and become orthodox, and I thought that was a kind of fascinating journey and I particularly was interested in the idea of somebody from a completely Atheist background, a sort of vehemently anti-theist background, embracing God.
And there are many arguments in the course of the novel between this daughter who finds Judaism and her parent, her mother in particular, who's furious that she's done this and sees this as a betrayal of the family's own religion, which is Atheism.
Tavis: Is it ever your intention to, beyond entertaining us, say something to us, or just pure entertainment?
Heller: Oh, no, for sure, I hope it says all sorts of things. Not necessarily things that I could sum up in nugget form, and I guess that's why I wrote the book, because I can't sum it up. The book is very much not against belief, but it's possibly against dogmatism.
Tavis: Nothing wrong with that, though.
Heller: The kind of people I think are heroic are the people who manage to listen to new information, take in new information, even if it threatens the fundamentals of what they've always believed, and change their minds.
Tavis: Any medium at its best challenges us to re-examine the assumptions we hold.
Heller: Absolutely.
Tavis: And that's a good thing.
Heller: Yeah.
Tavis: Expand your inventory of ideas.
Heller: Right.
Tavis: Good book. "The Believers -" Zoë Heller has done it again. Zoë, nice to have you on the program.
Heller: Thank you very much for having me.
Tavis: It's my pleasure.
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