Asymmetry by Lisa Halliday
Meet Lisa Halliday
Though Lisa Halliday is in her early 40's, Asymmetry is her first novel. She is so new that, although Asymmetry rates its own Wikipedia page, Halliday does not have a Wiki page of her own. What biography I was able to construct for her comes from an article in the Guardian about the "new faces of fiction for 2018" (Halliday appears about halfway down on the page) and from the official website for the Whiting Award, as Lisa Halliday received a Whiting Award for Fiction for 2017.
The following long quotation is from the Guardian:
...Lisa Halliday, Born in Medfield, a small town 45 minutes outside Boston, to a mechanic father and a mother who started out as a seamstress and went on to found a pest control business, Halliday was a bookish child, who would sit on the steps of the local library waiting for it to open. She graduated from a local school to Harvard, an achievement she attributes to the good fortune of growing up in a town with an outstanding record in public education.
But, though she had always been praised for her writing, she lacked confidence, and says “it was meeting real writers and observing their work ethic and their concerns about their work that made me think I could do this – that all it requires is persistence and perhaps I should give it a go.”
She stayed with the Wylie agency for eight years, working in both their US and UK offices, and punctiliously recording in her journal the wit and wisdom of the authors she encountered along the way, before leaving to embark on own writing career. But only now that she is 41, and living in Milan with the distraction of a small baby, is she is publishing her first novel. ...
Her early attempts at writing her own fiction attracted “encouraging rejections”, one of which described her work as “Babar written by EM Forster” – which she took to mean she had talent but had yet to find a story. It was such useful feedback that she has dropped it into the novel.
Gradually, her work began to find its mark, and she started to publish short stories and author interviews in the Paris Review. When her English husband landed a job as rights director with an Italian publisher, and the couple moved to Milan, the pieces of Asymmetry began to fall into place.
The “lightbulb moment” came when she had the idea of pairing the stories of two young people who happened to be living at the same historical moment, during the Iraq war. At first she tried to force their stories to intersect, but gradually she understood that to do so was a mark of immaturity as a writer. “Sometimes,” as Ezra says, “you just have to let your characters get on with it, which is to say coexist.”...Most of the buzz surrounding Asymmetry arises from Halliday's May-December romance with Philip Roth at the time she worked for the Wylie agency in New York City (Wylie were Roth's agents at the time). Roth is widely assumed to be the model for Ezra Blazer in the novel. She touches briefly on this in the video below, along with other themes of the book.
Desert Island Discs
There really is a show on BBC Radio 4 called "Desert Island Discs." If you click on this link right here, you can go to the website and subscribe to the podcast and browse the archives to find out what eight tracks, one book, and a luxury your favorite celebrities would take to a desert island with them.
Of course, since Ezra Blazer is not a real person, his selections won't be in there, so I looked them all up for you.
- How Are Things in Glocca Morra?
- Somehow
- Dvorak: Cello Concerto
- Fauré: Cello Sonata No. 1 in D Minor
- How About You?
- Debussy: Afternoon of a Faun
- Strauss: Four Last Songs (Im Abendrot)
- Albéniz : Iberia : Book 1 - II El puerto
