It’s been eight years since your
debut novel. Why the long gap?
I got to write The Night Circus in a
bubble. No one knew who I was,
and no one knew it was coming.
I wanted to be able to re-create
that bubble. I have a very long,
messy writing process. I’m not
an outliner; I have a space in my
head, and I need to figure outwhere the story is and how to
write my way through the space.
I probably rewrote it three or four
times almost from scratch.The Starless Sea’s hero discov-
ers a mysterious book in
his university library, and then
encounters a painted door
that takes him into a secretunderground wonderland com-
prising the world’s greatest
libraries. How did you develop it?
I write the spaces that I want
to go to. Everyone wants their
Hogwarts letter. I don’t want to
have to do homework, I don’t
want that school-set fantasy,
but I like so many of the ele-
ments of it, so I was trying to
think: What would be my space?
It’s more of an upper university
free study [where] no one’s
grading you. You have all of the
books and the stories and the
resources to do whatever you
want. It’s my version of that ideal
imaginary space.Game theory and videogames
are integral to the story struc-
ture. What inspired that?
I got really into these games that
have these branching narratives:
You make one choice and then
it affects where the game goes
from there. I had the beginning
of what became The Starless
Sea before I really got into video-
games. Then I thought, “Oh, this
would layer really nicely onto
what I already have.” Because I
was already playing with stories,
the way you have fairy-tale
retellings or different variations
on myths. I wanted to combine
that very modern videogame
sensibility with those very
old stories.The characters go to great
lengths to protect certain books
that they feel are essential to
unlocking the secrets of their
being, and the universe at large. If
you had to choose one book to be
your talisman, what would it be?
I liked getting to write their
attachments to their respective
books. But I don’t have that
book. I have a lot of books that I
love; I don’t have any book
tattoos or anything that’s that
[meaningful on that scale].
Maybe someday I will, and that
will be lovely, but right now I don’t,
and that’s one of the reasons I
liked writing about that for other
characters: to write something
that is a thing I wish I had.BY MAUREEN LEE LENKER
LoveUndergroundThe
Starless Sea
erin
morgenstern
—
11.5.2019EIGHT YEARS AGO, SHE DELIVERED HER PHANTASMAGORICAL DEBUT NOVEL,
The Night Circus, of which a staggering 3 million copies have been
sold. Now, Erin Morgenstern, 41, returns with her new fantasy,
The Starless Sea (Nov. 5): a love letter to all things literary.ERIN MORGENSTERN
fall BOOKS special