Interview with Casey Scieszka

The idea of immortality has fascinated humanity for millennia. What would it be like to live forever? Most people, I think, wouldn’t want to continue life endlessly if it meant growing steadily older and more decrepit, but the draw of eternal youth and beauty has not, if you’ll pardon the pun, faded. Casey Scieszka’s The Fountain, however, may change your mind. Read on to find out more from this interview with the author.

How did you get started writing fiction?

My dad is a children’s book writer— Jon Scieszka (The Stinky Cheeseman and Other Fairly Stupid Tales, The True Story of the Three Little Pigs)—and I have to credit him with making me a reader by reading to me so much and eventually even a writer by showing me what that actually looks like. Aka, a lot of drafts, a lot of staring into space, a lot of reading, a lot more drafts, and working with good people.

And what inspired you to write a novel exploring the theme of immortality?

I can trace the early seeds of my immortality-in-fiction fascination to my 5th grade English class, where we read Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbit, which follows a young girl who stumbles upon a magical stream that gives eternal life and the immortal family who guards it. It posed so many great “what-if”questions that I found myself still lingering on them literal decades later, wanting to write my own grown-up exploration of them.

Introduce us, please, to your main character, Vera Van Valkenburgh. Where is she, in her own mind, at the moment when we meet her?

Vera is 214 years into a life that instead of feeling like one long, satisfying stretch feels like a series of hurried, dangerous, and meaningless moments on the run. She’s spent and exhausted and lost and looking for a way out.

What brings her back to her home town after so many years away?

Thoroughly rattled by a recent experience in the desert, she decides to break her nearly two-centuries-held promise to her also-immortal mother and brother, and return to their hometown to figure out what did this to her so she can reverse it and finally be released.

For those of us who have no choice but to face our own mortality, it can be hard to appreciate Vera’s dilemma. How would you describe what bothers her about this condition that she can’t change?

This was the biggest challenge! Because who of us doesn’t think, given the chance, we juuuust might be the one to finally, properly take advantage of this amazing opportunity?

But in sitting with this character, and looking at the logistics of what living secretly with this condition would mean in her situation, I decided that for her, it wouldn’t feel like any of it amounted to much of a life at all. The constant running, the purposeful leaving of no trace or legacy to speak of. And that worse, given all of the technological advances of recent times, it would be incredibly dangerous.

But all of us have constraints within our lives, and all of us have to ask ourselves, what makes our own lives meaningful? And for Vera, when we first meet her, she has lost all sense of meaningfulness in her life despite its already miraculous length, and this is what she’s really wrestling with.

Family is a big part of this novel. What should we know about Vera’s brother, Eli, and their mother?

Without giving anything away, I’ll just say that from the very first page I was fascinated by the idea of what immortality would do to family dynamics. Would, after so many years, your roles become entrenched? Would power dynamics drift and shift over time? Why and how? You think your brother drives you nuts with his party-antics? What about two hundred years of ’em??

Lydia Kirke has a very different approach to their shared dilemma. Can you say something about that?

When I was writing, personally, I felt deeply conflicted about whether or not immortality and the ability to heal from anything would be a power or a curse, especially because as I began writing, one of my best friends was diagnosed with a rare and terminal cancer, and obviously all I wanted in the world was access to some magic to reverse that for her. I had many different angels and devils on my shoulders while writing, if you will, and I ultimately wound up with a wide enough cast of characters so that I could give air to a range of opinions and points of view. That was important to me, because there’s no reason people would agree on what to do about the nature of their shared condition simply because they are all immortal. We don’t do that now with our shared condition of being mortal!

Are you already working on something new?

Always! Though I am famous among from friends and family for being tightlipped about what I’m working on until it’s finished so that’s all I can say, haha!

Casey Scieszka, born and raised in Brooklyn, has lived in places as far flung as Beijing, San Francisco, Fez, and Timbuktu. The Fountain is her debut novel. Find out more about her and her books at https://www.caseyscieszka.com.

Photograph of Casey Scieszka © Steven Weinberg. Reproduced with permission.