Many of the reviewers of My Memories of a Future Life say the book is about reincarnation … and also not. As the author, what was your intent?
I’ve always been fascinated by the mythos of reincarnation. What a thrilling idea – that a person’s talents, loves or inexplicable pain might be echoes from a previous life. Even better, this might be remembered, with the right trigger. The world we live in is bewildering and amazing, and so are we.
So in this book I was interested in the idea of reincarnation as a human need. It seems to challenge so much about the way we live. The shadows driving our lives, the theories we are comforted by, the people who can make us believe one thing and not another. And then I thought, instead of a character going to a past life, what if she went to the future?
Is the main character, Carol Lear, intended as a sort of everywoman?
What an interesting question. As a novelist I start with specific characters with problems that will become the most profound challenges of their lives. On one level, Carol is hardly an everywoman because her life has been unusual – she is a concert pianist. But the impulse that started her on that path, and ultimately gets her into trouble, is universal – she wants a place to belong and to feel loved. As we all do.
Carol herself started with the crucial question – who would explore a future life? Why?
She does it from despair. When a mysterious injury stops her playing, she believes her life is over. Not just her career, her whole identity. She goes to a hypnotist and ends up seeing herself in a future lifetime. At first she shrugs it off as nonsense, but sees her future self is carrying oblique scars from her life now. These scars ultimately go to the core of what is trapping her.
I hope Carol will touch a chord in everyone who has something they cannot imagine living without. I know you didn’t mean the word everywoman as a gender statement, but I aim for her to be an everyman as well.
The interviewer, Jon P Bloch, is an Amazon top reviewer.
Q&A with literary fiction editor Victoria Mixon here
Roz Morris, author 