A conversation with
EVE CHASE The Birdcage is your fourth novel. What inspired you to write this story? I kept circling the idea of three half sisters, close in age but wary of one another, whose warring mothers consist of an ex-wife, an ex-mistress, and a life model with whom the artist father once had an intense, haunting love affair. I was quite sure the grown-up sisters would keep secrets from one another, and that these would become their invisible cages. I also knew they loved one another deeply, sharing some of their happiest childhood memories—and their worst.
This novel is set at Rock Point, a rugged and remote Cornwall seaside Victorian villa. What role does the setting play in the story, and why did you decide to set your novel in Cornwall? I needed a setting that was wild, beautiful, and remote, partly to isolate my characters and make it hard for them to leave. This area of Cornwall also has a long history of attracting artists—St. Ives is a few miles away—and I felt the father’s summer home and painting studio should be here. The villa itself, Rock Point, is perched on a cliff top, overlooking the raging Atlantic, idyllic in the summer, less so in the winter. As grown-ups, the sisters are marooned at the house during a vicious cold snap—and in their own emotional weather, of course, which is just as dangerous.
You often write about complicated relationships between sisters. What draws you to this dynamic, and what makes the relationships between the Finch sisters unique? I’m drawn to that delicious tension between love and rivalry, regression into family roles, and the need to carve out a new identity. The messy stuff every family has if you scratch beneath the shiny surface. As the Finch sisters also have different mothers, who explosively overlapped in their relationships with the father, well, it’s complicated! I love that.
This novel centers around a solar eclipse in 1999, when a horrific event happens that the main characters wish they could forget. Why did you decide to center the novel around that astronomical event? I wanted the past storyline to be steeped in the febrile mood of 1999—a year full of excitement and apprehension as we tipped into a new century—and the total solar eclipse seemed to capture it perfectly. I watched that eclipse in London’s Kensington Gardens and it still felt otherworldly, in a mystical end-of-days way, and pressed modernity (’99 only feels historic and analog now!) against the ancient. It’s a great visual image, too, a sweeping story arc, with its movement from light to dark to light again.
At the heart of Rock Point is an aviary, which is shrouded in mystery. Why did you decide to feature birds so heavily in your novel and not another animal? A caged bird is hard to resist on a metaphorical level—the sisters are all yearning for flight and freedom. But the lead character Lauren also has a bird phobia, so the birds bring a more disquieting Hitchcockian/Du Maurier overtone, too. The huge Cornish skies are alive with birds.
Charles Finch, the father of all three daughters, is a famous painter—best known for a portrait of the sisters painted during the summer of the 1999 eclipse. Did you have to do a lot of research about painting before writing the novel, and do you have a favorite work of art? I’ve always been interested in art and loved writing about it. During lockdown, I had a great time virtually wandering through galleries online—research!—and was particularly drawn to a group of postwar abstract artists who lived and worked in this part of Cornwall and the sculpture of Barbara Hepworth. Oil painting is quite technical in lots of ways, so I read up on that but was mindful of channeling the information through the eyes of a child. Outside my novel, I’m always touched by the humanity of Rembrandt’s portraits and I’m a huge fan of Tracey Emin, an astonishing storyteller. But the painting that best encapsulates this novel is Thomas Gainsborough’s The Painter’s Daughters Chasing a Butterfly. It has a very small cameo role near the end of the novel.
“I’m drawn to that delicious tension between love and rivalry, regression into family roles, and the need to carve out a new identity.”
Throughout the novel, each character slowly reveals some of their darkest secrets. Who was your favorite character to write, and why? Oh, tricky one! I felt most attached to Lauren because she’s the most vulnerable, or at least seems to be. But headstrong, no-filter Kat was fun to write, although difficult, because she had to have such a powerful selfrealization in such a short space of time.
You are most known for writing stories with deliciously dark atmospheres, and author Rosie Walsh has rightly said that you are “peerless in your ability to stitch together dark secrets and tantalizing twists with unforgettable characters and enthralling imagery.” What draws you to write these kinds of stories? That’s very generous of Walsh, and you wouldn’t know it from my notebooks! My stories do become more complex, and knottier, as I write and layer. Any twists are character-led: I’m interested in what characters hide from one another, and themselves. I try to always end my chapters on a cliffhanger, however small, and make my novels as addictive as possible for the reader, while also keeping them rich and transportive. To achieve that, I rewrite a lot. There are many drafts.
If you were a bird, what kind of bird would you be? A blackbird, commonplace, curious, busy, always foraging for something tasty to eat. Happy in a city or a field.
What is your writing routine like? When I’m writing, as opposed to outlining or editing, I’ll go to my writing shed in the garden, edit what I wrote the day before then try to get 1000 to 1500 good words down. I can do more words than this, but find if I do, I end up deleting half of them, that any short cut is the long way round. Towards the end of my book, I work very intensely, and at weekends, because I’m running out of time—I’m always running out of time!—and I like to be immersed in the world of my book. For me, it’s only in that intense last stage when the story truly starts to knit.
What books or novelists inspired you while writing The Birdcage? I wrote The Birdcage over the grimmest days of the pandemic, when the world felt very precarious, very uncertain, and reading was an escape from it. Happily, there were so many brilliant books and early proofs out by the likes of Maggie O’Farrell, Lisa Jewell, and Ashley Audrain. I read across all genres, just as I always do. I also watched a heroic amount of TV. Unlike many current events, a good story, however dark, offers an ending and resolution.
What’s next for you? I’m back in the ’90s, a decade that fascinates me, and this time, excitingly, I’m in London. I’ve been wanting to write about London for a long time, turning it into a character on the page. I can’t tell you more for fear of jinxing it!
DISCUSSION GUIDE 1.
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Lauren, Flora, and Kat have an unconventional sisterhood. What do you feel were some of the positives and negatives of their relationships? If you have siblings, were you able to relate your own family situation to this dynamic? If so, how?
A dark and dangerous event occurs at the Finch home during the summer of the total solar eclipse. Do you believe in cosmic energy? Why or why not? Do you think the solar eclipse influenced people’s behavior in The Birdcage?
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If Lauren, Flora, and Kat had been connected by a different father figure, do you think their lives would have been different? If so, in what ways?
What was your favorite scene in the novel, and why?
3. Discuss the ways in which childhood trauma affected each character in the novel. If you were Lauren, Kat, or Flora, how do you think you would have changed after that fateful summer?
Why do you think birds are often portrayed in literature and media as unnerving or eerie? How do you think the aviary sets the tone for this story, and if there was a different animal in the novel, do you think your experience of the read would have changed?
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Which character do you relate to the most, and why?
Who was your favorite character, and why?
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In a way, the Finches’ remote Cornish summer home feels like another character in the novel. If the Victorian villa were real, do you think you would choose to live there? Why or why not?
If the truth had been revealed about the Finch family sooner, do you think The Birdcage would have ended the way it did? Why or why not?
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11. Were you surprised by the ending?