Consumer Critique: The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells

Disclosure: I received complimentary products to facilitate this post. All opinions are my own.

The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells is a remarkable book, most notably because it's written so well from a male author, yet with the perspective of a female. Greta Wells is undergoing therapy for depression after the death of her brother and being left by her lover. Through the course of the treatment, she travels through three different lives (the "present" in 1985, and in 1918 and 1941), each one with different possible outcomes for herself, her brother, and her lover. The relationships shift and change in each timeline, but in the end, Greta must remain in only one time.

I had a chance to interview the author, Andrew Sean Greer, about the book.

1) What inspired you to write this book?

 

Because I set my stories in the past, I am often asked which time period i would most like to live in? And I take this very literally: my life, with my friends and family, in another era. It occurred to me that for my female friends, life would change dramatically—we have seen this even from the last generation to the present one!—and I imagined at first the same story of a woman's life, told three times, in different eras. And then it occurred to me: what if they all happened at once? What if she woke up every morning in a different story, the story created by the time in which she lived?

2) How did you choose the particular time periods used?

 

I chose them from an instinctual interest, who knows why? WWI has always fascinated me, with its mixture of ragtime, liberation and tragedy.   have written about the period after WWII—In The Story of a Marriage—but was fascinated by an America that did not yet know they were headed for another war. And Greta's default world, her "present day," I decided could be yet another moment nearer to the end of the century. I chose 1985 because it was a moment without war, but full of new kinds of freedom and tragedies of its own! All good for novelists!

3) Being male, how were you able to write well about a woman's experiences?

 

I feel my only job is to write from the point of view of someone unlike myself; to be true to my character. I know Greta is not every woman; who could ever be that except Chaka Khan? I focused on writing as her alone: a strong, emotional person driven to help those around her, but pulled also by a few excesses (of pleasure and language). I suppose that is a part of me, as well. The real challenge, and fun, was in creative two other Gretas—who we never see—the women whose bodies she is inhabiting as she travels. Of course, they are traveling as well, and enter her body when she is away, which means that when Greta returns to her 1985 life she finds someone else has been meddling with it! Creating those slightly different women let me imagine how each of us could be a little different if life had gone a different way, with altered expectations and desires.

4) Which of the three Greta's in the story do you think has the best life?

 

What a wonderful question! Well, one is the most liberated, but finds herself alone in a dark world. Another lives in a dangerous time, but also a wild and exciting one, and has a young lover! And in another, she runs a household in a time of war, with a housekeeper and a son. To tell you which I prefer might give away the ending! All I can say is: it depends on who you are, which life would suit you. But isn't that true, perhaps, not just of when you live, but where?