Q & A With Author Lynette Brasfield

What’s your novel NATURE LESSONS about?

NATURE LESSONS tells the story of an émigré—Kate Jensen—who returns from the States to her native South Africa at the age of forty to search for her missing mother, whom she believes to be mentally ill.

I like to think my novel is also about nature and nurture; love and loss and guilt; and the unique perspective each of us brings to the universe. One of my Zulu characters, Prudence, tells the young Kate that “what you see depends on who you are”—in other words, every culture, every religion, and every individual experiences the world a little differently.

What was the inspiration for NATURE LESSONS?

Following my father’s sudden death when I was nine, my mother banished our relatives from our lives, claiming they were in league with the South African government to “tear our family apart.” Also, she decided her employer—a tire manufacturer—was actively engaged in the plot, along with medical professionals. Growing up pretty much isolated with a mother who was paranoid gave me plenty of material for a novel, though I didn’t think of my experiences that way at the time!

So NATURE LESSONS is autobiographical?

It’s fiction, though certainly I drew on my life experience in writing the novel. I invented the characters and the action. The British writer L.P. Hartley, when asked if novels were usually autobiographical, said, “…a novel is…an anagram of [the author’s] experience, reflecting its shape and tone and tempo.” I don’t think that’s necessarily true of every novel, but it is of this one.

NATURE LESSONS is your first novel. Why did you wait till you were in your forties to write it?

Several reasons—one, I didn’t know how to write fiction until I took some classes, and more importantly, began to write (and rewrite) every day. Two, I’d been busy—getting married, establishing my career, divorcing, being a single mother of two small boys for eight years, remarrying. I suppose the idea for the novel began to grow when I read a book by Dr. E. Fuller Torrey called “Surviving Schizophrenia.” On page 57 he notes, “In evaluating delusions it is very important to keep in mind that their content is culture-bound. It is not the belief per se that is delusional, but how far the belief differs from the beliefs shared by others in the same culture or subculture…Minority groups in particular may have a culturally induced high level of paranoid belief, and this belief may be based upon real discrimination and real persecution.”

That concept fascinated me: I realized that if my mother had been black during the apartheid era, her fears might have seemed rational.

NATURE LESSONS is set primarily in South Africa. Is it a political novel?

NATURE LESSONS isn’t intentionally political or polemical. It wasn’t written to send a message--as some novelist once said, that’s the function of the US Postal Service. But I don’t think any novel set in part in South Africa during the sixties can help but reflect some of the horrors of that time.

What kind of experience has writing your book been for you?

Therapeutic, humbling, agonizing, rewarding, and all-consuming.

Did you have any interesting experiences researching your book?

Because the fictional mother, Violet, was an amalgam of research, personal experience, and imagination, I asked the then-president of the Orange County Psychiatric Society, Dr. William Callahan, to read a draft and let me know if the character was accurately portrayed from a clinical perspective. After reading NATURE LESSONS, he told me he believed the book would be tremendously helpful to relatives of the mentally ill, because it shows what it’s like to live with someone afflicted by paranoia, or dementia, or alcoholism, or Alzheimer’s, for that matter. The thought that I could help dispel some myths about mental health issues made me feel good: I didn’t write the book for that reason, but I’ll be glad if the novel educates the public while (hopefully) it entertains.