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Keziah Weir’s novel, The Mythmakers, opens with a mystery: Sal Cannon, a struggling writer, recognizes herself in a short story by Martin Keller, an author 50 years her senior whom she’d met once at a reading at the New York Public Library. Why would he write about her, all these years later? A desire to read the longer manuscript in progress leads Sal to the home of Martin’s widow, Moira, a physicist who lives in upstate New York—and down a rabbit hole of revelations.
The novel gathers complexity and momentum as the voices of multiple narrators speed toward a cluster of climaxes, each one complicating the last. What meaning will Sal make of the material she uncovers? And is it her story to tell? The Mythmakers is the first novel from Weir, a senior editor at Vanity Fair. She grew up in California and British Columbia and currently lives in Maine with her husband and dog.
Vogue: The Mythmakers is preoccupied with the intricacies and contradictions of storytelling. This comes through in the plot but also in the form: In addition to Sal, our main first-person narrator, chapters following different characters multiply over the course of the book. Can you say more about how you conceived of this narrative form?
Keziah Weir: From the beginning, I knew I wanted to tell the story in first person, and I envisioned sections that went into third person to describe events that Sal was not privy to or was maybe hearing secondhand from other people. During the years leading up to starting the book, [I was reading books that] played with form: Philip Roth’s Zuckerman novels; Paul La Farge, who was my professor at Bard, wrote The Night Ocean, which I think actually came out maybe a couple of years into writing this book; Nabokov’s novels Lolita, Ada, Pinin, and Pale Fire. And so I was very steeped in that kind of play with narration. What seemed like a really seamless, easy process in my head then took years and years of rewriting to try to get right.
The novel is subtly but centrally interested in the intersection of gender, literature, and ambition—playing with, and upending, the canonical focus on the great men of literary history.
I don’t remember where I read this, but it was something about [Roth’s relationship to his first wife, Margaret Martinson, who died not long after their divorce], and it was basically: “Her death then affected his literary output going forward.” And it was a gut punch to read, the idea that this person’s life had been shrunk down to how she affected the writing of her former partner. And then there’s Nabokov and Véra, the ideal first reader and editor—she did his transcriptions, and she carried his wallet, and she drove for him and made it possible for him to write incredible books. And by her account, she was happy to do that. But I think it’s an interesting dynamic to think about—these, you know, capital-G Great Men of literature and then so often the women who are sort of behind or beside them.
Martin sees [Roth and Mailer and Updike] as his peers in a certain way. He doesn’t reach the success that they do. I think I was more dismissive of Martin earlier on, as I was having all these changing feelings about these authors I had loved for so long. But then I really empathized with him too, as a character. A lot of the frustrations about not being able to write the way he wants to write and not finding the success he feels would make him happy, I can relate to those feelings.
Central to the novel is the question of who has the right to tell a story—that right implying ownership but also questions of why we tell stories in the first place and whether it’s always, in some way, a betrayal. Do you think that storytelling is always a betrayal?
I feel really conflicted about it. Sometimes telling a story about somebody else can be this incredible act of generosity and empathy and imagination. I think what’s tricky is that there are of course limits to what you’re able to project and understand about somebody else. Even if the person telling the story is doing all their due diligence, the person who’s being written about can still feel they’ve been betrayed because people are always going to see each other through different lenses, and people get each other wrong—or they get each other right, and that can feel really hurtful.
Working in magazine journalism and writing and editing and reading profiles and just loving them as a form, I have thought about that a lot over the last decade. Part of being human is telling stories about each other. It’s human nature. But it is also really complicated.
Different characters understand the world through different lenses: Martin through fiction, Moira through cosmology, their daughter Caroline through music, and others through dance, therapy, poetry, the study of religion.
I think they’re all ways of understanding the world that I am really interested in. My parents are classical musicians, and their primary form of expression is so different from writing. I’ve never been a musically talented person, and I wasn’t even so drawn to music. I preferred narrative; wordless classical music just took longer for me to get. And so I think each of the characters in the book has a little piece of something that I find really compelling but don’t totally understand.
Embodying these characters allows you to write into that curiosity, toward discovery. Can you say a bit more about other influences on the novel?
I was listening to a lot of Chopin’s Nocturnes. Something that I became interested in formally through different pieces of classical music is this idea of having a progression that rises and falls—there isn’t one big moment or climax that then resolves. It sort of ebbs and flows almost like a tide, like waves coming in and going out. I was trying to play with that idea with the book.
Otherwise, I was reading books on astronomy and physics. One of those is by a woman named Lou Page—A Dipper Full Of Stars—she was a geologist, but she wrote it to teach herself astronomy. I was thinking about Carl Sagan and people whose books are a model for that kind of writing. My reading life was also opening up from the very specific people who I’d studied as an undergraduate. I was reading Nicole Krauss and Zadie Smith’s essays and Toni Morrison. And I was seeing that it was possible that you could, you know, be a woman writer, writing about women. Mind-blowing.
Throughout your career in magazines, and now as an editor at Vanity Fair, you’ve written and edited book reviews, profiles, and other magazine journalism. Can you speak to the relationship between your own nonfiction and fiction?
I’ve read magazines since I was little. I remember having the Lindsay Lohan Vanity Fair cover that I’m sure my mom had gotten and then I weaseled away into my room. Both novels and magazines have been a big part of my life. I think that falling into other people’s brains, getting immersed in their stories, can be accomplished in both forms.
I didn’t get an MFA, but I’ve gotten to interview authors who I love over the years [and] profile Zadie Smith and Nicole Krauss and Rebecca Solnit. [In doing this,] I was trying to learn how to be a writer too. And I just have been really fortunate that the two can be in conversation with each other.
Did you have a run-in comparable to Sal and Martin’s meeting?
I did. I was at a reading at the New York Public Library. After the reading, we were all sort of milling around, there was a reception in the next room with cheese plates and too much cheap red wine. This man who was in his 70s just came up and started chatting with me. I was 22. He was saying all these wonderful things that I was very excited to hear at the time—that my life was going to be so beautiful, that he could tell that I was a writer. Afterward, my professor who had invited me was like, “You know that was Hampton Fancher, the screenwriter for Blade Runner?” Which meant little to nothing to me at the time, except that I was like, “Oh, that’s very cool.” I had already started writing the shadows of Martin and Moira, but I think that gave me something to latch onto. In some ways, it was a similar experience to Sal and Martin’s encounter. And then materially, it was totally different. But it opened up narrative pathways.
This interview has been edited and condensed.