It’s hard enough to have a crazy sibling: What if she’s a genius, too? Priya Parmar’s biographical novel “Vanessa and Her Sister” explores this conundrum through the fictionalized letters and diary entries of painter Vanessa Bell, elder sister of writer Virginia Woolf, interspersed with other imagined correspondences from siblings and friends. A pitch-perfect portrayal of a close but uneven relationship, based on exhaustive research through real-life diaries and letters, it covers the years before Woolf published her first novel, when the unmarried sisters lived with their brothers Thoby and Adrien in London’s Bloomsbury neighborhood.
Parmar, 40, spoke by phone with the Honolulu Star-Advertiser from her family’s home on the north shore of Kauai. Her first novel, “Exit the Actress,” was set in London, where she lives with her husband.
Question: How did your family arrive on Kauai?
Answer: My dad was in the World Bank, traveling all the time in Asia, Africa, India. Kauai was sort of a really good, convenient point to be launching off from. We just loved it. I grew up in Kauai half the time — vacations, summer — and went to the Maret School in Washington, D.C., and Mount Holyoke College.
Q: Do you return to Kauai frequently?
A: Yes, I’m always back and forth. I moved back and lived here from 2006 to 2010. All our childhood friends are still here. I got married here, in the backyard on my friend’s farm.
Q: How did you settle in England?
A: I studied at Oxford and got my master’s and Ph.D. in literature and the theater at the University of Edinburgh. In London I worked with Eve Ensler, who wrote “The Vagina Monologues” as her dramaturge. After being over there for so long, I realized I’d kind of made a life there. I met my husband, Brennan Williams, who is English, in a cafe in London. He’s in robotics. I have two stepdaughters, ages 12 and 9.
Q: Michael Cunningham wrote a fictional portrayal of Virginia Woolf in “The Hours.” Why did you choose Vanessa Bell?
A: I’d read Virginia’s diaries, letters, novels; my mom happened to have Vanessa’s letters. I read a letter that she wrote when Clive Bell first proposed. She rejected him. And it was so modern; such a real person stepped off the page that I just kind of fell for her right then, went down the rabbit hole.
There’s a wonderful selection of Vanessa’s letters, about 3,000 unpublished letters in several archives. (It’s) phenomenal. She drew all over her letters, little sketches to illustrate what she was talking about.
Q: Did you meet any of Vanessa’s descendants?
A: Yes. I met in person with her granddaughters Virginia Bell Nicholson and Cressida Bell (the daughters of Vanessa’s son Quentin), and Olivia Bell, their mother. Virginia took me to Charleston House (where Vanessa lived) and showed me some of Vanessa’s never-before-seen sketches of Julian (Vanessa’s first son, killed in World War I). Out of everything in my research, that was the most memorable because I had read the letters that Vanessa wrote while doing the sketches.
It was when Julian was a toddler when her affair (with artist and critic Roger Fry) was going on.
Q: Speaking of affairs, did Vanessa really find Virginia’s hairpins in her husband Clive’s jacket pocket?
A: There were two things that for me were big departures (from history): Virginia did have blue enamel hairpins, but I made up the part about the jacket pocket; the second was the fight (the sisters) had. … I agonized over them but felt I had to do it for the sake of narrative clarity.
Q: It’s your novel, after all. I was very moved by your account of the death of Thoby, Vanessa’s eldest brother, and later how you had Vanessa describing her son chasing fireflies and writing, “Julian reminds me more of Thoby every day.” Did that foreshadowing come from her sketches and letters?
A: It’s astonishing what sort of slipped in because I was working with such astonishing source material. And knowing what was going to happen to Julian.
Q: Was any of your book inspired by Kauai?
A: The St. Ives (Cornwall) bit, the beachiness, the homeyness, the family at home — that all comes from summers here, the days spent outside.
Q: Did you draw on your personal life to inform any of the characters? It is so much a portrait of siblings.
A: I have a brother and a sister. I dedicated the book to them. For some of the everyday sibling parts, what it’s like to sort of scream at your brother through the bathroom door when he’s in the bathtub, that came from my own life, but it’s really rooted in the research.
Q: Have you ever written about Hawaii?
A: I have thought about it. I don’t know if I have enough distance to write about it well. And I don’t know how I would write about it without tangling up my family in a way they wouldn’t like.
Q: What do you like to do when you’re back on Kauai?
A: Seeing people I love and going to all the beaches I’ve grown up going to. I’m a dreadful homebody; I haven’t been to the south side in like 10 years. But right now I’m not allowed to do any of my favorite things because I have to stay home and write. I’m sort of circling trying to figure out what my next book is.
