A meeting with ‘The Miniaturist’ author Jessie Burton
[dropcap]O[/dropcap]n Wednesday 30th July 2014, I met author Jessie Burton at The Collection in Lincoln – one of many stops on her tour as she promotes her debut novel The Miniaturist. If you haven’t already heard of Burton or The Miniaturist, you soon will. The book’s beautiful cover is in the windows of almost every bookshop I’ve walked past in the last month. As I did research in preparation for our interview, I discovered that earlier in the week, Burton was interviewed by Mariella Frostrup on BBC Radio 4. She’s developing a reputation, and that’s a tough act to live up to.
I waited in the vast atrium of The Collection with my friend Dominique, bookseller Sasha Drennan, whose independent bookstore Lindum Books had organised the event, and a sizeable audience of readers.
“We’re just waiting for the author now,” Sasha said. “She’s been signing books at Waterstone’s this afternoon.”
“Oh right,” I said.
“There were only three copies left though,” Sasha said. “So it shouldn’t really take her that long.”
[pullquote left]The Miniaturist isn’t just a book, it’s a phenomenon[/pullquote]The last time I had walked past the window of Waterstone’s the books had been piled up high, as part of an elaborate display. That had only been a few days ago. It was about this stage I really started to realise what I was dealing with. I glanced at my friend Dominique who, like me, was staring in stunned silence. The Miniaturist isn’t just a book, it’s a phenomenon. Jessie Burton is The Next Big Thing.
The Next Big Thing arrives a few minutes later. Bookseller Gill Hart welcomes her and introduces us. We shake hands. And then everything’s ok because, although Jessie Burton is The Next Big Thing, it’s obvious she’s also a Very Nice Person.
We go and sit in the staffroom, where there are sofas and champagne, courtesy of Lindum Books. Jessie is the first author to come to the newly-opened store and, to celebrate, Sasha pours Jessie a glass.
“We said we’d share it with our first author,” she says, smiling.
Everyone is smiling – we’re all having a nice time. And it’s not because of the alcohol.
On her website, Burton describes writing The Miniaturist ‘secretly’.
“It just means that when I was writing the book I had to do other jobs to pay the bills,” Burton explains. “A lot of my jobs were in London as a temp as a PA but never as a contracted worker. I was just someone who dips in and out accordingly because I was also a jobbing actress. With some of the jobs, I didn’t actually have that much to do so the thing I did was write the manuscript on a word document and if anyone walled past I just minimized the screen. It was a bit naughty but I still managed to do the work asked of me so I never felt too bad. Obviously though I wrote it in a fairly piecemeal, scrappy way so that was why it was a secret.”
The Miniaturist is no longer piecemeal, or scrappy. It’s beautifully written, telling the story of eighteen-year-old Petronella Oortman who, in the year 1686, marries a wealthy merchant and goes to live with him and his family in his grand house in Amsterdam. As a wedding present, her husband gives her a cabinet house – a miniature version of the house they live in. Gradually, dolls that appear to be identical to the real residents, delivered to the house by a mysterious messenger, populate the cabinet house.
“The house in the book is an object that really exists,” Burton says. “It was built in 1686 and was commissioned by a real Dutch woman called Petronella Oortman so that’s why the book is set there; that’s when the house was built. I’ve always been interested in how people used to live and the similarities or differences therein but, in this instance, it was dictated by the house and I had to research the period accordingly.”
Amazingly, Burton only spent ten days in Amsterdam. Despite time restraints, she has put together an impressive Pintrest board of photographs from her time there. Her main source of information on the period were the books she read. She cites Simon Scharma’s The Embarrassment of Riches as being particularly useful.
Also useful to Burton’s new career as an author is her experience as an actress. During her talk later in the evening, she reads a section from her novel. Having been to a quite a few author events in my time, I’m used to this part of a talk being the least interesting – authors who are animated and excited while talking about their books sometimes drop that enthusiasm when reading from it. Burton, however, never loses her charisma. She almost turns the small section of prose into a play, adopting the facial expressions and voices of the characters, making the book come alive. In a world where authors have to work hard to stand out from the crowd and where hibernating in a room with a laptop, staying isolated from readers, is no longer an option, charisma is an invaluable weapon to have.
She’ll have to use this weapon a lot over the next couple of months. The Miniaturist has been published in over thirty different languages and, together with her tour and the prospect of film rights lurking on the horizon, Burton is going to be very busy. Although delighted with the reception of her book, Burton says it was not at all what she anticipated.
“I had no expectations and it’s hard to get published,” she says. “You have to be very tenacious and it’s tough. All I wanted was to get a publisher interested – I wasn’t anticipating eleven publishers to be interested and then for it to go global. It’s sold now in thirty languages. So in terms of what I thought my road to publication would be, it’s nothing like I thought it would be. Obviously I’m thrilled but I’ve learned in the last eighteen months to just never try to anticipate, never try to predict. Just take every moment or week as it comes.”
As the evening draws to a close, the readers forming a neat queue as they wait to have their books signed, the air feels full of beginnings. Burton describes the end of The Miniaturist as the beginning of another, untold story. The success of The Miniaturist itself is a very promising beginning to Burton’s own career. Burton is the first author to come to an event organised by Lindum Books (Lincoln’s new independent bookstore) which, judging by the success of the evening, seems to also be destined to go from strength to strength. As the day comes to a close, the future is opening up. And the future looks bright.
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