Claire Messud’s Family Had Secrets. It Sent Her Searching for Answers in Her New Novel, This Strange Eventful History.

"Claire Messud isn’t entirely sure how long she has worked on her latest novel, This Strange Eventful History, which will be released in mid-May. Over lunch in Manhattan earlier this month, she laid out a timeline with as many hops and skips as her entwined plots. The project began about a decade ago with students in Hunter College’s MFA program serving as her research assistants, but in some ways, she has been waiting to write this story her whole life.

Though the novel intersects with current politics, Messud said it was the moral questions of our time that preoccupied her. “The world that I was brought up in, and the beliefs that I had seemed absolutely historical to my kids,” she explained. “My parents brought us up believing that borders were coming down, that internationalism was the future—hybridity, the dissolving of identities. Everybody would come together.” Over the last 10 years, she’s wondered why that future didn’t exactly come to pass."

Read more here.