I know you’ve lived in a bunch of different cities, and you travel a fair bit, too. Haley Cullingham: I wanted to start by talking about place, because I find the way that you write about place so fascinating and, especially in this book, it was such a dominant theme to me. The world keeps going when you remove yourself from it, but like Harriet’s oft-disappearing oldest friend Gretel, your absence is noted.
First, a few crumbs, and then the whole damn box: family, friends (who Harriet’s not sure about yet-she’s waiting for a sign), meetings and exams and essays and candles that won’t stay lit and houses that might not let you enter. The reader is allowed into this sojourn from reality, and then, when Perdita is again well, the world tumbles back like Harriet’s signature gingerbread to the floor. Gingerbread’s narrative suspends us in Harriet’s tale of her childhood and adolescence while her daughter Perdita recovers from a hospitalization. In each of these places, our reality skews just a little. Or the space between childhood and adulthood, where we begin to understand the bargains we strike to afford growing up. Or the cavern carved when someone we love disappoints us entirely and we probably should have seen it coming. But the spaces are also internal: There’s the space created by the suspension of reality that comes with a dramatic health incident and the subsequent, if you’re lucky, healing.
Some of those places are physical: the characters in the book cross borders in trunks, live in houses where the rooms occasionally move or the stairs keep out all but the most determined visitors, and sleep in beds watched over by flowering dolls. There are many places it feels like Oyeyemi’s latest novel, Gingerbread (Hamish Hamilton), could take you, if you were so inclined. Whether that place is a locked garden, an ancestral home (or several), or an imagined country, the reader is left with the feeling that they’re being guided through by a hand they can’t see, persistently tugging them left or right or sideways. She describes books as places she visits, and her writing invites readers to do the same.
Helen Oyeyemi’s work always holds an element of discovery.
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