A GIFT
THERE is no precise method for writing a compelling work of fiction, of course, but author Téa Obreht does have one question she tries to answer for herself during the process. “What is the difference between the truth and what the characters are telling themselves? If I can figure that out, then things really start to crack open,” she says. It is a question that also gets at the heart of why we are drawn to a good novel, because it affords us an objectivity and clarity about the lives of others that we rarely have about our own. But the road between a question and its answer can be a long one, and this was certainly true for Obreht, whose second novel, Inland, took eight years and many bouts of self-doubt and writer’s block to complete.
The arduous process was a surprise to the author in part because she wrote her debut novel, The Tiger’s Wife, relatively quickly during her time in Cornell University’s MFA program. Published by Random House in 2011, when Obreht was only twenty-five, the book became a breakout success, selling more than a million copies. Obreht was nominated for a National Book Award and became the youngest winner of the Orange Prize (now the Woman’s Prize for Fiction), among many other accolades.
Obreht has said that took less time to write because the inciting incidents of the novel were pulled from the pages of her own life. It was set in Belgrade, in the former Yugoslavia, where Obreht was raised by her mother and maternal grandparents until she was seven and civil war broke out. After fleeing the country, she and her family spent much of her childhood in transit, living for brief periods in Cyprus, Egypt, and eventually the United States. Obreht was very close to her maternal grandfather, Stefan. Because her father, as she stated previously, was “not in the picture,” Stefan served as the main paternal figure in her life. His death in 2006 inspired Obreht to begin work on —which centers around a relationship between a young woman, Natalia, and her grandfather—as a way to stay close
