God’s Wife: An Interview with Amanda Michalopoulou
The Greek writer Amanda Michalopoulou is the author of eight novels, three collections of short stories, and more than a dozen children’s books. She studied French literature at the University of Athens, worked for many years as a columnist for Kathimerini, and now teaches creative writing at various Greek institutions. Her work has been translated into twenty languages; the first of her two novels to appear in English, I’d Like, won the National Endowment for the Arts International Literature Prize in 2008, and the second, Why I Killed My Best Friend, was short-listed for the 2015 National Translation Award. (Both books were translated by Karen Emmerich.) Her new novel God’s Wife, translated by Patricia Felisa Barbeito, has just been published by Dalkey Archive Press.
Michalopoulou spent this fall in residence at the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program, where I had the good luck to continue a conversation with her begun long ago in Athens. But it was only after she departed for Greece that we embarked on this interview via email.
INTERVIEWER
The premise of God’s Wife is at once audacious and unsettling. Can you talk about the origin of your novel and the kinds of research you undertook to tell such an unlikely story?
MICHALOPOULOU
Certain books start with a disturbing question. My question here was, What if God had a wife? How would she be, what would she expect from him, and what would he expect from her in return? The Bible is full of submissive women who wished to have many children and either followed their husbands or became prostitutes. I read somewhere that these women speak 1.1% of the words in the Bible. In this patriarchal view, God’s wife would be an introverted human being, an acolyte. But what if she didn’t comply with this model of thought because of her education? I played around with this idea for some time and in 2012 I started reading philosophical and theological texts in a more focused way. What would a girl married to
