“The novel reveals the deepest truth in the simplest moments.”
“The complexity lies within the ordinary, the layers inside the things themselves seem endless. Nothing is easy, nothing is simple.” These thoughts echo through the life and work of Alice Munro, born in Wingham, Canada in 1931, a Nobel laureate who turns everyday life into something luminous. Her talent lies in making the familiar details—small rituals, routines, and moments—carry weight as time slips by. Tessa Hadley, a devoted admirer and one of Munro’s keenest protégés, understands this intimacy intimately. Reading Hadley’s prose, one often senses that truth resides in the texture of daily life, and that storytelling itself is a vessel for that truth. Hadley, who began publishing later in life, has become a touchstone for writers like Zadie Smith, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and the late Hilary Mantel. Soon she will come to Spain to present The Past, a novel where an ordinary family life glows with magical resonance.
Over the last twenty years, Hadley’s novels have asked what it means to know life’s truth. The question lingers: did she discover truth through writing itself?
That inquiry is deeply philosophical. Beyond simply unearthing truth, there is a need to express it in words. It can feel as though the thing to be understood only reveals itself when it is put into language. The truth learned through writing is not abstract; it belongs to lived experience, yet a final element emerges only when words are given form.
Do her novels help readers understand life more fully?
Most likely. Writing is inseparable from grasping life. Many people do not write yet still see the world with insight—artists, historians, sociologists, or emotionally wise individuals. Still, writing remains a unique craft, a specialized act that a chosen few undertake to discover personal truth.
Writers often overlook the tiny fragments of living. Hadley’s work shines light on those fragments, turning the ordinary into something luminous. Why the fascination with such small details?
That observation rings true for many readers. As a voracious reader, Hadley learned from authors who showed how ordinary things can become powerful and magical, lending meaning to life through prose. Greats like Tolstoy, Ginzburg, and Munro share this gift. Fiction, especially the novel, can reveal the deepest truth through the everyday—whether it is washing dishes, strolling through a field, a marriage in turmoil, or caring for a baby. The stories move through memory, loss, and love.
Those are universal themes. Love and loss are intertwined, memory lingers, and pain and suffering remain part of any meaningful life. Writers, poets, and painters everywhere wrestle with these questions. The fiction writer traverses the ordinary through daily texture and finds resonance, the ripple of loss and memory echoing across time.
What about the sense of time in literature?
A novel can bend time in surprising ways. Real life unfolds in a strict sequence, but fiction can hop from a present to a distant past in a single line, offering a panoramic view of loss as it accumulates.
That is the effect in The Past.
It is a kind of rare ability to travel between two presents, yielding a philosophically rich view of what loss means. Time is a fundamental storytelling tool, yet it often feels counterintuitive to ordinary life. It broadens the scope of meaning through loss.
And what role does forgetting play? Can books keep memory alive?
In fiction, small details saved from oblivion act like nets that hold precious fragments against time. When readers meet writers like Austen, Tolstoy, or Turgenev, those moments spring to life. A great writer makes writing an act against forgetting, even as forgetting remains a central theme. Fiction must acknowledge mayhem and fading memories if it seeks honesty about life.
We forget, we lose, and to keep living we write.
Indeed.
Her father was a professor, her mother an artist, and she studied Literature at Cambridge. When did the call to writing arrive?
From an early age she wanted to write her own books. Her mother created small illustrated volumes, and she penned the stories. The hardest moment in pursuing writing came during the Cambridge years, when the scale of great writers felt overwhelming. She paused, unsure of herself, and in a quiet Cambridge Library afternoon, she watched Shakespeare’s lines come together on the page. It was then she felt the powerful urge to try, and the decision to begin arrived.
She left formal schooling, stepped away from doctoral work, had children, and became autodidactic, learning by guided curiosity. Where did that curiosity lead?
There was a playful, informal approach to reading that she values. She is glad not to have pursued the doctorate; it never fully appealed. Later, as she built a world she could love on her own terms, she read everything. Gaps and lapses exist, but being self-taught offered the freedom to explore across periods and styles instead of narrowing focus.
At forty-six she published her first novel. What memories does she have of those early writing days?
She recalls that happiness seemed inseparable from writing. The moment of clarity arrived when she knew what she was doing and how to say it. Early stories reflected the world she knew, and it felt like wandering a desert for years, trying to imitate others, until she found her own key, opened her own door, and entered a small, familiar house that felt right. She trusted that she was touching reality somewhere.
Touching reality remains magical for a writer, even if it is not flawless. Last summer she set aside a two-year project that did not satisfy her and began a new one. Everything shifted with that change.
What about Henry James in shaping that distinct voice?
Practically, he offered a helpful guide. She spent years balancing family life and the urge to write, returning to study in informal settings rather than elite institutions. James influenced how she thought and imagined, but she learned to distance herself from him to avoid sounding antiquated. Later, contemporary writers entered the scene, and she found Alice Munro’s direct, lucid prose both refreshing and incisive.
Now she sees a shared truth with Munro and, in a sense, they remain distinct; Munro remains Munro, and Hadley remains Hadley.
Writing one’s own book became the enduring pursuit. For a time she taught writing, encouraging students to imitate the voice they admired, to try on a page or two. That exercise can be liberating. She suggested copying Elizabeth Bowen or Alice Munro, yet neither sounded like their models; they remained themselves. Imitation and homage can unlock a space for play that strict originality might block.
The first novel was written with four children at home. What about the path women have followed since then?
It is astounding. She does not see herself as the supercharged type who could pull it off, noting she is naturally lazy. The second question reveals more: she is a passionate feminist, energized by changes in women’s lives and the ongoing shifts in how they pursue creative work. She writes about these shifts constantly, yet acknowledges that the old model offered a certain freedom. Domestic life and writing could be balanced, and a life could be built to earn a living as a writer, even if it meant hardship at times.
And what about young women writers today?
She believes they are wonderful. Women have long shaped English fiction by capturing the texture of daily life inside a home, shaping relationships with emotional imagination. The woman writer has carried much of the mantle for centuries, a distinctive strength of the English tradition that she feels is less pronounced on the continent.
Thus the dialogue continues, for readers who seek truth in the quiet grandeur of the everyday and discover in fiction a way to see time, memory, and love through fresh eyes. [citation for historical context provided]