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| Victoria Redel (photo: George Rings) |
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Victoria Redel is the author of Paradise and three other books of poetry; three novels, including Before Everything; and two story collections. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Fine Arts Work Center. She is a professor in the Creative Writing programs at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in New York City. I Am You (SJP Lit/Zando, September 30, 2025) is an expansive novel about two 17th-century Dutch women painters and the hardships and joys they experience together.
These characters are based in history, but upon scarce information. How did you deal with such a shortage of fact?
It is great to have a shortage of facts because it provides freedom for invention. I encountered Maria Oosterwijck and my first whiff of a novel reading Russell Shorto's Amsterdam, where he says little is known about the painter Maria Van Oosterwijck. I was curious and began to research, and what he'd written turned out to be true. I believe I've learned all that's known about her--maybe there's untranslated Dutch sources--but, mostly, the same scant information was repeated everywhere: that Maria had not been allowed in the Guild because she was a woman; that she'd had a prominent reputation and a prosperous life as a painter despite that; that she trained the family servant, Gerta, to be her paint-maker and assistant. They lived together for a time, though they were not together at their deaths. This posed the question of why? What transpired between them? These seemed like interesting questions for a novel.
I also gave myself the freedom to challenge the received facts. For example, because of the nature of her paintings, it's assumed that Maria was highly religious. I've imagined her spiritual choices differently. I also did a ton of research about life in the 17th century. It's an essential moment in Dutch history and much is written about trade and everyday life. When the novel expanded to include England, I needed to learn about the English court.
One pleasure in writing a novel has always been diving into research. But the trick is to learn and learn and then not exactly try to forget it all, but, hopefully, create a seamless world, not so jammed with details that you feel the writer bragging, "look what I know." That's the hope: that the world is effortlessly stitched on every page. I want the world I shape to feel inevitable.
Do you have a background in the visual arts, or paint-making?
Yes, I was a visual studies major in college. In many ways this book has been gestating for 20 years, when I walked into a paint and pigment store on the Lower East Side, saw shelves stocked with jars of pigment. I wanted to know about and use every one of those brilliant colors! I read about the very storied global history of paint and pigment with the idea of writing a novel, but I couldn't find the story.
Then, a few years ago I had the opportunity to spend a couple of months living in Amsterdam, and it occurred to me that I might find a clue for that long-abandoned paint book. Every day, I went to the astonishingly beautiful art library in the Rijksmuseum to finish another book. But also to study the Dutch Golden Age. Then I'd leave the library to roam the canal streets. It was wandering through Amsterdam that I began imagining Maria and Gerta.
You excel at sensory writing: food, painting, color, sex.
Thank you for saying that. I say to my writing students, you have to love the thinginess of the world. Witness, observation, that's at the core of my job on the page. If I want you, the reader, to engage with characters and a world of my making, my task is to render a believable and sensual world. In 17th-century Amsterdam, smells and tastes were right in your face, for good and bad. There were fewer opportunities to be discreet about what you did with garbage. You threw it in the canal! You threw bodily waste in the canal. Those same canals were the lifeblood of the city. My job as a writer dovetails with Gerta, my narrator, who moves from a profound physical knowledge--caring for animals, for a house, making food--and, over the course of the novel, extends her range from house servant to studio assistant, to painter, and lover. Paint-making, botany, lovemaking are beautiful and messy. Her awareness expands. She has an artist's awakening. I want the reader to accompany her on that journey.
Gerta and Maria's story offers commentary on power dynamics, especially gender and class, in society and in interpersonal relationships. Was that by design or a natural feature of their lives?
It's what I learned through writing the book. There was an initial glimmer of power dynamics, understanding that Maria had a maid and assistant. And I right away knew it was Gerta who must tell their story. I needed to learn what Gerta needed to learn. As the story of what happens to them and between them unfolded, I saw that both interpersonal and societal power became more layered. What was at stake for each person? Their situation, their story complicates as it unfolds. What were their essential questions? I had to discover how they would each respond. I knew none of this when I started the book. I know very little when I begin. Which I think is good. Otherwise, I'd want to protect them from their choices and actions. The surprise and mystery of my characters' choices is the hardest and greatest fun of the whole enterprise.
Where does this novel fit in your larger body of work? What was different this time?
I started as a poet. My relationship to language as a poet is, I'd like to believe, present inside all the fiction. My prior novels take place in loosely contemporary periods--though I'd argue every novel is a historical novel--and I Am You takes a leap back in time. If one of the goals in writing fiction is to enlarge and engage the empathic imagination, to let oneself enter into what it is to be another human, here I had the opportunity to consider people in another historical moment with all that might entail. Certainly, there's much that reverberates in a contemporary way, but my task was to honor my characters, the choices and limitations of their present-day lives, and not impose current ideas and values on them. I didn't think about overlaps while I was writing, but perhaps obsessive love, devotion, autonomy, and secrecy are themes that ribbon through all my work. But as I say to my writing students, we don't choose our obsessions; for better or worse, they reveal themselves to us. --Julia Kastner