Daily Dialogue — November 19, 2015

INTERVIEWER: I’d like to talk now about your new novel, Atonement, which is coming out in a few days to coincide with your birthday. It’s your twenty-first novel…
OLDER BRIONY: It’s my last novel.
INTERVIEWER: Oh, really? You mean you’re retiring?
OLDER BRIONY: No, dying. My doctor tells me I have something called vascular dementia; which is essentially a continuous series of tiny strokes. Your brain gradually closes down. You lose words, you lose your memory: which, for a writer, is pretty much the point. That’s why I could finally write this book; and why, of course, it’s my last novel. Strangely enough, it would be just as accurate to call it my first novel. I wrote several drafts as far back as my time at St. Thomas’s Hospital during the war. I just couldn’t ever find the way to do it.
INTERVIEWER: Because the novel is autobiographical, is that right?
OLDER BRIONY: Yes, entirely. I haven’t changed any names, including my own.
INTERVIEWER: And was that the problem?
OLDER BRIONY: No. I had for a very long time decided to tell the absolute truth.

— Atonement (2007), screenplay by Christopher Hampton, novel by Ian McEwan

The Daily Dialogue theme for the month: Writers and Writing. Today’s suggestion by Melinda.

Trivia: James McAvoy considered the script the best he had ever read.

Dialogue On Dialogue: Commentary by Melinda: “I couldn’t find a clip, which is unfortunate because this is an incredible movie — and the start of its incredible, heartbreaking ending. This film is all about writing — a young girl trying to get attention through her innocent plays, a chance word used in a letter, the contents of that letter misunderstood…which the heroine ultimately tries to atone for through a gift of writing.”