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FEATURES
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We talk to the Dylan Thomas Prize-winner about Seating Arrangements
Weddings and family drama often go hand in hand, and in Seating
Arrangements the van Meter clan are on fine destructive form. The novel
follows the fortunes of the “Gatsby-esque” family, and their equally
well-established guests, as their privileged lives slowly start to implode in
the days leading up to the nuptials. Born and raised on the other side of the
country, Shipstead explains that she hadn’t really “encountered the Eastern
establishment until I went to Harvard University, where I met people who came
from families like the van Meters. Being in California until I was 18, I
hadn’t really given class any thought."
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The novelist's great-grandmother lived and died in a Victorian asylum
When I was a child, whenever my mother’s patience was pushed to its
limits sometimes she would shout at me: "You will send me to
Burghill!" Whatever could this Burghill be to hold such a sense of
threat? Well, apparently, it was a village where the local county asylum was
built, and within that asylum’s walls my maternal great-grandmother died.
Only recently did my mother confess the awful truth of our family’s past.
Before that my knowledge of Burghill was a memory from my teenage years, when
I accompanied my stepfather on a visit to one of his relatives who suffered
from schizophrenia.
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