Hadley Hury is a trinity. Not holy, but the novelist in him is wholly committed and his latest work, At the Villa Borago, is as much an opportunity for self-reflection as it is a delightful work of literature.
His writing process is all the more interesting for not being straightforward. He says, “It’s not easy writing creatively. If you have a teacher of literature looking over this shoulder and you have a critic looking over this shoulder, it can be rather stultifying.” He is all three, having taught, critiqued, and written. But he is grateful that “this time it’s as if all three of us kind of got going in the same direction, and it seemed to be beneficial rather than a constant thwarting. So that was lovely.”
But what is the book about? Well, hold on there. He does have an elevator pitch description, but only because he has to. Hury is not at all fond of the question. “It kills a lot of personal discovery, personal response, and it automatically sets a lens that you think you’re supposed to be looking for.”
Begrudgingly, he’ll say that the book is “ultimately about the transformative power of love.” And that’s true, but it hardly captures the novel’s spirit. Let’s look, though, at what he wanted to explore on its pages. It begins in 1962 and half of the book is set in Memphis. “I wanted it to be set on the cusp of a major social and cultural shift,” he says. Hury characterizes the setup this way: “I was going to Rhodes [College] in 1967 wearing ties to the refectory in the evening and going across the street for convocation at Evergreen [Presbyterian Church] two days a week and separate dorms and all that. By the time we finished in 1971, we were marching down Parkway against the bombing in Vietnam and for civil rights and all that.”
If his view of Memphis is affectionate, he acknowledges that his treatment of Florence, Italy, where much of the rest of the action takes place, is a love letter. Hury and his wife have been there and found a particular view from their hotel beautiful, enough to let it have a starring role. But he does not give short shrift to Memphis, which he adores.
He also has as his main character a woman, someone coming from the era of the Donna Reed stereotype and going into the 1960s with birth control and feminism. And he anticipates the challenges to his ability to write about a woman. “I don’t have to theorize about this. I’ve been a feminist all my life. I also believe the psychology of a hundred years that basically explains that in any of us, the male has feminine, the woman has masculine. I taught in a girls school for 15 years, and I’m married to Marilyn Adams, so I know about strong women.” There are, of course, other characters, but he is well pleased with the protagonist he’s wrought to lead the way.
Of those other inhabitants of his story, he says, “A couple are less savory than others, but there are no villains here. There are no wicked people. Some might not be who you would want to live with every day, but most of them are people you want to spend time with.”
Hury hopes the locations, characters, and situations give an inviting enough mix to, as he says, “hit one or more of those reading buttons.” He goes further: “I am interested in people knowing that it is not primarily a historical novel. While it is set between 1962 and 1964, everything in the story, everything about these people, everything the protagonist is going through ain’t been solved. In fact, a lot of it’s become retrograde. We’re not looking at a closed-off period of history. It’s very now.”
A Meet the Author event with Hadley Hury is scheduled for Saturday, October 25th, at 2 p.m. at Novel. At the Villa Borago is published by Palmetto Publishing.