Page 15 - Real Style April 2018

Culture News
bOOKS
Christine Mangan’s debut novel
Tangerine was recently released,
but even before it came out, it was
receiving a lot of positive buzz. it
follows the story of Alice and lucy,
inseparable college roommates
whose lives were darkened by a tragedy
that forced them to go their own ways. over a year later, Alice is married and living in tangier, Morocco, when suddenly lucy shows up on her doorstep trying to rekindle the broken friendship. like before, they become close, almost too close, and when Alice’s husband goes missing, Alice starts to question everything in her life. Tangerine is a smart page-turner that will leave you wanting more. We had a chance to speak with Mangan about her work.
Tangerine was getting a lot of buzz before it was even released. How did that make you feel?
i think, if anything, it has made me even more nervous for the public to read it! This will be
my first time publishing creative, rather than academic, work and it feels so much more personal—so with that, obviously, comes a bit of added anxiety!
Did you base Alice and Lucy on anyone?
Alice and lucy are based on experiences, rather than on any one particular person. What i really wanted to explore was the intensity of female friendships formed in one’s formative years, and, in particular, what happens when something threatens to change or alter that bond, as it always
inevitably does.
Similarly, i knew fairly early on that i wanted
to play around with the idea of identity and dark doubles, to provide the suggestion that, in many ways, lucy is, figuratively, just another side of Alice, the one who can say and do the things that Alice herself feels unable to, confined as she is by contemporary ideology.
There have been a lot of novels released in the last few years with unreliable female narrators, (Gone
Girl, The Girl on the Train), but your novel manages to avoid that route. Was that intentional?
i was always conscious of not wanting this to be something that necessarily tricked the reader or that had any
great reveal at the end. i think my favourite novels are the ones that gradually build and, though you may be surprised by where they lead, there
aren’t necessarily those “pull the rug out from under you” moments.
How much research went into making your novel as authentic as possible?
The amazing thing about tangier is that many of the same places that were there in the 1950s are still there today. When i went to visit (i’ve been to Morocco three times now), i got to sit in Café Hafa, where paul Bowles once sat. i got to visit the Gran Café de paris, where various Beat authors spent their time, and sip cocktails at Caid’s bar in the El Minzah Hotel, where every artist in tangier during the 1950s seems to have passed through at one time or another. Ultimately, a lot of what went into the novel was from my own observations and experiences while in tangier. of course, there
was also some additional research necessary in order to frame it within that time period, to get the political context of the story just right, and for that i turned to a number of resources, including the American legation Museum, which has such a wealth of information.
Which authors inspired you, and the writing of the novel?
i am a fan of all things Gothic. Authors like Daphne du Maurier, the Brontë sisters, Sarah Waters—they are my absolute favourites and ones that i read and revisited while working on Tangerine.
15