Shapiro Creates a Tapestry of Words in The Lost Masterpiece
In her ninth novel, The Lost Masterpiece, bestselling author B.A. Shapiro expertly weaves fictional modern events and an imagined history to tell the story of love, adultery, betrayal and family secrets. When Tamara Rubin inherits a valuable painting by Edouard Manet and learns of their connection, she is driven to explore the life of her great, great, great, great-grandmother Berthe Morisot and the legacy she left for those who followed her. Shapiro discusses the creation of her book with Authorlink:
AUTHORLINK: Tell me about your apprenticeship as a creative writer (degrees, jobs, workshops, writing groups, classes, or mentors), and what aspect of it was most pivotal in your development as a writer?
SHAPIRO: I have no formal training as a writer. I have three degrees in sociology and have worked in a number of jobs unrelated to literature: systems analyst, statistician, director of a software development firm, college professor. When I decided I wanted to write a novel, I enrolled in a class at the Cambridge Center of Adult Education, not exactly a degree-awarding institution. There I met four other would-be novelists, and we formed a writers’ group that lasted almost twenty years and produced nineteen traditionally published novels. I would not be where I am today without them.
AUTHORLINK: How did the premise of The Lost Masterpiece develop?
SHAPIRO: I fell in love with the paintings of Berthe Morisot and was horrified to discover that while her friends and colleague—Monet, Degas, Renoir, Sisley and Pissarro—were lauded as the founders of Impressionism, she was not. The six of them worked together, held multiple shows to full-scale ridicule and considered themselves equals. But after their deaths, all the men are household names, and no one remembered Morisot. How could I resist a story of an unsung female artist—or the chance to resurrect her and her accomplishments?
AUTHORLINK: What draws you to historical fiction as a genre? What are your challenges and rewards of the genre?
SHAPIRO: There’s nothing quite like being immersed in another time and place, and I thoroughly enjoy the research needed to produce a novel that makes the reader feel as if they’re really there. The challenges are myriad, as are the rewards, and can often stem from the same genre issues. Research, for one, is time-consuming and can be tedious, but the process also unlocks the past, the people who inhabited it, as well as the culture and values that made it what it was—and allow us to see our own society by comparison. And deciding what to change in order to honor both history and your story is tremendously difficult, but when you figure it out, it’s pure pleasure.
AUTHORLINK: What was it like developing Morisot as fictional character?
SHAPIRO: Berthe Morisot was extremely complicated, taking society-defying risks to fulfill ambitions no woman of her time and social status was allowed to harbor. This feistiness, along with her powerful will and prodigious talent, set her apart. And her personal life added a bit of intrigue to the story, as she was having an illicit love affair with the artist Edouard Manet, who was married at the time. Complications from the unbridled misogyny of the time tied her in knots, and exploring this on both actual and fictional levels both intrigued and infuriated me.
AUTHORLINK: Talk to me about the structure of the novel with the different characters point of view sections shedding light on the narrative. It is a bit like a painting with different colors contributing to the whole work.
SHAPIRO: Interesting you mention that this reminds you of a painting, because in some ways the method I used to build this structure resonates with that. There are so many plots, subplots, points of view and crisscrossing timelines, that I had to use multicolored file cards to figure out how it could possibly be made into a coherent whole. I took a stab at what the main scenes of each plots’ arc might be, did the same for all of the major characters’ arcs, and assigned each a different color of card. Every red card was a scene in Berthe’s story, roughly forty of them. And every orange card was one of Tamara’s, about thirty. And on and on. When I finished, I had a thick wad of cards, probably a hundred, which scared me. Still, I put them all on the dining room table and spent days moving them around in the hope I could make a novel out of this mess. When I was finally satisfied, they did resemble a bright, abstract painting.
AUTHORLINK: How long did it take you to write The Lost Masterpiece?
SHAPIRO: It took me about three years, which is typical for me, although some of my books have stretched into four.
AUTHORLINK: Tell me about your research.
SHAPIRO: I’m an academic by training and well versed in the most powerful and efficient research methods. Fortunately, for a novel you need far less diligence than you do for scholarly endeavors, which demand that you read and cite every mention in the literature of your topic. For a novel, you can stop when you lose interest and make the rest up. Seriously, I have a tall stack of books on my desk and a file cabinet filled with articles, source materials and every crazy idea I had from the beginning to the end of the process. The internet is also my friend. AI can be risky, but it’s also very helpful with small historical details. For example, “What kind of handbag would an upper-class Parisian woman carry in 1880?” The bot gave four choices, along with a description of each.
AUTHORLINK: How do you avoid getting lost in the research process?
SHAPIRO: That’s a tough one, as I struggle with this. It’s so easy to get sucked in, to forget your objective and lose yourself in compelling details that have nothing to do with your story. In my writers’ group, one of our sayings was, “Your research is showing.” I have this quote pinned to the bulletin board in my study to remind me not to get caught up in tangents.
AUTHORLINK: Talk about the process of revision for this book. Did you have to leave out anything you were particularly attached to?
SHAPIRO: Revising is my favorite part of writing a novel. It’s so much easier and more enjoyable than staring at a blank screen and dredging that first draft out of my muddled brain. I would guess that every page of The Lost Masterpiece has been rewritten at least twenty times, and I did seven separate drafts, including the two I did with my editor. It’s fun to make improvements, to polish, to find just the right detail, and to see that it’s actually getting better. But, alas, many of my favorite scenes, storylines and even characters ended up on the cutting room floor. They say you must kill your darlings, but that doesn’t mean it’s not painful.
AUTHORLINK: Discuss what you are working on now.
SHAPIRO: I’m writing another historical art thriller, which is also about an unsung woman, Misia Sert. Misa was a muse and patron to many great talents in Belle Epoch France. In her day, she was often referred to as the Queen of Paris. She encouraged and supported not only artists, but writers, musicians and choreographers: Toulouse-Lautrec, Renoir, Proust, Diaghilev, Villard and even Coco Chanel, to name a few. She also had a complicated personal life—three husbands, the first of whom sold her to her second—was feisty and talented. Neither her era nor the work of many of its greatest talents would have been what and who they were without her. And, as with Berthe, few now know her name.
B.A. Shapiro is the award-winning and New York Times bestselling author of ten novels, including The Lost Masterpiece, Metropolis, The Collector’s Apprentice, The Muralist and The Art Forger, which won the New England Book Award for Fiction, among other honors. Her books have been selected as Community Reads throughout the country and have been translated into over a dozen languages.
