After Nicole Krauss published an excerpt of her 2005 novel, The History of Love, in The New Yorker in 2004, she almost instantly found publishers locked in a bidding war for the right to publish her completed work. A sophomore novelist at the time, Krauss has since wracked up an auspicious resume of awards, including being shortlisted for the Orange Prize in 2006. Her latest novel, Great House, was released on October 12, and was named a finalist for National Book Award in fiction the next day.

Sitting down with Krauss at a coffee shop patio next to Queen’s Quay, the 36-year old mother is surprisingly soft-spoken for an author with such an impressive resume.

THE VARSITY: I wanted to start out by talking about your most recent novel, Great House. In wake of the success of The History of Love, was it difficult to write? Did you ever feel like you had to live up to the hype?

NICOLE KRAUSS: No, I didn’t actually feel too much pressure because of the success of the last book. But, I suppose that I have enough of my own internal pressures, that I hardly need anyone else’s to add to that. the scope of the audience of The History of Love came as a real surprise to me, and its something that I am still amazed by and feel deeply grateful for. But, at the end of the day, it hasn’t changed my ambitions as a writer.

TV: What are your ambitions as a writer?

NK: To remain true to my own instincts and intuitions, and to write the book that I’m meant to write, whether or not it will find as many readers as The History of Love.

TV: It seems to me that a theme running throughout your three novels is that of immigration. What drew you to this subject?

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NK: I don’t actually think that I write about immigration, per say. I do feel that a consistent subject through all three of my novels has been the idea of our human response to catastrophic loss. In the case of my first novel, Man Walks into a Room, the protagonist loses most of his memories, and he only has his childhood memories left. From there, he still has to create a coherent sense of self. This question of how we re-imagine ourselves in face of large loss and trauma is really the coherent theme in my three novels.

TV: Is this trauma universal? Is there a common thread of experience, even when your characters often come from diverse backgrounds?

NK: I think that it’s native to us as human beings to transcend our isolation and our solitude that we’re all born into, to some degree. I think we all have a need to express oneself to another, and to feel that one is seen and understood by the other, it’s really just a fundamental longing that we have as people. I do tend to gravitate towards writing characters whose isolation is somewhat pronounced, but none of the characters I’ve ever written have been satisfied with that condition. And I’m not interested, ultimately, in dwelling in solitude and its various discontents, I’m interested in the struggle to transcend that.

TV: I noticed that you dedicated The History of Love to your grandparents. Was the novel colored by their experiences? Do they make an appearance in the novel?

NK: No, not inspired by them, and they didn’t appear in the book. The History of Love had a main character named Leo Gursky, he was an old man, and people often ask me if that man is my grandfather, but he’s nothing like my grandfather. If anything, he’s very much like myself. At the same time, my grandparents were all born in Europe, and all were forced to leave the places that they were born. They were all Jewish, of course, in the Second World War, so fled from the tremendously destructive things that came with it.

In many cases, my grandparents could never return to those places where they were born, because they didn’t exist anymore. I think the sense of how one starts a second life and the idea of reinvention, through their experience and the way in which it was passed down to me has something to do with my interest in that.

TV: You started your career as a writer in poetry. Why did you decide to write a novel?

NK: In a way it was a kind of accident because I only started writing my first novel as an exercise to inform my poetry. I wanted to find the freedom in my work that I felt that I had lost. I was twenty-five at the time and I had been writing poetry since I was fifteen. Various things along the way various mentors along the way who had tremendous influence on me, and I think ultimately led me to a place where I felt somewhat trapped in my own work. I had no intention of becoming a novelist, but then I started to write.

TV: And you were successful. The History of Love was first published as an excerpt in The New Yorker, and publishers actually started to bid on the book before you completed it. What was that like? Were you overwhelmed?

NK: Until the moment it was published [in The New Yorker] almost no one had seen what I was working on. I had about two thirds of the novel completed. My agent, who was one of the very, very first people who read it I remember being so nervous about showing it to anyone and I was really emotional about it, because I had no conviction at all that this was going to be a book that was would find readers. I mean, it was the one that I wanted to write. But she had a very strong response to it, and she showed it to The New Yorker who also had a very strong response to it, very quickly it was in the pages of that magazine. But yes, in my head I had to filter out all of that [the positive responses] in order to finish the book to satisfy myself.

TV: What is your process like as a novelist? Do you always know where your writing is going?

NK: [laughs] Oh God, just the opposite. I don’t map anything out. I have no plan. I take no notes. I have no idea, really no sense of the characters at first. In the case [of Great House], I wrote out four stories they were almost confessions or monologues and I wanted to write them all. I felt very sure though, I also felt deep anxiety that if I stayed with them long enough and stayed with my intuitions the novel would create itself. This uncertainty that I hold myself to, I do it not because I want to live in a constant state of anxiety, but because I find that it’s a way for me to discover things I wouldn’t ever otherwise discover, a way to find myself into unknown territory, to be thrown off balance and arrive at places I wouldn’t have otherwise.

TV: Your last two novels, Great House and The History of Love were written largely in first person. Why do you prefer this point of view?

NK: My first novel, Man Walks into a Room, had a prologue and epilogue that was first person, and the rest was third-person. But I guess I’ve written less and less of that. Great House had no third-person at all. I like writing close to the bone emotionally and I find that first-person allows me to do that in the way that there’s no middle-man of the authoritative presence of third-person between the reader and the writer. I like all of my writing to have a sense of great exposure and intimacy.

TV: We’ve been speaking a lot about the idea of identity, and your fascination of the idea of identity without place. How do you consider your own identity? Do you relate it to a place?

NK: I don’t really think about it in that direct of way. The fact that my family is from so many places my mom grew up in London, my dad grew up in Israel and the fact that I was born an American; I mean, I could have been born in so many other places. In this sense, the idea of home has always been a somewhat elusive idea for me, and I think in writing novels, I’ve made an effort to make my own sense of home in the world: here’s a place where everything has meaning, in the novels that I write.

This longing for the creation of the abstract place that’s mine is really at the heart of my work.