Title: The Names' Explores the Effects of Domestic Violence

Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. What's in a name? How can your name shape your life? Do you think if you'd been called something else, your whole life might have been different? That's one of the questions at the center of Florence Knapp's debut novel. It's titled The Names. The story begins with Cora, a woman trapped in a terrifying abusive marriage with Gordon. Gordon is a beloved and respected doctor in the community. Behind closed doors, he controls every aspect of Cora's life and punishes her with physical violence.

Cora and her daughter Maia have survived the last nine years together, but now there's a new addition to the family, a baby boy. Gordon insists that Cora should name the baby after himself. Maia wants to name the baby her brother Bear. Cora really wants to name the child Julian. After this, the story goes in three different versions of the future, depending on what name Cora chooses for her son, and the book is divided that way by chapter. In one version, Bear grows up with his mom and sister. In another, Julian and Maia have to move to Ireland to live with their maternal grandmother. In the third scenario, the baby is named Gordon and Cora stays with an abusive husband.

The Names is a lovely and heartbreaking examination of the ripple effects of domestic violence and of the choices that can determine our futures. The Names is out now, and I'm joined now by its author, Florence Knapp. Nice to meet you.

Florence Knapp: Nice to meet you as well.

Alison Stewart: How did you get interested in the idea that a name can shape your future?

Florence Knapp: I think I'm really interested in the things that make us us, whether that's our family and our upbringing or our friends or those early formative experiences, and also our name, because we're given it at birth and then carry it through life with us everywhere we go. Often people will hear it before they even meet with us and bring a whole load of their own associations to that. Maybe that will affect whether we're, I don't know, called in for a certain job interview or whether we cross paths with a potential partner. I guess it also shapes our sense of self as well.

Alison Stewart: How did you decide on the three names Gordon, Bear, and Julian for this little boy?

Florence Knapp: With Gordon, I wanted a name that felt like it was very traditional and could be handed down through the generations. I think with the names, I did quite a lot of thinking through of how I could use them in different ways and there's a scene in the book where we meet Gordon as a 14-year-old, and he's getting ready to go out to a party and he's really nervous. He's not popular. He goes to his parents liquor cupboard and sees a bottle of Gordon's gin. I don't know whether you have-- Yes, you do.

I think he just feels this instant affinity with it of, it's got his name on it. He feels like it's his, and he takes a first sip from it and he doesn't like the taste of it, but he keeps going because it's his gin. Then with Bear, I wanted a name that felt really, really expansive and a name that feels like it's got this huge amount of space for the child to become who they could be in it.

Alison Stewart: His sister likes it because it's cuddly. Cuddly and strong.

Florence Knapp: Yes, it's an interesting name, isn't it? Because it does have that. It can be both. It can be brave and strong, but it can also be really cuddly and kind. It feels like it's one of those names that does say you can be absolutely anything. I really wanted to play with how a character would exist within that. Then with Julian, I wanted to-- I knew I wanted to-- I do a lot of kind of craft stuff myself, and I knew I wanted to write about that in some form. I wanted this boy to grow up to be a jeweler. I was thinking of the name Julian worked.

When I looked it up, that means Sky Father, which fitted perfectly for my story because in that narrative, it's where the mother hasn't called the child Gordon. She's able to say to the father, well, I didn't call him Gordon, but I called him a name that is at least a tribute to you. It means father, but in her head, she's also thinking Sky Father. It will elevate him above all those kind of this line of awful Earth fathers. The three names felt almost like they were there fairly early on for me. They very much, the names did set the narratives and how they unfolded.

Alison Stewart: Yes, I was going to ask about the narratives between Gordon, Bear and Julian. Did you think of them as separate characters or was there something fundamentally the same at the core of this boy?

Florence Knapp: I think there's something fundamentally the same at the core that makes him who he is, but it is very much a-- I guess I want to look at how people are affected by their upbringing. Certainly in Gordon's storyline, we see him being really manipulated by his father and almost weaponized by him so that he can be used against the mother. It's not until he's an adult that he can really, where he has more autonomy, where he's faced with certain moments where he maybe gets to choose the person he actually wants to be and to think, well, who am I when I strip away all those things that were part of my childhood, that have made me who I am? Am I happy with the person that I've become as a result of that? I guess he gets to decide.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Florence Knapp. We are talking about her debut novel, The Names. It's about how one mother's decision about what to name her son changes the course of his family's life forever. You mentioned briefly that you were into sewing and crafting. You wrote quite a bit. You did quite a bit in that, in your life, in your career, what made you want to write a novel?

Florence Knapp: The novel writing has actually always been there in the background. I've been writing fiction since 1999, since I was 21 and just left university. I guess more publicly, I'd been making quilts and dressmaking and doing those kinds of things. What was really lovely for me was being able to bring some of those things into this story. I didn't want to write about quilt-making directly because, to me, fiction feels easier when it's very separate from me, but I did. I just love writing about people working with their hands.

I guess also, to me, I think one of the things I realized as I was writing this novel is that when someone's being creative, it's having the freedom to make mistakes and to express themselves, and it is freedom in a way. In terms of the different narratives, what we see in the narrative where the domineering father is still very much a part of that narrative is that there's a complete absence of creativity and there's an absence of people gardening, people reading books, all those things around craft that also, I think, in some ways are a form of kind of creative or kind of imaginative thought and things like that.

Whereas in the storylines where those characters have more freedom, those things really open up and there's people making huge tessellating artworks from old battered yardsticks, and there's jewelers and there's people gardening and there's people dancing. It felt to me-- I think often when you're writing a novel, I think you only realize partly what it's about afterwards. I think afterwards, one of the things that I was thinking about is how much in my own life, creativity represents freedom and having the space to make mistakes.

Obviously, in growing up in that environment, there's no space to make mistakes. You have to get everything absolutely right.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk about Gordon. He's clearly abusive. We learn early on, it escalates during their brief courtship, she comes to realize there's something that's not right with this man. What kind of research did you do into intimate violence?

Florence Knapp: I'd never intended to write a book about domestic abuse. What happened was several months before I started writing The Names, I was part of a group of women where someone came to speak to us from a women's refuge. When she told me about her work, I was really-- It was incredibly harrowing, the things she told us. I was really, really affected by it. My way of processing the world tends to be through writing or through reading. I think I had a lot of basic questions that were whirring around in my mind in the months after she'd spoken to us.

Alison Stewart: Like what?

Florence Knapp: Well, why would someone be like that, and why wouldn't someone leave, and what would the effect on the children be of growing up in that environment? I think I knew all the answers to those on a fact-based level, but emotionally didn't quite understand it. I guess walking alongside Cora and her children, I was able to more fully understand those things. There's a bit in the book where I was writing one day and I was writing a scene where it's the storyline where Cora stays with Gordon and she is socially isolated and very much cut off from the world.

I was in my living room writing and I have this plant where all the leaves stand very upright and closed at night. Then during the day they all fall outwards. I was sitting there and I could hear the leaves brushing against the living room wall as they were falling outwards and suddenly had this realization that in Cora's world, where she's so isolated, that to her that would feel like life, and it would almost be something that I guess made her feel alive as well, because there was another living thing in the room. I think it's those moments of where you're trying to put yourself into someone else's shoes and think, "How would this feel?," that really--

I felt like I learned a lot by trying to imagine how Cora might feel and that by the end of the novel with it, certainly within the context of this one fictional family, I felt like I understood the challenges that were facing them better.

Alison Stewart: It's interesting, when you're writing, do you keep your senses aware for signals or for signs that speak to you to shift your writing, to think about your writing in a different way? That was so interesting about the plan.

Florence Knapp: Yes, I think that it's-- because I very much write fiction, so don't tend to bring my own life into it, but I do tend to bring in those environmental things that have gone on around me. There's another bit in the story where Cora realizes that she needs help and she's gone to the one friend's house that she once had a relationship with and no longer does, and that person's no longer living there and she's thinking, well, where could I go? The day before, I'd taken my dog to the vet and the vet had been telling me about judging a dog show at his daughter's school.

He was saying how hard it was because he really hadn't wanted to upset anyone by not choosing the teacher's dog. Also, there was so many things going on in his mind. As I was listening, I was just thinking, oh my goodness, you are-- He just seemed so kind. When I was sitting there the next day thinking, well, where would Cora go in this situation? I was thinking, okay, yes, no, that's who I would go to in that situation, is this vet who was-- The vet in the story isn't him at all, but it's-- Yes, I guess that I am-- That you have those feelers up thinking about what could come into your story.

Alison Stewart: We're talking to Florence Knapp. Her debut novel is called The Names. In the novel, it jumps forward seven years at a time. Why did that seem like the right amount of time?

Florence Knapp: I don't know whether there's any scientific basis for this, but I think there's a commonly held belief that the body renews in seven-year cycles. That felt like a nice starting point for it. In terms of revisiting the boys every seven years, I felt like if I didn't have any structure at all, when you're asking the reader to follow three different narratives, it would feel like handing them in an amorphous blob and just saying, try and keep track of all this. Whereas I felt, if I had a really clear structure of we're going to be visiting each character in turn every seven years, then a reader would hopefully be able to follow along with me more with that.

Also, I think what that did was it allowed me to really focus in on those moments that had been really, really formative for each version of the boys. There's one scene in the book where we see Gordon as a seven-year-old and he's in his classroom and his teacher said she wants them to write name labels for their trays. He's sitting there and he's got all his new colored felt tips for the term. He writes Luke on his name label. I think at some subconscious level he was maybe thinking, well, who could I be if I wasn't Gordon, if I wasn't named after my father?

Gradually his classmates notice that he hasn't written his real name on and the teacher comes over and tells him to leave the room and he's really cross with him. When he comes back in, his name's written there in capital letters and black sharpie. It feels almost like it's indelible. It's saying, this is Gordon, this is who you are. It's inescapable. I think for him that was probably a really formative moment in his life. In revisiting them every seven years, I was really able to focus in on those moments.

Alison Stewart: Who was hardest to write, Gordon, Bear or Julian?

Florence Knapp: That's such a good question. I think easiest felt to write was probably Julian because his narrative was set in Ireland and it always felt like I was going somewhere fresh and new in my mind. Probably hardest in terms of feeling like I really had to go to difficult places with my characters was Gordon where Cora has stayed in an abusive marriage, and you see the child being horrendously manipulated by the father. Yes, I think that was hardest.

Alison Stewart: Finally, at the end of your book, there's a glossary describing what all the different names mean. Why did you put that in?

Florence Knapp: Well, I think that I'm-- one of the things, I'm probably more interested in the associations that we bring to names than the traditional meanings behind them. The glossary has the traditional meanings, but what it shares and what I think has more importance in the book is what I or other people might bring as associations to those names, because I think those are the moments where our names are interacting with fate and chance in ways that we might not even be aware of. It also just felt like fun [laughs].

Alison Stewart: What do you think of your own name? Did it make you think about that as you were writing the book?

Florence Knapp: Yes, definitely. Also, I guess in how much I can never know quite how much my own names affected my life, but in the ways that I do know about. When I was six, my family moved across the world to live in Australia. I guess when you're standing in front of a classroom and at that time, Florence was a really, really uncommon name in the 1980s. I guess it was-- having a simpler name would have been easier.

Alison Stewart: The name of the book is called The Names. It is by Florence Knapp, a fine name, I might say.

Florence Knapp: Thank you very much.

Alison Stewart: Florence, thanks for being with us.

Florence Knapp: Thank you so much for having me.

Alison Stewart: Coming up on the show tomorrow, actor Jonathan Groff. He stars in the new Broadway musical Just in Time about the life of Bobby Darin. He joins us in studio to discuss alongside his co-star, Gracie Lawrence. I'm Alison Stewart. I appreciate you listening and I appreciate you. I will meet you back here tomorrow.