INTERVIEW:Debut novelist Rebecca Miller can't subtract her family from her life. But the daughter of Arthur Miller and wife of Daniel Day-Lewis tells Fiona McCannthat not everything she writes is culled from her own experience.
REBECCA MILLER is beautiful, with piercing blue eyes in a strong, clear face, her tiny frame draped elegantly across a sofa in a suite in Dublin's Clarence Hotel. She is also almost alarmingly versatile: having turned her hand to painting, acting, directing and short-story writing, she is now taking on the novel with her new book, The Private Lives of Pippa Lee.
Yet despite her prolific output and varied career, the men in Rebecca Miller's life - from her famous father, the late playwright Arthur Miller, to her Oscar-winning husband Daniel Day-Lewis - have long been leeching the limelight. She remains almost serenely unaffected, however, quietly carving her own niche as if oblivious to the clamour surrounding the starry figures that orbit her life.
Fortune may have smiled upon her birth - she was the doted-upon first child of Miller's marriage to photographer Inge Morath - but you get a sense that being born into this cradle of art had its drawbacks, particularly for a young woman determined to forge her own artistic path. "I would have started writing a lot earlier if I hadn't been [Arthur Miller's daughter]," she muses, defying any suggestion that her writing was a natural progression given her literary heritage. "That's more like it, that actually it prevented me from coming out as a writer."
Instead, Miller spent her formative years painting. "I painted pretty much through the 1980s and into the early 1990s, and acted through the early 1990s for five years," she recalls. Her acting career included roles in Regarding Henry, Consenting Adults and Mrs Parker and the Vicious Circle, but Miller never felt it was her vocation. "Acting was very much a way of learning about directing and I kind of knew it at the time," she admits.
"I knew I wanted to direct, and it fell into my lap that I had the opportunity to work with some really good directors and I sort of went with an instinct that this was the right thing to do, but not necessarily with a master plan."
She looks back now, reassessing the apparent randomness that has led her to where she is today, giving interviews in a Dublin hotel about the publication of her first novel. "It turned out to be a very good thing," she says.
Miller's directorial debut, in 1995, was Angela, a drama that won her the Filmmaker's Trophy at the Sundance Film Festival that year. She followed it with Personal Velocity, a screen adaptation of three of own short stories, which garnered her a Grand Jury Prize, before directing her husband in 2005's The Ballad of Jack and Rose. Plans are already in motion to make her debut novel into a film, with Robin Wright Penn, Winona Ryder, Julianne Moore and Alan Arkin already signed up. Miller the writer and Miller the director clearly work so well in tandem that the lines between literature and cinema are easily blurred. So which category does The Private Lives of Pippa Lee belong in?
"The novel came first," says Miller emphatically, although she adds that Pippa's story did morph into a screenplay at one stage during its various imaginings, before returning to novel form again.
"Then, because I had already opened the door in my mind that this could be a film and also because there are certain characters and situations which have a very deep well inside of me - because this one is so deep in me, for some reason - I feel like I can still mine a lot out of it. I don't think I'll have too many stories like that in my life, but I think this is one of them."
This is the story of Pippa Lee, whose life goes through a series of spins and stages before she ends up (as the book begins), in a retirement community with her successful husband, Herb, who is 30 years her senior. Pippa throws parties, makes crème brulée, watches Herb's fat intake and makes household lists while he works.
"IN A FUNNY WAY, Pippa is an artist's wife without being married to an artist," explains Miller. "There's often this reference [ in the book] to the idea of the artist's wife and that was something that I had a chance to observe up close growing up." Growing up for Miller included exposure to a host of established artists who were part of her parents' dinner-party circle, among them the novelist William Styron, and the artist and sculptor Alexander Calder, whose wife, Louisa Calder, Miller recalls as the quintessential artist's wife. It's a role Miller finds neither submissive nor demeaning. "It was a kind of an art, it was a happening, it was a way of making your life into art," she recalls. "In many cases these men would have just been rattling around in these windy old houses without these women who were filling their lives up, making their lives beautiful, feeding them, bringing them friends. I think it is something to be celebrated."
As befits an artist's wife, Pippa's life, or at least the one we meet her in, revolves around Herb, but as a young girl growing up, it is her relationship with her mother, the highly-strung, speed-taking Suki that defines her. "I was interested in a relationship with a mother-daughter that's almost like a love affair in that it's so intense," says Miller. "The way that they are with each other is super charged." Pippa's subsequent spin into a highly sexualised existence seems to stem from this concentrated early relationship, and Suki's legacy is never resolved for Pippa. The powerful nature of this mother-daughter struggle prompts the question of how much of Miller's own upbringing was mined for material. "My mother was a very different character from Suki," she insists. "But there were definitely strands that I used, memories . . . there were definitely bits and pieces from my mother's relationship with me."
How much her personal experience becomes fodder for her fiction is a recurring question, and Miller stresses that not everything she writes is necessarily culled from her own intriguing private life. "People do forget that for the most part a work of fiction is a work of imagination," she says. Yet there's no getting away from Miller's genealogy, which clearly played some part in the formation of the artist she has become.
"I'm quite sure there are links," she admits. "When I read my father's prose, [ I see] he also valued economy very much, and had a certain kind of utilitarian attitude towards writing, toward prose, which I share."
Working out how far this influence extends is an impossible task. "It's so hard to say how much your own genealogy so to speak influences you, changes you, forms you, because if you'd had a different grandmother, if you'd had different parents, how do you know how different you would have been?" she asks reasonably. "I can't subtract my family from my life."
She expresses neither gratitude for nor resentment of her particular family tree. "Sometimes you wish you could have been born differently, but you weren't and so in a way it becomes kind of fruitless [ to speculate]."
Miller now has a family of her own, and is raising her sons, Ronan and Cashel, with Day- Lewis in their Co Wicklow home. Although much of her novel was written in Ireland, it's very much an American book. "I don't feel ready to write about Ireland," explains Miller. "I don't feel I have the authority to write about Ireland and I don't know if I ever will."
Despite her strong connections here and the kinship she says she feels with Irish people, she is constantly drawn back to the country of her birth. "I'm definitely an American writer and eventually I'll have to go back," she says. "As much as I'm so disgusted with my country, I love it very much." She concedes that one benefit to being in Ireland is the artistic distance it has afforded her. "It's very good to get away from your culture, to watch it from a little bit of a distance. It was very helpful with this book."
Also helpful was the support she received from her husband, Day-Lewis, and though Miller admits she is nowhere near the kind of wife embodied so memorably in Pippa Lee, she says being married to an artist has helped her own development. "I love being able to ask Daniel questions and talk to him about everything regarding my work and be able to share his to a degree, and I think it would be quite frustrating for me to be with somebody who just didn't understand all of that," she says. Being married to someone so devoted to his art has also encouraged her to up her own game. "If you're with somebody who has great integrity, it forces your own integrity, it keeps you remembering you're on the right road," she says.
AFTER TWO AND A HALF years on this particular road, she's now ready for the next project, in this case the film version of her novel. "It will be a different way of telling the story," explains Miller, who slips into her filmmaker's skin with unsettling ease. "There are things you don't need in a film that you need in a book. Repetition works very well in books sometimes, whereas in film you only really need to say something once, because it's so big and visual."
Passing her characters on to actors, to embody them as they will, has its difficulties, but Miller says she is ready to watch how her story develops on the big screen. "In a way that's the game, that's part of it," she says. "You make something that you love so much, you burnish it, you polish it, you make it as good as you can, and then you have to abandon it." Her eagerness to meet the challenges of Pippa Lee's translation to film is palpable. "It's exciting - like falling out of an airplane without a parachute exciting," she says. "It's scary and it's exciting. And I guess I'm always looking to be scared, in a way. If you're not a little bit frightened by what you're doing, then why bother?"
There is a fearsomeness to Rebecca Miller, despite her delicate features, and for all her accessibility over the course of our meeting, she seems to remain just a little out of reach - perhaps it's because her publicist is asked to stay within earshot for the duration of our interview, or maybe because there are some subjects - like her brother, who was born with Down syndrome and raised in an institution - that I have been asked not to broach.
Early in her book, Pippa Lee is described by a friend as "a mystery, a cipher, something which is nearly extinct these days". It's a description that could also apply to Miller, for all her generosity and warmth. "I think fiction is a form of hiding," she tells me. "All fiction writers are there, but they're not always there in the place you think they are, they're hiding behind a rock that you don't expect, and that's definitely true of me. I'm interested in revealing and hiding myself at the same time."
The private lives of Pippa Lee may be an open book, but those of Rebecca Miller are another matter entirely.
The Private Lives of Pippa Lee is published by Canongate on Apr 1