Since his wife Eva died in 2014, Michel Faber has emerged a changed writer. The author of Under the Skin shares how he charted his grief through poetry and why he carries Eva’s shoes with him
At readings and book events, the Dutch-born author Michel Faber sometimes brings along a pair of red leather shoes, and places them in the front row. The shoes belonged to Eva Youren, his wife of 26 years, who died in the summer of 2014, having been diagnosed with incurable cancer of the bone marrow six years previously. He brought them to the London launch of his long-awaited novel The Book of Strange New Things, published just a few months after her death. The book, which he had been working on for a decade, and which Eva refused to let him set aside as the cancer took over their lives, is about a preacher who travels from a failing Earth to a newly discovered planet where the aliens are hungry for the word of God, and his attempts to bond with these strange new beings while maintaining his connection with the beloved wife he has left so many light years away. The shoes were an almost unbearable symbol of his recent loss: “I wanted them to embody her sprightliness and her vivaciousness, so I chose the last pair of shoes that she really loved, that she didn’t get to wear that much.”
Somehow the challenge of caring for her did something to my chemistry. I think it made new pathways form in the brain
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