Living With Mad Dogs and Englishmen

This Vulture profile of Claire Messud and James Wood, interrupted at intervals by the less-mannerly of their two dogs, makes one dream that Real Dual-Literary Couples of Cambridge may be Bravo’s first move towards the eventual goal of showing opera once more:

“Especially since having children,” Messud continues, “a lot of the time if you ask me ‘Have you read that book?’ the answer would be ‘not personally.’ [BARK!] The household has read it! I’m like the dog eating the leftovers, preying on James’s erudition.” (“On my employment,” Wood mutters, deflecting the compliment.)

“But the embarrassing [BARK!] truth,” she continues, “is that we probably spend more time together than almost anybody we know.”

“It’s funny, in a way, that you don’t have a room of your own,” Wood says. He has a work room upstairs, Messud an office elsewhere, but she often just works around the house. “On the one hand, there is this continuous marital exchange, but on the other there’s an independent thing going on, which is [BARK!] that her work is a life very separate from me [BARK!].”

Messud’s new novel, The Woman Upstairs (Indiebound | Amazon) is out on April 30th, but if you must have a Messud fix now, her novella The Hunters (Indiebound | Amazon) is creepy, glorious, brilliant, and has a very similar cover design.