By THIRSTY
Emily Holleman’s second novel, The Drowning Kings, continues her
pursuit of Cleopatra, her family and her times that she began in her debut
novel, Cleopatra’s Shadows. A
graduate of Yale University, Holleman worked for several years as an editor at
Salon.com before transporting herself back 2,000 years to the days of ancient
Egypt.
Stay
Thirsty Magazine caught up with Emily Holleman at her home in Brooklyn
for these five questions.
STAY THIRSTY: In your new book, The
Drowning King, you live in a time and place more than 2,000 years ago. How
did you manage working so deeply in the past while still living in the present?
Which era would you rather be alive in?
EMILY HOLLEMAN: There were definitely times that I didn’t feel like I
was living in the present. When I first started researching Cleopatra and her
dynasty, I had just left a job at Salon.com, where I had to be pretty on top of
what was happening around the Internet everyday, and I was so burnt out on the
Internet that I basically didn’t go online for the next six months. I remember
being at a party where someone made a bath salt/cannibalism joke (there was a
pretty horrifying video of a Florida man attacking a homeless person going
around), and I had no idea what they were talking about. My closest reference
for bath salts at that point would have Hippocrates. For a long stretch, I
didn’t read much of anything that was written before about 300 AD.
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| Emily Holleman |
But social media indifference or
no, I’d rather be alive now. Definitely now. While Cleopatra and Arsinoe
exercised a fair amount of power, the ancient world wasn’t a particularly great
place to be a woman. (And even the Ptolemy ladies all met pretty violent ends.)
STAY THIRSTY: Your book is the sequel to your debut work, Cleopatra’s Shadows. In The Drowning King you revisit Cleopatra’s
life during a well-documented time. How did you weave historical fact with
fiction to produce a story that has been called “A high-stakes family drama”…“Full
of tenacity, adventure, and scandal”?
EMILY HOLLEMAN: It helps when the historical facts are already full of
high-stakes and scandal! Cleopatra came from a dynasty rife with intrigue,
incest and internecine rivalries, and the famous queen herself was at least
indirectly responsible for killing three of her siblings. That said, the
Ptolemies are especially fun to write about because how much we know about any
particular historical moment varies dramatically. Basically all surviving
records derive from Roman sources, and so when the Romans are on the scene, we
have a very good sense of what’s going on in Alexandria. When the Romans are
absent—well, it leaves a lot of room for imagination.
STAY THIRSTY: Your sequel has an epigraph that quotes from
Sophocles’ Odepius at Colonus and
states in its concluding lines, “For some of us soon, for others later, joy
turns to hate and back again to love.” How did Sophocles influence your
thinking when you were writing this story?
EMILY HOLLEMAN: While researching, I spent a lot of time curled up
with Sophocles, Homer and Euripides. Cleopatra, Arsinoe, et al. would have been
intimately familiar with the classical Greek dramas and epics, so reading them
myself helped me envision how my characters might have perceived and
interpreted their world. (Not surprisingly, I’m a big believer that we are—in
no small part—shaped by the stories we tell and are told.) In particular,
Sophocles gave me a better understanding of the importance of fate and dreams
in the ancient world. And, besides, the Ptolemies, especially the late
Ptolemies, are an inherently a tragic family: one fated to tear itself a part
and ultimately fall before Rome.
STAY THIRSTY: As you look back to the social and economic period of
Cleopatra’s time, how much did outside events contribute to the fate of the
royals vs. the personalities of the royals themselves?
EMILY HOLLEMAN: On a macro scale, I’m not sure there’s anything any of
the Egyptian royals could have done to stave off a Roman takeover. By the
mid-first century BC, nearly every other independent or semi-independent state
in that part of the world had already become a Roman province, and Egypt was
already under pretty significant Roman sway. (The Ptolemies had been regularly
asking the Senate for help settling their dynastic disputes for almost a
century before Cleopatra and Arsinoe were even born.) That said, the details of
Egypt’s decline and fall—the toxic and intoxicating relationship between Egypt
and Rome, the effect of Cleopatra’s romances on the popular imagination. Well,
I’ve got to hand that to Cleopatra.
STAY THIRSTY: If you had a chance to chat with Cleopatra and Arsinoe
today, what would you ask them and what do you think they would ask you?
EMILY HOLLEMAN: I’d actually want to ask something along the lines of your
previous question: Do either of them believe that there was another strategy that
would have allowed their dynasty to survive? If so, what would they have done
differently? Do they have any regrets? I’d also like to ask how they felt about
each other. In my novels, I assume that they did at one point share a sisterly
bond (the fact that the historical Arsinoe did flee with Cleopatra to Syria
supports that idea), but I’d be curious as to what each of them had to say.
I have no idea what they’d ask me.
Maybe why I didn’t just change history and give everyone a happy ending.
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