| Livesey wrote early drafts of Eva in the third person, but it wasn't until she saw she could write the novel in first person that she knew she could finish it. "It was hard taking that kind of precipitous step into being able to imagine your parents," she says. "It seemed initially much easier to write about Eva in the third person, which was of course how I had always heard her spoken about." Writing three other novels had made her more technically adept, as well as more aware of the limitations and possibilities of the first person voice. "What I wanted to convey was Eva telling you this story. That the life was already lived, and that she was simply choosing what to tell you and how to tell it," Livesey says. "I threw out hundreds of pages about the war and about Eva's childhood and about almost everything, before I realized that I could achieve more in a matter of paragraphs or a few pages."
Struggling with "how to make the personally interesting artistically interesting," Livesey introduced the character of Samuel Rosenblum, a pioneering plastic surgeon who romances Eva. Livesey based Rosenblum on real-life plastic surgeon Archie McIndoe, head of the burns unit at East Grinstead near London. "It wasn't until I stumbled across this biography of a famous plastic surgeon that I realized what a crucial time the Second World War had been for plastic surgery," she says. "In Britain, it was the cradle of plastic surgery." The wounded patients on the reconstructive surgery ward serve as a metaphor for the struggle between appearance and reality in Eva's life. "She's someone for whom appearance and reality don't line up in a normal way, and that's what happens to these young men. The face is our normal passport to reality, so when your face is gone or dramatically changed this gap opens up between appearance and reality. Your appearance is no longer mirroring your inner reality."
Eva shares with Livesey's other novels a compelling sense of mystery, an edge of menace that transforms the ordinary into the extraordinary. In Criminals, a London businessman and his sister inadvertently kidnap a baby; in The Missing World, a boyfriend hides his past from an amnesiac girlfriend. "I think every novel should have a sense of mystery, and I suppose I see menace as one of the accompaniments of mystery," Livesey says. "Eva is related to my other novels in having that what-if quality—what if you found a baby in a bus station, what if someone you were close to lost a large chunk of her memory, what if you had companions nobody else could see." Eva is about "someone standing at an odd angle to the universe. That's something I'm very interested in—ordinary people going one step further."
For Livesey, writing the novel became a kind of comfort. "Eva is partly about certain kinds of loss, and how we make our negotiations with profound loss, and that profound loss is inevitable," she says. "The novel suggests that we do have a relationship with the dead. When I got to the end of writing it, that was one of the big realizations for me, that I did have a relationship with my mother, even though she was dead."
Leah Stewart is the author of a novel, Body of a Girl. She is currently the visiting writer at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee.
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Sewanee Writers' Series Publishes Twelfth Book
 The Sewanee Writers' Series is pleased to announce the March 2004 release of its twelfth book, Greg Williams's Boomtown. Boomtown is the sharp hip tale of New York City dot-commers after the Y2K panic has passed. Internet start-ups are thriving, the stock market is climbing, and the dawn of the new century is just a little too bright for its own good. In this, his second novel, Williams cuts to the core of the optimistic post-millennial psyche by following the lives of Jonathan Scarver, CEO of Allminder.com; Steven Bluestein, a systems analyst bent on revenge against the company; Brad Smith, Allminder's hard-drinking publicity director; and Nicole, a struggling actress hoping for a life that's better than the one she has.
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