Original subtitles

[MUSIC PLAYING]

"Alias Grace" is based on a double murder that

took place in 1843 in which the man

servant was hanged for the murder of his employer

Thomas Kinnear.

The housekeeper was also murdered

but that murder was never tried.

but that murder was never tried.

The Maid servant, Grace Marks, was

condemned as an accessory in the first murder

although we know she didn't shoot Thomas Kinnear.

She was condemned because she had a window of opportunity

in which she could have told on the man servant, McDermott,

and she didn't do it.

So that's why she got a death sentence.

But then a lot of people petitioned

on her behalf and her sentence was commuted to life.

Right before he was hanged, McDermott

Right before he was hanged, McDermott

said Grace Marks helped me to strangle Nancy Montgomery.

He was, however, a well-known liar.

But just because somebody is a well-known liar

doesn't mean they're lying on every occasion.

He gets hanged, she's the only person left alive,

and she never told.

So that's the basic story.

And the novel is about the attempt

to discover the truth on behalf of a pre-freudian psychiatric

to discover the truth on behalf of a pre-freudian psychiatric

doctor who has been commissioned to prove her

innocent by some reformists who think

that she was a young girl wrongly sentenced to life.

So she claims to have lost her memory.

She can't remember what happened.

And he's trying to find out where that part of her memory

may have gone.

may have gone.

So it's told through Grace.

She's telling the story.

She's telling the story to him, but she's also having

some thoughts of her own.

And he, in the third person, we hear his story

about him trying to find out the truth.

And we have Simon Jordan's mother's letters to him.

And we have his conversations with other people

who were involved.

who were involved.

And we also have some newspaper accounts and poems

and literary works of that time and from the supposed

confession of Grace Marks.

Although you don't know of course, whether it really

was because, I hate to break this to you,

but newspaper accounts are not always accurate.

This is the beginning of "Alias Grace."

This is the beginning of "Alias Grace."

So it is the first couple of pages.

But the wrong thing about it is that it's in the wrong person.

It's in the third person.

And I in fact, wrote hundreds pages

of "Alias Grace" in that third person.

And then two things happened.

I was doing this in France, and I was on a train to Paris.

And I got a blinding headache.

And I got a blinding headache.

And in the middle of that blinding headache,

I realized that I was going to have

to throw out that first 100 pages

and transpose them into the first person

because it wasn't going to work in the third.

And this is something that can often unblock a book for you,

either changing the person from first to third

or from third to first.

And if you're really daring, to second.

And if you're really daring, to second.

Or changing the tense from present to past,

from past to present can often make all the difference.

So if things are not working, you can try that.

And each person for a second and third

gives you quite a different relationship to the story.

So as a first person narrator, Grace can lie.

So as a first person narrator, Grace can lie.

As a third person narrator, it was a lot harder

for her to do that.

So that is those first pages but in the wrong person.

A lot of things just don't work out.

The wastepaper basket is your friend.

It was invented for you by God.

There's a form of storytelling that you

can call witness literature.

can call witness literature.

Witness literature is always first person.

And some witness literature is real,

you know what was it like in the gulag.

And some witness literature is fictionalized

witness literature.

The "Handmaid's Tale" is told almost entirely

from the first person and almost entirely

as remembered consciousness because the central character

is in fact recording her memories of what has

is in fact recording her memories of what has

happened on a tape recorder.

So this is her memory of what it was like to be in this room

that she finds herself living in against her will.

"A chair, a table, a lamp, above on the white ceiling

a relief ornament in the shape of a wreath,

a relief ornament in the shape of a wreath,

and in the center of it a blank space

plastered over like the place in a face

where the eye has been taken out.

There must have been a chandelier once.

They've removed anything you can tie a rope to.

A window, two white curtains.

Under the window, a window seat with a little cushion.

When the window is partly open--

it only opens partly--

the air can come in and make the curtains move.

I can sit-in the chair or on the window seat,

I can sit-in the chair or on the window seat,

hands folded, and watch this.

Sunlight comes into through window too

and falls on the floor, which is made of wood,

in narrow strips, highly polished.

I can smell the polish.

There's a rug on the floor, oval, of braided rags.

This is the kind of touch they like,

folk art, archaic, made by women in their spare time

from things that have no further use.

A return to traditional values, waste not, want not.

A return to traditional values, waste not, want not.

I'm not being wasted, why do I want?"

So in this case, the regime of Gilead

isn't real although everything in it is based on real things.

So somebody might find this and know it happened.

And that's what she's doing because she records all

of this, and then she hides it.

And lo and behold, several hundred years later somebody

And lo and behold, several hundred years later somebody

does find it.