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[MUSIC PLAYING]

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"Alias Grace" is based
on a double murder that

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took place in 1843
in which the man

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servant was hanged for
the murder of his employer

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Thomas Kinnear.

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The housekeeper
was also murdered

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but that murder was never tried.

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but that murder was never tried.

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The Maid servant,
Grace Marks, was

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condemned as an accessory
in the first murder

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although we know she didn't
shoot Thomas Kinnear.

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She was condemned because she
had a window of opportunity

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

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and she didn't do it.

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So that's why she
got a death sentence.

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But then a lot of
people petitioned

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on her behalf and her
sentence was commuted to life.

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Right before he was
hanged, McDermott

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Right before he was
hanged, McDermott

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said Grace Marks helped me
to strangle Nancy Montgomery.

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He was, however,
a well-known liar.

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But just because somebody
is a well-known liar

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

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

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and she never told.

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So that's the basic story.

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And the novel is
about the attempt

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

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

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doctor who has been
commissioned to prove her

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innocent by some
reformists who think

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that she was a young girl
wrongly sentenced to life.

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So she claims to
have lost her memory.

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She can't remember
what happened.

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

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may have gone.

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may have gone.

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So it's told through Grace.

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She's telling the story.

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

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some thoughts of her own.

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

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about him trying to
find out the truth.

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

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And we have his conversations
with other people

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who were involved.

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who were involved.

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And we also have some
newspaper accounts and poems

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and literary works of that
time and from the supposed

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confession of Grace Marks.

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

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was because, I hate
to break this to you,

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but newspaper accounts
are not always accurate.

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This is the beginning
of "Alias Grace."

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This is the beginning
of "Alias Grace."

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So it is the first
couple of pages.

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

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It's in the third person.

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And I in fact,
wrote hundreds pages

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of "Alias Grace" in
that third person.

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And then two things happened.

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

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And I got a blinding headache.

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And I got a blinding headache.

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And in the middle of
that blinding headache,

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I realized that I
was going to have

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to throw out that
first 100 pages

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and transpose them
into the first person

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

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

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either changing the
person from first to third

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or from third to first.

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And if you're really
daring, to second.

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And if you're really
daring, to second.

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Or changing the tense
from present to past,

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from past to present can
often make all the difference.

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

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And each person for
a second and third

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gives you quite a different
relationship to the story.

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So as a first person
narrator, Grace can lie.

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So as a first person
narrator, Grace can lie.

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As a third person narrator,
it was a lot harder

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for her to do that.

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

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A lot of things
just don't work out.

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The wastepaper basket
is your friend.

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It was invented for you by God.

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There's a form of
storytelling that you

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can call witness literature.

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can call witness literature.

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Witness literature is
always first person.

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And some witness
literature is real,

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you know what was it
like in the gulag.

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And some witness
literature is fictionalized

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witness literature.

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The "Handmaid's Tale"
is told almost entirely

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from the first person
and almost entirely

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as remembered consciousness
because the central character

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is in fact recording
her memories of what has

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is in fact recording
her memories of what has

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happened on a tape recorder.

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

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that she finds herself
living in against her will.

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

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a relief ornament in
the shape of a wreath,

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a relief ornament in
the shape of a wreath,

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and in the center
of it a blank space

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plastered over like
the place in a face

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where the eye has
been taken out.

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There must have been
a chandelier once.

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

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A window, two white curtains.

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

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When the window is partly open--

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it only opens partly--

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the air can come in and
make the curtains move.

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

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

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hands folded, and watch this.

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Sunlight comes into
through window too

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

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in narrow strips,
highly polished.

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I can smell the polish.

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

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This is the kind
of touch they like,

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

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from things that
have no further use.

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

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

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

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So in this case,
the regime of Gilead

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

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So somebody might find
this and know it happened.

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

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of this, and then she hides it.

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And lo and behold, several
hundred years later somebody

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And lo and behold, several
hundred years later somebody

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does find it.