Chocolate-Infused Dreams
Conversations with French-English writer Joanne Harris

There is a first moment for everything: The first kiss, the first film that moves to the core, the first song that changes the perspective on what music sounds like, and the first book that stands out from the whole library of hardcovers.

First time I discovered Joanne Harris was through a used copy of her novel Chocolat. I admit that I liked the film; not loved, liked. And was curious to see what the novel would read like after such an interesting film. And what I found when I read the first sentence, was way beyond my expectations. Something out of a vivid dream, a kaleidoscopic mesh of sounds, tastes, textures, and scents. Harris’s novels were not books to be read as part of a reading marathon for a virtual book club. They were immersive texts where feelings and scents coalesced to create a magical realism that didn’t include mythical creatures or breathtaking kingdoms. Her magic was dark and drenched in hot caramel, feminine and mystical. Her writing drew me in and I had to read “The Lollipop Shoes”, “Peaches for Monsieur le Curé”, and “The Strawberry Thief”, then ventured off to some of her darker stuff such as “Blueeyed Boy”. 

First things first: Joanne Harris is a French-English writer. She studied Modern and Mediaeval Languages at Cambridge and was a teacher for 15 years. Her most famous novel Chocolat was turned into an Oscar-nominated film starring Juliette Binoche and Johnny Depp. Her work infuses magical realism with religious themes, femininity and misogyny, motherhood, witchcraft, and food. Food, scents, sensual descriptions, and themes are central to Joanne Harris’s world. She weaves the narrative without a kaleidoscope of scents, tastes, textures, and emotions. Her novels are easy reads in terms of pace and narrative, but they are hard to get out of. Readers get lost sometimes in the delicious darkness of the text and are usually left with a bittersweet aftertaste when they have come to the last page of the tale. Like dark chocolate and pink champagne, Joanne Harris’s writing is both luxurious and dark, yin and yang, bright and cocooned.

I became infatuated with Harris, a woman so far away, living in what I envisioned as an orchard French heaven where the air smelled of vanilla and hot melting chocolate, and tasted like the finest wine one could ever drink. I read her “The Little Book of Chocolat” and was mesmerized by the potency of this confection in all its forms and combinations. I wanted to learn more about Harris. Was her creative process always that delectable? How did the woman who created “Chocolat” dive into dark territory and come up with “Blueeyed Boy”? What was there to expect more from her? I sought her and communicated with her via email, asking her about her craft and her experiences as a female writer who has a distinct voice and writing style. I wondered why she chose to become a writer in the first place, a question I like to ask often even though I struggle with the answer to it sometimes,

“Because it’s what I do best. Stories exist and thrive in many media, and writing happens to be mine. Words, correctly used, can be music, movement, and performance, as well as so many other things. Words are power.”

Since most of the novels that I loved by Joanne Harris centered around food or had food as -almost- the main protagonist, I had to ask her why she chose the culinary space as an integral part of her creative universe and whether she believed in certain foods as seductive or “sinful” as they are described in some of her novels such as the Vianne Rocher universe companions,

“The concept of food as something sinful comes from a very privileged and toxic place, and I don’t subscribe to it. But food has personal associations for all of us, and it’s something that everyone can share and understand. You can tell a lot about a person by the way they relate to food, how they celebrate, whether or not they cook, and how they remember the food of their childhood. As such, for a writer, food is a good way of exploring a character’s personality, relationships, past, and culture. “

I wondered if she weaved magic into her storytelling because she believed that the modern materialistic world needed a little magic to move forward or spice things up. Her answers, as simple as tactful as one wouldn’t expect from a writer whose worlds oozed with dreaminess and sensuality, surprised me,

“I don’t think of magic in that way. It’s not about making a story more exciting; it’s a way of seeing the world differently. Magic in my fiction is essentially about perception, deception, and transformation. It’s about how we see the world, other people, and ourselves, and how we go about changing those things – hopefully, for the better.”

In her novel "Peaches for Monsieur Le Cure" -the third from the Vianne Rocher universe- she had written about Islam; a community most individuals are cautious while writing about, so I asked her what drew her to that world and the idea of fasting in Ramadan, especially since she already played the theme of abstaining from food and drink in “Chocolat”,

“I’ve written about traditions of feasting and fasting under Catholicism – why not then under Islam? I live in a very cosmopolitan place, with a large and friendly community of Muslims, who helped me gain the confidence to tell the story I needed to tell as honestly as I could. I wanted to write about two communities in opposition to each other through ignorance and suspicion, how they have far more in common with each other than they initially think; and how the communities are brought together by compassion, friendship, and mutual respect.”

Since she always went back to Vianne Rocher and dug deeper into the story, I wondered what was about this universe that she as a writer couldn’t resist. It had always fascinated me how some characters had a firm grip on their creators and were hard to let go, and since Harris had played that game masterfully already, I needed to ask how and why she did it,

“I wrote Chocolat as the mother of a child of five, and that mother-daughter relationship lies at the very heart of the novel. The subsequent books have followed the lives of Vianne and her daughters, driven by my own experiences with my daughter. Though I am not Vianne, I do have this in common with her, which is why I feel connected to her in this way.”

I struggled with times when my gender stood in the way of being taken seriously as a writer and I asked Joanne if she faced a similar situation. Her answer was curt and fierce as would be expected from someone so opinionated and driven,

“There’s sexism in all areas of the publishing industry, of course; but the idea that women writers are to be taken less seriously than men is most often held by ignorant people who don’t know very much about literature...”

Even when asking her about the movie adaptation of “Chocolat”, Harris seemed distant, detached from the whole process. It amazed me because I would have been quite the opposite had one of my -ahem, future- novels gotten adapted into a film or a miniseries. Her sense of creativity enthralled me and deepened my respect for her,

“Fortunately, the author isn’t the one responsible for the making of a movie adaptation of their work. I watched the process from afar, with a couple of short visits to the movie set during the filming. It was lots of fun, and I got to know the cast and the director, but I would never expect a movie to perfectly embody a novel; they are such very different media that it would be unfair to make the comparison.”

I couldn’t talk to Joanne Harris without mentioning one of her scariest writings to date; Blueeyed Boy. It was a horrifying novel, a dark psychological tale of poisonous familial relationships and the dark recesses of the internet. It gave me nightmares. I wondered how she ventured into that dark place and asked about her inspiration especially since on her official website she wrote about the inspiration behind this particular novel in cryptic, fascinating prose,

“The role of a writer is to observe and reflect humanity. There’s plenty of darkness in the world to observe, and some of it should inevitably find its way into my stories. Monsters are not figures of fantasy: they walk among us every day. Through stories we learn to defeat them, and sometimes, to understand them too...”

Like all writers, I asked Harris whether she would like to see another of her writings as a film on the big screen or -more appropriately now- a Netflix/Amazon/Hulu miniseries,

“It would be an interesting experience, and I’d love to see it happen. I think most of my books are too complex to be filmic and are therefore better suited to being made into a series than a stand-alone movie. But those are not my decisions to make: I can only watch and hope.”

Since “online” according to Joanne Harris in one of her interviews is a “small community” as good as any French village or a Catholic school, I had to ask why she was fascinated with small communities in general,

“Small communities contain all the elements of potential drama, and their chemistry is so volatile that it often takes only one person to arrive or to leave to make a significant difference.”

As someone who found multiple taboo-breaking elements in Harris’s writings, I asked whether she viewed herself as a writer through that lens or if it was just my perception of her work,

“I don’t approach my work in that way: if I have challenged taboos or establishment ideas, it is because I am temperamentally drawn to asking difficult questions, as well as being temperamentally opposed to intolerance and prejudice.”

I am a firm believer in divine femininity. I read too much into the concept and usurp the wisdom of writers and researchers like Clarissa Pinkola Estes. That’s why I saw the three integral female protagonists in “Chocolat” - Anouk, Vianne, and Zozie, as different sides to women as seen in folklore or mythology. I asked Harris to comment,

“Folklore tends to favor archetypes, and yes, it’s possible to see my characters as such – the mother, the wise child, the temptress, the witch – but these archetypal elements exist alongside their very human, very singular characteristics. I want my characters to live and breathe, not simply serve a story. “

I had to ask a writer as mesmerizing as Harris to express her sources of inspiration. Even though in different cultures, inspiration is a foreign concept -ask Christopher Doyle about how Asian filmmakers work from a place of enigma rather than inspiration- to Harris, the concept resonated and she was generous enough to share with me hers,

“Inspiration comes from everywhere. Books, current affairs, art, music, theatre, overheard conversations, personal experience, and sometimes even dreams. I try not to set limits on how and where I find my ideas, but I know that to make art, you need to experience art, and to write about life, you need to live life to the full.

[On her most inspiring writers] I loved Ray Bradbury as a child: as an adult, I am still in awe of his energy; his love of language; his compassion.”