Interview with Jean M. Auel

Jean M. Auel dared to reinvent her life in her forties. After a career in business, she became consumed by an idea for a story set 25,000 years ago. As she began researching Neanderthals and Cro-Magnon people (the first early modern humans), Auel zeroed in on the archaeological and anthropological study of Ice Age-era Europe. Her debut novel, The Clan of the Cave Bear, was published in 1980 and would become Earth's Children, an epic series that has spanned six books and approximately 4,000 pages and sold more than 45 million copies. Now the 75-year-old has finished the saga of her intrepid Cro-Magnon heroine, Ayla, with the heavily anticipated final book, The Land of Painted Caves. The Oregon-based writer chatted with Goodreads about her extensive travels to prehistoric sites around the world.

Goodreads: It's been more than 30 years since you started work on the Earth's Children series. How do you feel now that it is finished?

Jean Auel: It's a little like sending your kids off to college. You raise them up and you get them ready and you get them registered. But I just haven't really accepted it yet. When the time comes, when it's published, and there's nothing more I can do about it, then I can say, "OK, it's done." And then I can cry. I really want to go back and reread the first books, and then either be upset or be happy. I'm not sure.

GR: You were a first-time novelist with The Clan of the Cave Bear. How have you evolved as a writer?

JA: I hope I'm a better writer, but I have to tell you it never gets easier. Writing is the hardest work I've ever done. I'm a mother, I had five children, I was working full-time, I was going to university at night, I got a master's degree in business administration, and I did all those things at the same time—and writing is the hardest thing. I love it. It's what I want to do, and even though I'm getting old, I'd still like to continue writing. I could write a mystery, maybe a prehistoric mystery. I really don't know. I've got a file with about 150 ideas I've accumulated over the years, but I don't know if any of them would be what I'd really want to get into—it just depends.

GR: Your love of research is well documented. You've learned wilderness survival skills and traveled to many archaeological sites.

JA: Right now, if I were lost in the wilderness, I feel that I could probably make it out, find a way to get home. I've learned a lot, and it's been great fun. Every single one of the caves in this last book I've been in—except for one very small one—and they really are exceptional.

GR: Is there a favorite memory from one of those trips?

JA: Lascaux was the first one that I went into. I had been reading about that cave, and I thought I understood it. Then I went there with an archaeology teacher from California. It was built for tourists, but then people were harming the artwork, so they were allowing no more than six people a day for no more than 35 minutes. They were really trying to protect it.

You go down these big stairs that were made for a crowd, and you go in one metal door and you close it, and there's just the dim light—you're getting your eyes accustomed to the dark. Then you go through another metal door, and you close it behind you and wait a little bit. You dip your feet in a solution of, I think, formaldehyde and antibiotic so that you're not bringing in stuff from outside. Then you open another door and, of course, the light's very dark, and it's a downward slope so I was watching my footing. There was a railing at the bottom, and I held onto that railing and I looked up, and I just literally couldn't breathe. It was so overwhelming. So beautiful.

It's hard to believe that this long ago we—meaning Cro-Magnon modern humans—were the ones who invented art. Not every cave has gorgeous art, but the ones that do are spectacular. They utilize the bumps and the dips in the cave walls; it's not a flat surface like a painting. When you turn off the flashlight and strike a match instead, in that flickering light the shadows of these dips in the cave walls kind of move, and it almost makes you feel like those animals are alive. It's pretty spectacular.

GR: How long has the artwork endured?

JA: It's sometimes very hard to date the art on the wall. For a while they were trying to date the art by how crude or how finished it was. But by the time they found Chauvet cave [in 1994], they had a means of dating using only tiny bits of charcoal. The trouble with Lascaux is that the black is not charcoal; it's black manganese dioxide, which is a rock. With Chauvet cave they were able to date the charcoal: It's between 32,000 and 37,000 years old. It's just overwhelming. We've been doing art for a long time.

GR: In The Land of Painted Caves, your heroine Ayla is training to be a spiritual leader. How did you construct what these people's rituals and beliefs would have been like?

JA: I researched more contemporary hunter-gatherer societies and their spiritual beliefs, but a lot of it is my imagination. Very often people come up with spiritual beliefs to answer questions. Why did my child get sick? Why did the rain come and flood the river? People don't—and still don't—have those answers, so we try to come up with reasons. I think that's the case for the people I'm writing about. But it's largely my imagination: the counting words, the colors, the various kinds of things that [Ayla] learns. That was great fun to figure out and just play with.

GR: Goodreads member Tara Lynn asks, "I'd like to ask Jean Auel about the way she clearly defines the feminist/matriarchy "Others" of her story vs. the patriarchy of the "Clan." What evidence does she have to support a belief that the Zelandonii, the S'Armunai, the Mamuti societies (and others described in the series) would have lived under a practicing matriarchy?"

JA: None. There's no way that anyone can come up with evidence for what people's beliefs were in those days. I will say that when it comes to the Cro-Magnon, the early modern humans, especially about 27,000 years ago (give or take a couple thousand years), they were [making] figures of big women. They're fat, and they're abundant. Some people say they're pregnant, and they're not. I've been pregnant, and I know what it looks like. These [figures represent] women who have been pregnant—mothers. Somehow that gave me a hint.

GR: How do you balance fictional storytelling with the archaeological evidence for these ancient societies?

JA: If it's bone or stone or pollen analysis, then I have a pretty good basis. If it's not hard, then you have to make some guesses, and sometimes you can get a lot of information even though it's just bones and stones. My original idea was this girl taking care of a man with a crippled arm. Dr. Ralph Solecki did a dig in Iraq called Shanidar Cave; they found a Neanderthal skeleton of an old man. The evidence indicated that he had been injured, was probably blind in one eye, and that his arm had been amputated—not broken off, purposefully cut. He was probably crippled from a young age. That became the basis for Creb [a character in The Clan of the Cave Bear]. When you look at that [evidence], I have to ask myself these questions: Who would take care of a crippled kid? Maybe someone who loved him. Who would take care of a young man who couldn't go off hunting woolly mammoths? Maybe his community cared for their weak and wounded. All of a sudden I'm looking at these stories of the Neanderthals being red of tooth and claw, and I'm saying, "That's not what that evidence shows me." Even though it's stone and bone, you can sometimes make these inferences.

GR: Ayla is always pushing the boundaries of whatever community she's in. Would you call her a feminist?

JA: Well, I'm a feminist. I'm not trying to make her a feminist in any sense of the word, but I am one. I'm 75 years old. I've been on the leading edge of that wedge that's been breaking in, and now more and more women are finding their way in the business world. But when I was beginning, it was a little more difficult.

I wouldn't call Ayla a feminist because I don't think feminism was an issue. What I've read of the hunter-gatherer societies is that the woman's role was very much respected. They knew that her contribution to the survival of their community was very much needed. Most anthropologists will tell you that hunter-gatherer societies tend to be equal. So I didn't feel I had to be feminist because they already were.

GR: Goodreads member Christopher H. writes, "I think readers might be interested in hearing how you've had to adapt your telling of Ayla's story, if at all, as new information has become available to you over the past 30 years, including new archaeological discoveries, advances in science (e.g., genetics, paleoclimatology, paleobotany, etc.), new theories of human evolution and expansion as well as the human/Neanderthal interactions you address so poignantly in your novels."

JA: It's interesting because I really haven't changed anything. But I'll tell you something that made me smile. Ayla had a mixed son (half Neanderthal) in the first story. What's lucky for me is that there are scientists with different points of view. A lot of times a scientist will tell me, "You used Dr. So-and-So's opinion, and he's wrong." But they knew I wasn't just pulling out of the blue sky. They knew I was coming from someplace that they understood. When I first started writing, many scientists had the opinion that the Neanderthals and the Cro-Magnon were close. And then they separated them. In the past couple months they've looked at the DNA studies of modern humans, and they're saying that everyone who is of European extraction has between 1 and 4 percent Neanderthal DNA. I've always said, "I guess we all have a little bit of Neanderthal DNA in us," and guess what? Apparently that's what they're coming up with now!

GR: Describe a typical day spent writing. Do you have any unusual writing habits?

JA: A typical night. I'm a night person. Generally what happens is that I get up about two in the afternoon, and I make what is my husband's lunch or dinner and my breakfast, and we spend some time together in the evening. Then he goes to bed and I go to work. I often catch the sun rising. Mornings are terrible for me, so I'd rather sleep mornings.

There's no such thing as a writer's block. I get inspiration from working. I just have to push through and finally it'll start to come together again. The brain is always going, you just don't realize it. I don't know how many pages I'll get done in any particular day, but I can determine how many hours I'll put in. When I first started I was obsessed—putting in 16 hours a day, seven days a week, and loving it. My in-laws told my husband that perhaps he should get some help for me. Once the book was published it was OK because writers can be a little crazy.

GR: What authors, books, or ideas have influenced you?

JA: I'm a reader. I love fiction. I love nonfiction, too. I love science. Some people have sports or fashion magazines in the bathroom—I've got science magazines. Those are my favorite reading: New Scientist and Scientific American.

I remember when I was very young, my sixth-grade teacher read a fairy tale to the class. It was called East of the Sun and West of the Moon, and I loved it. Looking back, I think the reason I loved it was that the man was captured by the witch, and the woman had to go save him. I didn't know it at the time but it was just easier for me to relate to. Even if it was an adventure story and there were guys battling with swords, that's what I'm doing—the action. I'm not sitting back there with the girl going, "Save me!"

GR: What are you reading now?

JA: Before Versailles by Karleen Koen. It's about Louis XIV just after he was king, and I'm finding it fascinating. I love historical fiction—it's like getting history in fun doses.