The Outlandish Companion - Diana Gabaldon [203]
Q: Jamie is described as being unable to wink, but in several places in the books, he “opens one eye” to look at Claire. Isn’t this the same thing? If he can open one eye at a time, surely he can blink?
A: Well, no, it’s not really the same thing. The movements are controlled by different sets of muscles. Try this: Close both eyes, then open one. You should feel a “pull” or movement, in the muscles of your upper eyelid/lower forehead.
Okay. Now, with both eyes open, wink with one eye. Assuming you can do this, you should feel most of the muscle movement in the upper cheek and lower eyelid muscles. See?
There was a long discussion on this point in one of the AOL groups, with people trying it both ways. Turns out there are quite a few people out there who can’t wink! Some people can wink, but only with one eye. Most were able to open one eye at a time, but some people (who could wink) couldn’t open one eye and leave the other closed. Likewise, many people could lift one eyebrow, but not the other. Evidently, there’s quite a lot of individual idiosyncrasy in eyelid-muscle coordination.
Q: How do you pronounce your name? What kind of name is it?
A: Gabaldon is a Hispanic name. This means it has two common pronunciations, one English, one Spanish. The most common (English) pronunciation is GAB-uhl-dohn (long “o” in the last syllable; it rhymes with “stone”).
The common Spanish pronunciation is gah-vahl-DOHN (still a long “o”). If I meet anyone who pronounces the name correctly in Spanish, I know that they are a) from New Mexico, and b) very likely from the area around Belen, which is where my father came from.11 (Yes, Gabaldon is my own name, not my husband’s).12
Q: What happened to Claire’s pearls? She pawned them, in Dragonfly in Amber, but later on she gives them to Brianna.
A: Well, when I finished the draft of the manuscript, I realized upon reading it through that I had forgotten to get the pearls back. I therefore made a quick note in the margin—“Get pearls!”—but didn’t do anything about it until we had reached the galley proof stage.
Since changes in the text are highly undesirable at this stage, whatever I did had to be brief—and it was. On page 672 (U.S. hardcover edition): “I am a fool,” Jamie grumbled, climbing the steep, cobbled streets to the wynd where Alex Randall had his lodgings. “We should have left yesterday, at once, as soon as we got back your pearls from the pawnbroker! D’ye no ken how far it is to Inverness? And we wi’ little more than nags to get us there?”
Q:In Drums of Autumn, what happened to Willie, after he and Jamie went to the Indian village?
A: I reckon he and Jamie returned to Fraser’s Ridge, whereupon he was joyfully reunited with the recovered John Grey, and the two of them went on their merry way to Virginia.
These are long books, but there’s only so much room in them, even so; I can’t take extra space to explain events that can reasonably be taken for granted, or there wouldn’t be room to deal with the Truly Interesting Stuff. And while I could certainly have thought of some Interesting Stuff to happen after Willie’s return with Jamie, explicating it and tying it in with the overall structure of the story would have made the book substantially longer.13
Q: Are you Scottish, or English?
A: American. Raised in Flagstaff, Arizona.14 However, my ancestry is both English (with one German branch) and Mexican-American (Latina, Hispanic, Chicana, whatever you want to call it); one of my maternal great-grandfathers emigrated from England (Yorkshire) to Arizona in the late 1800s, and two other branches of my maternal family arrived in New York during the American Revolution,15 while my father’s family is from New Mexico.16
Q: Have you ever been to Scotland?
A: I had never been there when I wrote Outlander, and did that book entirely from library research (since at the time, I thought the book was purely