Behind the Book Archives

Behind the Book by Brad Watson

by Brad Watson

The character Jane Chisolm in my new novel, Miss Jane, was inspired (an insufficient term I don’t really like) by my great-aunt, Mary Ellis “Jane” Clay, born in 1888 on a farm in east-central Mississippi. That is to say, there was the real person, my great-aunt, about whom we knew very little aside from her apparent (but secret, in terms of details) urogenital birth defect that left her incontinent and alone her entire life; and then there was, is, the character Jane Chisolm, about whom I’ve written, trying to imagine what it must have been like to live a life like that of my Aunt Jane. Jane Chisolm, the character in my novel, is born in 1915 and dies—well, that date is not certain. My Aunt Jane died in my nearby hometown of Meridian in 1975 at the age of 87.

I have only one personal memory of ever seeing Aunt Jane. When I was a boy, my mother’s extended family gathered every Sunday afternoon at my grandmother’s farmhouse in the country. One day, a car came up the red dirt road and parked beneath the oak tree near where we children stood. A man got out, went around to the passenger door, and helped out an old, thin, frail-looking woman dressed entirely in black, her long gaunt face obscured by a black lace veil pinned to the front of her little black hat. An uncle trotted over from the house to help, and the old woman was carefully conveyed across the yard to the house, the men’s hands gently gripping her bony elbows and resting against the small of her back. All we children had fallen silent and still as we watched the grave and strange processional.

One of my cousins whispered: “That’s Aunt Jane.”

“Who?” someone else said.

“Granddaddy Spurge’s sister,” another said.

Then we kept quiet, watching. We knew there was something remarkable about this old woman, this frail relic in black. Our parents would say, vaguely, when we asked, that “something was wrong” with Aunt Jane. Though what that might be we had no earthly idea at the time.

Years later, I was going through a box of old photographs and came across a black-and-white snapshot of a pretty girl wearing a dark dress and wide-brimmed hat, looking back over her shoulder at the photographer. Her expression and pose struck me as flirtatious. When I asked my mother who it was, she said it was Aunt Jane. Great-Aunt Jane.

I was surprised, and curious. This picture looked like it could have been taken by a boyfriend or lover.

My mother said that there were community dances back then, and Jane loved to go to them. She was quite popular with the boys.

“How did she manage that?” I said.

My mother didn’t know.

“But nothing ever came of it,” I said. “With a boy or man, I mean.”

“No.”

That’s when I became fascinated with my Aunt Jane and what her life must have been like. What her condition may have or could have been. How she managed it. How she managed being a person who found a way to enjoy the early, flirtatious part of courtship but no doubt had to back away from it at some point and become an “old maid.” Not only an old maid, but an old maid with what was, in that day, considered to be a shameful secret.

I never really stopped being curious about Jane. I never forgot the photograph. Never stopped being deeply curious about the story behind it.

No one knew exactly what was “wrong” with Jane. It wasn’t spoken of among people, even relatives, with any candor. Jane did not discuss it with anyone. My mother didn’t know. Distant relatives in Texas, children of her siblings, didn’t know. Her medical records had been disposed of or destroyed. The rest home where she’d lived out her last days was defunct and I couldn’t find anyone who’d worked there. All I had to go on was the fact that, in her last days, she’d told my mother’s older sister that she had only one opening for the elimination of waste. I had that, and the fact of her lifelong incontinence, and the fact that apparently she was relatively healthy, urogenital “deformity” aside. And nothing else, really.

Add to that the odd disappearance of the photograph that first fascinated me: It disappeared, and my mother could not recall ever having seen it. As if I’d invented it, made it up. I may as well have. Now I had an entire life to invent, make up, after all.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Miss Jane.

Fiction, Literary Fiction

Fiction Literary Fiction

Look! There’s a man in my book club!

Behind the Book by Ann Hood

by Ann Hood

I joined a book club for the first time in the late 1980s in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Back then, Park Slope was still a new frontier of dilapidated brownstones and streets littered with empty crack vials. Book clubs, too, were a new frontier. I’d never even heard of such a thing the day I saw a sign for one at my local ATM. A book club? Where members read books? To an English major and a full-time writer, that sounded pretty dreamy. I called the number at the bottom of the sign, and a couple weeks later walked into the apartment of Pete and Karen May, a dermatologist and an opera singer who had just moved to the neighborhood and wanted to make friends who loved to read, like they did.

Pete wasn’t the only guy in our book club. There was also Doug, a young copywriter at Scholastic with a burning desire to read the classics. Maybe because none of us knew anything about how these things worked, it never occurred to me that males and book clubs aren’t always simpatico. Somehow—and our process is kind of fuzzy to me now—we took turns selecting books, among them a biography of Montgomery Clift, Doris Lessing’s Diary of a Good Neighbor and If Beale Street Could Talk by James Baldwin. Doug had us read Emile Zola; Pete chose John Cheever’s Falconer. It didn’t strike me then, nor does it now, that their selections were particularly male. In fact, our book club of eight, never even discussed gender.

Perhaps this is why, when I formed a fictional book club for my new novel, The Book That Matters Most, it didn’t occur to me to leave men out of it. True, in the almost 30 years since I walked into that book club in Park Slope, I have visited hundreds of book clubs around the country and I can count on three fingers how many times a man was in one of them. And that’s including the husband of the hostess who felt compelled to join in only as a matter of etiquette.

There are some all-male book clubs in which manly books like The Things They Carried or Nobody’s Fool are read. “We do not read so-called chick lit,” Andrew McCullough, a member of the eponymously named Man Book Club, has said. In fact, the club’s website states its criteria as: “No books by women about women (our cardinal rule).” An all-male book club that meets in a Boston bookstore not only chooses manly books to read, but offers single malt whisky and cigars during the discussion.

When I was writing The Book That Matters Most, I asked male friends of mine if they’d ever been in a book club. Most of them answered no, and those who had were in co-ed book clubs rather than gender-exclusive ones. But none of them lasted very long. They didn’t like the books or the discussion or the lack of discussion. And women I spoke to claimed that a male changed the mix too much. “Men have a way of taking over the conversation,” one told me.

Fiction writers have to make a lot of decisions for the sake of plot. I wanted my main character, Ava, to have a romance. And I wanted her to also make a new friend who was male to help her trust men again after her divorce. That meant my fictional book club had to have at least two males in it. In the novel, each member has to choose the book that matters most to them. Although in my personal experience men didn’t choose “manly” novels, my initial instinct was to have one of my male characters choose Atlas Shrugged, a book I admit having no affinity for but that seemed appropriate for a certain type of guy to select. However, the more I wrote, the less my character became that type of guy. Instead, he emerged as a tender man trying to overcome the loss of his wife. By the time his book was going to be discussed, I jettisoned Atlas Shrugged in favor of Slaughter-House Five, a novel that examines grief in an unusual way.

My other male character? Well, he was the love interest and so I gave him The Great Gatsby as the book that mattered most to him. What woman wouldn’t fall for a guy who liked a novel about a man who did everything for love?

Ann Hood is the author of the bestselling novels The Knitting Circle and The Red Thread, among others. She has won two Pushcart Prizes and lives with her family in Providence, Rhode Island.

RELATED CONTENT: Read our review of The Book That Matters Most.

Author photo by Christina Sebastian.

Author Ann Hood opens up about her first brush with book clubs in a behind the book essay on her new novel, The Book That Matters Most.

Middle Grade

Middle Grade

Hatching a novel: How ‘Soar’ sprouted wings

Behind the Book by Tracy Edward Wymer

by Tracy Edward Wymer

I never thought I’d write a book about birds. I mean, NEVER!

Birds? Who cares about birds? They chirp, fly around and poop on bikes.

I had simply never given birds much thought. But then there was this one bird, a northern mockingbird, that nested in a tree limb hanging over my roof, right above my bedroom. Right above my head! And every morning it would start singing a “Hello, how are you doing?” song at 3 a.m.

Every. Single. Morning.

Then mating season ended and the song vanished—just like that. My beauty rest and sanity were saved!

A couple of years before the three a.m. singing bird, I moved from teaching fourth-grade language arts to teaching sixth-grade English. I remember being suddenly thrown into a cross-curricular research project on North American birds. I was shocked. Birds? This is English class. We read Shakespeare and other classics, like The Outsiders. No one here cares about birds. All I could think about was that mockingbird waking me up every morning at three a.m. and how I wanted it to migrate somewhere far away and never come back.

During my first year teaching the bird research project, I barely survived. Between learning which birds lived where, and which birds migrated, and which birds stayed home year-round, I felt as blind as a bat (not a bird). Then there was keeping track of students’ progress and helping them find resources about that rare hummingbird that might—just might!—fly over North American airspace every other year.

This bird research project was a staple of the sixth-grade curriculum, and if I wanted to keep teaching middle school English, I needed to commit and invest myself. I needed to put my best foot forward. That meant I’d have to take a genuine interest in BIRDS!

Biiiiirrrrrrrds… (eye roll)

To make our teaching lives more tolerable, my colleague and I curated a list of North American birds that allowed students to experience more success during their research. It also exposed students to a wider range of resources. We streamlined the project to include research categories such as appearance, habitat, migration, diet and mating. We also created writing projects that went along with each category of research. Students were suddenly having fun. WE were having fun!

All this time, I was learning to love birds, and I didn’t even know it.

Over the next several years, I came to appreciate birds and their various behaviors, quirks and personalities. Birds are, after all, similar to people. They’re social and habitual, and they teach their young to fly. Okay, people don’t literally teach their children to fly, but we do guide them out of the nest at some point. And isn’t that like flying?

I was also writing a lot during this time. In 2012, I published a book called The Color of Bones, a book I’d worked on for a few years. I was searching for my next writing project, and little did I know it was staring me right in the face.

One day, while hovering over a stack of students’ note cards, I thought to myself, “What if there was a boy who couldn’t find a bird? What if he searched for this bird every day, like his life depended on it? What if he was searching for a bird and no one believed he could ever find it?”

A couple of years later, after hundreds of hours of research, poring over field guides and websites, and then hundreds of hours of writing, I finished writing a book called Bird Nerd. Which gained me an agent, and then sold to Simon & Schuster as Might Fly Away. Which then molted (one last bird reference!) into its final incarnation as Soar.

Title changes. That’s another essay in itself.

Author photo credit Kremer/Johnson.

Tracy Edward Wymer's latest middle grade novel, Soar, is the story of seventh grader Eddie, who sets off on a bird-watching quest to find an elusive golden eagle after his father leaves home for good. There are so many bird jokes we could make about unflappable Eddie (sorry) and his quest, but Wymer's got that covered in a Behind the Book essay, wherein he shares his tumultuous birding beginnings.

Fiction, Mystery & Suspense, Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Fiction Suspense

From one unforgiving landscape to another

Behind the Book by Beth Lewis

by Beth Lewis

Beth Lewis drops readers into an unexpected and brutal world with The Wolf Road, the story of a girl who has just discovered that her savior, a man she calls her father, may be a serial killer. Lewis shares a look behind her debut.

When I pull back the curtain and actually think about where The Wolf Road came from, rather than what single moment inspired it, I realise writing it was pure escapism. It was a novel partly born of frustration at city life. There’s too many people, too much concrete and glass and noise, not enough trees and fresh air and wildlife. Elka’s attitude to and love of nature is mine, her mystification at certain peoples’ behaviour is also mine. Whenever I would put pen to paper, or more accurately, fingers to laptop, I would be transported to the forest and mountains, away from my too-small middle-floor London flat. It was wonderful and I hope is something readers can experience too.

When I dig deeper, pull the curtain back further, this frustration diminishes and I realise there are other reasons behind certain aspects of The Wolf Road. I grew up in the countryside. Two fields stood between me and the wild Cornish coast, the sheer cliffs and hidden coves, bristling with tales of smugglers and pirates. The weather bore down on us from all sides, and sometimes the squall lasted all night. It was a visceral, evocative place, and I’d never realised before how much it’d fed into my writing.

In the fields and along the coast stood two Second World War watchtowers. Both abandoned and given up to the elements. One tall and thin, three storeys of red brick with open sides on the top floor. The other squat, made of dark grey stone, walls two-foot thick and further away, on an area of moorland at the lip of a valley. We’d play in them, make them our dens, then flee when we saw the farmer coming. My brother and I would wander around these valleys and scrubland, populated by straggling sheep and too many rabbits, and we’d find dozens of shell casings, unexploded artillery rounds, ammo boxes, even an old, crumbling rifle. They were remnants of another world, a past of violence and gunshots and invading forces that I knew almost nothing about. At 10 years old, I had a vague sense of WWII, but it wasn’t a real event to me. It was what we learned in history class or were forced to hear about from grandparents. I knew it was Big and Bad and it left its mark everywhere, but it was never in the forefront of my mind. At that age, I never needed or wanted detailed and thorough explanations of the cause or its repercussions throughout the country. It didn’t affect me. It was done and dusted years ago. I just lived where a piece of it had happened.

The fact that this huge, world-changing event could happen and, eventually, be largely forgotten about, was fascinating to adult me and perfect story fodder. I figured the people alive generations down the line would not be all that interested in why their world was the way it was, instead, I thought, they’d be concerned with just living their lives. That’s really the origin of the post-apocalyptic element of The Wolf Road and the reason the Damn Stupid, Elka’s term for the decades-ago war that changed the world, is only touched upon. Even with scraps of history all around her, tales handed down from grandparent to parent to child, Elka’s concerns were of the “here, now” not the “back then,” as were mine at her age. She was worried about where her next meal would come from, where she would sleep that night, how she could reach the top of the ridge and there is a beautiful purity in those most simple of motivations.

Beth Lewis was raised in the wilds of Cornwall and split her childhood between books and the beach. She has traveled extensively throughout the world and has had close encounters with black bears, killer whales and great white sharks. She has been, at turns, a bank cashier, a fire performer and a juggler, and she is currently a managing editor at Titan Books in London. The Wolf Road is her first novel.

www.bethlewis.co.uk
Twitter: @bethklewis
Facebook: facebook.com/bethlewisauthor

Author photo credit Andrew Mason.

It’s Private Eye July at BookPage! All month long, we’re celebrating the sinister side of fiction with the year’s best mysteries and thrillers. Look for the Private Eye July magnifying glass for a daily dose of murder, espionage and all those creepy neighbors with even creepier secrets.

Powerless superheroes

Behind the Book by Beth Revis

by Beth Revis

The latest YA novel from Beth Revis, author of the bestselling Across the Universe series, stars a troubled 17-year-old boy named Bo who believes he has the ability to travel through time. When the girl he loves dies, he's convinced that she's actually trapped in the past, and he is the only one who can save her. Revis shares her personal connection to Bo and his heartbreaking story in A World Without You.

My brother was always He-Man. He was the oldest, he had the most action figures, and so he got to be He-Man. He’d stand over the castle with his plastic sword (a red lightsaber that apparently worked just as well in this universe as when we’d play Star Wars) and shout,“I have the power!”

Growing up, I rarely doubted that my brother had the power over my family. From the outside, we were pretty typical: mother, father, brother, sister. And on the inside, three-quarters of that equation was still decently on the normal spectrum.

It was the remaining 25 percent—my brother—that wasn’t normal. And that anomaly had the power to change everything.

My brother had the power to dictate my family’s finances. Money couldn’t be spared for field trips for me; they had to go to his therapist or latest round of medication. My brother controlled time—he needed so much more of it from my parents than I got. He controlled everything, by the end. Every decision seemed to be made to accommodate him.

When he died, a result of self-medicating the demons in his head with illegal drugs, it still felt like an unbalance. Even in the end, I was dropping my life to say goodbye to his. And he was still the one in control of the emptiness in my heart.

So when I started writing a novel about a boy with a mental illness, it seemed natural to give him power. In A World Without You, Bo attends a school for kids with burgeoning superhero powers, and he himself can control time. Except the school isn’t actually for superheroes. It’s for mentally disturbed youth. And Bo can’t control time . . . or the delusions that plague his mind.

It was in Bo’s character that I found understanding for the brother who is now gone from my life. The more I saw the world through Bo’s eyes, the more I felt like I was seeing through my brother’s eyes one last time. And it wasn’t in the scenes with power that made me feel connected to my brother, the person who I had always felt had the most power over my family. It was in the scenes when Bo broke, when he was scared and paranoid and alone. That was when I felt closest to my brother, closer than I’d felt since his death.

Eventually, I added another character to A World Without You, a sister, Phoebe. She could do nothing but watch as her brother sank into the world of his own mind, as her family struggled to hold onto each other in this time of crisis. She felt as powerless as I had growing up.

But it was in Phoebe that I found the power that I hadn’t realized I’d always had. Phoebe felt trapped—and so had I—but while she had felt as if she wasn’t important, wasn’t even seen, her presence in the story was what had made it whole.

My brother and I were both powerless growing up, trapped by different things, by each other, by the world around us. But we weren’t passive. It wasn’t until I wrote A World Without You that I realized this about myself, about him. We didn’t have power, neither of us, but we didn’t let that define us. We still held our plastic swords up, and we still proclaimed our power over the things that we could control.

Maybe that’s what we learn from stories: That we’re all equally powerless and powerful at the same time. And what matters is that we don’t put down our swords, even if they’re made of plastic.

Debut Fiction, Fiction, Historical Fiction

Fiction Historical Fiction Debut Fiction

Slipping into the moccasins of an 18th-century American pioneer

Behind the Book by Alix Hawley

by Alix Hawley

The whole idea behind my novel, All True Not a Lie in It, was a gamble. Once I was hit with the memory of an old National Geographic article about Daniel Boone, I couldn’t stop thinking about him and his story. I was hooked, utterly. But would other people want to read about a long-dead American frontiersman? (And, hang on, would they even know who he was?)

It took a lot of writing and rewriting. And one of the books that influenced me, perhaps surprisingly, was Lolita, whip-smart and shocking. It turns me into a gawper, a gasper—not so much for its horrors as for its own wild gamble. What writer can pull off the tale of an aging, predatory child molester without scattering readers like pigeons at a gunshot?

Nabokov can. His Humbert Humbert is one of literature’s most ghastly and sorry creations, but we find ourselves listening to him, following him across America, even as we recoil from his desires. Loathsome as he is, I will argue for this book every time. So why does Nabokov win? Why do we go along with Humbert into the dark?

We have Nabokov’s electric prose, of course. But we also have the character’s own words, his own voice: “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul.”

It’s the key. The gamble only succeeds because of it. If we’d had, instead, “His sin, his soul,” the book’s pull would have frayed like old rope. Well, I suppose I have a gambler’s heart, too. I rolled the dice and stepped into the first-person shoes, which I’d always found pinching. I fought it, writing draft after draft in other voices, until I caved. Fine. I, Daniel Boone. Double or nothing.

I walked around until the shoes fit. His voice is not my voice. He’s a rough, charismatic leader and a famous hunter; I’m female, fairly quiet, Canadian and vegetarian. But first person was the only voice for this book. Once I could hear it in my mind, I couldn’t shake it. I hope readers will follow me into Daniel’s shoes—and head—as he moves through the wilderness in search of perfection, a quest that leads to his daughter’s kidnap and his son’s murder. The aftermath is denial, guilt and hard suffering.

My story elides chronology in places, making guesses and filling in gaps for the sake of narrative. But I didn’t need an unreliable narrator—the story had plenty going on already—so I looked at complicated speakers, like Humbert, and how they tell us their stories.

And we want books to create a reality. To reanimate the 1700s, I had to plough up forests of detail and try to use what Daniel and his family would have known in a natural way: the Quaker meeting house of his childhood; the Appalachian wilderness he explored; the homes he and his wife, Rebecca, built; and the Delaware, Shawnee, Cherokee and Black lives that intersected with his. I read several biographies, including Lyman Draper’s The Life of Daniel Boone, a 19th-century rescue of Boone oral history and manuscripts, trying to expose the flavor of 18th-century life.

But the books that gave me what I most needed were fiction, Peter Carey’s and Hilary Mantel’s. Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang snares Ned Kelly’s wild mind and feeds it to us in pieces, letters and articles. Mantel’s Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, while in third person, give a similar feeling of an access-all-areas pass to someone’s brain. What works in these books is the uncanny sense that we’re listening to the characters while at the same time experiencing what it’s like to be them. We’re inside and outside. For me, this was the trick: We had to be able to see Daniel from both sides at once.

My Daniel Boone is talking to his dead, trying to turn himself inside out and see what he has done, and who he has become. This book is about what is lost, and what remains.

Canadian writer Alix Hawley studied English at Oxford University and now teaches at Okanagan College in British Columbia. All True Not a Lie in It, her debut novel, was longlisted for the Giller Prize. She is currently working on a sequel.

This article was originally published in the August 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Dark legacy returns to Salem

Behind the Book by Adriana Mather

by Adriana Mather

Debut author Adriana Mather draws from her own family legacy in How to Hang a Witch, a twisty mixture of history and horror. The protagonist, Samantha, shares her last name with the author, as Mather is a real-life descendant of Cotton Mather, one of the men responsible for the Salem Witch Trials. As a fictional descendant of Cotton Mather, Samantha finds herself caught up in a centuries-old curse when she moves to Salem, as well as encounters with real ghosts and classmates who don't appreciate her heritage. Mather shares more of her family connection to this dark side of American history.

My ancestors came over on the Mayflower, fought in the Revolutionary War, lived in Sleepy Hollow and survived the Titanic. They have everything under their belts from failed inventions to the first American-born presidency at Harvard. But nothing tops the infamy of my ancestor Cotton Mather who instigated the Salem Witch Trials. In How to Hang a Witch, I explore that piece of my family’s history and bring it into present day with a pinch of magic and a good old-fashioned mystery.

History is woven into the very fabric of the culture in modern Salem in a way I’ve never seen before. A world of tall tales, oddities and tragedies burgeon from its black houses and cobblestone streets. It’s just too amazing of a town not to set a story in . . . preferably in autumn. Throw in a handsome ghost and some spiced apple cider, and something wonderfully witchy happens.

And the research! It was one of my absolute favorite parts of the writing process—I could continue it for the next 20 years and still learn new and creepy things. Here is a quick list of what I discovered along the way:

Salem, Massachusetts, is home to Hocus Pocus, haunted tours and more magical potions than you can shake a stick at.
Curses are a thing in Salem. When Giles Corey was accused of witchcraft in 1692, he refused to plea guilty or not guilty. He was pressed to death over three days and right before he died he supposedly cursed Sheriff Corwin. People say even now that the sheriffs of Salem have always died mysteriously, either of heart attacks or blood disease.
My ancestor Nathanael Mather (Cotton’s brother) is buried in Salem’s Old Burying Point. He entered Harvard at 12 years old and died when he was 19. His epitaph reads, “An Aged person that had seen but nineteen Winters in the World.”
The first accusations of witchcraft came from girls who were 9, 11 and 12 years old. The adults around them went very quickly from asking, “What is ailing you?” to “Who is ailing you?” Knowing how young these girls were altered my perspective of how the events unfolded in Salem and had me greatly questioning the motives of the adults around them.
The youngest person accused of witchcraft was Sarah Good’s daughter, Dorothy Good. She was between 4 and 5 years old. She was both accused and jailed. She spent almost nine months locked up before she was released on bond.
Apparently just before Sarah Good’s death, she said to Rev. Noyes, “God will give you blood to drink.” And sure enough, in 1717 Noyes died from an internal hemorrhage, choking on his own blood.
Interestingly, Salem means “peace.”

I make it a point to go to Salem a few times a year, walk the old brick sideways pushed up by tree roots and enjoy the ancient architecture. I know my way around so well now that I could have a back up career as a tour guide. But even I avoid the graveyards in the dark . . . because you just never know.

Author photo credit James Bird.

Debut Fiction, Fiction

Fiction Debut Fiction

Storied NYC building inspires a thoughtful debut

Behind the Book by Fiona Davis

by Fiona Davis

I have always been intrigued by the history of buildings, whether I’m wandering around Blenheim Palace in England or the Tenement Museum in New York City. During an apartment hunt a couple of years ago, I was brought to the Barbizon 63 condo on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, formerly known as the Barbizon Hotel for Women.

Built in 1927, the Barbizon stands out among its neighbors, a 23-story tower of salmon-colored brick studded with Gothic and Moorish architectural elements. It housed thousands of women, including several icons-in-the-making like Grace Kelly, Joan Crawford, Joan Didion, Eudora Welty and Sylvia Plath.

Potential guests were required to provide three character references and, once registered, obey the hotel’s strict dress codes and rules. The contradiction between establishing one’s independence while being treated like a child seemed to capture the paradoxical message of that time period: You can pretend to be a career girl for now, as long as you settle down and have a family once Prince Charming puts a ring on it.

I’d seen photos of the hotel before the renovation, and the change was striking. What had been a virtual beehive of small rooms off dark hallways was transformed in 2005 into sleek apartments with rosewood floors and marble bathrooms. When the broker mentioned that a dozen or so longtime residents had been “grandfathered” into the building after it went condo and were sequestered in rental units on the fourth floor, I couldn’t help but wonder how they viewed the changes that had been made to the building—and the equally dramatic transformation of their city—after so many decades in residence. What a perfect setup for a novel.

As a journalist, I love crafting a story from research and interviews, and when I decided to write the book I approached the project in the same way. In addition to reading everything I could get my hands on about the hotel and that era, I interviewed several women who lived in the Barbizon during the 1950s and ’60s. I looked through women’s magazines from the early ’50s and scoured old issues of the New York Times to get a sense of what day-to-day life was like back then.

The more I researched, the more pressing it became to provide a glimpse into the way women were expected to live and behave in the early ’50s, and show just how hard it was to break out of that mold. For example, one women’s magazine from 1951 suggested that women stick to part-time jobs so as not to interfere with the “satisfactions of housekeeping.” Another dictated that a woman dining out with a man should never speak directly to the waiter. Talk about being voiceless!

Since the conversation regarding women’s roles continues even today, I included parallel timelines in the book: Darby shows up at the Barbizon Hotel in 1952, eager to do well at secretarial school and never marry. Rose, who moves into the condo of today, finds herself in a prickly situation with her boyfriend. In The Dollhouse, two very different generations of women challenge each other to stand up and be counted.

The book is definitely a love letter to New York City, my home for the past 30 years, and the city played a large role in my research. A visit to Lior Lev Sercarz’s legendary spice shop in midtown, La Boîte, gave me the idea for developing one character’s passion for blending spices. When I decided to include a downtown jazz club as a setting, I signed up for a class on bebop at Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Swing University, taught by the brilliant trombonist Vincent Gardner. It seemed that inspiration was everywhere.

The Barbizon Hotel holds a special place in the hearts of the women who stayed there, as a refuge where they launched successful careers and declared their independence. Every time I pass by, I look up and marvel at the beauty of the building and feel the same thrill I did a few years ago, when I first realized there was a novel within its walls waiting to be told. The cycle of inspiration continues.

Fiona Davis worked as a stage actress for nearly 10 years before becoming a freelance journalist and writer. A graduate of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, she now lives in New York City. The Dollhouse, her first novel, is the story of a 21st-century journalist who uncovers a 50-year-old mystery in the Barbizon Hotel for Women.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a review of The Dollhouse.

This article was originally published in the September 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Arts & Culture, Literature, Nonfiction

Nonfiction Literature Arts & Culture

Giving youth the cold shoulder

Behind the Book by Rebecca Smith

by Rebecca Smith

Last night my 19-year-old daughter’s friends were here for “prinks” (pre-going out drinks, much cheaper than buying them in a club). They all looked gorgeous. My daughter was in shorts and, I’m pleased to say, flat shoes. I can’t help but worry. They were all showing a lot of shoulder. The cold shoulder trend is really big in England at the moment.

“Are you going to be ok, mum, all by yourself on Saturday night?” my daughter asked. Neither of my sons was home. One has just graduated and found a job in London. My little one (16 and just over six foot tall) was staying over at a friend’s, and my husband had already left to sing in a local pub, something he does a few times each week. I only go if I really feel like it.

Was I going to be ok, home alone on Saturday night?

“Of course,” I said, automatically.

After I’d waved them off I sat in the garden with my two cats. The chickens were already thinking about going to bed. I wondered if I minded that I wasn’t the one with something to do. I like going out, but the thought of exposing whichever body part is currently deemed the most important fills me with horror. It comforts me to know that once, my ancestor Jane Austen felt the same. She loved dancing and flirting when she was young, but settled happily into the life of the middle-aged writer.

We live in Southampton, England, where Jane Austen once lived. My 21st birthday party was at The Dolphin Hotel, where Jane Austen celebrated her 18th birthday. After a ball there in December 1808, Jane wrote to her sister, Cassandra:

“Our ball was rather more amusing than I expected. . . . The melancholy part was, to see so many dozen young women standing by without partners, and each of them with two ugly naked shoulders! It was the same room in which we danced fifteen years ago! I thought it all over, and in spite of the shame of being so much older, felt with thankfulness that I was quite as happy now as then.”

Here’s proof that fashions come round again and again: naked shoulders were de rigueur 208 years ago.

My favorite night out now is a trip to the theatre with my best friend, Alison. At the same ball where she pitied the girls with the naked shoulders, Jane said that she and her best friend Martha Lloyd “paid an additional shilling for our tea, which we took as we chose in an adjoining and very comfortable room.” Alison and I would find comfort in doing the same; it’s so much nicer to go out with a good friend than to be searching for The One. As Jane Austen wrote in November 1813:

“By the bye, as I must leave off being young, I find many Douceurs [sweet compensations] in being a sort of chaperon, for I am put on the Sofa near the Fire & can drink as much wine as I like.”

So the writer of the world’s favorite love stories was quite happy to sit things out, drinking as much as she liked, while her nieces got all the attention. There is such pleasure in not caring about being the belle of the ball and in being able to just please yourself.

“The writer of the world’s favorite love stories was quite happy to sit things out, drinking as much as she liked, while her nieces got all the attention.”

I love going to museums and galleries and shopping by myself, able to go as quickly or slowly as I want without having to worry if somebody else is bored or wants to take ages looking at things that don’t interest me. When you have children or are in charge of somebody else’s (as Jane Austen often was) trips out involve constant awareness of their needs. Now that my children are older, I love doing things alone. The bliss of not struggling with a stroller and having to bring all that stuff!

Earlier in the week I was at the Jane Austen House Museum. I’ve been there countless times, but will never tire of the magical house and ever-changing garden. I spent a happy few hours, only looking at my watch occasionally to check I wouldn’t be late to meet my son after his first day at college in Winchester, a few miles away. I’m a feeble non-driver, too busy looking out of windows, I guess, to ever pass my driving test. As I rode away from the Museum on the bus, I thought of Jane Austen visiting London in summer 1813 and looking for likenesses of Mrs Elizabeth Darcy and Mrs Jane Bingley among the portraits. She didn’t have to take a bus, but rode in a barouche, the 19th-century equivalent of a sports car. She told her sister:

“I had great amusement among the pictures; and the driving about, the carriage being open, was very pleasant. I liked my solitary elegance very much, and was ready to laugh all the time at my being where I was.”

Thinking of my daughter asking, on her way out, whether I was going to be ok by myself, I realized that the answer will always be yes, of course, whether I say it automatically or pause to think. I realized that, like Jane, I like my “solitary elegance” very much, and that I’m very lucky to be able to please myself and to sit alone in the garden with my cats and the chickens or on the sofa by the fire with a book. Like Jane, I’m quite happy that I don’t have to stand about exposing my shoulders or anything else. Like Jane, I realized that I like being middle-aged.

Rebecca Smith, a 5th-great-niece of Jane Austen, is the author of three novels and several nonfiction books. Her latest, The Jane Austen Writer’s Club, is a compilation of writing advice from the beloved English novelist. Smith teaches creative writing at the University of Southampton in England.

Rebecca Smith, a great-niece of Jane Austen, writes about how her famous ancestor taught her to relish the pleasures of middle age in a behind-the-book essay.

Middle Grade

Middle Grade

The belle of the Donner Party

Behind the Book by Skila Brown

by Skila Brown

Young readers discover an unforgettable voice in the latest novel-in-verse from Skila Brown, To Stay Alive, about 19-year-old Mary Ann Graves, a real survivor of the tragic Donner Party of 1846. Brown shares the moment when Mary Ann captured her imagination.

What did I know about the Donner Party? I’m sure I’d heard about them in school—a paragraph in a dry textbook chapter on westward expansion. I had a fuzzy idea their story involved cannibalism when I pushed play on a How the Donner Party Worked podcast while driving on an interstate through Indiana four years ago.

I was immediately captivated.

This story was the very definition of high-stakes drama: accidental deaths, sickness, fights, missing treasure, romance and murders (plural!).

And of course there was the fact that they were stuck by the mountains all winter and watching their food supply dwindle. Mothers couldn’t feed their children. Honestly, the cannibalism seemed the least dramatic part of the whole escapade.

I had to know more. First books . . . then documentaries . . . then . . . googling the names of survivors for photos.

And that’s when I saw her. The “belle of the Donner Party.” Mary Ann Graves. Staring off to the side with dark ringlets and a strong jaw and a haunted look in her eyes. I couldn’t look away.

A little bit of research and suddenly I was holding in my hands a copy of her marriage license. Sunday, May 16, 1847: Just weeks after she was rescued, and while her feet were still healing, she and a rescuer named Edward Pyle—a man born in the same county in Indiana where I now live—stood before an official and took their wedding vows.

They were married for a year when her husband disappeared the following spring. For 12 months, he was missing and Mary Ann was alone. Around the time that would have been their second anniversary, his body was recovered. He had been dragged behind a horse, and when that failed to kill him, his throat had been cut. A man was tried and found guilty of the crime. Mary Ann reportedly cooked for him and delivered food to him in prison so that he would live long enough to hang.

I liked Mary Ann.

She remarried a few years later and had seven children. Those eyes that haunted me in her photograph gave her trouble after the snow-blindness she suffered while trying to cross the mountain for help. For the rest of her life, she couldn’t make tears.

Here was a woman who’d journeyed west by foot for the promise of new land and better climate. She’d watched her family starve around her on the way, then taken a husband, only to become a widow. Later in life she cared for her son while he was dying, taking sick herself and following him shortly after to death. And all the while, she was tear-less.

You don’t meet a character like this every day. I didn’t set out to write a book about the Donner Party, but no character I could create as a fiction writer would be as interesting to me as this woman. Someone who actually existed. I had to get my hand on every letter she’d written, every interview she’d done. I had to see what her siblings said about her, how the other people she traveled with described her.

I had to write about her. What choice did I have?

Every journey is yours

Behind the Book by Sarah Porter

by Sarah Porter

Inspired by the Russian folktale “Vassilissa the Beautiful,” the latest YA novel from Sarah Porter transforms Brooklyn into an enchanted land, where young Vassa is a hero in waiting. Porter discusses the power of fairy tales and how they can teach readers to love, to believe and to survive the darkest moments of our lives.

In fairy tales, a girl walks into the woods. Or sometimes the woods come for her, invading her home with their shadowy arms, wrapping her in brambles.

When you are a small child, all the world often seems dark and wild and confusing, an enchanted and menacing forest, and the only thing that stays safe and certain is your family’s embrace—that is, if you are one of the lucky ones. If you are less lucky, you might have a father who suddenly turns into a terrifying giant, or a mother like a poisoned apple, or you might not have parents at all. Then you can find yourself lost in the dark woods, even in the quiet of your own room.

And this is why we will always need fairy tales: Far from being escapist fantasies, they offer us instructions on how to survive. You are the hero, they say; well, then, this is one way to trick a giant, and this is how you might disarm a witch, or find your way to the castle, or win love. A fairy tale is an eminently practical story. They make such a profound impression on us when we are children, because we desperately memorize everything they have to tell us about how we can defeat our worst fears.

When I was small, the Russian fairytale “Vassilissa the Beautiful” was my map through the woods, my guide to defeating the darkness. Vassilissa goes up against the witch Baba Yaga with her magic doll to help her, but also with intelligence and sensitivity, and those things are enough to save her life. I was a dreamy, introspective child, and the survival strategies Vassilissa employed seemed like they might just work for me: Pay attention. Know when someone is baiting you. Accept help, but work hard at the same time. Listen for the secrets hidden inside the most casual statements. Her story, among others, taught me how to become myself.

I grew up and moved to Brooklyn, and started teaching creative writing workshops in public schools. Reading shows us the possibility of pathways in the woods and shows us techniques for fighting monsters, but when we write, we begin to cut new paths for ourselves. The deep woods are also inside us, and it takes a long and difficult struggle to find the way through our own hearts. As they say in Russian fairy tales, “The telling is easy, but the journey is not soon done.”

My students began to tell me stories about the challenges in their own lives: the mother who’d had to stay behind in a distant country, or the stepsisters who taunted them for skin that wasn’t the same color as theirs. It was like I could hear the fairy-tale woods marching silently into the classrooms and surrounding us, and I tried in every way I could to say, “You are the hero of this story. Look closely, and listen closely—not only to the world outside you, but to the world in your mind. There are ways through, and you will find them.”

That feeling was the inspiration behind Vassa in the Night: I wanted to write about the heroism of kids like my students, who face their sadness and confusion with deep-hearted courage. So I went back to the fairy tale I loved in my childhood, and set it in modern-day Brooklyn. Vassilissa became Vassa, an angry, purple-haired girl who responds to a dare with suicidal impulsiveness, but then finds her way to a heroism she never knew could be hers.

I can only hope that Vassa in the Night is a real fairy tale. I can only hope it offers its readers strategies for survival in difficult times: Kindness is more important than fear. Witches are not as invincible as they think they are. No matter how impossible the task, begin.

And the most crucial lesson of all: You are the hero, and every journey is yours.

Inspired by the Russian folktale “Vassilissa the Beautiful,” the latest YA novel from Sarah Porter transforms Brooklyn into an enchanted land, where young Vassa is a hero in waiting. Porter discusses the power of fairy tales and how they can teach readers how to love, to believe and to survive the darkest moments of our lives.

Fiction, Historical Fiction

Fiction Historical Fiction

Telling her story, not his

Behind the Book by Marie Benedict

by Marie Benedict

I almost didn’t write The Other Einstein. The little-known story of Mileva Marić, who made a heroic ascent from the misogynistic backwater of 19th-century Eastern Europe to become one of Europe’s first female physicists, kept calling to me, begging to be written. But the tale necessarily involved a depiction of Albert Einstein, the fellow Zurich Polytechnic student who wooed Mileva for years before their marriage in 1903—and who wanted to face that hurdle?

The idea of writing about the so-called secular saint, who was chosen as the Person of the Century by Time magazine and galvanized not only science but also the cultural and political landscape with his genius, daunted me. Obviously. Not to mention that people hold many preconceptions about Albert Einstein, and I wasn’t certain that I wanted to challenge them with The Other Einstein.

But then I realized that The Other Einstein wasn’t his story. It was her story. One that had been buried by time and prejudice and misconceptions. And I realized that I was honor-bound to excavate Mileva from the detritus of the past and share her with the world.

So I faced my discomfort with writing about one of the world’s most famous figures head-on. I dove deep into the world of 19th-century science. I tried to immerse myself in whatever details I could cobble together about Mileva, a surprisingly challenging task given that she had been married to Einstein for 16 years. While countless tomes exist about him and his work, Mileva doesn’t figure prominently in many of them.

Then I discovered Mileva’s letters. Written to family members, friends and, of course, Albert, those letters became my window into her life. They enabled me to imagine myself as the young Mileva. So tiny, her family joked that they needed to put stones in her pockets to keep the wind from blowing her away. So startlingly brilliant that her father fought against the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s laws preventing females from attending high school to secure her place in an all-male upper school. So different from all the other girls that she received the brunt of their youthful mockery. And so physically deformed in her hips that she believed no one would ever want to marry her.

In becoming Mileva, I began to see Albert Einstein through her eyes. He became a roguish, charismatic college student. He changed into a youthful, open-minded scientific partner and collaborator. He shined as a violinist who accompanied her singing with the gusto of a fellow musician. He transformed from a friend into a determined and ardent lover, who morphed again into a husband and father, bringing both tremendous joy and heartbreaking disappointment.

No longer the wild-haired scientific icon, Albert Einstein became a person. Marvelous yet flawed, as all people are. This metamorphosis, achieved only after long months of research, freed me from my fears. And I was able to write about Albert as Mileva experienced him.

But no matter how comfortable I became writing about Albert Einstein, The Other Einstein never became his story. It always remained hers.

Marie Benedict practiced law for more than 10 years before launching a career as a novelist. The Other Einstein is the first in a planned series telling the stories of women lost to history. Benedict, who has also published three thrillers as Heather Terrell, lives in Pittsburgh with her family.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of The Other Einstein.

This article was originally published in the November 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Art and science, siblings of understanding our world

Behind the Book by Nicola Yoon

by Nicola Yoon

In Pale Blue Dot, Carl Sagan wrote, “It does no harm to the romance of the sunset to know a little about it.” It’s a quote that I’ve always loved because it so neatly ties together two modes of thinking that are usually held separate—the artistic and the scientific.

In my new book, The Sun Is Also a Star, we meet Natasha and Daniel. Natasha is a very pragmatic girl. She believes in science and things that you can measure and prove. Daniel, a budding poet, seems to be her opposite. He believes in intangible things like fate and God. He believes that proof is wildly overrated.

One of the ideas I wanted to explore with this book was this idea that the scientific and the artistic are opposites. We make this claim all the time. If you’re good at math, then you can’t be good at writing. If you’re good at physics, then you can’t be good at painting. You are either right-brained or left-brained. But what if this is not true? I think most of us are reasonably good at using both sides of our brain. And yet we’re forced to specialize as early as middle school. We put ourselves—and each other—into boxes.

But what if we didn’t? What if we let ourselves be both? Would we see each other differently? Would we understand the world in new and more expansive ways? Back to that Carl Sagan quote: It’s possible to think a sunset is beautiful purely because of the colors. The way it can look as if someone painted wild streaks of red and gold and sometimes even a hint of green across the sky. The way cloud edges seem almost to be on fire. Is it any less beautiful to know the colors are caused by the scattering of wavelengths that occurs when sunlight strikes molecules (primarily nitrogen and oxygen) in the atmosphere? At sunset, sunlight travels a longer path through the atmosphere, scattering the short-wavelength blues and leaving us with the oranges and the reds.

Is it any less beautiful to know that, because of the way light enters each individual eye, you are seeing a different sunset than I am?

Or that by the time you see the sun disappear, it has already set? What you’re actually seeing is refraction—light bending around the horizon. You’re seeing the evidence of something already past.

We’re drawn to sunsets because they are beautiful. When we come to know the science of it, the beauty deepens even further. If the goal of the human project is the search for truth and meaning, then the scientists and the artists aren’t so far apart after all. It’s just the approach that’s different.

Author photo credit Sonya Sones.

All Behind the Book essays

‘Miss Jane’ Chisolm vs. my great-aunt Mary Ellis ‘Jane’ Clay