The only thing more exciting than the fact that author Angeline Boulley has followed up her bestselling, award-winning debut, Firekeeper’s Daughter, with a companion novel is that actor Isabella Star LaBlanc narrates the audiobook. LaBlanc, a member of the Sisseton Wahpeton Dakota tribal nation, takes a break from filming season four of “True Detective” (in Iceland!) to share her thoughts on the communal power of audiobooks like Warrior Girl Unearthed (11.5 hours), and the joys and challenges of bringing the story of Perry Firekeeper-Birch to life.
You also narrated Angeline Boulley’s first book, Firekeeper’s Daughter. How did you feel about Warrior Girl Unearthed as you began to read it for the first time? I’m a Firekeeper’s Daughter superfan first, and a Firekeeper’s Daughter audiobook narrator second. And as soon as I started reading Warrior Girl Unearthed, I knew Angeline had done it again. It felt like returning home. I fell in love with Perry immediately. From the first chapter, I was excited to go on this journey with her.
What is your relationship with author Angeline Boulley like, especially in the time since you’ve recorded Firekeeper’s Daughter? Angeline is the best! After my first day of recording Warrior Girl Unearthed, I texted her a little selfie and let her know how thrilled I was to be back in the saddle. When it comes down to it, I really am just trying to do right by her. Angeline is such a special person and writer. Her energy is infectious. We had so much fun doing press for Firekeeper’s Daughter. I count myself lucky to be in her orbit and to benefit from her support. I really owe her so much.
Tell me a bit about transforming Warrior Girl Unearthed into an audiobook. How did you prepare, and what did you most enjoy about the preparation? I was so honored when I was asked back to narrate Warrior Girl Unearthed, but I knew logistically it was going to be a challenge. I’m currently shooting a TV series in Iceland, which has my schedule packed and unpredictable. I really wanted to make it work, so after lots of back and forth with my manager and Steve Wagner from Macmillan, we were able to figure out a remote recording setup and scheduled sessions on the days I’m not on set. So I guess the first big preparation was scheduling, which is not very exciting, but it did feel like a miracle that it worked out.
After we got the logistics ironed out, I really dove in—which for me means spending a lot of time with pronunciation and starting to identify voices. I find a lot of joy in the preparation leading up to recording. It’s always a little daunting, but there’s something so exhilarating about hearing the story in my head for the first time and figuring out how to actually make it sound like that.
What did you feel most strongly that it was important to get “right” as you narrated Boulley’s words in Warrior Girl Unearthed? Definitely the language. The Anishinaabemowin is important not only to the storytelling but also to the characters and to the people these characters represent. I want my Ojibwe relatives to hear themselves in this. So I feel a huge responsibility to do the best I can to represent the language in a good way. Angeline and Macmillan, along with Michele Wellman-Teeple from Michigan State University, set me up with some amazing pronunciation resources.
I think the language is just as much a character as Perry, and I want to honor it that way. Before we began recording, I put out some tobacco to thank the language for letting me spend this time with it. That felt like the right place to begin.
“Before we began recording, I put out some tobacco to thank the language for letting me spend this time with it. That felt like the right place to begin.”
What do you believe is the most rewarding thing that your performance brings to the listening experience of Warrior Girl Unearthed? Firekeeper’s Daughter was my first ever audiobook. I had never narrated anything before that, and going in I knew pretty much nothing about the whole process. I have a lot more books and experience under my belt for this one, and it feels so rewarding to get to return to this world where it all began for me, and to now be able to offer up everything I’ve learned. I feel more in control of my work this time around, and my hope is that listeners will be able to hear that.
To listeners, it can sometimes feel like magic to hear a narrator move between dialogue and a lead character’s inner thoughts. What is your process when moving from Perry’s inner world to external interactions? Perry is a teenager, and I think being a teenager is a lot about reconciling your inner and outer worlds. Something I notice with Perry is that her external interactions often exude confidence in a way her internal monologue doesn’t. I think there’s something really vulnerable in the way she talks to herself, and something really powerful in the way she interacts with the world. I really try to let both those parts of her peek through and to be heard in conversation with each other.
As you read Warrior Girl Unearthed, what did you take away from the experience? Did you discover anything, either about the world Boulley depicts or about yourself? I found myself left with big feelings about how the ways in which we take care of ourselves help us take care of our people. I love how the characters Angeline writes have very unique passions and strengths they honor and offer to the world. Some might argue that I’m already grown, but I want to be Perry and Daunis when I grow up.
“So much of the culture I come from is centered on gathering together and sharing stories. Audiobooks feel like a new medium to do that.”
Boulley’s books reflect an exciting shift in children’s and teen literature toward diversifying which stories are published and who gets to write them. What would books like Firekeeper’s Daughter and Warrior Girl Unearthed have meant to you when you were growing up? I think it’s hard to overstate how much of an impact these books would have had on me as a young reader. It really is a gift to see not only yourself but also your community represented with so much heart. As a young Indigenous person it’s easy to feel lonely, like so much of the world doesn’t understand what matters to you. I know I would have devoured these books, and I would have held them with me as companions while I navigated a lot of the things these characters experience. How lovely it would’ve been to have these reminders that girls like me get to be exceptional, and be loved, and save the world.
With Warrior Girl Unearthed in mind, what do audiobooks offer that a book can’t? I think there’s something communal about audiobooks. Whereas reading can feel beautifully individual, there’s something special about the idea that with an audiobook, each listener is hearing the same voices come alive. It’s almost an equalizer between listeners; it creates an inherently shared experience.
I loved hearing that people listened to Firekeeper’s Daughter with their families. So much of the culture I come from is centered on gathering together and sharing stories. Audiobooks feel like a new medium to do that. We can listen to stories together, whether we’re in the same room or miles apart.
In addition to your work as an audiobook narrator, you’ve also acted on stage and in movies and TV. What are some of the unique challenges and pleasures of audiobooks as compared to those other types of performing? How do you feel your work in other media informs your narration work? I think all of my work informs each other. I feel like if I removed even one piece of the puzzle, one tool from the toolbox, I wouldn’t be the same artist. I’ve played all sorts of characters with different dialects, different ages, different dispositions. I feel like I draw on them to flesh out these books. So many of the voices I use to narrate come from characters I’ve played.
And now I feel my narration feeding back to my acting. I think one of the most challenging parts when I started narrating was learning how to act without being seen. So many character choices in visual mediums can be solely in your body. Narrating has allowed me to explore my voice, and in doing so has offered a tool to do more with less. I’m able to find a lot more stillness in my work on screen now.
What’s one thing people might not expect about your role as narrator? That I get to redo as much as I want! When people hear I do audiobooks, the first question is usually, “How can you read without messing up?” The answer is, I mess up a lot, and then a lovely engineer punches me back in and I do it again, and sometimes again after that. So the job actually has very little to do with reading a lot of words perfectly in one go.
Who in your life has had the biggest impact on your work as a narrator? I don’t think I can pick just one. I think most of the people in my life turn up in my narration in some way. You’ll probably hear them in this book.
What do you believe is your greatest strength as a narrator? My cultural vocabulary. What I might not know about technical voice acting, I do know about Native people. I can hear our voices, our rhythms, our laughter. I know about our ways of connecting to one another across tribes and regions. I find so much joy in narrating specifically for Native authors, because it feels like I was born for it. I grew up with these stories.
Voice actor Isabella Star LaBlanc returns for an encore after her powerful performance of Angeline Boulley’s bestselling, award-winning debut novel, Firekeeper’s Daughter. As LaBlanc reveals in our interview for Audiobook Month, performing Warrior Girl Unearthed required a deep understanding of the Anishinaabemowin, or Ojibwe language.
Mary Beth Keane grew up around bars. “Most of my uncles owned bars or worked in them,” she says. Which is why, when the world entered COVID-19 lockdown, Keane found herself yearning for the indoor camaraderie of a really packed bar. But besides socializing with her husband and two sons, the best she could do was drive around Pearl River, New York—the town where she grew up and now lives—hoping to spot a friend to chat with from afar.
To compensate, Keane immersed herself in writing The Half Moon, named for the townie bar at the novel’s center. The wonderfully unpretentious, gifted writer explains this by phone from Bozeman, Montana, where she’s researching her next novel. (Its Western setting will herald a marked change from her beloved 2019 novel, Ask Again, Yes, and The Half Moon, both of which are set in Gillam, a fictionalized version of Pearl River.)
In the novel, Malcolm Gephardt has worked at the Half Moon for years, and now he finally owns the place, with dreams to update and transform it. Unfortunately, creditors are at his heels, his marriage is on the rocks, and in the midst of a blizzard, a patron goes missing—setting the stage for plenty of riveting internal and external drama.
“This is a COVID book,” Keane says, “even though it doesn’t seem that way.” The pandemic is never mentioned, and there are no masks in sight. But Keane poured her loneliness and isolation right into Malcolm’s character, and the winter storm that paralyzes the town for a week or so accentuates the fact that a number of her characters feel trapped in their lives.
When asked about the impetus for The Half Moon, Keane explains that, at age 45, she’s starting to see couples get divorced and then, 18 months or so later, share Facebook posts showing “a whole new set of people and a new life,” she says. “I was thinking about to what degree we can change our lives once we reach a certain point. . . . I’m a very working-class child, and I grew up in a very Catholic community, and I don’t know whether it’s just me and the way I was raised, [but] I literally do not know how to do that.”
Not that she wants to, she adds quickly. “I’m very happy with my life. But part of being a writer is observing and watching other people, and I guess I just like thinking about things that I can’t imagine.” A friend of Keane’s recently commented that her books “are an argument for staying together, over and over,” which surprised the author. “Although it’s so obvious when I think about it now,” she says.
In The Half Moon, however, the odds of an intact marriage seem low. Malcolm’s wife, Jess, a lawyer, has been dreaming of having a child, but after years of unsuccessful fertility treatments, she has moved into the arms of someone else. Keane writes that Jess is weighed down by “Hormones. Grief. Boredom. The growing sense that life was passing her by and if she didn’t do something she’d leave nothing behind to prove she was even there.” Jess and Malcolm have had bitter disagreements over the financing of the bar, which she recognizes is his “baby,” his lifelong dream.
“Every bartender in my family already thinks this book is about them.”
In crafting Jess and Malcolm’s rocky marriage, Keane had no idea what would happen between the couple, and she reported to her editors that she had “tried every [outcome] you could possibly suggest,” including some wildly dramatic ones. Such is the “jigsaw” style of Keane’s creative process. “It seems like a piecemeal, haphazard way to write, but that’s the way I do it,” she says.
In a 2019 essay for the New York Times, she describes growing up without books and how her earliest literary influence as a kid in the late 1980s was the Reader’s Digest column “Drama in Real Life.” In a way, Keane says, her upbringing was freeing, especially when it came to choosing books at the library. “Boy, did I learn a lot from those Danielle Steel books,” she says, laughing. She wrote her first stories on the back of paper plates, then read them aloud to her mom. Her first clue that she might have a talent came after writing a fourth-grade essay about a baked potato. Later, at age 13, she wrote a short story for a school literary magazine about a girl whose sister had committed suicide; it was so convincing that her mother began getting condolences from friends who said they didn’t realize that she had an older child.
“I knew [early on] that it didn’t have to be true; it just had to be good,” Keane says. “So I always leaned toward fiction. I felt in my gut that I was better at writing than I was at other things.” As she grew older, her childhood reading habits allowed her to remain free from the burden experienced by many writers who try to measure up to certain literary reputations. “I really don’t care what everyone thinks is good or not. I just read for myself. And I think that is a gift that not every writer has.”
“As soon as I open a book and someone’s in therapy or playing tennis, I just don’t care.”
While Keane was at Barnard College, novelist Mary Gordon told her, “You have a subject.” At the time, however, Keane had no clue what it was. “Suddenly,” she says, “I was with people who’d been all over the world, and they had read everything. They were writing about things like anorexia, bulimia, sex—things that just seemed beyond me. But what was interesting to me then, and I think still is, is work and what people do for a living.”
Keane is the daughter of two Irish immigrants; her mother had various jobs, and her father was a “sandhog,” a New York City tunnel worker. For Ask Again, Yes, Keane interviewed members of the New York Police Department to collect accurate details for her police officer characters, but with The Half Moon, she simply turned to family, gleaning insider bar knowledge about things like jukebox earnings, free swag from breweries, beverage distribution and state liquor licensing authorities. Her cousins tended to be more helpful than her uncles. “Irish people, they clam right up if they think you’re asking too many questions, especially since I’m a writer,” Keane says. With a laugh, she adds, “Every bartender in my family already thinks this book is about them.”
The novel’s fictional bar takes its name from the ship that English explorer Henry Hudson sailed on his 1609 voyage to discover a Northwest Passage; a variety of places and products in the Hudson Valley share the Half Moon name. The moniker is apt, since readers will wonder whether Malcolm and Jess’ marriage is waxing or waning. “I also like that the name isn’t overtly Irish,” Keane admits. “It sort of bothers me when everyone describes [my work] as ‘Irish people’ and ‘an Irish novel.’”
The hallmark of a classic Keane character isn’t their background or heritage, but rather their inability to articulate what’s bothering them. “I’m more familiar with and more sympathetic to people who would sooner either tamp it way down and pretend it’s not there—or throw a beer bottle against a wall,” she says. Malcolm, for instance, can charm customers with his gift of gab for hours, but at home, he’s not so much of a talker. In fact, one of his truest, most memorable forms of self-expression comes when he throws a cup of coffee at someone’s car. “These are my people, I guess,” Keane says. “As soon as I open a book and someone’s in therapy or playing tennis, I just don’t care.”
Keane has spent a lifetime observing people in fiction and real life, and in both cases, she likes to keep things simple. “We’re just a disaster from beginning to end,” she says with a laugh. “Nobody gets any smarter. It’s just that kids look up to us. But I want to say all the time, ‘I have absolutely no clue what I’m doing, but I’m going to drag you along with me, and we’re going to do our best. You know, try to be kind to the people you love. And that’s about it.’”
Photo of Mary Beth Keane by Martin Hickey
When the world entered COVID-19 lockdown, author Mary Beth Keane (Ask Again, Yes) found herself yearning for the indoor camaraderie of a really packed bar. To compensate, she immersed herself in writing The Half Moon, named for the townie bar at the story’s center.
Soon after Simon and his sisters, Talia and Rose, arrive for a week at their grandmother Nanaleen’s house, Simon becomes convinced that the house is haunted. But in Lin Thompson’s second middle grade novel, The House That Whispers, Simon’s deepest fears aren’t things that go bump in the night—they’re all the things he can’t control, such as the possibility that his parents might split up, the way Nanaleen seems to be having more trouble remembering things and the fact that Talia hardly ever talks to him anymore. The walls of Nanaleen’s house may be trying to tell Simon and his family something, but in order to move forward, they’ll all have to find the courage to listen.
The House That Whispers is your second published novel. How was its creative journey different from the journey of The Best Liars in Riverview, your first novel? The biggest difference was the timeline, honestly. I spent over seven years working on my debut before we sold it—and then The House That Whispers went from an idea to a draft to a final manuscript in about a year total. It was such a wildly different creative experience, but in some ways, all those years I spent working on my first book gave me the tools to be able to write this second one so much more quickly.
It was also incredibly helpful that I got to work with my editor right from the start this time. I was so nervous when I sent her my first draft, which was a complete mess compared to the fairly polished versions she’d read of my first book, but she was able to sort through my jumbled thoughts and gently home in on what I’d written the book about: a kid who feels like too many things in his life are changing all at once, and who’s scrambling to try to control the few things he can.
Tell us about Simon and what’s going on in his life and in his heart as the book opens. Simon is an 11-year-old trans kid with a big imagination and a lot of energy. At the novel’s start, he and his two sisters are going to spend a week at their grandmother’s house while their parents work through some marital issues at home. Simon is also starting to notice that his grandmother is forgetting things and his older sister is pulling away from him more and more.
With all these things already shifting in his family, Simon has decided that it’s not the right time for him to come out as trans just yet, so he’s been keeping his gender and newly chosen name to himself for now. Whenever the other characters unknowingly misgender him, he fixes the name and pronouns in his head (and on the page) so that the reader, at least, gets to know the real him throughout the story.
How did you develop Nanaleen’s house as both a setting and a character in its own right? Is it based on any real houses that you’ve spent time in? I knew the feeling I wanted the house to have. Simon’s family has lived there for several generations, and I wanted to convey a sense of weight from that history, from all these lives that have come before and the unexpected places that their stories slip through the cracks.
For the simple logistics, when I realized how important the house itself was going to be, I looked through records of houses built in the same time period and combined a few to make myself a floor plan.
I also took inspiration for a few bits and pieces from the houses of my grandparents on both sides of my family: the dormitory-esque room where Simon and his sisters sleep, the upstairs closet full of old stuffed animals, and the walls and walls of family photographs.
“I was incredibly secretive as a kid, for reasons I couldn’t have articulated back then.”
For a novel with the word whispers in the title, there sure are a lot of secrets that the characters aren’t telling one another. What drew you to creating a story in which so many characters are withholding things? Did any characters reveal any secrets or surprises to you as you drafted? I think secrets are a theme I’m always drawn to. I was incredibly secretive as a kid, for reasons I couldn’t have articulated back then. Now I can see how that instinct was probably tied to gender discomfort and neurodivergence, but at the time it just felt like I had all of these thoughts and feelings that I couldn’t let anyone else know about because it would change the way they looked at me. I didn’t realize how much that was weighing on me until I started finding people I could comfortably open up to.
But I’m also very interested in secrets within families and that strange dynamic where everyone in the family seems to know about something but no one really talks about it. Simon’s great-aunt Brie definitely surprised me as I was drafting. I knew I wanted to explore some of those unspoken family secrets, but I wasn’t quite sure how, and with Brie, it really felt like I was uncovering pieces of her story and her life as I was writing them.
The novel is set during a pivotal time for Simon’s family, and in some ways, Simon’s parents also function as ghosts within the story: They’re physically absent for much of the novel, but they’re definitely present in Simon and his siblings’ minds. What felt important to you to convey about these dynamics? I love that description of Simon’s parents as ghosts. Even though they’re not on the page much, their relationship issues really kick-start the story, and the stress of that is always lurking in the back of Simon’s mind. I think it all ties back to those themes of secrecy and the things we don’t talk about. Even as Simon’s parents are struggling, they’re trying to maintain this image for the kids that everything is fine. But Simon and his siblings all know on some level that it isn’t true, and in a way, it’s scarier for them to know that something is wrong without having anyone tell them what. At the same time, Simon spends a lot of the book doing a similar thing—trying to convince both himself and his family that he isn’t bothered by everything that’s happening, even though it’s more and more obvious that he is.
“Too often, when adults talk about ‘protecting’ kids from certain things, it really feels like they’re just trying to protect themselves from having a slightly uncomfortable conversation.”
Simon and his older sister, Talia, are deeply affected as they uncover the story of their great-aunt Brie. What would you say to an adult who thinks that middle grade readers aren’t ready to learn about the hidden and sometimes hurtful queer histories in their own families? Back when I was a children’s librarian, we talked a lot about how important it was for kids to learn about hard subjects like death or divorce before they encounter them in their own lives. Having that context already in place can be invaluable if or when they do have to navigate those scary times.
I think the same concept applies here. Kids should know that queer people exist and have always existed, and it’s OK to tell them that queer people haven’t always been treated well and that it isn’t fair or right. Kids are going to learn it at some point—they might have already—and it’s so much better for them to hear that message from a trusted adult who can answer questions and help support them through it.
Too often, when adults talk about “protecting” kids from certain things, it really feels like they’re just trying to protect themselves from having a slightly uncomfortable conversation. But if you aren’t talking with your kids about hard topics, that doesn’t mean they aren’t learning about them—it just means that while they’re learning about them, they’re also learning to put their trust somewhere besides you.
Throughout the novel, Simon grapples with the concept of perfection, especially with regard to his understanding of himself and his family. What do you hope young readers take away from his experiences and the realizations he eventually has about this idea? I hope readers can see that perfection isn’t a real thing. So much of Simon’s focus on perfection is about the external image of it: this false projection of a perfect family or a perfect life. But none of it reflects what’s actually going on internally. And the more Simon and his family focus on making their lives look perfect from the outside, the more they’re neglecting their actual feelings and struggles underneath. Simon himself spends so much energy trying to look happy that he makes himself miserable in the process. But you’re allowed to feel negative emotions, and you’re allowed to acknowledge when you’re having a hard time. Better to be messy and real.
“You’re allowed to feel negative emotions, and you’re allowed to acknowledge when you’re having a hard time. Better to be messy and real.”
What was the most rewarding part of writing this book? Putting words to Simon’s gender euphoria. I loved getting to write a trans kid who feels so much joy in figuring out who he is, and it was important to me that he keep carrying that joy even as he’s struggling. Now more than ever, I want to get to celebrate what an amazing, happy, beautiful thing it can be to be a trans person.
What about the book are you most proud of? It’s such a simple thing, but I’m proud that the reader gets to meet Simon as himself, even before the other characters in the book know his name or gender. It was deeply cathartic to let Simon take charge of how he’s referred to in the story and how the reader knows him. He tells us who he is, and we just get to believe him.
It seems fair to call The House That Whispers a ghost story of sorts. What are some of your favorite ghost stories (in any medium) and why? Have you ever personally had an encounter with something supernatural? My favorite ghost stories are the ones that seem at least as interested in exploring the characters’ inner journeys as they are in the actual ghosts. One of the inspirations for this book was “The Haunting of Hill House” on Netflix; I love how that show uses horror to explore the characters’ emotions and mental health and the cycles of trauma in the family at its center.
As far as I know, I’ve never had a direct encounter with the supernatural. I did have a bit of a scare while writing this book, though. My home office is in the basement, and sometimes I would be working after dark, and I started hearing these scritch-ing sounds in the walls and shuffling behind the ceiling tiles. As it turned out, we had a mouse infestation! It really felt like the universe was trying to give me a fully immersive writing experience. If there are any actual ghosts in our basement, they don’t seem to want to bother anyone.
After spending several years as one of the reigning queens of science fiction, Martha Wells plunges into a high fantasy world of empires and body-hopping demons with Witch King. Centuries ago, someone killed the powerful demon Kai-Enna and trapped his consciousness in a magical prison. When a foolish mage tries to take his powers, Kai breaks out of his prison, takes over the mage’s body and sets out to get his revenge and see what has become of the world in his absence.
For the past few years, you’ve been working in the realm of sci-fi, giving readers the glorious Murderbot Diaries. What drew you back to fantasy, and especially fantasy of this scale?
I’ve always loved fantasy, and there have been a large number of original, innovative fantasy novels coming out in the last several years. During the COVID-19 pandemic, I did a lot of reading and also started to watch a lot of international TV shows, such as Chinese and Korean fantasy dramas. This was all a big inspiration, and I started to play with fantasy ideas again. I had writer’s block for the first six months or so of the pandemic, and I realized I needed a change to shake me out of it, so I decided to run with some of those ideas. Witch King is my pandemic book, basically.
“SF and fantasy don’t have to stay within narrow boundaries or conform to past norms to find readers.”
Your take on demons is really unique. What drew you to telling a story with a demon as a main character, and why did you set them up as these body borrowers?
That was really the idea that first sparked the book. I wanted to write a non-human character again, in a fantasy context, someone who would be an outsider to the human cultures they interact with but who would be functionally immortal, and be able to observe and participate in a long swath of history. I wanted the demons to have powers that were potentially terrible to humans, and the idea of being able to take over a dead or living body worked with the idea of how the Saredi and the demons became allies through Kai’s grandmother. The first scene was something I had in mind for a long time but just never had a story to go with it.
The idea of the Saredi bargain—having a demon carry out the legacy of a dead human by taking over their body—is really beautiful. Can you talk a little about the evolution of this idea?
I wanted the Saredi clans and the demons to be closely related, to be old enemies who had come to an agreement that evolved into an almost symbiotic relationship. I also wanted that relationship to seem normal to the Saredi (and the reader) but strange and terrible to an outsider who had only heard rumors about it. I wanted it to be very much open to misinterpretation.
Witch King shows a revolution in flashbacks, but the main thrust of the story is set generations later. Did you always have these two storylines in mind, or did one inspire the other?
I don’t really think of it as a revolution; the characters are repelling a colonial invasion. Originally the flashbacks weren’t going to be as prominent, but once I started, I realized the story of meeting Bashasa and the escape and destruction of the Summer Halls was really important to understanding what was happening to Kai in the book’s present day. It was also a lot of fun to write.
Kai’s past relationships—with the members of the Saredi tribe; with Bashasa; and with Tahren, Ziede and Dahin—are important but also very clearly only seasons within a very long life. Were there any other significant moments or people from his past that ended up on the cutting room floor but that you wish you’d found a place for?
Not really. I did want to write more about Ziede and Tahren and Kai’s present-day family, how it evolved, and show the reader more of those characters, but it didn’t fit into the storyline. Hopefully I can have room for that in a future book.
Questions about the legacy of extractive colonization and imperialism are an undercurrent in your recent works. The Murderbot Diaries critique colonization, whereas Witch King goes one step further and asks us to think about the process of decolonization. What interests you about this topic, and why do you think you keep returning to it in your fiction?
I think the Murderbot Diaries focus more on corporate greed and control over the economy than colonization. But I think colonization is something I keep coming back to because I live in the United States; we’re surrounded by its legacies. The present is an overlay of the past, and all those conflicts and injustices are still very visible in everyday life.
You are very intentional when it comes to people’s clothing and the nuances of fashion. Where did the inspiration for the clothes in Witch King come from?
I looked at a lot of historical sources, especially ancient South Asia, ancient Egypt and ancient Syria, as well as fantasy versions of historical sources. I wanted the different cultures to have their own styles but also reflect how they had been trading and borrowing from one another for a long period of their history.
Is there a particular ensemble that’s a favorite of yours?
My favorite is probably the Arike coat; I’d really like to have one in real life.
How has the world of SFF changed since you published your first book?
It’s changed a lot. I think the publishing world has finally realized that diverse voices, international voices and different cultural or original ways of telling stories are what the reading audience wants. SF and fantasy don’t have to stay within narrow boundaries or conform to past norms to find readers. The books and authors showing up on the award lists every year are proof of that.
Photo of Martha Wells by Lisa Blaschke.
In Witch King, the beloved author of the Murderbot Diaries introduces another snarky hero for readers to adore.
Novelist and poet Robin Gow explores grief, queer identity and one of North America’s most beloved cryptids in DearMothman. Noah’s best friend, Lewis, always believed that Mothman, a creature first spotted in West Virginia in 1966, is real. After Lewis dies in a car crash, Noah decides to honor his friend by proving Mothman exists for a sixth-grade science fair project. As Noah seeks the truth about this local legend, he also finds the courage to show his truest self to the world.
Introduce us to Noah and what he’s working through as the novel opens. Noah lost his best friend, Lewis, a few months earlier. Lewis and Noah shared so much—they were the only trans kids in school, and in many ways Lewis’ boldness made a pathway for Noah to express himself and his identity too. Noah has only recently started to come out to people as trans, so he’s also trying to understand how to share that without Lewis to lean on. Then there’s the question of Mothman. Noah has always been the skeptic of their duo, but without Lewis, he’s finding himself even more curious about Mothman.
Noah’s feelings of loss and grief come through so clearly. As you were writing, what felt like the most important aspects of his emotions to capture and convey to the reader? I wanted to capture the ways grief is knotted and complicated. One moment we can feel intense despair and sadness. In the next we can find ways to twist those feelings into guilt or even frustration and anger. I thought it was important to show all the different ways Noah’s mind tries to wrap itself around Lewis’ absence and what it means for him and the world around him.
Noah relates to Mothman deeply, and the novel contains many beautiful reflections on the relationships between queerness and monstrousness. Why was it important to you to explore these ideas—and to do so for a middle grade readership? When I was a middle schooler I didn’t know myself as a queer person. I didn’t have that language, but I always gravitated toward monsters because I could see how they were often misunderstood or mischaracterized by the stories they found themselves in. I wanted to speak to youth who, like me, gravitate towards the strange and the monstrous because we see ourselves in them. Then, also, I hoped to help us question what a monster is. Often monsters are echoes of what a society fears most, and those fears can be unfounded. They are often a version of “fear of the other.”
“Often monsters are echoes of what a society fears most, and those fears can be unfounded.”
How did you first encounter Mothman? My college friends just generally liked all things supernatural and strange. I was our college Gay-Straight Alliance president and I literally gave a PowerPoint presentation on why cryptids were queer culture. It started with a joke that Nessy was definitely a lesbian.
I was drawn to Mothman specifically because I felt like he was misunderstood. He never does anything mean to people in the stories—he’s just lurking.
Dear Mothman is both epistolary and written in verse. Why did you decide to use these two forms? Why did blending them feel like the best way to tell Noah’s story? Both forms allow the reader to access Noah’s most personal and often scattered thoughts as he tries to connect with someone (or something, depending on how you think about Mothman). And both poetry and the epistolary form allow space for messy emotions and confessions.
The first draft of the book was actually only written in letters. As I revised, I found moments that worked better as just Noah talking and moments that felt best directed to Mothman. I think having both makes the moments when Noah is reaching out to Mothman even more powerful. Overall, I think verse can really embody the whirling feelings of characters’ coming-of-age moments.
One of the most fun elements of Dear Mothman are Noah’s sketches. They look like something a kid his age would actually draw. How did these visuals come to be part of the book? One of my favorite things about Mothman and other cryptids is that artists have so many different renditions of them. From the beginning I knew that Noah and Lewis would see those variations online and probably want to add to them. The first page I wrote was the school report Lewis and Noah made about Mothman, and I imagined that drawing it was really exciting for them because it would be a moment to let their imaginations explore what they thought Mothman was like.
Then, as we revised the book, we found more places where Noah might doodle. I drew some idea sketches in places and descriptions in others, and we worked with an illustrator who brought the ideas to life. Rebecca Harry did the drawings, and I think she perfectly captured how Noah would imagine Mothman as a gentle and fun monster. I also think the drawings channel the whimsy and fantasy of the cover art by Tracy J. Lee!
How do you think art can help us channel our feelings and understand ourselves? As a young person I actually mostly “wrote” in drawings. I made comics and graphic stories before I was writing anything. I am autistic, and I really struggled with writing and reading, especially in elementary school through middle school. Drawing was a space where I could push those struggles with words aside and capture imaginary creatures and worlds. I often draw myself as different genders and species. Drawing felt like the best kind of escape.
Noah meets new friends through LARPing—live-action roleplaying. Tell us about the role that these new friends and LARPing play in Noah’s life and why they’re such an essential part of his story. In my original drafts of the story, Noah’s friends were just playing pretend. My editor pointed out that kids at this age start to age out of just playing pretend and start to do things like Dungeons & Dragons and LARPing—still playing pretend but in different structures. To Noah, the fact that these kids still use their imaginations to play signals to him that they might be possible friends and allies, because he also loves to dream and imagine.
And things like LARPing and Dungeons & Dragons can be a huge part of queer culture. I mean yes, nonqueer people play them too, but for queer people these games are spaces where we can be ourselves and explore genders and sexualities without the confines and limits of the real world. In my own life, role playing and playing pretend were the first place I got to be my real gender. Even if I didn’t come out until college, I was playing games as a boy in elementary school.
Early in the novel, when Noah is telling Mothman about a conversation he had with his mom, he writes, “Why doesn’t anyone listen to me? . . . No one listens to kids or monsters.” That line is going to resonate so powerfully with so many young readers, so I want to ask: How do you think the world would be different if it weren’t true? I think we would be a more imaginative place. I think so many of the world’s problems persist because we’re forcibly cut off from our imaginations by crushing systems of capitalism and white supremacy. Then we inflict that violence on our youth. Sometimes we do this to try to help them survive and sometimes we do this almost as a punishment. Because we had to go through it.
I reflect on my experiences as a young autistic person in an ableist world. I was often made fun of, harassed and punished by adults and educators for my imagination, for being strange and for questioning what we were told. I learned to hide myself to avoid as much of that harassment as I could. I’ve spent most of my adult life working to reclaim what these systems have tried to beat out of me. This is the truth for so many youths, and at even higher rates for youth of color. I think about where our dreams and imaginations could take us if we gave all youth the space to be creative instead of just trying to survive.
The world needs drastic change, and I think more than any group of people, youth can see that and have the curiosity and questions to bring forth that change.
“I think so many of the world’s problems persist because we’re forcibly cut off from our imaginations.”
Three big-picture questions: What was the most challenging part of writing this book? What was the most rewarding? And what about the book are you most proud of? The most challenging part was probably carrying the plot through poems. I am a poet-of-center and thus my books often begin almost as character studies with a plot in the background, so it’s something I have to work to bring forward.
The most rewarding, I think, is how I’ve given space to Noah’s gender feelings. It’s sometimes hard to feel like we have space as trans people to have complicated and unsure feelings around gender, but I feel good about how that came through in this book.
I’m proud of how I’ve navigated Mothman as a character and a presence. I struggled with how to end the story and not tie a neat bow but still give the reader a satisfying conclusion. I am someone who genuinely believes in monsters, ghosts and all things unexplained, and I feel proud of how I (I hope) have sustained that mystery and fantasy.
If you were to go searching for any cryptid (besides Mothman, of course), who would you want to look for? Would you want to find them? I would look for the Squonk or the Jersey Devil. The Squonk is a somewhat lesser-known cryptid of Pennsylvania. He cries all the time and is a kind of wrinkly piglike creature. I have two pet pugs and I feel like he’s not that far from a pug dog . . . so I’d be very happy to find the Squonk.
The Jersey Devil I’m interested in because I think the Pine Barrens are probably the most mythical-feeling place I’ve ever been. It feels like ancient creatures lurk there. I’m still not sure if I’m ready to meet the Jersey Devil though. They seem a bit more frightening, but if given the choice I think I would still want to meet them.
“I’ve gone places and seen things that most people don’t,” Barbara Butcher says. That’s a mighty understatement, given that she spent 22 years working as a death investigator for New York City’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. As she gazes at the panoramic view from the windows of her high-rise apartment in Brooklyn, she muses, “I can look at any given building and say, ‘Oh, that was the guy that had the drug overdose’ or, ‘There’s the guy who got stabbed.’” But despite such horrors, she loved the job. “If you’re going to investigate death, New York City is the place to do it,” she says.
Butcher began as a medicolegal death investigator, eventually becoming director of the Forensic Science Training Program, logging countless hours at death scenes all over the city while “getting some justice for people and getting some answers for families,” she says. Butcher chronicles all of this heartbreak, drama, intrigue—and occasional humor—in her spellbinding memoir, What the Dead Know: Learning About Life as a New York City Death Investigator.
Butcher’s job, she explains, was not to solve murders but to investigate all of the circumstances surrounding deaths. While forensic pathologists determined the cause and manner of each death, Butcher scoured bodies and their surroundings for clues, such as signs of violence or disease. Having worked on “perhaps 5,500 cases,” she decided it was finally time to write about them during COVID-19 lockdown. “I remember all of them,” she says, including “naturals,” murders, accidents and suicides—which she says she always found disturbing. A particularly wrenching story involved an older Jewish woman who jumped off of her apartment’s roof, leaving no note or clues about her last act. “This woman had survived a concentration camp, the loss of home and country,” Butcher writes. “What could make her want to kill herself after all these years?” Throughout the book, Butcher’s descriptions are vivid yet respectful, reflecting the dizzying array of human experience.
What Butcher most loved about the job was getting to witness exactly how people lived. “Once someone’s dead, they can no longer hide anything from you,” she says. “So, being a nosy person, I get to go in there, investigate how they died and look at how they lived—go through their possessions for identification, medications, things like that.” She found herself in every kind of setting, from multimillion-dollar penthouses with priceless artwork to apartment bedrooms crammed with multiple bunk beds and hammocks strung between them. She has climbed into railroad tunnels to access caves where people had set up housekeeping. She has ventured to the Whitehouse Hotel, which was a “flophouse” with hundreds of cubicles that she recalls as “pieces of plywood with chicken wire on top, and that’s where people lived and died—literally a warehouse for humans.” Both during our call and in her book, she repeatedly bristles at the long-standing discrepancy in investigative resources. There will be few resources dedicated to, say, “a young Black woman who is a sex worker found murdered in the back alley of the Javits Center,” she says, while a “white girl from a wealthy family and murdered on Park Avenue will be on every headline and police blotter until it’s solved.” She adds, “I don’t think anyone should be lost to history, and perhaps that’s why I picked the cases that I did.”
“Every day is a disaster waiting to happen. Every little footstep outside my door is a potential serial killer.”
Once Butcher began working on her book, she found that writing about cases was decidedly easier than writing about herself. To deal with the many troubling situations that she encountered, she developed a steely detachment, which worked well for her career but caused repeated problems in her personal life. “I don’t do vulnerable,” she says. “That’s not my thing.” At her editor’s insistence, however, she added more intimate details into her manuscript, revealing, for instance, that she experienced depression and suicidal thoughts as teenager. Butcher also describes how her childhood love of science led her to become a physician assistant and then a hospital administrator, but she lost that position after she began to drink heavily. Her life was decidedly off the rails when she turned to Alcoholics Anonymous, whose career counseling service suggested that she should become either a poultry veterinarian, of all things, or a coroner. She scheduled an informational interview with Dr. Charles Hirsch, the legendary NYC Chief Medical Examiner, who hired her on the spot. “Alcoholism had landed me my dream job!” she writes.
“I’ve noticed these things in my life,” Butcher says, “where something bad happens, but out of it, ultimately, I’m steered in a better direction.” In fact, she even came to believe that her experiences with alcoholism helped hone her investigative skills. “We’re always hiding everything,” she says, referring to people with substance abuse disorders, “and so we know what’s hidden.”
Dr. Hirsch soon became a beloved mentor. “He was like a father, a brother, a friend. Just so much about him was so good,” Butcher says. His guidance was essential, especially since Butcher was only the second woman to take on her role in Manhattan, the first having left after only a month. She worked hard, as she writes, to fit in as “one of the girls who is one of the boys.” Over the years, Butcher was ribbed for showing up at death scenes in Talbots suits, but she prided herself on looking professional and found that it helped move investigations along. There were jokes, too, about her name, but she calls her surname “a great gift from my dad,” who was a policeman. She loved arriving at scenes and saying, “Butcher from the Medical Examiner. What d’you got?” and still chuckles about the time when an intern named Slaughter tagged along.
“When you’re surrounded by death and evil and murder and horror and tragedy, you accept it as the norm.”
This sense of humor also comes through in Butcher’s writing. What the Dead Know contains numerous one-liners such as, “You learn to think outside the box when the box contains a dead person.” Explaining the need for such dark humor, she says, “You have to deflect the pain and the sadness.”
Butcher was suddenly forced out of her job in 2015 when Bill de Blasio became mayor of New York and made his own appointments. “I miss it every single day,” she says. “I crave it. I long for it. It got to the point where I was thinking, ‘Well, if things go really, really bad, they’ll have to take me back—like during a nuclear attack or something.” She laughs at her desperation but adds, “Yeah, I miss that job. It was absolutely fantastic. Having said that, I will also say that it ruined me emotionally.”
Over the years, Butcher began to see calamity lurking at every turn. “The PTSD is god-awful,” she admits. “Years of therapy have mitigated it somewhat, but the thoughts are still there. Every day is a disaster waiting to happen. Every little footstep outside my door is a potential serial killer. When you’re surrounded by death and evil and murder and horror and tragedy, you accept it as the norm.” As for her own death, she speculates, “I’m fairly certain that I’ll be hit in the head by a stray bullet while trying to save a child from a river crossing. . . . It will be something dramatic, I’m quite certain.”
“If you have an amazingly cool job that you really love and enjoy, and you get to do a little good in the world—well, that’s wonderful, isn’t it?”
Butcher sank into a deep depression after leaving the Medical Examiner’s Office, eventually requiring hospitalization and electroshock therapy, which she recounts in her book. “Ultimately, creativity is what saved me,” she says. “I took some piano lessons. I took dance lessons. I did things that were creative and fun and the opposite of death. I think that is part of why I wrote this book now. It’s a way to create something that may take me out of this feeling of being so totally bereft.”
Meanwhile, Butcher has two more books in the works. The first is a novel based on a story from her investigative life. “I have a theory of what really happened, so I have to fictionalize it,” she says. The other is a nonfiction exploration of the sorry state of death investigation in the United States. Butcher says she abhors the fact that about 60% of the country is served by elected coroners (as opposed to medical examiners), some of whom have no higher qualification than a high school degree. “That is why it is often easy to get away with murder,” she says, “if you are clever enough to make it look natural.”
“I think almost everyone is interested in death on some level,” Butcher says, “because it’s going to happen to everyone. Some might imagine that I have some insight into it, but I don’t, of course.” Regardless, she’s extremely proud of the work she’s done throughout her career. “If you have an amazingly cool job that you really love and enjoy, and you get to do a little good in the world—well, that’s wonderful, isn’t it?”
Headshot of Barbara Butcher by Anthony Robert Grasso.
The New York City death investigator shares what it was like to have a career that both saved and ruined her life.
Have you ever seen a pregnant woman, perhaps with her arms weighed down by shopping bags, digging through her purse in front of a heavy door—and rushed forward to let her in using your own keycard? Or perhaps found a stray USB drive on the floor in your office building—and plugged it into your computer to see if you could figure out who to return it to?
If the answer to either or both questions is yes, you might have done someone a big favor . . . or you might have fallen prey to a penetration tester. Pen testers, as they’re often called, are daring and creative sorts hired by companies to identify security vulnerabilities, help repair weaknesses in their systems and recommend practices for avoiding issues in the future. That might involve attempting to access a vitally important database or evading security guards after sneaking into a presumably well-secured building.
A husband-and-wife pen tester team is at the center of Ruth Ware’s propulsive and emotionally complex new thriller, Zero Days. Gabe and Jack (short for Jacintha) revel in the complicated challenges and thrills that come with performing legally sanctioned digital and physical break-ins for their clients.
“I wouldn’t trust myself to think, well, I can investigate this better than the police, whereas I think Jack genuinely does think that.”
Ware revels in it, too; the internationally bestselling author’s deep fascination with the subject is evident in the wealth of intriguing details and scenarios that make Zero Days, her eighth novel, a supremely suspenseful reading experience. In a call with BookPage from her home on the south coast of England, where she lives with her husband and two children, the author says that she got hooked on the idea of writing about pen testers while performing in-depth research for two of her previous books.
“I had been researching apps and startups and tech companies for The Turn of the Key and One by One,” she explains. “I started listening to a lot of tech startup podcasts, and then from there I just gravitated toward the crime-y stabby edge. . . . I ended up on the darknet end of the internet, and that was where I first found out about pen testers and the extent of what they do.”
She also listened to “hundreds of hours of podcasts, read blogs, memoirs, online articles and interviews and so on,” she says. “Usually my process of research is to dredge as widely as I can and absorb as much as I can, and then at the end maybe 5% of that makes it into the book.” This immersive process helps her “paint the picture of the person who would do this job, what’s their day-to-day life like, what are all the interesting little nuggets of weirdness that are going to make it into the book.”
Jack’s keen ability to strategize and adapt under pressure is essential to her role—and, tragically, becomes necessary for her very survival. One night, while Jack is completing an assignment, Gabe is brutally murdered in their home. Not only does Jack lose her beloved life partner but the police consider her the prime suspect. Knowing that as long as they’re focusing on her they won’t search for the real killer, Jack decides to run for it: She’ll do her utmost to evade capture while figuring out who the real murderer is, and hopefully exact some vengeance along the way.
It’s a decision that makes complete sense for the character, of course, but what about the woman who created her? Ware insists with a laugh that “I wouldn’t make that decision in a million years. I would hunker down and hope to god that everything was sorted out. I wouldn’t trust myself to think, well, I can investigate this better than the police, whereas I think Jack genuinely does think that. And to an extent, she’s going to be right because of her unique skill set.”
The author also notes that Jack’s preternatural confidence in all manner of sticky situations is not something she possesses. “I am superaware of my own limitations,” she says. “I am an incredibly bad liar, which is a strange thing for a writer to say. . . . I’m very law-abiding. If I have the least consciousness of guilt, I go scarlet. That’s how I know I could never do that job. I could never walk into somewhere where I didn’t belong and act like I did.”
Jack, on the other hand, can and does, and when she takes to the streets of London—home to one of the most extensive CCTV surveillance systems in the world—that capability is crucial. But while she does fall on the more-prepared side of things, even in particularly dicey circumstances, she is also fallible, subject to misguided impulses, nagging injuries and uncertainty about what to do next.
“The temptation when you’re writing is always to go a little bit more Mission: Impossible, a little bit more Ethan Hunt, sliding down lift shafts and such, and the dramatic part of me would have loved to write some of those things,” Ware says. “But it was also really important to me to root it in the reality of what these jobs are, which is that, yes, it does take a certain type of personality, but actually you don’t have to be at the pinnacle of fitness or have a genius IQ. . . . You need to be very confident and very charming and able to push the envelope a little bit more than someone else might.”
Jack also struggles under the weight of immense shock and grief. Her deep sadness over the incomprehensible loss of Gabe comes in waves throughout Zero Days. It’s something she isn’t able to fully process, what with the police, and possibly the people who killed Gabe, close on her tail.
“I think human beings are much lovelier and kinder than we give them credit for.”
That sorrowful refrain was crucial, Ware says, when it came to imbuing her time-is-running-out tale with a mournful yet determined heart. “Probably the biggest critique I have of Golden Age crime [fiction], and modern crime as well, is that sometimes the death of the person whose murder forms the mystery at the heart of the book can be treated like it’s just there to provide the puzzle or the impetus for the main character,” she says.
“Thank god I’ve never really lost anyone in my life in the way that Jack loses Gabe, but I have been bereaved,” Ware adds, “and it is a seismic life event that you do not get over quickly; you’re not out there merrily detecting two weeks later. I wanted to be really careful to show the effects that grief has on a life and the ripples of consequence. . . . That’s true to how I think we are as people, we carry on putting one foot in front of the other because we have to and the world does go on . . . but every now and again you get hit by the reality of what happened.”
In terms of achieving practical verisimilitude in her story, Ware turned to a British reality TV show. “When I was researching, I spoke to a number of police officers,” she says, “and they all said the same thing: You should watch ‘Hunted.’” The action-packed goings-on in the show, which follows 14 people as they try to remain hidden for 28 days while a team of experts attempts to track them down, vividly illustrate the speed at which paranoia can build and how easily one can be found via elements of modern life such as online banking.
Another aspect of the show resonated with Ware on a deeper level. “The ones who win are usually successful because they’re likable people and they persuade people to do nice things for them,” she says. “And it just constantly amazes me how willing people are to go the extra mile for total strangers.”
That revelation was, happily, in keeping with her own convictions. “I wanted to show both sides of that in the book. Jack’s a suspicious person; she has to be because of her job, and being on the run is only exacerbating that, “ Ware says. “But at the same time, I think human beings are much lovelier and kinder than we give them credit for.”
Even as we celebrate the good in humanity, though, Ware warns that we should not be cavalier about protecting ourselves online. After all, as Jack muses in Zero Days, there are most definitely bad actors lurking around the internet: “slippery, shadowy, forcing their way through the cracks in our online security and the doors we left open for them in our digital lives.”
When I tell Ware that this poetically stated line is quite the chilling sentiment, she replies with a cheery “Thank you!” and adds, “I think once it comes out, if anyone takes any moral or lesson from this book, it should be to use a password manager.” That’s because, she explains, “reusing passwords is the equivalent of chaining all your door keys and car keys in the same bunch and then putting your address on it,” while a password manager generates and stores unique passwords for the myriad accounts we all juggle every day. “Literally every single person I interviewed said this,” the author says. And by the way, she laughs, “I was already using a password manager, so I felt very smug.”
” . . . every book is really a process of tricking myself into believing that nobody apart from me is going to read it.”
While she’s justifiably pleased with herself when it comes to online savvy, Ware is far from smug about her career thus far. Since her first book, In a Dark, Dark Wood, was published in 2015, her books (more than 6 million in print, and counting) have been published in more than 40 languages worldwide. “I never expected to have this level of success. . . . There are moments when it’s brought home to me very forcibly; when I walk into a place full of readers who are there for me, it’s wonderful and terrifying.” But, she says, “when I’m actually at my desk writing, it’s something I try not to think about too much. . . . For me, every book is really a process of tricking myself into believing that nobody apart from me is going to read it.”
Of course, that’s extremely unlikely to happen with Zero Days, which Ware says is a bit of a departure from her typical fare. “I don’t want to sit down and think, what would be the next Agatha Christie-ish Ruth Ware book that I could write?” she says. “It’s much more about finding something I want to say, and then hopefully at the end of that people will like it and my publishers will be able to market it. Which is exactly how this book came about, with me becoming mildly obsessed with the subject and my imagination running away with me, and then at the end of it thinking, oh gosh, I think I’ve written a thriller!”
Indeed she has, one that will have readers rooting for Jack as they strategize survival and try to ferret out the truth right along with her. Presumably, they’ll also gather up tips that will come in handy should they one day become embroiled in a similar pickle—or even be inspired to become pen testers themselves. And all the while, Ware hopes, “I would like us to be a little bit less suspicious of each other as individuals, because I think the world has mostly good people, but a little bit more careful with our online security overall.” In other words: Get thee a password manager!
Photo of Ruth Ware by Gemma Day Photography.
The mega-popular thriller writer’s Zero Days finds the human heart within the high-stakes security industry.
Jennifer Ackerman knows birds. In fact, the award-winning science writer and bestselling author has written three books about them (The Genius of Birds, Birds by the Shore and The Bird Way). Now, with What an Owl Knows: The New Science of the World’s Most Enigmatic Birds, she shines a light on “the most distinctive order of birds in the world.” We asked Ackerman about her research, including her travels far and wide to meet with scientists, researchers and countless volunteers dedicated to observing and understanding these enigmatic creatures—and figuring out how we can help save them.
What an absolutely fascinating book you’ve written! What do you think is the quality that makes humans most intrigued by owls—their wide-eyed cuteness, their perceived wisdom, their air of mystery? I would say all of the above! Owls have enchanted humans for tens of thousands of years. We see ourselves in them, with their huge heads and big forward-facing eyes (and yes, their cute faces). And yet they’re also so very different from us—strange, mysterious denizens of the dark, capable of flying silently and navigating the night, with sensory powers beyond our own that allow them to hunt in the pitch black. So it’s the whole package of mystery, cuteness, extraordinary skills and intelligence that inspires awe and wonder.
Your earlier books (e.g., Chance in the House of Fate, Ah-Choo! and Sex Sleep Eat Drink Dream) were about humans. In your more recent books, you’ve turned to birds. What prompted that transition from writing about people to writing about our feathered friends? I’ve loved birds since I was a child. My first book, Birds by the Shore, explored the nature of the mid-Atlantic coast, including ospreys and shorebirds. I took a detour into human biology because I was fascinated by the riddle of humanity’s place in the natural world. Chance in the House of Fate is about the genetic similarities between humans and other organisms, the long thread of DNA that connects us with all living things.
But in 2013, my husband was diagnosed with cancer, and I decided to turn my attention back to nature and to my first love: birds. I’m an avid reader of scientific journals, and I noticed an abundance of new research about the shifting view of bird brains and bird behavior. I got interested in what makes birds tick. How do they communicate? Why do they sing so gloriously? And how do they learn their songs? What’s going on in their minds while they forage, build nests, raise their young? How do they make decisions and solve problems? This launched me into The Genius of Birds and The Bird Way, and from there to owls.
More than one of the researchers and scientists you introduce in What an Owl Knows spoke of a pivotal moment in childhood when they knew they were meant to work with owls. Did you have a similar early-in-life feeling of certainty about working with birds? Those stories of pivotal moments really resonated with me. When I was 7 or 8, I started bird-watching with my dad along the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal in Washington, D.C. My dad had been a bird-watcher himself since childhood, when he learned about birds and birdsong as a Boy Scout. He was a busy guy (with five daughters!) when I was young, but he loved to get out on weekends and look for warblers and thrushes. Bird-watching was a good way to get some time alone with him. We would rise before dawn, head down to the canal and the woods along the Potomac River, and listen in the dark for birdsong. My dad gave me my first pair of binoculars and my first bird field guide. From then on, I was hooked.
In your afterword, you note that you decided to write this book during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. What about that time do you think drove you to immerse yourself in the world of owls? Did you get to know any owls near your home during lockdown? So many of us turned to birds during the pandemic. I think we needed to feel connected with other creatures, and the birds were right there in our backyards. A friend of mine had a barred owl family living in the woods behind her, and we would take walks looking for the nest. That was how we spent time together. We heard the owls but never actually saw them. On the river near where I live, I did get to see a great horned owl, but only once. These birds are just so elusive and difficult to spot!
In deciding what birds to write about next, I realized I wanted to focus on a single family or order, one that would point to the incredible variety of birds even within a single group. Owls vary dramatically from species to species and even from individual to individual within a species, so they seemed like a great choice. I wanted to learn more about the idiosyncrasies of different species and what had been discovered about their evolution, adaptations and individual natures.
“It’s the whole package of mystery, cuteness, extraordinary skills and intelligence that inspires awe and wonder.”
Readers will likely be surprised to learn that when owls, say, swat at nighttime joggers, they might just be trying to play—not attacking. What does owls’ penchant for purely fun activities tell us about them? The playfulness of owls signals several illuminating things about them: first, that they feel safe enough—and well fed enough—to engage in activities that take energy and may make them vulnerable. It also points to their intelligence. Birds that play (mostly parrots, corvids and owls) tend to be species with relatively bigger brains. Scientists suspect that play depends on cognition. So owls may play because they’re smart but also because it’s fun and rewarding. In most animals, play triggers the release of dopamine, which is active in the reward system of the brain, as well as endogenous opioids, which are essential for sensations of pleasure. In other words, owls may play not just to practice life skills but because it floods their brains with feel-good chemicals.
You learned that the availability of owl-centric merchandise is a good way of discerning whether owls are viewed favorably or negatively in a particular location or moment in time. Do you have any favorite owl items that you wear, use or display? I admit that my house, my yard and my wardrobe are full of owly objects: owl photos and sculptures and ceramic pots, owl pins and earrings and necklaces, owl T-shirts and owl socks. But my favorite owly object is a piece of folk art I found in a little cafe in Iguaçu, Brazil. It’s a comical little owl bell crafted from metal with big, bright eyes and wings made of pale yellow citrine stones.
This is probably an impossible question to answer, but: You traveled to so many wonderful places to meet with scientists and observe myriad owls in the wild. Which ones—the places and the owls—were your favorite, the ones you hope to get back to as soon as you can? That is a hard question. I’d like to get back to the Atlantic Forest in Brazil, which harbors nearly as much biological diversity as the Amazon. Given the chance, I’d return to Montana in a heartbeat to spend more time with great gray owls, one of my two favorite species. (The other is burrowing owls, which are so comical, idiosyncratic and full of character and live all over the Americas.) I’d also love to go to the Sky Islands of southeastern Arizona and northern Mexico, a place I’ve never been, to see all the little forest owls there, such as the flammulated, elf and whiskered screech owls.
“I like to imagine that I’m writing a letter to an interested friend, and that helps me sort out what’s essential and interesting and what I can leave on the cutting room floor.”
Have you developed any routines over the course of your writing career that help you balance your time in the field with reading, researching, editing, etc.? How did you decide what to keep in What an Owl Knows and what to leave out? I usually spend a year or two reading, researching, interviewing and doing fieldwork for my books. My favorite part of the process is being out in the field at research sites, traipsing around with scientists obsessed with their species and eager to share their vast knowledge and let me observe their fieldwork. They’re all unfailingly generous with their time, and I depend on their expertise. Then it’s another year or two of writing and editing, draft after draft after draft. Sometimes the amount of material I gather is overwhelming and chapters balloon. But the editing of the extraneous, the sculpting and crafting of narrative, is a joyful experience. I like to imagine that I’m writing a letter to an interested friend, and that helps me sort out what’s essential and interesting and what I can leave on the cutting room floor.
You asked many owl experts what individuals can do when it comes to advocating for and helping to preserve owl populations and habitats. What are a few things that readers can do right now to get started? Most importantly, do whatever you can to help preserve owl habitat. If you own any piece of land, however large or small, think about the owls that might be living there and what they need. Don’t mow your lawn if you can avoid it. (Or better yet, do away with your lawn altogether and plant native grasses.) This will draw in more prey for owls. Leave dead trees and snags standing if they don’t pose a danger. If you own a large piece of land, consider a conservation easement to protect it after you’re gone. And finally, support organizations and legislation that promote habitat conservation.
Among the other immediate actions readers can take:
Keep cats indoors. (Cats kill owls and compete for their prey.)
Protect owls from accidents by not throwing apple cores and other garbage into roadside ditches, covering your chimney with a mesh lid, taking down soccer nets when they’re not in use, limiting your Halloween fake cobwebs to indoors and removing any unused barbed wire from your property.
Don’t use rodenticides to control rodents; use traps instead.
Use 100% recycled paper to help reduce the loss of trees.
Support owl research, education and rehabilitation centers.
“Owls are even stranger, more intriguing, more powerful and more appealing than I imagined.”
Owls are beautiful, majestic and adorable—as can be seen in every wonderful photo in your book—so it’s not surprising that people wish to have them as pets. It is, however, a terrible idea. Will you give readers a sum-up as to why? Yes, a terrible idea. For one thing, in most countries, including the U.S., it’s illegal to keep owls without a special permit and licensing. Moreover, owls are high maintenance and hard to care for. They eat rodents or other animals that must be fresh, and their droppings are stinky and messy. Their talons are sharp and can damage furniture, shred blankets and pillows and puncture skin. In the breeding season, they hoot all night long, which makes for patchy sleep. They can live for up to 30 years, so it’s a massive commitment, a way of life. But most important in my mind: Owls are wild birds, and they’re meant to live life in the wild. As one licensed owl care provider told me, “In cages they simply cannot do all the things their bodies were designed for, and their spirits require.”
When you think about your time among the owls, what made the biggest impression on you? What are you most hoping readers take away from What an Owl Knows? Exploring owls for this book just blew away all my assumptions about these birds. Owls are even stranger, more intriguing, more powerful and more appealing than I imagined. They’ve also changed the way I experience the world. Owls see what we don’t see. They hear what we don’t hear. So they invite you to notice things that you might otherwise miss. Also, they’re so quiet and subtle, so well camouflaged, and they point to the value of not standing out in the world but fitting into it.
But I think what impressed me most is how complex these magnificent birds are, how highly skilled, distinctive and idiosyncratic, with unique voices and personalities all their own, and with a full range of feelings and emotions. I hope readers will come away from the book with the same new thrill, wonder and awe, and with a new appreciation for how critical owls are to the well-being of the planet.
What’s next for you? Is there anything you want to share, owly or otherwise? This summer, I’m going on the road to share a presentation about owls and what I learned writing this book. Like the book, the presentation is illustrated with gorgeous photos. It also includes some amazing videos of secret moments with owls, as well as audio recordings of the range of owl vocalizations, from a great gray owl’s deep, throaty hoot to the “devil’s cackle” of a Eurasian eagle owl. I hope people can make it to these talks—I’ll be signing books there—or perhaps catch one virtually. There’s a schedule of upcoming events at my website.
I do have another book in the works, but I’m going to be owly about that and keep it a secret!
Author headshot of Jennifer Ackerman by Sofia Runarsdotter.
The bestselling author of bird books turns her attention to one of the most alluring avians in What an Owl Knows.
When ghostwriter Chandler Cohen has a wildly disappointing one-night stand with actor Finn Walsh, she chalks it up to the perils of casual sex and moves on. But then she finds out that Finn is her new client—and he’d really appreciate it if, when they’re not working on his book, she taught him how to satisfy a woman properly.
Sex in romance novels is often idealized and aspirational, but you absolutely turn that on its head in this book! What made you want to create a handsome, charming, appealing hero who’s genuinely awful at sex? I love subverting tropes whenever I can, and while I adore romance novels, the sex can sometimes feel a bit airbrushed. Don’t get me wrong, sometimes that’s exactly what I want to read. Other times, though, I’m eager to see more varied, more realistic sexual experiences on the page—and those can absolutely still be hot. I would argue that sometimes they’re even hotter.
There’s a reason I only ever write beta heroes: I love the awkwardness and fumbling and blushing. It’s far sexier to me to read (and write) a spicy scene between two people working together to learn what each other likes, especially because this lends itself to significant character and relationship growth. Communication is crucial in these scenes, and when the sex is bad, there needs to be a lot of communication to make it better. That journey makes the end result all the more satisfying.
With Finn, I wanted to challenge myself: Could I redeem a hero who’s bad in bed? Would readers still root for that character? (I hope so! He’s quite sincere about wanting to improve, and he is a very good listener.) That’s also why I made his most famous role a nerdy scientist type who wasn’t the main character of his show: I didn’t want him to be typical leading man material.
“There’s a reason I only ever write beta heroes: I love the awkwardness and fumbling and blushing.”
I was intrigued by the comparison Finn made between ghostwriting and acting—how both are a chance to escape from your own story for a little while and live in someone else’s. Is that something you enjoy as an author? It’s truly my favorite thing, and it’s why I studied journalism. I am so curious about people, and journalism gave me a noncreepy way to ask them questions about themselves. In all seriousness, though, it’s such a privilege to get to learn about what someone loves and then to try and bring that passion to the page.
As you note in Business or Pleasure, there are countless different ways to approach writing a memoir. Did you read a lot of them for research? Do you have any particular favorites? I’ve read plenty of celebrity memoirs over the years, so in a way, I was researching before I started writing! I also spoke to a few ghostwriters about their experiences, which helped me add more depth as I was drafting. I will admit that the first memoir I read post-Business or Pleasure happened to be Prince Harry’s Spare. I found myself trying to determine which turns of phrase might have been massaged by the ghostwriter and which ones might have been exactly as the subject had spoken them. That was the first book where I felt I could really see the ghostwriter.
As for favorites, Mara Wilson’s Where Am I Now? really struck a chord with me. I also loved both of Mindy Kaling’s books and Judy Greer’s I Don’t Know What You Know Me From.
Outlines and planning of all sorts are very important to Chandler. Is that a trait you share? What did that add to her character for you? Perhaps to my own detriment at times, but yes! My process usually begins with some character work, learning their backstories and what brought them to the places they’re at when the book opens. Then I outline. I recently started using Gwen Hayes’ Romancing the Beat and can’t believe it took me this long to pick it up. Total game changer.
The outlines Chandler uses were my editor’s idea. In my first draft, Chandler’s sex-ed instruction was interwoven with the “practical” portion of her lessons, and it messed with the flow of the intimate scenes—they’d be getting into it, and she’d pause to give him a lecture on anatomy. The outline suggestion was great because it speaks to how Chandler is a planner who’s spent years chaining herself to a career that isn’t giving her what she needs. She takes the job with Finn in hopes of getting out of a professional rut, and it wrecks her plans in the best possible way.
“My characters don’t love each other in spite of whatever else they happen to be dealing with. They simply love each other, full stop.”
In Chandler’s lessons with Finn, she talks about how movies and TV tend to focus on the male gaze. It could be said that heterosexual romance tends to focus on the female gaze. Do you agree? I agree to an extent, yes. But I think this can get tricky because the male gaze so often sexualizes women, and just as I’m not interested in media featuring women as sex objects, I never want to write men as sex objects either. That’s not progress. While my books center women’s desires because I’m mainly writing from a single point of view, my heroes’ desires are still present, and my hope is that these relationships feel healthy and balanced.
The Lord of the Rings books were deeply formative for Finn. Was there a series like that for you? One you connected with as a child or a teen that still holds a lot of resonance? Yes, absolutely! The Princess Diaries books were my comfort reads, and they always feel like slipping back into conversation with an old friend. I have distinct memories of sitting in an aisle of Borders (RIP) with the latest volume, trying not to read the whole thing before I could bring it home but unable to stop myself from turning the pages.
You render the world of fan conventions so vividly! Do you have much experience with them? Thank you! I’ve been to Emerald City Comic Con a few times, and I’ve always loved the energy there and how cons are a place where people can be unashamedly passionate about what they love. One of my early ideas for Business or Pleasure actually sparked at a con many years ago at a panel with a few “Buffy” actors. I found it fascinating that their careers mainly centered on the con circuit and wondered what that might be like—to be most well known for something you did two decades ago.
I’m this weird combination in that I studied journalism, which revolves around interviewing strangers, but I also have moments of intense shyness. Most of my con experiences were with my now-husband, and he’d always have a joke or anecdote ready for a celebrity, while I’d give an awkward smile and struggle to make eye contact. Essentially, I’d be terrible at Chandler’s job!
I loved the specificity of your portrayal of the Jewish experience, from looking for matzo ball soup when you’re sick, to seeking out menorahs in holiday movies, to going to services and realizing you still remember all the words. Why was it important that Chandler and Finn shared a Jewish background? While all my protagonists are Jewish, I tend to go back and forth with my heroes. For Business or Pleasure, I wanted another point of connection between Chandler and Finn. They’re coming from two different worlds, but they have more in common than they initially realized, from a shared feeling of imposter syndrome to mental health to religion.
You don’t shy away from serious topics in Business or Pleasure, including mental health and abortion. What made you decide to include those subjects? What story possibilities did they open up for you? I never want my writing to feel didactic, but mental health tends to play a key role in my books because it’s often at the forefront of my own mind, and it’s been a long journey for me to feel comfortable and safe in my own brain.
I want to test the limits of what we can call a romantic comedy, because I still consider my books rom-coms even when they deal with depression or grief or any number of “heavier” topics. And I put that in quotes because while those things might seem heavy for a rom-com, they’re so much a part of our regular, nonfictional lives, and humans still manage to fall in love all the time. My characters don’t love each other in spite of whatever else they happen to be dealing with. They simply love each other, full stop.
The Ray Carney saga is Colson Whitehead’s first series, and just like his readers, he feels passionately about the man at its center: a respectable, upwardly mobile furniture salesman by day, and fence of stolen goods by night. “I love him too. He’s been a great source of pleasure and inspiration,” says the author. But that affection doesn’t stop Whitehead from mercilessly putting Ray through the wringer.
Picking up four years after the close of Harlem Shuffle, Crook Manifesto heightens the dangers and stakes for the prosperous Harlem merchant and former hustler, and Ray soon gets sucked back into life on the seamier side. After all, as Whitehead writes, “crooked stays crooked and bent hates straight.”
In truth, the author may love Ray now, but the character was born out of a kind of hate—the distaste Whitehead felt for a ubiquitous trope in heist movies. “The character of the fence is always a travesty,” he says. “The team does all the work, and half the crew’s dead—they’re crawling or bloody, the cops are after them. And then some random guy you haven’t even seen before in the whole movie is like ‘10 cents on the dollar.’”
“I hated the fence so much that I started thinking, who is that? Who is that guy?”
Whitehead was incensed by the patterns he observed on-screen, but that ire gave way to curiosity: “I hated the fence so much that I started thinking, who is that? Who is that guy?” And from this interrogation came the driving force of the Ray Carney trilogy: “the psychology of the fence. . . . Having a front business and having your illegal stuff in the back provided the divided nature of Ray Carney.”
Although Whitehead kept his cards close to the vest, he knew almost from the start that he had a series on his hands. While the initial instinct was “to do a heist book and just have fun with that genre,” once started, the ideas kept flowing. There was just too much material, and he was having too much fun to stop at one book. “I was halfway through [Harlem Shuffle], and I was coming up with more capers that obviously would not fit,” he says.
Doing the math, he figured: six adventures, two books. But also, “if you do two, might as well do three. You know, I’m definitely a rule-of-three guy.” Still, he proceeded cautiously in terms of commitment. He didn’t want to be held to a third book, just in case he got bored—but that never happened. Now he’s deep in the writing of Ray’s third and presumably final set of adventures.
Along with the series being a trilogy, each individual book has a three-act structure. Harlem Shuffle tells of three separate misadventures for Ray at three pivotal moments during the 1960s, and this structure continues in Crook Manifesto, which evokes the ’70s down to the sight, feel and smell of a crumbling New York City. In the first book, Ray is in his 30s; second book, 40s; third book, 50s. Ray’s experiences with aging and all its attendant challenges are essential to the series, and it also means that initially, “his kids are babies; in the second book, they’re teenagers of varying degrees of annoyingness; and in the third book, they’ll be in college and out of the house.”
Three decades is, as Whitehead says, “a long stretch of time.” But in addition to the capers and misadventures that flow from the heist narrative, he found something compelling about the mystery surrounding the fence, and with great finesse he explores the dichotomy between Ray’s straight-and-narrow life and “the call of the street.” We witness Ray’s wrestling with his criminal nature—“bending toward it, embracing it, rejecting it,” Whitehead says—and by shifting our focus to this internal tug of war, we are invited to think beyond the usual markers of time and success.
In the four-year interregnum between Harlem Shuffle and Crook Manifesto, Ray has kept his nose clean, built a prosperous business and bought both a commercial building for his store and a home for his family, moving uptown to the much storied if fraying Strivers’ Row. It’s a laudable, remarkable rise for the son of a failed career criminal, and yet it’s not enough.
In 1971, the year Crook Manifesto kicks off, Ray’s sabbatical from crime ends abruptly in an almost ironic way, considering the innocence of the inciting incident in comparison to the refuse he must wade through after. Ray calls on an old contact to get tickets to a sold-out (and history-making) Jackson 5 concert for his 15-year-old daughter—although as Whitehead points out, this fatherly duty is a cover to give in to an itch that’s been nagging at him for years.
The world around Ray is also evolving. In Harlem Shuffle, Whitehead allowed the pull of crucial—though not necessarily widely remembered—events in New York City history to guide him in shaping Ray’s story. In pursuit of key moments to “exploit,” he arrived upon the anti-police Harlem riots in 1943 and 1964. Whitehead decided that Invisible Man had portrayed the former in such an iconic, indelible manner that “I’ll let Ralph [Ellison] keep the 1940s one. I haven’t read a lot of stuff about the 1960s one. So it was open territory.”
The tension between the public and the police escalates to a palpable and deadly fever pitch in Crook Manifesto. The New York Police Department wages war against Black power activists, and a police corruption scandal widens, putting cops in the hot seat. And yet, in a way that matches the dualism of the novel’s leading man, Ray’s story also shows how normal life goes on alongside such events.
In keeping with that, the movie- and music-obsessed author takes the opportunity to throw his love of pop culture history into the mix, something that gives him great pleasure. “I was very taken with that idea that I could get my pop culture fixation and bring Ray along,” he says. So in addition to the Jackson 5 concert, which provides a soundtrack and momentum for Crook Manifesto’s first movement, the second section weaves in the rise of Blaxploitation cinema. It’s a heady and riveting mashup of politics, culture, family life and crime that only a talent of Whitehead’s stature could so seamlessly blend.
Photo of Colson Whitehead by Chris Close.
As the Ray Carney series steps into the 1970s, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Colson Whitehead continues to explore history through propulsive heist narratives that go far beyond crimes and cover-ups.
With Family Lore, a magical saga centered on a family of Dominican American women, Elizabeth Acevedo takes greater narrative risks, reaches deeper into family dynamics and finds an expansive new register for her astonishing storytelling.
Your first book, The Poet X, won the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature. What did that accolade mean to you as a writer, and how did it change your career? I don’t think I fully appreciated at the time the kind of propulsion that a major award like the NBA can have on someone’s career. It put my work under a particular kind of scrutiny. I’ve always wanted my next work to be better than my last, but it’s hard to hold every future book to the success of my debut. My debut achieved accolades I may never see again. That’s just the truth of it.
But I still have a lot of stories to tell. I’ve had to put in effort to be unswayed by external validation as it pertains to any projects since. What I’m currently making doesn’t grow under the shadow of what my first book did, and it’s been critical I don’t make comparisons. I will forever be grateful to the judges of the National Book Award and the merit they saw in The Poet X. It’s not hyperbole to say that award changed the course of my life because of the doors it opened.
“Poems are like cats. . . . Maybe they want to be in the same room as you, but they’re fine in the corner by themselves, and when they eventually want attention, they’ll piss on your bed and let you know.”
You’re known not only for your novels but also for your poetry. What do you feel you’re able to achieve with poetry that you can’t with fiction? What does the format of a novel allow you that poetry doesn’t? Ah! I love this question. I think poetry is interesting for me because it’s my most patient kind of writing. I don’t believe in rushing a poem. It can arrive over long lengths of time, one line on one day, an image on another. Poems are a way of thinking, and I don’t have to turn to paper right away for them to begin composition. Poems are like cats. They are independent, OK being alone for a while. Maybe they want to be in the same room as you, but they’re fine in the corner by themselves, and when they eventually want attention, they’ll piss on your bed and let you know. Poems are great containers for an urgent and visceral moment and emotion. I need to shift how I see the world to give language to a poem.
The novel, however, requires me to sit with the character and actions daily. To catch the rhythm of the story, I have to show up again and again, or I lose the thread. The novel doesn’t tolerate being ghosted. I need to pet it daily or it’ll run away. I like that novels allow for ensemble truth-telling. I think that’s what I most often chase in a story—the many versions of honesty and humanity that can exist in one specific world, in one specific moment in time.
You’ve made it clear that one of the most important things for you to capture as a writer is what is true, even if it isn’t the literal truth. Can you expand on this? In my writing, I’m less concerned with how certain actions happened than I am with the feelings that said actions caused, and how these feelings change the arc of how someone thinks of themselves or others. My stories are trying to capture the fault lines in everyday people and how those cracks occurred and whether or not they can be mended. But I don’t think truth is singular or linear. It’s an assemblage of experiences and interconnections where we make meaning. Sometimes folks try to preserve a memory in amber, and it can be a defining memory, but then you speak to the other party of that experience (if there is one) and they have a wholly different way of seeing the world. Memory is messy. How do we make sense of the distance between when something happened and where we are now, when we might have new information about ourselves and the world? That space is where I want to write into as I mine human dynamics.
Your previous work has been written for young adult readers. What was your first experience writing a novel meant for adults like? Are there any ways in which writing for adults versus teenagers posed new challenges (or afforded new opportunities)? I like to think of my writing as having different registers. I don’t think the note where my writing is located has changed; I write family stories about messy parents and children and the aspirations of immigrant and first-gen folks to find purpose and self-love. At least I think I do. But the register for the adult novel climbed a bit higher. It let me be spicier in terms of how I discuss sexuality and sexual experiences.
On a formal level, there are ambitions in how Family Lore is constructed that I think would have been a huge ask for young adult readers: time jumps, long asides that break up the narrative, six characters in close third-person, a first-person point-of-view narrator, poetry, historical research. While I like to challenge my younger readers, I’m mindful of still being welcoming. I know I’m requiring adults to do a lot of work in Family Lore, and I’m less concerned with them finding it too hard. The book won’t be easily consumed by folks who don’t do the work.
“I think I’ll know what I feel about something, but then the character twists the event in their own mouth, and I need to make room for a new way of approaching the narrative.”
In your author’s note, you mention that you hate the idea of defining the purpose of a book (or what it is “about”) before you’ve actually written it. For you, the act of writing is what allows the purpose or meaning of a story to come to light. Were there any moments while writing this novel when you found yourself surprised or staggered by something you put on the page or how the story evolved? I think wanting to be delighted by where the writing goes is one of the reasons I struggle with plot. Even if I have an idea of the pivotal events, I discover so much while getting the characters from one place of action to the next. Often my favorite parts of the novel are those in-between moments I hadn’t accounted for. In Family Lore I don’t think I realized how much the love and protection between the women was going to be central. In many ways, romantic love fails or is incomplete for the majority of the characters. But the sibling and cousin dynamics offer a tenderness and safety net where romantic love falls apart. I needed to write these women’s sometimes bumbling efforts to show up for one another to realize that they are the love they’ve been striving for.
There are, of course, lines and ideas that I didn’t know I’d have before I began writing. I had a myomectomy in 2021 that left me feeling alien in my body. In the novel, the character Ona has a myomectomy, but as I was writing her, I began to touch on light and what it means for light to enter a body where incisions were made. It’s not how I’d thought of surgery myself. But in her voice, I arrived at a new lens of considering what had gone wrong—and right—in my own fibroid removal. Moments like that happened a lot. I think I’ll know what I feel about something, but then the character twists the event in their own mouth, and I need to make room for a new way of approaching the narrative.
The topic of family dynamics, particularly between sisters and mothers and daughters, is one that you’ve explored in several of your novels, including Family Lore. What is it about female family relationships that fascinates you so much, and why do you think they have such universal appeal and resonance among readers? I write what haunts me. The family I come from and the families I grew up around—including extended family—practiced a good amount of enmeshment. In trying to piece apart my self-identity and self-worth, I had to undo threads that bound me to others. It was—and is—garbage dumpster work. It’s sifting through so much junk I carry that doesn’t innately belong to me. It’s reconsidering what it means to be a part of a community for yourself, not how perfectly you can perform yourself. I still don’t recognize sometimes how I’m thinking of every single person in my life and whether or not they’ll approve. So my novels agitate these webs because my mind agitates those webs. I think what Family Lore does that’s special is it reaches farther back than any of my other books to show historically how these dynamics of dysfunction were created within a family and are being undone or at least questioned.
One core feature of Family Lore is that nearly all of the women exhibit a preternaturally special talent or skill, from being able to foresee death to having an irresistible way with limes. If you could grant yourself with a special ability, what would it be and why?
I used to say teleportation would be the superpower I would want, but I think that’s when I had permeable boundaries and an inability to say no to things when all I wanted was to stay my ass at home. I was very much into hustle early in my career. I was holding a hot iron and striking my little heart away. It was exhausting to feel like my professional success had an expiration date, and my desire for teleportation was often because I was traveling so extensively that I was missing a lot of important moments with family and friends.
These days I would want the ability to fall asleep instantaneously. My anxiety is always worse at night, and my anxiety worsens the less sleep I have—it’s a conundrum. Being able to turn the light switch off in my brain and have deep, restorative rest seems like it’d be such a subtle but game-changing talent—much like the quiet magic of the women in the novel.
“I think this book is demonstrative of my being less concerned with being liked, or with earning love, and more of my groundedness in what needs to be said in this particular moment.”
You’ve revealed that Family Lore is perhaps your bravest novel. In what ways did writing this novel require exceptional courage from you? I touch on a lot of taboo and sacrilegious subjects in the novel. And while the novel intentionally meanders structurally, I’m very direct in how things like porn addiction, infidelity, emotional abuse and sex are approached. I think this book is demonstrative of my being less concerned with being liked, or with earning love, and more of my groundedness in what needs to be said in this particular moment. To say that which only I can say, even if it offends someone or causes them to see me as less than perfect. So yes, maybe it’s the book I’ve written most bravely.
Without giving too much away (and echoing something you mention in your author’s letter), the finale of Family Lore feels as much like a beginning as it does an ending. Could you see yourself revisiting these women again in the future and continuing their saga? Ah! I love the Marte women so much. And I had so much writing that didn’t make the story and so many places I could see these characters going. That said, no. My rule for a book is like my rule for exes: I don’t double back once the story is done.
Author photo of Elizabeth Acevedo by Denzel Golatt.
With Family Lore, a magical saga centered on a family of Dominican American women, Elizabeth Acevedo takes greater narrative risks, reaches deeper into family dynamics and finds an expansive new register for her astonishing storytelling.
Patti Hartigan was a self-described “baby theater critic” when she met August Wilson in 1987. The two were chatting at the National Critics Institute at the famed O’Neill National Playwrights Conference, and Wilson asked if Hartigan had seen his play Fences, which was then the talk of Broadway. “Being green and subsisting on a freelancer’s pitiful wages,” she recalls in her debut book, August Wilson: A Life, “I blurted out, ‘My mother saw it, but I can’t afford a ticket.’ The minute I said it, I wished I could take it back.” But the next day, Hartigan received a note that two tickets would be waiting for her at the box office.
This act of generosity toward a fledgling critic was emblematic of Wilson, Hartigan would discover. After landing at the Boston Globe as theater critic and arts reporter, she built a rapport with Wilson over the years, talking with him whenever he opened a play at the city’s Huntington Theatre. Then in January 2005, with Wilson poised to complete his monumental 10-play Pittsburgh Cycle—one play about Black life in America set in every decade in the 20th century—Hartigan flew to Seattle to interview him for a celebratory piece. Neither she nor Wilson yet knew that a fast-spreading cancer would lead to his death just a few months later. He managed to complete the final play, Radio Golf, under great physical and mental strain, and when he died in October 2005, the world mourned the loss of a voice that had changed the landscape of the American theater.
“He didn’t want to be the first. But certainly, in carving out room in American theater for Black playwrights . . . he paved the way.”
But “time passed and there was no biography,” Hartigan says in a video call. “I decided someone has to do this, and because I knew him, I decided to jump in.” The first-time biographer spent five years researching and writing August Wilson: A Life, an accomplished work that not only takes full measure of the playwright’s career but also delves into his childhood and ancestry to unearth a family history that Wilson himself did not fully know. Hartigan would even climb a mountain in Spear, North Carolina, where generations of Wilson’s strong-willed antecedents were born. Wilson himself never undertook that journey, saying that he wrote from “the blood’s memory” rather than doing research. Yet again and again, Hartigan found spine-tingling similarities between the stories he created and his family’s actual past.
Patti Hartigan
Wilson is largely associated with Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, specifically its Hill District, where he set all but one play in his monumental cycle. The Hill is where his mother, Daisy, and others in the family settled during the Great Migration, and it’s where Wilson was born in 1945 and grew up. His singular intelligence was apparent from an early age, and Daisy made sure he was educated in the best parochial and public schools. But his intelligence could not shelter him from endemic racism, and after being belittled and undervalued at school, he dropped out at just 15. (Years later, the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh awarded the autodidact a high school diploma, an honor he cherished alongside his two Pulitzer Prizes and other awards.)
Wilson’s earliest literary aspiration was as a poet, which Hartigan says is hardly surprising given the soaring poetry of his monologue-driven plays. His move into theater was both accidental and serendipitous, coinciding with the politically fueled Black literary movement of the 1970s, which played out in neighborhood theaters in Pittsburgh. Wilson was driven, and when he learned about the O’Neill Conference—arguably the preeminent play development opportunity available at the time—he began submitting a play each year. He was met with rejection after rejection until 1982, when he received the coveted telegram from artistic director Lloyd Richards. Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom had been selected.
Richards was perhaps the most influential Black theater maker of the age—he was the first African American to direct a play on Broadway, Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun—and “a presence like no other,” says Hartigan. He took Wilson under his wing and played a major role in the playwright’s progress. When asked if she thought there would have been an August Wilson without a Lloyd Richards, Hartigan admits there is no way of knowing, but probably not. “The two of them fed each other. August would come with a play that was four and a half hours long, and Lloyd could cut it down and streamline it and ask the right questions,” she says. “But the relationship was key for both men. Lloyd’s career had a resurgence when he began working with August.” The professional falling-out that came later, which Hartigan thoughtfully chronicles, was painful. “Both were right and both were wrong, and it’s a tragedy. Yet you can praise the relationship that was.”
Hartigan, clearly a great admirer of Wilson and his work, is nonetheless forthright in her appraisal of both. She does not shy away from portraying the playwright’s flaws as a man, a husband, a father. More than once she addresses the frequent observation that, with a few notable exceptions, Wilson’s female characters are weak. “I think the criticism is warranted,” she says. “Yet I’ve seen later productions where the women are painted in by just the direction [of the play]. So I think there might be a little more to the women [in Wilson’s plays] than we initially thought.”
The August Wilson Estate declined to grant permission to Hartigan to quote from his intimate letters or from some of his early writings, a decision she regrets because “paraphrasing just can’t do him justice.” Yet she manages to capture Wilson’s voice well. “He didn’t want to be exceptionalized,” she says. “He didn’t want to be the first. But certainly, in carving out room in American theater for Black playwrights—and the subject matter that he was able to bring to the stage—he paved the way.”
Patti Hartigan spent five years researching and writing August Wilson: A Life, an accomplished work that takes full measure of the playwright’s career and life.
Writer, editor and podcaster Andrew Leland was diagnosed with an incurable degenerative retinal disease in childhood. As he approached middle age and his retinitis pigmentosa (RP) advanced, Leland found himself in a liminal state: not yet blind, but experiencing enough visual impairment to understand what a future without sight would look like. In his thought-provoking memoir, The Country of the Blind, Leland explores how the transition from sighted to blind is affecting his life, his view of himself and his relationships while diving deep into the history, politics and rich culture of blindness.
You write quite a bit about the realities, both physical and emotional, of RP. What was the effect of expressing these experiences while writing your book? It was powerfully, unmistakably therapeutic. I began the book awash in a sea of misconceptions, generalizations, assumptions and confusions; what an immense gift it was to be given the opportunity to spend three years rigorously interrogating, investigating, elucidating and defusing them! One side effect of that extended introspection, however, was that if I was self-conscious about blindness before, now I’m profoundly, professionally self-aware in ways that don’t always feel especially healthy. A lot of people with RP say they don’t notice any gradual changes in their vision, but instead complain of sudden, cataclysmic transition points every few years. Why did they experience sudden declines, whereas I felt a more or less constant awareness of the gradual changes in my vision? My doctor gently suggested that as a writer immersed in a project like mine, I may be more attuned to the microlevel changes in vision.
It was useful to study these changes while writing the book, but there are days when it feels like a burden and a distraction to be so persistently obsessed with how much vision I have, how much I’ve lost and what it all means. I’m looking forward to letting go of some of that acute sensitivity to my own experience, though I suspect that might be a lost cause at this point.
You question whether vision deserves its spot at the top of the hierarchy of senses. As your RP has progressed, how have your thoughts changed regarding the degrees of importance people assign to different senses? Our brains are wonderfully multimodal in their apprehension of the world. What we might experience as a purely visual activity—looking for a cup of coffee on the table, for instance—actually contains a great deal of information beyond sight. We’re gathering tactile cues (fingers brushing the table as they move toward the hot cup), auditory signals (the clink of a fingernail as it connects with the ceramic mug), even olfactory indicators (the steam rising off the coffee). I’ve had to turn up these nonvisual channels as my vision has gradually turned down. Looking for a cup with my fingers might strike an onlooker as a fumbling way of going about things, but one quickly grows accustomed to it. It’s not a magical blind tactile adventure; I’m just finding the cup like I always have, albeit in a different style. If I’m in a frame of mind where I’m mourning the loss of my vision, this can feel like a diminishment, knocked a few rungs down the ladder of the senses. How much easier it was to do things visually! But my day-to-day experience, on the whole, underscores the fact that vision doesn’t really deserve its elevated status. The brain is plastic, and can settle into other modalities quite comfortably.
You write, “I’ll never be native to blindness, the way that those born blind are.” Can you elaborate on how your experience of losing something you once had differs from being native to blindness? I think there are advantages and disadvantages to being congenitally blind (from birth) versus adventitiously blind (a phrase that always makes me think of a blind adventurer). The congenitally blind—if they’re lucky enough to have early access to good blindness training—have the cognitive advantage of wiring their brains nonvisually from the start. They’ll read Braille faster than I ever will, even if I make it my full-time job to increase my reading speed: It’s like being a native speaker. I’ve met a number of congenitally blind people who bristle at the ubiquitous term (some would call it a euphemism) vision loss. They haven’t lost any such thing! For this reason, I have wondered if those blind from birth have an easier time accepting and celebrating their blind identity. But these sorts of generalizations only go so far. So much depends on the environment one grows up in, and there are many congenitally blind adults who have to work through the damage of childhoods spent sheltered from the world, with loving families who have abysmally low expectations for their independence and abilities.
The adventitiously blind, even though they have to catch up on blindness skills, have the advantage of having grown up with an intuitive understanding of the shared but largely unspoken grammar of the visual world. This includes everything from the semiotics of color (how to explain why red is angry, or blue calm?) to the infinite stream of gestures, shapes and objects (USPS mail-carrier sacks; Day of the Dead decorations; elephant skin) that are rarely described. I ran across an account of a blind person saying that they had no idea how people held their arms when they’re being sworn in by court clerks. What does “raise your right arm” mean? Is it an angled, “Sieg Heil”-style salute? Or does it go straight up, like a grade schooler waiting to be called on?
In short, the congenitally blind might have less work to do to find comfort in the world of blindness, and perhaps the adventitiously blind will find it easier to intuit many aspects of the visual world we all live in.
What would you say to people who instinctively think of blindness as sad or tragic? It’s a harmful but understandable mistake. In one sense, they’re not wrong. The experience of losing vision after living with sight is unavoidably painful. But that pain is, ideally, temporary: One mourns the loss of sight, and perhaps there will always be occasional twinges of remorse or frustration, but there are very few blind people who live their lives carrying around the constant feeling of aggrieved sadness and tragedy. I think it comes down to a kind of emotional neuroplasticity. In addition to the sensory adjustments (learning to navigate traffic by ear, or knowing when chicken is done by the way it feels when you slice it), we can also learn to process difficult feelings, so that something that once felt tragic and insurmountable eventually becomes benign, normal. This is an idea that I’ve found many intelligent, compassionate sighted people have an incredibly difficult time accepting. The received sense of blindness as a tragedy runs very deeply and stubbornly through the culture. Nearly every blind person I’ve met has had the experience of casually going about their day—shopping, traveling, whatever—and having their good mood shattered by the noxious, unsolicited sympathy of strangers (or family, for that matter): Bless you. I’m so sorry.
“One mourns the loss of sight, and perhaps there will always be occasional twinges of remorse or frustration, but there are very few blind people who live their lives carrying around the constant feeling of aggrieved sadness and tragedy.”
Artificial intelligence has received quite a bit of play in the press lately. What are your feelings about the possible uses of this technology for blind people? Like the disabled community more broadly, blind people don’t just benefit from advances in technology, they often drive them. Blind people were early adopters and often collaborators on the development of some of the technological tools that underpin today’s AI revolution, from synthetic speech (think Siri or Alexa) to the origins of “machine vision,” e.g., advances in scanning and Optical Character Recognition (OCR) that first automated the process of making printed books accessible to blind readers.
There’s a great app called Be My Eyes, which connects blind people with sighted volunteers who temporarily access the camera on the blind user’s phone, allowing them to read the recipe on a box of brownies or answer queries like “Does this shirt match these pants?” Be My Eyes recently released a feature called “virtual volunteer,” in which OpenAI’s GPT-4 image-to-text technology will replace those human volunteers for a wide range of tasks.
But just as there are tasks for which a Be My Eyes user might prefer a human volunteer (in the case of a more subjective judgment, perhaps, like describing a photo of a loved one), technology will never replace the human interdependence that’s as much a hallmark of the disabled experience as our reliance on (and obsession with) tech.
While discussing the stigma attached to blind people’s use of canes to get around, you said that you sometimes felt like an impostor while using one. Has that feeling of fraudulence changed over time? The feeling of fraudulence was at its worst when I first tentatively brought the cane out in public, when I really felt like a sighted person carrying a cane like an affectation. Since then, I’ve continued to lose vision, and the cane feels more immediately necessary. Now that I know (from painful experience) the kind of mayhem I can cause for myself and others if I try to travel without it, and how much more quickly and confidently I move with it, I don’t have nearly as much ambivalence. It’s become my trusty sidekick.
I still feel fraudulence around blindness more broadly, though. I sometimes feel reluctant to call myself blind when I still have enough residual vision to recognize faces and read large print.
This is shifting, too, but slowly. I’m consciously working to accept the blind parts of myself as sufficiently blind for me to embrace the identity as my own. That feeling of acceptance, which I’m arriving at not only by losing more vision but also by immersing myself in the history, culture and communities of blindness, is one of the biggest gifts that writing the book gave me.
“I’m consciously working to accept the blind parts of myself as sufficiently blind for me to embrace the identity as my own.”
Can you tell us your definition of what you call “the blind sense of humor”? Has your own sense of humor been influenced by your experience of blindness? I was surprised by how much I read and thought about Samuel Beckett while writing this book, but I think it’s because his sensibility feels connected to the blind sense of humor: the ability to look at an impossible experience and find a kind of transcendent absurdity in it. I really hate the idea of “cheering up” someone who is going through a difficult time. Pouring sugar and sunshine into darkness and pain feels artificial and to me only exacerbates and underscores the intractability of the problem. But comedy that accepts the difficulty and finds humor within it—that’s the good stuff.
There are two memoirs by writers with RP that were important to me as I began thinking seriously about what I was going through: Jim Knipfel’s Slackjaw and Ryan Knighton’s Cockeyed. Both books helped me see blindness as a kind of Beckettian slapstick, in which physical mishaps open the door to an existential shift in one’s relationship with the world. No matter how skillful you are as a blind person, there are inevitable moments of apologizing to lampposts, sinks that turn out to be urinals or (as one blind blogger put it) “jalapeños in the oatmeal.” The blind sense of humor is the ability to find the hilarity and joy that lies coiled in every one of these daily absurdities.
“No matter how skillful you are as a blind person, there are inevitable moments of apologizing to lampposts, sinks that turn out to be urinals or (as one blind blogger put it) ‘jalapeños in the oatmeal.'”
Do you think a cure will ever be found for RP? Retinal specialists have been telling me that a breakthrough is just around the corner since I was diagnosed nearly 25 years ago. To be fair, there has been real scientific progress, even if there’s still nothing to stop the ongoing degeneration of my retinas. My attitude in general about cures is: Keep up the good work, science, and give me a call if there’s something definitive you can do to help. In the meantime, I’m going to work on figuring out how to lead a fulfilling life as a blind person. The alternative—obsessing over Google alerts about new clinical trials and miracle drugs, year after year, decade after decade—feels entirely counterproductive to the emotional work I’m doing to accept blindness.
How are ableism and cures interrelated? There’s nothing particularly ableist about a scientist trying to find a cure for blindness. The problem comes from doctors’ and researchers’ ignorance about the lived experience of blind people. It’s far too common to receive a diagnosis of RP from a doctor who has no sense of the possibilities of a joyful and productive blind life; with proper training, one might not even need to change careers. And on the research side, there’s a similar tendency to paint blindness as a quasi-terminal disaster in the service of fundraising: John’s life was destroyed when he lost his vision. Won’t you donate to prevent his daughter from sharing the same fate? This rhetoric reinforces the low expectations and stigma that define blindness in the public imagination.
Looking back at the process of writing this book, was there anything you would have done differently? Early in the reporting process, one of my sources—a sighted historian—asked me who else I was talking to. I rattled off the names of blind MacArthur geniuses and Guggenheim fellows I’d already booked interviews with. He praised me for assembling such an impressive coterie of highly accomplished blind people, but then he admonished me to make sure I also spoke with blind people at the margins, who were far more representative of blind life in the U.S. than the decorated, overeducated blind folks I was initially drawn to.
I took his advice, and did talk to blind people working in sheltered workshops or refilling vending machines or who were unemployed, sometimes houseless and surviving on government assistance. But in the end, I still ended up focusing more on the blind people who I aspired to emulate as I entered the world of blindness. The book is, in part, my attempt to rehabilitate the image of blindness for myself (and my readers), and I think at least superficially, it’s easier to make that case by profiling successful blind artists, writers, entrepreneurs and scientists—all of whom face tremendous barriers of their own—than it is among the blind people living at the margins. But if I had another three years to write the book, or another 300 pages, I would have done more reporting on blindness, poverty and unemployment. I plan on continuing to write about disability, so I’ll hopefully get that chance soon.
What are you working on next? At the moment I’m particularly interested in the question of how the process of making something accessible to someone with a disability—an audio description of a TV show for a blind person, say, or a plain-language translation of a complicated text for someone with an intellectual disability—changes the meaning of the information that’s being conveyed. One thing I learned in writing the book, and becoming blind, is that the experience of disability changes one’s relationship not just with other people and the physical, built world but also with information itself. In the case of blindness, the way I read, watch and listen has been radically transformed. This doesn’t just change my identity as a media consumer; it has profound implications for the way I understand and access the world. And I’m beginning to see how this dynamic plays out with other disabilities, as well: Deafness, autism and mobility and intellectual disabilities all have fascinating and complicated relationships with language and communication. So I may be working toward a larger project around these ideas of disability and information. We’ll see.
We talked to author Andrew Leland about his thought-provoking and contemplative memoir, The Country of the Blind, which explores how the transition from sighted to blind is affecting Leland’s life, his view of himself and his relationships. It also dives deep into the history, politics and rich culture of blindness.
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Your previous work has been written for young adult readers. What was your first experience writing a novel meant for adults like? Are there any ways in which writing for adults versus teenagers posed new challenges (or afforded new opportunities)?
How are ableism and cures interrelated?
