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Behind the Book by Michael Sims

by Michael Sims

“Would you like to edit a vampire anthology?” the editor asked me.

“Vampires?”

“Victorian vampires,” George clarified.

“I’m your man.” Fresh from writing my fourth book about natural science, I jumped at the thought of a holiday jaunt across misty moors.

The whole project was fun, but the best part was merging the two channels of my career: writing about nature and editing anthologies of fiction. After two collections of Victorian and Edwardian crime stories, this was my first venture into supernatural tales. I planned to include the stories that mark the moment when European writers turned folklore into a mythology of aristocratic decadence and the betrayal of innocence. In the vampire Bible, this collection would be Genesis.

To make this work I realized I had to write a natural history of vampires. So cousin Fritz is coming back from the grave to drink the blood of his widow— This idea did not come out of nowhere. Which natural phenomena were misinterpreted as supernatural evidence of vampires?

First, what can we say about vampires?

1) They’re dead.
2) Despite this considerable obstacle, they’re coming back from the grave.
3) So therefore they’re not really, exactly, precisely dead—not, you know, totally dead dead.
4) They vant to drink your blood.

All the rest varies. Some vampires are very pale, but then so is Taylor Swift, and she’s not a vampire. Probably. Some flee from a cross the way Superman dodges kryptonite, but others could march into a Baptist revival and not blink an eye. Many have a serious case of death breath, but clearly some sparkly tousled young boy vamps do not, or moody teenage girls would not be so eager to kiss them.

Death now is sanitized. How often do you see a dead body except on CSI? But until the last century this wasn’t the case. Often a vigil was held over the dear departed before the corpse—in those days before embalming—was hustled off to the grave. Traitors and murders were executed in public and their bodies left hanging on a gibbet. Rival religious factions might dig up each other’s dead and feed them to their dogs. Back then practically everybody could have whispered, “I see dead people.”

Often they saw corpses again after burial. Cemeteries were overcrowded, bodies stacked and spilling out, causing rampant disease, as well as insomnia-inspiring glimpses of your deceased Aunt Inga. People had strong ideas about what was normal in the grave, but like most of our ideas they had very little basis in reality. Any variation from this mythical norm was weighed as possible evidence of vampirism, in a thoughtful analysis reminiscent of this scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

What if you saw blood around a corpse’s lips? Often bodies were buried upside down, and because they were buried soon after death the blood pooled at the lowest points, which included the mouth. What about skin that seems to be glowing with life? Decomposition can cause skin to look flushed again after it loses its outer layer. What if you knew someone who couldn’t take sunlight? Perhaps he had porphyria, some kinds of which cause light sensitivity. What if dead hands looked like claws? Skin pulls away from the nails, making them look longer. The list goes on and on.

The most important thing I learned—feel free to take notes—is how to predict who might come back as a vampire. The list includes murderers, their victims, battlefield dead, the drowned, stroke victims, the first person to fall in an epidemic, heretics, wizards, and people who talk to themselves. And alcoholics. And grumpy people. And don’t forget women of ill repute. Oh, and redheads.

Michael Sims collects tales of the vampires throughout literature in the anthology Dracula's Guest: A Connoisseur's Collection of Victorian Vampire Stories. He has brown hair.

“Would you like to edit a vampire anthology?” the editor asked me.

“Vampires?”

“Victorian vampires,” George clarified.

“I’m your man.” Fresh from writing my fourth book about natural science, I jumped at the thought of a holiday jaunt across misty moors.

The whole project was fun, but the best…

Fiction

Fiction

Behind the book: How I found ‘Percival’s Planet’

Behind the Book by Michael Byers

by Michael Byers

With Pluto so much in the news lately, you’d be justified in thinking Percival’s Planet a cynical effort to capitalize on a popular story. But honestly it isn’t! I began the book long before Pluto was demoted from planetary status. In fact, in its early stages, Percival’s Planet had nothing to do with Pluto whatsoever.

I’d intended to write a novel about my grandparents. My grandmother Margaret struggled all her life with mental illness; her marriage to my grandfather Paul was turbulent, lasting only long enough to produce my mother and my uncle. In a revisionary spirit I wanted to rewrite their marriage so it didn’t end—so that it outlasted its difficulties.

But as I wrote my grandfather’s story, I found it—despite everything—boring. I couldn’t find a way to make his time at law school exciting. His courtship and marriage lay flat. So I put the book down and wrote another novel about something else entirely (Long for This World, 2003). Still, my grandparents’ story remained intriguing to me, so when I finished Long for This World, I returned to that previous attempt.

When I did, I remembered that in the late 1920s at Harvard (during the period in which my grandfather was studying law there), something peculiar was happening. Astronomers attached to Lowell Observatory were looking for Planet X—the world that would eventually be called Pluto. Evidently at some point during my research into the period for the previous version I’d come across this fact and stored it away for later use. Now I thought, All right, what if my grandfather hadn’t been in the law school, but had instead been an astronomer? What if he had been along to assist on the Planet X search? What might have happened then?

In this way, unexpectedly, the book evolved from being about my grandparents to being about the search for Planet X—which was eventually discovered at Lowell Observatory, in 1930, by the high-school educated Kansas farmboy Clyde Tombaugh.

In bringing Clyde Tombaugh into the novel—to eventually become its central character—I read what I could find of Clyde’s own accounts of his life. I was particularly interested in how Clyde depicted his experiences as a 1920s-era farmboy making telescopes in his spare time, and in how he described his time at Lowell Observatory conducting the photographic search for Planet X. As a novelist, of course, my attention fastened on the interesting gaps in his own account. What did it feel like to make a perfect 9-inch mirror in the middle of a lonely Kansas farmyard? What did he think when his crucial oat field was ruined by hail, destroying his college fund and diverting the course of his life forever? What must it have been like to receive a letter from the eminent V.M. Slipher, inviting him to come to Lowell Observatory on a trial basis? What must Clyde have felt, arriving as a young man in Flagstaff, Arizona, to meet Slipher at the Flagstaff train depot, and to climb into the astronomer’s Model T on a snowy afternoon? And, finally, what must he have felt having actually found the long-sought Planet X?

My most fruitful research occurred at Lowell Observatory itself. There, I handled not only the Pluto telescope but Clyde Tombaugh’s own observational journals, filled out in ink in his meticulous blue handwriting. Turning those ruled pages, I understood who Clyde had been—and why he was the perfect man to find Planet X. Anxious to please, afraid of being fired, studied in the painstaking work of building a telescope from scratch alone—only Clyde could have done such a thorough, uncomplaining job of the Planet X search. Only Clyde could have spent almost a year staring at hundreds of massively populated starfield plates—then finish by spotting the infinitesimal flyspeck of Planet X. The more I learned, the more it seemed to me it should have been impossible for Clyde to find Planet X, and at some point it struck me that it was as though Lowell Observatory had sent the boy out on a snipe hunt—and he came back, all earnest and pleased, with an actual snipe.

As I was writing, Pluto suddenly entered the news by being demoted from planetary status. At first I thought this was the end of any hopes for the novel. Who wants to read a book about a planet that doesn’t exist anymore? But I saw, to my surprise, that people really cared about Pluto—the runt planet at the end of the solar system. Who knew? "Save Pluto" organizations cropped up overnight. I, too, think Pluto’s planetary status is a fitting monument to Clyde Tombaugh’s work, and I hope the book gives him the recognition he deserves for his industry and dedication, and that it captures, at least a little, the experience of discovering a new world.

And, yes, I still haven’t really written about my grandparents.

Maybe next time!

With Pluto so much in the news lately, you'd be justified in thinking Percival's Planet a cynical effort to capitalize on a popular story. But honestly it isn't! I began the book long before Pluto was demoted from planetary status. In fact, in its early…

Fiction

Fiction

The dark corners of research that inspired ‘Room’

Behind the Book by Emma Donoghue

by Emma Donoghue

I always knew I wanted my novel Room to work on two levels: as a universal, almost fairy-tale story about love between mother and son, and as a totally realistic child’s-eye account of being raised in a locked room that measures 11 foot by 11. To get the second bit right, I didn’t just read up on experiences similar to the one in my story—the roughly half-dozen young women who have survived lengthy, secret confinement, mostly famously in Austria and the U.S. but also in Belgium, Japan and Russia. I followed my nose in many directions to understand, as deeply as I could, every aspect of what Ma and Jack might go through, both inside and outside their prison.

Appalling though much of the material I’d been researching was, it reminded me how much kids are at the mercy of those who look after them, and what a holy duty we have to give them both the love and freedom that they need.

For my previous historical novels, I’ve mostly worked in university libraries; this time, my library was the Internet. That made the research pretty visceral—videos of dungeons on YouTube—and also gave it a moment-by-moment, one-headline-followed-by-the-next quality: sad stories gathering a few more dreadful details every day, until they fade from the public view. Many of my sources were not ‘expert opinions’ but the raw reactions of people all over the world who rush onto message boards. Listening in gave me insight into what such cases mean to those who hear about them: how they trigger empathy as well as voyeurism, judgment as well as revulsion. And also what such unsought celebrity—being put on a pedestal, and knocked off it too—might do to a survivor like Ma.

The worst topic was something I really needed to figure out: exactly what children can and can’t survive. I found a site called Feral Children and forced myself to read through all its cases of children raised in confined or abusive settings. In the first week I kept bursting into tears, eyes locked in horror on my screen. The story of Jack and Ma is really not that bad compared with many I read; there are cases of children neglected, starved or tortured over long periods, often by their own parents or guardians, that I try not to think about anymore because they make me shake.

But I also came across much more heartening material about what psychologists call resilience: the power to get through things that might destroy someone else. I read academic papers on the kind of family model that could allow Ma and Jack to endure both their prison and its aftermath. I studied unassisted birth, women having babies in concentration camps and raising their kids in jails all over the world, what it’s like for children conceived through rape, and the long-term effects of solitary confinement in U.S. prisons.

I talked to a friend who breastfed her kid till the age of five. I looked up pop hits of the early 2000s to find out what songs would be lingering in Ma’s head. I checked out police slang, sexual-assault evidence-collection guidelines, the protocols of expensive psychiatric clinics, treatments for post-traumatic stress disorder.

I picked my brother-in-law’s brains on the matter of how Old Nick could have created a secure prison from a garden shed, and tracked down the most high-tech glass available for the skylight, the kind that looks transparent but is criss-crossed with unbreakable mesh. I designed Room on a home-decor website, figuring out how to fit all the furniture in.

Finally, the pleasantest research I did was playing with and listening to my children. My son Finn was five while I was writing the book. I analysed his quirky grammar, noted his obsessions, even asked for his help with ‘the book about Jack and the bad guy’: for one scene, he let me roll him up in a rug to see if he could wriggle out. Appalling though much of the material I’d been researching was, it did one good thing for me: it reminded me how much kids are at the mercy of those who look after them, and what a holy duty we have to give them both the love and freedom that they need.

Research comes in many forms, and there’s nothing dry-and-dusty about it. I picture it as the process of sinking deeper and deeper into the water before I kick off and start to swim.

—

Emma Donoghue is the author, most recently, of Room, which is longlisted for the 2010 Booker Prize. Born in Ireland, Donoghue now resides in Canada with her partner and their children.

RELATED CONTENT: Read our interview with Emma Donoghue for Room.

Fiction

Fiction

A disappearing act

Behind the Book by Rick Bass

by Rick Bass

Nashville Chrome is a fictional treatment of the lives of the Browns, a 1950s country music trio whose sudden success was as inexplicable and meteoric as their subsequent disappearance.

They were once the biggest thing in country music—the first group ever to have number one hits in both country and pop charts and the Beatles’ most admired American group. They were confidants of Johnny Cash and the closest friends and mentors to a young Elvis Presley. The key to the Browns’ success was a mysterious “tempered harmony” that could come only from shared bloodlines. The smoothness of their sound helped usher in the more commercial Nashville music industry.

As fascinating as their story is, I was struck most by the question of why the Browns, and not any other group or individual, emerged out of that time and place and almost singlehandedly altered the course of American music. So stark and dramatic was their success that it seemed their sound might as well have come from a venthole in the earth—as when the earth’s plates slide over rifts of volcanic activity—and that from that hotspot, new life and land was formed. Was their own genetic drift that random?

But that question proved unanswerable, and so I decided to focus on a new heart of inquiry, less scientific and less metaphysical: wondering not so much why fame had chosen the Browns, but rather, how they each dealt with it after it went away.

This book is far less an environmental parable than any I’ve ever undertaken, and yet in thinking about the parallels in this story—the creation, as if from a garden of innocence, of something amazing, and then the bittersweetness of the wonderful thing’s slow going away—there seems to be a larger metaphor for our times. The success of the Browns’ sound came in part from a taming of the old Appalachian nasal caterwaul—rough and raw as a cob—that rendered a new, smooth, chrome-like sound more accessible, and more marketable. I wonder if part of the book’s unspoken, haunting regret—like the Browns’ sound itself—comes from a subconscious awareness of some of the costs and losses involved in this trade.

As cultural spokespersons for the 1950s, the Browns hold intriguing clues to how we once were as a country: a product of our landscape and our fears and hungers, and of complicated circumstances that could no more hold steady than could a river stop in mid-flow. For a little while, the Browns changed the world—but just because they changed it did not mean they controlled it, or that the world was obliged to stop for them. Of the two sisters, one realized this, and retreated to anonymity with grace, while the other—Maxine, the oldest—burns, and waits still for that river to return. It’s a fascinating story, and I’m grateful to the Browns for living it.

RICK BASS is the award-winning writer of many works of nonfiction and fiction. His new novel, Nashville Chrome, considers the sudden rise and fall of the country music trio The Browns.

Nashville Chrome is a fictional treatment of the lives of the Browns, a 1950s country music trio whose sudden success was as inexplicable and meteoric as their subsequent disappearance.

They were once the biggest thing in country music—the first group ever…

Fiction

Fiction

Behind the Book: Where author and characters meet

Behind the Book by Ruiyan Xu

by Ruiyan Xu

Raymond Carver once said: “You are not your characters, but your characters are you.” Sometimes readers will ask whether I have a favorite among the three protagonists of my novel, The Lost and Forgotten Languages of Shanghai; they will tell me that they adored one of the characters, disliked another, and felt exasperated by the third (but different readers take different sides); and they will assume there’s one character who reflects my autobiography most accurately, to whom I’ve given most of my own experiences. “Nope,” I’ll shake my head, “I made them up.” But the truth is, that’s not entirely accurate.

When I started writing stories as a child, I never wrote about me—or at least that’s what I thought at the time. I wrote stories about men and women falling out of love long before I ever fell in love myself. I wrote stories set in times and places I’d never been. During my last semester of college, I was feeling adrift, unsure of where I was going or what I wanted to do. What I started writing then, and what I kept writing the next eight years, were the stories of three characters who, on the surface, were nothing like me.

Why did I start writing about Li Jing, a thirty-something Shanghainese financier who gets brain damaged in a terrible accident and loses the ability to speak Chinese? I didn’t resemble Li Jing’s wife Meiling either; she is a woman defined by her role as a wife and mother, who, in the aftermath of Li Jing’s accident, must try to keep her husband’s business afloat and her family together. As for Rosalyn Neal, an American divorcee who comes to Shanghai to conduct medical research into Li Jing’s case? I had never even contemplated medical school, nor was I anywhere close to being married, much less divorced. Each of these three characters were a decade older than me, full of experiences and concerns and losses I couldn’t have possibly known about. But as I wrote about them, I realized that though the exteriors of their lives diverged sharply from my own, each of them, strangely, embodied a piece of me.

At the beginning of the book, when Li Jing wakes up in the hospital, he is horrified to find that he can no longer speak any Chinese. Li Jing’s loss—the loss of a language, but also of all the other things that language affects, including relationships, memories, and the ability to work—happens in an instant. But for me, the same kind of loss happened over the course of years and decades. I moved from China to America at the age of 10, and when I arrived, I didn’t speak any English. Eight years later, when I went back to Shanghai to visit family, it was Chinese that I struggled with. With the deterioration of my Chinese, I lost more than just words and sentences; my relationships with members of my extended family were weakened because it was hard to communicate, and I felt alienated and estranged from the very city I grew up in. Li Jing’s frustrations and pains, once he is robbed of his tongue, gave me an outlet to explore my own history, the process of losing a language, and what else you lose when you can no longer speak to the ones you love.

For Meiling, her husband’s accident and its aftermath means making drastic changes to her own life. Not only does she have to work with the hospital and Rosalyn to manage Li Jing’s care, she must also provide some stability to their young son. look after her elderly father-in-law, and keep Li Jing’s business running. Her life becomes impossibly busy, but her relationship with her husband deteriorates after a series of miscommunications. Meiling had always been an observer, keeping life at a bit of a distance. Her husband’s accident spurs her into action, but her sense of remove never quite leaves her. She keeps watching her husband, keeps judging him, and never allows herself to express her emotions or ask him about his. Her reaction to the crisis . . . well, let’s just say it doesn’t sound entirely unfamiliar to me. And as a writer, I must admit to that sometimes I feel as though I’m watching the proceedings instead of participating in them.

When Dr. Rosalyn Neal comes to Shanghai for the first time, she is simultaneously isolated by clamor of the city and seduced by its beauty. Soon, she falls in with a crowd of hard-drinking expats, allows herself to leave her painful divorce behind, and develops an unprofessional relationship with her patient. It is as if in traveling halfway around the world she can throw off her troubles and give herself a momentary escape from her “real” life. Unfortunately, before the book is over, she will realize that even when we are far from home, we cannot escape who we are. In portraying Shanghai through Rosalyn’s eyes, I was able to express what I saw when I went back to Shanghai as an adult. The city I returned to was very different from the city I had grown up in; this new Shanghai was full of nightclubs and bars, dazzling and sophisticated. Rosalyn loses her head in the city, the way we all can when we’re in a different place, when we want to create new versions of ourselves. But the thing is, you can’t ever really run away from yourself. It always catches up with you sooner or later.

I am not my characters—my life is nothing like theirs, and what happened to them haven’t happened to me. But where they come from, how they feel, who they are—all of those things come from me, and they’re not entirely invented. I look back at what I’ve written—from decades-old stories to new drafts, and now I think: ah, there I am. Writing has a way of not letting you run away from yourself, and your characters have a way of reminding you that they are, after all, you.

Ruiyan Xu lives in Brooklyn. The Lost and Forgotten Languages of Shanghai is her debut novel.

Fiction, Historical Fiction

Fiction Historical Fiction

Searching for a giant in the family tree

Behind the Book by Kathleen Kent

by Kathleen Kent

One of the benefits of writing a novel based on a well-documented historical figure is the wealth of material available to help with character development. My first novel, The Heretic’s Daughter, was based on Martha Carrier, my grandmother back nine generations—an accused witch hanged in 1692 who Cotton Mather referred to as The Queen of Hell—and the stories my family had been passing down for 300 years.

There were court transcripts, depositions, arrest warrants and contemporary essays detailing some of Martha’s deeds (or misdeeds in the eyes of her accusers) chronicled by the magistrates, neighbors and family who knew her, all of which I was able to use in creating the narrative.

It was quite a different experience developing the character of Thomas Carrier, Martha’s husband, for my second novel, The Wolves of Andover. In Massachusetts there were only a few tax records that I could find, and a petition by him following the witch trials that he be compensated for his wife’s unjust death. And yet, Thomas was a man who Carrier family legend claimed had lived to 109 years of age, was seven feet tall, and was one of the executioners of King Charles I of England. I had grown up hearing stories of Thomas from my grandparents, but I had assumed for a long time that these tales were like the proverbial fish stories: stories that had grown in size over time.

While researching The Wolves of Andover, I was able to substantiate his age and height. The New England Journal of 1735 reported that Thomas, at that time living in Colchester, Connecticut, had died at age 109; was over seven feet tall with a full head of hair; and had walked several miles with a bag of grain over his back a few days before his death. The Journal reported that he was still, at that advanced age, “fleet of foot.” When I travelled to Connecticut to visit his gravesite, I marveled at the numbers carved into the headstone: AE 109 Yrs. According to the local stories, two coffins had to be fitted together to bury him.

Proof of his being one of the two executioners of King Charles I may never be substantiated. It is widely believed that the official executioner at the time refused absolutely to cut off the head of an anointed king, and that Cromwell at the last minute had to find two willing axmen. This story, in the form of local gossip, seemed to follow Thomas throughout his life, both in Massachusetts and Connecticut. According to a Connecticut historian I spoke to while doing research, Thomas even gained a reputation in Colchester as a ferocious Indian fighter, continuing to protect the homes he had built for himself and family well past 70 years of age.

In the past few years I have spoken to fellow descendants, from different branches of the Carrier line, who heard the same stories I was told, not only of Martha and the witch trials, but of Thomas, who was the giant who killed a king.

Here’s what I was able to establish through research: He never abandoned his family during the witch trials and helped rally his neighbors to raise funds to free some of the children accused of witchcraft from prison. He kept his farm going in Andover until 1711, when he was compensated by the Crown for his wife’s death, and then he left for Colchester, with all his surviving children and grandchildren. There he built three homes and a blacksmith forge, and the bag of grain he was carrying the few days before he died was for an ailing widower in the neighboring town of Glastonbury.

Sometimes, though, it’s what is not in the historical records that gives an intriguing glimpse at a character’s inner life or purpose. Thomas, who was 48 years old when he married Martha, never married again after her death—a highly unusual and even scandalous position for a single male in Puritan society. As the writer of the story, I got to make the call as to his reasons for never again taking a wife. I believe it was because Martha Carrier, his wife, was a remarkable woman, a woman he stood by no matter what, a woman whom he appreciated for her independent nature, with whom he was able to share his darkest secrets, a woman who was irreplaceable. As much fun as it was to write a story about Thomas’ adventures in England and the mystery surrounding his work for Cromwell, it was even more satisfying to pay homage to the love story of these two remarkable people.

Kathleen Kent is a New England writer with a fascinating family tree. The Wolves of Andover is her second novel, and a prequel to her bestselling debut, The Heretic’s Daughter.

Inspirational Fiction

Inspirational Fiction

Home to Harmony

Review by bookpagedev

by Lynn Green

Jan Karon hit the motherlode of publishing when she tapped into a deeply felt yearning for small-town community and character. Since then, other writers have trod the path to small-town America, helping millions recapture (or reinvent) their memories of a simpler life that holds its own sweet rewards.

One of the latest and most successful to walk this road is Philip Gulley, a Quaker minister and best-selling author of three nonfiction books that have delighted and inspired hundreds of thousands of readers. The first of these, Front Porch Tales, grew out of essays Gulley wrote for his church newsletter. Gulley’s stories were so inspiring and hilarious that some of his church members suggested he write a book. Front Porch Tales has since sold more than a quarter-million copies and spawned two sequels with more brief essays on the delights and challenges of small-town living: Home Town Tales and For Everything a Season.

Now Gulley is trying his hand at fiction, with this month’s release of Home to Harmony (audio), in which the fictional town of Harmony, Indiana, hosts the biggest collection of crusty, lovable characters since James Herriott settled in Yorkshire.

“I wanted to write not only about the good that people do, but also about the funny messes we get ourselves into, Gulley says, “and about how, even in those moments, wonderful things can still happen. One of Gulley’s favorite characters in Home to Harmony is Miriam Hodge, head elder of the town’s Quaker meeting, and a woman of uncommon wisdom and grace. “It’s hard for me to think of Miriam as a fictional character, Gulley admits. “I keep expecting to meet her any day now. Despite winning the author’s affection, Miriam manages to get herself into some embarrassing scrapes. In one episode, the ladies of the Quaker meeting decide to make a quilt as a fund-raising project. When they hang the quilt in the meeting house and the sun hits it, the face of Jesus appears on the surface of the quilt. Mobs of people begin lining up to see the holy quilt, forcing Miriam to make a private confession to her minister: she had spilled coffee on the quilt, leaving a stain that resembled the face of Jesus. “That’s not the Lord we’ve been seeing, Miriam admits, “that’s Maxwell House. Miriam’s minister is Sam Gardner, the book’s narrator who, like Gulley himself, returns to live in his hometown after attending college and seminary. Gardner is offered a job when the town’s Quaker pastor dies in an accident. (“Both his parents had died of heart problems, which he feared would happen to him, so he’d begun to jog and was hit by a truck. ) In an interview, the author displays the same wry humor and love of people that enliven his books. Appropriately enough, Gulley would fit right in as a resident of Mayberry, RFD, since he looks like a cross between Sheriff Andy Griffith and his deputy, Barney Fife. Gulley has Barney’s wiry build, combined with Andy’s wide grin and reassuring manner.

After a few minutes of conversation with the minister, you can see why his speeches and sermons have drawn many admirers. Gulley is charming, self-deprecating, and utterly sincere as he holds forth on the joys of living in Danville, Indiana a place where most of the 4,000 residents know one another. As a writer, he aims to capture this sense of intimacy and belonging in his books.

“I just wanted to tell the world about these wonderful people I know, Gulley says, “people I grew up with; people who taught me things. I really believe in people. I’m one of those rare and lucky individuals who has never been too disappointed by people. In that sense, I’m truly blessed. Home to Harmony is intended to be the first in a series, with the next entry, Searching for Harmony following the same characters through a series of crises and challenges. Through it all, Gulley says, his aim is “to gladden people’s hearts. I’ve met so many people who’ve done that for me. Home to Harmony and the other books I write become the way I pay back what was given to me.

Fiction, Historical Fiction

Fiction Historical Fiction

Behind the Book: A neighbor’s legacy inspires haunting debut

Behind the Book by Elena Mauli Shapiro

by Elena Mauli Shapiro

Elena Mauli Shapiro was born in Paris and lived there until she moved to the United States at the age of 13. Her first novel, 13 rue Thérèse, tells the story of an American professor who arrives in Paris and finds a box of artifacts in the filing cabinet of his new office. Fascinated by the contents of the box, he begins to piece together the life of the mysterious Parisian woman who collected them. Here, the author reveals the real-life inspiration for her imaginative and beautifully constructed debut.

I grew up at the book’s titular address in Paris, 13 rue Thérèse. When I was a very little girl, an elderly recluse named Louise Brunet lived in one of the apartments upstairs. All I remember of her to this day is the sound of her television turned all the way up, echoing in the courtyard. When the speakers died, she watched without sound. When she died, none of her remaining relatives came to fetch her belongings, leaving the landlord the task of clearing them all out. He saved the best jewelry and silverware for his wife, then asked the tenants to come take whatever they wanted. They scavenged, taking away minor treasures: an embroidered tablecloth, a worn fur coat, delicate glassware. Whatever they didn’t want, the landlord would throw away: old stockings, endless bottles of pain medication, a plastic box filled with scraps of some sort—except my mother stopped his hand as he was about to drop the box down the maw of a big black trash bag. Don’t throw that away, she said, I’ll keep that.

In the box: postcards and letters from the front in World War I, dried flowers, a rosary. A datebook for the year 1928.

Two pairs of fragile lace church gloves: white ones for a little girl, black ones for a grown woman. There were many small objects in the box, all worth nothing but memories. As I grew up, I was endlessly compelled by this collection, by the tiny sepulcher of Louise Brunet’s heart. The fact that I could never know the story behind the objects only made the attraction stronger. I would write a book one day about these mute little witnesses. I had to.

I wrote reams of pages over many years in the process of whittling myself into a writer, but I did not write about the box. I would not get into the box until I was a strong enough writer to do it justice. I don’t know that I could have ever made the conscious decision to start, but I didn’t have to. One day the box came to get me in my dreams. The result was a short, countdown-shaped narrative of the life of Louise’s father that starts with a picture of him old and winds itself down to a picture of him young. I looked at the peculiar eruption that had burst out of me and I thought, uh oh—

Two

One

Zero.

The surge from below was so intense that it was difficult to hold myself together. There was some sorcery about what I was doing, channeling pieces of live people that I knew and loved into pieces of a dead stranger who had haunted me my whole life. My entire being hissed with the alchemy of it. The composite Louise Brunet I was carrying in my body threatened to rend me. I needed to put another body between hers and mine. This is when I made Trevor Stratton, the American academic who finds Louise Brunet’s artifacts and functions as the narrative frame for the story, a frame who helplessly bleeds into the portrait he surrounds. As playful a metafictional device as Trevor may be, he was first and foremost essential secondary containment. I will always be grateful to him for that, though he doesn’t exist.

Neither does the Louise Brunet I collated really exist, though she wears the name and face of a real person. It is my obsession with her image, with the image’s flickering in and out of existence, that drove the book from its inception. Louise Brunet came to embody the parts of ourselves that will never be seen, the stories we tell ourselves about each other that may or may not be verifiable, the memories that are lost and those that are secreted whole around a kernel of something that may or may not have occurred. Trevor’s possession by her was my rendering of the most human of traits: our total inability to see without interpreting and our relentless desire for sense and story, all driven, finally, by our simple need for connection.

Elena Mauli Shapiro is currently working on a second novel, set in Romania. Find out more about 13 Rue Thérèse on the book's website, where you can see more of the artifacts from Louise's box. Find out more about Shapiro on her blog.

Fiction

Fiction

Behind the Book: Finding a story through the lives of others

Behind the Book by Rachel Simon

by Rachel Simon

My sister Beth, who is 11 months younger than I, has developmental disabilities. When she was born in 1960, it wasn’t uncommon for doctors to recommend that parents place children like my sister in institutions, but my parents were strongly opposed to doing that. So my sister grew up at home, and I knew little about institutions.

In my late 30s, I wrote a memoir about my relationship with Beth, Riding the Bus With My Sister, and when it came out, I started getting invited to speak at disability-related conferences around the country. At every event, I met people who’d lived in, worked at, or had relatives who’d been sent to institutions, and all of them were eager, sometimes tearfully so, to share their stories with me.

Over and over, I returned home reeling. The reality of institutions had obviously affected millions of people—yet no one outside of these conferences spoke about such things, or even seemed to know about them. And even I, a sibling who did know, had known very little.

I began thinking I should write a novel that dealt with the material, but the subject seemed so massive that I just put the idea to the side.

Then one day, after a talk in Illinois, I came across a book at a vendor’s table, God Knows His Name: The True Story of John Doe No. 24, by Dave Bakke. Immediately intrigued, I bought the book. In 1945, I learned, a deaf, African American teenager was found wandering the streets in Illinois. No one understood his sign language so no one knew who he was. A judge declared him “feebleminded” and put him in an institution. There he remained for 50 years until he died.

The tragedy of John Doe No. 24 haunted me—and all the more so because I’d come to understand that countless other people had endured similar fates.

Yet I still couldn’t fathom how to present such an emotionally fraught topic.

A few years later, the college where I’d taught part-time for over a decade restructured my department and I was let go. Grieving the loss of a job I’d loved, I was sure of only one thing: I wanted to keep writing.

So in this vulnerable state, I sat down with a notebook, waiting to see what would emerge. And instantly, it came.

It is 1968. Night. A rainstorm. An elderly widow is in her farmhouse, reading a book. Who is she, I asked myself, and then I knew: she was a retired schoolteacher, in a state of grief. A knock comes to her door. Who is it, I asked myself. Again, I knew. Standing before her is someone with my sister’s disability—and someone like John Doe No. 24. They are the love of each other’s lives, and he calls her Beautiful Girl. They have just escaped from an institution—and Beautiful Girl has just borne a baby girl. Then the whole first chapter spilled out, and when I reached its ending, I was as shocked as my readers have been when she says to the widow: “Hide her.”

Then I just followed the story, and it flowed from me in a way that nothing had before.

I’m not sure I believe, as some readers have suggested, that John Doe No. 24 reached out from the beyond and told me about the life he’d wished he’d lived. I do know that I could not have written this book without being Beth’s sister—and without believing, deep down, what my parents taught me from the day Beth was born: that everyone deserves to love and be loved, and to live a life of dignity and freedom.

Fiction, Women's Fiction

Fiction Women's Fiction

The untold stories of military families

Behind the Book by Laura Harrington

by Laura Harrington

Theater writer Laura Harrington based her debut novel, Alice Bliss, on a one-woman, one-act musical she wrote that she couldn't get out of her head. Her desire to dramatize the experience of military families was due to her belief that the story of the war at home and its effect on children, families and communities was one that needed to be told—but it also resonated on a personal level. In a behind-the-book essay, Harrington explains how her family history informed her moving and memorable story of a girl's coming-of-age while her father is deployed in the Middle East.

My father was a navigator/ bombardier in WWII, flying missions into Germany from his air base just north of Paris. Both my brothers enlisted in the Air Force in 1966, at the height of the Viet Nam war, directly out of high school and college, respectively. Even though I don’t have a family member serving in the current war, my family has been deeply impacted by war.

My father suffered from what was then called battle fatigue following WWII, a time he would never talk about directly. Nor would he talk about the experiences during the war that had so devastated him. The silence surrounding my father’s war experiences has probably been the single greatest mystery and inspiration in my life. I believe that my fascination with war grows out of my need to understand these experiences and to bear witness to this silent suffering.

I think that making the war personal is important. Telling the stories of those who have a loved one deployed is important.

I chose to write about the family of a soldier in the Reserves in 2006 because in my research I learned that Reservists make up 63% of our armed forces. For the families of Reservists a sense of isolation can be especially acute. They often live in communities where few, if any, of their friends and neighbors are in the military or deployed. Not only do Reservists’ children feel that no one knows their story, they often feel that no one even knows they exist.

There are more than 1.7 million military children and teens scattered across the country. Most of us have the luxury of thinking the war is distant; these children do not. They live with this war, day in and day out; they wake up with it, they fall asleep with it; it is woven into the daily fabric of their lives. They are expected to carry on at home and at school, to pretend that they do not have a parent who is risking his or her life, that they are not consumed with worry, that their daily life is not affected by this absence.

How should this sacrifice, borne by less than 1% of our population, affect the rest of us, the lucky 99% of us? What is our responsibility? Most of us have the luxury to blithely choose to remain ignorant of the war, or simply not pay attention. We can turn the page; we can change the channel. There is decadence in that choice and, I would suggest, a sense of shame, a moral disquiet.

I think that making the war personal is important. Telling the stories of those left behind, illuminating the lives of spouses and partners and children who have a loved one deployed is important.

Stories have the unique power to open our eyes and our hearts to people and to worlds and to experiences that we would not otherwise know. I wanted to find a way to tell the story of this endless war, to shed light on these struggles, and most importantly, I wanted to hear these voices.

I hope that Alice Bliss can help us begin to see this war one child at a time, one soldier at a time, one missing father at a time.

Read an excerpt from Alice Bliss on Harrington's website.

Fiction

Fiction

How Flannery saved the day

Behind the Book by Ann Napolitano

by Ann Napolitano

I slumped onto the couch and told my husband that the novel simply didn’t work. I was a year into A Good Hard Look, and it already felt like a lost year. Maybe I should throw it away and start over, I said.

I didn’t know what was broken, so I couldn’t fix it. The main character, Melvin Whiteson, was rudderless. The story was aimless. There was no spine, no uniting thread.

My husband was seated across from me; he leaned forward. He loves nothing more than to solve a problem, and he’s a writer himself, so he knows what he’s talking about. I’m stubborn though, and I wanted sympathy, not a solution. So instead of listening, I let my attention drift. I told myself I would be fine if I never published a second novel. I imagined possible alternative careers: therapist (too much education required), chef (terrible hours), personal assistant (I had done this for almost a decade; I was qualified, but not interested). I closed my eyes in an act of dramatic self-pity, and listened to my husband sigh in response.

When I opened my eyes I found myself looking at the bookshelf above his head. My eyes fell on a book I hadn’t picked up in nearly a decade. It was a collection of Flannery O’Connor’s letters, The Habit of Being. I studied the spine of the book as if it had something to tell me. And it did, in a way. The thought fell upon me slowly, with the weight of a heavy blanket: Flannery O’Connor should be in the novel.

This seems like a crazy idea, even now. Here are a few reasons why: (1) Flannery is a Southern icon, and I am from New Jersey; (2) I had read her stories in college, and been awed by them, but I’d also found them abrasive and upsetting; (3) I had never even aspired to write historical fiction. Incorporating a real, well-known person into my make-believe world seemed fraught with traps and complications. Could I possibly pull that off?

Despite my skepticism, the words continued to blink in my head. Flannery O’Connor should be in the novel. The idea was certainly intriguing, and what if this was an actual flash of inspiration? I was in no position to turn that away. I decided to approach the idea by reading everything I could get my hands on. I re-read Flannery’s stories (still shocking, still brilliant), her essays and two novels. I read the one existing biography on her, and several critical essays about her work. Then I re-read The Habit of Being, and to be honest, this is when my apprehension began to wane. Flannery’s letters are wonderful—in correspondence she is irreverent and sarcastic, kind and generous. Through the letters, I followed her path away from her Southern town and domineering mother to graduate school. She began her writing life in New York City, where she had dear friends and a life that satisfied her. When she felt her shoulders begin to tighten during a harsh Northern winter, she attributed the discomfort to arthritis. But by the time she arrived home to visit her mother, she was desperately ill. She was only 26 years old when she received the diagnosis that was also a death sentence. She had disseminated lupus—the same disease that had killed her father.

Flannery settled down on her mother’s farm, Andalusia, and poured herself into her work. The doctors gave her five years to live; she took 13. And during that time she produced some of the best fiction we have.

I flew to Atlanta, rented a car and drove to Andalusia. I walked across the speckled grass, and sat on Flannery’s white porch. A story began to grow in my head; pieces that seemed to have no business being in the same room came together. Melvin Whiteson met Flannery O’Connor at a Southern wedding; I held my breath, and followed the characters deeper into the narrative. Flannery, and the bravery with which she lived her life, soon became the spine of A Good Hard Look. Raymond Chandler famously said, “When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand.” My version of that was to have Flannery O’Connor show up, on crutches.

The novel took six additional years to write; I slumped on the couch in despair many more times, but I never again considered throwing the book away. The crazy idea had become a real, three-dimensional world. Flannery walked among her beloved peacocks, turning her sharp eyes on the world I was creating; my new struggle lay in making sure it met her approval.

A Good Hard Look is the second novel by Ann Napolitano, who received her M.F.A. from New York University and lives in New York City with her family.

I didn’t know…

Fiction, Mystery & Suspense, Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Fiction Suspense

Characters with secrets—and stories—to tell

Behind the Book by Lisa Unger

by Lisa Unger

In some respects, the germ for Darkness, My Old Friend took hold a long time ago. Its prequel, Fragile, was loosely based on an event from my own past. In high school, a girl I knew was abducted and murdered. The event—a shocking, horrifying thing—reverberated through the small town where I grew up. And I felt its impact for many years. I wouldn’t say the incident haunted me, but my thoughts returned to that time quite often. Finally, the story, or at least a heavily fictionalized version of it, found its way onto the page when I sat down to write Fragile.

During that process, I met Jones Cooper. When he first showed up in Fragile, he was the husband of my main character Maggie and I didn’t think he had an especially big role to play. As it turned out, he was a critical character. The entire book hinged on his past deeds, and how he’d sought to escape them.

When Fragile was done, I was still thinking about Jones. He and I don’t have that much in common. He is an older guy, in his late 40s. He has retired from his career as a detective, and he isn’t totally sure what he’s going to do next. His marriage is under a tremendous strain as he deals with how his past actions have affected his present, and what they mean for his future. He’s in therapy (very reluctantly). I kept wondering: How is he going to move forward? He has this tremendous darkness within him; how is he going to conquer that? What is he going to do with his life? He can’t just putter around the house! He’s too smart, too interesting.

Usually when I have that many questions and worries about a character, I have no choice but to explore him further on the page. And so began Darkness, My Old Friend, the next chapter of the story.

In a safe, picture-perfect town, the very worst possible thing occurred on a bright and sunny day when all was exactly as it should be.

We had to remain in The Hollows, of course, because Jones is part of that place, and it is part of him. This fictional town from Fragile was at first just a place I came up with because it was similar, if not identical, to the area where I grew up—some hybrid of that spot and an ideal town I had in my head. Near to the city but removed enough to be peaceful and close to nature, The Hollows had a hip, picturesque downtown center, safe streets, a coffee shop, a yoga studio. Again, I didn’t think very much of it at first. But it too evolved and became something more than I expected.

As I did with Jones, I came to sense a great darkness within The Hollows. It has a history, a spirit and a personality. It has wants and needs; it has an agenda. It’s not malicious precisely. Not exactly. I’m not quite sure what The Hollows is up to, to be honest. But I delved a little deeper in Darkness, My Old Friend. And I’m not done with it yet. Or, rather, it’s not done with me.

Shortly after I started writing, a girl by the name of Willow Graves appeared in the narrative. All I knew about her was her misery at living in The Hollows; she hated it. "THE HOLLOWS SUCKS," was what she was writing in her notebook when I first saw her, sitting in her English class, bored to tears. Her mother Bethany, a best-selling novelist, had moved them from New York City after a bitter divorce from Willow’s stepfather. Willow was getting into trouble. So Bethany thought that The Hollows, far from Manhattan and all its temptations, was a safer place for her wild child. Little did she know that trouble finds a girl like Willow anywhere, maybe especially in The Hollows.

I had a lot more in common with Willow than with Jones. In many ways, with her quasi-gothic look, and her rebel’s heart, her penchant for—ahem—storytelling, she reminds me of the girl I was a million years ago. She was out of place, the misfit in a small town, filled with lots of self-imposed angst. She was sure that anyplace was better than The Hollows. I felt for Willow, wished I could tell her to just hang in there. And to try, try, to stay away from that dark place inside. If you follow, I wanted her to know, you can’t always find your way home. But most of us have to learn that lesson that hard way, and Willow was no exception.

It’s the juxtaposition of disparate things that fascinates me: Dark and light, death and life, bad and good. The thin, blurry line between those things keeps me up at night, churning out the pages. And when that line exists within a character, as it does with most of the people who populate Darkness, My Old Friend, I am obsessed with it.

I suspect that my obsession with this idea began more than 25 years ago, when I was a girl, not unlike Willow, living in a place not unlike The Hollows. In a safe, picture-perfect town, the very worst possible thing occurred on a bright and sunny day when all was exactly as it should be. I know Fragile came from there, and Darkness, My Old Friend is certainly an evolution of that story. In a way, maybe all my books began there. Maybe I’m still the girl trying to understand all the many different ways something so horrible could happen to someone so innocent on an ordinary day.

Best-selling writer Lisa Unger takes on the dark side of small-town life in Darkness, My Old Friend, her sixth novel. She divides her time between New York City and Florida. Visit her website for more information.

Fiction, Suspense

Fiction Suspense

Ending the ‘Child 44’ trilogy

Behind the Book by Tom Rob Smith

by Tom Rob Smith

One of the most exciting challenges in writing a trilogy of novels is trying to create connections that go beyond having a set of characters return. Of course, there are no rules to writing, but it strikes me that if you’re going to stipulate that there are three books rather than an undefined number, you need to make creative use of that decision.

As someone who enjoys wandering around old churches, whether in England or on my research trips to Russia, I’ve seen lots of triptych paintings. The form offers a way of presenting three images that can be viewed in any order, images which exist in their own right but which are at their most powerful when considered together.

The number three has powerful signals for any writer—suggesting a three-act structure, implying that the books are telling an over-arching story that will come to a satisfying conclusion. But a trilogy is not one enormous novel being split into three parts. The reader must be taken on a journey during each individual novel. Furthermore, since many readers will come to the novels in a different order, readers should be allowed to build the experience in their own way. It must be as fascinating for a reader to construct their relationship to the novels by starting at the end as it is for a reader who has followed them from the beginning.

In the broadest sense, my three novels not only tell the history of the main character Leo Demidov, they tell the story of the Soviet regime, beginning with the Stalinist paranoia and fear, followed by the moral confusion that followed the dictator’s death, which is at the center of my second book, The Secret Speech, and ultimately ending with Agent 6 and the depiction of an empire in decay, expressed through the occupation and invasion of Afghanistan.

Yet beyond historical and biographical chronology, the books within a fiction trilogy must reflect upon each other in some way. With Child 44, I wanted to use the criminal investigation to explore the society in which the crimes took place—not to concentrate on the forensic, or procedural, but to look at the way in which Communist Russia tried to claim there was no crime in its Utopian society at a time when a series of terrible murders were taking place. In a sense, it was about a reaction to the crimes, rather than crimes. It was about one man fighting against a political system that refused to allow him access to the truth.

With Agent 6 I mirrored this approach, fascinated by the emotional impact of a brilliant and determined detective trying to solve the murder of someone he loves, in a time when geopolitics make it entirely impossible to reach the crime scene. How do you live with knowing that the investigation has been nothing more than a cover-up—and being unable to petition those responsible, unable even to set foot in the country where the crime took place? Once again detective Leo Demidov comes up against political obstacles in his attempt to solve the most important case in his life.

Going further, I used the structural device of echoes and parallels across the three books to take very different angles on similar ideas. In Child 44 Leo Demidov is an officer of the MGB, part of the secret police apparatus. Leo witnesses the brutality of the secret police, he is part of its brutality and he turns his back on it. In Agent 6, he is sent as a Soviet advisor to Afghanistan, where he is ordered to help create an Afghan secret police. He watches with dismay and despair as a young idealistic Afghan woman makes the same mistakes he did, becoming a State Security officer in order, she believes, to build a better country. It was fascinating to reverse the relationship that I created in Child 44.

In similar fashion, the combination of characteristics that Leo embodies as a young man seen in Child 44 are found in the American Communist Jesse Austin, a character based on the singer and athlete Paul Robeson, in Agent 6. The two are a curious pair, similar on many levels, both passionate believers, yet whereas Leo’s idealism cracks, Austin’s remains unbreakable even when his career and wealth are taken from him, even when confronted with the awful truth of the Soviet regime.

So, with the trilogy at a close, I hope I’ve created three books that not only stand on their own but also dance with each other.

After graduating from Cambridge, Tom Rob Smith spent time as a TV screenwriter before publishing his best-selling debut novel, Child 44, in 2008. In Agent 6, Smith’s Russian hero Leo Demidov takes on his most personal case yet—one that takes nearly 20 years to solve.

RELATED CONTENT
Read a review of Agent 6.

Read an interview with Tom Rob Smith for Child 44.

Read a review of The Secret Speech.