The biggest emotional challenge Chris Cleave faced in writing his scintillating fourth novel, Everyone Brave Is Forgiven, was the duty he felt to honor the memory of his grandparents.

Their experiences in the grim opening years of World War II, when Britain’s defeat by Germany was a distinct possibility, helped to inspire the book. 

“I didn’t feel a need to accurately portray their lives,” Cleave says during a call to the home in suburban London that he shares with his Paris-born wife, a chef turned nutritionist, and their three children, ages 6, 9 and 12. “In fact, I carefully didn’t. But I did feel the need to do justice to their memory. More than anything I felt my mother reading over my shoulder when I was writing this one. I felt a familial duty to deliver something my family would find beautiful. And they’re a tough crowd.”

"I felt a familial duty to deliver something my family would find beautiful."

Powered by crackling dialogue among his characters, Cleave’s novel is beautiful, though in a darkling sort of way. The story opens with teenage socialite Mary North fleeing her Swiss finishing school as soon as war is declared and signing on to be, she hopes, a British spy. Instead she’s assigned to be a teacher, replacing male instructors sent off to war. While her mother and her best friend, Hilda, think teaching is beneath her social station, Mary discovers she actually likes it. She develops a special bond with a black American child named Zachary Lee, whose father performs in a minstrel show, a popular form of entertainment in London at that time.

“I think 80 percent of London’s children were evacuated at the start of the war,” Cleave explains. “I was looking at all these evacuation photos, children getting onto trains in their duffel coats, looking very cute, and being taken to a place of safety in the countryside. Then I was looking at a lot of photos of street scenes of London in the 1930s, and there were a lot of black and mixed-race children in the East End. But the evacuation photos were almost universally of white kids. I became curious about where that was coming from.”

Readers of Cleave’s 2009 bestseller, Little Bee, know him to be a keen observer of political and social divides. Amid the devastating German Blitz, Mary falls for Tom Shaw, a middle-class school administrator, but she is also attracted to his more sophisticated apartment-mate, Alistair Heath, who enlists to fight in France, suffers from what we now call PTSD and later nearly starves to death during the siege of Malta. Mary’s dalliances put her at odds with her friend Hilda. As the novel progresses, Cleave’s portrayal of the ins and outs of these socially and psychologically complex relationships is gripping.

“I was very interested in competitive friendships. These are very young people—Hilda and Mary are 18 when the book starts—and they’re jostling for position. In a world of socialites, where the competition was all about who you were going to marry, I felt it might take a long time before their competition was transcended by the competition against the greater evil. By that, I don’t mean Germany. I mean that the enemy is the terror and the danger itself. I didn’t want to write a novel where my characters have great solidarity to begin with and then stoically face down the enemy threat. I wanted the threat to exacerbate the tensions that existed in the friendships and within the society they inhabit. I’m very interested in the fracture lines—between Hilda and Mary, between white and black, between high class and working class, between town and country. For me, the story lies in those tensions. I think there are two wars we have to win. One of them is against the enemy, yes, but the other one is against the tendency of our own society to divide, to polarize, to fracture.”

Cleave says the technical challenge in writing Everyone Brave Is Forgiven was getting the period details right. In his writing room, which he describes as “monastic,” he has a large aluminum suitcase to remind him that he needs to get out and do his research. “I have a rule for myself that I must physically visit the places I’m talking about. I sort of immerse myself in the worlds of the characters.” So he read novels by Evelyn Waugh, Dorothy L. Sayers and others that his characters would have been reading at the time. He listened to the music and radio shows his characters would have heard. “I tried to learn what they would have done on a Friday night in wartime.” He collected census data and bomb damage maps. He researched in libraries instead of on Google. And he lost 22 pounds eating London war rations from that period.

“It was quite dramatic and not that much fun. One of the things I noticed was how much our eating behavior has changed since then. The things that were rationed were sugar, lard, butter, margarine and bacon, which are things I don’t eat at all. The biggest thing I discovered was not how hungry I felt, but how I didn’t want to eat that stuff,” he wryly notes.

"Cleave’s characters, both at home and on the battlefield, confront not just privation but shocking and unexpected losses."

In those early, difficult days of World War II, Cleave’s characters, both at home and on the battlefield, confront not just privation but shocking and unexpected losses, something Cleave brilliantly conveys to his readers.

“It was one of those things where I just woke up in the middle of the night and worked it out. I had particular points in mind where the characters died. Then I went back and just arbitrarily killed them 25 pages earlier. It was brutal. I gave myself huge problems because they had died at very inconvenient moments. But that’s war—horrible, brutal, arbitrary. Death comes unexpectedly. I just cut them off midsentence. It was a real nightmare to fix the book.”

Despite the self-inflicted challenges of writing the novel, Cleave says writing historical fiction was liberating. 

“You have to raise your game. The penny dropped when I went to see the Royal Shakespeare Company perform. I’m a big fan. Given that Shakespeare can conjure these brilliant, bloodthirsty tragedies, I wondered why so many history plays, why so many Henrys, Edwards and Richards? And I realized that because he’s talking about this platform of our shared history, because we know the great currents behind the play and we know the ending, what we are curious about is character. So by writing historical fiction, he gets to go straight to the heart of character. That’s what I loved about it. . . . I discovered with historical fiction that I can go straight in there and open with strong dialogue and do the thing that I love most of all, which is character and dialogue and letting the development of the characters inform the progress of the novel.”

Writing about war, Cleave says, surprisingly freed him “from having to have bad guys. I’ve discovered—it took me years to work this out—that bad guys make for terrible dialogue. Something that was really good about writing a wartime book is that the enemy is evil itself. There’s no need to have a bad character in order to create the tension in the story. And that means that you have dialogue between people for whom dialogue is a realistic possibility.”

And the dialogue in Everyone Brave Is Forgiven is excellent—sharp and witty. “A novel for me is a fight to give the characters more space to talk in. I like to win space for my characters to talk in a way that advances their character rather than the plot. If I’m doing my job well as a storyteller, then I can keep the story going where it needs to go and still give my characters space to breathe and be themselves.”

Asked if writing this novel was different from writing his previous books, Cleave says, “For the first time I felt that writing the book was its own reward. I was really loving the process of writing it, and I was learning a lot about myself. I didn’t mind what happened as long as I was happy to show it to my mum.”

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

Anton DiSclafani follows up her bestselling debut, The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls, with another morally complex and compelling historical novel. The After Party charts the ups and downs of a friendship between two women who are navigating society in the wealthy Houston community of River Oaks. Cece, married with children, has the typical life of a 20-something woman in the 1950s—and she can't help but worry about the less conventional choices made by her beautiful best friend, Joan. As Cece tries to protect her unpredictable friend, dark secrets surface. 

We asked DiSclafani, who now teaches Creative Writing at Auburn University, a few questions about her new book.

For your first novel, you had a personal connection to the North Carolina region in which it is set. What drew you to Houston in general, and the River Oaks community in particular?
​My entire extended family lived in Texas at one point (many of them still do), so I spent a lot of childhood vacations staring out the backseat of our rental car. We used to drive through River Oaks so my mother could admire the houses; after a while, I started to admire them, too.

Houston in the 1950s is a fiction writer’s dream. Anything went. People were spectacularly rich, but the societal rules that dictated other, older parts of the country didn’t exist there.

In the Author’s Note, you mention that you spent a good deal of time researching the Shamrock Hotel, one of the centerpieces to this novel where more than a few pivotal moments occur. Did you dig up any juicy tidbits about the hotel that you weren’t able to incorporate into the book?
Rumor has it that Frank Lloyd Wright took one look at the Shamrock and asked: “Why?”

One of the areas where The After Party particularly shines is in its candid depiction of the complexities of female friendship—the devotion, but also the resentments and viciousness that can crop up. Can you talk a bit about Joan and Cece’s relationship and the dynamics that you wanted to explore between them?
I wanted to explore what a friendship looks like in all its agony and glory. The extreme, instinctive closeness that characterizes a friendship between girls, first, and then how, in this case, that closeness continues through adolescence and into adulthood. People move around so much now, but until relatively recently it wasn’t unusual to die in the same place you were born in. So that kind of friendship interested me—a friendship that began in girlhood and continued into adulthood.

But what happens when one friend pulls away? When the friendship sours? Will the one friend survive without the other? That’s what The After Party is about—surviving friendship.

"That’s what The After Party is about—surviving friendship."

As a writer, what is the personal appeal to setting books in the past as opposed to the present? In your mind, does historical fiction offer any advantages over novels with contemporary settings?
There are all sorts of historical pressures a novelist can use to her advantage. It was a different world for women (for everyone, of course, but especially for those who weren’t white, wealthy men); I find that world fascinating to write about. Choices were very limited, and the limits built tension. In this case, what happens when a woman didn’t want to get married at 22 and have her first child at 23? That wouldn’t be a source of conflict if the book were set in present day. Everyone would understand.

The immediacy of the modern world is exhausting. You can’t remember a tiny piece of trivia at a dinner party, you look it up. You send a text to a friend and you expect a response immediately, and worry when you don’t get one. I like that the past isn’t so rushed. From a novelist’s perspective, there’s a lot more stewing, a lot more wondering about what someone else is thinking without receiving any sort of electronic signal.

In the 1950s, acceptable standards of behavior for women and what constituted a scandal were quite a bit more conservative than they are now. Without giving anything away, what was your thought process when it came to constructing a storyline that was faithful to the time but would still appeal to and (hopefully!) surprise and titillate modern readers?
We’ve grown up and moved forward, in some ways, but in other ways we’re still shocked by certain attitudes and behavior on the part of women. I think it’s easy for a modern reader to relate to the past’s codes of decorum. And, in a way, when you’re writing historical fiction you’re not writing about the past. You’re writing about the present, and you set in the past to emphasize certain things.

"[W]hen you’re writing historical fiction you’re not writing about the past. You’re writing about the present, and you set in the past to emphasize certain things."

Were there any specific lessons you learned when writing The Yonahlosee Riding Camp for Girls that you applied to your second novel?
It was a beast of a different order. Yonahlossee felt like it wrote itself (or perhaps I’m flirting with nostalgia). But I had just graduated from my MFA program when I started Yonahlossee. Nobody expected anything of me. This time around, of course, there was pressure. First I wrote a failed book (or 250 pages of one) that I had to set aside, and then start over. Now I see that the failed book was my way into The After Party (I took one of the less important characters, Cece, and made her the main character), but at the time my outlook wasn’t so rosy.

Once I found the story, I wrote the book quickly. And it didn’t require nearly as much revision as Yonahlossee. So I think the process of writing the first draft was more difficult because I was thinking harder. I was trying to layer the book in ways that would pay off a hundred, two hundred pages down the road.

In addition to a being a published author, you’re also an Assistant Professor in the English department at Auburn University and have taught creative writing courses as well. What’s your favorite class to teach and what do you love most about being in the classroom?
Perhaps unsurprisingly, I love teaching historical fiction! I love revealing to students how to choose a little patch of history and stake a story on it. And I love everything about being in the classroom. It doesn’t feel like work. There’s an energy there I haven’t found anywhere else.

You’re originally from Florida, but currently live in Alabama and spent good chunks of your formative years in North Carolina and Georgia. What do you love most about living in the American South and why do you think it makes such a rich place for exploration in literature?
I’ve just moved back to the Deep South after spending 10 years away, in the Midwest. My immediate answer is I love how nice everyone is here. There’s a friendliness in the South that makes it a really pleasant place to live. You don’t ever meet a stranger when you’re out and about. It’s also beautiful—people love their yards and homes. Why is it such a rich place for exploration in literature? I don’t know—it’s a good question that I’ve thought a lot about. We have such a history in the South, much of it fraught, and I think (I hope) that part of being a Southerner is constantly reexamining who you are in the world, where you come from: what the South was, what it is now, what it should become. There’s also a deep love for the past in the South. Antiques, cemeteries, homes. And the past—is there any greater territory for fiction?

The ladies in this novel spend a lot of time living it up and sipping on boozy beverages—from dirty gin martinis and Manhattans, to champagne and daiquiris. When you indulge in a tipple, what’s your preferred poison?
I actually wrote this book while I was pregnant, so it was kind of torture, writing about all of these boozy beverages and not being able to indulge. Now that I am not pregnant, I love a good gin martini, dry with olives.

What are you working on next?
A Southern gothic ghost story, set in the 1940s.

RELATED CONTENT: Read our review of The After Party.

Author photo by Nina Subin.

Jessie Burton’s second novel is set in the changing London of the 1960s and central Spain at the start of the Spanish Civil War. Like her bestselling debut, The Miniaturist, The Muse focuses on a work of art: in this case, a significant Spanish painting with a mysterious provenance that links the lives of three women over four decades. BookPage asked Burton about her love of research, her writing process and what historical fiction she admires.

What was your initial inspiration for The Muse?
I was inspired by so many things when I wrote this book—huge scopes, like war, and love, and art, and colonialism. Oddly, compared to The Miniaturist—which was anchored by a very solid, physical object—The Muse derives from multiple interests, and was driven more by experience than curiosity. I wanted to write about Spain, and about London in the 1960s, and about art. My approach to the historical research was the same, but my impulses to write this book were very different. I was chasing something different.

This is your second novel to revolve around a work of art. Is that where you start—imagining the painting or physical object?
No—it was different this time! The dolls’ house in The Miniaturist is a real object. As you say, the paintings in The Muse are imagined, and only emerged in my mind’s eye one the writing was underway, and I had started developing the characters and plot.

Why did you decide to make Odelle from Trinidad? What do you think her being a newcomer to London adds to the novel, and how did you approach writing from her perspective?
Trinidad had direct colonial links to London and England in those days. It still does have links, but now in a reconfigured form. I knew from the beginning Odelle wouldn’t be a white woman, but I didn’t make that choice so I could augment her character, or add to the novel in a tokenistic way. Nevertheless, as non-black woman myself, there was a lot of consideration that followed the knowledge that Odelle was going to drive the story.

I have long been interested in British behavior and policy in the West Indies from the time of slavery, and how this trickled down into the 20th century. Odelle’s life as a child of the Empire in the 1940s was a direct product of the legacy of slavery and colonialism. She would have been brought up to talk and think almost more Englishly than the English—and as a bright girl would have absorbed the message of “connectedness” that the British Isles had to the islands in the West Indies. She would also have subconsciously absorbed both the insidious, and more overt, messages of how whiteness equaled safety, power, wealth and authority. She would have been told how she was a family member of empire, and she would have also been told that she was an outsider. That must have had a profound, splitting effect on first arrival in England. Odelle is an “immigrant,” but she knows the English better than they know themselves, because she actually reads those Shakespeare plays and Tennyson poems, and had posters of Princess Margaret on her wall. She speaks the Queen’s English, she possesses all the signifiers of alleged Englishness except one thing: the colour of her skin.

For me, Odelle’s Trinidadian heritage assimilates into her womanhood, her falling in love, her fear of love, her ambition to write—it is not solely a racial prism through which I see her. I was striving for a woman who meets us at the axis of all these points. But obviously she is exposed to racism on a micro- and macro- level, in a way a white woman would never be. Does this fuel her ambition even more? I don’t think so. I think her secretly knowing she’s a great writer is fuelling her ambition. She resists thinking of herself as a generalized representative of her entire island. She is an artist. She is also a prim girl, desperate to rebel. She is Caribbean. She is a Londoner. She wants better make-up in the department stores. Her new boss, Marjorie Quick, sees all this in her, and I hope that I do too.

I read widely around the Caribbean experience in London and the UK, I read fiction and poetry written by Caribbean writers, and I also consulted a professor at the University of the West Indies, who is about the same age as Odelle would be now, to check I was accurate when Odelle uses her Trini dialect.

I checked out your Pinterest page for The Muse! It’s a wonderful way to share your visual inspiration. What other kinds of resources did you use?
Thanks! I used books, mainly. Trusty books. And films from the period, and radio documentaries. There’s an extensive bibliography in the back of the novel.

You have written two historical novels. What about the past appeals to you as a fictional subject?
I can’t answer that easily. I don’t really think of it as the “past,” as if it’s some dim and distant place that is severed from our present day. For me, it lives on. There are similarities and differences, and these points of reference are rich opportunities for me to explore universal themes of love, loss, triumph, grief . . . but also to understand how things have changed.

Why do you think Olive works so hard to conceal her talents?
For many reasons: because she enjoys the joke on her father, because she can paint without having to be accountable for the public product, because she’s frightened, because she hasn’t thought it through, because it keeps her close to Isaac, because it makes her feel powerful, because she can watch herself from the outside and the inside at exactly the same time.

Have you ever heard of this happening in real life?
Yes—it has happened in the history of art creation and marketeering that women’s work has been attributed to men. It happened to Judith Leyster in 17th-century Holland, it happened to Margaret Keane in 1950s and ’60s America. In the art markets, women’s work has historically always sold for less, with rare exceptions. Women painters are less prominent in art history, and less numerous. Women’s work has been destroyed by their menfolk (Alice Neel springs to mind, whose lover, Kenneth Doolittle, incinerated over 350 of her watercolors, paintings and drawings.) Women have often been disregarded as anything other than muses—unable to create works of “genius” themselves. We always are described as “women writers,” “women artists”—I’ve even been called a “lady novelist.” In 2016, this is still a held view in some quarters. It is a persistent and enraging state of affairs. It is complete rubbish. So yes, maybe I felt like turning the tables a little, and twisting the real reasons as to why Olive is ‘hiding’ behind Isaac. Olive doesn’t lack confidence in her talent, she just lacks confidence in the art market, which, when you think about it, makes her pretty savvy indeed.

What are some of your favorite historical novels?
Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies, the Regeneration trilogy.

How does your training as an actress influences your creation of characters?
I guess it must, because so many readers have told me now that they feel they know these people as if they were real, as if their dialogue was out of a play or a film. It’s not deliberate. It must just be part of where I’ve come from professionally. I always read my work out loud, several times, so in that sense it’s quite performative, my way of inhabiting these imaginary people, and putting flesh on their bones. But the best characters always keep a little bit of themselves secret, even to their creator. Perhaps that’s when the actor—or the reader—steps in and closes the gap.

Are you already thinking about a new novel? 
Maybe . . .
 

 Author photo © Hugh Stewart for Vogue 2015.

RELATED CONTENT: Read our review of The Muse.

How could a bright, beloved son become America's most infamous assassin? Historical novelist Jennifer Chiaverini, who has taken readers to the Civil War era in bestsellers like Mrs. Lincoln's Dressmaker and Mrs. Grant and Madame Jule, answers that question in her latest work, Fates and Traitors, which tells the story of John Wilkes Booth through the eyes of the four women who knew him best. Chiaverini, who lives in Madison, Wisconsin, answered a few questions about her book and its fascinating protagonist. 

Your book has the subtitle “A Novel of John Wilkes Booth,” but it’s told from the perspectives of four different women. What do the voices of the women in his life reveal about Booth that a straightforward story about him would not?
For me, one of the great joys of writing historical fiction is the opportunity to bring little-known or forgotten historical figures to the forefront of the story. Women and people of color, especially, have too often been relegated to the margins and footnotes, if they make it into the historical narrative at all. I love introducing readers to these courageous, extraordinary people and allowing readers to witness transformative events in our nation’s history through their eyes.

When I first began planning Fates and Traitors, I envisioned it as a first-person narrative from the perspective of Lucy Hale, the staunchly Unionist, abolitionist daughter of New Hampshire Senator John Parker Hale—and, according to some historians, John Wilkes Booth’s secret fiancée. As my research continued, I discovered that Lucy and Booth knew each other only very briefly, for less than a year before the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln. Also, because Booth concealed so many of his beliefs and activities from Lucy, her perspective was too limited for the novel I wanted to write. As I delved more deeply into Booth’s history, and especially after I learned that his dying words were for his mother, Mary Ann, and he had left his last written manifesto with his sister, Asia, I realized that telling the story from the perspectives of Mary Ann, Asia, Lucy and one of his co-conspirators, Mary Surratt, would allow me to offer a richer, more detailed understanding of who John Wilkes Booth was and how a bright, beloved son could have turned into the country’s most notorious assassin.

Did any of the four voices come more easily than the others? Which narrator did you most relate to?
All four women are fascinating characters and compelling narrators, but if I had to choose the one I would most like for a friend, I’d pick Lucy Hale. Her contemporaries described Lucy as charming, pretty, intelligent and very popular in social circles both in Washington, D.C., and in her hometown of Dover. She had a great sense of humor and a mischievous streak—which I enjoyed bringing out in Fates and Traitors—but she was also devoted to her family and worked tirelessly to support the Union cause by organizing fundraisers, sewing and knitting for the troops, and visiting wounded soldiers in military hospitals. And anyone who has ever fallen in love with someone who is completely wrong with them, only to find out too late that they’ve been deceived and betrayed, would find it hard not to sympathize with Lucy.

How did you research this novel?
Whenever I write historical fiction, I begin my research at the Wisconsin Historical Society library in my hometown of Madison. It’s a wonderful resource, an archive of marvelous depth and scope tended by knowledgeable, curious, enthusiastic librarians and scholars. In my research for Fates and Traitors, I also consulted numerous excellent online resources, including the archives of digitized historic newspapers at the Library of Congress, Genealogybank.com, Dave Taylor’s excellent blog, BoothieBarn: Discovering the Conspiracy, and websites for the Surratt House Museum, the Ford’s Theatre National Historic Site and the Junius Brutus Booth Society. Whenever I can, I also like to visit preserved historical sites that relate to the people and events I include in my novels, because that significantly enhances my understanding of a place and its people.

Was there anything you discovered about Booth in the course of your research that surprised you?
Before I began my research, I assumed that Booth came from a zealously Confederate family, like that of his fellow conspirator and Marylander, Mary Surratt. I was intrigued to discover that instead Booth had been raised in a rather progressive, egalitarian, abolitionist household, and that he was the only member of his immediate family who sympathized with the South. I could imagine his family’s increasing dismay, and in some cases outrage, as they watched the son and brother they loved turn his back on their most cherished values. They probably felt powerless to do anything about it, but I doubt they ever imagined that his new passions would drive him to such extremes of violence.

"I could imagine his family’s increasing dismay, and in some cases outrage, as they watched the son and brother they loved turn his back on their most cherished values."

Did writing this book change how you viewed him?
I understand Booth and his motivations better than before I wrote Fates and Traitors, but although I sympathize with the boy he was and the difficult circumstances he endured in his youth, nothing I learned about him justifies his actions on that fateful night at Ford’s Theatre. Make no mistake, Booth is not the hero of this novel. In my opinion, he’s not even a hero of the Confederacy. At the time of the assassination, there was absolutely no political or strategic advantage to be gained for the South by killing President Lincoln. Some of Booth’s associates tried to convince him of that, but he disregarded their warnings. He could have walked away at any time, but he chose murder. I don’t sympathize with that at all.

You first wrote about the Civil War in your Elm Creek Quilts series, and it’s an era you’ve touched on in several of your standalone historical novels. Why do you think it provides such a rich setting for fiction?
Civil War era was a tumultuous and transformative time for our nation, showing the best and worst of humanity in stark contrast. Looking back, we discover great moral failings alongside true heroism in the struggle for justice, equality, and freedom. My personal heroes are people who face adversity with moral courage and dignity, whose hunger for justice and compassion for others lead them to stand up for what is right even at great risk to themselves. My favorite characters to write about either possess similar qualities, or are given the opportunity to summon up these qualities and do what is right but fall short. What the Civil War says about our country—that we are capable of both great moral failings and tremendous goodness—resonates strongly even today, and as a creative person, I’m drawn to explore and try to understand that conflict.

Do you have a favorite Civil War novel, other than your own?
I’ve read and enjoyed too many to choose only one favorite, but one Civil War novel I particularly loved is Paulette Jiles’ Enemy Women, the haunting story of an 18-year-old Missouri woman who escapes from a Union prison and flees South in search of her family.

What are you working on next?
My next novel, Enchantress of Numbers, features Ada Byron King, Countess of Lovelace—the daughter of the renowned poet Lord Byron and an early 19th-century mathematician who is credited with writing the first computer program long before the first computer was ever built.

Author photo by Michael Chiaverini.

Reading Pachinko is like binge-watching every season of an HBO series. Instead of capturing a single time and place, Min Jin Lee’s heartbreaking historical novel spans the entire 20th century through four generations, three wars and two countries with a troubled past. A moving and powerful account of one of the world’s most persecuted immigrant communities—Koreans living in Japan—it may be remembered as one of the best books of the year.

But here’s a secret: Lee almost abandoned Pachinko after the first draft.

Twenty years ago, she quit her job as a corporate lawyer to become a writer. It didn’t go well. “I wrote a dreadful manuscript with a pretentious title that was never inflicted upon innocent readers,” Lee says. Her second attempt didn’t go much better, but her third attempt at fiction, Free Food for Millionaires, was published to universal acclaim in 2007.

And yet, Lee couldn’t stop thinking about her abandoned second novel, the one that would eventually become Pachinko. While Free Food for Millionaires focused on Korean Americans in New York, she still wanted to write about the Korean diaspora in Japan. “The fascinating history of the Korean Japanese,” Lee says, “is one of the clearest manifestations of legal, social and cultural exclusion in a modern, well-educated and developed democratic nation.”

The first draft of Pachinko was set in Tokyo during the 1980s. But when Lee returned to the manuscript, she realized that she had to go back much further.

In 1910, Japan annexed Korea. With the stroke of a pen, every citizen of Korea became a subject of Imperial Japan, and would remain so until Japan’s defeat at the end of World War II. During those 35 years, thousands of Koreans immigrated across the sea to Japan, many of them farmers unable to prove they owned their land.

It is these Korean-Japanese immigrants and their descendants—the Zainichi—that Lee wanted to explore in the resurrected novel that became Pachinko.

The word Zainichi is Japanese for “staying in Japan temporarily,” which is misleading, since most Korean Japanese are permanent residents and naturalized Japanese citizens. Sadly, Zainichi have suffered decades of oppression in Japan. During World War II, Korean men were forced to fight for Japan while Korean women were kidnapped as sex slaves for Japanese soldiers. After the war and throughout the 20th century, Koreans were disenfranchised, excluded from Japanese society and denied equal rights. In fact, Japan didn’t stop fingerprinting Koreans during alien registration procedures until 1993.

“The Zainichi are by definition considered foreign, transient and ‘other’ by many Japanese people,” Lee says. “Moreover, some Korean Japanese, especially children who are traumatically bullied, are seen as other to themselves. I was profoundly disturbed by this idea of being seen as permanently ‘other’ at key stages of one’s psychological development.”

In 2007, just after the release of Free Food for Millionaires, Lee and her husband moved from New York to Tokyo. 

“The move to Japan was a lucky coincidence for the book, but when I had to let go of the initial draft and start again—buddy, I was not a happy camper,” Lee says. “The field research forced me to throw out the initial manuscript and write a historical novel based primarily on one family.”

The result is Pachinko, a poignant, sprawling, multigenerational epic in the same vein as Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing, full of births, deaths, marriages and betrayals. Written in light, fluid prose, it begins in the 1880s on the coast of Korea, where a boy with a cleft palate is born into a small fishing village. Shortly after Japan colonizes his homeland, he marries the daughter of a farmer with the help of a matchmaker. Their own daughter, Sunja, almost brings the family to ruin as a young adult, but a Protestant minister whisks her away to Japan in 1933, where she becomes the matriarch of an extended family.

In Osaka, Sunja and her children are subject to bigotry because of their Korean heritage. Through World War II and the fall of the Empire of Japan, Sunja raises two boys with the help of her sister-in-law. The firstborn studies European literature in college until he learns a shocking family secret. Heartbroken, he moves to Nagano and pretends to be Japanese, eventually joining his brother in the pachinko business, though not in the same parlor, or even the same city. Eventually, Sunja becomes the grandmother of a Tokyo banker who carries the story into the 1980s, a full century after the story began.

The novel was initially called Motherland, but Lee changed the title when she came to a realization: “Nearly every Korean-Japanese person I interviewed or researched was somehow related (either intimately or distantly) to the pachinko business, one of the very few businesses Koreans were allowed to work in or have an ownership interest.”

If you’ve ever watched “The Price Is Right,” you’re already familiar with pachinko. It’s essentially a vertical pinball machine, though it was stylized as “plinko” for the game show.

“The pachinko business—a multibillion-dollar industry with double the export revenues of the Japanese automobile industry—is often viewed with great suspicion and contempt by middle-class Japanese,” Lee says. “However, one out of every 11 Japanese adults plays pachinko regularly, and there is at least one pachinko parlor in every train station and shopping street in Japan. Pachinko is a game of chance and manipulation, and I was interested in this gambling business as a metaphor.”

Like a pachinko ball, Sunja careens through the 20th century as a daughter, a wife, a mother and finally a grandmother. “It took so much of my life to write this novel, and even though the work and the waiting was its own trial, I have to acknowledge that it was helpful to age along with the book because I had the opportunity to encounter and learn as many different perspectives as possible,” Lee says.

And while Pachinko takes place on the other side of the globe, it should be required reading for Americans in 2017. 

“The recent presidential election has demonstrated a deeply divided nation, but what is even more troubling to me is how all the different groups cannot seem to comprehend the views of the others,” Lee says. “In an increasingly polarized world with great economic, educational and socio-cultural disparities, I want to believe that we can turn to narratives to empathize with all the parties who participate in both inclusion and exclusion.”

If you want a book that challenges and expands your perspective, turn to Pachinko. And don’t be intimidated by the page count or the grand scale of the story—in Lee’s deft hands, the pages pass as effortlessly as time.

This article was originally published in the February 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Grace Holland's life is spent in service to her children, her husband and her home, and any disatisfaction she feels is quickly pushed aside in the constant menial work that fills a housewife's time in 1947 Maine. But when wildfires sweep down the coast, Grace's home is completely destroyed and her husband is lost, most likely dead. 

Anita Shreve's The Stars Are Fire is the story of Grace's life after the fire, of her quest to secure housing and then financial security for herself and her children, and her discovery of the struggles and joys of independence. It is a book of small moments, a collection of seemingly simple themes that build to surprising and moving crescendoes. Shreve's spare, economic prose suits her character’s practicality and initial hesitance to determine the course of her own life. While Grace’s upbringing has not prepared her for any of the challenges she faces, she slowly begins to unfurl in the new space and freedom allotted to her, as naturally as a plant grows to fill unoccupied space. Shreve's crisp writing becomes more expansive in the moments when her protagonist consciously stretches beyond the boundaries of her previously narrow life.

A former journalist and creative writing teacher, Shreve became a literary sensation with the publication of her first novel, The Weight of Water, in 1997 and rose to further prominence when her next book, The Pilot's Wife, was selected for Oprah's book club. Shreve's books have fascinated audiences ever since and sold tens of millions of copies worldwide. We contacted the author at her home in Maine to ask about the historical inspiration for The Stars Are Fire and the ways in which the novel charts the evolving freedoms of American women. 

When did you first learn about the Maine fires of 1947? Did the idea for Grace’s story come along at the same time? 
I first heard about the fire about a decade ago when I picked up a pamphlet about the town of Cape Porpoise, Maine. I remember that there were harrowing descriptions of the Fire of ’47, as locals called it. And the pictures of the fire were just as terrifying. Later I read a book called The Week That Maine Burned. But it wasn’t until eight or nine years later that I thought about writing a novel based on the fire. One of the details that had most intrigued me was the notion of women and children having to flee into the sea to save themselves from the coastal fire. I began to imagine a woman named Grace with two children who has to do just that, and the novel was born.

Grace’s trajectory at times reminded me of a coming-of-age story. She is a married woman with children, but over the course of the novel she discovers and embraces her independence and sexuality. Where did the inspiration for her character development come from?
The development of Grace’s character came about because of the era and her marriage. It’s not a particularly good marriage even before the fire. But the era—post World War II—was a stultifying period for women. Most were housewives, stuck at home unless they had a car, which Grace didn’t. Laundry was done on a washboard and hung to dry. There’s a scene in the novel in which her husband, Gene, comes home with a wringer-washer in an attempt to save the marriage. The machine is so welcome, it does the trick. For a time.

"I’m interested in the reality of a woman pushed to the edge. How will she behave? I take it minute by minute."

The struggles of Grace and the other female characters in the novel to carve out lives for themselves despite the restrictions placed on their gender feel very realistic for the historical setting. Did you draw on family history to craft this aspect of the novel?
I did research to be true to the era. That was essential in shaping Grace’s character, especially in regards to what she can and cannot do. I used my mother and her chores and her approach to them to flesh out Grace—although I did not use my parents’ marriage. They were happily married for 56 years. But I remember the wringer-washer, the sheets and towels on the line, the one-night-a-week grocery-shopping trip, the playpens and bathinettes.

Grace’s relationship with her mother evolves significantly over the course of the book. How responsible do you think her mother is for Grace’s personality and situation, especially at the beginning of the novel?
Grace’s mother, too, is a woman of her era, but with prewar notions of how a woman should behave. When Grace tries to tell her that her marriage is troubled, the mother steers the conversation elsewhere. She doesn’t want to talk about such difficulties. But after the fire, as the necessity for Grace to make a life for them all evolves, Grace’s mother begins to soften her stance. Grace married at a young age. Her fiance fought in the war and appeared to be a gentleman. He was at school trying to better himself. That would have appealed to Grace’s mother at that time.

The balance between the bleak moments of Grace’s trials and the moments of triumph and grace is so delicate. How did you calibrate that during your writing process?
I kept it as real as I possibly could. I often do this in novels. I’m interested in the reality of a woman pushed to the edge. How will she behave? I take it minute by minute. Because Grace has endured so many hardships, the joys, when they come, while they may seem small to us, are momentous to her.

Music plays a key role in this novel. Are you a fan of classical music or did you have to research this element of the story?
I’m a fan of classical music but don’t know much about it. I do, however, love Brahms Second Piano Concerto very much and thus included it in the book

The coast of Maine has been a frequent setting for you, and Grace’s connection to the sea and the natural world is a touchstone of The Stars Are Fire. What is it about this place that continues to inspire you?
Every novel I think to myself: OK, I’m moving west in this novel. But I can’t seem to take a step away from the coast of Maine. It’s in my bones, I suppose. I know the area very well, and one of my favorite activities in life is to sit in a chair and look at the ocean.

The action of The Stars Are Fire felt very organic as it unfolded. Did any plot points surprise you in the midst of writing, or did the book follow your original plan for it?
I knew that Gene would be gone for a large part of the novel, and that the reader might be wondering if he would come back. I certainly knew the fire would be a large part of the book. And I knew that eventually Grace would either push a baby carriage or drive a car away from her home. I didn’t know where she was going or exactly why.

What’s next for you?
I’m afraid I can’t say. I’m superstitious about talking about a work in progress. I wrote my first novel, Eden Close, in complete secrecy, and that worked, so I’ve kept to that decision throughout the other seventeen.

Author photo by Elena Seibert

Inspired by a true story, Jamie Ford’s poignant new novel is framed by two world’s fairs held in Seattle—what the author calls the  “metaphorical rocks” of his powerful tale. At the first fair in 1909, a real-life raffle was held to give away an orphaned baby, an event that both haunted Ford and piqued his curiosity.

He imagines what might have happened to that child in Love and Other Consolation Prizes, a riveting story that moves from heartbreak and poverty in turn-of-the-century Southern China to Seattle’s glittering 1962 world’s fair, the Century 21 Expo. The fair's opening day triggers painful memories for one attendee—a man named Ernest Young, who recalls a time when he fell in love with two girls and muses, “The present is merely the past reassembled.”

We asked Ford, author of the 2009 bestseller Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, about fate, family secrets and the rewards of writing redemptive fiction.

Your novel was inspired by an incident in which a baby was raffled off at the 1909 Seattle world’s fair. How and when did you become aware of this event?
I remember watching a DVD in 2009 that was commemorating the 100-year anniversary of the Alaska Yukon Pacific Exposition, Seattle’s forgotten world’s fair. (I know, I have weird viewing pastimes). The program was narrated by the actor Tom Skerritt, who casually mentioned that a boy was raffled off and that his name was Ernest, and a newspaper clipping flashed onscreen that read “SOMEBODY WILL DRAW BABY AS PRIZE.” 

And just like that, I fell down the rabbit-hole. . . .

Even now, after reading the novel, it’s hard for me to believe that such a raffle happened in the U.S. just over a century ago. Were you similarly dumbstruck? What does this say about how much our culture has changed in the last century?
Ironically, at Seattle’s second world’s fair (in 1962), a vendor gave away poodles––which was criticized for being inhumane. So as the philosopher, Robert Zimmerman, sang, “The times they are a-changing.” 

And I wasn’t quite dumbstruck as much as consigned to the weirdness of history. Those early world’s fairs all had ethnographic exhibits, which were basically human zoos that featured “exotic” or indigenous people. The fact that a boy was raffled off seemed like an extension of that mindset.

Also, this didn’t just happen at world’s fairs. In the May 1920 issue of The Kiwanis Magazine there’s an article about the Asheville, North Carolina chapter: “One of their unique features was to auction off a real baby for adoption at a luncheon attended by the ladies.”

Strange days, indeed.

The description of 5-year-old Yung’s experiences aboard the ship to America are riveting and heartbreaking. Can you tell us a bit about how you researched this era and the activity of human smugglers?
While doing research at the Anacortes Maritime Museum near Seattle, I learned that smugglers Ben Ure and Lawrence “Pirate” Kelly made their fortunes transporting immigrants, tied in burlap bags so that if customs agents were to approach, their human cargo could easily be tossed overboard. The tidal currents would carry the bodies of these discarded immigrants to a place now known as Dead Man’s Bay. There are probably happy people having picnics on that beach as I write this, who have no idea how the place earned its name.

I also looked at oral histories of some of the first immigrants from Southern China (where my great-grandfather immigrated from). I was trying to figure out why someone would put themselves at such risk on the high seas. It turns out many of those men and women didn’t have a choice—they were sold.
 
You write of young Ernest and the raffle: “His fate had been decided by this simple piece of cardboard.” Where do you fall on the fate vs. random chance continuum? Do you think our individual destinies are fated or dependent on chance and luck?
The romantic in me desperately wants to believe in luck, or fate, or for lack of a better word—destiny. But the cynic in me worries that all of this is somewhat predetermined. You could argue that all human action is guided by external causality, which creates the narrow pathways in which we exist. When you’re bored and want to feel especially helpless, look up the philosophical idea of Determinism. Warning: It will break your brain.

“I’m not a bitter person in life. I don’t want to be a bitter author on the page. There’s no shame in happiness.”

Why did you choose to bookend your story with two world’s fairs, one in 1909 and the other in 1962? Do you see the fairs as turning points in Seattle’s history?
I love the symmetry of showcasing Seattle’s two world’s fairs. But also, the fairs were snapshots of how the city (and the U.S.) presented itself to the world at large. 

Both expositions focused on the latest technology, architecture, and what was happening in the arts. Both featured celebrities and politicians. But in looking at the fairgoers themselves, what amused them, what they celebrated, you get a marvelous anthropological glimpse at how we behaved. I guess you could say that both fairs were great for people-watching, even decades later.

You write of Ernest, “He suspected that everyone his age, of his vintage, had a backstory, a secret that they’d never shared.” Do you think such secrets are specific to his era and location? Or are they a broader part of the human experience?
Oh, no. We all have secrets. I certainly do. But we’re always followed by the next generation (often our own children) who are obsessed with the future, not the past. So these secrets stay hidden. 

I recently found out that my late mother had another child, who was given up for adoption. So I have a mystery sibling. I’ve heard that she’s a police officer in Vegas.

Go ask your parents their deepest, darkest secrets. Who knows what you’ll find.

How do you feel about Mrs. Irvine and how do you think readers will react to her character? Does she deserve any credit for trying to do what she thought was right?
I think she’s a product of her time. That is to say, she means well, but she’s lacking in empathy. Like many good, well-meaning people in life, their Achilles heel is an inability to embrace the complexity of others. People are qualitative, not quantitative. 

But, that’s just me. I’m a pretty emotive guy.

Your depiction of Gracie’s dementia is tender, even life-affirming. Do you have any family experience with this condition?
I saw this to some degree with my Yin Yin and Yeh Yeh—my Chinese grandparents. My grandfather took care of my grandmother for a decade as her health slowly declined. It takes special dedication, and tenderness, to be that kind of caregiver.

And then I experienced it first-hand as I cared for my mother in hospice. When you meet fear and dread with love, because that’s all you have left, it changes you.

Early Asian-American life is a poignant theme in your works, and you’ve been compared to other Asian-American authors such as Amy Tan. How do you see yourself fitting in (or not fitting in) to a growing canon of Asian-American authors?
I don’t know. Honestly, it’s not for me to decide, and I still have more books in me, so we’ll see what happens. I love historical fiction, but I’m open to all kinds of storytelling. Last year I published a few stories that were basically Asian-themed steampunk. And last week I had a crime noir tale published in an anthology. Oh, and I’m still working on a screenplay and a script for a graphic novel. Plus, there’s always a lot of really bad poetry leaking out of my brain.

Reviewers often remark that your books are hopeful or triumphant, an outlook that seems relatively rare in current fiction. Do you set out to write hopeful stories or do they develop organically as you write?
I love redemptive stories. Not necessarily ones with perfect happy endings, with rainbows and unicorns, but I like to at least have a jumping-off point where characters can continue their journeys—if only in the imagination of readers. 

It’s sad that stories of hope and redemption are sometimes seen as “less than literary,” as though every story needs to crush your soul to have creative merit.

I’ve never bought into that idea. I’m not a bitter person in life. I don’t want to be a bitter author on the page. There’s no shame in happiness.

Author photo by Alan Alabastro

Here’s something that may come as a surprise for fans of Paint It Black and the Oprah-approved White Oleander: Bestselling novelist Janet Fitch has a secret passion for Russia. It started back when the writer, 62, was attending junior high in Los Angeles and fell in love with Crime and Punishment, launching a deep dive into the waters of Russian literature.

“I’m a pretty intense person myself,” Fitch explains during a call to her home in Los Angeles, “and a lot of the literature we got as kids was pretty pallid—it didn’t suit me at all.” Opening Crime and Punishment, she says with a laugh, “was like, OK, here we are. This is my internal landscape.”

After decades of reading Russian literature and history and a few trips to the country, Fitch—who studied history at Reed College—has distilled that fascination into her first work of historical fiction, The Revolution of Marina M., an epic page-turner and part one of a two-volume tale set during the Russian Revolution. Ten years in the making, the novel snuck up on Fitch, who had originally planned to write about a Russian émigré living in 1920s Los Angeles. But it was impossible to tell the character’s story without flashing back to the past in Russia—interludes that, according to Fitch’s critique group, were the most interesting parts.

Soon, Fitch was making a full-on plunge into one of the most turbulent and confusing periods in Russian history, a place where few Western novelists have dared to tread, even after 100 years.

“The Revolution is a moving target,” Fitch says. “People can be good guys and bad guys, or they’re bad guys to start out with, then good guys. . . . It’s a far more sophisticated problem.”

Luckily for readers, Fitch has created a firecracker of a guide through the tangled years of revolution: the titular Marina. Born with the new century, Marina is just 16 when the first tremors of rebellion begin to penetrate her comfortable upper-class St. Petersburg home. As a passionate young poet, Marina finds her soul stirred by the calls for freedom and action.

“To be Marina, it was a joy,” Fitch says. “This is the first time I’ve written a character who wasn’t under the foot of events, but more equal to the events. She’s a far more fiery person than I’ve ever written before. A much braver person than I’ve ever written before. She’s much more of a real heroine than I’ve ever tried before.”

Like any real heroine, Marina must deal with some complicated relationships. She and her two best friends aren’t always on the same page when it comes to the idea of revolution: Mina, the daughter of Jewish academics, is more cautious, while Varvara, who lives in near poverty, is ready to burn it all down. Marina’s father is a government official, invested in keeping things as close to the status quo as possible; her mother is an aristocrat who refuses to even think about politics; and her sensitive younger brother is facing pressure to enlist. In the midst of all this, Marina is also dealing with a normal coming-of-age dilemma: her burgeoning sexuality. Should she wait for her childhood crush to come back from the front or throw in her lot with a passionate proletarian poet?

“She’s much more of a real heroine than I’ve ever tried before.”

Needless to say, this headstrong teenager doesn’t always handle these complexities well. “I’ve known fiery people,” Fitch says. “They’re glorious, they believe, they’re willing to stick their necks out, they’re willing to fall a long way, they make a mess—for themselves and others—but they live in a large way.” That spark makes Marina’s picaresque journey through this turbulent era a compelling one to follow, even if, at times, you might wish you could warn her about what’s to come.

“It’s the first book that I’ve written that has been very propulsive, as far as the events of the story,” Fitch says. “When you’re in the midst of a revolution, your life will be changed week by week by what happens in the external world. So it’s much more of an event-driven book.”

Fitch’s earlier novels, which she describes as “more interior,” were both bestsellers. Both have been adapted to film—White Oleander as a major feature and Paint It Black as an indie film, released in October via streaming services. But no matter how different The Revolution of Marina M. is to Fitch’s previous works, it has many of the hallmarks her readers have come to look for, including complex and dynamic female characters. Readers will come away with more understanding of the Revolution, but this is no history book.

“People living through history don’t know what’s going on at the top. We only see the effects on our lives. That’s what fiction does best. It’s showing us how it felt to be in those times, rather than what Lenin thought. The average person had no idea; they’re just trying to get some food, find work, decide between your two boyfriends,” she says with a laugh.

The events that sowed the seeds of the Russian Revolution—vast income inequality, a rise in populism, an unpopular leader, a lengthy and pointless war—might seem uncomfortably familiar to modern readers, and Fitch does see some parallels between world events in 1917 and 2017.

“We are living in a revolutionary period right now . . . not the cataclysm that the Russian Revolution was, but we’re living through a time of extreme change,” says Fitch. “Revolutions don’t stop, that’s the most important thing you can take away from The Revolution of Marina M. Once the wheel gets turning, it keeps turning. In Russia, it’s still turning.”

This article was originally published in the November 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

(Author photo by Cat Gwynn.)

With his much-anticipated fourth novel, Charles Frazier returns to the Civil War setting of his National Book Award-winning novel, Cold Mountain.

Varina centers on an unexpected and controversial figure: Varina Howell Davis, wife of Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy.

You’ve said that after Cold Mountain, you didn’t think you’d ever want to write about the Civil War again. Why have you returned to this setting?
I don’t really think of Varina as a Civil War book. The present time is 1906, and the book covers most of her long life. But she calls the war—especially the chaotic weeks following the fall of Richmond—“the axle of her life.” Everything turns around it. In a sense, American history and culture do the same. That war and its cause—the ownership of human beings—live so deep in our nation’s history and identity that we still haven’t found a way to put it behind us for good. I think of historical fiction as a conversation between the present and the past, and Varina Davis’ life offered me a complex entry point into that dialogue.

Why did you want to tell Varina’s story?
I like writing about strong, complex women, but I hadn’t known much about Varina Davis until I ran across a fragment of fact—that shortly after her much-older husband Jefferson’s death, Varina moved from Mississippi to New York City, intending to be a writer at age 60. During those years she became friends with Julia Grant, Ulysses S. Grant’s widow. Along with personal affection for each other, they apparently saw their friendship as an emblem of national reconciliation. Eventually I became interested in a fictional version of Varina in old age, looking back, stitching together history and memory and invention, hoping to make sense of her long life filled with privilege, loss and persistence. Her dramatic, problematic life was a narrative situation begging for interpretation and interrogation.

What was the most daunting part about telling this story?
Varina looks back at seven or eight decades of American history from the perspective of the early 20th century, so one immediate problem was how to structure the story, how to order all that time. The book is partly about memory—both true and false—and I realized very quickly that I wasn’t interested in calendar time. I wanted to move fluidly through my character’s life, following a memory pattern, not in a straight line. I wanted quick shifts from scene to scene, place to place, time to time. As a writer, I always want to meet the reader at least halfway, so I enjoyed finding ways to create a variety of fixed points in the swirl of time and memory, an internal logic to the narrative shifts.

When writing historical fiction, how do you navigate memory, history and invention?
When I write about historical figures, I’m always in search of a fictional character, not a biographical sketch. My research process tends to be inefficient and intuitive, and a majority of the research I do never finds a place in the book. I read a great deal of primary sources—letters, journals, newspaper articles—and biographies, but eventually I have to step away from the foundational facts of history in order to find my fictional character. So, discovering which plants would be edible during April in upstate South Carolina or getting in the car and driving the route Varina took as she fled south trying to reach Florida becomes more useful to my writing than reading 50 more Jefferson Davis letters.

What was the most surprising thing you learned about Varina during your research?
It was less about Varina than about someone else whose path crossed Varina’s during the Civil War. Strange but true, a 4- or 5-year-old multiracial orphaned boy, nicknamed Jimmie Limber, lived in the Confederate White House in Richmond alongside the children of Jefferson Davis. He was photographed along with Varina’s children and is mentioned in several memoirs by her friends and acquaintances, and he was the subject of wild rumors. The story of their meeting is somewhat hazy—Varina may have seen him being beaten on the street and taken him home, or her own sons may have known him from the little boys’ street gang they belonged to called the Hill Cats. Either way, Jimmie Limber stayed with Varina and her children as they fled from Richmond at the end of the war until they were captured by Federal troops in south Georgia. He then came under the care of a teacher from Boston working with freed slaves on the Sea Islands, and soon after, at about age 6 or 7, he may have been sent to an orphanage. At this point he drops out of the historical record.

I became interested in imagining a life for that little boy, and in having him, as a middle-aged man, seek out Varina. This fictional character, now called James Blake, wants to fill blanks in his memory to better understand his life, and over the course of seven Sundays in the late summer and fall of 1906, he and V visit to talk and try to reconstruct and understand history—the nation’s and their own—to re-examine their lives.

We’re in an era of recasting the legacy of the South and the Confederacy, particularly with the tearing down of Confederate statues. What do you think Varina can contribute to these conversations?
It’s important to remember how those monuments came to be where they are (or were, in a few cases). They didn’t spring up right after 1865, but are largely a product of the Jim Crow South. The Stone Mountain monument wasn’t even finished until the early 1970s. There’s a very strong argument that the monuments have much more to do with suppressing equal rights than commemorating ancestors. With that in mind, part of what drew me to Varina Davis was that she left the South—with no intention of returning—before the rise of the Lost Cause and Jim Crow, and even in her 70s tried to look forward rather than backward. So, the events of the past few years—among them the violence of white supremacists in Charlottesville, the church shootings in Charleston, the national debate over Confederate flags and memorials—certainly shaped the book, especially as they emphasize the extent to which the history of our country is built around the armature of slavery and the Civil War, and how far we still are from putting those issues behind us.

After fleeing Richmond at the end of the war, Varina writes, “Head full of sorrow, heart full of dreams. How to maintain the latter as life progresses? How not to let the first cancel the second?” What’s your answer to her questions?
The Buddhist suggestion that we should avoid despair or hope offers the beginning of an answer. If I come up with anything more useful, I’ll let you know.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Varina.

Photo credit Mark Humphrey