All Behind the Book essays

First allow me to say that I had nothing to do with our current financial meltdown. A few years ago I found myself starting a novel about a family of bank robbers set during the Great Depression, a story that would become The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers. At the time, our stock market was briskly accelerating, the wind in its hair and its wrist casually dangling out the window. My house had almost doubled in value, along with pretty much everyone else’s, and people at parties traded ideas for the next great investment (redo the kitchen? buy nanotech stocks? get a second house?).

While casting about for an idea for my second novel, I read a history of bank robbers during the Great Depression and was intrigued by colorful characters like John Dillinger, Bonnie & Clyde and Pretty Boy Floyd. I next read a number of books about the Depression itself and marveled at the stories. Fistfights at the offices of employers who announced they needed to hire two men and found themselves fending off a riot of hundreds of applicants; long lines of laid-off white-collar workers waiting on city sidewalks for a free lunch, shamefully shielding their faces from view; families facing desperate decisions about how to simply stay alive; angry young men robbing banks and redistributing wealth the old-fashioned way.

This all seemed so otherworldly to me as I read about the ’30s from the comfortable vantage of 2007. And it had seemed so otherworldly to the people living it, too. People in the Great Depression, particularly the early years, felt utterly unmoored. Their world had been turned upside down. One year, shoeshine boys had been trading stock tips; the next year, stockbrokers were taking walks out their 20th-floor windows. Countless people were dispossessed, out of work and literally starving. How had this happened? We were a nation in complete and utter shock. All of the foundations of normalcy had been torn down—faith not only in capitalism but also in democracy; the belief that hard work would be rewarded, that the American Dream could be achieved. Our most basic assumptions had been revealed to be no more than empty myths.

One year, shoeshine boys had been trading stock tips; the next year, stockbrokers were taking walks out their 20th-floor windows.

I had always wanted to write a novel centered on a typical American middle-class family unexpectedly derailed by economic disaster, but had struggled with figuring out how to do so without being too depressing—and had wondered how I might make the story interesting to readers who were themselves living in the strongest economy ever known to man. The larger-than-life bank robbers of the Depression, I realized, presented me with a perfect opportunity. My fictional family could be a shop-owning clan in a small Midwestern city, ruined by the father’s horribly timed real estate speculation. In response, two of the three sons become bank robbers—and, soon enough, folk heroes to the legions of angry souls who blame the banks and the government for the hard times—and a third son can stay home to try supporting the family legitimately. The domestic tension, the sibling rivalries, the cool bank-robbing scenes, the fedoras and Tommy guns and fast cars, the mythology of the ’30s bank robbers, the sense that all of America’s founding principles had suddenly and irrevocably been called into question, a nation that seemed on the verge of revolution—all these were rich in narrative possibility for the novelist, even in 2007. I had no idea that any of this might also become frighteningly relevant to my own times—after all, as I wrote the rough draft, the Dow was above 13,000.

A very unfunny thing happened during the final revisions of The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers—the world economy collapsed. I had, alas, not seen this coming (one glance at my retirement account will prove my point). But as I read and reread my book in the final months of copyediting and proofreading, it was eerie that so many things I had once considered borderline fantastical were becoming commonplace in 2009: entire neighborhoods foreclosed and vacant; a modern-day Hooverville popping up beneath a highway overpass in my childhood home of Providence, Rhode Island; populist rage at government and banks, along with accusations and counteraccusations about the merits of socialism and the failures of capitalism; the sense that we had, for the last few years or decades, been deluded fools, recklessly living according to a set of fictional principles that had finally crumbled in the face of reality.

When writing The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers, I had not been trying to tell the future or draw parallels between a distant time and our own—and I think the book works even for readers unconcerned with such analogies. But it also proves that no matter how hard a writer might try to tell own his story and control his characters, there are always more powerful forces at work. The best you can do is tell your tale and let it loose upon a world that we’re all trying to make sense of, even as it changes around us, day after day.

Thomas Mullen made his literary debut in 2006 with the award-winning novel The Last Town on Earth. His second novel, The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers, has just been published by Random House. Mullen lives in Atlanta with his wife and two sons.

People always ask why I spell Kleopatra’s name with a K. In fact, it’s the original Greek spelling. Kleopatra was not Egyptian at all, but the last of a Greek dynasty that ruled Egypt for almost 300 years. The unusual spelling is entirely appropriate: I want people to rethink the very idea of Kleopatra right down to the spelling of her name.

In a recent speech, the esteemed writer Susan Sontag claimed that "the writer’s first job is not to have opinions but to tell the truth . . . and refuse to be an accomplice of lies and misinformation." Not all writers not even those who chronicle history subscribe to Ms. Sontag’s sentiments. Mitigating factors bias, distort and color both history and its characters. Who was in power when the history was written? What was the political orientation of the historian? What were the prejudices of the age? Of all the women distorted by history and myth, Kleopatra is the most vivid example. Far from the seductive, treacherous archetype of feminine evil who lives in the popular imagination, Kleopatra was one of the ancient world’s most brilliant and powerful rulers. She survived blood-curdling family rivalries, single-handedly ruled a rich nation and kept Egypt independent while all its neighboring countries had been annexed to the Roman Empire. She spoke nine languages, patronized art, drama, athletics and the sciences, and had the loyalty of her subjects rare for the members of her dynasty.

The Kleopatra handed to us by history was the victim of a smear campaign by her rival and mortal enemy, Octavian (who became Caesar Augustus). Octavian feared with good reason not only Kleopatra’s power as the Queen of Egypt, but also her influence with Julius Caesar, and later, Mark Antony. But history is written by the winners, and Octavian, in his war against Antony and Kleopatra, won. After her death, he destroyed all written histories favorable to her, and her story was rewritten by his court historians. The more I found out about the historical Kleopatra, the more infuriated I became. Women have virtually no role models who have held Kleopatra’s great power, and I could not accept that the most powerful woman in history, with the possible exceptions of Queens Elizabeth I and Victoria, has been remembered only for the men with whom she slept. The more I learned about the real Kleopatra, the more I raged on to friends and anyone who would listen. Finally, a fellow writer—perhaps tired of hearing the diatribe—suggested that I turn my passion into a book.

I enrolled in an inter-disciplinary graduate program at Vanderbilt University where I could study with classicists, historians and women’s studies scholars. I traveled to Egypt, Greece, Turkey and Rome, walking in Kleopatra’s footsteps. I dragged my 60-something mother into the dizzying heat of the Egyptian desert, escorted by a tour guide and a truckload of men with machine guns! At the outset, I had no idea what it was going to take to write this book with integrity, but after nine years, two graduate programs and all my travels, a two-volume novel was born.

In Volume One, Kleopatra, I wanted to tell the becoming of Kleopatra, to chronicle the events and circumstances that went into the making of this towering and fascinating woman. Traditionally, her story begins as she rolls from the legendary carpet, landing at Caesar’s feet. But Kleopatra had an extremely exciting story before she came spinning into Caesar’s life. Volume Two, Pharaoh (due out in August 2002), begins when Kleopatra is thrust into the center of history’s great stage. It’s been both strange and illuminating to spend a decade of my life with someone who has been dead for 2,000 years. But I hope that I’ve contributed to the ongoing dialogue about the ways in which women have been ignored, misinterpreted or discredited by the telling of history. I felt it was time to set the record straight.

Karen Essex’ Kleopatra is being published this month by Warner Books. A journalist who wrote a well-received 1996 biography of pinup legend Bettie Page, Essex lives in California.