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Anton DiSclafani follows up her bestselling debut, The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girlswith 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.

Anton DiSclafani follows up her bestselling debut, The Yonahlosee Riding Camp for Girlswith 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. 

Interview by

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.

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 research, her writing process and the historical fiction she admires.
Interview by

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 its 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 its an era youve 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.

Historical novelist Jennifer Chiaverini has taken readers to the Civil War era in bestsellers like Mrs. Lincoln's Dressmaker and Mrs. Grant and Madame Jule. Fates and Traitors tells the story of the infamous assassin John Wilkes Booth through the voices of the four women who knew him best. Chiaverini answered a few questions about her book and its fascinating protagonist. 

Interview by

Pura Belpré Award-winning author Guadalupe García McCall draws readers into the war-torn years of the Mexican Revolution with her latest novel, Shame the Stars. We spoke with the author about the heartaches of the two families at odds during this contentious period, the inspiration from her own heritage and more.

Many reviewers have compared your novel to Shakespeare’s classic play Romeo and Juliet, with the strife of two feuding families on opposing sides of a rebellion and a love story of honor and resistance shrouded by fighting. What other works influenced your characters and narrative in Shame the Stars? What other writers and poets did you draw upon for inspiration and direction, and why?
Margarita Engle writes wonderful, lyrical historical novels-in-verse. Two of my favorites are The Surrender Tree: Poems of Cuba’s Struggle for Freedom and Hurricane Dancers. Her work in these particular books inspired me to continue to use poetry to find the voice of the characters in my fiction because I think narrative poetry lends itself beautifully to that end.

I also really liked how Christina Diaz Gonzalez used newspaper headlines to introduce every chapter in her first novel, The Red Umbrella. I knew I wanted to do something like that, but I was torn, because I wanted young people who read my book to be exposed to more than the headlines of newspapers of that time period. I wanted them to see the actual articles that shaped the novel and the plot development, so I decided to have the news articles appear as epistolary matter, as newspapers pieces literally ripped from the pages of history. Not only did it lend drama to the novel, it imbued it with a sense of secrecy, urgency and danger that I felt was in keeping with the tone of this particular piece.

You were born in Piedras Negras, Coahuila, Mexico, then immigrated with your family to the United States at the age of 6, and grew up in Eagle Pass, Texas, a few miles from the border. What did your unique perspectives on Mexican-American heritage bring to this story?​ How much of yourself is in Joaquín and Dulceña?
Growing up along the Rio Grande, sitting on both banks of that river, treading waters that were shallow and meek one minute and deep and rough the next, with parents who knew the true history of our borders, gave me a very unique perspective. It was that muddled, dangerous, fascinating perspective which made it important for me to explore this setting. I grew up hearing stories about prejudice and injustices from my father, who came to the United States in the 1950s when he was 15 years old with a letter from a rancher who guaranteed him work. The stories he told were interesting, told with passion, outrage, even disgust. But what I found most fascinating was his self control, his ability to speak about those times with such integrity and composure, such courage in the face of injustice.

I think there is a lot of my father in this novel. Joaquín has my father’s passion, his dignity, his fearlessness. But there is a lot of my husband and my three sons in Joaquín, too. He is torn and a little confused by his desire to be good and kind and compassionate, but also to fight for what he believes in, and that is something I see in all the men in my life. Joaquín’s mother, Jovita, aka “La Estrella,” by the same token, is like my mother. She has my mother’s heart, her defiance, her strength in the face of adversity, always defending her gente, doing whatever it takes to make sure they don’t come to harm.

As for Dulceña, I think she’s a lot like me. As a Mexican-American woman, it is hard to navigate the modern world, juggling both passion and compassion, fear and courage, weakness and strength, especially when there are so many mixed signals as to how a woman should act in our society. Dulceña is a romantic, a dreamer, an idealist and an artist, and those things are not necessarily perceived as strengths, but they are; they can be. It takes a lot of courage to let the world see your heart, to lay it down on the ground in front of the enemy and say, “This is it. This who I am. This is what I’ve got,” and that is what Dulceña does.

“It takes a lot of courage to let the world see your heart, to lay it down on the ground in front of the enemy and say, ‘This is it. This who I am. This is what I’ve got.’”

You’ve interspersed your novel with Joaquín’s poems, his letters to and from Dulceña, and newspaper clippings surrounding the historical events of the main story. What did this use of multiple sources and styles enable you to do or say that you couldn’t have otherwise?
The artifacts for this book were carefully chosen to help me tell the story in the most creative, but also most authentic, most realistic way possible. The newspaper clippings I chose helped me foreshadow events in the novel. The poems helped me characterize Joaquín, his fears, his dreams, his hopes, and illustrate what he was up against. The notes and letters between him and Dulceña show their motivation and evolving points of view. All artifacts, whether fiction or nonfiction, are parts of the puzzle, like bricks on a wall, that help either clarify or shed light on the issues surrounding the conflicts in South Texas in the time period of 1915 to 1919.

Of all your characters, I found Joaquín’s father, Don Acevedo, to be the most intriguing. He’s an astute businessman with so much to lose in the revolution—including his lands, his family and his very life. As readers, we can tell that he loves all of them very much, but his political positioning prevents him from outright backing the rebels, even though he supports them in the shadows. How common and necessary would you say Don Acevedo’s quiet and tempered resistance was to the larger rebellion?
Acevedo’s position was very common during this time. He had to be diplomatic and play the game of politics, because to speak his mind would have meant certain death. In 1915, during the matanza, Tejanos couldn’t afford to antagonize the Texas Rangers. The Rangers and their posse (local sheriffs and deputies) would often hang Mexicanos and leave them out in the brush as a warning to other “rebels.” More often than not, this lynching came with a warning to the family, too. If they tried to recover the body, to perform any kind of burial rite, that would put a target on their backs, and they would be next on the cuerda. So the people had to do things in secret. Their loyalties were always in question, and they didn’t know who to trust, so they just didn’t speak about their troubles. It was a matter of survival.

“The struggles on the border are far from over, and we can’t afford to repeat old patterns, make the same mistakes; to do so would be indefensible.”

In American History classes, students are often taught about the glorious battles, sacrifices and victories of the Texas Rangers. However, within your novel, you’ve painted quite a different picture of these historical figures—filling in the gaps between the myth and the reality. Why was this so important for your novel, and what do you hope to achieve by sharing the darker side of this story of these unlawful lawmen?
I’m a big fan of Chinua Achebe, and when I was reading about him and his book Things Fall Apart, I read an old African proverb he shared that said, “As long as the lion has no voice, the story of the hunt will glorify the hunter.” That proverb explains exactly why I felt it important to write this novel. I know that the Texas Rangers have a reputation for being fierce and fighting for justice, but there is this dark moment, this period of prejudice and injustice in their history that I felt can’t be ignored, for to ignore it would be to condone it and all that it implies. There was a time where along the Texas border, the Ranger was the most feared, most brutal, most dangerous creature in the brush, and we can’t forget that. We can’t deny it or leave it buried under the dust in the chaparral. We have to dig those old bones up, expose them, share these injustices with the world so that we can be mindful and not let it happen again. The struggles on the border are far from over, and we can’t afford to repeat old patterns, make the same mistakes; to do so would be indefensible.

Both your main and supporting characters have to deal with unwarranted searches and seizures, physical abuse and even rape from unlawful Texas Rangers—most of which is incited simply by race and unchecked power. How does your story connect with the current state of American relations with our neighbors south of the Mexican borderline? How have race relations since changed in the United States for people of Mexican descent? How does having these fictional characters dealing with real-life public and political issues in a historical context help people still dealing with this kind of mistreatment today?
I’d like to say things are different now. Unfortunately, that is not the case. We live in similar times. There are still things coming in, crossing over our borders, drugs, human trade, all sorts of illegal activity, done by a small group of people that mars the landscape, puts the average, hardworking Mexican-American citizen in a bad light. So we get politicians and law enforcement groups and even common men looking sideways at us with narrowed, distrusting eyes. But the fact is that the majority of us are not involved in that violent, dangerous lifestyle. There are so many of us who live honest, decent lives on the border, and we resent being lumped in with “criminals and rapists” when we are American through and through. We love this country, we believe in this life we’ve built here as much as we love and believe in the life of our families and friends on the other side of that coppery sliver of water, the Rio Grande, El Rio Bravo, that river that knows and remembers everything we’ve sacrificed, everything we’ve endured, everything we’ve lost.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Shame the Stars.

Justin Barisich is a freelancer, satirist, poet and performer living in Atlanta. More of his writing can be found at littlewritingman.com.

Pura Belpré Award-winning author Guadalupe García McCall draws readers into the war-torn years of the Mexican Revolution with her latest novel, Shame the Stars. We spoke with the author about the heartaches of the two families at odds during this contentious period, the inspiration from her own heritage and more.

Interview by

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.

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.

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BookPageThis is a publisher-sponsored interview.


As England enters the fray of World War II, the women left behind in the small, sleepy village of Chilbury must adapt to their quickly changing world. Unwilling to let their church choir shutter after the men are drafted, the ladies of Chilbury take the reigns and transform the choir into a place of solace, strength and kinship. Written in a series of personal letters, Jennifer Ryan's debut novel, The Chilbury Ladies' Choir, follows a diverse cast of women characters as they navigate village life, love, friendship and dangerous family secrets. 

A native of England and a former book editor, Ryan now lives in the Washington, D.C. area. We asked her about the women who inspired her story, what we can learn from the women who lived through World War II and more.

On your website, you mention drawing inspiration for this novel from your grandmother—Party Granny. Can you tell us a little about her role and experiences during World War II?
At the beginning of World War II, Party Granny was a pretty, plump and jolly 20-year-old. Her life changed irrevocably as a result of the war, as it did for many young women of the time. She had been engaged to a young man who joined the army but decided to end their relationship because there was far more excitement for a young woman than there had ever been before the war.

"There was a general feeling that every day could be their last, making people drop their morals and enjoy life to the very fullest."

Dancing and parties became common, as people were urged to keep their spirits up, and there was a general feeling that every day could be their last, making people drop their morals and enjoy life to the very fullest. Soon she met and married a naval officer, Denis, who subsequently left in a submarine for a few years. He left her pregnant, which meant that she got extra food rations, including milk and eggs. She also didn’t have to work (by this time in the war, all women between the ages of 18 and 40 had to take on war work), although by the end of the war she was working as an administrator in a nearby factory.

She belonged to the local choir, which, like the Chilbury Ladies’ Choir, was women-only by default as all the men had left for war. Unlike Chilbury, it was a notoriously bad choir—or so she told us in her hilarious stories—and they sang off key for the entire war. On one occasion, a choir member had been injured in a bombing raid, and when Party Granny’s choir came to the hospital to cheer her up with a few songs, their singing was so hysterically dreadful that they were paraded through the entire hospital to cheer up every ward.

It was the parties that my grandmother remembers the most; putting on the radio and swinging each other around to some jazz tunes. At that point there didn’t need to be much excuse to roll up the rug and put on a gramophone record or two. It became so commonplace, even for a mother with a baby in a pram, that they all knew the most recent dances and would kick off their shoes in a flash every time the trumpets and saxophones of "In the Mood" were heard.

Aside from piecing together your grandmother’s stories, what kind of research did you conduct for this novel?
The best part of my research was talking to old ladies about their memories of the war. Their eyes would light up when I asked them questions, and if there were more than one—I was often in an old people’s community—they’d all start talking on top of each other. They’d tell me about the dances, the affairs, the unwanted pregnancies, the gossip, the American boys, and then they’d remember the bombs and how they all pulled together, making cups of tea and singing—there was always a lot of singing and dancing.

"Shockingly, most of them told me that the war was the best time of their lives. This was because of the camaraderie and the fun, the relaxed attitudes and the new jobs."

We’d invariably end up having a few choruses of popular songs from the day, "Roll Out the Barrel" and "It’s a Long Way to Tipperary." One old lady, who must have been over 90, insisted on showing me how to do the dance to "Knees Up, Mother Brown," and I clasped her elbow hoping she’d be okay as she got up out of her wheelchair and began kicking her legs in the air. Shockingly, most of them told me that the war was the best time of their lives. This was because of the camaraderie and the fun, the relaxed attitudes and the new jobs. One of them became an engineer and designed plane parts and another became a senior nurse and then was sent to study medicine, which was very unusual for a woman in those days. They told me that they had more control over their lives, that the men had gone and they could do a better job without them, thank you very much.

Of course, the war wasn’t all fun, and there were plenty of horrific, sad stories of people losing loved ones. I remember tears coming to the eyes of one lady as she told me that she lost both her sons, and that she was left with no children, no family. There are also a great many memoirs, diaries and letters from the era which make for very interesting reads. World War II has been fascinating to me since my childhood, and I had already read a great many of these books before I even thought about writing a novel, although it gave me the perfect excuse to read them all over again.

Did you always envision The Chilbury Ladies’ Choir as an epistolary novel, or did you naturally gravitate to the form during your writing process?
I wanted to write the novel in the women’s own voices, both in letters and journal entries, so that the reader could really get into their minds. The speech patterns of the era, as well as the mindset, could be conveyed better, I felt, through this medium. I wanted the reader to be fully immersed in the era and characters.

Having read so many gripping and fascinating first-hand accounts of the war in books of letters and journals, it made me realize how well this form would work. I almost felt that it would be missing a step if I didn’t write it in the way I had encountered the personalities behind my research materials. There is something terrifically raw about a journal or diary that provides a true insight into a person’s fears and dreams, and I especially wanted to use that to augment the interior thoughts of the protagonists.

How closely does the village of Chilbury mirror your native Kent?
When I was growing up in the '70s, the war didn’t feel that long ago, and people would often speak about it, remembering stories or memories. Many adults had been evacuated as children to different parts of the country, including many of my family members. Food rationing continued well into the 1950's, as well as the shortages, and everyone seemed very OCD about using teabags twice and not wasting food under any circumstances. One of my great aunts contested that broken biscuits were better for you than the ones that had made it intact.

There was also a sense that the country was broke. We’d done all we could and won the war, but we lost everything else in doing so. There were still bomb sites in London and in some towns in Kent, too. It wasn’t uncommon to see a house bombed out of a terraced row, making it look like a knocked-out tooth. Air raid shelters were still around, especially the big triangular concrete ones in public parks. A friend of my sister's once eased open the old wooden door to one; we all peered down the dark, spidery concrete stairs then ran away screaming.

Although the countryside remains the same as always—the run of hills called the Downs are in the right place—the world is a different place now. It was an interesting and special time, as the end of Britain’s colonial era was nigh, and with it the waning power of the aristocracy and the traditional class system. There were the vestiges of an age almost already past, and the cusp of a new order, which enabled the Chilbury ladies to challenge the status quo and forge a new world for themselves.

What inspires you the most about the women in this story?
When I was researching the war, I began to come across a similar theme: individual women—previously living relatively insular lives, often with a man around to tell them what to do—joined women’s groups. Through work, choirs, the Sewing Bees, the Women’s Voluntary Service or through having women evacuees and billets—these were the catalysts for them to change their lives for the better. Part of their impetus came from a sense that they were not alone, that the group was behind them.

A World War II diarist, Nella Last, joined the Women’s Voluntary Service and slowly began to stand up to her domineering husband. At the start of the war, she was getting over a nervous breakdown. He wouldn’t let her socialize without him, and since he was a quiet, unsocial man, this meant that she had few opportunities for friends. The war changed all that, and soon she was managing a mobile canteen for the troops or bomb raid victims. Her health improved dramatically, and by the end of the war she had even stopped coming home to make her husband’s lunch every day. He wasn’t happy at all, but she was determined never to allow him, or any man, tell her what to do ever again.

Women became more open with each other, and sharing stories of their own lives shed light on some of the atrocities that were happening behind the closed doors of marital and family homes. Domestic violence and child abuse became a lot more visible, and with many of the men away, far easier to shame out of existence. The evacuation of children also made it easy to see how other people lived their lives. Some weren’t happy with how theirs looked from the other side. The other way in which the women’s groups helped was that they made the war a shared experience. One woman’s pain or heartache became their problem too, and I tried to capture this in The Chilbury Ladies’ Choir. A few of the women suffer losses of loved ones, and the choir embraces them, telling them that they are all part of a new family of friends. This gave the women a tremendous strength and resilience in a time of horrific loss.

What lessons can we learn today from the bold women of this period?
Today, we face some of the same challenges as they did in those times, universal themes that continue to affect women everywhere. The first, and probably the most important, is that we are still in a world created and organized decades and centuries ago by men. It is never too late to challenge the way things are done, as the women do in Chilbury. Small steps and seizing opportunities to gain control of aspects of our lives, such as work and family responsibilities, all make a difference. We need to make the world more geared toward our needs and wants, rather than it being molded to an old-fashioned world of yesterday. For me, it was important that the Chilbury ladies first took on the choir for themselves, but then changed it to meet their own purposes. They made the entire choir work better for them, moving away from the traditional role of a choir and directing their aims toward a choir that helps them and other women.

I think this what I’d like readers to take away from Chilbury, that it’s up to us to take control of our world, create a new way of seeing old ways of doing things, and rejuvenate them for our own uses. We, too, need to question the status quo and find ways that will better suit our purpose.

We have to ask: are you an avid singer? What’s your favorite hymn or piece of choral music?
Yes, I am an incredibly avid singer! I belonged to my school choir (which was terribly serious) and then a few different adult choirs. I simply loved choir practice: creeping into a cold church at night, greeting my fellow choir members with a joke or two, singing and hearing our beautiful voices blend together to create such a majestic sound. Since I wrote Chilbury, I’ve come to learn that all kinds of chemical reactions happen when we sing with other people, which is part of the great bonding experience that it becomes. And then there’s the music, which affects our emotions in such a profound way.

My favorite choral work is Mozart’s "Requiem." What a phenomenal, intense, moving piece of music! Mozart was writing it as he was dying, and it brings the whole of humanity, death and spirituality together in an incredibly big and moving way. It was as if he was truly putting his all into it. It was the very last piece of music that he wrote—indeed, he didn’t quite finish it—and, tragically, it became the "Requiem" for his own funeral.

As England enters the fray of World War II, the women left behind in the small, sleepy village of Chilbury must adapt to their quickly changing world. Unwilling to let their church choir shutter after the men are drafted, the ladies of Chilbury take the reigns and transform the choir into a place of solace, strength and kinship. Written in a series of personal letters, Jennifer Ryan's debut novel, The Chilbury Ladies' Choir, follows a diverse cast of women characters as they navigate village life, love, friendship and dangerous family secrets. 

Interview by

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 Wifewas 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

Anita Shreve's new novel, The Stars Are Fire, is the quietly powerful story of a Maine woman's struggle to live independently after her husband is killed in a 1947 fire.
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In her latest novel, Mary Gordon explores faith, family and war through dual narratives: that of a woman who joins the forces fighting Franco in late-1930s Spain, and of her granddaughter in 2009. There Your Heart Lies displays tremendous historical depth and emotional resonance.

Where does the title of the novel come from?
From the Gospel of Matthew. Jesus is telling people not to covet material possessions and says, “For where your treasure is, there also does your heart lie.”

What inspired this novel?
I have been fascinated by the Spanish Civil War. I was brought up in a very politically conservative Catholic environment, which saw Franco as the Savior of Western civilization, particularly the Catholic Church. When the words “Spanish Civil War” were spoken, they were always followed by, “nuns were raped, priests were killed.” I went to Barnard in 1967, the first non-Catholic institution I had ever been attached to, and there I heard that no nuns were ever raped, no priests were ever killed and that either 1) the Lincoln Brigade were all heroes of the people or 2) those influenced by Orwell insisting that the Anarchists were all heroes of the people destroyed by the Stalinists.

But what brought it all together was my reading of Simone Weil and Georges Bernanos. Simone Weil went to Spain to fight with the anarchists, but was appalled by their blood lust. Bernanos, a devout Catholic, was originally pro-Franco, his son was a Falangist, but he was so appalled by the brutality of the Francoists in the name of God and the church that he wrote an impassioned book condemning them. Both Weil and Bernanos wrote their impressions, she for the left-wing press, he for the right. She wrote to him, saying “I am an anarchist. You are a royalist. I thought you were my enemy, but you are my brother.”

In short, what fascinated me was the evidence of such conflicting narratives that only the two great writers could see through, or see clearly, that in such horror, there was only the tragedy of blood. That being said, everything I have read and thought insists that I believe that the Francoists, armed by Mussolini and Hitler, and acting in the name of and with the support of the Church, were the greatest monsters.

Some of the stories in The Liar’s Wife (2014) were also explorations of American innocence and European experience. Do you see these themes in There Your Heart Lies?
Yes, I do. Of course, there is the great ghost of Henry James who has gone there before me, with a greatness I could never approach.

“Fiction is the opposite of the Tweet: It insists on itself, its opposite and something in between. A complexity of thought that is the only weapon against tyranny.”

Reading a novel with such deep political and religious themes is interesting in today’s current political climate. How do you think fiction adds to our understanding of current affairs?
I think that fiction is the only way we an try to make sense of the conflicting and confounding barrage of information that makes us despair, otherwise, of making meaning. Fiction is the opposite of the Tweet: It insists on itself, its opposite and something in between. A complexity of thought that is the only weapon against tyranny.

Faith has been a significant part of all of your books, and it’s certainly a factor in this one. Do you think of yourself as a Catholic writer?
Well—in that I was formed by that imagination, those images, those habits of mind. But I don’t identify strongly with other “Catholic” writers; they have never been my models. Even Flannery O’Connor, whom I deeply admire, has not been important to my work in the way that Virginia Woolf, Turgenev, Ford Madox Ford, Katherine Anne Porter have been.

You have taught at Barnard since 1988. What are some of the things that keep you in the classroom?
The wonderful sense that young people are excited and passionate about the same things about which I was excited and passionate when I was young.

What book(s) is/are on your nightstand now?
Elena Ferrante’s Frantumgaglia. Margaret Drabble’s The Dark Flood Rises. Ivan Turgenev’s A House of Gentlefolk. The Collected Poems of W.H. Auden.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of There Your Heart Lies.

Author photo © Christopher Greenleaf. 

In her latest novel, Mary Gordon explores faith, family and war through dual narratives: that of a woman who joins the forces fighting Franco in late-1930s Spain, and of her granddaughter in 2009. There Your Heart Lies displays tremendous historical depth and emotional resonance.

Interview by

In Janet Benton’s fictional debut, Lilli de Jong, a young woman finds herself pregnant and alone in 19th-century Philadelphia. Lilli’s decision to keep her baby leads her to a charity for unwed mothers, a job as a wet nurse and, briefly but most alarmingly, the perilous urban streets. A historical saga and a romance, Lilli de Jong is both a scathing indictment of societal biases and a testament to the redemptive strength of a mother’s love. With the same grace and thoughtfulness displayed in her novel, Benton answers questions about women’s reproductive rights, then and now, the Quaker faith and the power of motherhood.

You have worked as an editor and a writer of nonfiction for several decades. What about this subject made you want to explore it in fictional form?
I’ve written fiction since I was very young, and I have an MFA in fiction writing. But Lilli de Jong is the first novel I’ve finished. The voice I heard from the beginning was that of Lilli telling her story. I didn’t choose how to explore the story; it never struck me as a subject area, but rather as an embodied and urgent tale. I hear a voice for nonfiction, too, but it’s my voice—that of a person with a body and a history that are already established. When writing in a fictional voice, there’s a sense of being an actor—of taking on a role, trying on a new position in life, a new time and place and set of concerns. I loved doing that with Lilli. She was such an interesting person to inhabit, and I cared deeply for her and her baby, Charlotte.

I also loved pretending to live in Philadelphia in the 1880s, which is not so hard to do, since the city is a living history museum. I feel a thrill when I see places Lilli goes in the book. Driving on Broad Street in downtown Philadelphia, which is lined with tall, old edifices, I’m moved to see the grand City Hall looming ahead, partly because Lilli and Charlotte spent a lot of time nearby while City Hall was being built. As I move through the city, I recall scenes from the novel, imagining the two of them traveling the same streets. It’s a strange, thrilling sensation.

What kinds of historical resources did you use? How did the research shape the narrative?
Oh, many kinds. Some favorites were from the 19th century: records from an institution that sheltered unwed mothers, a pamphlet on the care and feeding of babies, newspaper articles (which were written in a very dramatic style then), travel guides, doctors’ accounts of life at Blockley Almshouse, a guide to doing charity work with the poor, accounts of underpaid working women, home health-care manuals (most health care took place in the home, and detailed guides were written for mothers) and so much else. I was also inspired by countless books, including Janet Golden’s A Social History of Wet Nursing in America, Ann Fessler’s The Girls Who Went Away, Howard Brinton’s Quaker Journals. The research and the narrative shaped each other.

What wonderful historical tidbit did you have to leave out?
I don’t know if it qualifies as wonderful, but in one scene, Lilli takes refuge in a park. As I was writing that diary entry set in June 1883, I decided that Lilli would pick up a newspaper and encounter some actual news of the time. I did an online search. An article came up from a New Zealand newspaper about stories reported in The World, a Philadelphia paper. Called “Horrible Disclosures at Philadelphia,” the article told of a man who’d performed abortions, which were illegal and thus done in dangerous circumstances, who’d been arrested when his wife charged him with brutal assault. Neighbors said that many women went into his house and never left. Found in his Philadelphia home were “the bodies of several children, and a large number of adult human bodies.” Skulls were found in the cellar, and there were vicious, lustrous-coated dogs living down there. The man’s accomplice reported that some bodies were cremated in the stove on which the family’s meals were prepared; others were likely fed to the dogs.

On reading this, Lilli feels a great kinship with the murdered women. If she had sought to end her pregnancy, she might have gone to this man. I wrote the scene and kept it a while, but I knew it knocked the story in too gruesome a direction. I didn’t need to go to such extremes in order to create a portrait of meaningful suffering.

Lilli is a woman of great faith. How did her being Quaker shape her experience?
I think her faith enables her to do as she does, and here’s why. The founding principle of the Society of Friends is that God sends guidance directly to those who are open and willing. The Quaker practice of silent worship is meant to allow one to perceive this voice. This is likely one reason that Quakers have a long tradition of defying injustices, including slavery and war; the practice of listening to one’s inner voice can create a sense of rightness and the bravery to act. So Lilli’s faith tradition helps her to act as she does. It was important to me, too, that Lilli wouldn’t accept society’s view of her—that she wouldn’t consider herself a sinner and be ashamed. This tired view supports prejudice, and she needs self-respect to act with strength. So what religious background might have given an unwed mother the ability to decide for herself about her own experience? All religions, clearly, can foster courageous people and rebels. But in Philadelphia in the 1880s, I thought most likely she would be a Quaker. Her family and community wouldn’t have seen her as virtuous, but Lilli fights for what she believes is right, regardless of what others say. She was, in fact, raised by her Quaker mother and elders to do just that. Yet she has to stay away from her family and community in order to live as she does. I see Lilli and her companions, by the end of the book, as living on the brink of modernity. They find their places in a society that’s changing fast due to industrial growth, immigration, greater ease of travel, etcetera. There’s room for people like them there.

“This is likely one reason that Quakers have a long tradition of defying injustices, including slavery and war; the practice of listening to one’s inner voice can create a sense of rightness and the bravery to act.”

I read Lilli de Jong the week my oldest turned 21 and was reminded of the tremendously physical work of nursing and caring for an infant. Some things really haven’t changed much. How did your own experience as a mother inform the novel?
I drew on my experience a lot for these aspects of the novel. Like Lilli, I nursed my daughter most of the day and night at first, and I barely slept. Like Charlotte, my daughter was highly alert at birth and developed quickly. I wrote in a diary about my daughter and used bits from that to describe Charlotte. Like Charlotte, my daughter smiled at first feeling the wind. I adored the dearness of her face as she nursed. She was and is unutterably dear to me. But the big picture was wholly different. I was and am married, my baby was not going hungry, I didn’t grow up as Lilli did, my mother is alive and well, and so on.

I’m glad you were reminded of the physical work of mothering. I aimed for readers to feel those things up close.

You are a writing mentor—what exactly does that entail?
I work privately with people who are writing books, usually novels or memoirs. At intervals of their choosing, I read, comment on and discuss their pages, sharing what I’ve learned through decades of working as a writer, editor and teacher in many professional settings. My aim is to help them craft powerful stories. It’s a very effective way to work.

You wrote this at a time when women’s reproductive health was once again making headlines, as was the value of women’s work outside the home. Within this climate, what does this book mean to you, and what do you hope readers will take away?
It’s hard to recall a time when women’s reproductive lives didn’t make headlines and women’s work inside and outside the home wasn’t contested, isn’t it? The same was true in Lilli’s day; the Harper’s article that Clementina talks about with Albert, in which a man describes the proper education of women (very little), was common to the time. At least now, in the United States, we can take for granted that girls go to school, women vote, and married women own property and keep their wages.

Lilli’s story, I hope, has the power of fiction. Fiction, by being concrete and affecting the senses, can break down barriers and generate compassion. I hope readers will take away a felt experience of mothering under duress. I hope they’ll understand more about the difficult, irreplaceable work of mothers. I hope they’ll care more about children, who need loving care. Beyond this, I’ll leave the reader alone and state my own views: that most mothers in the world must struggle far too hard to provide for their children, and that this country needs to create policies and paid-leave programs that support the fundamental, future-building work of parenting.

Lilli de Jong is about tenacity and the tremendous bond between parent and child, but there are times when the going gets pretty rough. What did you do to keep your spirits up as you were writing?
I might have watered the garden, walked, talked on the phone, made a cup of something hot—but mostly I plowed through. I didn’t have time to hesitate. I did cry, while writing the first several drafts especially. I needed to immerse myself in what I was putting Lilli and Charlotte through, to raise up my own feelings, in order to write a genuine account. Over time, the work became more a matter of paring and puttering to achieve effects, rather than taking on the story’s full weight. Still, every time I edited it, I aimed to listen carefully to Lilli’s voice on the page and to concentrate deeply, so I wouldn’t damage it. I hope I haven’t damaged it. I’m an endless editor. The only reason it’s done is because it has to be.

What are you working on next?
I have three novels at various stages of development. I look forward to the moment when one of them refuses to let me go!

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Lilli de Jong.

Author photo credit Steve Ladner.

In Janet Benton’s fictional debut, Lilli de Jong, a young woman finds herself pregnant and alone in 19th-century Philadelphia. Lilli’s decision to keep her baby leads her to a charity for unwed mothers, a job as a wet nurse and, briefly but most alarmingly, the perilous urban streets. A historical saga and a romance, Lilli de Jong is both a scathing indictment of societal biases and a testament to the redemptive strength of a mother’s love. With the same grace and thoughtfulness displayed in her novel, Benton answers questions about women’s reproductive rights, then and now, the Quaker faith and the power of motherhood.

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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

 

Jamie Ford, whose new novel, Love and Other Consolation Prizes, is based on a haunting historical event, answers our questions about fate, family secrets and the rewards of writing redemptive fiction.
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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.)

After decades of reading Russian literature and history and a few trips to the country, Janet Fitch 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.

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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

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.

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For Justina Ireland, the dark history of the American Civil War and the fantastical concept of zombies aren’t nearly as far apart as most people think.

“My brain works in concentric circles, and I always think of zombies as leading to upheaval and change, as signaling the end of an era and the beginning of a new one,” Ireland says. “And the Civil War did the same thing historically—derailed everything. The only difference is that you’re defending yourself from your neighbor rather than a ravaging horde.”

Ireland is speaking from her home in York, Pennsylvania, about an hour from both Gettysburg and the city of Baltimore, where her third novel, an artful blend of alternate history and horror titled Dread Nation, takes place. The Battle of Gettysburg, which resulted in the largest number of casualties in the entire Civil War, “seemed like the perfect terrible moment for things to get even worse,” says Ireland. “War is horrible enough because you’ve just lost someone, but there’s a whole new level of trauma when your dead friend is trying to eat your face.”

When Dread Nation opens, we meet the smart, fiery, impulsive Jane McKeene, who’s been training for years at Miss Preston’s School of Combat for Negro Girls. Jane was born the same week that the zombies—known as “shamblers”—first rose from their graves. Since Jane is biracial, she was sent to combat school as required by the Native and Negro Reeducation Act—in order to “groom the savage” out of her. Though she’s one of the top students, Jane isn’t content to become a bodyguard for the daughter of a rich, white family.

When Jane and her rival—the demure, rational, beautiful Katherine—are invited to the mayor’s house as a reward for their lifesaving zombie-combat heroics, they soon discover that the zombies aren’t the only evils they’ll have to face down, nor are they the most sinister.

“A good zombie story is never really about the zombies,” Ireland says, and while dealing with various hindrances, her characters develop a “consciousness of knowing that they live in a country that doesn’t necessarily value them the same way it values other people.” Throughout Dread Nation, the author incisively and repeatedly broaches racism, classism, sexism and religion as tools for social control, as well as the politicization of zombies and the use of pseudoscience to try to justify it all. “I’ve always found it interesting how people can do both good work and terrible work with the same passages of the Bible. And these are still things we do today—we still use religion and science to push our own prejudices and beliefs, to wield ideologies that promote our own personal agendas.”

Therein lies the power of a well-written zombie story: It can provide an opportunity for society to talk about how our truest selves come out during difficult situations. “I think that’s something a lot of zombie literature gets wrong,” Ireland says. “When things get bad, we all of a sudden expect people to change drastically from the people who they were. But if they are inherently selfish and already doing what they can to survive for themselves, then they’re only going to cling more tightly to the old ways of life, rather than letting them go and adopting new ones.”

Consider the civil rights movement, post-Civil War Reconstruction or any opportunity for people to make a big change. “[People] want to protect the things they like, who they are and their identity,” Ireland says. “And I don’t think that’s ever changed throughout history. They opted for the small changes because they were more comfortable as a society.”

“There’s a whole new level of trauma when your dead friend is trying to eat your face.”

For many of these same reasons, Ireland found the world of Dread Nation to be a difficult one to explore. “Time travel’s not fun for people of color,” she says. “It’s like asking, ‘What terrible era can I go live in?’ But real people survived it, and that merits depicting.”

Before she’d even begun writing Dread Nation, Ireland’s desire to communicate these suppressed stories was confirmed in the most authentic and motivating way possible. During a visit to a predominantly black school, Ireland brought copies of her two previous books, Vengeance Bound, which features a white main character on the cover, and Promise of Shadows. A student noticed that Ireland’s book jackets did not feature a person of color and raised her hand to say, “No disrespect, miss, but why’d you write a white girl? I can’t find books with people like me in them.”

Ireland was mortified. “I had to go back and do some self-examination,” she says. “I want to be able to go to a school and proudly hold up a black girl on the cover and say, ‘I wrote this book. I hope you like it because I wrote it for you.’ And every time I sit down at the computer to write, I can hear that little girl’s voice.”

With Dread Nation, Ireland wanted to write the best book she could. She was also thinking of the kind of readers she wanted to invite into her world (which she plans to revisit in a follow-up novel). “I just wanted this book to land in the hands of people who need to see themselves reflected. I wanted to find something that resonates with people and makes them sit up and take notice of a world they hadn’t paid attention to before—and that it leaves them feeling refreshed and alive.”

 

This article was originally published in the April 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Author photo by Eric Ireland.

For Justina Ireland, the dark history of the American Civil War and the fantastical concept of zombies aren’t nearly as far apart as most people think.

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