Book Group–Questions for Me

Published April 27th, 2008

I visited a book group in Northbrook, Illinois, and they had a lot of surprising questions that I thought might interest others.  Here they are:

What or who inspired you to write The Heroines?  The idea for the book began when I was in residence at the Ragdale Foundation in Lake Forest, Illinois.  The book is set there.  I arrived with no ideas about what I should write.  The Prairie Homestead is similar to Ragdale in that writers and artists get a break from their lives to work on their projects.  I was also reading At-Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O’Brien, and I loved his idea of resurrecting characters from other novels and using them to one’s own ends.  This literary appropriation stems from several ideas.  That there’s nothing new to write under the sun.  That characters should be free to move about and not be restricted by their controlling authors.  That one cannot “own” one’s characters, etc.

How long was the process?  I began the book in the summer of 2002, put it aside for a while (I had to get a full-time job), and then picked it up again in 2004.  I sold it in September of 2006.  But even then, I worked for a good six months with my editor, Nan Graham, the copyeditor, etc. 

When does it come out in paperback?   January 2009.

How did you write the chapters? Were they in order? I wrote the main story of Conor’s arrival and Penny & Anne-Marie’s struggles first, interspersing flashbacks of certain Heroines within that.  The most important thing for me was to get the present-action drama done, to tell the mother-daughter story first.  Later I added a few Heroines who I thought fit in with Penny’s story (Hester Prynne, Scarlet).  So the Heroines were mostly chosen for how they fit into the main story, as those would be the Heroines Penny would think about during her “adventure.”  I did not choose my favorite heroines from literature. 

How did you come up with the hospital scenes and were they based on reality?  The hospital scenes were inspired by both real-life occurrences and research. I worked for a time teaching middle school to behavior-disordered kids, so I got to know the language and issues surrounding kids of that age.  The ice-cream scoop rewards system comes straight out of that experience, as well as the behavior of the students during group therapy, which we had weekly in our classrooms.  I also spoke with a student of mine from the University of Chicago, who worked in adolescent psych wards in the seventies while he was in medical school.  He told me about the habits of the psychiatrists, who would wait in the ER hoping/looking to admit adolescents with good insurance, and the song-and-dance routine they’d use to guilt parents into admitting their children.

Who inspired Gretta and Penny’s characters?  With Gretta, I was emulating in some ways my mother-in-law, though she was French and very refined, not gruff and Germanic.  What both women shared were domestic talents that had begun to be seen as unimportant in feminist America:  baking bread, darning socks, gardening, not wasting a thing.  The tendency to use everything came from surviving the Second World War.  I loved the tension that Anne-Marie, though highly intelligent, could not frost a cake to save her life, and that Gretta covers for her to save her from the wrath of Edith, A-M’s mother.  I wanted to write about the roles of women, how domesticity is both revered and denigrated, and how women do not excel in housewifery simply based on their gender.  Yet, those domestic arts should also be treasured, and that what’s ultimately most important is that women can choose where they wish to expend their energies, and should be respected for either choice.  Penny falls in the middle.  She likes making jam with Gretta, but she’s being raised to use her voice and mind and to be independent.

Who was the first Heroine and why didn’t Penny’s grandparents know about them? The first Heroine that Anne-Marie remembers was Rapunzel.  When A-M tried to discuss Rapunzel’s visit, her mother’s response was short-tempered.  Edith threatens to punish A-M for insisting that the visit was real, and A-M goes quiet.  Even at five, A-M knew to avoid confrontations with her mother. 

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