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This past week, my first novel was promoted by Bookbub and, predictably, when a title is pushed to millions of readers, my sales soared. It was terrifically exciting … even if it is temporary, the author’s version of Warhol’s fifteen minutes of fame. There was even a day when my book was RIGHT NEXT TO one of my favorite novels, The 19th Wifeby David Ebershoff, on the Amazon Best Seller list for historical mysteries.

It was enough to make me feel dazed. Weak in the knees.  

But it wasn’t enough to make me forget the fact that five years ago, I didn’t even have an agent. I had lots of rejection letters and four unsold manuscripts. (Ugh.) But this is perhaps a good time to reflect on one of those bad, early manuscripts, about art looting during WWII, because I think I’m heading back to that time period for my next stand-alone.

Whenever I finish a manuscript—and I finished “Down a Dark River,” about a Scotland Yard inspector in 1878 last month—I don’t begin to write a new book right away; I begin to read. I think of it as throwing ingredients into a pot. The flavors blend. And here are three bits floating in my next stew:

First: a book review by Adam Gopnik in the August 29 issue of the New Yorker. He was discussing the book Blood in the Water, by Heather Ann Thompson, an historian at the University of Michigan; the title of the review was “Kill Box: Learning from the Slaughter in Attica,” and it concerned the 1971 uprising and massacre at that prison in upstate New York (less than an hour’s drive from where I grew up).  A paragraph toward the end of the article demanded my attention; I read it over, three times:

“At moments of crisis, the integrity of our institutions turns out to depend, to an alarming degree, on the fragile integrity of individuals. Prisons are our vulnerable point because they reveal, under pressure, that procedures designed to insure justice have to be constantly reanimated by human will. … At 3 p.m., Edland stepped forward and told the world the truth: that all the dead had been killed by the gunfire of the advancing troopers and guards. It is an act of historical imagination [by Thompson] to have recovered their unostentatious courage. It also requires, for us to see such acts as heroic, getting past the language of masculinity and assertion that had entrapped both the prisoners who took hostages and then the guards who would kill them. To call men of smaller official obligations, carried out in the face of intimidation, heroes is, perhaps, to change the meaning of what we mean by heroism. It may be time for that, too.”

I ripped the article out of the magazine and promptly lost it in the quagmire of paper in my office. When I went searching online for the reference some weeks later, I googled “New Yorker fragile integrity” to find it again. Upon reflection, I realized this was an interesting choice of search words. I had completely forgotten the sentence was from the review about Attica—perhaps because the idea of the “fragile integrity of individuals” could have belonged in half a dozen articles I’ve read recently, with topics ranging from racism to public school education.

Second ingredient: a book about gardening. I’m not a gardener at all—everything dies on me, even mint and philodendrons—but I was at a bookstore waiting for my daughter, and there was a book on the discount rack with lovely pictures. On the page about thistles, it explained how the primary plant can send out a “stolon,” a shoot that runs horizontally, along the ground, and then sets down roots at intervals. Pretty pink thistles can destroy an entire garden this way, quietly choking the other plants. What a metaphor, I thought.

Third ingredient: my old, bad manuscript about art looting in WWII. Gosh, it is dreadful. Flat characters, odd dialog, clumsy descriptions. But there’s some good research there, and even the tiny details stoked my interest. I’d forgotten, for example, that the swastika was actually an ancient symbol; the Nazis bent the four arms of the cross in the other direction, so it twisted counter-clockwise, instead. The symbolism poked at me.

I am often compelled by stories of injustice, of individuals who must counter the weight of large institutions, of times when empathy fails. This feeling I have, that individuals can make small, important pronouncements and conduct themselves in quiet, profoundly significant ways, compels me. This next novel features a young female surgeon, a police detective, and an embittered, twisted man who is bent on evil and operates with the quiet cunning of thistles. 

Last weekend, I went back to Milwaukee for the first time in twelve years to attend my friend Ruth’s book club, a group of nearly a dozen women who have meeting for over twenty years (!) and all read my debut novel, A LADY IN THE SMOKE.  Ruth assured me that they’re all very nice and love to read; and Ruth is so lovely I could only imagine her friends would be kind. But I was curious and a bit anxious about how this was going to go. It’s one thing to receive comments from anonymous readers on Amazon and Goodreads—but quite another to be sitting In The Room when people discuss one’s baby. I mean, book. Would they be polite but reticent, with that manufactured smile and an overenthusiastic, “Oh, yeah, it was a great read!” Would they shy away from asking real questions, not wanting to offend someone who is a complete stranger? Would they ask questions about Victorian England that I couldn’t answer? Before I left Ruth’s house, I ate half a box of chocolate-covered peanuts.
 
But of course they were warm and engaging. The first question came from the hostess and was, perhaps inevitably, about my research: How long did it take you to research all that about trains and railway schemes? That was an easy one. And then we were rolling.
 
But I was relieved that they didn’t shy away from asking real questions. And a meeting like this, with a group of women who are well-read and inquisitive, pushed me to articulate what I am trying to accomplish with my novels. I came away with three main insights.
 
Ruth brought up that she sometimes forgot she was in Victorian England because the relationships among the characters felt very contemporary. And I suppose they would because, after all, the pain of betrayal, a desire for revenge, loneliness, uncertainty, curiosity about our parents, empathy, loyalty to our friends, and a desire for love are all part of our (my) lived experience. Are these emotions timeless? Some scholars would say not, that there are emotions that emerge and gain traction at particular times in history (Patricia Meyer Spacks historicized boredom, for example, in her book of that title); but I do believe there is a certain universality and timelessness to the big emotions.
 
This led to another point: the inner life of the characters. In response to one of the questions, I explained that one of my deepest pet peeves is with novels in which secondary characters (that is, characters other than the protagonist) exist only to foil or further the main plot. I call these “narcissistic novels,” as in these, it seems that the whole novelistic world revolves around the protagonist. For me, it’s important that the other characters have lives and concerns of their own that have nothing to do with the protagonist’s desires and needs. So, for example, Elizabeth’s best friend Anne Reynolds’ chief concern is not Elizabeth’s dilemma; it is her brother Philip, who seems on the verge of self-destruction and desperately needs Anne’s help. Another point: characters need not only to change over the course of the novel; they should also, at times, deceive the protagonist and the reader. Someone commented that none of the characters (except Lord Shaw) really surprised them; they showed who they were from the beginning. These readers were half-expecting Paul or James or someone to trick or betray Elizabeth. Perhaps at some level, I am uneasy with pulling the rug out from under my heroine; but this is something I need to think about for my next book.
 
Finally, it’s very important to me that the research is real—and by that, I don’t mean just factually accurate. I mean that when researching, I am not allowed to pick out the historical details that feel “convenient” for creating the conflict or resolution that I’ve already decided will happen. It is important to accept when my research takes me places that I don’t expect, when it doesn’t yield the apocryphal tidbit I was looking for to tie up a plot point, for example, or provide a justification for a chapter I want to include. As a result, my book feels more authentic to me; and often, paradoxically, the unexpected find is exactly the piece I didn’t know I needed—the twist or turn that creates the additional mess I need to get my characters from point A to point B.
 
The evening drew to a close; the enormous trees, so unlike the stiff Arizona cacti, rustled against the black sky; the patio lanterns that had kept the insects away were burning down; the appetizers were mostly gone. I offered everyone my heartfelt thanks. Every author (particularly every debut author) should have a chance to be the guest star at a book club. It’s terrifically fun and affirming, and I returned home to Arizona feeling yet again that (in the words of Elizabeth Gilbert) I love writing more than I hate failing at writing.